Beller McKenna 1998

How "deutsch" a Requiem? Absolute Music, Universality, and the Reception of Brahms's "Eindeutsches Requiem," op. 45Author(s): Daniel Beller-McKennaSource: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1998), pp. 3-19Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/746789Accessed: 24/02/2009 12:06

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How deutsch a Requiem? Absolute Music,

Universality, and the Reception

of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45

DANIEL BELLER-MCKENNA

As concerns the text, I must admit, I very happily also would omit the "Deutsch" and simply put "Menschen."

-Johannes Brahms

These words penned by Brahms in a letter concerning the premiere of his Requiem are among his most frequently cited. And not surprisingly, since Brahms's suggestion that he would replace "German" with "Human" resonates beyond the Requiem to some widely held ideas about his place in music history: namely that his musical style emphasized the universal over the particular, and that it transcended its time and place, rooted as it was, on the one hand, in a variety of musical pasts while, on the other

19th-Century Music XXII/1 (Summer 1998). ? by The Re- gents of the University of California.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the an- nual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Phoe- nix, 1997. I would like to thank James Hepokoski for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

hand, pointing toward the future. Arnold Schoenberg argued the latter point in his semi- nal 1947 essay "Brahms the Progressive," and that view of Brahms has been cemented more recently by such diverse scholars as Peter Gay, J. Peter Burkholder, and Carl Dahlhaus.1

As concerns the Requiem itself, the emphasis on the word "Human" in Brahms's quotation also supports the commonly held view that the work is aimed at "Humanity" by com- forting those who remain in this world rather

'Schoenberg, "Brahms the Progressive," in Style and Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), pp. 398-441. This case has been made more recently by Peter Gay in "Aimez- vous Brahms? On Polarities in Modernism," in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans (New York, 1978), pp. 232-56, and by J. Peter Burkholder in "Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music," this journal 8 (1984), 75-83.

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19TH than by praying ceremonially for the souls of CENTURY the dead in the form of a sung liturgy. In fact,

the Human vs. German quotation can and has been used recently to sum up this modern view of Ein deutsches Requiem. For example, Michael Musgrave begins his recent handbook on op. 45 with this quotation as an epigraph and goes on to say that it "captures the essence of the work,"2 while John Eliot Gardiner duti- fully integrates it into a 1991 essay entitled "Brahms and the 'Human' Requiem." Gardiner goes a step further, however, to insist that Brahms's Requiem is "'German' not in a nationalistic sense, but because [it is] rooted in the language of the Lutheran Bible."3 Gardiner does not clarify what he means by "nationalistic" here, but his assertion seems to adopt the late-twentieth-century view of Humanity as something transnationalistic and transre- ligious.4 Winfried D6bertin argued this case yet more emphatically in a 1990 essay on the Re- quiem:

That was the express intention of the composer. Brahms wished to serve not only the members of one confession with his music, also not only Chris- tians, but rather all people. Indeed, he named it a German Requiem because he used Luther's Bible for his text selection, but would have gladly deleted the word "German" in order to express that the work is dedicated to people of all races and religions.5

D6bertin went on to assert that Ein deutsches Requiem is "universally Human"-he uses the formulation allgemein-menschlich at least ten

2Michael Musgrave, Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem (Cam- bridge, 1996), p. 1. 3John Eliot Gardiner, "Brahms and the 'Human' Requiem," Gramophone (April 1991), 1809-10 (quote, 1810). 4In his biography of one year earlier, Malcolm MacDonald makes exactly the same point: "It is 'German' in no nationalistic sense but because it is rooted in the language of the Lutheran Bible" (Brahms [New York, 1990], p. 195). 5"Das war die ausdruckliche Absicht des Komponisten. Nicht nur den Angehorigen einer Konfession, auch nicht nur Christen, sondern allen Menschen wollte Brahms mit seiner Musik dienen. Er nannte sie zwar ein Deutsches Requiem, weil er sich der Lutherbibel bei seiner Text- auswahl bediente, hatte aber auf das Wort 'deutsch' gern verzichtet, um so zum Ausdruck zu bringen, dag das Werk den Menschen aller Volker und Religionen gewidmet ist" (Winfried Dobertin, "Johannes Brahms' Deutsches Requiem als religioses Kunstwerk," Brahms-Studien vol. 8, ed. Kurt and Renate Hoffmann [Hamburg, 1990], p. 9).

times in his fifteen-page essay-and that Brahms intended the piece as a comfort for people of all nations.6

As Western readers in an age of global mar- kets, the United Nations, and transcontinental political alliances, we tend to assume the same set of universally human values that underlie Gardiner and D6bertin's claims about the Re- quiem. Those values are so ingrained that one might hardly recognize them for the culturally loaded keywords they are. Far from the benign terms that these authors would suggest, the words "Human" and "Universal" have been heavily laden from the start with a Eurocentic view of the world. Culturally weighted meaning in those words became more focused in the middle of the nineteenth century when the concept of Humanism crept into nationalisti- cally German theories of history and culture (and-eventually-race). Thus, whereas similar readings of the Requiem were expressed by Brahms's contemporaries, almost none of those early critics doubted the work's essentially Ger- man character. The nineteenth-century concept of universality, growing out of the En- lightenment ascendancy of Rationality over Christianity and the resultant attempt to re- claim spirituality in the more general name of "Religion," was difficult to separate from press- ing issues of pan-German national identity span- ning the Protestant-North and Catholic-South. Given that Brahms's Requiem was composed primarily in 1866, the year of the divisive war between Prussia and Austria, and quickly en- tered the repertoire during 1869-70, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, a reexamination of the references to universality in the early reception of the piece is warranted.

That leaves the question, How did reading the Requiem as a work that transcends its context develop since then? It is here that nineteenth-century ideas about "absolute music" impinge on the piece. And although such ideas are already present in the earliest critiques of the work, they were significantly transformed in polemical Viennese music criticism of the later nineteenth century. There, Eduard Hanslick

6"Mit seinem Deutschen Requiem will Johannes Brahms Leidtragende aller Nationen und aller Religionen tr6sten" (D6bertin, "Johannes Brahms' Deutsches Requiem," p. 23).

4

and his followers downplayed the Requiem's German, Christian, and modern attributes in order to accommodate the work within their aesthetic polemics over absolute music.

II Because the "Deutsch vs. Menschen" quota-

tion has figured so prominently in current in- terpretations of Ein deutsches Requiem, Brahms's motivations for making such a statement warrant a reappraisal-if only to de-em- phasize the quotation in our current understanding of the piece. Brahms made the remark in a letter to Carl Reinthaler, who was preparing his Bremen cathedral choir for the premiere of the Requiem. Brahms was to conduct that performance on Good Friday, 10 April 1868. In a letter of 6 October 1867, Reinthaler had conveyed his concern to Brahms that the work might be inappropriate for a Good Friday concert:

My thought was this: you stand in the work not only on religious, but on completely Christian ground. Already the second movement alludes to the proph- ecy of the Lord's return, and in the penultimate [movement] the mystery of the resurrection of the dead, "and that not all will be put to sleep," is thoroughly dealt with. It lacks, however, for the Christian consciousness the point on which everything revolves, namely the redeeming death of the Lord. "Had Christ not arisen, thus would your faith be in vain," said Paul in connection with the passage that you have dealt with. Perhaps at the passage "Death, where is your sting," etc., the point could be found, either briefly within the movement itself before the fugue or through the construction of a new movement. Anyhow, you say in the last movement: "Blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord from now on," that can only mean, after Christ has brought his salvation work to completion.7

7"Mein Gedanke war der: Sie stehen in dem Werke nicht allein auf religi6sem, sondern auf ganz christlichem Boden. Schon die zweite Nummer beruhrt die Weissagung von der Wiederkunft des Herrn, und in der vorletzten wird das Geheimnis der Auferstehung der Toten 'und daB nicht alle entschlafen' ausfuhrlich behandelt. Es fehlt aber fur das christliche BewuBtsein der Punkt, um den sich alles dreht, namlich der Erlosungstod des Herrn. 'Ist Christus nicht auferstanden, so ist Euer Glaube eitel,' sagt Paulus im Zusammenhang mit jener von Ihnen behandelten Stelle. Nun ware aber an der Stelle 'Tod, wo ist dein Stachel' etc. vielleicht der Punkt zu finden, entweder kurz im Satze selbst vor der Fuge oder durch die Bildung eines neuen Satzes. Ohnehin sagen Sie im letzten Satz: 'Selig sind die

