Brahms's Song Collections.

* Brahms's Song Collections, by Inge Van Rij. Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org/us; [phone]), 2006. 271 pp. $90.

Inge Van Rij, music lecturer at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, provides a new study of the connective aspects of Brahms's song sets. Previous major scholarship on Brahms songs (Lucien Stark, 1995; Eric Sams, 2000) studied each song individually. With the possible exception of the Magelone Lieder, Op. 33, and the Vier ernste Gesange, Op. 121, Brahms's songs have never been approached as cycles or cohesive sets. However, Brahms complained to his friend Alwin von Beckarath in 1883 that most singers performed his songs in arbitrary groupings, paying no attention to the groupings he had created, which he compared to "song bouquets." Van Rij explores what Brahms might have meant by "song bouquets."

This study, which does not lead to a strong conclusion supporting a cyclical or unified performance approach to most of Brahms's songs, would be of greatest value to a singer/scholar deeply interested in the evolution of the song cycle as a genre, as well as consideration of Brahms's relationship to poetry and the Lied. The book is clearly organized into six sections: 1) Context; 2) Conception to Publication; 3) Arrangement; 4) Performance, 5) Reception; and 6) Cyclic intent. The discourse is dense with historical detail, but easy for the informed reader to follow.

Of particular interest is the author's examination of the popular 19th century concept of organicism, popularly applied to the arts during the third quarter of the 19th century. Organicism suggests the unification of a musical work by way of its common seeds or inspirational conditions. Brahms was a strong adherent to this philosophy. The popularity of this concept coincided with the first written discussion of the term "song cycle," a genre with an elusive definition even today.

Brahms favored poems arranged loosely together by the poet rather than forming tightly connected poetic cycles. The romantic enthusiasm for publishing collections of poetic fragments also lent itself to the perception of loosely connected parts. In the genesis of his songs, from carefully selecting groups of poems to creating the completed song sets, Brahms relied upon an inner developmental process of cohesiveness. Creating song sets for a single vocal range or from the viewpoint of a single character were not necessarily the goals of Brahms's process.

Today, Brahms's songs are nearly always performed in formal public concerts. Gender identification between character and singer and the question of transposition for songs of widely varying vocal range within a song set, are several of the most perplexing challenges if Brahms's songs are to be presented as cohesive sets. While this interesting book will not change the performance presentation of Brahms's songs, its explorations deepen our understanding of the history of the Lied.--Reviewed by Margaret Kennedy-Dygas, Hope College

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