Rahbee, David ATorres, Mario Alejandro2025-08-012025-08-012025-08-012025Torres_washington_0250E_28362.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/53723Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Washington, 2025This study reconsiders the problem of historically informed performance in the symphonic works of Johannes Brahms by focusing on the recordings and writings of Felix Weingartner (1863–1942). Rather than treating Weingartner as an authoritative model, the project positions him as a historically significant interpreter whose proximity to Brahms, philosophical clarity, and recorded legacy provide a meaningful lens for exploring Brahms’s aesthetic values. The goal is not to reconstruct a singular “Brahmsian style,” but to understand how Weingartner’s documented choices, especially in his 1938 recording of the Fourth Symphony, interact with surviving manuscript annotations, performance traditions, and Brahms’s own expressed preferences.The study begins with an investigation of Weingartner’s philosophical writings and professional formation, establishing his position in a transitional generation of conductor-scholars. It then traces the distant but meaningful connections between Brahms and Weingartner, including Brahms’s 1895 letter of praise following a performance of the Second Symphony. The middle chapters address broader questions of Brahmsian performance, dismantling the myth of a single “authentic” tradition by analyzing Brahms’s contradictory views of other conductors such as Bülow, Richter, and Steinbach. These discussions culminate in a comparative analysis of Weingartner’s recording and Brahms’s annotated manuscript for the Fourth Symphony, using score-based and aural analysis to evaluate points of alignment and departure. By resisting the urge to canonize a single interpreter, this dissertation contributes to performance studies by reframing Weingartner not as a prescriptive model, but as a historically grounded perspective from which to understand Brahms’s flexible and often self-contradictory approach to interpretation. In an era when performance norms tend toward either strict textual fidelity or exaggerated expressive license, Weingartner’s legacy offers a balanced approach that honors structural coherence without suppressing expressive depth. His recorded interpretations, shaped by philosophical conviction and technological limitation alike, invite us not to imitate his style, but to engage with Brahms’s music more thoughtfully, more contextually, and more historically.application/pdfen-USnoneBrahnmsInterpretationManuscriptSymphonyWeingartnerMusicMusic historyMusicThesis