Brahms and the German Spirit (review)

Daniel Beller-McKenna has set out to correct what he sees as a deficiency in Brahms scholarship of the post-World War II period, namely the failure to acknowledge the composer's patriotism—his Germanness—because of a fear that his reputation and the reception of his music might be tainted with Nazi-style nationalism; thus the "universalistic assessments" of his compositions are a "strategy" (p. 4) to separate him from German culture. Beller-McKenna's approach is to situate Brahms's life and work in the context of German romantic and cultural nationalism, and to emphasize the role played by folk music and religion in this larger context.

In the introduction, Beller-McKenna not only explains his reasons for writing the book, but deals with the concept of "the Volk as a source of all German culture—high and low," but one in which "our modern perception might be blurred by the distinct brand of völkisch nationalism that emerged from new racist theories and ideologies during the late nineteenth century" (p. 11). He illustrates Brahms's romanticized view of the Volk and his use of old religious materials in an analysis of the "Geistliches Wiegenlied," op. 91 no. 2, which couples the old tune "Josef, lieber Josef mein" with Emanuel Geibel's translation of a Spanish poem (also set by Hugo Wolf), demonstrating that for Brahms "the archaic and the völkisch cannot be separated from the religious" (p. 29).

In chapter 2, "Religion, Language, and Luther's Bible," Brahms is described as "a typical product of the post-Romantic secularization of German culture" (p. 31), who "strongly identified with [the] secularized and cultural brand of Lutheranism" (p. 32). Beller-McKenna summarizes earlier nineteenth-century historiography of the German language, and the relationship between the language and Luther's translation of the Bible. He describes Brahms's own copy of the Bible, in which he made copious annotations, suggesting that details of sacred texts the composer later set may have been influenced by details of this edition, and continues with a detailed account of a notebook into which Brahms copied a number of Biblical texts, portions of which he later set in opp. 74 no. 1, 109, 110, no. 1, and 121. Beller-McKenna concludes that for Brahms, "all of these texts bound up the religious with the national" (p. 64); in particular he emphasizes those that refer to the "house" as a metaphor for Solomon's temple, which is in turn a metaphor for the nation. This chapter is valuable for its wealth of primary information; readers will find plenty of food for thought, even if they might not accept all the author's conclusions.

The third chapter is centered on Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45, first on the texts and music that emphasize the themes of comfort and nostalgia usually associated with the work. However, Beller-McKenna argues that it also "belongs to a small group of Brahms's sacred works that access a major vein of religiously inspired political thinking of the day: the apocalyptic anticipation of the new German Reich (p. 77)." His analysis of the sixth movement concludes that "the C major fugue ... marks the apocalyptic moment in [the work]. It belongs neither to earthbound time nor to divine eternity; it is the pure state of transition between the two" (p. 93). But Brahms is "expressing not the Christian apocalypse but rather a deep sense of arrival that was part of the German national spirit in the years leading up to 1871" (p. 94). In this discussion in particular, notwithstanding the historical apparatus and perceptive musical analyses, the author seems to be reaching for a new—and ultimately unconvincing—explanation for the work.

The Triumphlied, op. 55 has had an unfortunate history: begun in 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and enthusiastically performed in Germany after the victory of 1871, its fate in the twentieth century was understandably...