Lateness and Brahms

Reviews / Votes

Lateness and Brahms brilliantly explores the ideological intertwinings between Austrian political life and the various genres of 'absolute' music, which have often been regarded as only abstract or purely aesthetic. Notley flings open the doors of cultural context and reception for Brahms at the end of his career. Uncovering the key debates surrounding this composer and his musical traditions, she restores crucial factors of local framing and connotation obvious to his contemporaries but largely lost to later generations. A rich tapestry of close reading and cultural interpretation, this indispensable book not only obliges us to rethink late Brahms and his world but also challenges us to confront how we have constructed other composers in our own histories and narratives. This is music and cultural history at its best. * James Hepokoski, Yale University * In this fascinating book, we learn about Brahms's late instrumental works through a variety of prisms * political, analytical, social, historical, cultural and moreand emerge with an altered understanding of compositions forever important to all who value music at its most elevated. The juxtaposition of Vienna's artistic flowering at the fin-de-siecle with what Notley calls 'coarse politics' in the twilight of Viennese Liberalism makes for an extraordinary tale, here set in the context of her delineation of 'lateness' as the over-arching phenomenon of this repertory. Borrowing from fellow Vienna resident Sigmund Freud, Notley finds that stylistic change was 'overdetermined' in the composer's late years, that the extraordinary harmonic and tonal subtleties of this music are both an expression of their time and alienated from it. The best scholarship makes us hear music differently and know its creators in greater depth, and Notley has done both.Susan Youens, University of Notre Dame *