Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler Junior and The Piano Trio in B, Op. 8

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 132 no.
2 252–305
Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler

Junior and the Piano Trio in B, Op. 8
roger moseley
I see, as though it were in a picture, a group of children standing in the hall of our house in
Düsseldorf. With amazement and admiration they are looking up at the banisters, on
which a young man with long, blond hair is performing the most daring gymnastics. He
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hoists himself from right to left and up and down; at last he raises himself firmly on his
arms, with his legs high in the air, and a final leap lands him below in the midst of the
admiring crowd of children. We Schumanns were the children, and the young man was
Johannes Brahms.
Eugenie Schumann1
I had prepared myself to find [Brahms] looking changed and older, but not beyond rec-
ognition. . . . As I gazed at him, I was utterly unable to recognize the man I had known ten
years previously. There, indeed, was the great head with the hair brushed back as of old,
though less tidily than in former days; but his figure had become much heavier, and both
mouth and chin were hidden by a thick moustache and shaggy, grizzled beard that had
completely transformed his appearance. I felt, with a shock, that my foreboding that
I should never see my old friend again had been realized.
Florence May2
My thanks go to all those who have read and responded to this text as it has made its protracted
journey into print. Some remain anonymous, but among the rest I must give special mention to
Richard Taruskin, Roger Parker, Katherine Bergeron, Suzannah Clark, Verity Platt, Bettina Varwig
and Benjamin Walton.
1
‘Wie auf einem Bilde sehe ich im Flur eines Hauses in Düsseldorf eine Schar Kinder stehen; die
blicken staunend hinauf nach dem Treppengeländer. Dort macht ein junger Mann mit langem
blondem Haar die halsbrecherischsten Turnübungen, schwingt sich von rechts nach links, hinauf,
hinab; schließlich stemmt er beide Arme fest auf, streckt die Beine hoch in die Luft und springt mit
einem Satze hinunter, mitten hinein in die bewundernde Kinderschar. Die Kinder waren wir, ich
und meine etwas älteren Geschwister, der junge Mann Johannes Brahms.’ Eugenie Schumann,
Erinnerungen (Stuttgart, 1925), 13–14, trans. Marie Busch as Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann
(London, 1927), 4. Eugenie’s memory is not dated, but probably issued from the late 1850s.
Her account suggests that the young Brahms might have been under the influence of the
Turnbewegung, the German gymnastic movement. To a large extent, the popularity of the
Turnbewegung throughout the nineteenth century lay in its complex relationships with various
brands of German nationalism. See Dieter Langewiesche, ‘“Für Volk und Vaterland kraeftig zu
wirken”: Zur politischen und gesellschaftlichen Rolle der Turner zwischen 1811 und 1871’,
Kulturgut oder Körperkult, ed. Ommo Grupe (Tübingen, 1990), 22–61.
2
Florence May, The Life of Johannes Brahms (London, 1905), i, 27–8. Her memory is of Brahms
performing his Second Piano Concerto, op. 83, in 1881, three years after he had definitively grown
his beard. The Brahms May saw may not have been quite so grey and corpulent as the older man
that Michalek’s etching depicts, but she vividly describes the gulf that separates him from
Laurens’s subject.
! The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/jrma/fkm004
REFORMING JOHANNES 253
Figure 1. Jean Joseph Bonaventure Laurens, charcoal drawing of Johannes

Brahms, 1853 (detail). Reproduced from Dieter Boeck, Johannes Brahms
(Kassel, 1998), 65. Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Des 6.
These two literary reminiscences of Brahms map neatly – perhaps too neatly –
onto his iconographic legacy, encapsulated by the images reproduced in Figures 1
and 2. Eugenie Schumann’s memoir introduces the blond, athletic hero of
a Kinderszene whose physical prowess stands as an auspicious metaphor for his
musical gifts. Florence May, on the other hand, professed incredulity at the gulf
that separated the energetic man she had known from the portly, unkempt
figure playing the piano rather indifferently on the stage before her. For both
writers, to describe Brahms was simultaneously to conjure up his shadowy coun-
terpart; their accounts neatly bifurcate the composer, but neither author meant to
threaten the coherence of his identity. Their contrasting reminiscences serve to
establish the dialectical limits of a spectrum that encompasses the broad expanse
of Brahms’s ‘true’ nature. The dour north German who settled in gemütlich
Vienna thus becomes Brahms the Romantic classicist, the rebarbative sentimen-
talist, the progressive traditionalist; the contradictions and ambiguities within his
254 ROGER MOSELEY
Figure 2. Ludwig Michalek, etching of Brahms, c.1890–1. Reproduced from

Boeck, Johannes Brahms, 246. Courtesy of Wenderoth-Verlag.
personality are all reconciled within the accommodating figure of Janus.3 But
while Janus’s gaze might be all-encompassing, neither pair of eyes can perceive
the other, and the bearded Brahms’s distaste for biography and ruthless destruc-
tion of his juvenilia ensured that he rarely confronted his clean-shaven past.
Despite his best efforts, however, there remain a few telling instances where the
old master encounters the young blood, exposing the tangle of contingencies that
inform the double aspect of Brahms’s identity. One such rendezvous is the Piano
Trio in B, op. 8.
The trio’s genesis was bound up with both Robert Schumann, who encouraged
the reluctant Brahms to complete the work, and Clara Schumann, who helped
3
See, for instance, Constantin Floros, ‘Brahms – ein Januskopf’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 144/4
(1983), 4–7, and Elfrieda F. Hiebert, ‘The Janus Figure of Brahms: A Future Built upon the Past’,
Journal of the American Liszt Society, 16 (1984), 72–88.
persuade him to publish it. It took shape during the months surrounding the
appearance of ‘Neue Bahnen’, Robert’s messianic article hailing Brahms, on 28
October 1853. Brahms’s belated letter of thanks revealed his misgivings about
Schumann’s extravagance: ‘The praise that you have openly bestowed on me
will arouse such extraordinary expectations of my achievements by the public
that I don’t know how I can begin to fulfill them even somewhat.’4 Schumann
himself seems to have harboured second thoughts; soon afterward he omitted the
article from his collected writings, and he made anxious enquiries of Joseph
Joachim as to whether Brahms was living up to his billing.5 Schumann prodded
Brahms in the direction of the symphony, and the troublesome project that would
ultimately result in the First Piano Concerto, op. 15, in 1858 constituted Brahms’s
most self-conscious response to ‘Neue Bahnen’.6 But the piano trio that Brahms
completed in the article’s wake also picked up the gauntlet that Schumann had
thrown down.7 Hugely ambitious in concept, scale, materials and process, the
Trio in B houses a welter of musical ideas and idioms, almost as if Brahms had
taken it upon himself to compile a lexicon of all the styles at his command. Even as
he sent it to be published, however, Brahms wrote to Joachim of his dissatisfaction
with the work and expressed a desire to revise it, little knowing that it would
take him all of 35 years to get around to it.8 In 1888, Brahms’s publisher Fritz
Simrock acquired the rights to his early works with an eye to marketing new,
4
‘Das öffentliche Lob, das Sie mir spendeten, wird die Erwartung des Publikums auf meine
Leistungen so außerordentlich gespannt haben, daß ich nicht weiß, wie ich denselben
einigermaßen gerecht werden kann.’ Johannes Brahms to Robert Schumann, 16 November
1853; Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896, ed. Berthold
Litzmann (Leipzig, 1927), i, 1–2, trans. Styra Avins and Josef Eisinger, Johannes Brahms: Life
and Letters, ed. Avins (Oxford and New York, 1997; henceforth Life and Letters), 24. Every
Brahms critic ponders the complex ambiguities of Schumann’s gesture; see, for instance, Jan
Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York, 1997), 83–7. Mark Evan Bonds explores
the ideological motives behind ‘Neue Bahnen’ in After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in
the Symphony (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 141–5, as does Helmut Kirchmeyer in Robert Schumanns
Düsseldorfer Brahms-Aufsatz ‘Neue Bahnen’ und die Ausbreitung der Wagnerschen Opern bis 1856:
Psychogramm eines ‘letzten’ Artikels (Berlin, 1993).
5
‘Nun – wo ist Johannes? . . . Lässt er noch keine Pauken und Drommeten erschallen? Er soll sich
immer an die Anfänge der Beethovenschen Symphonien erinnern; er soll etwas Ähnliches zu
machen suchen.’ Robert Schumann to Joseph Joachim, 6 January 1854; Robert Schumanns Briefe:
Neue Folge, ed. F. Gustav Jensen (Leipzig, 1904), 390.
6
For a thorough account of the First Piano Concerto’s arduous genesis, see George Bozarth,
‘Brahms’s First Piano Concerto Op. 15: Genesis and Meaning’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des
Konzerts: Festschrift Siegfried Kross zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Reinmar Emans and Matthias
Wendt (Bonn, 1990), 211–47.
7
Michael Kube provides commentary on other piano trios from Schumann’s circle and on the
status of the genre in mid-century German musical culture in ‘Brahms’ Klaviertrio H-Dur Op. 8
(1854) und sein gattungsgeschichtlicher Kontext’, Internationaler Brahms-Kongress Gmunden 1997:
Kongreßbericht, ed. Ingrid Fuchs (Tutzing, 2001), 31–57.
8
‘Das Trio hätte ich auch gern noch behalten, da ich jedenfalls später darin geändert hätte.’ Brahms
to Joachim, 19 June 1854; Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim, ed. Andreas Moser,
Brahms Briefwechsel, 5 (Berlin, 1912), 43.
256 ROGER MOSELEY
improved editions. Brahms deplored Simrock’s profiteering, and in this case was
also suspicious of his publisher’s judgment: ‘I think it exceedingly unwise of you
to buy . . . music that cost approximately a hundred louis d’or, and which in the
near future won’t be worth powder and shot.’9 But he was none the less attracted
by the opportunity to revise his juvenilia, and proceeded to make minor changes
to his early piano works. He initially approached the Trio in B in a similar fashion,
working on the autograph score of the original version and making editorial
emendations as he went, but it soon became apparent that the scale of his changes
would require a fresh manuscript. Far from merely revising the piece, Brahms
found himself radically recasting it, taming its profusion of ideas and disciplining
its formal excesses. After completing the bulk of the revision during the summer
of 1889, he tested the new version on friends and audiences over the following year
and made further minor alterations prior to publication in 1891.10

When recasting the trio, Brahms approached the work as composer, editor
and critic. The diverse requirements of these roles meant that overhauling the
trio was at once preservative and modernizing, both a smartening up and a
dressing down, and Brahms acknowledged the resultant ambiguities in his
guarded reactions to the finished product. To his old friend Julius Grimm
he wrote: ‘Do you still remember something of a trio in B major from the
time of our youth, and wouldn’t you be eager to hear it now that – I didn’t
put a wig on it – but combed and tidied its hair a bit?’11 To Clara Schumann,
however, Brahms was less coy about the scope of his revision: ‘I have written my
9
‘Ich finde es über die Maßen unvernünftig, wenn Sie von Härtels Sachen kaufen – ich kann
mir nicht denken, wie teuer – die ihnen beiläufig 100 L’dors gekostet haben, und die in
kürzester Zeit nicht einen Schuß Pulver wert sind.’ Brahms to Fritz Simrock, 1 April 1888;
Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Fritz Simrock, ed. Max Kalbeck, 2 vols., Brahms Brief-
wechsel, 11–12 (Berlin, 1919), i, 181, trans. Karl Geiringer, Brahms: His Life and Work (New
York, 1982), 364–5. For a while, Brahms considered publishing through Peters; he thought
Simrock charged too much for his music, making it inaccessible to the public. See the
letters and commentary in Life and Letters, 583 and 654–5. Robert Pascall mentions Brahms’s
revisions of the piano works in ‘Brahms and the Definitive Text’, Brahms: Biograph-
ical, Documentary and Analytical Studies, ed. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 59–75 (p. 71).
10
For an exhaustive comparison of all surviving materials from the revisionary process and an
account of its unfolding, see Franz Zaunschirm, Der frühe und der späte Brahms: Eine Fallstudie
anhand der autographen Korrekturen und gedruckten Fassungen zum Trio Nr. 1 für Klavier, Violine
und Violoncello Opus 8 (Hamburg, 1988). See also Ernst Herttrich, ‘Johannes Brahms –
Klaviertrio H-Dur Opus 8: Frühfassung und Spätfassung: Ein analytischer Vergleich’, Musik,
Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift für Günter Henle, ed. Martin Bente (Munich, 1980), 218–36;
Gottfried Scholz, ‘Zu Johannes Brahms: Klaviertrio in H-Dur Op. 8’, Die Kammermusik von
Johannes Brahms: Tradition und Innovation, ed. Gernot Gruber (Laaber, 2001), 139–48; and
Norbert Meurs, ‘Das verstellte Frühwerk: Zum H-dur-Trio Op. 8 von Johannes Brahms’,
Musica, 37 (1983), 34–9. Brahms made one far-reaching alteration with four single strokes of
his pencil: the first movement’s common time signature was changed to cut time.
11
‘Kennst Du etwa noch ein H dur-Trio aus unserer Jugendzeit, und wärest Du nicht begierig, es
jetzt zu hören, da ich ihm – (keine Perrücke aufgesetzt –!) aber die Haare ein wenig gekämmt und
geordnet.’ Brahms to Julius Grimm, early March 1890; Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit J. O.
Grimm, ed. Richard Barth, Brahms Briefwechsel, 4 (Berlin, 1908), 150, trans. Life and Letters, 672.
B major Trio once more.’12 He was tickled by the response of David Popper, the
cellist and étude-writer who premièred the revised version: ‘He liked my changes
so much that he begged me to revise all his works for him.’13 But to Simrock,
Brahms was cagey: ‘I must categorically state that the old one is bad, but I do not
maintain that the new one is good!’14 He vacillated over what should become of
the original, first expressing indifference to its fate – ‘whether you melt it down
or print it anew is quite seriously all the same to me’ – before eventually instruct-
ing Simrock to make it available on request.15
While the disparity between the two versions of the Trio in B may seem as clear-
cut as that between Figures 1 and 2, the power of these contrasting images lies as
much in what they share as in how they diverge. In the following pages, I shall
consider both incarnations of the trio in order to map out the common ground
they occupy as well as the qualities that divide them. Along the way, the themes
that emerge – Brahms’s conception of his musical legacy (both inherited and
bestowed) and his position within a changing aesthetic and critical landscape –
will be imbricated and developed. Brahms first conceived the trio within the
circumference of the Schumanns’ Freundeskreis, but he revised it under the
glare of public scrutiny; in so doing, he had to mediate between his own compos-
itional concerns and how his music and motivations could be construed by
friends, critics, historians and even analysts. By revealing the tensions between
these different agendas, I hope to cast new light on Brahms’s bifurcated image and
to show how the Trio in B reveals the interdependence of the ‘original’ and the
‘revision’, the public and the private, and the old and the young (or should it be
the new?). Ultimately, I argue, it is the Tranquillo coda to Brahms’s revised first
movement that best expresses what each version gains and loses while taking stock
of what remains: it looks back with clear-eyed nostalgia over the 35 years that
separated its composer from his former self. In my own coda, I shall explore how
this Tranquillo section traces the impossibility of integrating past and present,
and how its air of tender resignation resonates with latter-day musicological
preoccupations.
12
‘Ich habe mein H dur-Trio noch einmal geschrieben.’ Brahms to Clara Schumann, 3 September
1889; Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms, ed. Litzmann, ii, 393.
13
‘Popper hat meine Umarbeitung so gut gefallen, daß er mich gebeten hat, alle seine Werke
umzuarbeiten.’ Quoted in Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Gottlieb-Billroth
(Berlin and Vienna, 1935), 461.
14
‘Wegen des verneuerten Trios muß ich noch ausdrücklich sagen, daß das alte zwar schlecht ist, ich
aber nicht behaupte, das neue sei gut!’ Brahms to Simrock, 13 December 1890; Johannes Brahms
im Briefwechsel mit Fritz Simrock, ed. Kalbeck, ii, 37.
15
‘Was Sie mit dem alten anfangen, ob Sie es einschmelzen oder auch neu drucken, ist mir, im
Ernst, ganz einerlei.’ Brahms to Simrock, 13 December 1890; ibid., 37, trans. Life and Letters, 678.
‘Was mit der alten Ausgabe geschehen soll: es ist wirklich unnütz, darüber zu reden und zu
beschließen – nur meine ich, man kann sie nicht wohl jetzt mit der neuen Ausgabe zugleich
anzeigen. Wird sie verlangt, so schicken Sie sie, und scheint es Ihnen eines Tags nötig oder
wünschenswert, so drucken Sie sie neu (lassen ja auch möglicherweise die neue Ausgabe ein-
gehen!).’ Brahms to Simrock, 29 December 1890; Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Fritz
Simrock, ed. Kalbeck, ii, 38–9.
258 ROGER MOSELEY
That the Brahms who revised the Trio in B was a very different composer from the
Brahms who conceived it is made strikingly explicit on the final page of the
autograph of the first version, which is signed ‘Hannover. Januar 54. Kreisler
jun.’.16 In addition to op. 8, the Piano Sonatas opp. 1, 2 and 5 and the opp. 3
and 6 sets of songs bear the same signature; its earliest appearance dates from 1852,
on Brahms’s left-hand arrangement of the Rondo from Weber’s Piano Sonata op.
24. The young Brahms was no stranger to pseudonyms – some of his early hack-
work was issued under the names of G. W. Marks and Karl Würth – but the
persona of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s intertextual
musico-literary creation, was of a different order.17 Kreisler, originally modelled
on the composer Ludwig Böhner, served as a nom de plume for Hoffmann before
assuming fictional life in his novel Lebensansichten des Katers Murr. The figure of
Kreisler thus shaded from Böhner’s concrete existence into Hoffmann’s aesthetic
fantasy, representing a musical ideal that could only be expressed in belletristic
terms.
You have sharpened your hearing faculty to the point that you sometimes can perceive the
voice of the poet concealed inside you . . . and yet do not believe that it is you yourself who
have spoken and no one else. . . . The musician – that is, he in whose innermost being music
unfolds into a condition of total awareness – is surrounded by melody and harmony
everywhere.18
For Kreisler, the composer’s essential activities are listening and transcribing: he
serves as the world’s sounding board. This characterization of the composer as
listener rather than creator, discoverer rather than inventor, struck a chord in
Brahms that resounded through an entry among the bons mots by musicians,
16
David Brodbeck suggests that the trio was actually ‘the product of the following spring, at which
point it enters the composer’s correspondence with Joachim’. ‘Medium and Meaning: New
Aspects of the Chamber Music’, The Cambridge Companion to Brahms, ed. Michael Musgrave
(Cambridge, 1999), 98–132 (pp. 122–7: on p. 298 n. 42).
17
On Brahms and Kreisler, see Constantin Floros, Brahms und Bruckner: Studien zur musikalischen
Exegetik (Wiesbaden, 1980), 84–98; Siegfried Kross, ‘Brahms and E. T. A. Hoffmann’, 19th-
Century Music, 5 (1981–2), 193–200; Antonio Baldassarre, ‘Johannes Brahms and Johannes
Kreisler: Creativity and Aesthetics of the Young Brahms Illustrated by the Piano Trio in B
Major, Opus 8’, Acta musicologica, 72 (2000), 145–67; and Heinz Gärtner, Johannes Brahms:
‘Trüge ich nicht den Namen Kreisler’: Biografie eines Doppellebens (Munich, 2003). Bozarth offers
a thoughtful reading of Brahms and Kreisler vis-à-vis the inception of the First Piano Concerto
in ‘Brahms’s First Piano Concerto Op. 15’, 230–8.
18
E. T. A. Hoffmann, trans. Max Knight, ‘Johannes Kreisler’s Certificate of Apprenticeship’,
19th-Century Music, 5 (1981–2), 189–92; the piece appeared as ‘Johannes Kreislers Lehrbrief’ in
Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, published in 1815. See also Martyn Clarke’s
translation in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer,
Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge, 1989), 159–65. More than 40 years after the
fact, Joseph Joachim recalled the extent of Kreisler’s influence on the young Brahms: ‘Wohl
war dieser Jüngling Johannes, Johannes Kreisler junior, wie der dem weltlichen Getriebe
abgewendete Neunzehnjährige sich mit Vorliebe nannte, mit seinem reichen Gemüt, seiner
Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen, tief von dem Zauber der Romantik umfangen.’ Quoted in
Über Brahms, ed. Renate Hofmann and Kurt Hofmann (Stuttgart, 1997), 216.
painters, philosophers and poets that he stored in a journal entitled ‘Young

