A nation that does not keep a living connection with its origins is close to withering, as certainly so as a branch that has been cut from its roots. We are still today what we were yesterday.
Heinrich von SybelFootnote 1
Johannes Brahms is perhaps most persistently characterized as a composer who sought to preserve a connection between venerated precursors and his own creative activities. He spoke openly and repeatedly about the primacy of exemplary forebears in a composer’s acquisition of technical skill; his only student, Gustav Jenner, described how Brahms structured his pedagogy around ‘composition of pieces after models’.Footnote 2 Beyond providing the basis for a musical education, however, it seems clear that for Brahms ‘the past’ more broadly was to serve as the magistra of one’s intellectual and artistic development. Michael Musgrave has characterized the study of history as Brahms’s ‘chief preoccupation’; while in Hamburg in the early 1860s, for instance, Brahms arranged to be privately tutored in European and art history. His earnest study of Renaissance and Baroque music, and in particular the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, his personal acquaintances with musicologists and historians, and his avid interest in political history are indications that Brahms shared what Carl Schorske has described as ‘the historical outlook central to the nineteenth-century liberal culture’.Footnote 3
Brahms’s well-known music-historical study, his devoted efforts to preserve the living connection with ‘origins’ called for by contemporary German historian Heinrich von Sybel, took an especially formative turn in the 1850s. Following the appearance of his first nine opuses in 1853–54, only one work by Brahms saw print between 1854 and late 1860, the four Ballades, op. 10 in 1856, and even these had been written two years earlier. In other respects, though, Brahms was hardly idle. His apparent hiatus coincided with an immersive study of earlier repertory and part writing, facilitated by his mentorship by Robert and Clara Schumann, whom the 20-year-old composer met in Düsseldorf in 1853. Through his friendship with the Schumanns, Brahms experienced new professional opportunities and entered previously remote social circles. During the three-and-a-half-year period from 1854 to 1857, Brahms became a virtual fixture in the Schumann household, gaining sustained access to their impressive library of scores, which became his music-historical classroom. The simultaneity of Brahms’s reduced output and his self-instruction, alongside various dramas in his personal life, has led scholars to call this period of retrenchment Brahms’s ‘struggle for mastery’, ‘crisis and renewal’, ‘turmoil and apprenticeship’, or simply ‘retirement and study’.Footnote 4
The attribution of ‘historical consciousness’ to Brahms has been a polestar of scholarship on the composer. This literature has taken interpretive approaches ranging from Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence to postmodern deconstruction, from Hegelian dialectics to Bakhtinian dialogics.Footnote 5 Over time, two ostensibly discrete streams of discourse – ‘Brahms the Historicist’ and ‘Brahms the Progressive’ – merged to become a single conceptual dyad deployed to situate the composer within a more expansive landscape. Michael Musgrave, for example, has argued for a ‘much broader sense in which Brahms can be called a Progressive’. Musgrave paints a picture of Brahms ‘the painstaking scholar’, whose exploration of music history was not simply a matter of finding artistic inspiration but was also bona fide academic research. He concludes that Brahms’s ‘scholarly endeavor’ resulted in a depth of music-historical knowledge that placed him far ahead of his contemporaries and in the vanguard of both musical composition and musicology as an emerging discipline.Footnote 6 Looking at Brahms’s historically informed progressivism from another perspective is J. Peter Burkholder who, like Arnold Schoenberg, has argued that the origins of modernism in European concert music can be traced to Brahms’s compositional language. In this view, a notion of ‘modern music’ linked to Brahmsian historicism and characterized by ‘composers obsessed with the musical past’, revolutionized how twentieth-century art music composers came to think about creativity and measure their success. Notably, however, Burkholder rejects the notion, suggested by Musgrave, that Brahms’s historical-mindedness was part of a diversified intellectual portfolio, arguing instead that he took a more utilitarian view of the musical canon.
Brahms regarded these predecessors as useful models for his own music because he understood them to be solving intrinsically musical problems in ways that were new to him. He was not interested in them as historical figures – as musicologists and cultural historians are interested in them – but as musicians, as one composer is interested in the work of a colleague.Footnote 7
Burkholder’s assertion that Brahms’s historical study was targeted specifically toward the solution of ‘intrinsically musical problems’ feels somewhat tenuous, however, when we account for the breadth of his intellectual curiosity. Brahms’s surviving correspondence and personal library reveal that he relished his and Beethoven’s shared enthusiasm for Plutarch, owned a well-read copy of the Koran in German translation, and developed an intimate knowledge of German political history. The ramifications of Brahms’s historical study, it would appear, extended well beyond his technical development as an art music composer. This is hardly surprising. To the mid-century Bildungsbürgertum of Brahms’s time, the matter of how historical knowledge was transmitted, by whom, and in what form was not only a matter of artistic integrity but was also very much bound up with issues of social status, professional identity and political affiliation.Footnote 8 Daniel Beller-McKenna has observed that Brahms ‘is reported to have been extremely well read in historical literature, both German and foreign (though always in German translation) and in books on more recent political history’. This is certainly true, and indeed through closer scrutiny of Brahms’s reading habits – by in a sense ‘reading over Brahms’s shoulder’, as Beller-McKenna puts it – I believe we can build upon Musgrave’s more general claims and conjecture some likely conclusions about the particular stripe of Brahms’s sustained interest in the relationship between German history and political philosophy.Footnote 9 Such critical attention strongly suggests Brahms’s inclination toward a uniquely influential politics of historical knowledge that proliferated in German scholarship after 1850, one closely associated with the Prussian School of history writing.
