Specters and “Derangements”: Michael Finnissy’s Summonings of Brahms the Progressive

Brahms represents a composer with whom (in Ian Pace’s words) Michael Finnissy “has had a recurrent fascination but something of a love-hate relationship,” replicating, perhaps, a wider cultural ambivalence to the Brahmsian heritage in the twentieth century, and in particular Brahms in the Schoenbergian guise of “the Progressive.” This chapter examines Finnissy’s In stiller Nacht (1990; rev. 1997) and Brahms-Lieder (2015), both of which approach Brahms’s progressive “manner” via his settings of German folksongs. Approaching Finnissy’s reworking of notions of developing variation in these works and his allusions to other compositions by Brahms with reference to Derrida’s hauntological concept of specters, the investigation demonstrates how Finnissy’s “derangements” of Brahms’s music offers listeners the opportunity to reconfigure, reappraise, and rethink their (plural) images of Brahms and his legacy.