Throughout his life, Brahms was preoccupied with the question of how humanity could come to terms with the harshness of reality and humankind's ultimate fate – death. During the period he conducted the Hamburger Frauenchor for several years from 1859 onward, the number of works that he programmed concerning death is notable, including the Bach cantatas Christ lag in Todesbanden and Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis and Schumann's Requiem für Mignon. Brahms set both sacred and secular texts related to death from his earliest published works, including his setting of ‘Come Away, Death’ from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as the second of the Vier Gesänge, op. 17, and Begräbnisgesang for chorus and orchestra, op. 13. An anonymous reviewer of Brahms’ setting of this old German song on a text by Michael Weisse wrote presciently that his elegiac oeuvre ‘transfigure[s] earthly sorrow into eternal joy and hope’.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Brahms wrote a number of choral works based on the secular texts of a group of humanist writers who were active in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century: Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and Friedrich Holderlin (1770– 1843). These compositions, Schicksalslied, op. 53, Nänie, op. 82, and Gesang der Parzen, op. 89, are at the heart of a group of works that espouse a common aesthetic outlook, and which I refer to as ‘Brahms’ Elegies’. Whereas many of Brahms’ instrumental compositions might be described as elegiac, these three one-movement works for choir and orchestra can be distinguished from the larger group on account of the nature of their poetic texts. All three are concerned with the legends of Classical Antiquity as mediated through turn-ofthe- century German Idealist poetry; all three address the gulf that is perceived to exist between the divine and the earthly realms; and all three confront the subject of loss, expressed in a distinctive poetic form in each of these three poems. In their own secular way, each of these three works deals with the transience of life and the inevitability of death.

Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, of 1846 holds a contested place in the nineteenth-century repertory. One of her finest compositional achievements, it was performed regularly throughout the nineteenth century. Yet she herself seems to have led the way for a languishing of its reputation when, upon its publication in 1847, she acknowledged that she ‘did not care for it particularly’ and that, by comparison to Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63, composed a year later, it now ‘sounded effeminate and sentimental’. This may represent nothing more than an internalization of the widespread belief at this time in women’s inferiority as composers, but her self-doubt cast a long shadow. Clara Schumann’s Trio is usually cited in recent scholarship merely to contextualize Robert Schumann’s Trios (Daverio, 1997; Nemko, 1997), or to exemplify the composer’s capacity for withdrawal into the private musical sphere by way of coping with the emotional and psychological distress with which she was dealing when she composed the piece (Reich, 1985, Rev. 2001; Ferris, 2004).

This chapter considers Schumann’s Trio in relation to a range of contemporaneous piano trios, and through the lens of the New Formenlehre, giving particular emphasis to fugal passages in the opening and closing movements. The striking pianistic virtuosity of this Trio is matched by a compositional virtuosity that significantly enhances our understanding of romantic sonata form. Schumann’s innovations are explored in relation to the Schumannian belief that only through interiority might virtuosity be legitimized and elevated. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Schumann’s Trio as a formal model for later Piano Trios by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Bedřich Smetana.

This chapter explores musical Romanticism as a historiographical concept. Drawing on a range of sources, from nineteenth-century writings to textbooks published in the twentieth century, it probes the distinction that has been made between classicism and Romanticism, noting that it is only when musical Romanticism is over that the concept of a Romantic era starts being crystallised. It investigates the degree to which the year 1848 can be considered to be a symbolic moment for the end of Romanticism and, through the music of the second half of the nineteenth century, considers the relationship between musical Romanticism and closely related concepts such as neo-Romanticism, realism, and modernity. Drawing on a wide range of historiographical writings from the second half of the twentieth century, it explores changing conceptions of where musical Romanticism is deemed to reside, whether in instrumental music or vocal music, and whether within the Germanic realm or beyond it. It investigates the place and role of women within musical Romanticism and explores their absence in writings on musical Romanticism in relation to broader writings on Romanticism and feminism.

The compositional output of Johannes Brahms contains a wealth of lieder and choral works that attest to the composer’s intense engagement with literature and the Bible. Brahms was an avid reader, deeply engaged with the literature of his own time and that of the past. He was also strongly preoccupied with philosophy. Literary figures often provide a much more complex and rich account of the human condition than many of the ideologies of philosophy that dominated the nineteenth century. For instance, we find the philosophical ideologies of Kant and Hegel filtered through the writings of figures such as Hölderlin, Goethe and Schiller. Brahms was aware of this, which is evident in his compositional output in several ways.

The composer’s broad intellectual curiosity was often concerned with philosophical issues. From an early age and throughout his life, he read widely and kept a log of proverbs and philosophical sayings that were significant to him.