Brahms responded immediately to Rein- thaler's suggestion in a letter of 9 October: "As concerns the text, I must admit, I would very happily also omit the 'German' and simply put 'Human,' I also avoid knowingly and intention- ally passages such as John 3:16. Occasionally, I have taken much liberty because I am a musi- cian, because I had use for it, because I couldn't argue away or erase a 'henceforth' from my venerable poets."8 Brahms's ambivalence about his own chosen title for the piece had surfaced earlier in letters to Clara Schumann and Albert Dietrich where he referred to it as "a sort of German Requiem" and "my so-called German Requiem" respectively.9 At least two possible explanations account for Brahms's misgivings about the title of op. 45. The first concerns the connections between the title's cultural meaning and political circumstances in Germany during 1866. Brahms seems to have worked most continuously on the Requiem during the winter and spring of that year; Hermann Levi asserted that most of the work was composed at Karlsruhe, where Brahms was living with Julius Allgeyer from February to April of 1866.10 It was during these very months that the war between

DANIEL BELLER- MCKENNA Reception of Brahms's op. 45

Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben von nun an,' das heifit doch nur, nachdem Christus das Erlosungswerk vollbracht hat" (Carl Reinthaler, Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Carl Reinthaler [Berlin, 1908], pp. 7-12). 8"Was den Text betrifft, will ich bekennen, daf ich recht gern auch das 'Deutsch' fortliege und einfach den 'Menschen' setzte, auch mit allem Wissen und Willen Stellen wie z. B. Evang. Joh. Kap. 3 Vers 16 entbehrte. Hinwieder habe ich nun wohl manches genommen, weil ich Musiker bin, weil ich es gebrauchte, weil ich meinen ehrwuirdigen Dichtern auch ein 'von nun an' nicht abdisputieren oder streichen kann" (ibid). 9Letter from Brahms to Clara Schumann of April 1865 in Clara Schumann-Johannes Brahms Briefe, ed. Berthold Litzmann, vol. I (1853-71) (Leipzig, 1927), p. 504. The comment to Dietrich is recounted in his Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms in Briefen besonders aus seiner Jugend- zeit (Leipzig, 1898), p. 60. '?Levi is quoted by Max Kalbeck in Johannes Brahms, vol. II (3rd expanded edn. Berlin, 1921; rpt. Tutzing, 1976), p. 220. Accounts of the Requiem's Entstehungsgeschichte are numerous. Most recently, Michael Musgrave summarizes the details clearly and succinctly in Brahms: A German Requiem, pp. 4-13. Following the lead of Kalbeck, most scholars believe the Requiem originated sometime in the late 1850s, was substantially planned out by 1861, and was brought to completion between 1865-67. See Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms II, 214-32; Siegfried Kross, Die Chor- werke von Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1958), pp. 208-18; and Klaus Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem von Johannes Brahms (Tutzing, 1971), pp. 91-108.

5

Prussia and Austria broke out. Although brief, the war marked a decisive turning point in the political and social history of German-speaking lands in the nineteenth century. For decades, and especially since the revolutionary year of 1848, German political leaders had sought to establish a grof3deutsch state, one that would encompass both Protestant and Catholic lands. The Austro-Prussian War dashed those hopes. At the same time, Prussia's military was pro- pelled toward its preeminent position in central Europe, presaging the victory over France a few years later that completed the kleindeutsch so- lution of a unified Kaiserreich under Prussia's King Wilhelm and his Chancellor Bismarck. It was not long before Prussia's Protestant Church began to exert considerable influence in Wilhelm's government and Bismarck embarked on his Kulturkampf against Catholic influence in the Empire.

In contrast to what would be his enthusias- tic response to the events of 1870 and 1871 (to which his Triumphlied, op. 55, stands as a monument), Brahms was apparently opposed to the Austro-Prussian War. In 1866 he wrote to Allgeyer, "Whether they fight for thirty or for seven years, it will be fought as little for humanity now as when they already fought for thirty and for seven years.""l Brahms's friend and biographer Max Kalbeck averred that in the mid-1860s Brahms, like many other Ger- man liberals, had not yet been won over to the kleindeutsch Prussian cause and still had misgivings about Bismarck, despite the deep veneration he later developed for the "Iron Chan- cellor."'2 In this context, especially when one considers the strong religious overtones of the Austrian-Prussian conflict, it is quite possible to understand Brahms's remark in October 1867-that of "gladly omitting the [word] Ger- man" in the work's title-to have been strongly colored by political events of the day. In sum, Brahms might have been expressing a fear that with that title he would appear to be siding with Prussia, in that the German language to which the word "deutsch" in the work's title

"In a letter to Julius Allgeyer of January 1866, quoted in Alfred Orel, Johannes Brahms und Julius Allgeyer: Eine Kunstlerfreundschaft in Briefen (Tiitzing, 1964), p. 39. '2Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, II, 218.

refers could be understood to represent northern Protestantism as opposed to Austrian Ca- tholicism.

If this was the case, Brahms's sensitivity to the issue might also account for an acerbic remark he made to his friend Adolf Schubring, a prominent music critic who in 1869 published the first substantial analytical commen- tary of the piece in the Ailgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In his essay, Schubring had observed that the various themes of the third movement's eight sections derive from three manifestations of a basic contrapuntal configuration illustrated in ex. 1. In a letter of 16 February 1869, Brahms thoroughly rejected Schubring's analysis, claiming that any resemblance among the themes was at best coincidental and at worst a sign of weak inspiration. More importantly, he added the sarcastic quip, "Have you then not yet dis- covered the political allusion in my Requiem? 'Gott erhalte' was begun precisely in the year 1866."'3 As seen in ex. 2, Brahms is alluding here to the similarly coincidental resemblance between the orchestra's introductory theme in the first movement (ex. 2a) and Haydn's patriotic hymn "Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser" (ex. 2b). Although Brahms's suggestion that his tune had a political source is surely not to be taken seriously, his comment does reveal his awareness-perhaps even his anxiety-that his piece could be rightly or wrongly construed in political terms that had been associated with the Austro-Prussian War.

Yet a second context involving religious politics of a different kind may also shed light on Brahms's misgivings about his title; namely,

13"Ich streite, dafi in Nr. 3 die Themen der verschiedenen Satze etwas miteinander gemein haben sollen. (Ausgen- ommen das kleine Motiv -'k fr) Ist es nun doch so (ich rufe mir absichtlich nichts ins Gedachtnis zuriick): So will ich kein Lob dafir, sondem bekennen, dai meine Gedanken beim Arbeiten nicht weit genug fliegen, also unabsichtlich ofter mit demselben Gedanken zuruckkommen" (I dis- pute that in no. 3 the themes of the various sections have something to do with one another. [With the exception of the little motive, F- f ]. If it is indeed so [I cannot recall anything intentional]: for this I want no praise, rather I confess that my thoughts do not take flight far enough in my work, and thus frequently return unintentionally to the same ideas.) (Brahms im Briefwechsel mit J. V. Wid- mann, Ellen und Ferdinand Vetter und Adolf Schubring, ed. Max Kalbeck [Berlin, 19151, pp. 213-14).

