For two decades, beginning in the early 1870s, Robert Keller, music editor for N. Simrock Verlag in Berlin, worked with diligence and devotion to usher into print most of Johannes Brahms's major compositions, including all four of his symphonies, the Violin Concerto, the Double Concerto, the Second Piano Concerto, and numerous chamber, choral, and vocal works.

This volume collects for the first time the complete extant correspondence between Brahms and Keller, as preserved in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. To read their correspondence is to witness a relationship of mutual respect and increasing friendship and to gain an appreciation for the meticulous labor that went into the publication of Brahms's masterpieces.

This edition includes transcriptions of the letters in the original German and English-language translations.