Kreisler’s Treasure Chest’:
Form is something that has been created over a thousand years through the efforts of the
greatest masters and which every follower should learn as quickly as possible. It would be a
most foolish delusion of misguided originality for everyone to set out again to search and
grope for what was already available in great perfection.19
That Kreisler Junior’s signature first appeared on Brahms’s transcription of

Weber’s Rondo rather than an original composition demonstrates his respect
for the ‘greatest masters’ and suggests that Brahms initially envisaged the persona
more as a collaborator – even an amanuensis – than as an independent creative
ego.
The nature of Brahms’s relationship with Kreisler was transfigured by his
encounter with Robert Schumann in the autumn of 1853 and the new-found
enthusiasm for his mentor’s music and aesthetics that ensued. In particular,
Brahms seems to have been fascinated by the distillation of Schumann’s
psycho-musical tendencies into the personae of Florestan and Eusebius. In the
summer of 1854, after Robert Schumann’s breakdown, Brahms cast himself and
Kreisler in Schumannesque roles when writing to Clara:
I often quarrel with myself – that is, Kreisler and Brahms quarrel with one another. But
usually each has his decided opinion and fights it out. This time, however, both were quite
confused, neither knew what he wanted; it was most comical to observe it. Anyway, tears
almost came to my eyes.20
For Siegfried Kross, the troublesome, tragicomic dissociation of Brahms and

Kreisler was a necessary stage in Brahms’s shedding of his awkward – and, to
observers such as Joachim, somewhat embarrassing – literary alter ego. But rather
than indicating a weakening of Schumann’s influence, the tensions between
Brahms’s creative personae surely reveal its deepening complexity. In what he
called the ‘Little Variations on a Theme by Him [Robert], Dedicated to Her
19
‘Die Form ist etwas durch tausendjährige Bestrebungen der vorzüglichsten Meister gebildetes,
das sich jeder Nachkommende nicht schnell genug zu eigen machen kann. – Ein höchst törichter
Wahn übelverstandener Originalität würde es sein, wenn da jeder wieder auf eigenem Wege
herumsuchen und herumtappen wollte, um das zu finden, was schon in großer Vollkommenheit
vorhanden ist.’ Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein: Aussprüche von Dichtern, Philosophen und
Künstlern, zusammengetragen durch Johannes Brahms, ed. Carl Krebs (Berlin, 1909), 143.
20
‘Ich habe oft Streit mit mir, das heißt, Kreisler und Brahms streiten sich. Aber sonst hat jeder seine
entschiedene Meinung und ficht die durch. Diesmal jedoch waren sie beide ganz konfus, keiner
wußte, was er wollte, höchst possierlich war’s anzusehen. Übrigens standen mir fast die Tränen in
den Augen.’ Brahms to Clara Schumann, 15 August 1854; Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms,
ed. Litzmann, i, 9, trans. Life and Letters, 51. Floros draws close parallels between the charac-
terization of Florestan and Eusebius on the one hand and Kreisler and Brahms on the other:
‘“Brahms” ist still, scheu, zurückhaltend, diszipliniert, “Kreisler” dagegen impulsiv, erregbar,
leidenschaftlich, unbeherrscht und unberechenbar.’ Constantin Floros, Johannes Brahms: ‘Frei,
aber einsam’: Ein Leben für eine poetische Musik (Zurich, 1997), 36.
260 ROGER MOSELEY
[Clara]’, published as op. 9 under a less suggestive title, Brahms not only appro-
priated Robert Schumann’s theme and muse, but also tagged certain variations
with a ‘Kr.’ or a ‘B’ in the same manner that Schumann had attributed numbers to
Florestan and Eusebius in his Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6. While testifying to the
appeal held by Hoffmann’s flights of Romantic fancy, Kreisler Junior bespoke
Brahms’s longing for affiliation, a desire for a father that aimed itself at various
targets – directly at Schumann, and (through and beyond him) at great
figures from the musical past. The Trio in B marked Brahms’s first attempt to
justify the legacy Schumann had thrust upon him: more than a mere pen-name,
Kreisler Junior served as both an inspiration and a mask.
The overall design of the work is strikingly monotonal, since all four move-
ments are in the key of B (two major, two minor).21 Given the tonic’s prepon-
derance, Brahms was faced with the challenge of generating diversity and contrast
within each movement. In the opening Allegro con brio, he adopted an unusual
tonal scheme in which the tripartite exposition orientates itself around not only B
major and G# minor (the relative minor), but also E major (the subdominant).
The opening 43 bars, safely anchored in B major, fail to hint at the unconventional
tonal manoeuvres to come. They consist of five sections alternately orientated
toward tonic and dominant; throughout, the harmonic security, the yearning
of the violin and cello in thirds and sixths, and the piano’s undulations combine
to unabashed lyrical effect, while the open fifths in the piano’s left hand imbue
the music with a pastoral tinge. These characteristics stand in marked contrast
to Brahms’s other early sonata-form movements, not to mention the post-
Beethovenian codification of sonata form itself: instead of a laconic first subject,
tightly coiled with motivic potential, a fully fledged Schubertian melody gently
unfolds. But at its climactic arrival on the dominant (bars 62–3), the lyricism is
curtailed by a series of downward scales in the piano, and the music sequentially
winds toward D# to prepare for the second theme in G# minor (bars 83–4). This
modulation coincides with a shift from the opening sunny singing style to an
arioso lament, replete with mournful appoggiaturas, scored for the solo piano in
austere octaves. Although this new theme is marked espressivo, it lies in the
instrument’s nondescript mid-range, where its melancholy cannot help but
sound limp after the lush opening. Indeed, there is a touch of awkwardness
about its very presentation, since the roles of the piano and cello are strangely
inverted: the former struggles to elegize while the latter wrestles with a chordal
accompaniment (bars 94–8). Although the arioso theme shares motivic material
21
For this reason, I follow David Brodbeck in referring to op. 8 as the Trio in B (rather than B
major). Among Brahms’s other chamber works, the Piano Trio in C minor, op. 101, forms the
most obvious parallel: all four of its movements are in C, three in minor and one in major.
Likewise, all four movements of the Horn Trio, op. 40, are in E b, three in major and one in minor,
although the characteristics of the natural horn may well have contributed to this work’s mono-
tonality. In all three cases, it is possible that Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas in E, op. 14 no. 1, op. 90
and op. 109, ‘Pastoral’ Sonata, op. 28, and String Quartet in E minor, op. 59 no. 2, provided
Brahms with monotonal models.
with the movement’s opening melody, the connection is obscured by gestural

disjunction; the piano’s halting sighs hinder any perception of thematic progress.
When the music reaches the dominant of G# minor again, the scene shifts as the
piano conjures up a spectral presence. Alone once more, it murmurs a chromatic
stile antico fugue subject (bars 98–103), reminiscent in its twists of the Kyrie from
Bach’s Mass in B minor; Schumann’s fugues on ‘B-A-C-H’, op. 60, particularly
no. 4, may have served as mediating models. But Brahms’s fugue subject does not
merely pay homage to specific antecedents, for in a wider sense it points to the
obscure romance of the archaic, beguilingly set forth by Hoffmann.22 Like the
arioso theme, this fugue subject is related to the movement’s opening melody, but
it too is more fragmentary than organic: deep and pianissimo, it sounds like a
disembodied echo, reaching back in space as well as time. It stands as a focal point
for the contrapuntal processes to which the other themes in the second group will
be subjected and which proceed to govern the movement’s development and
recapitulation.23 Immediately picking up on the bookish mood, the arioso
theme returns in canon between the violin and cello (bars 103–17) before the
latter belatedly answers the fugue subject, bringing it to cadence in G# minor. In
response, the piano muses on the fugue subject’s opening three notes before
spinning them into a simple country dance in E major (bars 126ff.); the cello’s
musette drone on open fifths again brings pastoral connotations, and the poco
scherzando marking at bar 126 confirms that a solemn fugue subject has been
irreverently transformed. The strictures of the academy and the melancholy of G#
minor have not been forgotten, however. The dance, like the arioso theme, does
not escape canonical treatment across all three instruments before a cloying ca-
dence gives way to Lydian arabesques that fall softly from violin to cello, signalling
the end of the Arcadian idyll: the underpinning tonic of E drops by a semitone
(bar 155) back to the dominant of G# minor, the return of which is underscored
with an elongated recollection of the arioso theme’s opening phrase (bars 157–61).
Scholars have struggled to make sense of this elaborate and idiosyncratic
exposition. For James Webster, its subdominant tendency has serious implica-
tions: he charges the movement with ‘massively violating’ the sonata prin-
ciple.24 Nicholas Cook rationalizes the E major section by ‘enclosing’ it
22
See, for instance, the attitude of Kreisler (and, conversely, that of the dilettantes) to the ‘Goldberg’
Variations, BWV 988, as described in ‘Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Musical Sufferings’,
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. Charlton, 84–5.
23
Brahms’s respect for the past and his keen interest in contrapuntal procedure were soon to be
expressed even more literally in his exchange of counterpoint exercises with Joachim. See David
Brodbeck, ‘The Brahms–Joachim Counterpoint Exchange; or, Robert, Clara, and “the Best
Harmony between Jos. and Joh.”’, Brahms Studies 1, ed. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1994), 30–
80, and William Horne, ‘Through the Aperture: Brahms’s Gigues, WoO 4’, Musical Quarterly, 86
(2002), 530–81.
24
James Webster, ‘Schubert’s Sonata Form and Brahms’s First Maturity’, 19th-Century Music,
2 (1978–9), 18–35 (part 1), and 3 (1979–80), 52–71 (part 2) (p. 59). If the exposition contravenes
Beethovenian norms, its lyricism and tripartite structure hint at connections with Schubert along
the lines that Webster establishes in his article; however, Brahms’s dalliance with the subdom-
inant has no Schubertian precedent.
262 ROGER MOSELEY
within the G# minor of the second group as a whole, but casts doubt on its
thematic status: motivic interpenetration leads him to conclude that ‘from a
strictly thematic point of view, we are hardly justified in speaking of . . . a
second group at all’.25 Since tonal and motivic approaches to harmonic
and thematic structure have yielded such dubious results, bringing topical
resonances into play might help us gain purchase on the movement’s discourse.
Applying the poietic and aesthetic conventions of topoi to mid-nineteenth-
century German chamber music requires a degree of justification and context-
ualization. While the topoi deployed by Brahms throughout the movement draw
on the music of Schubert and Beethoven, they reach back beyond them to
Viennese music of the late eighteenth century.26 The proliferation of topoi in
Mozart and Haydn was due to relatively – perhaps uniquely – stable associa-
tions between musical gesture and social meaning, and the subsequent con-
ception of music as a gnomic phenomenon, promoted by Hoffmann, led to
the denigration of overtly topical music as naive or superficial. It is telling, for
instance, that the only places Schumann sets his music squarely within topical
boundaries lie within the never-never land of his Album für die Jugend, op. 68.
For grown-ups, unproblematic relationships between gesture and meaning
were a thing of the past. While vestiges of topoi persist elsewhere in
Schumann’s music, meaning floats free as signifier and signified lose traction
(compare, for instance, the prim strut of the ‘Soldatenmarsch’ from the Album
für die Jugend with the eccentricity and metrical legerdemain of the marches in
the Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6, and Carnaval, op. 9). In Kofi Agawu’s sum-
mary, Schumann’s topoi transform sign into symbol, ‘loading the associative
dimension in such a way that listener and performer are invited – indeed,
compelled – to construct a metaphorical scenario or plot for the piece’.27
Unmoored from their syntactical functions, Schumann’s topoi share the
burden of constructing meaning with their interpreters. Conversely, the
topoi invoked by Brahms in his early works are less ambiguous than Schu-
mann’s, and their grasp on the concrete is the firmer for it. They thus reveal a
twofold historicism by virtue of the world of yore they depict and the old-
fashioned means of musical signification by which they do so.
Throughout the first movement of the Trio in B, however, clearly defined
topical gestures are thrown into bizarre juxtaposition. After the topical diversity
of the exposition, military and hunting topoi have significant roles to play in the
development, and their presence might be heard to signal a shift in mode from the
lyric to the epic: the opening theme and the arioso lament are both infused with
new urgency, while the imitative potential of the ‘country dance’ theme is
25
Nicholas Cook, ‘Performing Rewriting and Rewriting Performance: The First Movement of
Brahms’s Piano Trio, op. 8’, Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie, 4 (1999), 227–34 (pp. 232n, 229).
26
See Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, 1980); Wye J.
Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago and
London, 1983); and V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music
(Princeton, NJ, 1991).
27
Agawu, Playing with Signs, 137, 142.
energetically explored. Responding to such poetic markers, Jonathan Bellman has

proposed that a combination of the pastoral, the archaic and the heroic adds up to
what he calls the ‘chivalric style’, which Brahms inherited from Schumann.28 This
style is at its clearest in the Magelone Romanzen, op. 33: fanfares, horn figures and
heraldic melodies abound in the songs’ depiction of courtly love. But the chivalric
style is characterized by a less tangible narrative quality that Bellman defines as
‘a certain expansiveness of pacing, a capricious shifting of meters and textures,
that suggests the allusive and episodic nature of a recounted story’.29 Such a
description neatly fits the first movement of the Trio in B, helping to explain
its topical peregrinations as well as its idiosyncratic departures from the sonata-
form paradigm. Indeed, it suggests that Brahms may have had a complementary
generic archetype in mind: the ballade. William Horne has argued that the piano
pieces Brahms wished to publish in the summer of 1854 as ‘Leaves from a

Musician’s Diary, edited by Young Kreisler’ were early versions of the op. 10
Ballades.30 If he is correct, the association of Kreisler Junior with Brahms’s chi-
valric style is strengthened; in any case, Brahms’s proposed title showed the young
Kapellmeister to be embroiled in narrative subtexts, in experiences that were later
shaped into stories to be (re)told. Max Kalbeck, Brahms’s acolyte and voluminous
biographer, hinted at this connection when he described the first version of
op. 8 as ‘ein musikalisches Reisetagebuch des jungen Kreisler’, and the scope
and kaleidoscopic variety of the movement bear him out: Johannes’s travels
range outwards across topical boundaries and backwards through history.31
Throughout it all, however, Brahms was at pains to show that the music’s topical
variety and episodic structure make sense when perceived from Young Kreisler’s
unitary perspective, and the means by which he attempted this were motivic. The
first movement’s opening melody was mined to yield raw material for almost all
the work’s themes (as illustrated in Example 1).
The intervallic pattern of the trio’s opening theme – 5^ – 1^ – 2^ – 3^ – can also
be found in the first song of the Magelone Romanzen (see Examples 2a and 2e).
Christopher Reynolds has grouped the opening of op. 33 no. 1 with similar
themes in the First Piano Concerto (Example 2c), the Piano Quartet in A,
op. 26 (Example 2d), and the Third Symphony, op. 90 (Example 2i), and
28
Jonathan Bellman, ‘Aus alten Märchen: The Chivalric Style of Schumann and Brahms’, Jour-
nal of Musicology, 13 (1995), 117–35. Such a style manifested in music what Jürgen Habermas de-
scribed as ‘romantic modernism’, exponents of which ‘looked for a new historical epoch and
found it in the idealized Middle Ages’. Habermas, trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, ‘Modernity: An
Incomplete Project’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Towns-
end, WA, 1983), 1–15 (p. 2).
29
Bellman, ‘Aus alten Märchen’, 119.
30
Horne, ‘Brahms’s Op. 10 Ballades and his Blätter aus dem Tagebuch eines Musikers’, Journal of
Musicology, 15 (1997), 98–115. For a broader consideration of the ballade genre, see Günther
Wagner, Die Klavierballade um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1976), esp. pp. 71–142.
31
Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1909–14), i, 149. It seems likely that Kalbeck’s
terminology referred to Brahms’s proposed Blätter aus dem Tagebuch eines Musikers.
264 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 1. Thematic connections across the first version of the Trio in B, op. 8.
(a) first movement, bars 1–4
x y y y x
(b) first movement, second theme, bar 84

y
(c) first movement, ‘fugue subject’, bars 98–9

y y
(d) first movement, ‘country dance’ theme, bars 126–7

y
(e) second movement, bars 1–3

x y y
(f ) second movement, trio, bars 165–7

y
(g) third movement, bars 1–4

y y x y
traced it back to several pieces by Schumann, including the final number of

Kreisleriana, op. 16 no. 8 (Example 3k).32 Reynolds argues that the contexts of
these themes, which all consist of a 5^– ^1– 2^– 3^– 5^– 8^ outline, make it ‘probable that
Brahms adopted this lively motive as a representation of his alter ego, “Johannes
Kreisler, Junior”’.33 Carol A. Hess has built on Reynolds’s foundations in her
examination of autobiographical allusions in Rinaldo, op. 50, by linking this
32
Christopher Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony by Brahms?’, 19th-Century Music, 9 (1985–6), 3–25.
33
Ibid., 20.
Example 2. Instances of the 5^ – 1^ – 2^ – 3^ motif in works by Brahms.

