This volume sharpens the image of the young Johannes Brahms, which has tended to be neglected by scholars to date, and attempts to grasp the aesthetics behind his early works (opuses 1 to 10). Lea Lollath focuses on the composer's affinity to Romantic Literature. She shows that the young Brahms not only enthusiastically received Romantic texts in general and those by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Joseph von Eichendorff in particular, but that the boundaries between the real and poetic worlds became partia...