Y. Nézet-Séguin: Brahms Cycle IV

Brahms's Second Piano Concerto was completed in 1881, fourteen years before the Old Railway Station, the entrance building of today’s Festspielhaus. The proximity in time sheds light on a related aesthetic, the Repräsentationsstil, a magnificent meta-style that incorporated all previous styles. In Brahms's piano concerto, for example, we find borrowings from Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. This approach had its antecedent in the symphonies of Louise Farrenc, since she too was a musical architect. Countering the urge to reform after the death of Beethoven, she focused on style, form, preservation, cultural skepticism, and industrial progress. A conservative aesthetic that stands in contrast to the growing fluidity of form in Romanticism.