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Brahms: The Four Symphonies. By Walter Frisch. (Yale Music Masterworks Series.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. [xi, 226 p. ISBN 0-300-09965-7. $20.] Music examples, bibliography, index.
When Brahms: the Four Symphonies was originally published in 1996, it was the first English language account of the complete Brahms cycle since Julius Harrison's 1939 survey. At present, there exist at least four studies covering this same ground, as well as monographs on three of the four individual symphonies. (Only the Third Symphony lacks its own account.) Despite the proliferation of available material, we may be thankful that Yale University Press has reprinted Walter Frisch's study. While these other accounts explore particular issues in great detail or specificity, Four Symphonies provides an excellent comprehensive introduction to both the symphonies and the burgeoning scholarly apparatus that now surrounds them.
Divided into eight chapters, Four Symphonies has the weight and feel of a Brahms symphony itself. Structured in a gentle arch, it moves fluidly from cultural and stylistic issues (chaps. 1 and 2), to individual analyses of each symphony (chaps. 3 though 6), to questions of interpretation and performance (chaps. 7 and 8). Frisch's treatment is flexible and engaging, written in a prose style that, while involving technical language, does not bury the reader in needless jargon. The reprint offers slight corrections and emendations to the 1996 edition-Heather Platt''s Johannes Brahms: A Guide to Research (New York: Routledge, 2003) offers a more up to date bibliography-but Frisch covers a gamut wide enough to prepare students toward placing and understanding the more recent literature.
Chapter 1 undertakes a broad survey 01 the symphonic crisis in post-Beethoven Germany, and focuses in particular on the conflicting demands that a symphony faced: communal values versus romantic individualism, monumental...