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II. III.

i 111 i 1. J \j , i ?J 1.X1, ftI dd ~ d d 1

-a I 9

'o EI2a I

Sor das Fugen-Them r Sogar das Fugen-Thema:

- i . I j J .


der Ge - rech - ten See - len

Example 1: Table of motivic relationships in movt. III of Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45, from Adolf Schubring's review in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1869).

a. p legato

I 1 I I I a a. 0I Io -

I

b. p legato

Langsam

Gott, er - hal - te Franz den Kai - ser,

< i r F

Example 2: Similarities between the opening orchestral motive of Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45, movt. I, and Haydn's anthem "Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser."

the debate in northern German lands over the relationship between modern religion and traditional Protestantism. Such a debate already had a long history: by the end of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment had eroded the moral authority of the Lutheran Church in Ger- many, and subsequent generations of intellec- tuals-Romantics (many of whom were trained for the church) and others-had turned as strongly against Lutheran dogma as against rationalism itself. The upshot of this revolution was twofold: outside the church it had led to various forms of secular religion (to be discussed presently), while within Protestantism it had spurred a dramatic theological transformation, most prominently manifested at the beginning of the century in Schleiermacher's 1799 address to "Religion's Cultured Despis- ers." Here Schleiermacher had evoked religious feeling not only to counter the logical component in idealist philosophy but also to liberate

the believer from traditional Christian dogma. As a result, Brahms and his German contemporaries inherited a culture in which it was possible to be "religious" in a broad, nondogmatic sense, without holding to the particular tenets of Christianity. For German artists and intel- lectuals, Lutheranism became as much a cultural tradition as a system of faith.14 Along

14In his last, posthumously published theories of nationalism, Ernest Gellner explains the complicated status of religion as a cultural symbol in the nineteenth century and suggests the nationalist ramifications of that status: "On balance, the Age of Nationalism in Europe is also the Age of Secularism. Nationalists love their culture because they love their culture, not because it is the idiom of their faith. They may value their faith because it is, allegedly, the expression of their national culture or character, or they may be grateful to the Church for having kept the national language alive when otherwise it disappeared from public life; but in the end they value religion as an aid to community, and not so much in itself" (Gellner, Nation- alism [New York, 19971, pp. 76-77).

7

I ,

these lines of thought, Brahms might have as- sumed that "deutsch" here would be identified with the Lutheran origin of the text and thus mark his piece as Protestant-in this case as opposed not to "Catholic," but rather to the more modern and neutral "religious." This interpretation of Brahms's remark would accord with his rebuttal to Reinthaler's suggestions to Christianize the piece. Brahms never claimed the work was irreligious; he merely stated that he had no need for Christian dogma, but rather took many texts out of the Bible because he had use for them and couldn't argue away or erase a "henceforth" from his venerable poets.

An overriding issue in both of these poten- tial contexts for Brahms's remark is language: specifically the status of the German language in the formation of a national identity. What- ever else Brahms may have intended by the unusual title of his piece, ostensibly at least, the word "deutsch" refers to the substitution of the familiar Latin with the German vernacular. To write a "German" requiem, after all, is to supplant a foreign text, a willful replace- ment of Latin with German, and of Catholic with Lutheran. Language formed a central part of German identity for Romantic nationalists in the generation before Brahms, like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who dedicated most of his fourth Reden an die deutsche Nation to the importance of language as a defining element of the German Volk, and Ludwig Arndt, who believed that the purity of the German language spoke to the purity of the Teutonic race. And although it would be anachronistic to hold Brahms to the nationalistic view of language expressed in the Napoleonic era, it would be equally unreasonable to think that none of that patriotic veneration of the German language had filtered down to him, especially given his strong attachment to Luther's Bible.

Ernest Gellner stressed the interconnection of "Protestant-type" religions and nationalism, and the centrality of language to both. "By trans- lating scripture into the vernacular," wrote Gellner,

Protestantism elevates the vernacular into a high culture.... Thus Protestantism achieves for its own religious ends, that transformation of a peasant dia- lect into a "real" language, codified and capable of

transmitting messages in a context-free manner over a large anonymous population. That which, later, nationalism strove to do, and did, for overtly political ends, Protestantism practiced earlier.15

Gellner's theory has obvious ramifications for Brahms's setting of the very document that raised the German vernacular to the status of high culture (all in the name of Protestantism), Luther's Bible. Indeed, the complete title of op. 45, Ein deutsches Requiem nach Worten der heiligen Schrift, without striking an overtly nationalist pose, celebrates the work's biblical lineage and makes clear the importance of the text's German-Protestant origin.16

Brahms himself draws attention to the importance of language in his previously cited response to Reinthaler's letter. The conductor's comments concern neither the title of the work nor the language of its text, but rather its religious nature. Therefore, Brahms's reference to the word "deutsch" in the text [sic], is curious: he is responding to a criticism, or a question, that Reinthaler never lodged. As such, Brahms's response might betray his own awareness of and sensitivity to the religious/nationalistic im- plications raised by the word "deutsch" in his title and by the status of language in the work. Brahms may have feared being associated with contemporaneous jingoistic proclamations concerning the German language, some within his own profession, which continued in the line of Arndt and Fichte. A prime example of such writing occurs in Wagner's "Was ist deutsch?" from 1865:

It was only at the division of the empire of Charlemagne that the name "Deutschland" made its first appearance: as the collective name for all the races who had stayed on this side of the Rhine. Consequently it denotes those people who, remain- ing in their ancestral seat, continued to speak their

'5Gellner, Nationalism, p. 77. See also Gellner's earlier Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983). 160f further interest on this point is Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities," whose origins he specifically traces to the advent of capitalist print media in Europe around 1500. Anderson even singles out Martin Luther as "the first best-selling author." See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), p. 43.

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Table 1

Early Critiques and Concert Reviews of Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45 (cited in this article)


Deiters, Hermann. "Johannes Brahms' geistliche Compositionen." Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 34 (1869): 266-68.

Hanslick, Eduard. "Die musikalische Saison in Wien 1874-1875." Deutsche Rundschau 8 (May 1875): 307-14. Reprinted in Concerte, Componisten und Virtuosen der letzten ffinfzehn Jahre, 1870-1885 (2nd edn. Berlin: Allgemeiner Verien fur Deutsche Literatur, 1886), 135.

Kleinert, Paul. "Ein deutsches Requiem." Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung 11 (13 March 1869): 161-65.

Maczewski, Amadeus. "Ein deutsches Requiem... von J. Brahms: Verlagvon Rieter-Biedermann." Musikalisches Wochenblatt (1, 7, 14, 21, 28 January 1870): 5, 20-21, 35-36, 52-54, 67-69.

Schubring, Adolf. "Schumanniana Nr. 12: Ein deutsches Requiem. . . von Johannes Brahms, op. 45." Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (13 and 20 January 1869): 9-11, 18-20.

original mother tongue, whereas the races ruling in Romantic lands gave up that mother tongue. It is to the speech and the original homeland, then, that the idea of "deutsch" is knit.17

Although Wagner wrote this essay one year before Brahms made his comment to Reinthaler, he did not publish it until 1878, and thus there can be no question of "influence" here. Rather, it reflects an ongoing development of volkisch ideology that was at least foreign (if not repug- nant) to Brahms's culturally sophisticated and politically Liberal sensibilities.

Whether he was distancing himself from at- titudes like Wagner's or reacting to contextual scenarios like the ones suggested above, it is unlikely that Brahms's proposed substitution of "menschen" for "deutsch" should be understood as a straightforward affirmation of universal expression over national sentiment. Rather, the latter reading speaks more to our own values as manifested in words like "Hu- man" than to those of Brahms's milieu. I will consider our current perspective on these issues at the end of this article.

III Brahms's remark may be brought into a still

clearer focus by a critical reading of the

17Richard Wagner, "What is German?" in Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays, ed. and trans. Charles Osborne (New York, 1973), p. 41.

Requiem's earliest commentaries, where the politico-religious German nationalism of pur- portedly "universal" expression in the work lies closer to the surface. A selective list of the most extensive and substantive early critiques and reviews of op. 45 is provided in Table 1 above.18 Although their positive slant on the piece is representative of the Requiem's overall early reception, it should be noted that these writers are among the more conspicuously pro- Brahmsian voices to critique the work during the nineteenth century. That bias accounts not only for their approval of op. 45 but also for their frequent use of the latest musico-political code words of the day ("freedom," "modern," "characteristic," etc.), which are often employed for the specific purpose of directly challenging Brahms's detractors and the proponents of the German musical avant-garde, especially as ar- ticulated by Franz Brendel and his Neue Zeit- schrift fiir Musik.

