In 1934, Hans Friedrich Blunck, the president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer under Joseph Goebbels, pronounced music to be, “in all probability, the most powerful of the arts.”Footnote ¹ In more recent times, musicologists and historians such as Celia Applegate, Pamela Potter, and Albrecht Riethmüller have qualified this adage critically to mean that German music was held up, by Germans if not everybody, as the loftiest of all the arts anywhere. In their interpretation, music, within the German tradition, was looked upon as the cement holding the nation together—it was a communal sacrum, and any violation of it was deserving of punishment.

There is broad scholarly agreement, then, that as Germans lacked a sense of political identity for the better part of the nineteenth century, music was used to compensate for this by contributing to a sense of spiritual nationhood, a Kulturnation. The musicologist Ryan Minor has now supported this impression. In a conscientiously researched study, he has demonstrated how compositions by Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms were utilized toward that nationhood goal. According to Minor, it required a combination of human associations; musical performance talent; specific musical composition; and, ideally, the existence of an extraneous enemy to conjure “choral fantasies”—music to inspire a sense of community paired with a defiance against outsiders. Already the need of a resistance to the threat of Napoleon generated choral music that galvanized the Volk through the repeated civic experience of performance. There followed more formalized associations and events: festivals, choral societies, and reading clubs—the makings of a bourgeois Vereinswesen leading, under the best of circumstances, to forms of political democracy, often tempered by Christian religion. Creations by leading composers of the day consciously helped in these processes. Thus Mendelssohn's Lobgesang of the Vormärz and Liszt's “Beethoven” cantatas toward the middle of the nineteenth century contributed to the growth of a nation's consciousness in a state of becoming. When Brahms wrote motets after 1870, Bismarck had begun to forge the German nation politically, and the festivals for which Brahms created, were living monuments to an evolving Reich of growing nationalist pride, as was Brahms himself. Brahms's stature in this context is something that has so far not been widely known.

Minor's careful expositions are enlightening, but on the whole rather more for the musically literate specialist than the historian of modern Germany. A social historian, for instance, would have wished for more evidence regarding the interstices of music making (and here, specifically, choral singing), and everyday life and work. I, for one, would have wanted to know a lot more about the social composition and social/political function of the male choirs Minor alludes to so frequently in his study—too much so in a merely musical context. This not withstanding, it is an excellent example of interdisciplinary scholarship.