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A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8, explores how musical allusion can be interpreted to convey Johannes Brahms's attitudes to critics, friends, other composers and his own past. The young Brahms's attachment to E. T. A. Hoffmann's literary alter ego Johannes Kreisler helps explain the extent to which the music of others makes itself heard in the first version of the trio. Changing standards of criticism affected the nature and scope of Brahms's revision, which expunged perceived allusions; the older Brahms's more detached compositional approach shared elements with Heinrich Schenker's analytical perspective. There are also parallels between Brahms's excisions and the surgical innovations of his friend and musical ally Theodor Billroth. Both Brahms and Billroth were engaged with the removal of foreign bodies in order to preserve organic integrity, but traces of others – and of the past – persist throughout the revised trio.

The ambiguity of Chopin's music and its amenability to reinvention help account for its enduring appeal to pianists, composers, and critics. This article examines the conditions under which such ambiguity has taken shape on the page and at the piano. Just as curves become jagged—or “aliased”—when represented by the grid of discrete pixels that form digital displays, so have the contours of Chopin's music been both veiled and disclosed by the straight lines that define the staff and the keyboard. Despite the term's contemporary ring, the issues raised and reflected by aliasing are rooted in a set of nineteenth-century dichotomies concerning the discrete and the continuous, artifice and nature, instruments and bodies, virtuosity and poetry, machines and voices, and constraints and liberties, all of which Chopin's music was heard both to invoke and to elude. By way of recordings and transcriptions by Leopold Godowsky, Marc-André Hamelin, Josef Lhévinne, Vladimir de Pachmann, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and Arthur Rubinstein, the article presents various instances of aliasing and attempts to mitigate it via a range of compositional, pianistic, and cultural techniques that reveal how aliases can produce ambiguity by calling the very distinction between identity and difference into question.

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