On Brahms and his Circle: Essays and Documentary Studies by Karl Geiringer (review)

On Brahms and his Circle, comprising all the short articles Karl Geiringer wrote on the subject of Johannes Brahms, is an admirable book in many ways, with useful indexes, musical examples, and many illustrations, some of them quite rare. It is a mine of information far beyond what Geiringer provided himself. While this feature is a virtue, it is also a problem.

A few years into his appointment as curator of the great library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, the 34-year-old Geiringer was exploring a storage room in the Musikverein building, which houses the institution to this day. The year was 1933. The collection was in some disarray, much of it 'stored in boxes and drawers owing to lack of man-power and space to preserve them properly' (Karl Geiringer with Bernice Geiringer, This I Remember (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1993), 51). He found a large sealed package, labelled 'Not to be opened before 1927'. As that date was six years past, the young director of the library broke the seals without further ado, and discovered therein a huge collection of letters addressed to Johannes Brahms, 'carefully preserved by him' (ibid). The letters, from his family and many of his friends, had been sealed by judicial order for thirty years after Brahms's death in 1897.

With this discovery, Geiringer set the course for the rest of his life and enriched our knowledge of Brahms incomparably. His wife Irene conceived the idea of writing a new biography of the composer based on a reading of all the letters, with Karl in charge of the musical aspects of the Life and Works. Irene Geiringer's role was kept secret for years because only Karl had received permission from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde's board of directors to use the letters. Her collaboration was acknowledged on the title page of later editions, but the full extent of her contribution was only made public with Geiringer's recent memoir (ibid. 60). Their book quickly became the most widely read biography of Brahms and remained so until recently, when the reawakening of interest in Brahms and his times produced works that made its biographical aspects, at least, obsolete.

But the Life and Works was only the beginning. Geiringer's interest in Brahms was piqued. He made himself familiar not only with the composer's letters but also with the very large personal library that Brahms had bequeathed to the Gesellschaft, much of which had also been packed away in boxes. In ensuing years, he published at least a dozen articles detailing what he had learned: the broad scope of Brahms's interests as indicated by his library, the wide range of his friends and colleagues, and hitherto unsuspected aspects of his relationships with his family. Seven of Geiringer's papers presented correspondence, almost always published for the first time: from family—mother, father, sister, and brother—and from musically important friends and collaborators: George Henschel, Friedrich Chrysander (editor of the Complete Handel edition), C. F. Pohl (the important Haydn biographer), Antonín Dvořak, George Grove, some of the Wagner circle, and Eusebius Mandyczewski, Brahms's protegé and Geiringer's predecessor as librarian of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. The other articles, with two exceptions, were general surveys. Based as they were on primary sources, these pioneering articles too have retained their interest.

They appeared mostly in prominent scholarly journals, and are still readily available either in a good research library or electronically. But some were published in now obscure journals, and some of the most important ones appeared only in popular musical magazines and newspapers. There is therefore a body of work that does not appear in the catalogue published in honour of his seventieth birthday (Karl Geiringer: A Checklist of his Publications in Musicology, ed. Martin A. Silver (University of California at Santa Barbara, 1969)). An attempt...