This chapter gives a practical guide to the creative process through step-by-step description of the composition of a short piano miniature, from initial idea to final score.

This chapter considers how notation has been used, questioned, and re-made by composers over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers the ideologies behind notation as an interface between composer and performer, and offers some playful examples of notational strategies that invite collaboration with the performer by challenging assumed norms of interpretation and performance.

This chapter considers the complex task of editing Puccini’s works, informed by the production of the Ricordi critical edition (launched in 2008 and ongoing). An abundance of materials exist upon which the editor can draw, including autographs, sketches, printed editions, and correspondence, thanks to Puccini’s close and long relationship with the Ricordi firm. However, some gaps exist in the surviving sources, and some sources disagree with others. The author explains that the editor must choose a text on which to base the edition, drawing on further sources as necessary to make informed interventions, striving to get as close as possible to the composer’s intentions, but mindful of the fact that his intentions and preferences changed over time. In Puccini’s case, second editions usually reflect the works as performed at their premieres, the first edition already becoming obsolete in rehearsal. The chapter discusses the various decisions and interventions that an editor must make in order to make an edition both faithful and usable. Puccini’s working method and process of revising his operas are discussed in detail. The chapter ends by asking whether early recordings, as well as printed and written documents, should inform an edition.

The term ‘declamation’ shifted its meaning from a training and display exercise undertaken by orators to a mode of speech used by tragic actors. By the end of the seventeenth century, the logic of grammar had suppressed the vagaries of orality, and the term ‘declamation’ served to define that which separated dramatic speech from the speech of everyday life. Because speech is driven by the breath and produced by the body, the thought or idea expressed by the actor could not be dissociated from their feeling or passion. In the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth century the dramatic text was conceived as sonorous matter, a visual sign of corporeal actions. The second phase follows from words becoming the arbitrary signs of ideas. From the perspective of a modern taste for self-expression, the earlier conception of the text as a score places unwelcome constraints upon the actor’s freedom.

Like many other nineteenth-century composers, Brahms was often approached to edit other composers’ works. Publishers strove to attract famous musicians such as Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt and Julius Rietz for editing work, alongside music scholars, not least because their names attracted buyers. Brahms’s own preference as editor was to remain anonymous, and we also do not know exactly why he undertook this work. The demands on time (studying the sources, comparing texts, revising, corresponding with the publisher, etc.) were considerable, especially alongside his own daily work of composition and concert duties. Furthermore, the pecuniary rewards were limited [see Ch. 8 ‘Finances’]. Thus, in relation to Brahms’s edition of Mozart’s Requiem, he was told on 12 February 1876 that he, like all the other editors, would have to be content with a ‘modest compensation of 1.50 Marks per score plate’.

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.

Is it appropriate to include a chapter on editing Brahms’s music in a book about Brahms in Context? In fact, it is not only appropriate but indispensable because it concerns what Brahms left for the present day: his notated music. Furthermore, from the first compositional idea through to publication, his works existed in the ‘context’ of his contemporaries: friends, acquaintances, copyists, publishers, proofreaders, performers, concert organisers, musicians and critics. Finally, the ‘context’ should not be limited to his contemporaries because we also need to investigate how his now ‘historic’ scores were edited after his death and continue to be edited today in the light of philological and editorial premises and methods. Naturally, the question of ‘suitable’ editing arises, and this must reflect knowledge of current Brahms philology.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.