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Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His "Werther" Quartet.

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Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His "Werther" Quartet. By Peter H. Smith. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. [ix, 325 p. ISBN 0-253-34483-2. $49.95.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

In 1853, writing in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, Robert Schumann famously expressed his opinion that Brahms was "fated to give us the ideal expression of the times" (translation by Malcolm MacDonald, Brahms [New York: Schirmer Books, 1990], p. 18). Such an expression indeed emerges in Brahms's piano quartet in C minor, op. 60, the Werther Quartet, which takes its name from Brahms's own characterization of it in letters to his friends Hermann Deiters and Theodore Billroth: "Imagine a man who is about to shoot himself, and for whom there is no other way out," and "An illustration, as it were, to the last chapter of the man in a blue swallow-tail coat and yellow waistcoat" (p. 1). The latter is an obvious reference to the tragic and quintessentially romantic figure of Goethe's Werther, a suicidal young man in love with the wife of an admired older friend.

Musicologists have often read into Brahms's statements a connection between the piano quartet, Werther, and Brahms's relationship with Robert and Clara Schumann. In Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His "Werther" Quartet, Peter H. Smith offers the first theoretical basis for the dramatic, suicidal content of the quartet. Although theoretical interpretations can be as subjective and controversial...

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