In some cases these critics' artistic allegiance was buttressed by a personal friendship with the composer. Eduard Hanslick's relationship to Brahms is well known (and will be revisited below). Schubring became interested in Brahms's music after reading Robert Schu- mann's 1853 essay "Neue Bahnen" and began a

'8A more complete survey of early critiques and reviews of op. 45 can be found in Angelika Horstmann, Untersuch- ungen zur Brahms-Rezeption der fahre 1860-1880 (Ham- burg, 1986), pp. 130-80.

9

correspondence with Brahms during the mid to late 1850s over musical issues in the composer's early published works.19 Deiters, who had met Brahms through the Disseldorf Schumann circle in 1856, was a close enough friend to warrant receiving the proofs of the Requiem immediately before Brahms sent them on to the publisher Rieter-Biedermann.20 And although there is no evidence that Brahms knew Kleinert, the composer recommended Kleinert's review to his publisher (Johann Melchior Rieter).21 This review was, therefore, so positive and closely aligned with Brahms's own sentiments as to gain his personal approval.

In these and nearly all other early commentaries, the Requiem was understood to be first and foremost a "modern" work.22 Although many critics ultimately attributed its modernity at least in part to Brahms's musical style, the overriding modern value that they identified in the piece is the sense of "freedom" it conveys through both its music and its text. Most reviewers maintained that Brahms had freed himself from any specific religious Kultus through his choice of biblical texts, reflecting a modern form of faith. Uniformly, these same critics directly related this religious freedom to the artistic freedom Brahms exhibits in op. 45:

19Walter Frisch discusses Schubring's relationship to Brahms as well as his critical writings on Brahms's music in "Brahms and Schubring: Musical Criticism and Politics at Mid-Century," this journal 7 (1984), 271-81. 20Florence May, The Life of Johannes Brahms, vol. II (2nd edn. London, 1948), p. 414. Deiter's relationship to Brahms is also discussed in his own biography of the composer, Johannes Brahms (Leipzig, 1880 and 1898). 2'Brahms's recommendation of Deiter's review is cited in Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, II, 273-74. 221 use the word "modem" here in the spirit that my sources used it, to denote something current and up-to-date. I do not intend-and I strongly doubt they intended-to suggest that Brahms was a "Modernist," with all the stylistic and ideological ramifications that term would come to convey in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In making this distinction, however, I do not take issue with those recent scholars who have argued that Brahms was indeed a Modernist (including the essays by Burkholder and Gay cited in n. 1, as well as Frisch, "Musical Politics Revisited: Brahms the Liberal Modernist vs. Wagner the Reactionary Conservative," American Brahms Society Newsletter 13 [Spring 1995], 1-3) and William Youngren ("The Modernist Brahms," American Brahms Society Newsletter 10 [Spring 1992], 1-3). Rather, I am asserting that the early reviewers of the Requiem did not use the word in that sense.

"breaking the bounds of tradition" wrote Paul Kleinert; "breaking through the limits of musico-rational progress," according to Ama- deus Maczewski; while to Hermann Deiters "the name itself of the German Requiem af- fords Brahms a certain artistic freedom and com- municates for him the general meaning of a solemn sacred funeral-music from the designa- tion of the death-mass. This freedom in the choice of text already implies complete freedom in the musical representation."23

According to the critics, however, Brahms does not forge this artistic and religious freedom single-handedly. All of the critics listed in Table 1 named the same two musical figures to represent the Protestant and Catholic origins of Brahms's religious and artistic autonomy: Bach and Beethoven. Schubring, for example, praised Brahms's Requiem as "music that is so artistic and elaborate as Sebastian Bach's, so sublime and powerful as Beethoven's Missa solemnis." And later Schubring identified in the opening measures of op. 45, "in nuce the modern faith of the nineteenth century, which alone must struggle through doubt to benefi- cial certainty, doubt with which neither the naive Spener-based Lutheranism of Sebastian Bach nor the philosophical Nature-religion of Beethoven had to contend."24 Although Schu- bring failed to elucidate his interpretation of the work's beginning, he clearly meant to place Brahms at the head of a progressive cultural movement, one that simultaneously furthers German musical developments of the previous 150 years while giving expression to a liberal, secularized form of faith. In this way, Schubring connects Bach's and Beethoven's religious context to their musical significance for Brahms's Requiem.

Such a pairing of Bach and Beethoven was not without precedent and probably not coinci-

23"Schon in dem Namen des deutschen Requiems hat sich Brahms einer gewissen kunstlerischen Freiheit bedient und ihn von der Bezeichnung der Todtenmesse auf die allge- meinere Bedeutung einer feierlichen geistlichen Trauermusik ubertragen. Diese Freiheit in der Wahl des Textes bedingt aber zugleich eine volle Freiheit der musikalischen Darstellung" (Deiters, "Johannes Brahms' geistliche Compositionen," p. 277). 24"Es ist in nuce der moderne Glaube des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, der sich erst durch Zweifel zur um so

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dental in the case of op. 45. In The Idea of Absolute Music, Carl Dahlhaus identified this pairing as central not only to the emerging idea of absolute music in the nineteenth century but to a Germanic focus within that concept.25 Bach and Beethoven stood for two ages of Ger- man cultural history that were to be synthe- sized in a "new poetic age." Various nineteenth- century critics recognized this new age in the music of this or that contemporaneous composer, depending on the musico-political lean- ings of the critic. To these early reviewers of the Requiem, Brahms is the "chosen one," and op. 45 is the piece that "reveals" him to his followers. Kleinert, for example, writes, "And if we expect of a genius that he will open a new door, through which will flow the current [Strom] that pours forth all that lives in the Age and sweeps away with it all that the past hands down to life, thus will one hardly be able to deny Brahms that honorable title [die Ehrennamen] after this Requiem."26

These critics also tend to move beyond the mere Ehrennamen of "Genius" to more reli- giously tinged honorifics. Frequently they al- lude to or directly quote Schumann's messianic 1853 essay "Neue Bahnen," particularly the passage "if he would only point his magic wand to where the powers amassed in the orchestra and chorus lend him its might, yet more wonderful glimpses into the mysteries of the spirit world await us."27 In his review of the Requiem, Schubring carries the implied Mes-

wohlthuenderen Gewiliheit hindurchringen muBf, Zweifel, die weder dem naiven Spener'schen Lutherthume Sebastian Bach's, noch der philosophischen Naturreligion Beethoven's Anfechtung bereiteten" (Schubring, "Schumanniana" 12, as cited in Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem, p. 81). 25Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago, 1989), p. 119. Dahlhaus traces this phenomenon well into the twentieth century in chap. 8, "On the Three Cultures of Music," pp. 117-27. 26"Und wenn wir von einem Genius erwarten, daBf er eine neue Tur auftut, durch welche der Strom dessen, was in der Zeit lebt, sich ergiefiend auch alles mit fortreiBfe, was die Vergangenheit an Leben uberliefert, so wird man Brahms nach diesem Requiem den Ehrennamen schwerlich versagen diirfen" (Kleinert, "Ein deutsches Requiem," as quoted in Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, II, 274). 27Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift ffr Musik (28 October 1853), pp. 185-86.

siah archetype further still: "Even we who had seen the wings of the young eagle grow and unfold, were not prepared for such an ascent [Aufschwung], somewhat like the astronomer might feel, who before all the world sees shin- ing in the heavens the star, that he had pre- dicted long before without really believing he would find."28 Likewise, an anonymous re- viewer of the 1868 Bremen premiere speaks of the luminaries attending the performance who "came, to a certain degree, to follow the new star. "29

Amadeus Maczewski exhibits none of this messianic posturing in his critique. Rather, he delves into a deeper level of discourse than other early critics and calls forth many overarching philosophical, historical, and theological concepts. Like Schubring, Kleinert, and Deiters, Maczewski places Brahms at the crest of a development that began with Bach and Beethoven, a development he defines as the striving after the "musically characteristic." Maczewski's use of the word Charakteristik suggests his familiarity with several more or less contemporaneous writers on music rang- ing from Robert Schumann and Adolf Bernhard Marx on the conservative side, to Franz Brendel and Richard Wagner on the progressive side. All these writers differed in their use of the term, "depending on the polemical or apolo- getic function it fulfilled."30 For Maczewski, die Charakteristische seems to imply a pseudo- Hegelian historical progression and synthesis of the general with the specific. "With Bach," Maczewski writes, "the characteristic still appears in the form of the musically universal,