(a) Trio in B, op. 8, first movement, bars 1–2
(b) Piano Concerto in D minor, op. 15, first movement, bars 157–8
(c) Piano Concerto in D minor, finale, bars 1–2

(d) Piano Quartet in A, op. 26, second movement, piano RH, bars 3–4
(e) Magelone Romanzen, op. 33, no. 1, bars 1–4
(f ) Horn Trio, op. 40, finale, bars 1–2
(g) Die Mainacht, op. 43 no. 2, bars 3–4
Wann der sil ber ne Mond durch die Ge
(h) Symphony in C minor, op. 68, finale, bars 30–3
(i) Symphony in F, op. 90, first movement, bars 1–2

266 ROGER MOSELEY
‘Kreisler’ motif to a theme that, she claims, represents Rinaldo, and, more
obliquely, Brahms himself.34 Reynolds and Hess imply not only that the
5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ – 5^ – 8^ motif is distinctive enough to bear the weight of Kreisler
Junior as a protagonist, but also that its transformations reflect his progress –
and, ultimately, his fate.
With Kreisler’s signature at the end of the Trio in B in mind, it might be
tempting to link the first movement’s 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif to Reynolds’s and
Hess’s hypotheses. But while the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ – 5^ – 8^ sequence of pitches that they
identify is relatively rare, the shortened four-note version peppers Brahms’s
works with such frequency that, according to Georg Borchardt, it can be
found either directly, inverted or in retrograde form in no fewer than two
thirds of Brahms’s compositions.35 Some of its more notable appearances are
given in Example 2. At first glance the omnipresence of the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif may

seem to dilute, or even to nullify, its significance.36 Within certain works, how-
ever, it is certainly capable of assuming thematic and structural importance;
it serves as the theme for the finale of the Horn Trio (Example 2f ), for instance,
after having appeared as a ghostly pre-echo in the Adagio (bars 59–65). This
funereal slow movement has been widely held to portray Brahms’s grief at the
death of his mother, and the horn’s veiled hints at the jubilant finale to come seem
to signal a will to survive despite his loss. As Heinz Becker has pointed out, the
5^ – 1^ – 2^ – 3^ motif is at its most characteristic on the horn, and its presence here
suggests a way of interpreting it as more than a specific sequence of pitches.37
Its meaning is by no means fixed: in works such as the Horn Trio, the motif
promises the heroism that Reynolds and Hess ascribe to Young Kreisler, but in
the Trio in B its optimistic upward thrust meets with eventual doom in the form of
the finale’s savage B minor close. If Kreisler Junior was a post-Beethovenian
protagonist, his victory over fate was never certain – and was sometimes,
it would seem, undesired.38 Elsewhere, the motif is depersonalized, as if to
encompass the Romantic ideal of nature itself. The motif ’s pentatonicism and
‘pure’ evocation of the overtone series are most noteworthy in its appearance in
34
Carol A. Hess, ‘“Als wahres volles Menschenbild”: Brahms’s Rinaldo and Autobiographical
Allusion’, Brahms Studies 2, ed. David Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 1998), 63–89 (p. 86).
35
Georg Borchardt, ‘Ein Viertonmotiv als melodische Komponente in Werken von Brahms’,
Brahms und seine Zeit, ed. Constantin Floros, Hans Joachim Marx and Peter Petersen
(Hamburg, 1984), 101–12.
36
Charles Rosen, for instance, has inveighed against the ‘decoders’ of thematic allusion in general
and the attribution of meaning to the 5^– 1^– 2^– 3^ motif in particular. Critical Entertainments: Music
Old and New (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000), 184–5.
37
Heinz Becker, ‘Das volkstümliche Idiom in Brahmsens Kammermusik’, Brahms und seine Zeit,
ed. Floros, Marx and Petersen, 87–99 (p. 89).
38
For Dillon Parmer, the piece’s unusual tonal trajectory represents ‘the complete antithesis of
Romantic heroism’. ‘Brahms, Song Quotation, and Secret Programs’, 19th-Century Music,
19 (1995–6), 161–90 (p. 182). In similar vein, Kenneth Hull suggests that the allusive
relationship between passages in symphonies by Beethoven and Brahms indicates the latter’s
anti-heroism. ‘Allusive Irony in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony’, Brahms Studies 2, ed. Brodbeck,
135–68 (pp. 137–40).
retrograde as the ‘Alphorn’ theme in the finale of the First Symphony

(Example 2h), but the motif is also conspicuous throughout Brahms’s settings
of folk songs. He fancifully claimed that it echoed an ‘altdeutschen Minnelied’
in the Andante of his Piano Sonata in C, op. 1, and included an arrangement
of the same song, Verstohlen geht der Mond auf, in his anthology of Deutsche Volks-
lieder published in 1894.39 Many other songs in the Deutsche Volkslieder – the
sources of which Brahms first encountered on a trip down the Rhine during his
Kreislerian days – share the melodic contour 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ .40
The volkstümlich manifestations of the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif in German art music
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formed an impressive legacy, as
Example 3 shows. From the nationalistic folk song Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter
to Papageno’s Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen via the chorale Wer nur den lieben Gott
läßt walten and the quodlibet from Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations, the motif
appears in musical contexts that represent the pastoral and the militaristic, the
spiritual and the earthly: in a word, the traditional. The wide range covered by
these examples adds weight to the notion that Brahms’s audience would have
understood the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif not as a discrete succession of pitches bearing a
unique meaning, but as a topos in its own right. The implied sonority of the horn,
the folk traditions from which the motif rises, and the upward trajectory that it
outlines are connotative rather than denotative, suggestive rather than descrip-
tive: the motif ’s significance lies precisely in its ubiquity. It was thus more potent
for Brahms to invoke it ‘unconsciously’, acting as the Kreislerian vessel through
which it passed, than it would have been for him to acknowledge its appropriation
from Beethoven, Schumann or any other source. But at the same time, the motif’s
amorphously heroic outline matches the protean nature of the Kreisler persona
itself; by throwing his compositional agency into question, Brahms was
strengthening his claim on the tradition he was perpetuating by reinscribing
the 5^ – 1^– 2^ – 3^ motif in collective memory.
In December 1853, Brahms submitted the Piano Sonatas in C major and F# minor
to Breitkopf & Härtel for publication. He wrote to Robert Schumann of the
strange banality their printed appearance lent them: ‘To me they look much too
39
Matthias Schmidt locates the meaning of the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif in Brahms’s lifelong attachment
to this folk song: ‘Die bevorzugte Viertonwendung des Volkslied-Incipts von “Verstohlen geht
der Mond auf” (Quart- und zwei Sekundintervalle in aufsteigender Folge) findet sich tatsächlich
in zahlreichen Brahms-Werken thematisch aufgehoben: vom Allegro con moto oder dem
Scherzo des op. 8-Trios bis zum Andante des Doppelkonzertes op. 102.’ Johannes Brahms: Ein
Versuch über die musikalische Selbstreflexion (Wilhelmshaven, 2000), 103.
40
These songs include Ach, englische Schäferin, WoO 33 no. 8; Maria ging aus wandern, no. 14; Mir
ist ein schön’s braun’s Maidelein, no. 24; Dort in den Weiden steht ein Haus, no. 31; Och Moder, ich
well en Ding han!, no. 33; Soll sich der Mond nicht heller scheinen, no. 35; Es wohnet ein Fiedler, no.
36; Du mein einzig Licht, no. 37; Des Abends kann ich nicht schlafen gehen, no. 38; Ich weiß mir’n
Maidelein, no. 40; and Es saß ein schneeweiß Vögelein, no. 45. In addition, the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif
opens Vor dem Fenster, op. 14 no. 1; the Marienlieder, op. 22 nos. 1 and 2 (and the middle section of
no. 4); Sandmännchen, WoO 31 no. 4; the Vineta (Aus des Meeres tiefem Grunde), op. 42 no. 2;
Sonntag, op. 47 no. 3; and All meine Herzgedanken, op. 62 no. 5.
268 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 3. Earlier instances of the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif.

(a) Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter, bar 1
Prinz Eu gen, der ed le Rit ter,
(b) Johann Sebastian Bach/Georg Neumark, Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten, BWV 642,
bars 1–2
(c) Bach, quodlibet from the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, BWV 988, bar 2
(d) Mozart, Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen from Die Zauberflöte, K.620, bars 1–2
(e) Beethoven, Violin Sonata in C minor, op. 30 no. 2, finale, bars 15–16
(f ) Schubert, Sonata in G, D.894, third movement, bars 55–6
(g) Chopin, Impromptu in F , op. 36, bars 7–8
(h) Schumann, Papillons, op. 2, no. 3, bars 1–4

Example 3 continued
(i) Schumann, ‘In der Nacht’ from Fantasiestücke, op. 12, bar 3
3
3
(j) Schumann, Kreisleriana, op. 16, no. 3, bars 14–16

3
(k) Schumann, Kreisleriana, op. 16, no. 8, bars 1–2
(l) Schumann, Bunte Blätter, op. 99, no. 5, bar 1
ordinary and timid in their new form, indeed almost philistine. I still cannot get
used to seeing these innocent nature-children in such proper clothing.’41 Despite
Schumann’s warning that ‘wounds may await him’, Brahms could not have
anticipated the surge in critical interest that was to greet his works over the
decades to come; beyond the knowing smiles of the Schumann coterie, different
rules and expectations applied. Brahms’s thoughts and deeds in relation to the
41
‘Mir sehen sie in der neuen Gestalt noch viel zu ordentlich und ängstlich, ja fast philisterhaft aus.
Ich kann mich noch immer nicht daran gewöhnen, die unschuldigen Natursöhne in so anstän-
diger Kleidung zu sehen.’ Brahms to Clara Schumann, December 1853; Clara Schumann und
Johannes Brahms, ed. Litzmann, i, 3, trans. Life and Letters, 30. Brahms’s clinging to the Kreisler
persona could be interpreted as a symptom of the same unwillingness to set himself before the
public.
270 ROGER MOSELEY
Trio in B indicate that he found the probing responses of such critics as Adolf
Schubring and Hermann Kretzschmar unwelcome and invasive. They scrutinized
Brahms’s ‘nature-children’ for biographical traces and scoured them for allusions,
thus establishing an enduring critical tradition.42
A judge by profession, Schubring was an amateur critic who took it upon
himself to revitalize Schumann’s compositional legacy and musical influence.
While he admired the scherzo and finale of Brahms’s Trio in B, Schubring
expressed serious reservations about its first movement in a review published
in 1862.43
No more than in his C-major Piano Sonata is Brahms able to give the first movement of his
first trio any unified shape. Here, as in the sonata, the same factors contribute to the failure:
the padded counterpoint and overloaded polyphony – and then chiefly the error that he
draws from the main theme contrasting ideas that repel each other. Opposition within the
theme is only appropriate in a humorous scherzo and trio; the rest of the sonata movements,
on the other hand, require as themes merely secondary ideas, which do not conflict with the
obligatory association and reduction of basic themes which culminate in the development
section. . . . The second group soon takes on a crabbed, grating quality. . . . After the devel-
opment section the glorious first theme resounds once again; but then up to the end of the
movement Brahms bids farewell to beauty. Two new developments of the first and third
themes surpass each other in bizarre eccentricities. . . . The whole thing disintegrates into a
frenzied rout. . . . Here passion and character celebrate their triumph, while beauty covers
her face in sorrow.44
42
The issue of Brahms and allusion has received much recent attention. See, for instance, Kenneth
Hull, ‘Brahms the Allusive: Extra-Compositional Reference in the Instrumental Music of
Johannes Brahms’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1989), and ‘Allusive Irony in
Brahms’s Fourth Symphony’; Dillon Parmer, ‘Brahms and the Poetic Motto: A Hermeneutic
Aid?’, Journal of Musicology, 15 (1997), 353–89, and ‘Brahms, Song Quotation, and Secret
Programs’; Raymond Knapp, ‘Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion’, Journal of Musicological
Research, 18 (1998), 1–30, and ‘Utopian Agendas: Variation, Allusion, and Referential Meaning in
Brahms’s Symphonies’, Brahms Studies 3, ed. Brodbeck (Lincoln, NE, 2001), 129–89; Margaret
Notley, ‘Discourse and Allusion: The Chamber Music of Brahms’, Nineteenth-Century Chamber
Music, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (New York, 1998), 242–86; and Christopher Reynolds, Motives for
Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, MA, and London,
2003).
43
Schubring’s writings on Brahms have been translated by Walter Frisch as ‘Five Early Works by
Brahms’, Brahms and his World, ed. Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 103–22. See also Frisch’s
‘Brahms and Schubring: Musical Criticism and Politics at Mid-Century’, 19th-Century Music,
7 (1983–4), 271–81.
44
Adolf Schubring, ‘Schumanniana Nr. 8: Die Schumann’sche Schule, IV: Johannes Brahms’,
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 14 (1862), 109–10, trans. Frisch, ‘Five Early Works by Brahms’,
116–17. The Trio in B was performed in Boston on 26 December 1855, after which an unnamed
critic anticipated Schubring in reporting ‘no clear impression of [the piece] as an artistic whole’
and described it as ‘strange’, ‘episodical’ and ‘wayward’. Quoted in Michael Struck, ‘Zwischen
Alter und Neuer Welt: Unbekannte Dokumente zur Uraufführung und frühen Rezeption
des Klaviertrios Op. 8 von Johannes Brahms in der Erstfassung’, Traditionen – Neuansätze:
Für Anna Amalie Abert (1906–1996), ed. Klaus Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1997), 663–76 (p. 673).
Schubring perceived conflict between the music’s topical undergrowth and the
thematic integrity that aimed to ensure Young Kreisler’s survival in its midst. Part
of the problem stemmed from the way the themes of Brahms’s second group, such
as the arioso lament, ruthlessly exploit the placid opening melody, stripping melos
down to its unlovely components. But the process struck Schubring as equally
unsatisfactory when it ran in a more conventional direction, such as the recap-
itulatory passage in which the stile antico fugue subject is given a predictably
strenuous workout (bars 354–95). Although Schubring conceded that the
motifs throughout Brahms’s first movement – and indeed the whole work –
were drawn from its ‘glorious first theme’, this economy was not enough: the
very fact that such unruly bedfellows shared a common source was grotesque,
obeying the letter of organic law only to travesty its spirit. In 1868, Schubring
made explicit his opinions on how it should be done.

Thematic work is the logic of music. He who does not remain at his musical task, the
theme; he who does not understand how to work up the individual motives and motivic
particles of the theme into new characteristic shapes by means of mosaic combination,
continuation, expansion; he may for a while – if he has the tools – delight the untutored
multitudes with his potpourris, or startle them with prickling harmonies, tone colors, and
orchestral effects achieved by simple means. But a logical musician he is not.45
The following year, he praised ‘Herr, lehre doch mich’ from Brahms’s Ein
deutsches Requiem, op. 45, on account of both its thematic parsimony and its
unimpeachable technique: ‘All the melodies . . . are derived by inversion, dim-
inution, by the addition of prefixes and suffixes, from . . . three main themes,
which are themselves conceived in triple counterpoint.’46 But Brahms’s response
to Schubring’s lofty verdict was deflationary.
I disagree that in the third movement the themes of the different sections are meant to have
something in common. (Except for the small motive ) If it is nevertheless so –
I deliberately call back nothing from my memory – I want no praise for it, but do confess
that when I am working, my thoughts do not fly far enough away, and thus unintentionally
come back with the same idea. Yet if I want to retain the same idea, then it should be clearly
recognized in each transformation, augmentation, inversion. The other way would be a
trivial game and always a sign of the most impoverished invention.47
45
Adolf Schubring, ‘Die Schumann’sche Schule: Schumann und Brahms. Brahms’s vierhändige
Schumann-Variationen’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 3 (1868), 41–2, 49–51, trans. Frisch,
‘Brahms and Schubring’, 275.
46
Adolf Schubring, ‘Ein deutsches Requiem . . . von Johannes Brahms’, Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung, 4 (1869), 9–11, 18–20, trans. Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1984), 31.
47
‘Ich streite, daß in Nr. 3 die Themen der verschiedenen Sätze etwas miteinander gemein haben
sollen. (Ausgenommen das kleine Motiv ) Ist es nun doch so (ich rufe mir absichtlich
nichts ins Gedächtnis zurück): So will ich kein Lob dafür, sondern bekennen, daß meine
Gedanken beim Arbeiten nicht weit genug fliegen, also unabsichtlich öfter mit demselben
zurückkommen. Will ich jedoch dieselbe Idee beibehalten, so soll man sie schon in jeder
Verwandlung, Vergrößerung, Umkehrung deutlich erkennen. Das andere wäre schlimme
272 ROGER MOSELEY
Although Brahms’s self-deprecation is notoriously hard to interpret, the overt

