Influenced by Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, Johannes
Brahms not only learned to play the organ at the beginning of his
career, but also wrote significant compositions for the instrument as a
result of his early counterpoint study. He composed for the organ only
sporadically or as part of larger choral and instrumental works in his
subsequent career. During the final year of his life, however, he
returned to pure organ composition with a set of chorale
preludes--though many of these are thought to have been revisions of
earlier works. Today, the organ works of Johannes Brahms are recognized
as beautifully-crafted compositions by church and concert organists
across the world and have become a much-cherished component of the
repertoire. Until now, however, most scholarly accounts of Brahms's life
and work treat his works for the organ as a minor footnote in his
development as a composer.
Precisely because the collection of
organ works is not extensive, the pieces--composed at different times
during Brahms's lifetime--help to map his path as a composer,
pinpointing various stages in his artistic development. In this volume,
Barbara Owen offers the first in-depth study of this corpus, considering
Brahms's organ works in relation to his background, methods, and
overall artistic development, his contacts with organs and organists,
the influence of his predecessors and contemporaries, and analyses of
each specific work and its place in Brahms's career. Her expert history
and analysis of Brahms's individual organ works and their interpretation
also investigates contemporary practices relative to the performance of
these pieces. The book's three valuable appendices present a guide to
editions of Brahms's organ works, a discussion of the organ in Brahms's
world that highlights some organs the composer would have heard, and a
listing of the organ transcriptions of Brahms's work.
Blending
unique insights into composition and performance practice, this book
will be read eagerly by performers, students, and scholars of the organ,
Brahms, and the music of the Nineteenth Century.
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