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Michael Musgrave. Brahms: A German Requiem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii, 97 pp. ISBN 0521409950 (paperback).
David Brodbeck. Brahms: Symphony No. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. x, 115 pp. ISBN 052147959 (paperback).
It is fitting that the two first installments to feature Johannes Brahms in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series-Michael Musgrave's Brahms: A German Requiem (1996) and David Brodbeck's Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (1997)-not only appeared near, or during, the centenary of his death, but also treat the very works which secured for the composer both international recognition and a permanent place in the canon. It is also fitting that these first installments reflect the two scholarly traditions that have defined Brahms research in English, the British and the American. The former is well represented by the seasoned Brahms scholar Michael Musgrave, who gives a most sober account of the Requiem. His is a handbook in the strict sense, for even the uninitiated can follow its systematic coverage with little difficulty. The latter tradition, embodied here in the work of the younger scholar David Brodbeck, differs from its British counterpart by forgoing the mandates of a "handbook." Drawing upon the "New Musicology," particularly hermeneutics, Brodbeck sets about instead to unlock the meaning of the symphony and to defend the work against its detractors in a discussion which only readers with better-than-average musical sophistication can follow with ease. It is perhaps as a result of these differing traditions, as well as their intended audiences, that the respective treatment of these two musical monuments diverge in overall approach and emphasis.
This difference of approach is evident from the start. The discussion of the protracted compositional histories of each opus, for instance, covers the topic with varying degrees of economy. As is already well known, both the Requiem and the Symphony stem from the same compositional impulse, an aborted Duo Piano Sonata/Symphony in D Minor of February 1854, modeled on Beethoven's Ninth and Schumann's Fourth Symphonies. Supposedly inspired by Schumann's attempted suicide, the aborted work survives in the first movement of Brahms's First Piano Concerto, in the second movement of the Requiem, and, indirectly, in the Symphony (in that Brahms retained elements from his models). Musgrave clearly delineates the evolution of the Requiem from its...