Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [402]
62. Gal 187–8.
63. Gal 188.
64. There is a certain mystery about Amalie Joachim’s performance of “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” because she was a contralto and Handel’s aria is written for soprano. Since it seems certain that she sang the Handel in the premiere, it either was transposed or Amalie had a remarkable upper range for a contralto. (The first possibility seems more likely.)
65. Brahms Briefwechsel XVIII, 48–9n.
66. May 406.
67. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 2/2/1868. (Paragraph breaks added.)
68. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 3/19/1868.
69. Keys 57.
70. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 9/4/1868.
71. Musgrave Music 103.
72. MacDonald 169, with further commentary from Raphael Atlas—MacDonald calls the form of the finale a sonata, Atlas a rondo.
73. Litzmann Life 258.
74. Litzmann Life 258.
75. Geiringer Brahms 99. Johann Jakob was almost the only Hamburg presence in the audience. Eduard Marxsen was prevented from coming by illness, and neither Avé-Lallemant nor Brahms’s other Hamburg acquaintances showed up. Their absense was noted and deplored.
76. MacDonald and Virginia Hancock cite specific musical and textual connections to Schütz in MacDonald 196–7. For one, Schütz wrote a magnificent German Requiem of his own.
77. The leading theme of “Denn alles Fleisch,” what I’m calling another version of the Brahmsian Dies Irae, was probably not in the original symphony sketch (which is lost), but added to the old idea.
78. Litzmann Life 258.
79. Dietrich 70–1.
80. Dahlhaus Nineteenth-Century Music 184. Dahlhaus complains that in the Requiem “a forlorn hope is made to substitute for faith.”
81. M. McCorkle 171.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1. Brahms Briefwechsel III, 45.
2. Dietrich/Widmann 71–2.
3. Stark 147–8.
4. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 6/24/1868.
5. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 9/12/1868.
6. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 10/15/1868.
7. Litzmann Life 261.
8. Brahms Briefwechsel XVIII, 68.
9. These excerpts are from the Dover Score of the Songs, trans. anonymous.
10. Litzmann Life 368.
11. Brahms Briefwechsel X, 124.
12. Specht 236–7 and MacDonald 192–3.
13. Brahms Briefwechsel VII, 36. In the letter to Allgeyer on that page, Brahms astutely demolishes the idea that the St. Luke Passion is actually by J. S. Bach. He was one of the first to declare it a spurious attribution, and did it on purely musical grounds.
14. Geiringer Brahms 359.
15. Barkan Brahms/Billroth Letters 12.
16. Geiringer Brahms 102.
17. Stephenson 156–8.
18. Keys Brahms 63.
19. See Boyer.
20. MacDonald 186.
21. Stark 76.
22. The extent to which Brahms assembled his lieder opuses as a set and expected them to be presented that way is hard to pin down. Certainly they rarely have been.
23. Litzmann Life 266.
24. Brahms’s famous letter to Fritz Simrock about the Rhapsody appears in Kalbeck II, 327–8, and Stephenson 145, each with a different date.
25. Kalbeck II, 299.
26. Brahms Briefwechsel IX, 82.
27. Schauffler 131.
28. E. Schumann 119.
29. The first sonority of the Alto Rhapsody is an augmented triad formed by a downbeat appoggiatura on the leading tone, with the third and fifth of the tonic triad added on the second beat: B-E-G, the B resolving up to C on the fourth beat. Brahms seems to have associated the augmented triad with a despairing tone; it figures prominently, for example, in the bleak song “Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen.” The unsettling effect in the beginning of the Rhapsody results from the root of the chord being displaced by an appoggiatura on the downbeat. Its resolution to C, on a weak beat, makes for a very shaky tonic triad, and the effect is amplified by the tremolo strings. The introduction engages in chromatic peregrinations without really establishing the tonic, and there is no strong dominant-tonic cadence anywhere in it
30. Trans. Stanley Appelbaum, in the Dover score.
31. Garlington 528.
32. Brahms Briefwechsel IX, 85.
33. Dietrich/Widmann 74.
34.