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Brahms: The Four Symphonies.

Article Excerpt
Brahms: The Four Symphonies. By Walter Frisch. (Yale Music Masterworks Series.) New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. [xi, 226 p. ISBN 0-300-09965-7. $20.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

When Brahms: the Four Symphonies was originally published in 1996, it was the first English language account of the complete Brahms cycle since Julius Harrison's 1939 survey. At present, there exist at least four studies covering this same ground, as well as monographs on three of the four individual symphonies. (Only the Third Symphony lacks its own account.) Despite the proliferation of available material, we may be thankful that Yale University Press has reprinted Walter Frisch's study. While these other accounts explore particular issues in great detail or specificity, Four Symphonies provides an excellent comprehensive introduction to both the symphonies and the burgeoning scholarly apparatus that now surrounds them.

Divided into eight chapters, Four Symphonies has the weight and feel of a Brahms symphony itself. Structured in a gentle arch, it moves fluidly from cultural and stylistic issues (chaps. 1 and 2), to individual analyses of each symphony...

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