Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion

Abstract

Given his anxieties about Beethoven and his frequent musical allusions, Brahms has seemed ripe for a musical application of Harold Bloom's theories, advanced in The Anxiety of Influence. Yet such an application does scant justice to Brahms's compositional situation and practice (examined here primarily in the First and Third Symphonies), where establishing a relationship to the past was subordinate to other concerns. While Brahms's foregrounding of non‐referential musical discourse—which allows his allusions to operate primarily on a subliminal level—does reflect anxiety, it is less an “anxiety of influence” than an “anxiety of allusion,” a phrase that places his anxiety between the past and his audience rather than primarily with the past.

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