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...