Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: "Encroaching on All Man's Privileges" (review)

TLDR: Musgrave as discussed by the authors provides brief biographies of individuals mentioned frequently in the text, and many of the footnotes provide further context, and there are some problems with this type of layout, and a student not already familiar with the general course of Brahms's life might have difficulties using this book.

Abstract: not address such issues as style or critical reception. In part because of the repeated use of the early biographies and because new primary documents have not surfaced, the story of the mature composer’s life has changed very little. That is not the case, however, with his childhood. The research of Kurt Hofmann (see, for example, his “Johannes Brahms in Hamburg,” in Brahms und seine Zeit: Symposion Hamburg 1983, Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, 7 [Hamburg: Laaber Verlag, 1984], 21–32) has significantly altered our view of Brahms’s formative years in Hamburg, painting a more positive picture of his experiences and his contributions to the family’s income. Despite the importance of this work, it has taken awhile for it to be reflected in subsequent English-language research, and even the most recent biography, by Jan Swafford ( Johannes Brahms: A Biography [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997]), does not mention it. Musgrave does include it, but he places it in a footnote (pp. 290–91), where an unsuspecting reader might not recognize its significance. To assist the reader, Musgrave provides brief biographies of individuals mentioned frequently in the text, and many of the footnotes provide further context. Nevertheless, there are some problems with this type of layout, and a student not already familiar with the general course of Brahms’s life might have difficulties using this book. Perhaps a time line of important events in the composer’s life, including details like the dates of his compositions, would have helped. Similarly, the index could have been more helpful, especially by including names of works. While this is not a life-andworks study and does not include any protracted examinations of Brahms’s pieces, there are a few passages that relate to specific compositions. For example, there is a description of Brahms conducting the DMinor Piano Concerto and a discussion of his attitude to tempos in the First Symphony, but neither of these works is listed in the index. Musgrave’s final section attempts an overview of Brahms reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There have been numerous complicated twists and contradictory interpretations of Brahms’s works and their relationship to the wider sociopolitical and intellectual developments of both centuries. Consequently, compressing all of this information into a single chapter was an imposing task. Nevertheless, Musgrave is able to trace the most important trends, and he concludes by offering insights into Brahms and postmodernism.