Johannes Brahms and the Train: Musings on Musicians and Steam Thomas Quigley Thomas Quigley 1 Die Presse, die Maschine, die Eisenbahn, der Telegraph sind Prämissen, deren tausend-jährige Konklusion noch niemand zu ziehen gewagt hat Friedrich Nietzsche 2 The Nineteenth Century was a time of great change in many, many ways. These changes, whether for better or worse, impacted on the people who lived at that time: on all people, from all ways of life. The development of the steam engine into the steam locomotive, and the expanding of the locomotive’s original use to transport not just goods but also people, is a good example of these changes. People all over Europe and the United Kingdom were afforded opportunities to literally expand their horizons, whether it be for commercial opportunities, or social pleasures. In this article I will look at the composer Johannes Brahms and comment on how trains impacted on his life.3 When I talk about the impact the train had on Brahms’s life, I want to make clear what this article doesn’t include. This article is not about examining Brahms’s music to see if there are allusions to trains in it; in my opinion, there is nothing in Brahms’s music to suggest locomotives, train travel, or railways. Brahms did not write pro-gramme music: music associated with extra musical ideas, e.g. reproducing sounds in nature, or linked to a pictorial or narrative scheme. Brahms was a composer of 1 I’d like to thank my life-partner Ernest de Beaupré, and fellow Brahms colleagues Styra Avins and Wiltrud Martin, for their help in preparing this article.2 English translation by author: » The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw « . From Nietzsche: II. Der Wanderer und sein Schatten: Prämissen des Maschinen-Zeitalters, in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Menschliches, Allzumenschli-ches II: Ein Buch für freie Geister (= Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Werke und Briefe auf der Grundlage der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe, hrsg. von Giorgio Colli / Mazzino Montinari, Berlin/New York 1967ff.; Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin/New York 1975ff, hrsg. von Paolo D'Iorio, 2009—), S. 278, <http://www.nietzschesource.org/texts/eKGWB>, 27.7.2011. 3 This article is a tribute to Prof. Dr. phil. Hartmuth Kinzler. Prof. Kinzler shares my interests in both the composer Brahms and in trains; this article honours our personal and collegial friendship, which began when we first met at the Internationaler Brahms-Kongress Gmunden in Austria, in 1997.