Contributors to this exciting new volume examine the intersection of structure and meaning in Brahms's music, utilizing a wide range of approaches, from the theories of Schenker to the most recent analytical techniques. They combine various viewpoints with the semiotic-based approaches of Robert Hatten, and address many of the most important genres in which Brahms composed. The essays reveal the expressive power of a work through the comparison of specific passages in one piece to similar works and through other artistic realms such as literature and painting. The result of this intertextual re-framing is a new awareness of the meaningfulness of even Brahms's most "absolute" works.

Peter H. Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Notre Dame and author of Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music (IUP, 2005).

Heather Platt is Professor of Music History at Ball State University and author of Johannes Brahms: A Research and Information Guide (2nd edition, 2011).

Ackowledgements
Part I
1. "The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound": Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms, Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith
2. The Learned Self: Artifice in Brahms's Late Intermezzi, Steven Rings
Part II
3. "Alte Liebe" and the Birds of Spring: Text, Music, and Image in Max Klinger's Brahms Fantasy, Yonatan Malin
4. Brahms's Maidens in their Cultural Context, Heather Platt
5. Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism: Form as Expression in Brahms's Gesang der Parzen, Margaret Notley
Part III
6. Sequence as Culmination in the Chamber Music of Brahms, Ryan McClelland
7. 'Phantasia Subitanea': Temporal Caprice in Brahms's Op. 116, nos. 1 and 7, Frank Samarotto
8. Monumentality and Formal Processes in the First Movement of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, op. 15, James Hepokoski
9. The Drama of Tonal Pairing in Chamber Music of Schumann and Brahms, Peter H. Smith
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index