28"Selbst wir, die wir doch die Flugel des jungen Adlers hatten wachsen und sich entfalten sehen, waren auf solchen Aufschwung nicht gefafit, und in unsere Andacht und Freude mischte sich ein Gefuhl, wie es etwa der Astronom empfinden mag, der am Himmelsgewolbe vor aller Welt endlich den Stern erglanzen sieht, den er schon langst, ohne jedoch Glaube zu finden, vorherverkindigt hatte" (Schubring, "Schumanniana" 12, reproduced in Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem, p. 79). 29Weser-Zeitung (Bremen) 12 April 1868 (supplement to no. 7601), quoted in Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem, p. 62. 3?Carl Dahlhaus, "Die Kategorie des 'Charakteristischen' in der Aesthetik des 19. Jahrhundert," in Klassische und romantische Musikisthetik (Laaber, 1988), pp. 219-30 (quote, p. 225).


11

. . . while in Beethoven the many facets of the world of feeling unfold as individual moments within music's general content of feeling."31 The rational and objective (universal) spirit of the eighteenth century is thereby juxtaposed with the subjective (individual) spirit of the early nineteenth century.

Maczewski then placed Brahms at the pin- nacle of this development for "possessing the talent of characterization to a high degree," explaining that

his creations express not the tendency, not the intention of easily recognizable artistic physiognomy, but rather the purely musical manner of expression and formation .... Just as the particular is based on the universal, so too does the musically characteristic assume the musically universal, musical reason, that which, independent of time and individuality, is definitive and lasting.32

And later, when discussing Brahms's biblical text compilation in op. 45, Maczewski makes similar claims about Brahms's religiosity: "With all the absorption in the finest gradations of a characteristic conception, Brahms's music essentially stands on the ground of a thoroughly universal, purely human religious sentiment."33

For Maczewski then, the universal religious feeling represented in the Requiem is grounded in Brahms's ability to express musical universality through the musical particular (or the "musically characteristic"). Whereas other crit-

31"Bei Bach der verkorperten musikalischen Vernunft erscheint auch das Charakteristische immer noch in der Form des allgemein Musikalischen,... wahrend Beethoven die ganze Fulle der Gesichter, die Mannichfaltigkeit der Empfindungswelt als einzelne Momente innerhalb des allgemeinen musikalischen Stimmungsgehaltes entfaltet" (Maczewski, "Ein deutsches Requiem . . . von J. Brahms," p. 20). 32"Nicht die Tendenz, nicht die Intentionen sind es, welche seinen Sch6pfungen die leicht erkennbare kunstlerische Physiognomie aufdruicken, sondern die rein musikalische Ausdrucks-und Gestaltungsweise.... Wie das Besondere auf dem Allgemein beruht, so setzt auch die musikalische Charakteristik das allgemein Musikalische, die musikalische Vernunft voraus, die, von Zeit und Individuum unabhangig-eine, endgiiltig und bleibend ist" (ibid., p. 20). 33"Bei aller Vertiefung in die feinsten Schattirungen einer charakteristischen Auffassung steht die Brahms'sche Musik doch wesentlich auf dem Boden einer durchaus allgemein, rein menschlich religi6sen Empfindung" (ibid., p. 35).

ics identify the modernity of op. 45 with its sense of freedom, Maczewski defines modernity in the Requiem as its capacity to express the universal through the particular. He thereby introduces the final strand of Romantic ideology that renders Brahms's Requiem utterly Ger- man in the minds of the critics; that is, the ability of the particular to represent the universal. The power of this seemingly paradoxical concept derived from at least two separate Ger- man intellectual traditions, each of which con- tributed to the burgeoning sense of nationality in nineteenth-century Germany. On the secular side, the humanist revival in German edu- cation from Goethe through Humboldt to Burckhardt focused on the gebildete individual and the morally governed state. (As Humboldt writes: "As for the individual person, so too with the entire nation."34) It is no surprise, for example, that Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has for its first book "The State as a Work of Art," and for its second "The Development of the Individual."35 In his recent handbook on Humanism, Tony Davies con- tends that Burckhardt's "interest is in the political significance of Renaissance individualism, portending . .. the onset of the modern nation state, populated and animated by individual citizens."36

For Germans, the humanistic idea that the community could be embodied in the individual resonated with long-standing Lutheran postu- lates concerning the relationship of the individual to the community. From the beginning, Luther contended that the individual's relationship to God represented the Church at large, and later Pietism heightened the importance of the individual at the direct expense of orga- nized religion. By rejecting both the rigid dogma that had settled into Lutheran theology by the

34Quoted as an epigraph to chap. 2 ("Individuality and individualism") of Koppel S. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York, 1934), p. 63. 35Jakob Burckhardt, Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, vol. I: Der Staat als Kunstwerk, vol. II: Entwicklung des Individuums (Basel, 1860). 36Tony Davies, Humanism (London, 1997), p. 17. Much of the first half of Davies's book examines the degree to which the modem notion of Humanism was developed by and for nineteenth-century Germans.

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middle of the seventeenth century and, subse- quently, the rationalism of the early enlightenment, the Pietists encouraged a pluralistic and individualistic approach to worship. Each man and woman was free to establish his or her own personal relationship with their Savior. Such individualism did not, however, diminish the need for a larger group of the faithful, but rather heightened a sense of community among the individual believers. In her encyclopedic socio- logical study of nationalism, Liah Greenfeld writes:

An individual left entirely to his own spiritual resources and deprived of the sources of moral authority in the mind inevitably turns to the group for guidance. Indeed Pietism, which regarded the exter- nal organization of the official Church as unimpor- tant, opposed to it a community of the faithful, the invisible Church of the elect. This Church was a reflection of each member's personal relationship with the Savior, yet it was impossible to achieve true unity with God outside the community. Since the way to God lay through "humility and abnegation," the community of the faithful consisted of individu- als who renounced their particular interests and their very selves. It represented a diminutive Kingdom of God on earth and thus was the ideal community.37

cifically, the Pietists' view of the individual's relationship to the many took on more con- crete nationalistic significance in the early nineteenth century, when Germans promoted culture and Bildung as the hallmarks of their ascendance among European nations. As con- sistently underscored by Romantic nationalists from Schlegel, to Fichte, to Muller, to Schleiermacher, with its superior culture, Ger- many could express humanity most fully and perfectly among the European nations. To Ger- man nationalists, writes Greenfeld, "Germany was the perfect nation because it expressed humanity most fully, the most human nation of all. This was consistent with the ground rule that true individuality is the expression of the universal."39 Thus, although it was one nation among many, it represented the highest form of humanity-the expression of the universal through the particular.40

Within the field of musicology, Sanna Pederson has recently demonstrated how that ideology found potent musical expression in the

Pietism's emotional, subjective component was carried on in German-speaking lands through the eighteenth century in the form of Sturm und Drang and later Romanticism, which "was called 'a kind of artistic and intellectual Pietism,' [and] thus transplanted Pietistic principles into the secular sphere and there articu- lated, amplified and systematized them."38 Spe-

37Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 319-20. On this subject, see also Pinson, Pietism, pp. 68-69. The concept of an "Invisible Church" originated with Luther, who saw this comprising not only the faithful of the here and now, but the elect of all ages: past, present, and future, a Church "so hidden that it was nowhere except in the eyes of God." See Luther's Works, vol. II, Selected Psalms II, ed. Jarislov Perlikan (St. Louis, 1956), p. 88. I thank my wife Catherine Beller- McKenna for drawing my attention to the Lutheran roots of this idea, which she discussed in her D.M.A. thesis, The Voice of Luther's Church: Instrumental Cantus Firmus Chorales in Selected Cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach (University of South Carolina, 1998), pp. 14-17. 38Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 326. Her quotation is from William J. Bossenbrook, The German Mind (Detroit, 1961), p. 249.

39Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 364. Greenfeld goes on to cite a wide array of Romantic-nationalists on the subject of German-Human universalism and further connects the uni- versalist idea of Germany to contemporaneous veneration of the German language and the elevation of nationalism to a pseudoreligious cause. As I have noted earlier, the nationalistic connotations of the German language have obvious ramifications for Brahms's German-texted Re- quiem. 40In a recent posthumously published essay, "History of Ideas and Political Theory," Isaiah Berlin traced the development of the Individual/Universal relationship through Western philosophy of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, placing heavy emphasis on the Roman- tics' transformation of Herder's cultural diversity into sub- jectivism and German nationalism: "For Byronic Roman- tics, 'I' is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adven- turer, the outlaw, he who defies society and accepted values, and follows his own. . . . But for other thinkers 'I' becomes something much more metaphysical. It is a collective-a nation, a Church, a Party, a class an edifice in which I am only a stone, an organism of which I am only a tiny living fragment. It is the creator, I myself matter only insofar as I belong to the movement, the race, the nation, the class, the Church, I do not signify as a true individual within the superperson to whom my life is organically bound. Hence German nationalism: I do this not because it is good or right or because I like it-I do it because I am a German and this is the German way to live" (Berlin, "The First and the Last," New York Review of Books [April 1998], 56-57).

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19TH generation preceding Brahms.41 Pederson focuses CMNTURY on the reception history of the Beethovenian

symphony, particularly in the journalistic polemics of A. B. Marx. When in 1828, for example, Marx defines the task of German art as "striving after the higher more comprehensive point of view, proper to our age and our father- land, ... to take up and to bring everything that has arisen in our neighbors to a higher more spiritual maturity," he is echoing like-minded but more general statements from the turn of the nineteenth century by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who wrote in Der Patriotismus und sein Gegenteil of 1805 that Germans understand Patriotism more fully than their neighbors, and by "understanding the age through it, can perceive . . . the next objective of humanity."42

Reverberations of such thinking are not hard to find in early critiques of Brahms's Requiem. Take, for example, Schubring's claim that the Requiem "will and must satisfy the laity of every nation . .. , because that which each most values is contained therein, for Italians accompanied singable melody, for the French piquant rhythms and clear declamation, for Germans all three as well as wonderfully rich harmonies [emphasis mine]."43 Although we may make a distinction in degree between such remarks by Brahms's supporters and the more chauvinistic rhetoric of Wagner et al., the un-

4ISanna Pederson, "A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity," this journal 18 (1994), 87- 107, and "On the Task of Music Historians: The Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven," Repercussions 2 (1993), 5-30. As for the supremacy of the symphony in such nationalist aesthetics, the role of the string quartet should also be mentioned, as this was seen to be the most intellectual and thus purest type of instrumental music. The significance of Beethoven's late style as demonstrated in his last quartets certainly played a role in this ranking. See Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, pp. 14-15. 42Marx's comments are drawn by Pederson from "Standpunkt der Zeitung," Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 5 (1828), 493. The quoted passages from Fichte appear in Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 365. 43"Eine Musik [die] wird und mufi eben so den Laien jeder Nation wie den Musikkenner jeder Partei befriedigen, weil fur Jeden das darin enthalten ist, was er am meisten schatzt, fur den Italiener gegliederte sangbare Melodie, fur den Franzosen pikante Rhythmen und verstandige Dekla- mation, fur den Deutschen alles Dreies und zugleich wunderbar reiche Harmonie" (Schubring, "Schumanniana" 12, as cited in Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Re- quiem, p. 89).

derlying emphasis on German cultural superi- ority must be recognized just the same. And therefore, like the political and religious context behind Brahms's "menschen" vs. "deutsch" quotation, the musical politics in the early reception of op. 45 demonstrate the nationalistic exclusivity behind seemingly egalitarian words like human and universal.

IV Prior to the official "premieres" of Ein

deutsches Requiem at Bremen and Leipzig in 1868 and 1869 respectively, the city of Vienna had played an important (if inauspicious) role in the early history of the work. A partial performance had been held in Vienna on 1 Decem- ber 1867, when Johann Herbeck conducted the first three movements with the Singverein of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Predictably, that performance had drawn a response from yet another of Brahms's friends, and perhaps his most influential supporter in the musical press, the eminent Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick. Hanslick's take on Brahms's most successful piece is significant not on account of his stature as a critic, but more importantly as a theorist of absolute music. His highly influential 1854 tract Vom Musikalisch-Sch6nen has proved the most influential statement on absolute music for twentieth-century readers.44 As a leading music critic from 1855 and profes- sor at the Vienna University after 1861, Hanslick used the ideas outlined in his book as a framework for his position in the musico- political battles that were played out in the Viennese press during the last quarter of the century. His views on Ein deutsches Requiem, therefore, loaded as they are with his own absolute musical agenda and the ideological bag- gage it carried, provide a critical link between the contemporaneous readings of op. 45 and the still persistent understanding of the work as an expression of "universal" values.

The 1867 Viennese performance had met (at best) with an uneven reception from Viennese

44Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schonen: Ein Beitrag zur Re- vision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1854). The book was reprinted fifteen times by 1922. The modern English translation by Geoffrey Payzant is based on the 8th edn. of 1891 (Indianapolis, 1986).

14

audiences and critics there, a failing that has been attributed to several factors. Beyond the disastrous results of the percussionist's much- cited mistaken reading of fp as ff for the D pedal in the closing fugue of the third movement, some inherent stylistic features of the work may have left the Viennese cold. Already during his season as director of the Sing- akademie (1863-64), Brahms had developed a reputation in the city as a promoter of dry, ascetic, and archaic music from the time of Bach and earlier. Hanslick himself cited similar qualities in the 1867 rendition of the Re- quiem, even in the successfully performed first two movements, which he labeled "dryly seri- ous," and suggested that such a work would grow on the Viennese only through repeated hearings. Already, however, Hanslick's strat- egy was to cast the potentially problematic fea- ture of the work-its historical patina-in a favorable light. Not surprisingly, he did so through the soon-to-be familiar agency of Bach and Beethoven:

The "German Requiem" is a work of unusual importance and great mastery. It strikes us as the ripest fruit in the field of church music to emerge out of the style of Beethoven's late works. Since the death- masses and funereal-cantatas of our Classics, hardly any music has presented the shudder of death and the seriousness of transience with such force. The harmonic and contrapuntal art that Brahms acquired in the school of Sebastian Bach and inspired with the living breath of our time recedes for the listener completely behind the mounting expression from touching lament to annihilating death-cry.45

45Hanslick's review was originally published in the Neue freie Presse of 3 December 1867 and then reprinted in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2/15 (1867). Later it was included in Aus dem Concert-Saal: Kritiken und Schilderungen (Vienna, 1870; rpt. Westmead, 1971), pp. 426-27: "Das 'Deutsche Requiem' ist ein Werk von ungewohnlicher Bedeutung und groller Meisterschaft. Es duiinkt uns als eine der reifsten Friichte, welche aus den Styl der letzten Beethoven'schen Werke auf dem Felde geistlicher Musik hervorgewachsen. Seit den Todtenmessen und Trauercantaten unserer Klassiker hat kaum eine Musik die Schauer des Todes, den Ernst der Verganglichkeit mit solcher Gewalt dargestellt. Die harmonische und kontrapunktische Kunst, die Brahms in der Schule Sebastian Bach's erwarb und mit dem lebendigen Athem unserer Zeit durchhaucht, tritt fur den Horerganz zuruiick hinter dem von ruhrender Klage bis zum vernichtenden Todesgrauen sich steigernden Ausdruck."

