Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (AMS Studies in Music) - Tapa dura

"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 more―and 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-siècle 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

Lateness and Brahms takes up the fascinating, yet understudied problem of how Brahms fits into the culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Brahms's conspicuous and puzzling absence in previous scholarly accounts of the time and place raises important questions, and as Margaret Notley demonstrates, the tendency to view him in neutralized, historical terms has made his music seem far less interesting than it truly is.

In pursuit of an historical Brahms, Notley focuses on the later chamber music, drawing on various documents and perspectives, but with particular emphasis on the relevance of Western Marxist critical traditions.