v. 27 no. 3
Johannes Brahms: An Annotated Bibliography of the Literature from 1982 to 1996
By Thomas Quigley. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1998. xiii, 697 p. $85 U.S. ISBN 0-8108-3439-1
This is the second book published by the author surveying the literature on Brahms. The first, also published by Scarecrow Press,covered the Brahms literature to 1982; the current book continues the bibliographic journey to 1996. Given the mere 15 years it covers, the size of the book is amazing, amounting to nearly 700 pages of new citations. Such, it seems, is the indefatigable scholarly industry of devoted Brahmsians.
The timing of the appearance of both books has been carefully planned, the first covering the years up to, but not including, 1983, the 150th anniversary of Brahms' birth; the volume under review here stops at 1996, the year preceding the academic celebrations of the centenary of Brahms' death in 1997. Room is thus conveniently made for a third volume which may eventually follow.
Thomas Quigley is uniquely situated to bring such a mammoth task to fruition. For many years he was deeply involved with what is familiarly known as "the McCorcle project," the 841 page thematic and bibliographic index on Brahms and his music initiated by Donald McCorcle and completed after his death by his wife, Margit. This pioneering work, written in German, was published by Henle in 1984. Quigley's two books serve the admirable purpose of making all this material and more available to an English speaking public.
The book is divided into seven parts, each dealing with individual topics such as historical and research information, Brahms' life and his relationships to other people, studies of his music (by individual work), and what is called his "perpetuation." An interesting and timely appendix concerns Brahms on the Internet, a topic Quigley has investigated with some thoroughness. Where possible, Quigley has provided a brief annotation of the citations, indicating by an asterisk those sources he has not actually seen. About half of the sources cited have been directly viewed by the author; the remaining annotations are drawn from published abstracts and, presumably, RILM.
The bibliographic net has been widely cast, the citations including not only the expected monographs and articles, but also reviews, newsletters, and both doctoral and masters' theses. The net extends even to David Barber's comic classical-music introduction Bach, Beethoven, and The Boys, hardly a scholarly source, but evidence of the author's desire for what a colleague of mine describes as CBC: Complete Bibliographical Control. While perfection in these matters is illusive, Quigley has clearly made a noble attempt, his book missing very few recent writings on the composer and none of consequence.
The book is heavily weighted toward writings in English and German, not only the primary languages for writings about Brahms, but also the languages in which the available material is already most conveniently bibliographically compiled. There are, for example, few citations of writings in French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, although Czech sources are more fully mentioned. This is both an indication of the languages in which the work on Brahms principally takes place, but it is in some measure an indication of the ease of bibliographical access to sources outside the primary English German axis.
While the book is intended to cover the years indicated, Quigley has taken the opportunity to include earlier items that have been recently reprinted, as well as items that came to his attention since his first book. The two books therefore need to be used together for maximum bibliographical coverage. The book contains a complete title, monographic series, and institutional title index, as well as a personal name index. Both the indices and the individual citations are superbly cross referenced through an easy to use system of numbers. A particularly happy feature is the easy access both to collections of essays and to the individual items within a particular collection.
Experienced in this kind of work, Quigley has produced a book that is a model of its kind. Far easier to use than the Internet, this book, together with its earlier companion, is sure to become the standard point of bibliographic reference for English speaking readers about Brahms. In this computer age, where the presumption too often is that everything can be found on the Internet, the book makes an eloquent case for the convenience of having this kind of information between the covers of one or two books. One can only hope that the author will retain his enthusiasm for Brahms' bibliography and that the third volume in the series will come forth in due course.
Kenneth DeLong
The University of Calgary