Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance ed. by Katy Hamilton, Natasha Loges, and: Brahms among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion by Paul Berry (review)

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Public and Private Performance, edited by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, began as a conference held at the Royal College of Music, London, in 2011. The book draws together various musicological strands that in recent years have preoccupied scholars of nineteenth-century music. More specifically, it concerns domestic music-making, Brahms in the home, social, cultural, and hermeneutic contexts for Brahms’s smaller forms, and the question of the arrangement of larger works for smaller forces. Although these may sound like familiar themes to Brahms scholars, Hamilton and Loges have not only shaped these various strands into a coherent whole that is engaging and compelling, but they have also achieved that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-worn subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again.

The book is not arranged into parts or sections. The editors have instead allowed the contributions to follow on from one another without imposing categories. Readers will find it equally satisfying to jump in at any given essay or to read all of the contributions in sequence. With this in mind, I borrow (and slightly amend) the imagery that Julian Johnson recently employed to describe the contents of his latest book, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (New York and Oxford, 2014): the result of Hamilton and Loges’s volume is less a progression of ideas to be read from left to right or as some sequence of themes, ‘and rather more like the map of the London underground or the New York subway. Any of its multiple lines can be traversed in [various] directions; all of its lines intersect with several others, producing interchanges from one to the other; [and] all the stations co-exist’ (p. 11). This is a rich and enriching volume that addresses a myriad of issues relating to private and public performances and the performance contexts of the works of Brahms and his contemporaries.

The dichotomy between listening to and participating in music-making is introduced in Michael Musgrave’s foreword and runs as a thread throughout the book. Nowhere more clearly do we gain a sense of the porous boundaries that existed between the public and the private sphere of Brahms’s output than in the composer’s attitude towards recording. The phonograph recording of Brahms in the home of the Fellinger family in 1889 is a case in point. Katrin Eich demonstrates that on this occasion and others, Brahms had anything but a one-dimensional view with regard to divergent performance spaces. His own activity as a pianist saw him move constantly ‘between the home and the concert hall and their intermediate incarnations’ (p. 109), while as a composer he was equally comfortable with his works being performed in any number of spaces and situations. Robert Pascall also addresses the impact that the invention and development of the phonograph had on the ‘old way of life’, with the availability of recordings bringing about a gradual close to an ‘important musicological and musico-historical fact of the nineteenth century’—the practice of playing piano duets (p. 139). That practice is brought very much back to life in Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall, where the reader is permitted to embark upon numerous encounters with the composer’s many piano-duet partners, the roll call of which includes Clara Schumann, Hermann Levi, Elisabet von Herzogenberg, Emma Engelmann, Carl Reinecke...