According to Hanslick, the Viennese did not warm up to the piece until 1875. In that year, Brahms, in his final season of a three-year stint as director of the Singverein, conducted op. 45 on 28 February in the concert hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Only three days later a Wagner concert was held in the same hall featuring excerpts from Gotterddmmerung. Hanslick took the opportunity to compare "the main works of the two leading tone poets of the age" in an essay reproduced in part in the appendix.46 He is hardly impartial; Brahms "achieves the highest goals with the purest artistic means, warmth and depth of feeling with complete technical mastery," all done with "originality and the most noble naturalness and simplicity." Hanslick barely left any space to discuss Wagner's music except to set up (once again) the Requiem's lineage in Bach and Beethoven: "Wagner begins completely anew on the debris of all music earlier than his own; Brahms believes one should not be ashamed of proper ancestors like Bach and Beethoven." Without mentioning politics or nationalities, Hanslick already tips his hand as to the Austro- Germanic bias of his viewpoint: note that all of the constituents in his "lineage" (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner) are German.

Hanslick uses the Bach-Beethoven lineage here as an ideological weapon against Wagner, who, of course, was similarly claiming the Bach- Beethoven legacy on behalf of his music-dra- mas. There is also an emphasis on Brahms's compositional techniques that suggests that Hanslick might have preferred another vehicle with which to make his comparison: a symphony. Brahms would not complete his first symphony for another year. And although the Requiem had been widely interpreted as the realization of Robert Schumann's prophetic 1853 essay "Neue Bahnen," the specter of the symphony still loomed large for Brahms, as well as for his friends and supporters.


46"Die musikalische Saison in Wien 1874-1875," Deutsche Rundschau, book 8 (May 1875), 307-14. Hanslick's essay is reprinted in Concerte, Componisten und Virtuosen der letzten funfzehn Jahre, 1870-1885 (2nd edn. Berlin, 1886), p. 135. The portion on Brahms's Requiem and Wagner's Gotterdimmerung also is reprinted in Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem, pp. 135-36.

15

Without a Brahms symphony at his disposal, Hanslick described op. 45 in terms one might reserve for an autonomous work like a symphony.47 Already, the previously quoted phrases like "purest artistic means" and "complete technical mastery" set this tone. Then, after taking Wagner to task for ignoring his musical ancestors, Hanslick goes on to assert that, "whereas with Wagner music gives up the power of its inwardness to become Malerei, with Brahms music remains the most proper language of a powerful spirit, and shows us how a musical composition can stir every heart, without stirring the foundations of music." By emphasiz- ing Brahms's adherence to purely musical laws and effects, Hanslick sought to decontextualize (or at best recontextualize) op. 45. For while Wagner's Gotterddmmerung is hopelessly bound to its own time by its mannerisms, tone- painting, and "new orchestral effects," the musical qualities of Brahms's Requiem are presented as relatively timeless, and the piece is sooner to be compared with Bach's B-Minor Mass and Beethoven's Missa solemnis than with contemporaneous sacred music, from which, according to Hanslick, nothing has been written that can take its place beside it.

The previously cited, pro-Brahms critics had tended to provide Bach and Beethoven as sym- bols of two earlier periods in German music in order to place Brahms squarely in the present as the realization of a new age. Hanslick, however, used these "worthy ancestors" more to rescue Brahms from his age than to define his place in it, as indicated most strongly by the conspicuous absence of the word "modern" in his review. We would be wrong, however, to equate Hanslick's retreat from Wagnerism with a retreat from the Germanic: the absolute music tradition that Hanslick championed, and which undergirded his affirmation of the Requiem's artistic qualities, was Austro-Ger- manic to the core-as the predictable presence of Bach and Beethoven underscores.

47Peter Gay considers Hanslick's aesthetic dilemma with vocal music in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, chap. 6, "For Beckmesser: Eduard Hanslick, Victim and Prophet," pp. 272-73. See also Dahlhaus, "Reine, absolute Tonkunst," in Klassische und romantische Musikasthetik, pp. 298- 303.

Also receding into the background in Hanslick's review is the reference to the Requiem's confessional neutrality, which he introduces merely to evince further the power of Brahms's music to engage the soul of the listener: "It casts aside every confessional frock, every ecclesiastical custom, chooses German biblical words in place of the Latin ritual text, and chooses them in such a way that the truest nature of the music and thereby the mind and heart of the listener is drawn into more intimate participation."48 Here there is no mention of modern religious freedom, but freedom from anything confessional or ecclesiastical altogether, as the text's sacred connotations are dis- solved into the "truest nature of the music." As the text becomes less central to the Requiem's effect on the listener, in Hanslick's view, the piece functions less like sacred music and more like absolute music. And note that he goes out of his way to ascribe the German biblical text with a role in accomplishing this task.

In recent decades, Dahlhaus argued that Hanslick's materialistic appropriation of the Wagnerian term absolute musical art reflected "an esthetic presented in an attitude of dry empiricism in the spirit of disenchantment after the collapse of Hegelianism around 1850."49 Indeed, Hanslick's reputed formalism reins in the metaphysical side of aesthetic theories about instrumental music that he inherited from the Romantics, theories that had posited music's ability to approach the divine Infinite and Ab- solute and to transport listeners to the spirit realm. Infinity and the Absolute endure in Hanslick's formalist theory and criticism, but they are more mundane than spiritual; Hanslick wished to sublimate them into a suprahistorical view of the musical absolute that unites com- posers like Brahms with his Germanic ancestors in a quasi-timeless fashion.

48Hanslick, Deutsche Rundschau (1875). 49Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, p. 27. Neverthe- less, Dahlhaus then proceeds to a lengthy discussion of the original conclusion to Vom Musikalisch-Schonen, sup- pressed from the second edition onward, in which Hanslick displays his "piety toward the romantic metaphysics of instrumental music" (pp. 27-28). The Hanslick passage in question appears in the first edition of Vom Musikalisch- Schonen (Leipzig, 1854), p. 104.

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19TH CENTURY

MUSIC

Hanslick probably could not have treated Ein deutsches Requiem as the representation of "timelessness" in 1875 had the work not already become firmly established as part of the Austro-German concert repertoire, a speedy assimilation that was driven in part by the patriotic fervor of the early 1870s.50 And it is worth noting that Hanslick, unlike recent com- mentators, made no attempt to dissociate the piece from its German origins. Rather, he wished to claim Brahms's Requiem for a specific brand of German-ness: that is, for the sup- posedly universal-and decidedly German dominated-language of absolute music, and as the opposite of Wagner's chauvinism and the reactionary nationalism with which Wagner and his music were associated. Moreover, as Leon Botstein, Margaret Notley, and Sandra McColl have recently argued, Hanslick and other musically conservative critics in Vienna held to principles of formal clarity and compositional rigor, against what they saw as an ero- sion of musical logic and a parallel decline of liberal political traditions from the 1860s and 70s.51 Indeed, to the extent that this decline was associated with the rise of Modernism, Hanslick's disinclination to call op. 45 "modern" in his review could be a stylistic corollary to the anti-Wagnerian content of the essay.52

A diary entry concerning op. 45 by one of Hanslick's musically conservative/politically liberal younger colleagues demonstrates how much the issue of German identity played into

5?Horstmann notes a concomitant emphasis on patriotic sentiment in reviews of op. 45 around 1870 and 1871 (Untersuchungen zur Brahms-Rezeption, p. 159). Hanslick, though a Prague-born Catholic member of the Hapsburg empire, displayed a strong streak of German patriotism. See Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, pp. 12-13. 51See Leon Botstein, "Brahms and Nineteenth-Century Painting," this journal 14 (1990), 154-68; Margaret Notley, "Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nine- teenth-Century Vienna," this journal 17 (1993), 107-23; and Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896-1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford, 1996). 52On Hanslick, Wagner, and Modernism, see Gay, "For Beckmesser," Freud, Jews, pp. 257-77. I cannot agree with Gay's depiction of Hanslick as a Modernist himself (which he argues on the grounds that criticism itself was a by- product of Modernist thinking). His essay is nevertheless highly informative concerning Hanslick's relationship to Wagner and the debate over Modernism in Vienna from the late 1860s through the end of the century.

these journalistic debates. Referring to the Musikverein's memorial performance of the Requiem on 11 April 1897 (eight days after Brahms's death), Max Kalbeck complained:

There were large spaces in the hall, and the standing room, which is in the habit of being overfilled at a Bruckner- or Strauss-fest, was just about empty. Even at the funeral neither the university nor the student body was represented. The "German Nationalists" celebrate the servile, weak-whited Romeling Bruckner. Modern youth has no time for the greatest German artist. One has to live in such an age!53

Sandra McColl, who quotes this entry in her recent book on Viennese music criticism in 1896-97, points out that while Kalbeck was "himself self-consciously German-and-proud- of-it" his German-ness was essentially cultural and linguistic rather than political.54 Kalbeck, like his mentor Hanslick, may have viewed their enterprise as apolitical and thus some- how more artistically pure than that of their opponents. But, as argued above, the mid-century cultural nationalism to which Kalbeck owes his Liberalism was anything but apolitical. And by extension, the German-ness he champions (as much as we as modern-day "Lib- erals" might identify with it and appreciate its distance from Wagnerism) is cultural and linguistic-and political.

