Late Idyll: Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms - Tapa dura

Mr. Brinkmann's monograph is a loving look at Brahms as exemplar of the melancholic temperament...[His book is] technical, but makes reasonable leaps from technical observations to aesthetic claims. That may be the only way to understand music in words: Immerse oneself in it, learn its jargon and come out the other side hearing connections previously only guessed at. -- Kenneth LaFave "Washington Times"

This text examines Johannes Brahms's Second Symphony, discussing interesting aspects of the work and what it reveals about the composer and his time. Reinhold Brinkmann guides the reader through the symphony movement by movement, examining musical ideas in all their compositional facets and placing them in the context of major trends in the intellectual history of late-19th-century Europe. He delineates connections between this symphony and the composer's other works and traces its relation to the music of Brahms's predecessors, particularly Beethoven. This text also considers the reasons behind Brahms's revisions of the original manuscript and explores the meanings of the disparity between the first two movements of the symphony and the last. The result is a reading of an important composition, clearly placed within its biographical, historical and artistic context.