Brahms's Song Collections

Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Context
• Organicism
• Lyric cycles
• Self-reflexivity, fragments, and Hoffmann's Kater Murr
• Textual coherence in the song-cycle canon
• Key sequence
• Key characteristics and other alternative approaches to tonal sequence
• Part II: Conception to publication
• Before composing: texts and notebooks
• From conception to arrangement: 'Heine cycles'
• Ordering for publication
• Titles and title pages
• Flower imagery
• Part III: Arrangement
• Plot archetypes: sorrow to comfort
• Narrative
• Op. 32 as narrative
• Op. 57 as narrative
• Narrative elements in other bouquets
• Self-reflexivity
• Alternatives to narrative: juxtaposition and resonance
• Tempo, closure, and cyclic patterning
• 'Wie Melodien'
• Part IV: Performance
• Performance contexts
• Criteria in assembling a recital programme
• Gender and dramatic characterisation
• Identification between singer and narrator
• Tessitura, range, and performance by several singers
• Transposition
• Performance and coherence in the Ophelia-Lieder
• Part V: Reception
• Reviews
• Responses of Brahms's acquaintances
• Identification of composer with narrator
• Dedicatory cycles and the composer's voice
• The graphic cycles of Max Klinger
• Part VI: Cyclic Intent.