The Songs of Johannes Brahms
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Eric Sams
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Format: PaperPrice: $37.00
Sams demonstrates how Brahms built a verbal expressiveness from his unsurpassed devotion to musicianship and musicology. Songs were among Brahms’s first and last works, and much of his music is associated with words, whether overt texts or covert allusions. Essential to the composer’s method of songwriting was a harmony between musical form and poetic text. Sams underscores the use of motifs at the core of Brahms’s song-music. He argues that it is not so much with words that Brahms sings to us, but with the very music itself. Brahms became the innovator of an all-pervasive new language in which musical form became a medium for poetic dialogue.
“[This book] reveals fascinating glimpses into [Brahms’s] life. . . . The amount of research and high level of scholarship that is evident on every page . . . is indisputable. . . . [It] will greatly enhance your listening.”—Pamela Lidiard, Music Teacher
“Sams’s book is the fruit of a lifetime’s immersion in the topic. No one else alive is better qualified to write it. There is no doubt that this will be the standard work on the Brahms lieder for years to come.”—Graham Johnson
“These chapters clarify Sams’s unique observations and offer ample motivation for further study by students , scholars, and performers, all of whom will return to the scores to see for themselves the large system of motifs unearthed and labeled by Sams. . . . Sams’s comments on and translations of individual songs are full of enlightening information and flesh out the analysis summarized in the opening chapters.”—Choice
“The one to choose if one were forced to own only a single book about the Brahms lieder.”—C. A. R. Hills, Literary Review
“Any publication from the pen of Eric Sams on the subject of nineteenth-century German-language song literature predictably will be a major musicological event; The Songs of Johannes Brahms surely falls into that category. . . . Freshness of language and creative imagination characterize all of Sams’s writing, and never more completely than in this volume. . . . What a wonderful contribution to the literature of the lied appears in this book.”—Richard Miller, American Music Teacher Magazine
Publication Date: October 30, 2015
