Brahms und Ungarn. Biographische, rezeptionsgeschichtliche, quellenkritische und analytische Studien by Adam Gellen (review)

Many graduate students will likely turn green with envy when opening this volume: Adam Gellen succeeded in finding a dissertation topic related to a “great composer” that has often been touched upon by earlier generations of scholars, but not yet received the kind of monographic treatment it surely deserved.

Ignoring the brief introduction and the concluding summary, the book consists of four chapters of rather diverse lengths. The first two provide the background for the following discussion; “Hungary in the Nineteenth Century” includes not merely historical and music historical overviews, but also useful sociological discussion of the “melting pot” character of Budapest in Brahms’s time, while “Hungarian Music and the Style Hongrois” surveys the diverse genres and musical features plausibly identified as “Hungarian” by the contemporary audience. While readers familiar with Hungarian music history will find little new in these sections, “newcomers”—arguably the majority of the book’s audience, whose interests lie more with Brahms than Hungarian culture in general—all of this is certainly welcome, and reflects a solid grasp of the relevant literature.

It is thus in the following chapter, entitled “Brahms and Hungary,” that the author starts to present his own discoveries, which result from his careful reconsideration of the evidence related to Brahms’s contacts with Hungarian music and musicians. As it turns out, much of what standard biographies relate on this matter is apocryphal: there is no evidence that the composer would have mingled with emigrant Hungarian soldiers soon after the unsuccessful War of Liberation in 1848–49; it is also unlikely that he would have met Ede Reményi, his initiator to the Hungarian-Gypsy idiom, earlier than January 1853. In addition, the famous story about Brahms falling asleep during Liszt’s performance of his B-minor Sonata seems pure fabrication. As to the composer’s later contacts, Gellen believes that, even if Brahms seems to have had a positive opinion about Ernő Dohnányi’s C-minor Piano Quintet, the much-quoted sentence—“I could not have done that better myself”—probably never left his mouth.

Expanding on the sociological inquiries of his introduction, Gellen does a good job in spotting the similarities among the backgrounds of diverse Hungarian personalities with whom Brahms had close relationships. The gist of his findings is that the composer, who showed minimal interest in ever learning a foreign language, actually preferred to remain on “German cultural soil” even when leaving his home: most of his “Hungarian” friends and acquaintances came from German or Jewish families, spoke German as their mother tongue, and in fact advocated German rather than Hungarian culture; the emigrant violin virtuoso Reményi, the life-long friend and musical advisor Joseph Joachim, and the Viennese fellow composer Carl Goldmark are only the best-known examples. In that light, the eighteen trips Brahms made to Hungary between 1867 and 1891, and the twenty-eight concerts in which he participated during those trips, may to a great extent be due to the fact that in Budapest he could feel very much at home (even the mostly favorable local reviews echoed the arguments he knew so well from the Austrian and German press). That said, Brahms obviously considered his Budapest sojourns as good opportunities to deepen his knowledge of both Hungarian music and food (especially goulash), and his decision to have several important works premiered in the Hungarian capital—the B-flat Major Piano Concerto (op. 83), the C-minor Piano Trio (op. 101), the D-minor Sonata for Violin and Piano (op. 108), and the revised B-major Piano Trio (op. 8)—suggests that he must have been satisfied with both the available performers and the receptive audience.

The rather cosmopolitan background of most of the composer’s Hungarian contacts has some bearing on the discussion of “Brahms and Hungarian Music” (the title of the last main chapter), since it implies that, after the initial inspiration...