¹ Lester mentions the counterpoint exercises by correspondence that Brahms would engage with Joachim for the simple love of it. These did not last long as the violinist did not follow Brahms's enthusiasm or discipline.

² The songs in question are ‘Regenlied’ (‘Rain Song’), Op. 59, no. 3, and ‘Nachklang’ (‘Echo’), Op. 59, no. 4. In the former, the narrator implores the rain to reawaken childhood memories and dreams, hoping to recapture the awe of ‘heavenly dew’. The latter likens tears on the poet's cheeks to raindrops dripping from trees. When the sun shines again the lawn will be greener, but tears will still be warm. In the lieder as well as in the Sonata, the accompaniment figures evoke these raindrops, while in both poems, joy resides only in the irrecoverable past and memory.

³ Theodor Billroth went as far as describing the sonata as ‘an echo of the song, like a fantasy about it’, but Brahms disagreed. Brahms did point Billroth toward the poems by hinting that a gently rainy evening would create the proper mood for the sonata, but, significantly, remained silent about what he had written to Clara. The missive, in which Brahms related the opening of the Adagio to Felix's battle with illness, finally resurfaced in the 1980s. Knowledge of that letter would have attached a particular meaning to the recurrence of the Adagio's theme during the finale and disclosed a series of interconnecting relationships between movements (thus confirming the sonata as a memorial to Felix). But Brahms was reticent (see Lester, 134, 138, 170, 238, 239, and 243).

⁴ For the German Requiem, one of the few works that has specific metronome markings, Brahms replied to a conductor, ‘In my view, the metronome isn't worth much; … many a composer has withdrawn his metronome markings …. Those which are found in the Requiem are there because good friends talked me into them. For I myself have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together. The so-called elastic tempo is not a new discovery, [and] one should attach a ‘con discrezione’ … I indicate my tempi in the heading, without [metronome] numbers, modestly but with the greatest care and clarity’ (Lester, p. 271).

⁵ In a recent study of the performance history of Brahms's symphonies, Christopher Dyment cites a comment by Brahms concerning Hans von Bülow, the dedicatee of his D-minor Violin Sonata, known for changing tempos noticeably according to the character of the music: ‘if I had wanted [this], I would have written it in’. (Lester, p. 273).

⁶ Lester, Joel, Bach's Works for Solo Violin: Style, Structure, Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Lester points out the similarities between the finales of Op. 78 and Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata, a relationship that Brahms would have deeply admired. Op. 78's sonata-long ‘narrative of memories’ – some of flourishing youth and artistic accomplishment, others of loss and death – draws part of its convincing power through its relationship to Classical era models.

⁸ Tovey, D.F., ‘Brahms's Chamber Music’, in The Mainstream of Music and Other Essays (Cleveland: Meridian, 1959), 263Google Scholar. This description is likely based on Joachim's interpretation, which eventually became performance tradition to this day.

⁹ Brahms, perhaps his own harshest critic, reportedly destroyed up to four early violin sonatas (one of them performed by the composer and Ferdinand David and taken up by Liszt and Reményi).

¹⁰ In general, Brahms saves fortissimo markings for particularly emphatic passages, and to indicate which parts of the texture he wants to project. See the end of the exposition in the first movement of the Third Symphony, Op. 90, or the few fortissimo passages assigned to the soloist in his Violin Concerto, Op. 77.