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The Brahms Notebooks: The Little Treasure Chest of the Young Kreisler

by Johannes Brahms

Summary

When Brahms was about twenty years old, he began to copy into the notebook he always carried, long or short passages he had read and wished to keep. He entitled this collection The Treasure Chest of the Young Kreisler. This practice belongs to an old tradition followed by Erasmus, Ben Jonson, and John Milton, to mention but three examples. Four of Brahms's notebooks have been preserved. In 1909, twelve years after the composer's death, the German music critic, author, and scholar Carl Krebs collected and published these notebooks in one small, handsome volume. The limited edition was soon exhausted and the collection was never reprinted. Krebs was aided in writing his informative Preface by the author Max Kalbeck, the first volume of whose monumental biography of Brahms had appeared in 1903. Kalbeck calls attention to these notebooks (as does Jan Swafford), convinced that they offer the key to Brahms's innermost being. The present volume, translated and introduced by Agnes Eisenberger, provides the original German with its English translation on facing pages. The annotations and the descriptions of the diverse authors are by Siegmund Levarie