message is clear enough: there is no mystery here, and no need for critical sophis-
try. Where Schubring lauded him for his scrupulous motivic economy, Brahms
affected to chide himself for his lack of invention; where Schubring saw ingenious
internal allusions and judged internal correspondences to be evidence of inten-
tion, Brahms countered that such relationships were trivial and arbitrary, reveal-
ing nothing more than a failure of imagination.
In the light of this blunt retort, it seems unlikely that Brahms paid much heed
to Schubring’s finger-wagging on compositional aesthetics, but the critic’s keen
eye for allusions was symptomatic of a burgeoning trend that provided Brahms
with a compelling motive to revise the Trio in B. If Schubring forged thematic
connections within works, he also searched for thematic correspondences
between them. His review of the Trio in B was part of a series of 12 articles in
the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that promoted the music of Schumann and his
successors. The second of these ‘Schumanniana’, entitled ‘Schumann und der
Großvater’, examines Schumann’s use of the Großvatertanz in Papillons, op. 2,
and Carnaval (see Example 4).48 In the last movement of Papillons, the Groß-
vatertanz brings the ball to an end. On its return in Carnaval’s ‘Marche des
“Davidsbündler” contre les Philistins’, identified as a ‘thème du XVIIème
siècle’, the Großvatertanz represents the conventional and academic preoccupa-
tions of the Philistines and is thrust into the whirlwind of battle from which the
Davidsbündler emerge triumphant.49 These instances of the Großvatertanz had
already been noted by Carl Koßmaly in 1844, but Schubring was convinced that
there were many more undocumented recurrences of the theme in works by
Schumann ranging from the Album für die Jugend, op. 68, to Genoveva,
op. 81.50 The identification of these ‘allusions’ may seem ingenious and uncon-
vincing in equal measure, but it is telling that Schubring felt the urge to seek them
Spielerei und immer ein Zeichen armseligster Erfindung.’ Brahms to Schubring, 17 February
1869; Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Viktor Widmann, Ellen und Ferdinand Vetter,
Adolf Schubring, ed. Max Kalbeck, Brahms Briefwechsel, 8 (Berlin, 1915), 216; trans. Frisch,
Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, 31–2; translation adapted after Giselher
Schubert, ‘Themes and Double Themes: The Problem of the Symphonic in Brahms’, 19th-
Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 10–23 (p. 21n), and Life and Letters, 383. Also see Friedrich
Krummacher’s commentary on this letter in ‘Reception and Analysis: On the Brahms
Quartets, Op. 51, Nos. 1 and 2’, 19th-Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 24–45 (pp. 31–2).
48
Adolf Schubring, ‘Schumann und der Großvater’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 53 (1860), 29–30.
49
Paul Nettl traced the Großvatertanz back to a seventeenth-century balletto by the Viennese
composer Johann Heinrich Schmelzer and links it directly to the quodlibet from Bach’s
‘Goldberg’ Variations (Example 3c) in ‘Bach and Volksmusik’, The Little Bach Book, ed.
Theodore Hoelty-Nickel (Valparaiso, IN, 1950), 123–33.
50
Carl Koßmaly, ‘Ueber Robert Schumanns Claviercompositionen’, Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung, 46 (1844), col. 36, cited in R. Larry Todd, ‘On Quotation in Schumann’s Music’,
Schumann and his World, ed. Todd (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 80–112 (p. 110n). Papillons and
Carnaval aside, Todd enumerates no fewer than 12 instances of the Großvatertanz identified
within Schumann’s oeuvre by Schubring (pp. 85–91).
Example 4. The Großvatertanz in Schumann’s Papillons and Carnaval.

(a) Schumann, Papillons, op. 2, no. 12, bars 1–4
(b) Schumann, ‘Marche des “Davidsbündler” contre les Philistins’ from Carnaval,
op. 9, bars 53–7
Thème du XVIIème siècle
out and perhaps even more significant that it was the ubiquitous 5^– ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif
that drew his attention.
The growing public interest in allusion and quotation surely contributed to
Brahms’s wariness on the matter of motivic relationships, even within his own
works. Drawing on a range of mid-century German critics, Anthony Newcomb
claims that ‘quotation, or even similarity of melodic material . . . to music of the
recent past by another composer . . . was not viewed as we now tend to view it – as
a source of aesthetic meaning and as a gesture of homage and emulation to
older music of the growing musical canon’.51 Spotting allusions to other com-
posers’ works – the sport of Reminiszenzenjägerei – became a beloved pastime of
‘dilettantes’, prompted by the approach of such critics as Schubring and, later, by
the widespread tracking of leitmotivs. Newcomb contends that Reminiszenzen-
jägerei was confined to melodic similarities, and paid no heed to more abstruse
formal, harmonic or rhythmic modelling; as he puts it, ‘intellectual property
rights rested in melodic material’.52 Brahms recoiled from what he perceived as
the overweening superficiality of the allusion-spotters, as was illustrated by his
infamous exasperation at those who pointed at Beethoven’s Ninth poking out
51
Anthony Newcomb, ‘The Hunt for Reminiscences in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Music
and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays, ed. Karol Berger and Newcomb (Cambridge, MA,
and London, 2005), 111–35 (p. 112); see also Reynolds, Motives for Allusion, 3–4.
52
Newcomb, ‘The Hunt for Reminiscences’, 117.
274 ROGER MOSELEY
from under his own First – ‘every jackass hears that’.53 But, rather than attacking
the practice of Reminiszenzenjägerei in general, it seems likely that Brahms was
lashing out at those who treated the Beethoven reference as a plagiaristic blunder
instead of a deliberately provocative intertextual gesture.
The surgeon Theodor Billroth, Brahms’s distinguished friend, mocked the
prevalence of long-eared listening and the craze for forging connections by pre-
dicting that a Wagner-loving mutual acquaintance would ‘probably believe that
the marvellous horn solo in the introduction to the last movement [of the First
Symphony] is derived from some of the Nibelungen’s 76 leitmotivs!’54 Further
light is cast on Brahms’s own attitude by a letter he wrote in 1888 to Otto Dessoff,
who had been mortified to discover an unwitting echo of Brahms’s Second
Symphony, op. 73, in a string quartet that Dessoff had dedicated to Brahms.
Don’t do anything stupid! One of the stupidest topics of stupid people is that of
reminiscences. . . . Don’t worry about it! Actually, I’d have kept my mouth shut and
made off with the free goods. You must not change a single note. After all, you know, of
course, that I too have stolen when given the opportunity, and much more egregiously.55
But, despite his jocular tone, the aging Brahms grew anxious about allusion and
the fine line separating homage from theft, and he responded by dichotomizing
his approach to the incorporation of music by other composers. When thematic
quotation was at stake he resorted to scholarly acknowledgment, as in the song
Unüberwindliche, op. 72 no. 5, which footnotes the Scarlatti sonata that served
53
In Kalbeck’s account, the exchange unfolded thus: ‘Es ist merkwürdig, wie das C-Dur-Thema in
Ihrem Finale dem Freudenthema der “Neunten” ähnelt.’ ‘Jawohl, und noch merkwürdiger ist,
daß das jeder Esel gleich hört.’ Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, iii, 109n.
54
‘Er wird wohl das wunderbare Hornsolo in der Introduktion des letzten Satzes aus irgendeinem
der sechsundsiebzig Leitmotive der Nibelungen herleiten!’ Theodor Billroth to Brahms, 10
December 1876; Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel, ed. Gottlieb-Billroth, 226. Billroth was
not too far off the mark: ‘You won’t believe what criminal charges the little Beethoven reminis-
cence from the Ninth has brought you in Leipzig’, wrote Schubring, only half-jokingly. Quoted
in David Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Cambridge, 1997), 66. The practice continued after
Brahms’s death: Donald Francis Tovey wrote in 1929 that Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Violin
in A, op. 100, was ‘sometimes known by the “mutton-head” title of “Meistersinger” sonata
because of its first three notes’. Quoted in Margaret Notley, ‘Brahms’s Chamber-Music
Summer of 1886: A Study of Opera 99, 100, 101, and 108’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University,
1992), 58. Of course, the First Symphony’s ‘Hornsolo’ has a history beyond the reach of Wagner’s
influence. In general terms, its evocation of Alpine peaks relied on the 5^ – 1^ – 2^ – 3^ motif in
retrograde; more specifically, Brahms had sent the theme as a birthday greeting to Clara
Schumann in 1868 (reproduced in Life and Letters, 368).
55
‘Ich bitte Dich, mache keine Dummheiten. Eines der dümmsten Kapitel der dummen Leute ist
das von den Reminiszenzen. . . . Verdirb nicht, rühr nicht daran! – Eigentlich hätte ich nichts
sagen und hernach mir das herrenlose Gut nehmen sollen. Keine Note darfst du daran ändern.
Schließlich weißt Du natürlich, daß ich bei der Gelegenheit auch und viel schlimmer gestohlen
habe.’ Quoted in Herttrich, ‘Johannes Brahms – Klaviertrio H-Dur Opus 8’, 230. For commen-
tary on Brahms’s exchange with Dessoff see David Brodbeck, ‘Brahms’s Mendelssohn’, Brahms
Studies 2, ed. Brodbeck, 209–31 (pp. 226–30); Parmer, ‘Brahms, Song Quotation, and Secret
Programs’, 162; and Newcomb, ‘The Hunt for Reminiscences’, 125–7.
as its melodic source.56 Elsewhere, such as in the Clarinet Quintet, op. 115,
he tacitly drew connections with other pieces that were structural or generic
rather than thematic, privileging abstract method over concrete material and
thus throwing the tune-hounds off the scent.
When it came to revising the Trio in B, Brahms’s blue crayon had probably
been sharpened by Kretzschmar’s evaluation of the work, published in 1884.
Kretzschmar’s attention had been drawn to the second theme of the finale
(Example 5a):
Without a doubt, Beethoven’s late style had a great influence on the form as well as the spirit
of Brahms’s first period. Indeed, the young Brahms seems to have orbited around
Beethoven’s genius as if it were a sun, conditioning all his thoughts and feelings. In one
work, the highly interesting trio, op. 8, this obsession finds a fierce expression. The second
theme in the last movement, beautifully sung by the cello, is an obvious quotation of the
main theme from Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte [op. 98], the melody which
carries the cycle’s valedictory words: ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder’ [Example 5b].
Thenceforward, this kind of symbolic reference to important melodies is to be found in
Brahms’s music. The connoisseur [Kenner] feels right at home and the uninitiated listener
[Uneingeweihten] is left undisturbed thanks to the complete naturalness with which these
poetic references are made. In particular, we believe that Beethoven’s song cycle also makes
an appearance in the song Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot [op. 3 no. 5].57
In 1854, Brahms would have been flattered by such comparisons. 30 years later
they were irredeemably tinged with Reminiszenzenjägerei and thus with the
56
At first, Brahms had merely wished to indicate that the theme was not his by marking it with the
designation ‘alienum’; its non-Brahmsness was more significant than its Scarlattiness (see
Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1, 65–6). George Henschel claimed that mentioning
Scarlatti by name was his own idea. Henschel, Personal Recollections of Johannes Brahms
(Boston, MA, 1907), 33. Applauding Brahms’s acknowledgment as a canny pre-emption of his
critics’ attacks, Schubring suggested that he should similarly credit Beethoven for the
Freudenthema-inspired melody in the finale of the First Symphony, to which it seems unlikely
that Brahms would have responded positively. Quoted in Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1,
66–7.
57
‘Auf die Form wie auf den Geist der ersten Periode hat ohne Zweifel der letzte Beethoven einen
großen Einfluß gehabt. Um den Genius dieses Meisters scheint Denken und Sinnen des jungen
Brahms wie um eine Sonne gekreist zu haben. In einem Werke, dem in vielfacher Beziehung
hochinteressanten Trio op. 8, findet dieser Kultus einen geradezu rührenden Ausdruck. Das
zweite Thema in seinem letzten Satze, vom Cello so schön eingeführt, es ist eine offenbare
Umspielung vom Hauptgesang aus Beethovens “Liederkreis an die ferne Geliebte” – dieselbe
Melodie, die am Ende des Werkes die Worte der Widmung trägt: “Nimm sie hin denn, diese
Lieder”. Man begegnet dieser Art symbolischer Verwendung bedeutender Melodien in den
Kompositionen von Brahms bis in die neueste Zeit herein. Den Kenner heimelt das an, den
Uneingeweihten stört es nicht, da diese poetischen Bezüge in vollendeter musikalischer
Natürlichkeit gemacht und verwertet sind. Den “Liederkreis” Beethovens speziell glauben wir
in dem Liede “Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot” [op. 3 no. 5] nochmals berührt zu sehen.’
Hermann Kretzschmar, ‘Johannes Brahms’, Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik aus den Grenzboten
(Leipzig, 1910), 151–207 (p. 158). Tellingly, the text of Brahms’s op. 3 no. 5, better known as In der
Fremde, had been set by Schumann as the opening song of his Eichendorff-Lieder, op. 39.
276 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 5. Parallels between the finale of Brahms’s first version of op. 8 and
Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.
(a) Brahms, op. 8 (first version), finale, bars 105–10
Vc.
espressivo
(b) Beethoven, Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder from An die ferne Geliebte, op. 98, bars 9–10
Nimm sie hin denn, die se Lie der
insinuation of epigonism, despite Kretzschmar’s tone of approval: the older

Brahms had no wish to be perceived as orbiting around anyone. When it came
to revising the trio, direct references to An die ferne Geliebte were swept away.
Several commentators, however, have followed the lead of Eric Sams in sug-
gesting a deeper reason for the allusion’s disappearance.58 Although the issue
has been hotly debated, many musicologists believe that Robert Schumann
alluded to Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder in the Fantasie, op. 17, and the
finale of the Second Symphony, op. 61, as an expression of his love for Clara;
from such a perspective, Brahms’s appropriation of the theme could be under-
stood as an intimate reference to her as well as an act of homage to Beet-
hoven.59 While Schumann’s allusive intentions remain unknowable, the ques-
tion of how they were construed can be addressed: Schumann’s biographer
J. W. Wasielewski had linked the finale of the Second Symphony with An die
ferne Geliebte in 1880, so Brahms was doubtless aware of the speculation such
connections could foster. David Brodbeck argues that the public probing of these
intimate allusive issues helped force Brahms’s editorial hand.60
Echoes of Schubert were also suppressed in Brahms’s revision of the trio. The
second theme of the slow movement bears a resemblance to Am Meer from
Schwanengesang (see Example 6), and the perception of the similarity
58
See Eric Sams, ‘Brahms and his Clara Themes’, Musical Times, 112 (1971), 432–4; Hull, ‘Brahms
the Allusive’, 237–8; and Brodbeck, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 123–7.
59
See Nicholas Marston, Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17 (Cambridge, 1992), 36–7, and ‘Voicing
Beethoven’s Distant Beloved’, Beethoven and his World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael
Steinberg (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 124–47; Todd, ‘On Quotation in Schumann’s Music’, 92–5;
and Berthold Hoeckner, ‘Schumann and Romantic Distance’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 50 (1997), 55–132. A similar melodic outline appears in bars 32–4 of Süsser
Freund, du blickest, the sixth song of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -Leben, op. 42.
60
Brodbeck, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 299n.
Example 6. Parallels between the third movement of Brahms’s first version of op.
8 and Schubert’s Am Meer.
(a) Brahms, op. 8 (first version), third movement, bars 33–4
32
Piano espressivo
(b) Schubert, Am Meer, bars 3–4
Das Meer er glänz te weit hin aus
reportedly irked Brahms.61 Sams suggested that a reading of Heine’s poem might
explain why. ‘It is about bitter tears, tragic parting, hopeless love. It is set in
Hamburg . . . and when in November 1854 Brahms returned to his own home
in Hamburg, Clara Schumann was with him.’62 Regardless of any biographical
resonances, however, it seems that it was again the public perception of an allusive
gesture that led to its excision, for Eusebius Mandyczewski had cautiously
broached the subject in a review of the revised trio in 1890: ‘The [slow move-
ment’s] original second theme might not have passed the older Brahms’s stricter
checks because of its remarkable similarity to Schubert’s song Am Meer, or be-
cause of other characteristics.’63 At issue here is less what Brahms had originally
61
‘In the Adagio . . . an annoying similarity . . . bothered the composer’, and the uneasiness that he
experienced on its account ‘compelled him to a complete revision of the . . . movement.’ Hans
Gál, trans. Joseph Stein, Johannes Brahms: His Work and Personality (New York, 1963), 161–2.
62
Sams, ‘Brahms and his Clara Themes’, 433. Parmer follows Sams in suggesting that the Am Meer
reference invites a reading of the poem in terms of Brahms’s thwarted love for Clara. ‘Brahms,
Song Quotation, and Secret Programs’, 183–5.
63
‘Mochte das ursprüngliche Seitenthema wegen seiner auffallenden Ähnlichkeit mit Schubert’s
Lied Am Meer oder wegen anderer Eigenschaften die strengere Prüfung nicht mehr bestanden
haben.’ Eusebius Mandyczewski, review of the revised op. 8, Deutsche Kunst- und Musik-Zeitung,
1 March 1890, 61. Perhaps the blatant parallel fifths in the piano’s left hand at the theme’s reprise
(bars 50–2), partially mitigated by the theme’s pastoral topos, were among the other factors that
Mandyczewski had in mind. Eduard Hanslick and Kalbeck echoed Mandyczewski’s observation
of the similarity to Am Meer. Hanslick, Aus dem Tagebuch eines Musikers: Kritiken und
Schilderungen (Berlin, 1892), 321; Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, i, 152. For a consideration of
Schubert’s influence on Brahms, see Pascall, ‘“My love of Schubert – no fleeting fancy”:
Brahms’s Response to Schubert’, Schubert durch die Brille, 21 (1998), 39–60, and Webster,
‘Schubert’s Sonata Form and Brahms’s First Maturity’.
278 ROGER MOSELEY
meant than what critics such as Wasielewski and Mandyczewski perceived.

