Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Brahms and the German Spirit.

Article Excerpt
Brahms and the German Spirit. By Daniel Beller-McKenna. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. [xi, 243 p. ISBN 0-674-01318-2. $49.95.] Illustrations, music examples, index, notes.

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 volkisch 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 volkisch cannot be separated from the religious" (p. 29).

In chapter 2, "Religion, Language, and Luther's Bible," Brahms...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!