Der Epigone: Ignaz Brüll, ein jüdischer Komponist im Weiner Brahms-Kreis (review)

Book Reviews 153 phy-to examine the interactions ofEnglishness and Jewishness in English history, and, more specifically, to uncover the ways in which Jewishness is and has been part of English identity. In accomplishing these goals, this well researched and carefully documented study provides today's readers with knowledge that can replace much speculation as we seek to understand Shakespeare's representations of Jews. At the same time, students and scholars of Anglo-Jewry in other periods will find In Shakespeare and the Jews essential insights to inform their own investigations. Meri-Jane Rochelson Department of English Florida International University Der Epigone: Ignaz Briill, ein jiidischer Komponist im Weiner Brahms-Kreis, by Hartmut Werker. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994. 285 pp. DM 58.00. The famous Toleranzedikt, issued by Joseph II the year after his strictly Roman Catholic mother Maria Theresia passed away, put Austrian civil law on an equal footing with church law and in so doing opened the door to the legalization ofthe status ofthose few Jews whose presence in Vienna had been "tolerated" for reasons of state. Some twenty years later, as the liberating spirit of the code napoleon spread across the continent, the imperial capital began to attract Jews from the four comers of the sprawling empire, who as a rule contributed substantially not only to the city's economic welfare but also to its cultural life. The reactionary regime of Prince MetterniCh, it is true, revoked many a previously granted privilege, but not for long. By the late 1860s, at any rate, Austrian Jewry did enjoy for the first time all the rights attached to Austrian citizenship. In the meantime, Emperor Franz Joseph had let "his" Jews go about their business in relative peace, quite in keeping with the Biedermeier atmosphere so dear to a population loath to enter an industrial world generating more and more seemingly insoluble problems. Romanticism, not even "storm and stress," had never firmly taken root in Austria, and most of its artists rather catered to the tastes of a comfortably established bourgeoisie fond ofthe theater, especially in its operatic guise, but also enjoying poetic readings and musical soirees in their often palatial homes. One such family, that of the Olmiitz textile merchant Sigmund Briill, came to Vienna in 1850 with a four-year-old son who gave evidence of considerable musical gifts even at that young age and grew up to·become a renowned pianist as well as composer of a long list of operatic and purely instrumental works. Ignaz Briill was in fact still in his late twenties when he completed Das goldene Kreuz (The Golden Cross), 154 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 the opera which for decades remained his principal claim to fame among opera lovers out for an evening's colorful, melodious entertainment rather than heart-rending drama, let alone ear-splitting melodrama. Here, as in a number ofsubsequent stage works, Bmll essentially followed in the footsteps of German Spieloper, the nineteenth-century genre most closely associated with the name ofAlbert Lortzing, who favored relatively simple plots frequently involving well-known historical figures and events yet nearly always in such a way as to leave the audience with the happy feeling that "all's well that ends well." The librettist ofDas goldene Kreuz was a fellow Austrian Jew, Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, who, like Viktor Leon after him, shared Bmll's esthetic outlook, which remained basically unchanged throughout a life that witnessed Richard Wagner's rise to fame as well as the operatic triumphs of Giuseppe Verdi and, indeed, Giacomo Puccini. For Bmll never outgrew the idyllic mid-nineteenth-century milieu ofthe central European family into which he was born and to which he remained faithful to his final days in 1907. By then, of course, he had long since passed from the contemporary musical scene. He was in fact barely in his forties when his fellow Moravian Gustav Mahler began to overthrow the last of the academic musical conventions that never ceased to govern Bmll's musical practices. Which may well be why Hartmut Wecker's title refers to him as "The Epigone," with the qualification in somewhat smaller print that he was "a Jewish composer...