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Chapter 28 - Philosophy

from Part IV - Society and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2019

By
Nicole Grimes
Edited by
Natasha Loges  and
Katy Hamilton
Natasha Loges
Affiliation:
Royal College of Music, London
Katy Hamilton
Affiliation:
Royal College of Music, London
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Summary

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.

Keywords

BrahmscontextphilosophyHerderSchopenhauerNietzscheliteratureHegelBildung
Type
Chapter
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Brahms in Context , pp. 277 - 285
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Further Reading

Beller-McKenna, D., ‘Brahms on Schopenhauer: The Vier ernste Gesänge, op. 121, and Late Nineteenth-Century Pessimism’, in Brodbeck, D. (ed.), Brahms Studies 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1994), 170–88Google Scholar
Forster, M., Gjesdal, K., The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimes, N., Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)Google Scholar
Grimes, N., ‘German Liberalism, Nationalism, and Humanism in Hanslick’s Writings on Brahms’, in Grimes, N., Donovan, S. and Marx, W. (eds.), Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 160–84Google Scholar
Musgrave, M., ‘The Cultural World of Brahms’, in Pascall, R. (ed.), Brahms: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–26Google Scholar
Thatcher, D., ‘Nietzsche and Brahms: A Forgotten Relationship’, Music & Letters 54/3 (July 1973), 261–80Google Scholar

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