Souvenir de la Russie

Around the year 1850 August Cranz, a Hamburg music publisher and the father of Brahms’s piano pupil and friend Alwin Cranz, encouraged the composer “to provide savoury arrangements of favourite operatic melodies for the retail trade”.

Cranz issued Brahms’s arrangements no differently from those by his other composers, namely, undated and without plate numbers. He also hid the names of the authors of these numerous prints behind the collective nom de plume “G. W. Marks”. In Brahms’s oeuvre the category of pseudonymously published arrangements is, for the most part, shrouded in pbscurity, especially as his holographs for these works are presumably lost. Only the present style, Souvenir de la Russie, stands out from the other arrangements of his early period as there are number of clues and cross-relations that establish Brahms’s authorship almost beyond question.

This practical edition is based on Kurt Hofmann’s reprint of the first edition. Numerous engraver’s errors in that edition have been corrected; inadvertent omissions, obvious inconsistencies of phrasing, and similar items have been altered without comment to make them conform with parallel passages.