Whether intended or otherwise, anything construed as an allusion was method-
ically eliminated.64
Example 2g gives the opening phrase of Brahms’s Die Mainacht, which
echoes op. 8’s opening thematic gesture and thus its raft of predecessors listed
in Example 3. But when discussing the song with George Henschel, Brahms
disparaged its melody’s familiar grace, instead focusing attention on the
effort – thematische Arbeit at its most literal – that had earned Die Mainacht its
true worth.
There is no real creating without hard work. That which you would call invention, that is to
say, a thought, an idea, is simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible,
which is no merit of mine. Yea, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until
I have made it my own by right of hard work.65
By dissociating himself from the prevailing mid-nineteenth-century poetics that

privileged originality over craftsmanship, Brahms was simultaneously distancing
himself from Hoffmann’s Kreisler, who ‘[did] not believe that it [was he himself ]
who [had] spoken and no one else’.66 The older Brahms wanted to draw a firm
line between his own utterances and those of others, and that led him to think
long and hard before opening his mouth. In the process, he placed such a pre-
mium on diligence over inspiration that revision, rather than composition,
seemed to have become his métier.
Heinrich Schenker recounted Brahms’s opinion of him with something ap-

proaching masochistic pride in a memoir written to celebrate the centenary
of Brahms’s birth.
64
While most commentators on allusion test their observations against evidence of compositional
intention, Knapp has stressed the listener’s role, arguing that allusiveness is aesthetic rather than
poietic. ‘Utopian Agendas’, 172–4. Similarly, James Hepokoski argues that ‘more germane than
disputing whether this or that allusion is “really there” is the task of attuning ourselves to the
generalised aesthetic invitation to hear ad hoc allusions at all – and recognising that invitation as a
central component of the music.’ ‘Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition’, The
Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, 2002), 424–59
(p. 437).
65
Quoted in Henschel, Personal Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 22. By refusing to take credit for
the song’s melody, perhaps Brahms was also tacitly acknowledging its indebtedness to Chopin’s
Impromptu in F # , op. 36 (Example 3g); for a penetrating analysis of these and other issues arising
from Brahms’s comment, see Reynolds, Motives for Allusion, 104–17. Robert Haven Schauffler,
whose testimony is not always reliable, reported that Brahms made a similar remark on the
relationship of inspiration and perspiration to Arthur Abell: ‘My themes come to me in a flash.
They are intuitive. Long after their arrival I take them up and work very hard over them.’ The
Unknown Brahms: His Life, Character, and Works (New York, 1933), 171–2.
66
Reynolds, Motives for Allusion, 106–7; Hoffmann, trans. Knight, ‘Johannes Kreisler’s Certificate
of Apprenticeship’, 190.
At my first visit, I presented to Brahms my published opus 1; he neither praised nor

censured it, but only said, ‘You play piano very well.’ . . . I felt honored by the first
words the master had directed at me. [On another visit,] he graciously and patiently
looked [over my sketched-out pieces]; and once again, he neither praised nor censured
them, but only said, ‘Not written out in full’, and added that in his youth he had destroyed
many things, and preferred to begin a new attempt rather than to spend time on making
corrections.67
In 1933, Schenker flaunted the scars left by Brahms’s asperity as stigmata, evidence
of the trials that the keeper of the flame had undergone. Schenker liked to portray
his relationship with Brahms as symbiotic, for their personal contact was the most
direct evidence for Schenker’s assertion that his theories simply arose from the
practice of master composers; this helps explain the propagation of Brahms’s

apocryphal remark that ‘only young Schenker knows how to write about
music’, a comment that distantly echoes Schumann’s paean to the young
Brahms.68 Schenker’s possession of a relayed torch was advertised more directly
in 1912, when he dedicated his analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to
‘the memory of the last master of German music, Johannes Brahms’.69 This
dedication is readily interpreted as an attempt to seal the canon, a protest at
what Schenker considered the degeneracy of modern music, but it is also a sub-
tle manifesto for the analyst’s importance, even an insidious claim that analy-
sis had usurped composition altogether: where Brahms left off, Schenker began.
In order to make such a claim, Schenker had to present the great composers of
the past in his image as much as he showed himself to be made in theirs. Scott
Burnham has written of this confluence in the context of Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony:
On the one hand, Schenker’s quasi-abstract Urlinie appears to construct the analysis, to
make its particular discoveries possible. On the other, the piece itself appears to construct
the Urlinie. . . . Either this piece was made to order for Schenker’s way of thinking, or
Schenker’s way of thinking was made to order for this piece. Yet either/or misses the mark
here, for this is clearly both: Beethoven’s compelling surface influences Schenker, while
Schenker appropriates that selfsame quality for his Urlinie.70
67
Heinrich Schenker, ‘Erinnerungen an Brahms’, Deutsche Zeitschrift, 46 (1933), 476–7, trans.
William Pastille, ‘Schenker’s Brahms’, American Brahms Society Newsletter, 5/2 (1987), 1–2
(p. 2). Schenker cherished Brahms’s caustic comments as ‘treasures’, and berated his fellow
aspiring composers for failing to value them.
68
The remark was attributed to Brahms by Israel Citkowitz in 1933, quoted in William Pastille,
‘Heinrich Schenker, Anti-Organicist’, 19th-Century Music, 8 (1984–5), 29–36 (p. 29). Its appeal is
so alluring that Pastille could not help but express his desire to believe it: ‘This remark, if
authentic – and one hopes it is . . .’ (ibid.). Similarly, Brahms is rumoured to have recommended
Schenker’s compositions to Simrock, but there is no reliable corroboration; the caustic com-
ments that Schenker reported hardly make it seem likely.
69
Quoted in Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms
(Oxford, 1996), 163.
70
Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 98–100.
280 ROGER MOSELEY
If Burnham’s appealing contention holds good for Beethoven, then it should also
inform the case of Brahms, given that Schenker invested so much in the continu-
ity of tradition from Beethoven through Brahms to himself. Sure enough, there is
evidence of many shared preoccupations between Brahms and Schenker. Some
are predictably broad: they shared reservations about Bruckner and the peda-
gogical tradition of his teacher Simon Sechter, elevating the eighteenth-century
theorist Johann Joseph Fux far above any contemporary authorities.71 Other
points of contact are more specific, such as the convergence of the composer’s
and the analyst’s approaches to sonata form, which Peter H. Smith has explored.72
Like Schenker, Brahms insisted on the primacy of counterpoint between the outer
voices as well as a clear hierarchy of keys within a piece. His pupil Gustav Jenner
recalled Brahms’s reaction to his attempts at Lieder:
Sometimes [Brahms] used a drastic but unusually simple means to open my eyes and make
me sense quite clearly that under that sumptuous and glittering cloak lay hidden a pitiful,
shabby, and undernourished being, which could not possibly show itself naked. Brahms
would cover up the upper system of the piano accompaniment with his hand, and pointing
to the vocal line and the bass he would say with an expressive smile: ‘I read only this.’
. . . Even in the case of a very long song whose subsidiary phrases were extended and
internally consistent, the principal key always had to be articulated by means of clear
relationships, so that, so to speak, the sum of all the keys utilized in the piece combined
to create an image of the tonic key in its activity. . . . The splendid freedom we sense in
Brahms’s creative power is rooted in part in his instinctively sure sense of the unified
character of the modulation; and the saying that it is only by subordinating himself
that man can be truly free finds in him a beautiful confirmation.73
The proto-Schenkerian rhetoric of Jenner’s account is striking, and it seems likely

that Schenker the aspiring composer was also privy to such wisdom. In his com-
mentary on Brahms’s miscellany of parallel octaves and fifths, also written in 1933,
Schenker claimed that ‘Brahms’s rejection of mere appearance results from his
deep involvement with the reality that lies behind appearance: strict counter-
point, the eternal truth of composition, which Beethoven termed “the eternal
religion”’.74
71
On the Viennese theoretical tradition and the positions of Sechter, Bruckner, Schenker and
Schoenberg within it, see Robert W. Wason, Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to
Schenker and Schoenberg (Ann Arbor, MI, 1985). On Schenker’s critical activities at the turn of the
century, see Kevin Karnes, ‘Heinrich Schenker and Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-
Century Vienna’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 2001).
72
Peter H. Smith, ‘Brahms and Schenker: A Mutual Response to Sonata Form’, Music Theory
Spectrum, 16 (1994), 77–103; a revised version of this article appears as Chapter 4 of Smith’s
Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in his Werther Quartet
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2005), 108–21.
73
Gustav Jenner, trans. Susan Gillespie, ‘Brahms as Man, Teacher, and Artist’, Brahms and his
World, ed. Frisch, 198–9.
74
Heinrich Schenker, trans. Paul Mast, ‘Commentary on Brahms’s Octaven und Quinten u. A.’,
Music Forum, 5 (1980), 142–92 (p. 151). It is notable how Schenker exerted his accumulated
Example 7. Brahms’s analysis of the voice-leading in the Allemande from Bach’s

B b Partita, BWV 825, bars 36–7.
6
6 5 6
4 3 3
But the most evocative intersection between Brahms and Schenker does not fit
in so neatly with the formation of a shared agenda, as it arises from material
that Schenker could not have seen. As mentioned above, Brahms himself had
written of the thousand-year-old precepts of form when stocking Young Kreisler’s
treasure chest, pronouncing that ‘those who have excelled are those who kept
returning to the ur-principles and who developed knowledge and abilities
through observation, learning, and practice’.75 In the summer of 1855, Brahms
replied to a letter from Clara Schumann in which she had raised some questions
over notes and ornaments in the Allemande from Bach’s Partita in B b, BWV 825.
Concerning bars 36–7, Brahms opined that ‘the A flat in the bass is correct’,
sketching out the following explanation (see Example 7); an A b was required,
he thought, ‘because it continues stepwise in that line A flat, B flat, C, D’.76 Voice-
leading took priority over the kind of immediate harmonic considerations that
had engendered Clara’s doubts: the similarity to Schenkerian notation and
thought is self-evident. Brahms’s approach to the Allemande is nothing less
than analytical, which is why its familiarity is startling. We are used to
Schenkerian analysis presenting itself as post hoc demonstration or rationalization;
what we have here is close to Schenker avant la lettre, the laying of a trail that, with
the benefit of hindsight (and Schenker’s historiography) is deceptively clear.
Compositional planning and analytical retrospection seem to merge. By these
authority in his critical discussion of Brahms’s interpretations of his examples, treating Brahms as
an equal at best.
75
‘Alle, die immer wieder zu den Urprinzipien zurückkehrten und Kenntnisse und Fertigkeiten
beobachtend, lernend, übend ausbildeten, sind tüchtig geworden.’ Des jungen Kreislers
Schatzkästlein, ed. Krebs, 62.
76
‘Das as im Baß richtig, weil’s weiter tonweise in der Stimme geht as, b, c, d.’ Brahms to Clara
Schumann, 20 August 1855; Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms, ed. Litzmann, i, 132, trans.
Life and Letters, 108. Avins comments that ‘[Brahms’s] ear has picked out the harmonic motion in
a manner more akin to the musical thought of a later generation. . . . Even his method of notation,
showing Clara the notes her ears should concentrate on, harkens forward to the structural hearing
practices of a later time’ (p. 109). What had puzzled Clara is unclear; perhaps she had thought that
the a b in question might have been a b b. The a b that Brahms preferred may have struck her as
dubious because it lacks a resolving g.
282 ROGER MOSELEY
criteria, how could Brahms fail to meet Schenker’s standards of greatness? As

Burnham remarks,
Schenker’s change of emphasis from the track of the listener to the act of creation inscribes
into musical theory the romantic view of the artist as a rival Creator. . . . For the artist is now
fully a hero; the analyst a high priest – and genius the ambrosia either possessed or
divined.77
There is also a striking convergence between Brahms and Schenker on the issues
of organicism and intentionality, topics that Brahms touched on in his corres-
pondence with Schubring. Toward the end of Brahms’s life, Schenker expressed
his own opinion, but he might as well have been paraphrasing Brahms:
This organic process is naturally organic only so long as it is not tainted by consciousness. In
the moment when the composer supplants his imagination with the search for similarities,
that which would otherwise readily seem organic to us sinks to mere thematicism – that is, to
willed similarity.78
I find that the imagination, after it brings forth a certain construction, is absolutely besieged
by many other constructions of a similar nature, and the power that these similar con-
structions exert over the composer is often so irresistible that he includes them in the
musical content he is constructing without even becoming aware of their similarity.
Often (one guesses it only after a completely devoted examination of the art work), the
composer would have preferred to bring about a completely dissimilar construction, but
one can see how his imagination did not deviate from its initial cause, and forced a similar
one upon him.79
Burnham argues that Schenker adopted the composer’s approach, yet these
intriguing points of contact suggest that, equally (and increasingly), Brahms
took what would harden into the analyst’s impersonal approach, goaded into
its esotericism by his frustration with the brand of criticism that sought to uncover
his life beneath his art.80 The intimate bond between composition and analysis is
also apparent in the lesson Brahms gave Alexander von Zemlinsky on how to write
quintets. Zemlinsky remembered how Brahms ‘opened up the string quintet by
Mozart and explained to me the consummate qualities of this “still unsurpassed
mastery of form”. And it sounded self-evident when he said, “That’s how it’s
77
Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 102.
78
Schenker, essay on Eugen d’Albert of 1894, trans. Karnes, ‘Heinrich Schenker and Musical
Thought’, 183.
79
Schenker, lecture and essay ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’ of 1895, trans. ibid., 182–3.
80
A parallel might be drawn with Bruckner’s reliance on large-scale metrical grids when composing
his symphonies, an approach that could also be considered analytical. The difference lies in the
fact that Brahms’s methods anticipated the dominant strain of analytical discourse in twentieth-
century Anglo-American musicology, thus ensuring the esteem in which his music has been held;
Bruckner has suffered by comparison.
done from Bach up to myself.”’81 As in his letter to Schubring, Brahms skirted

agency in order to include himself in his historical and analytical judgment,
his summing-up of tradition.
If Schenker explicitly assumed Brahms’s legacy with his Ninth Symphony
dedication, then Brahms had donned what would become Schenker’s mantle
in editing, revising, criticizing, analysing – in a word, objectifying – his Trio in
B. The complexity of Brahms’s music had always required any serious response to
engage with the analytical – Schubring’s reviews featured copious music examples
in order to isolate motifs and elucidate their transformations – but the notion of
composition performing a kind of analysis seems to exceed the traditional
limits of a composer’s role. Brahms’s analytical process seems not to have pre-
ceded the revision of the earlier work, but rather to have been enacted through
it, and the resultant composition/revision/analysis/critique seems to perform

itself, leaving precious little room for the input of his former self (or anyone
else).82 Insofar as allusions and references persist, they are musicalized and
turned inward: this is music not about ‘life’, but about music. Its meanings are
shown to emanate not from Kreisler Junior, or even from Brahms, but from a
different kind of musical tradition, strengthened and purified through deperson-
alization: the canon.
Brahms made the most substantial alterations to the outer movements,
cutting them ruthlessly to sharpen and tighten the musical discourse. The
opening expanse of the first movement was left largely untouched, but there
is one telling difference: Brahms cut the violin’s initial arpeggiated descant over
the soaring phrases in the cello and piano (bars 6ff.). These entries had reputedly
been Joachim’s idea, in which case their excision marks the first of Brahms’s
moves to eradicate the presence of others from his music.83 By outlining an
E major 6–4 chord in bars 6–7, 9–10 and 16–17, they had anticipated the first
version’s ‘country dance’ theme (bars 126ff.), but all members of the motley
band of themes that had formed the original second group were jettisoned in
favour of a new, better-behaved second subject (bars 75ff.) that establishes
and secures the relative minor as the exposition’s tonal destination. Its theme
consists of Brahms’s most characteristic signature, a chain of descending thirds,
81
Alexander von Zemlinsky, ‘Brahms und die neuere Generation: Persönliche Erinnerungen’
(1922), trans. Frisch as ‘Brahms and the Newer Generation: Personal Reminiscences’, Brahms
and his World, ed. Frisch, 205–7 (p. 206).
82
Schenker made fragmentary, unpublished notes on the Trio in B, preserved in the New York
Public Library’s Oster Collection, reel 12, nos. 176–87. See Allen Cadwallader and William
Pastille, ‘Schenker’s Unpublished Work with the Music of Johannes Brahms’, Schenker Studies
2, ed. Carl Schachter and Heidi Siegel (Cambridge, 1999), 26–46.
83
The anecdote is related in Tovey, ‘Brahms’, Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (A–H),
ed. Walter Willson Cobbett (London, 1929), 158–82 (p. 162). As a violinist, Joachim was doubtless
annoyed at being excluded for so long from his partners’ rhapsodizing. Schubring had com-
plained about the violin’s ‘superfluous’ contributions, likening them to a canary’s chirp.
Schubring, trans. Frisch, ‘Five Early Works by Brahms’, 117.
284 ROGER MOSELEY
answered – as if reflected in a warped mirror – by an uneven, dissonant ascent;

the concision and irreducibility of this material is exemplary of Brahms’s
mature motivicism.84 Despite its radically different tone and affect, the rewritten
exposition can be understood to present a commentary on its earlier iteration, as
shown in Example 8. The new second subject straddles G# minor and E major, the
two keys between which the first version’s second group vacillates: Brahms col-
lapsed horizontal juxtaposition into vertical ambiguity. His new theme could be
heard as a world-weary, compromised inversion of the first version’s E major
country dance – both themes outline arpeggios, setting off from and returning to
5 (Example 8a) – while the octave piano texture recalls that of the arioso theme
(first version, bars 83ff.). In addition, Example 8b shows how its pitches forge a
connection with the 6^ – 5^ – #4^ – 5^ opening theme of the finale (a theme that lay
motivically isolated in the first version of the trio). The first movement’s
new closing theme (bars 110ff.) provides an additional prefiguring of the
finale’s opening (Example 8d), and its auxiliary-note triplets reflect the large-
scale auxiliary-note motions that govern the progress of the second group as
a whole, summarized in Example 9.85
The revised exposition constructs a more sophisticated network of thematic
relationships than the original but relies on less conspicuous scaffolding, yielding
a simpler, more elegant background reduction in Schenkerian terms; D# is pro-
longed across both first and second groups (as 3^ and 5^ respectively), and register is
more carefully controlled. Brahms sacrificed the multifarious topoi from the first
version, resulting in an exposition in which the difference between first and
second subjects is sharpened and polarized rather than allowed to diffuse into
plurality.
Nowhere is the new version’s analytical tendency clearer than in the develop-
ment, where both versions follow a similar tonal trajectory (as shown in Figure 3),
but articulate it in dramatically different ways. In the original development,
Brahms was keen to overlay the topoi from the exposition and to place them in
dialogue with one another, but he paid less attention to harmonic coherence.
Modulations are asserted by fiat or effected through chromatic chicanery (from B
minor to C major at bars 210–11, for instance), and a good deal of time is spent in
the tonic minor, the subdominant and the relative minor, which would normally
be avoided in order not to rehash the exposition or to detract from the impact of
the recapitulation. When revising the section, it is as if Brahms set himself the
84
Cook links the falling thirds of this theme to the Intermezzi op. 117 nos. 2 and 3 and op. 119 no. 1
(‘Performing Rewriting and Rewriting Performance’, 228n), although in his riposte to Cook’s
article Paul Scheepers disputes the distinction between themes characteristic of ‘early’ and ‘late’
Brahms. ‘What Incoherence? A Response to Nicholas Cook’, Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie,
4 (1999), 235–7 (p. 235). My own position on this issue will emerge below.
85
Edward T. Cone notes the derivation of the closing theme from the second subject in ‘Harmonic
Congruence in Brahms’, Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. George
Bozarth (Oxford, 1990), 165–88 (pp. 174–7).
Example 8. Relationships between the second thematic group of the first move-
ment of the revised op. 8 and other themes from both versions of the trio.
(a) revised version of op. 8, first movement, bars 75–8, and first version, first movement,
outline of bars 126–9 (‘country dance’ theme)
(b) revised version of op. 8, first movement, bars 76–8

