Presented at the American Brahms Society’s “Brahms in the New Century” conference in New York, NY, on March 23, 2012. Awarded “Outstanding Student Paper” at the College Music Society’s Pacific Southwest Regional Conference in Malibu, CA, on February 12, 2011.

Autumn of 1887 was a low point in Brahms’s career. His Concerto for Violin and Cello, Op. 102, was criticized even by his supporters for being overly academic and lacking in feeling. This criticism was nested in a right-leaning political environment that favored feeling over intellect and propounded increasingly radical strains of nationalism fueled by anti-Semitism. Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder, Op. 103, for all their disarming simplicity, represent Brahms’s successful negotiation of this complex artistic and ideological climate to restore his reputation as a significant composer. Brahms achieved this by evoking the style hongrois, or Hungarian Gypsy style, in specifically partial ways. We see this by comparing the Zigeunerlieder to their source material, by Zoltán Nagy, and to Brahms’s earlier “Hungarian” works such as his Danses hongroises, woo. 1. Brahms “naturalized” nineteenth century ideas of Gypsiness, both in the sense of representing Gypsies as simply people of nature and by eliminating specific ethnic or national connotations, thus strategically positioning the Zigeunerlieder as an antidote to perceived over-intellectualism while avoiding threatening implications. The Zigeunerlieder can also be understood as biographical reflection, referring to Brahms’s rapprochement with Joseph Joachim and hearkening back his early friendship with Joachim and the Schumanns. The analysis also considers the Vier Zigeunerlieder in Sechs Quartette, Op. 112, and proposes a holistic interpretation of that apparently discordant cycle. Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder, far from being as simple as they appear, are sophisticated works that embody complex layers of meaning.