This chapter argues that Schumann's Piano Quartet in E flat is situated at a crossroads. On the one hand, it offers the listener a compelling — and strikingly original — synthesis of earlier models and practices. While its structural underpinnings hearken to Schubert, its intense motivicism and rhythmic urgency suggest a Beethovenian source. The contrapuntal tour de force of its closing pages points back even further still, to the fugues of J. S. Bach. On the other hand, the work looks well into the future: the chains of cascading thirds that run through its final paragraphs would become a staple of Brahms's musical vocabulary.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.Whence is the stream of years? Whither do they roll along? Where have they hid, in mist, their many-coloured sides? I look into the times of old, but they seem dim to Ossian's eyes, like reflected moon-beams, on a distant lake.... Dweller between the shields; thou that awakest the failing soul, descend from thy wall, harp of Cona, with thy voices three! Come with that which kindles the past: rear the forms of old, on their own dark-brown years! -James Macpherson This quotation comes from Cath-Loda: Duan Third, a prose poem first published by James Macpherson in a collection of 1763 (Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem .. . together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal), then reissued in 1765 in the second volume of The Works of Ossian.'Macpherson claimed on the title pages of both collections to have "translated from the Galic [sic] language" the poetry of the legendary thirdcentury bard Ossian, who celebrated in verse and song the heroic exploits of his father, Fingal, and son, Oscar. Here, in a relatively brief excerpt, we find several of the chief stylistic features of Ossianic poetry: a pervasive melancholy tone emanating from the bard's consciousness of the transience of all things ("Whence is the stream of years? Whither do they roll along?"); images of the absence, withdrawal, or diffusion of light in nocturnal landscapes ("moon-beams," years hiding "in mist" their "many-coloured sides," so that the past appears "dim"); and invocations to the harp, the bard's instrument of choice, by way of extrava19th-Century Music XXI/3 (Spring 1998). ? by The Regents of the University of California. I would like to thank Mark Evan Bonds, Jon Finson, David Schulenberg, and R. Larry Todd for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 'James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 319. 247 This content downloaded from 195.34.79.174 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:54:11 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH CENTURY MUSIC gant metaphors or epithets ("Dweller between the shields ... descend from thy wall").2- Late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Europe was overtaken by a veritableOssianic fever, the most obvious sign of which was the flood of translations of Macpherson's work, not only into French, Italian, and German but also into Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Hungarian, and even Greek.3 The reasons for this phenomenon are deeply implicated in the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical currents of the times. Germaine de Sta6l was one of several writers who discovered...

This chapter focuses on Brahms' Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Op. 102. It sketches a musical family tree for the “Double” Concerto — a network of models in which Robert Schumann and the members of his extended creative family play a crucial role. The sketch will focus on two levels of the concerto's genealogy. On the one hand, it will address the extent to which the work was bound up with Schumann's aesthetic of the concerto in general and with his late works for soloists and orchestra in particular. On the other hand, it will attempt to reveal Brahms' debt to an idiom — transmitted to him principally through Joachim — about which most critics of the concerto have said little of substance: the style hongrois that is, the musical language employed by Western composers to evoke the performing manner of the Hungarian gypsies.

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