( )
( )
(c) revised version of op. 8, first movement, bars 110–11
(d) revised version of op. 8, finale, bars 1–4 (transposed from B minor to G minor for
ease of comparison)
286 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 9. Analysis of the second thematic group in the first movement of the
revised op. 8.
(3) 5 N
N N
N
75 79 84 – 94
i V II 6 i 64 V i
5 5
N
N
95 N 106 109 110
V i6 V7 i
first version
bar 181 188 211 223 233 244 254 269
key E minor B minor C major E major G major F major G minor B 6–4
second version
bar 121 127 137 162 179 185
key G major E minor B minor C major E major G minor
Figure 3. Keys visited in the development sections of the first movement of each
version of op. 8.
challenge of sticking to the rather arbitrary tonal scheme he had previously

imposed while infusing it with a greater sense of harmonic logic. To this end,
he smoothed the edges between modulations: while the first version abruptly
swerves from C major to E major (bars 217–22), the revised version interpolates
D and E b between the two keys (bars 165–73) to rationalize the progression with-
out forfeiting its unpredictability. Elsewhere, Brahms played on functional am-
biguity: the original version moves from E minor to B minor though a sequential
reiteration of the same material (bars 181–94), whereas the revised version toni-
cizes B minor only after it has been prepared as the dominant of E minor (bars
135–7).
In the earlier version, the first B major 6–4 chord is heard in bar 242, which
clumsily signposts the recapitulation from the distance of a good 50 bars; in the
revised version, the recapitulation is smuggled in under cover provided by a
feature from its predecessor. Brahms took the E major to G# minor modulation
from the end of the original exposition (bars 148–59) and placed it at the end of the
revised development (bars 179–85). But as the music cadences into G# minor at bar
185, the movement’s opening theme steals upon the ear, and takes its time to reach
the home terrain of B major. Typically, the older Brahms resisted the temptation
of the double return, preferring to present the recapitulation as a chromatogram
showing the distinct separation of theme and key even though the remainder of
the recapitulation follows the textbook right down to the skilful truncation of
the first subject and bridge (bars 205–14) and the subtle rescoring of the second
subject (bars 214ff.).86 The very gesture of recapitulation is thus placed within
quotation marks, even turned into a topos. It is disarmed as a dynamic structural
element because its chief feature – that of return – is ambiguously blurred, and its
potential to change the course of the exposition goes politely ignored. There are
no fugal outgrowths here; only the sweet strains of the coda defy conventional
expectations, as we shall see.
Although the scherzo survived practically unscathed, the Adagio was
subjected to the same brand of surgery as that practised on the first movement.
Brahms streamlined its formal structure by excising the extended doppio movi-
mento ‘coda’, resulting in a more conventional ternary design. The replacement
of the Am Meer allusion is particularly noteworthy: once again, a pastoral-tinged
melody in E major is supplanted by a mournful cantilena in G# minor.87
Brahms rejected the charms of the pastoral – which had elicited the glaring
86
See Cook, ‘Performing Rewriting and Rewriting Performance’, 228, for an evocative account of
the recapitulatory moment, which he uses as the basis for an intriguing distinction between
‘spatial’ repetition in the first version of the movement and ‘psychological’ repetition in the
second – although, as he acknowledges, each movement makes use of both kinds of repetition.
On Brahms’s fondness for such recapitulatory sleight of hand, see Peter H. Smith, ‘Liquidation,
Augmentation, and Brahms’s Recapitulatory Overlaps’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1993–4), 237–61.
87
Brahms retained the transition from the Am Meer section to the reprise of the opening theme
(bars 58–61 in the first version; bars 66–9 in the second), which evokes the ambiguous relationship
between E major and G# minor explicit in the exposition of the first movement of the 1854 version
and the recapitulation of its successor. These four bars depart from an E major chord, which is
congruent in the first version but surprising in the G# minor context of the revised movement: the
only preparation consists of bar 65, in which the piano and strings exchange G# minor and E
major chords (seemingly without heeding each other).
288 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 10. Relationships between the first and second themes in the third
movement of the revised op. 8.
(a) both versions of op. 8, third movement, bars 1–4
(b) revised version of op. 8, third movement, bars 32–6, and melodic reduction
espressivo
parallel fifths in bars 50–1 of the first version – in favour of bitter-sweet nostal-
gia.88 This ‘new’ theme turns out to be closely related to the movement’s opening
(see Example 10), which is itself based on an inversion of the first movement’s
initial theme; Brahms thus short-circuited allusion, bringing the music back
within his own orbit and firmly under his control. The dialectic between the
celestial chorale of the movement’s opening and the earthly emotions of the Am
Meer allusion is turned in upon itself, for the new second theme merely reflects
wistfully upon the first (much as the G# minor arioso lament had mourned the B
major bel canto in the exposition of the original first movement). Likewise, one of
the secondary themes in the finale is an impassioned chain of appoggiaturas (bars
153ff.) that derives from a short chromatic motif in the first version (bars 77ff.),
and the fustian ‘march’ – in 3/4, admittedly, but decidedly bellicose – that replaces
the An die ferne Geliebte reference (bars 64ff.) seems to have issued solely from
Brahms.
It is significant that Brahms let the opening themes of every movement
stand while replacing the second themes in all but the scherzo; each replacement
is regularized to some degree. The first movement’s new second subject is
four-square in its metrical structure and predictable in its sequence of question
and response; the second theme of the slow movement is equally conventional on
the same counts, and so is the ‘march’ in the finale. In each case the new second
theme is tidily differentiated from the first, cementing the proprieties of
Beethovenian sonata form by ensuring the kind of clear dialectical framework
that was lacking in the original version. Particularly in the first movement, the
88
On the other hand, a pair of suspiciously non-pastoral parallel fifths at bar 24, pointed out by
Schubring in his review, is neatly circumvented in the revised version. See Avins, ‘Performing
Brahms’s Music: Clues from his Letters’, Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performance Style,
ed. Michael Musgrave and Bernard D. Sherman (Cambridge, 2003), 11–47 (p. 45n).
taming of the profuse second group goes hand in hand with Schenkerian good
behaviour: Young Kreisler’s balladic rhapsodizing is renounced along with the
subdominant. Loose ends are neatly tied, both structurally and thematically.
In sum, Brahms seems to have carried out his revisionary work with clinical
meticulousness.
Even among his friends, Brahms’s efforts met with a mixed reception.
Eduard Hanslick was enthusiastic, praising the ‘splendour, ripeness and unity’
of the revised trio and declaring that he no longer liked the first version, but others
were more ambivalent.89 Although they could appreciate what had been gained,
they regretted what had been lost, and perhaps even resented Brahms’s hermetic
self-sufficiency. Elisabet von Herzogenberg thought that Brahms ‘had no right to
take the lovely, if sometimes muddled, outpourings of [his] youth and recompose
them with [his] master’s hand’.90 In public, Theodor Helm echoed such reserva-
tions: ‘What stood there earlier . . . seemed to us the direct outpouring of a pas-
sionate youth’s heart; what stands there now has been dictated by the technical
artistic understanding of one who has since become a master but also a much
more coolly thinking man.’91 Margaret Notley reads a political subtext beneath
Helm’s reproach in the form of an implied criticism of Brahms’s liberalism,
‘cool thinking’ not being à la mode amid the growing turbulence of fin-de-siècle
Vienna.92 In 1884, Brahms’s music had come under attack from Hugo Wolf for
the risk that its low temperature posed to the audience’s health: ‘Through
[the First Piano Concerto] there blows a draft so icy, so damp and cold,
so foggy, that one’s heart freezes, one’s breath is taken away; one could get
the sniffles from it. Unhealthy stuff.’93 If, as Nietzsche maintained, Wagner’s
89
‘Was für ein prachtvolles, reifes, einheitliches Stück ist dieses Trio geworden! Seit ich es gehört,
will mir das Original-Trio gar nicht mehr gefallen.’ Hanslick to Brahms, quoted in Scholz, ‘Zu
Johannes Brahms: Klaviertrio in H-Dur op. 8’, 140. Mandyczewski also approved of Brahms’s
having put right ‘was er in seiner Jugend nicht recht gemacht hatte’. Deutsche Kunst- und Musik-
Zeitung, 1 March 1890, 61.
90
‘Bei dem alt-neuen Trio ging mir’s eigen. Im Stillen protestierte etwas in mir gegen die
Umarbeitung – es war mir, als hätten Sie kein Recht dazu, in die Jugendzüge, die lieblichen,
wenn auch ab und zu verschwommenen, mit Ihrer Meisterhand jetzt hineinzukomponieren, und
ich dachte, das kann nimmermehr werden, weil niemand derselbe ist nach so langer Zeit.’
Elisabet von Herzogenberg to Brahms, 9 October 1890; Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit
Heinrich und Elisabet von Herzogenberg, ed. Max Kalbeck, 2 vols., Brahms Briefwechsel, 1–2
(Berlin, 1907), ii, 241–2.
91
Quoted in Margaret Notley, ‘Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nineteenth-
Century Vienna’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1993–4), 107–23 (p. 120).
92
Ibid. Helm’s stance was relatively broad-minded, although his newspaper (the Deutsche Zeitung)
became increasingly anti-Semitic during the late 1880s, as described and contextualized by
McColl in Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897.
93
‘Durch diese Composition geht eine Luft, so eisig, naßkalt und neblig, daß einem das Herz
erfrieren, der Atem benommen werden möchte; ’nen Schnupfen könnt’ man sich dabei holen. –
Ungesundes Zeug.’ Hugo Wolf, review of 30 November 1884; Hugo Wolfs Kritiken im Wiener
Salonblatt, ed. Leopold Spitzer and Isabella Sommer, 2 vols. (Vienna, 2002), i, 65.
290 ROGER MOSELEY
music played sexual and neurological havoc with its audience, then Brahms’s
merely threatened to send it home with the flu.94
Coldness, sickness and death were prominent within Wolf ’s critical lexicon
when it came to Brahms and his circle. Less than a month earlier, he had com-
mented on the pianist, conductor and ex-Wagnerite Hans von Bülow’s new-
found enthusiasm for Brahms, ‘to whose compositions [he had] recently
turned with an almost pathological mania’.95 Two years later, Wolf savaged
Bülow’s Beethoven playing, which he had formerly hailed as exemplary.
[To get at Beethoven, Bülow] simply strikes him dead. Now his real work as a Beethoven
player begins. The corpse is carefully dissected, the organism’s most subtle details are
traced, the viscera studied with the fervour of a haruspex, and the course in anatomy is
under way. . . . Always presenting us with nothing but the note-skeleton and concerning
himself above all with the artful relationship of the musical organism’s big and little bones,
he turns every work of art into a dance of death. . . . Bülow’s technical equipment is, indeed,
astounding, as is its unfailing reliability; his ability to wound or kill at the first strike is
almost frightening. But when it comes to breathing life and soul into the corpse, he lacks the
necessary serum. He is merely a skilled surgeon.96
Wolf was denouncing Bülow as one of Brahms’s favourite interpreters and aes-
thetic representatives: Bülow’s defection had turned his virtues – clarity, serious-
ness, respect for the score – into inadmissible sins. But even among Brahms’s
closest friends there had been distaste for Bülow expressed in similar terms, as
Elisabet von Herzogenberg’s account makes clear:
Everybody lay prostrate before this anointed one, who bore himself like a priest elevating
the Host in the glittering monstrance for the first time. At times he seemed to be giving a
94
See Joachim Köhler, trans. Ronald Taylor, Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation (New
Haven, CT, and London, 1998). Köhler remarks that Nietzsche’s response to Wagner’s music
acknowledged how it ‘induces in its listeners a state of extreme physical agitation akin to sexual
stimulation’ (p. 163). In this sense, Nietzsche was echoing the criticisms of his nemesis Max
Nordau, who condemned both Wagner and Nietzsche for their depravity in his polemical screed
Entartung (Berlin, 1893).
95
‘Brahms . . . dessen Compositionen Bülow in neuerer Zeit mit geradezu krankhafter Manie sich
zuwendet’. Wolf, review of 9 November 1884; Hugo Wolfs Kritiken im Wiener Salonblatt, ed.
Spitzer and Sommer, i, 60. Bülow was the soloist in the performance of Brahms’s First Piano
Concerto that gave Wolf the shivers.
96
‘Um ihm aber doch beizukommen, schlägt er ihn einfach todt. Nun beginnt seine eigentliche
Thätigkeit als Beethoven-Spieler. Sorgfältig wird die Leiche secirt, der Organismus in seine
subtilsten Verzweigungen verfolgt, die Eingeweide mit dem Ernste eines Haruspex studirt und
der anatomische Cursus nimmt seinen Verlauf. . . . Indem er uns stets nur das Notengerippe
entgegenhält und sich hauptsächlich mit den kunstvoll ineinandergefügten Knochen und
Knöchelchen des musikalischen Organismus beschäftigt, wird ihm jedes Kunstwerk ein
Todtentanz. . . . Bülow’s technisches Geschick ist in der That ganz erstaunlich und seine unfehl-
bare Sicherheit: auf den ersten Griff sein Opfer zu verwunden oder zu tödten, geradezu er-
schreckend. Aber dem toten Körper Seele und Leben einzuathmen, dazu fehlt es ihm ganz
und gar an dem nöthigen Impfstoffe. Er ist eben nur ein geschickter Chirurg.’ Wolf, review of
6 February 1887; Hugo Wolfs Kritiken im Wiener Salonblatt, ed. Spitzer and Sommer, i, 188.
repulsive anatomy lecture. It was as if he were making the experiment of stripping an

antique statue of its lovely flesh, and forcing one to worship the workings of bone and
muscle.97
In 1898, the conductor Felix Weingartner extended such rhetoric to Brahms

himself:
I can admire the work, the construction, but I experience a sentiment similar to that of a
doctor when dissecting a body. . . . When I let Brahms’s music act on me insensibly, I feel
the same powerless frigidity that doctor would feel in making himself try to put life back
into the dissected corpse.98
When considering the Trio in B, it is easy to see how the surgical trope might
apply: Brahms was operating on his own youthful music. In a letter to Simrock,
he even referred to the revision as a ‘castration’.99
Surgical analogies appear all the more apposite in the light of Brahms’s
alliance with Billroth, whose fame in Vienna rivalled Brahms’s; indeed, both
men adorned Austrian currency until the introduction of the euro. Billroth,
the founder of modern abdominal surgery, had been appointed Chair of Surgery
at the University of Vienna in 1867, at the age of 38. In 1873, he performed the
first successful total laryngectomy, and Daniel F. Roses recounts how ‘the task of
establishing phonation challenged him scientifically and musically. . . . Viennese
instrument makers were commissioned to create the mechanism to make speech
possible.’100 Billroth proceeded to embark on the research that would lead to ‘his
most famous achievement, resection of the stomach to treat carcinoma of the
pylorus (the opening between the stomach and the intestine)’.101 Although he
97
‘Alle lagen sie konsterniert vor diesem Gesalbten, der sich gebärdete, als zeige er uns zum ersten
Male das Allerheiligste in strahlender Monstranz. Derweil war es aber nur widerwärtige
Anatomie, die er trieb, eine Art Kunstübung, wie wenn man einer antiken Statue alles holde
Fleisch abzöge und zwänge einen, vor dem Knochen- und Muskelapparat in Anbetung nieder-
zufallen.’ Brahms to Elisabet von Herzogenberg, 27 March 1881; Johannes Brahms im
Briefwechsel mit Heinrich und Elisabet von Herzogenberg, ed. Kalbeck, i, 145, trans. Robert
Philip, ‘Brahms’s Musical World: Balancing the Evidence’, Performing Brahms, ed. Musgrave
and Sherman, 349–72 (p. 353). Clara Schumann shared such reservations, as did Brahms him-
self; see Robert Pascall and Philip Weller, ‘Flexible Tempo and Nuancing in Orchestral
Music: Understanding Brahms’s View of Interpretation in his Second Piano Concerto and
Fourth Symphony’, Performing Brahms, ed. Musgrave and Sherman, 220–43 (p. 230).
98
Felix Weingartner, trans. Maude Barrows Dutton, The Symphony Since Beethoven (Boston, MA,
1904), 60–1, 58 (translation adapted).
99
‘Ich denke selbstverständlich dabei nicht an das Honorar und weiß wirklich nicht, was ich für
das Kastrieren verlangen soll.’ Brahms to Simrock, 29 December 1890; Johannes Brahms im
Briefwechsel mit Fritz Simrock, ed. Kalbeck, ii, 39.
100
Daniel F. Roses, ‘Brahms and Billroth’, Surgery, Gynecology, and Obstetrics, 163 (1986), 385–98
(p. 390).
101
Daniel F. Roses, ‘Brahms and Billroth’, American Brahms Society Newsletter, 5/1 (1987), 1–5 (p. 3).
See also W. Kozuschek and C. Waleczek, ‘Die Entwicklung der Magenchirurgie im 19.
Jahrhundert’, Theodor Billroth: Ein Leben für die Chirurgie, ed. Kozuschek, D. Lorenz and
H. Thomas (Basle, 1992), 28–51.
292 ROGER MOSELEY
was a musical amateur, Billroth was supremely dedicated to Brahms’s music and
counted himself among the regal few who could fully comprehend it. After perus-
ing the score of the First Symphony for the first time, he described to Brahms the
circumstances for an ideal performance of the work:
I wish I could hear the symphony completely alone in the dark and begin to understand
King Ludwig’s peculiarities. Think of all the stupid, ordinary people who surround one in
the concert hall, of whom, in the best cases, fifty have enough sense and artistic feeling
to apprehend the core of such a work at first hearing, not to mention understanding it.
I am already in a bad mood at the prospect.102
When looking over some of Brahms’s songs, Billroth again expressed his sense of
musical superiority and his desire to hear the music as privately as possible, even to
the point of disembodiment:
It is very arrogant of me, and yet I believe there are not many who can immerse themselves
in these tone-poems as I do. Where will I find singers who can bring me the total pleasure
of realizing what pre-echoes in my fantasy? I can’t, for example, imagine that the recently
deceased [historian Wilhelm] Ambros, who was so musical, had even a notion of how
those songs of yours should sound. Even Hanslick could have for only a few of them the
intimate sympathy, the answering echo from one’s own soul, such as I experience it.103
It is startling to imagine that even Hanslick was no match for Billroth’s Brahmsian
sensibilities. Similarly, no less an authority than Clara Schumann told Brahms
that Billroth’s mode of expression made her feel like a dilettante, indicating that a
listener of Billroth’s intensity and intelligence transcended the old binarism of
Kenner and Liebhaber: here was an amateur who knew far too much. Billroth’s
disdain for the Viennese concert-going public reflected the attitude, shared by
102
‘Ich wollte, ich könnte die Symphonie ganz allein hören, im Dunkeln, und fange an, König
Ludwigs Sonderbarkeiten zu verstehen. Alle die dummen, alltäglichen Menschen, von denen
man im Konzertsaal umgeben ist und von denen im günstigsten Falle fünfzig Sinn und künst-
lerische Empfindung genug haben, um ein solches Werk in seinem Kern beim ersten Hören zu
erfassen – von Verstehen gar nicht zu reden –, das alles verstimmt mich schon im voraus.’
Billroth to Brahms, 10 December 1876; Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel, ed. Gottlieb-
Billroth, 225. Billroth was referring to Ludwig II of Bavaria, who watched Wagner’s music
dramas in splendid solitude.
103
‘Es ist sehr arrogant und doch glaube ich, daß es nicht allzu viele Menschen gibt, die sich so in
diese Tongedichte versenken können wie ich; wo finde ich Sänger, die mir das zum vollen Genuß
bringen könnten, wie es meiner Phantasie vorklingt? Ich kann mir zum Beispiel gar nicht
denken, daß der kürzlich verstorbene Ambros, der doch so musikalisch war, auch nur eine
Ahnung davon empfunden hat, was in Deinen Liedern klingt. Selbst Hanslick dürfte nur für
wenige derselben die innige Sympathie, dies Aus-der-eigenen-Seele-Herausklingen empfinden,
wie ich es empfinde.’ Billroth to Brahms, 2 July 1876; Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel, ed.
Gottlieb-Billroth, 221–2. Billroth’s attitude recalls Brahms’s remark that he would enjoy the best
performance of Fidelio at home with the score, an opinion he later restated vis-à-vis Don
Giovanni. Schauffler, The Unknown Brahms, 217.
Brahms, that standards of musical literacy were declining sharply.104 Rather

