Review article based on Nicole Grimes. 2019. Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. xv + 277; ISBN 978-1-108-47449-8).

The writer Salomon Hermann Mosenthal quipped that when Brahms was in really high spirits he would sing to himself “The grave is my delight.”[1] Max Kalbeck, who conveys the anecdote, presents it as an attempt to poke fun at the composer. However, no-one could reasonably challenge the idea that Brahms possessed one of the most pessimistic dispositions of nineteenth-century composers or that his oeuvre is dominated by works that engage, one way or another, with loss and mourning. In a series of compositions ranging from his first work for choir, the Begräbnisgesang, Op. 13, to the last opus published during his lifetime, the Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, Brahms returned time and again to the themes of death and grief.