Unlike Wagner, Mahler, or Schoenberg, Johannes Brahms is often absent from discussions of Viennese fin-de-siècle psychological theories and their intersections with musical culture. The privileged context depicting an aging Brahms resistant to new trends in politics and the arts discourages the notion that he would have known and been influenced by any such developments in the developing field of psychology or psychological arts. As a case study exploring Brahms’s potential engagement in these areas, this article reexamines the contested “legend” of Brahms playing piano in dive bars as an adolescent, not to determine its veracity, but in part to reveal how this motif functions in two different narrative models of Brahms biographies to about 1933. In the first model, the composer emerges spotless from the trials of a low-income childhood; in the second, however, he remains scarred by the unhealthy sexual climate of the bars. I argue that cultural-intellectual contexts in fin-de-siècle Vienna influenced Brahms’s attempts to shape his biographical narratives and that both models could have originated with Brahms himself. From Paolo Mantegazza’s sexology treatises to Hermann Bahr’s scandalous plays, the Viennese reading public was confronted with both scientific and literary material that conflated psychology, sexuality, and personal identity, while other artists such as Max Klinger sought to explore the unconscious motivations behind behaviors. In this context, we may reevaluate anecdotal evidence in which Brahms accords his adult problems to a traumatic childhood experience of playing piano in dangerous establishments: it suggests that Brahms could have taken part in fin-de-siècle trends of self-analysis and psychologized autobiography.

A favorite project of scholars in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France was to collect folk songs from various French provinces and to add new harmonic accompaniments before publishing them. This folk-song project, like so many others, has obvious nationalist undertones: gathering songs from every French province and celebrating an essential and enduring French spirit. Yet the nuances of this project and its broader context suggest a diverse set of concerns. An examination of the rhetoric around folk-song collection shows how French scholars of the period conflated history and geography: they made the provinces the place of history. Collecting songs from the provinces thus became a way of recovering France's past. Paired with contemporary discussions of musical progress and especially those related to harmony, the addition of piano accompaniments to monophonic songs now reads as a form of history writing. In this article, I argue that French music scholars of the fin de siècle acted out their preferred narratives of music history through folk-song harmonizations. What seemed like a unanimously motivated nationalist project actually reveals the development and contestation of the discipline of music history.