than sitting among the allusion-hunting masses, Billroth preferred to retreat
to the high ground of Brahms’s chamber music; he revelled in the rarefied
atmosphere of Brahms’s professional coterie as he and its other members stud-
ied, performed and responded to the latest works in camera. For them,
Brahms’s life and work formed an unproblematic whole. Roses observes that
Billroth was noted for his unprecedented degree of self-discipline and statistical analysis.
His greatest achievements in the field of surgery were characterized by their arduous sci-
entific evolution from the pathologic and animal laboratories to the operating theater.105
While working toward the landmarks of his first string quartet (in C minor, op. 51
no. 1, which he was to dedicate to Billroth) and symphony, Brahms tested ideas
and techniques in musical laboratories – in terms of both genre and occasion –
prior to braving the concert hall, just as he was to refine the revised Trio in B
over a series of private performances before finally releasing it for public con-
sumption in 1891. But Billroth himself tried to draw yet closer parallels between
his medical activities and musical discourse. ‘Science and art spring from the same
source’, he remarked in a letter to Brahms, and he tried to explain the medical
condition of Haydn’s biographer Carl Ferdinand Pohl by way of a rather tortured
musical analogy:
Nerves, blood and nutrition form a triad: if one component is impure or weak, the whole
does not sound right. . . . With Pohl, the fifth is weak and the third must over-exert itself in
order to make itself heard. But the triad is still there, and it sounds pure and lovely, as is
rarely the case with much stronger instruments.106
Billroth’s surgical impulses eventually contributed to the deterioration of his

friendship with Brahms. Oswald Jonas recounted that Billroth cut out the first
line from the autograph of the A minor String Quartet, op. 51 no. 2, in order to
affix it to the composer’s portrait.107 Brahms was livid, clearly feeling that he
alone possessed the authority to mutilate his scores. But just as Billroth pioneered
the removal of carcinomas and the expert resectioning of the affected organs, so
Brahms demonstrated surgical flair in pruning foreign bodies from his trio.
104
On musical literacy in Vienna over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see Leon Botstein,
‘Brahms and his Audience: The Later Viennese Years 1875–1897’, The Cambridge Companion to
Brahms, ed. Musgrave, 51–75 (pp. 60–6).
105
Roses, ‘Brahms and Billroth’, American Brahms Society Newsletter, 5/1, 5.
106
‘Wissenschaft und Kunst schöpfen aus derselben Quelle.’ Billroth to Brahms, 6 January 1886;
Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel, ed. Gottlieb-Billroth, 381. ‘Mit Nerven, Blut und
Ernährung ist es wie mit dem Dreiklang; wenn eines unrein oder schwach ist, klingt das
Ganze nicht mehr recht zusammen. . . . Bei Pohl ist die Quinte schwach, und die Terz muß
sich über ihre Kräfte anstrengen, sich hörbar zu machen; doch der Dreiklang ist noch da und
klingt so rein und lieb, wie selten bei anderen viel stärkeren und gleichmäßig starken
Instrumenten.’ Billroth to Brahms, 27 July 1883; ibid., 351.
107
Cited in Oswald Jonas, ‘Adventures with Manuscripts’, Notes, 3 (1946), 135–45 (p. 135).
294 ROGER MOSELEY
He freed himself of their corrupting influences by restitching op. 8’s corpus

into the unassailable work of a hale and hearty Brahms rather than the unhealthy
outpourings of a lovesick Kreisler Junior.108 Brahms was thus able to achieve in art
an excision of the kind denied the surgeon, as Billroth wistfully lamented: ‘It is too
bad that one can’t make excisions in the course of a thorough revision that
substitutes better material. But one plays life a vista from a score presented by
fate, and does it with more or less skill.’109 Brahms’s renunciation of what had
been identified as allusions to Schubert, Beethoven and the Schumanns seems to
have constituted an attempt to situate his music beyond their reach, safely in the
realm of the ‘absolute’. The sounds of others, no matter how venerated, gave way
to the pristine sonorities of Brahms’s own ‘better material’, and what had once
been sight-reading thus became a polished performance. In writing Kreisler
Junior out of the trio, Brahms both acknowledged and erased youthful indiscre-
tions while simultaneously reflecting the gulf in critical standards that separated
mid-century Schubring from fin-de-siècle Schenker.
Brahms’s attempt to wipe life’s residue from the surface of the trio may well
have been encouraged by the biographical approach taken by Brahms’s
musicological friends. Under the influence of Jacob Burckhardt’s work on
the Renaissance, the graceful teleological arcs of style history began to take
precedence across epochs and within the oeuvre of individual composers while
biographical factors were played down accordingly. Philipp Spitta’s work on
Bach and Schumann, Chrysander’s on Handel, Otto Jahn’s on Mozart, and
Gustav Nottebohm’s on Beethoven all bear witness to this tendency.110 But,
perhaps surprisingly, the young Schenker was reluctant to applaud Brahms’s
efforts to keep life and work apart. Indeed, his own obituary criticized Brahms
for living a life that could not engender a truly great symphony:
Despite all his efforts, the contents of his symphonies betray the fact that they did not arise,
as was the case with Beethoven, out of life experience. . . . In [Ein deutsches Requiem, the Vier
ernste Gesänge, op. 121, the Schicksalslied, op. 54, and the Triumphlied, op. 55,] the influence
of his life on his art was clearly visible – more clearly than in his purely instrumental works
(although it must be admitted that glimmers of his experience filter into even these pieces
quite often).111
108
In 1927, Daniel Gregory Mason wrote that Brahms’s music conveyed ‘the sense of satisfying
poise, self-control, and sanity . . . Brahms alone has Homeric simplicity, [exhibiting] the primal
health of the well-balanced man.’ Quoted in Michael Musgrave, A Brahms Reader (New Haven,
CT, and London, 2000), 247.
109
‘Schade, daß man dabei keine gründliche praktische Revision durch Streichen und neue, bessere
Einschattungen vornehmen kann. Man spielt aber das Leben a vista ab nach einer vom Fatum
vorgelegten Partitur mit mehr oder weniger Geschicklichkeit.’ Billroth to Brahms, 26 April
1890; Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel, ed. Gottlieb-Billroth, 454–5.
110
Spitta was the dedicatee of Brahms’s op. 74 motets and encouraged Brahms’s interest in Schütz
and Gabrieli; Brahms worked with Chrysander on his complete edition of Handel’s music. Jahn
and Nottebohm were also good friends of Brahms’s.
111
Heinrich Schenker, ‘Johannes Brahms’, trans. William Pastille, American Brahms Society
Newsletter, 9/1 (1991), 1–3 (pp. 2–3). While Schenker’s verdict belies his later work, he was in
His undisputed surgical prowess notwithstanding, Brahms could not prevent

such glimmers from filtering into the revision of his Trio in B; indeed, it may
well be that their most beautiful flickerings arose from his attempts to snuff
them out.
The opening movement of the first version of op. 8 ends in breathless euphoria,
with Kreisler Junior conquering all before him: the fugue welds together the
rococo and the heroic (the galloping horn calls of bars 396ff.) before the opening
theme and arioso lament are placed cheek by jowl (bars 410–34), providing a
dialectical platform from which the coda can take flight. Perhaps its extended
rejoicing betrayed a sense of hubris that the unremitting finale would have to
punish; perhaps, as Cook has suggested, it betrayed Liszt’s influence in a manner
that Brahms was keen to overwrite.112 In any case, the revised first movement
ends very differently. Structurally, its coda is little more than an appendix, as
sonata-form business matters have been efficiently dispatched by the recapitula-
tion. Divested of responsibility, the coda is free to recall and fantasize. Instead of
re-enacting Young Kreisler’s ardent urgency, it memorializes it, and the pervasive
aura of nostalgia is underscored by Brahms’s indication Tranquillo.
Such a marking is fairly rare toward the end of Brahms’s chamber movements,
but occurs with greater frequency in his later works.113 The character at these
points tends toward peaceful resignation; the finale of the Clarinet Sonata in E b,
op. 120 no. 2, manages to rouse itself for a barnstorming ending, but in other cases,
such as the finale of the Violin Sonata in G, op. 78, and the Trio in B’s revised first
movement, Tranquillo signals that the music has already reached its ultimate
resting place. Its brand of tender melancholy has long been perceived as a
Brahmsian hallmark. Reinhold Brinkmann has brought Thomas Mann’s concept
of ‘taking back’ to bear on the muted ending of Brahms’s Third Symphony and its
line with many other fin-de-siècle Viennese critics who privileged the immediacy of experience
over the mediation of reflection, discussed by Notley in ‘Brahms as Liberal’.
112
See Cook, ‘Performing Rewriting and Rewriting Performance’, 229–30.
113
Tranquillo appears in the finale of the Piano Quartet in C minor, op. 60 (bar 351), the first
movement of the Violin Sonata in G, op. 78 (bar 159), the slow movement of the Piano Trio in C,
op. 87 (bar 156), the first movement of the Violin Sonata in D minor, op. 108 (bar 236), and the
first movement and finale of the Clarinet Sonata in E b, op. 120 no. 2 (bar 98). Beyond chamber
music, the indication appears toward the end of Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras from Ein
deutsches Requiem. Avins has pointed out that Brahms agreed with his editor, Robert Keller,
when he suggested that there was a difference between Tranquillo, indicating an expressive
change of tempo, and tranquillo, a simple warning against rushing. ‘Performing Brahms’s
Music’, 22–3. According to Tovey’s report from an associate of Joachim’s, tranquillo ‘always
with Brahms . . . meant a decidedly slower tempo’. Cited in Sherman, ‘How Different was
Brahms’s Playing Style from Our Own?’, Performing Brahms, ed. Musgrave and Sherman,
1–10 (p. 8n). Fanny Davies, who performed the Trio in B with Joachim and the cellist
Alfredo Piatti in 1891, indicated in her copy of the score that while the first movement should
start at ¼60, the Tranquillo section should be played at ¼54. Cited in Bozarth, ‘Fanny Davies
and Brahms’s Late Chamber Music’, Performing Brahms, ed. Musgrave and Sherman, 170–219
(p. 185).
296 ROGER MOSELEY
withdrawal from conventional expectation.114 In similar vein, Brahms’s revision-

ary surgery on the Trio in B takes back many of the allusions that Young Kreisler
had so ingenuously set forth. In their place, the Tranquillo section constructs a
Keatsian ‘temple of Delight’. First (bars 255ff.), the fervent lyricism of the opening
returns, but as a Gegenbild rather than a reprise; the older Brahms seems to dwell
on the memory of his youthful naivety. Then (bars 271ff.), the first and second
subjects (which have been carefully kept apart throughout the main body of the
movement) are blended; the motivic concision of the latter’s chains of thirds is
clothed in the lyrical garb and tonality of the former. Rather than aiming at a
synthesis, as did the juxtaposition of first and second subjects toward the end of
the original first movement, their merging seems only to conjure up what once
might have been.
Throughout the revised first movement, the interweaving of ostensibly non-

referential intervallic patterns, such as these chains of thirds, seems to be
unencumbered by topical or autobiographical associations.115 But the con-
junction of the severe second subject and its transfiguration in the retrospective
Tranquillo section brings the Andante and Intermezzo of Brahms’s Piano Sonata
in F minor, op. 5, to mind. These two movements have been scrutinized for
programmatic and biographical implications.116 The Andante is a passionately
lyrical movement that takes the unusual liberty of ending in a different key from
that in which it began, and Brahms borrowed lines from C. O. Sternau’s poem
Junge Liebe to emphasize its amorous overtones:
The evening is coming, the moonlight shines,
Two hearts are united in love
And embrace each other blissfully.117
In his review of the sonata, Schubring insisted that ‘one must hear the poem, hear
it and experience it, as it is sung by Clara Schumann, who often plays it in
114
Reinhold Brinkmann, trans. Peter Palmer, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms
(Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995), 220–6.
115
Schoenberg famously exposed the thirds that constitute the opening theme of the Fourth
Symphony in his lecture-cum-essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, reprinted in both forms in
Thomas Nelson McGeary, ‘Schoenberg’s Brahms Lecture of 1933’, Journal of the Arnold
Schoenberg Institute, 15/2 (1992), 5–99. More recently, Brahms’s chains of thirds have been
associated with notions of death and fate: see Siegfried Kross, ‘Die Terzenkette bei Brahms
und ihre Konnotationen’, Die Sprache der Musik: Festschrift Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller zum 60.
Geburtstag, ed. Jobst Peter Fricke (Regensburg, 1989), 335–46, and Hull, ‘Allusive Irony in
Brahms’ Fourth Symphony’, 137–40.
116
See George Bozarth, ‘Brahms’s Lieder ohne Worte: The “Poetic” Andantes of the Piano
Sonatas’, Brahms Studies, ed. Bozarth, 345–78; Parmer, ‘Brahms and the Poetic Motto’; and
John Rink, ‘Opposition and Integration in the Piano Music’, The Cambridge Companion to
Brahms, ed. Musgrave, 79–97 (pp. 81–5).
117
‘Der Abend dämmert, das Mondlicht scheint, / Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint / Und
halten sich selig umfangen.’
her concerts.’118 Predictably enough, he also heard a familiar allusion in the

theme that closes the movement.
Brahms has his lovers embrace to their hearts’ content, repeat their most tender farewells,
and even call out the last goodbye from a distance. . . . One lover is left behind
alone. . . . Everything is silent; quietly he hums the Schildwachtlied by [Wilhelm]
Hauff: ‘His heart beats warmly, he thinks of distant love,’ and loudly, ever more loudly,
he rejoices in the night: ‘She loves me truly, she is faithful to me.’119
But, after an intervening scherzo, the sonata’s Intermezzo, subtitled Rückblick,

looks back at the Andante with hollow bitterness, transforming its tender song
into a relentless dirge (see Example 11).120 Prompted by Schubring’s interpret-
ation of the first Andante, one might be tempted to read its desolate counterpart
as an expression of Brahms’s passion for Clara. According to Brahms’s Werk-

verzeichnis, however, the Andante and the Intermezzo were completed earlier
than October 1853 – that is, before Brahms and Clara had even met.121 But the
sonata was not published until February 1854, and Brahms vacillated over the
inclusion of the lines from Junge Liebe until the last minute. His instructions to
print them were sent on 26 December 1853, after the manuscript had been sealed
for dispatch; the verses, he decided, were ‘perhaps necessary or pleasant for an
appreciation of the Andante’.122 By the end of 1853 Brahms’s feelings for Clara
had deepened, and so his vacillations over whether to include Sternau’s words
were possibly bound up with her. If so, this chain of events indicates the extent to
which Brahms allowed musical meanings to exceed his original intentions, for
Clara had attached herself to music that was written before Brahms knew her.123
118
Schubring, trans. Frisch, ‘Five Early Works by Brahms’, 114.
119
Ibid. Frisch (p. 122n) identifies the folk song as Treue Liebe, which appeared with Hauff’s text in
Friedrich Silcher, rev. Alfred Dörfel, 100 Volkslieder für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des
Pianoforte (Leipzig, n.d.), 76. It opens with the 5^ – 1^ – 2^ – 3^ motif.
120
Perhaps the scherzo, which opens with a clear allusion to the finale of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio
in C minor, op. 66, could have originally been Brahms’s ‘Reminiscences of Mendelssohn’, a
work that he played for Clara Schumann and planned to publish as part of the ‘Leaves from a
Musician’s Diary, edited by Young Kreisler’. Such a scenario would dovetail with the hypothesis
Horne sets forth in ‘Brahms’s Op. 10 Ballades and his Blätter aus dem Tagebuch eines Musikers’.
121
Noted in Bozarth, ‘Brahms’s Lieder ohne Worte’, 348–9.
122
Ibid., 360.
123
Something similar had happened with Robert Schumann’s ‘In der Nacht’, from the Fantasie-
stücke, op. 12, which also opens with a 5^– ^1 – 2^ – 3^ melody (see Example 3i). Robert told Clara how
he had found the story of Hero and Leander within the piece after he had written it, and how the
tale had made him think of his own beloved: ‘I imagine Hero to be just like you, and if you were
sitting in a lighthouse, I’d probably learn how to swim, too.’ Robert Schumann to Clara Wieck,
21 April 1838; The Complete Correspondence of Clara and Robert Schumann, ed. Eva Weissweiler,
trans. Hildegard Fritsch and Ronald L. Crawford (New York, 1994), i, 158. An additional connec-
tion between Clara and the Andante of Brahms’s op. 5 is provided by the Adagio of the First
Piano Concerto, which Brahms called ‘a tender portrait’ of her. (‘Auch male ich an einem sanften
Porträt von Dir, das dann Adagio werden soll.’ Brahms to Clara Schumann, 30 December 1856;
Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms, ed. Litzmann, i, 198.) The two movements share a dis-
tinctive cadential gesture (bars 183–5 in op. 5; bars 12–13 in op. 15).
298 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 11. Parallels between the first Andante and Intermezzo (Rückblick) in
Brahms’s Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 5.
(a) opening of op. 5’s first Andante, with Sternau’s epigraph
Der Abend dämmert, das Mondlicht scheint,
Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint
Und halten sich selig umfangen.
Andante espressivo Sternau
legato
(b) opening of op. 5’s Intermezzo (Rückblick)

