This chapter explores the importance of adapting for a composer, whether that be in their own creative practice (for example by adapting stories for the stage or screen) or in their engagement with others’ works through arrangements or orchestrations. It considers what a suitable definition of adaptation might be, and where the boundaries of originality might lie in adapting someone else’s work, before arguing that adaption necessitates a valuable set of composition skills that require us to think actively and conscientiously about our role in history and society.

At first glance, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise would hardly suggest itself for choral adaptation. The history of choral arrangements of songs from the cycle bears this out: The only song to have a major presence in choral music since the nineteenth century is “Der Lindenbaum,” which was first adapted by Friedrich Silcher in a way that emphasized its folklike, communal potential over its darker elements. Other songs of the cycle, such as “Der Leiermann,” seem to innately resist any similar treatment. This essay focuses on how the recalcitrance of “Der Leiermann” in relationship to choral arrangement colors the approaches of two recent arrangers to the song, Thomas Hanelt and Gregor Meyer; the chapter then takes into account a more improvisatory group performance of the song presented by student performers at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in December 2008. The possibility of choral or other non-solo approaches to “Der Leiermann” innately forces performers and audiences to approach the wanderer’s solitude, and the cycle’s ending, from new subjective perspectives, even as these arrangements also attractively offer nonprofessional singers a chance to grapple with Schubert’s masterwork.

Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) long maintained a dual career as a composer and as a collaborative pianist, with Lieder at the heart of both. In the early 1990s, Reimann stepped away from professional performance in order to focus fully on composition, and around this time he embarked upon a project of Lieder arrangement that has included, to date, eight adaptations of sets of nineteenth-century songs scored for voice and string quartet. This chapter illustrates the spectrum of ways in which Reimann’s arrangements and reimaginings of Lieder advance both musicological and performance-related concerns. My main case study is the complex Schubert-based Mignon (1995), which pulls together four voice-piano songs, two incomplete fragments, and a male voice part-song from Schubert’s many engagements with Goethe’s character. The presentation of Schubert’s songs in Mignon demonstrates Reimann’s close analytic engagement with the source songs—his compilation makes clear use of Schubertian harmonic traits—and his awareness of the history of these early settings in performance and scholarship, specifically within traditions that have primarily valued Schubert’s later engagements with particular texts. Ultimately, I argue that Mignon constitutes both a powerful defense of lesser-known and long-overlooked Lieder, and a historiographical critique that comes to life in performance.

In light of the conclusions reached in the previous chapters and the knowledge gained through the fragments, the author addresses the issue of Ephorus’ universality. He tries to understand which reasons led Polybius to mention Ephorus as his only predecessor; and he sets Ephorus’ universality in the context of the historiographical thought of the fourth century BC, to better appreciate its novelty.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

Since Brahms only had a salaried position for brief periods (as choral director in Detmold, 1857–9, director of the Vienna Singakademie 1863–4 and artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde 1871–5), he had to support himself primarily by other means. Apart from concert fees, he relied on the honoraria his publishers paid him and did not receive royalties. Indeed, his relationships with his publishers are a means of tracing his stratospheric career trajectory. As a young man, Brahms was forced to tout his works to publishers and enter into protracted and wearying negotiations, which jarred against his artistic principles. In later years, he was a universally courted composer who could determine the conditions under which his work would be published. In fact, after 1869, it was virtually only one publisher, Fritz Simrock, who issued all of Brahms’s new works.

The dedication of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German intelligentsia to collecting and consuming folk music was fostered by a belief that a repository of wisdom lay with the common people and that, by drawing together the peasant songs of various regions where German was spoken, one could grasp a German national identity [see Ch. 26 ‘Politics and Religion’] where, politically, none existed.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of private musical activity as a testing ground, a compositional setting and, indeed, as a pleasurable activity for Brahms. ‘Private music-making’ deserves a word of explanation first, since private spaces were not always in the home, performers were not always amateurs and repertoire was not strictly divided according to public or private consumption. While Brahms was clearly often concerned to write music suitable for amateur performers, such repertoire was not automatically excluded from the concert platform as a result. Indeed, since the public lied recital was an innovation during his lifetime, some of the pieces which had previously found readier advocates in the domestic space were pushed further into the limelight thanks to pioneering programmers such as Gustav Walter and Amalie Joachim [see Ch. 19 ‘Singers’].

Three days before Brahms was born on 7 May 1833 in Hamburg, the first weekly illustrated magazine, the Pfennig-Magazin was published. Following on from the success of the Penny Magazine, which had appeared in England since 1832, the Pfennig-Magazin also aimed to reach a broad public. A few months later, the Hamburg music publisher Julius Schubert announced a new music periodical, a Pfennig-Magazin für Pianofortespieler, which offered ‘selected piano compositions for beginners, experienced players and virtuosos’.

Brahms was born at a time in which the market for printed matter, and especially music, was burgeoning as a result of newer, cheaper printing methods and the growing demand from music-making (especially piano-playing) amateurs [see Ch. 14 ‘Private Music-Making’]. Arrangements were very profitable, but since resulting copyright issues were still unresolved, this led to many copyright disputes between publishers from the 1830s onwards [see Ch. 11 ‘As Arranger’].

On 22 November 1883, ten days before Hans Richter was to conduct the premiere of Brahms’s Third Symphony Op. 90 in Vienna, Brahms organised a musical evening in the elegant Ehrbar Salon. With the Austrian pianist Ignaz Brüll, he presented the new symphony in his arrangement for two pianos to a distinguished group of invited guests: Hans Richter and his wife Mariska, critic and author Eduard Hanslick and his wife Sophie, historian and composer Carl Ferdinand Pohl, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde professor Josef Gänsbacher composer and Vienna Conservatory professor Robert Fuchs, physician Josef Standhartner,critic and later Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck and choral conductor and composer Richard Heuberger.