![]() ![]() As times changed, so did writing instruments of choice, as did letterhand itself, and even within the same country: a comparison between Bach's ornate Baroque handwriting and Felix Mendelssohn's Romantic notehand will attest to this. Some of the "blue chip" composers wrote their music with the quill, while those who came later usually used the straight pen. Just as machines don't have human resilience, steel or even gold pen points didn't have the flexibility of the quill, which came from living organisms, while points for the straight pens were manufactured. ![]() The visible variances in notation in Brahms' Violin Concerto manuscript, aside from the clearly different note hands, make it likely that Joachim used a steel pen for his own score markings. By the time he died at 64, quills had already been supplanted by the straight pen years before. Born in 1833, he learned his penmanship with quills, and he continued using them well into the 1890s, even after they were already long out of fashion. Like most of us, Brahms was a creature of habit. ![]() It takes little imagination to envision what might have happened if the concerto had been one movement longer. Arriving onstage in grey street trousers, it soon became obvious he had forgotten to fasten the braces, so that as he conducted, more and more of his shirt was continually revealed between upper and lower garments. Unfortunately Brahms hadn't finished dressing properly. Brahms' trousers temporarily overcame their ground-shyness at that first performance of the Violin Concerto, but with results that were if not actually calamitous then potentially very embarrassing. While both pants legs were shy of the ground, one could be noticeably shyer than the other. When his tailor was bold enough to make them the proper length, almost in defiance of the composer's orders, Brahms attacked the pants with his desk shears and just cut them to ankle-length - a wonderfully simple solution to this problem, but sometimes he cut and slashed without overmuch regard for the laws of symmetry. Brahms liked to wear his trousers unfashionably short. The account first appeared in Robert Haven Schauffler's The Unknown Brahms (originally published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1934). A "holograph" manuscript differs in that such scores are entirely in the composer's notehand.Ī near-incident at that Leipzig premiére of Brahms' Violin Concerto warrants retelling here. Joachim's own musical recommendations for solo instrumental changes are written in red ink, and are found in numerous passages in Brahms' manuscript.Ī composer's own manuscript - the autograph score - can eventually bear handwritten notations of others involved in its preparation for printing: copyist, engraver, and instrumental collaborator can all be represented in such a handwritten score. It was Joachim who gave the first performance (in Leipzig, with Brahms conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra) soon after its completion in 1879. The different musical handwritings found in the autograph manuscript clearly record the creative collaboration between the composer and his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, to whom the concerto was dedicated. The Introduction was by the late violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, whose own teacher, Georges Enesco, had played under the baton of Brahms himself. No printed score can offer such insights." - This is from the Introduction to the Harvard University Press edition of the facsimile of the handwritten score of Brahms' Violin Concerto, the original manuscript of which is at The Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ![]() "I have always felt a peculiar frisson upon seeing for the first time the actual handwriting of a master composer, alive with its irregularities, its visible impulses, its detectable moments of ease and worry, of joy and despair. Manuscripts, Pens and Composers by Jeffrey Dane ![]()
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