Brahms beyond Mastery by Robert Pascall (review)

Robert Pascall, a distinguished scholar of Brahms’s music, has earned his reputation primarily through his contributions to the new collected edition of the composer’s oeuvre. The present monograph sums up a secondary area of his scholarship. This has centred on a group of quasi-Baroque dance movements for piano that Brahms composed in the mid-1850s, some of which he later reused in at least one chamber work. Pascall treats the original dances in the first chapter of this monograph, and devotes the remaining chapters to the transformation of two of the dances in the String Quintet in F major, Op. 88 (ch. 3) and the reappearance, in his view, of another of the dances in the String Sextet in G major, Op. 36 (ch. 2) and of two dances in the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 (ch. 4). Along the way he provides a concise, personal overview of Brahms’s lifework.

As Pascall recounts in his first chapter, Brahms completed a suite in A minor and appears to have planned another in B minor, but he chose not to publish any movements from either suite. Manuscripts for Sarabandes and Gigues in A minor and B minor nonetheless came to light in time for these dances to be included in the first collected edition of Brahms’s oeuvre; they were also published as separate prints (1917, 1927). Musicians immediately recognized that Brahms had elaborated the A minor Sarabande when he composed the three Grave sections in the middle movement of Op. 88, and several scholars, notably Hans Gál in a book published in 1961, wrote about Brahms’s miraculous reworking of the Sarabande for that chamber masterpiece.

‘Unknown Gavottes by Brahms’, Pascall’s first publication about Brahms’s Bach-inspired project, appeared in Music & Letters, 57 (1976), 404–11. Like other sources for this early project, the manuscript that Pascall discussed in this article was for some time cloaked in mystery. As part of an endeavour to preserve copies of musical manuscripts in a ‘Photogrammarchiv’, around 1930 the Austrian National Library made a Photostat of an autograph manuscript titled ‘Sarabande u. Gavotte’ (in Brahms’s hand) that contained the A minor Sarabande and Gavottes in A minor and A major. In 1967 a catalogue of the Photogrammarchiv’s holdings referred to this particular manuscript as a sketch (Entwurf) for Brahms’s Op. 88; the manuscript itself resurfaced considerably later. To my knowledge, Pascall was the first person to write about the Photostat and about the connection between the A major Gavotte and the two fast sections in the middle movement of Brahms’s Op. 88. Clearly, these were important discoveries.

The opening chapter of Pascall’s monograph offers a fine reproduction of the manuscript that he first wrote about in 1976. Here, as in the other chapters, he gives a précis of the works that are the focal point of the chapter. Perhaps because of the way Pascall presents his analytical observations, readers may feel that the Sarabande emerges as an almost routine dance movement, which it is not. For example, writers usually note that the Sarabande sounds inconclusive, but Pascall calls the ending ‘a perfect cadence in A minor, the dominant chord being in first inversion’ (p. 14). It is difficult to understand why he refers to the final cadence as ‘perfect’, since there is no dominant chord and certainly no bass motion by fifth in that cadence—even though there is ample bass motion by fifth before the cadence. Indeed, for many listeners the final phrase seems to end too soon, and the effect of the cadence is further weakened through marked use of flat-side harmonies that is corrected at the last minute through motion to a diminished seventh built on the leading note and then to the tonic (bb.15–16).

That Brahms recomposed the A minor Sarabande and the A major Gavotte for the String Quintet’s complex composite movement, which is both...