Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance

Katy Hamilton · Natasha Loges

sept 2014 · Cambridge University Press

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Johannes Brahms was a consummate professional musician, and a successful pianist, conductor, music director, editor and composer. Yet he also faithfully championed the world of private music-making, creating many works and arrangements for enjoyment in the home by amateurs. This collection explores Brahms' public and private musical identities from various angles: the original works he wrote with amateurs in mind; his approach to creating piano arrangements of not only his own, but also other composers' works; his relationships with his arrangers; the deeper symbolism and lasting legacy of private music-making in his day; and a hitherto unpublished memoir which evokes his Viennese social world. Using Brahms as their focus point, the contributors trace the overlapping worlds of public and private music-making in the nineteenth century, discussing the boundaries between the composer's professional identity and his lifelong engagement with amateur music-making.

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Katy Hamilton holds the post of Junior Research Fellow in Performance History at the Royal College of Music, specialising in the vocal music of Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries. She is the author of William Hurlstone: A Catalogue of Works and was assistant to pianist Graham Johnson for his three-volume encyclopaedia Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs. In addition, she is an active chamber accompanist and repetiteur, having worked with instrumentalists, singers and choirs in England, Ireland, Spain and Germany. From 2008 to 2013 she was the course organiser and Music Director of the International Summer School of Music at Shrewsbury (ISSMUS), a specialist summer school for singers, composers, conductors and pianists.

Natasha Loges is Assistant Head of Programmes at the Royal College of Music, where she teaches on Brahms, the history of opera and the German lied. She has published various articles on Brahms's songs in journals such as Music and Letters and Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council award, she is currently completing a monograph called Brahms and his Poets. She is also active as a song accompanist and has broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. As a speaker, she has a long-standing association with the Oxford Lieder Festival, the UK's largest festival of art song.