Conference Agenda

The spread of Brahms’s music by members of his inner circle in post-Risorgimento Italy remains undiscussed in English-language sources. With the formation of local Società del Quartetto in the sixties across Florence, Milan, Naples, Turin, Bologna, and other Italian cities, the reawakening of interest in instrumental music gradually brought the nation’s musical culture on par with their northern neighbors towards the close of the century. Subscription concerts hosted by these quartet societies, dedicated exclusively to the performance of chamber and orchestral repertoires, opened pathways for Brahms’s newly-composed works to be heard in Italy.

Despite being performed by leading musicians closely connected to the composer, Brahms’s music faced a certain apathy in Italy compared to other European musical centers. Challenging the initial promotion was a public for whom the middle to late works of Beethoven were only recently discovered. The lack of familiarity with four-movement symphonies coupled with the near absence of abstract music within the public listening culture (satiated instead with symphonic poems, operatic overtures, and popular dances) significantly tempered Brahms’s Italian reception. Touring musicians including Joachim, Hugo Heermann, Fanny Davies, as well as the Florentine, Bohemian, and Rosé Quartets were less inclined to actively premiere new works by Brahms on the peninsula, opting instead to program the composer’s more accessible works. This presentation charts the slow but gradual reception of Brahms’s music by non-Italian musicians who played a significant role in promoting instrumental music in Italy, but keenly selected programs to suit public taste. The discussion thus contextualizes the spread of Brahms’s works within the wider narrative of an Italian performance culture increasingly favorable to non-operatic genres in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.