Andante molto
legato
3 3
3 3
If not, then Schubring’s review was forging a connection between Brahms and
Clara of the type that has persisted throughout the literature despite – and indeed
owing to – the lack of decisive evidence. There can be little wonder that the aging
composer was so wary of accretions and connotations, whatever their source,
when revising op. 8: he knew their power only too well.
In this light, the austere second subject from the first movement of the revised
op. 8 (see Example 8b) can be heard to follow the Intermezzo of op. 5 in echoing
the sonata’s Andante; it is at once more exact and more estranged, set in the
parallel minor but visually alienated by the enharmonic shift from A b to G#. The
chain of descending thirds – celebrated by Schoenberg as the locus classicus of
Brahms’s manipulation of intervals – is freighted in the Andante with love’s

promise, and then, in the Intermezzo and the trio’s new second subject, with
its aching loss. But whereas the retrospection enacted by the bitter Intermezzo of
op. 5 turns ardour into hopeless disillusion, the revised coda of op. 8’s first
movement reverses the trajectory: the Tranquillo section transforms the painful
memory of the second subject into a thing of beauty, a source of pleasure. In tempo
ma sempre sostenuto . . . sostenuto . . . in tempo: Brahms’s ambiguous directions
convey the paradox of time’s evanescence as the violin and cello strain
against each other in suspensions of lovely longing (bars 279ff.; see Example
12a).124 The young Brahms had all the time in the world, as the opulent length
of the first version proved; now, scalpel in hand, he tries in vain to hold time
back, finally yielding with weighty fortitude at the final in tempo (bars 283ff.).
Heroism now lies in the acceptance, not the defiance, of fate’s vicissitudes. This
ending transfigures the amorous scene evoked by the final section of op. 5’s
Andante, in which, Schubring tells us, the protagonist celebrates his true love
(see Example 12b). Here, the trio does not efface the past, or even merely mirror it;
the music deepens what has been, preserving its ardour while imbuing it with the
accumulation of bitter-sweet experience. Perhaps this marks a different kind of
allusion – distanced, veiled, repressed, but still loving, still present. Perhaps it is
merely another forged connection. Or perhaps it represents an instance when
Brahms’s thoughts ran down familiar corridors: ‘I . . . do confess that when I am
working, my thoughts do not fly far enough away, and thus unintentionally come
back with the same idea’ (see above, note 47). Clara Schumann may have returned
unbidden, but that would merely testify to the extent to which she was bound up
with Brahms’s mechanisms of memory and repression (and their musical man-
ifestations). In any case, Schubring’s speculation goes to show that while motifs
and themes can be endlessly entwined and rationalized, their connotations will
not submit so readily to composerly control.
The revised finale of the trio retains the Faustian grimness of its predecessor as
it powers toward a similarly uncompromising B minor conclusion. Brodbeck
perceives anguished references to Clara amid the ferocity, ‘in keeping with the
painful circumstances of [Brahms’s] own experience’; he even finds ‘a fleeting
reference to the An die ferne Geliebte melody’ in the finale, although it is ‘brutally
cut off’.125 Drawing a stark contrast with Robert Schumann’s climactic
124
Davies entered in her score at this point that ‘sostenuto by Brahms actually means “slower tempo
as though one could not get enough richness out of the sentence –”’. Quoted in Bozarth, ‘Fanny
Davies and Brahms’s Late Chamber Music’, 185.
125
Brodbeck, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 126. Brodbeck’s terminology is apt, given Brahms’s
description of the revised Trio as a ‘castration’. Tovey also found the revised finale somewhat
unsparing: ‘The new [version of op. 8] is not an unmixed gain upon the old, especially in the
finale where the experienced Brahms grips the young Brahms so roughly by the shoulder as to
make us doubt whether a composer so angry with the sentimentalities of his own youth would
not be over-ready to tease and bully, or, still worse, to ignore young composers anxious to learn
but less sure of their ground.’ ‘Brahms’, 163.
300 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 12. Parallels between the end of the first Andante of op. 5 and the closing
Tranquillo section from the first movement of the revised op. 8.
(a) revised version of op. 8, first movement, bars 268–89
268 poco rit.
dolce
perdendo
perdendo
poco rit.
dolce
in tempo ma sempre
272 sostenuto
in tempo ma sempre
sostenuto
sostenuto
276
cresc. poco a poco cresc.
cresc. poco a poco cresc.

sostenuto
Example 12 continued
281 in tempo
in tempo
3 3
284
286
302 ROGER MOSELEY
Example 12 continued
(b) end of op. 5’s first Andante, bars 187–92
187
con molto espressione

e sostenuto
sempre
191
invocation of the An die ferne Geliebte allusion in the Fantasie, Brodbeck suggests
that Brahms’s brusque treatment of the allusion mirrors his wounded feelings
toward his unfulfilled relationship with Clara. At first hearing, the overbearing
‘march’ (bars 64ff.) that replaces the An die ferne Geliebte allusion seems to sup-
port Brodbeck’s reading. Driven by a heavy off-beat accompaniment, it ‘seems to
want almost literally to stamp out all memory of [the allusion]’, as Malcolm
MacDonald puts it.126 Tellingly, the alteration did cause Clara some distress, as
she confessed to Brahms: ‘The entire trio strikes me as being much better propor-
tioned, but I don’t like all of it. . . . The second theme of the last movement seems
to me to be quite ghastly.’127 If she had indeed taken the original reference to
Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder as an intimate allusive gesture, then it is unsur-
prising that its bombastic replacement upset her.
And yet Brahms’s substitution need not be interpreted as a destructive gesture. In
the finale of the first version, the yearning strains of the An die ferne Geliebte theme
culminate in a joyous climax (bars 461–4), only to encounter disaster in the B minor
reprise of the main theme (bars 465ff.); as in op. 5, love meets with defeat. In the
revised version, it is the pompous ‘march’ that suffers the same fate (bars 241ff.). By
consigning his new theme to failure, Brahms encourages us to hear the speciousness
of its ‘heroic’ bluster: Clara was quite right to bemoan its ‘ghastly’ hubris. Its initial
appearance in martial D major brings the pomp of the Triumphlied to mind, while
its eventual capitulation to B minor could be heard to reflect Brahms’s loss of
confidence in belligerent German nationalism. The jingoism of 1871 had long
126
Malcolm MacDonald, Brahms (London, 1990), 341.
127
Quoted in MacDonald, Brahms, 339.
given way to wary pessimism; in particular, the tribulations of the Dreikaiserjahr

of 1888 formed a sobering backdrop to Brahms’s revision of the trio.128 In this
context, his removal of Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder can be understood as a
preservation as well as a deletion: Brahms’s excision endorses Kierkegaard’s con-
tention that ‘forgetting is the shears with which one clips away what one cannot
use . . . under the overall supervision of memory’.129 Lifted out of the trio, the
allusion is spared its grim destiny within the discourse of the finale. It survives
sous rature, unspoiled by acrimony and safe from the corrosion of time, simultan-
eously forgotten and remembered. After all, Brahms ultimately ensured that
it would still be available to those who sought it (albeit only on request from
Simrock).
Kierkegaard might as well have been writing of the complex and fraught rela-
tionship between Brahms and Clara Schumann when he went on to claim that
‘the art of remembering and forgetting will . . . prevent one’s sticking fast in some
particular circumstance in life and ensure perfect suspension’.130 The beauty of
the suspensions that prolong the ending of Brahms’s revised first movement lies in
the impossibility of their forming part of a lasting synthesis. Inspired by the C
minor String Quartet, Kevin Korsyn has probed the limitations of discussions of
Brahms’s music that collapse its tensions into ‘controlled pseudo-ambiguities’
in order to worship at Janus’s altar.131 Cook establishes a dialectic between
performance and analysis in relation to the development of the revised first
movement, which involves ‘chaotically diversified materials’, ‘violence’ and
‘self-mutilation’ en route to implicating performers in ‘dissimulation’.132 In his
reply, Paul Scheepers calls these ideas into question by asking whether performers
‘want to “play the truth” or . . . to underplay it, like criminals or advocates’.133
Despite their mutual opposition, both critical approaches proceed within the
long shadow cast by Schenkerian Law. Both depend on the same definition
of truth and its musico-ethical consequences; concomitantly, both fail to
reckon with the historical forces that worked on Brahms even as he struggled
to master them. Brahms was embattled by history, by the futility of his at-
tempts to control it, by the irreconcilability of past and present. By remodelling
the Trio in B he had tried to tip posterity’s scales, but in the end he had to confess
to Simrock that he could not be sure he had improved the work; by ultimately
leaving both versions in his catalogue, he deferred to the judgment of the future.
128
Daniel Beller-McKenna discusses the Fest- und Gedenksprüche, op. 109, in this political context
in Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2004), 133–64.
129
Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Alastair Hannay, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (London, 1992), 235.
130
Ibid., 236.
131
Kevin Korsyn, ‘Brahms Research and Aesthetic Ideology’, Music Analysis, 12 (1993), 89–103.
Korsyn borrows the phrase ‘controlled pseudo-ambiguities’ from Paul de Man, ‘The Dead-End
of Formalist Criticism’, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(Minneapolis, 1983), 229–45 (p. 236).
132
Cook, ‘Performing Rewriting and Rewriting Performance’, 233–4.
133
Scheepers, ‘What Incoherence?’, 236.
304 ROGER MOSELEY
Predictably enough, the twentieth century overwhelmingly preferred the

‘unsurpassed objectivity’ of the revised version, just as it preferred Florence
May’s statesman to Eugenie Schumann’s gymnast.134 Performers, audiences
and musicologists alike have continued to trust the comforting image of the
bearded master and put their faith in his unerring expertise, despite his own
ambivalence; they chose to place their faith in the old certainties represented
by the text of Brahms’s Fassung letzter Hand, even though his musical actions
call them into question. Scheepers goes so far as to suggest that the ‘Brahms of
1854 was not yet able to continue with the first theme of the trio in the
“appropriate” . . . manner, and that he was actually able to do so only later in
his career’.135 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, those who do not
equate analysis with historiography might share with Brahms the sense that it is
impossible to transform the past into a wholly satisfying present, and vice versa.
Emotions may be repressed and allusions rescinded, but their imprints remain.
What the Trio in B’s Tranquillo section captures is the fleeting beauty of a
moment where past and present – Eugenie Schumann’s fresh-faced athlete and
Florence May’s bearded master – confront each other with memories and with
things forgotten before taking resigned leave of each other. To leave the last word
to Kreisler Junior,
Des Jünglings Gesicht
Ist ein Gedicht.
In Mannes Gesichte
Lies seine Geschichte.136
ABSTRACT
A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8, explores how
musical allusion can be interpreted to convey Johannes Brahms’s attitudes to critics,
friends, other composers and his own past. The young Brahms’s attachment to E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s literary alter ego Johannes Kreisler helps explain the extent to which the
music of others makes itself heard in the first version of the trio. Changing standards of
criticism affected the nature and scope of Brahms’s revision, which expunged perceived
allusions; the older Brahms’s more detached compositional approach shared elements
with Heinrich Schenker’s analytical perspective. There are also parallels between
Brahms’s excisions and the surgical innovations of his friend and musical ally Theodor
Billroth. Both Brahms and Billroth were engaged with the removal of foreign bodies in
order to preserve organic integrity, but traces of others – and of the past – persist through-
out the revised trio.
134
Hans Gál, ‘Editor’s Commentary’, Johannes Brahms: Complete Piano Trios (New York,
1988), p. v.
135
Scheepers, ‘What Incoherence?’, 235.
136
‘The youth’s face / is a poem. / In a man’s face / one reads history.’ Quoted and translated in
George Bozarth, ‘Johannes Brahms’s Collection of Deutsche Sprichworte’, Brahms Studies 1, ed.
Brodbeck, 1–29 (p. 13).
Roger Moseley (rogermo@uchicago.edu; www.rogermoseley.com) is a Post-Doctoral Re-

search Fellow at the University of Chicago, a collaborative pianist and an improviser
specializing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical idioms. Among
other projects, he is currently working on a book, entitled Academic Overtures: Setting
History to the Music of Brahms, which considers the composer’s relationships with musical
thinkers in Germany and Austria in order to explore their influence not only on how his
music was written, but also on how it was read, performed and heard in the nineteenth
century and beyond.

Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler Junior and The Piano Trio in B, Op. 8

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Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler Junior and The Piano Trio in B, Op. 8

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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 132 no.

Reforming Johannes: Brahms, Kreisler

Figure 1. Jean Joseph Bonaventure Laurens, charcoal drawing of Johannes

Figure 2. Ludwig Michalek, etching of Brahms, c.1890–1. Reproduced from

and made further minor alterations prior to publication in 1891.10

painters, philosophers and poets that he stored in a journal entitled ‘Young

That Kreisler Junior’s signature first appeared on Brahms’s transcription of

For Siegfried Kross, the troublesome, tragicomic dissociation of Brahms and

with the movement’s opening melody, the connection is obscured by gestural

energetically explored. Responding to such poetic markers, Jonathan Bellman has

pieces Brahms wished to publish in the summer of 1854 as ‘Leaves from a

(b) first movement, second theme, bar 84

(c) first movement, ‘fugue subject’, bars 98–9

(d) first movement, ‘country dance’ theme, bars 126–7

(e) second movement, bars 1–3

(f ) second movement, trio, bars 165–7

(g) third movement, bars 1–4

traced it back to several pieces by Schumann, including the final number of

Example 2. Instances of the 5^ – 1^ – 2^ – 3^ motif in works by Brahms.

(c) Piano Concerto in D minor, finale, bars 1–2

(e) Magelone Romanzen, op. 33, no. 1, bars 1–4

(f ) Horn Trio, op. 40, finale, bars 1–2

(g) Die Mainacht, op. 43 no. 2, bars 3–4

Wann der sil ber ne Mond durch die Ge

(h) Symphony in C minor, op. 68, finale, bars 30–3

(i) Symphony in F, op. 90, first movement, bars 1–2

given in Example 2. At first glance the omnipresence of the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif may

retrograde as the ‘Alphorn’ theme in the finale of the First Symphony

Example 3. Earlier instances of the 5^ – ^1 – 2^ – 3^ motif.

Prinz Eu gen, der ed le Rit ter,

(f ) Schubert, Sonata in G, D.894, third movement, bars 55–6

(g) Chopin, Impromptu in F , op. 36, bars 7–8

(h) Schumann, Papillons, op. 2, no. 3, bars 1–4

(j) Schumann, Kreisleriana, op. 16, no. 3, bars 14–16

(k) Schumann, Kreisleriana, op. 16, no. 8, bars 1–2

(l) Schumann, Bunte Blätter, op. 99, no. 5, bar 1

made explicit his opinions on how it should be done.

Although Brahms’s self-deprecation is notoriously hard to interpret, the overt

Example 4. The Großvatertanz in Schumann’s Papillons and Carnaval.

Thème du XVIIème siècle

Nimm sie hin denn, die se Lie der

insinuation of epigonism, despite Kretzschmar’s tone of approval: the older

(b) Schubert, Am Meer, bars 3–4

Das Meer er glänz te weit hin aus

meant than what critics such as Wasielewski and Mandyczewski perceived.

By dissociating himself from the prevailing mid-nineteenth-century poetics that

Heinrich Schenker recounted Brahms’s opinion of him with something ap-

At my first visit, I presented to Brahms my published opus 1; he neither praised nor

practice of master composers; this helps explain the propagation of Brahms’s

The proto-Schenkerian rhetoric of Jenner’s account is striking, and it seems likely

Example 7. Brahms’s analysis of the voice-leading in the Allemande from Bach’s

criteria, how could Brahms fail to meet Schenker’s standards of greatness? As

done from Bach up to myself.”’81 As in his letter to Schubring, Brahms skirted

it, and the resultant composition/revision/analysis/critique seems to perform

answered – as if reflected in a warped mirror – by an uneven, dissonant ascent;

(b) revised version of op. 8, first movement, bars 76–8

(c) revised version of op. 8, first movement, bars 110–11

bar 181 188 211 223 233 244 254 269

key E minor B minor C major E major G major F major G minor B 6–4

bar 121 127 137 162 179 185

key G major E minor B minor C major E major G minor

challenge of sticking to the rather arbitrary tonal scheme he had previously

repulsive anatomy lecture. It was as if he were making the experiment of stripping an