| Summary: | "Do we need another book on Brahms? After all, among those figures with an established place in the Western musical canon, Brahms seems particularly notable for the constant outpouring of discourse and discussion that his music has occasioned over the past 170 years. We can observe this in the aftermath of the composer's death in Vienna: in lengthy eulogies that appeared in the Viennese press, and in the range of memoirs and biographical studies that were published in the early decades of the twentieth century. Brahms's music had also been extensively discussed in print during his own lifetime. In 1892 he was the subject of essays by Wilibald Nagel and Philipp Spitta that sought to make sense of his works historically, either by describing the composer as Beethoven's successor or through reference to a larger swathe of music history that stretched back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the mid-1850s his published compositions were analysed in detail in a variety of German-language music periodicals. We might trace the start of all this intellectual preoccupation with Brahms's music back to the celebrated and often cited essay 'Neue Bahnen' by Robert Schumann, that was published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik at the end of October 1853"--
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