V The late-nineteenth-century battle for the

political identity of German culture strongly colors our own late-twentieth-century view of the Brahms-Wagner dichotomy. And, of course, the battle was not limited to that time, for when Wagner's music and that of his sym- phonic counterpart, Bruckner, were appropri- ated by the National Socialists in the middle of our century, the need to interpret musical polarities between Brahms and Wagner in political and ideological terms took on a new stri- dently disturbing tone. We have been left with a Brahms (and a Requiem) whose German-ness is not only qualified, but frequently downplayed altogether. Although this judgment resonates

53As cited in McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, p. 129. s4Ibid.


17

19TH with contemporaneous rhetoric about the piece CENTURY from Brahms's friends and supporters (Schub-

ring, Deiters, Hanslick, et al.), we should not lose sight of our own late-twentieth-century motivations for perceiving Brahms and his music in this positive political light.

A failure to reflect in said manner may in part account for why, in order to claim Brahms's Requiem for the seemingly benign concept "Hu- man," John Eliot Gardiner-and others-shied away from acknowledging any residually em- bedded modern German-ness in the piece (defining it instead in terms of Luther's Bible) and offered to "rescue" it from a "crypto-Wagne- rian" (read German) performance tradition.

I used to find Brahms's Requiem a maudlin, rather depressing work .... The faults lie not in the music which . . . is often very beautiful, but in the execu- tion: by adopting a slow, over-reverential attitude, unwieldy forces and a crypto-Wagnerian approach to phrasing and sound quality the vitality of the work is easily sapped .... The piece cries out to be res- cued-as Handel's oratorios once did-from the slushy choral approach and the turgidity of uninflected orchestral playing.55

Having thus associated Brahms's work with the eighteenth-century choral works of Handel, Gardiner proceeds further, seeking to uproot completely the Requiem from its chronologi- cal moorings by adopting Hanslick's suprahistorical paradigm for the piece:

Brahms was in the vanguard of "the early music revival" of the mid-nineteenth century. He had a strong understanding of where he stood in the un- folding of German music. If you approach his music

55Gardiner, "Brahms and the 'Human' Requiem," p. 1809.

from Schiitz, Buxtehude, Bach, Handel and Haydn it is easier, I believe, . . . to perceive the extent to which he was a modernist, drawing on traditional materials but breaking new ground. His Requiem is a fascinating synthesis of the old and new and cannot be understood only in terms of the nineteenth century.56

As Richard Taruskin has noted, Gardiner's rhetoric amounts to a "radical defamiliari- zation" and produces "not a historically correct performance but a politically correct performance."57 While Taruskin has in mind the "politics" of the early music movement, Gardiner's comments have more general political relevance as well.

Ironically, by endorsing an approach to the Requiem that considers it in the light of its historical past, Gardiner is merely furthering the "timeless" component of Hanslick's absolute music agenda. That agenda, as we have seen, carried with it a heavy dose of nineteenth- century Germanicism, precisely the thing from which Gardiner proposes to rescue the piece. We are thereby reminded that we can ill afford to base our late-twentieth-century construction of meaning in Brahms's deutsches Requiem on mid-nineteenth-century remarks (including Brahms's own) about the Humanity and Uni- versality of the piece, without acknowledging the deeply Germanic bias that lay behind those ideas at the time. To take Brahms's and others' words out of context to support our own world view is to lose sight of how German a Requiem this was. After all, in the end Brahms left ^ the word "deutsch" in the title. 1W0

56Ibid., p. 1810. 57Taruskin, "Tradition and Authority," in Text and Act (New York, 1995), p. 174.

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APPENDIX

Excerpt from Hanslick's Deutsche Rundschau review of the 1875 Vienna performance of Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45.

Welch seltsames Zusammentreffen, daB knapp nacheinander, in demselben Saale Scenen aus Wagners "G6tterdammerung" und Brahms' "Deutsches Requiem" gespielt wurden; die Hauptwerke der beiden hervorragendsten Tondichter der Gegenwart! Gr6ofere Gegensatze in der Musik zweier Zeitgenossen gleicher Nation sind kaum denkbar. In Brahms' Requiem sehen wir mit den reinsten Kunstmitteln das hochste Ziel erreicht, Warme und Tiefe des Gemuiths bei vollendeter technischer Meisterschaft, nichts sinnlich blendend und doch alles so tief ergreifend; keine neuen Orchester-Effecte, abet neue, grogfe Gedanken und bei allem Reichtum, aller Originalitat die edelste Natiirlichkeit und Einfachheit. Bei Wagner jeder Satz in Manier getaucht, bei Brahms kein einziger. Wagner fangt auf den Trummen aller frtiheren Musik die seinige ganz neu an; Brahms glaubt anstandiger Vorfahren, wie Bach und Beethoven, sich nicht schamen zu sollen. Wahrend die Musik bei Wagner die Innerlichkeit ihrer Herrschaft aufgegeben hat, um Malerei zu werden, bleibt sie bei Brahms die eigenste Sprache eines starken Gemiiths und zeigt uns, wie eine Tondichtung alle Herzen erschuittern kann, ohne die Grundfesten der Musik zu erschiittern. Man darf es heute ruhig aussprechen, daI seit Bachs H-moll-Messe und Beethovens Missa solemnis nichts geschrieben worden, was auf diesem Gebiete sich neben Brahms' "Deutsches Requiem" zu stellen vermag. Ja, unserem Herzen steht letzteres noch naher, schon deshalb, weil es jedes confessionelle Kleid, jede kirchliche Convenienz abstreift, statt des lateinischen Ritualtextes deutsche

Bibelworte wahlt, und zwar so wahlt, daB die eigenste Natur der Musik und damit zugleich das Gemiith des H6rers in intimere Mitwirkung gezogen wird.

(What an odd coincidence, that scenes from Wagner's "G6tterdammerung" and Brahms's "German Re- quiem" were performed shortly after each other in the same hall; the main works of the present-day's two leading tone-poets! Greater antitheses in the music of two contemporaries from the same nation are hardly conceivable. In Brahms's Requiem we see the highest goal achieved with the purest artistic means, warmth and depth of feeling with complete technical mastery, nothing sensually dazzling and indeed everything so deeply moving; no new orchestral effects but new, great thoughts and with all richness and originality, the most noble naturalness and simplicity. With Wagner, every piece is emersed in mannerism, with Brahms none is. Wagner begins completely anew on the debris of all music earlier than his own; Brahms believes one should not be ashamed of proper ancestors like Bach and Beethoven. While with Wagner music gives up the power of its inwardness to become Malerei, it remains with Brahms the most proper language of a strong spirit, and shows us how a musical composition can stir every heart, without stirring the foundations of music. Today one can calmly declare that since Bach's B-Minor Mass and Beethoven's Missa solemnis, nothing has been written in this field that can take its place beside Brahms's "German Requiem." Indeed the latter is still closer to our heart precisely because it casts aside every confessional frock, every ecclesiastical custom, chooses German biblical words in place of the Latin ritual text, and chooses them in such a way that the truest nature of the music and thereby the mind and heart of the listener is drawn into more intimate participation.)


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Beller McKenna 1998

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