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This long-awaited book situates the symphonies in their biographical context, offers text-critical investigations, presents matters of performance practice and gives an analytical overview of each work. In Brahms: Symphonist, the late Robert Pascall offers new revelations about Brahms symphonies resulting from a life-long pursuit of Brahms scholarship. Completed shortly before his death, Pascall's book brings together four scholarly perspectives. First, it situates the symphonies in their biographical context narrating their genesis, performance history and reception. Second, the book offers text-critical observations, by investigating the relationships between sketches, manuscript sources, publications and arrangements made by the composer or by others in his lifetime. Third, matters of performance practice are presented: how were the symphonies performed in Brahms's lifetime, what performance values did Brahms espouse, what were the practicalities of performance, and what legacy as conductor did Brahms pass on to succeeding generations? Finally, the book gives an analytical overview of each work. One of the book's highlights is a reappraisal of the materials for Brahms's unfinished Fifth Symphony, situating them in relation to the broader question of Brahms's 'retirement' from composition. Brahms: Symphonist will be required reading for students and scholars of nineteenth-century and Romantic music, Johannes Brahms aficionados, as well as those interested in the development of the nineteenth-century symphony.

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9781783277780

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ROBERT PASCALL (1944-2018) was a distinguished musicologist with a lifelong devotion to Brahms, from his student years at Oxford (where his teachers included Egon Wellesz and Jack Westrup) to the crowning glory of his career: new critical editions of the Brahms Symphonies published by Henle Verlag between 1996 and 2012 as part of the complete edition of the composer's works. He served as professor of music at the universities of Nottingham and Bangor, and in 2009 he was appointed honorary professor of music philology at Cambridge. In the same year he was made an honorary member of the Royal Musical Association.

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