Completed on his 74th birthday and just months before his death in 2018, renowned musicologist Robert Pascall’s posthumously published Brahms: Symphonist represents the culmination of nearly five decades spent in intimate dialogue with Johannes Brahms’ symphonic legacy. Pascall, whose physical resemblance to the composer was matched only by his intellectual affinity, brings to this final work the weight of his contributions to the Johannes Brahms Complete Edition – those meticulous G. Henle Verlag critical editions that have become the gold standard for Brahmsian scholarship.

The historical positioning of Brahms’ symphonies within the broader symphonic tradition receives particularly nuanced treatment. Where contemporary scholarship often reduces the ‘War of the Romantics’ to simplistic binaries, Pascall illuminates the profound complexity of Brahms’ position as a “conservative revolutionary”. As a result, his four symphonies, spanning the decade from 1876 to 1885, emerge here not as mere reactions to Wagnerian progressivism, but as synthesising Classical and Romantic musical aesthetics, therefore forming a bridge between Beethoven’s intimidating legacy and the later expansive visions of Bruckner and Mahler.

Pascall’s analytical approach adopts multiple scholarly perspectives. The biographical contextualisation precisely traces the genesis of each symphony, while the intertextual...