Brahms the ‘German’ Nationalist
Brahms’s unbridled exhilaration over German unification in 1871 can obscure how his relationships to nationalism were complicated by intersecting affiliations, allegiances and affinities. Celia Applegate has observed that in the case of Brahms – a Hamburg-born sympathizer of Prussian Kleindeutsch nationalism who was a permanent resident of the Austrian capital of Vienna for the last 26 years of his life – the notion of Heimat, both in actuality and as a state of mind, requires some disaggregation.Footnote 10 Brahms’s reconciliation of his multiply situated politics is also profitably understood as developing over time.
Contemporaneous with Brahms’s ‘years of study’ in the 1850s was a simultaneous process of upward social mobility. Our understanding of the latter is still being refined. Brahms was born in Hamburg to Johann Jakob Brahms, a versatile professional musician with facility on a number of instruments, and Christiane Brahms, a seamstress of middle-class background. Kurt Hofmann and Styra Avins have argued that some of the more resilient elements of the ‘humble beginnings’ narrative long associated with Brahms – his birth in a Hamburg tenement, a childhood of such abject poverty that he was forced to play piano in brothels, and so on – fall somewhere on the continuum between mild exaggeration and outright biographical fiction. Hofmann, in particular, has shown that Brahms’s parents’ income rose steadily over the years, arguing that the family’s social standing was ‘secure’.Footnote 11 Still, however one might characterize his family’s socioeconomic status, Brahms’s professional opportunities and social outlook were transformed when he became Robert and Clara Schumann’s protégé in 1853. Comments sprinkled throughout his correspondence during this period indicate that Brahms was fully, even painfully, aware of the cultural distance that separated what his mother described as a working-class (arbeitende Klasse) upbringing in Hanseatic Hamburg and the life to which he had access in the Schumanns’ bourgeois household in the Prussian Rhineland. ‘My former acquaintances have become even more repugnant to me, I do not comprehend my former life’, the twenty-one-year-old composer complained to Clara Schumann during a return visit to Hamburg. ‘Since experiencing that wonderful summer with you, it would be impossible for me to remain here’.Footnote 12 Three days later, in another letter to Clara, he was even more candid:
I have now seen just about all of my old acquaintances again; goodness, how unassuming I used to be, every conceited pup, I thought, was cleverer than I; I often shuddered with horror when I saw them again, it seemed to me as though they were firmly stuck in the mud and I had gone really far away from them.Footnote 13
Musgrave characterizes Brahms’s first visit to Vienna in 1862 as a ‘move from provincial Hamburg, with its hard upbringing and limited opportunities, to the city of the classic masters’.Footnote 14 Hamburg’s reputation for ‘provincialism’ merits some unpacking, since it helps clarify Brahms’s ambivalence about his hometown and his eventual politics. The city of Hamburg is in fact a republic, one of only three non-monarchies among the 25 states that became part of the German Empire in 1871. It might be reasonably described as an isolationist city for a number of reasons. Because of the long-standing dominance of the city’s merchant class and the deeply ingrained ideology of trade, most official policy decisions were scrutunized in economic terms. In 1788, Hamburg authorities abolished church music on the grounds that it was too costly. The city’s art collection was auctioned off in 1789 to raise money for the city treasury. Its Gothic cathedral was torn down between 1804 and 1807, its stones sold and converted into cash. In 1840, one Hamburg Senator was pressured to pawn a diamond-encrusted insignia he had received as a gift of appreciation from a foreign government and deposit the proceeds in the city archive. And a cost-cutting reform measure in 1851–52 drastically reduced expenditure on the city’s police force, based on the determination that ‘existing weapons, uniforms, parades, and exercises … are a superfluous luxury’.Footnote 15 For Brahms, these bottom-line values were echoed at home. Even as he sought to gauge his new professional opportunities and establish his self-sufficiency as a full-time composer of art music, his mother, Christiane, offered her assessment of socioeconomic realities, and her own class identity, in frank, pragmatic terms.
Whether you pay attention to it or not, only the person who has money is respected … then he is free and independent, has no need to bow to anyone, can clothe himself according to his station. The artist is dependent entirely on the great and wealthy, art is luxury. The working class can do without it, must do without it. So the artist must seek friends among the rich. Oh, one doesn’t get through the world so easily and proudly, one has to put up with a lot and bow and scrape.Footnote 16
The sense that being ‘German’ was a vital aspiration varied widely, and feelings of cultural nationalism, which enabled residents in certain locales to feel some degree of connectedness with those in other German states, also ran much less high in Hamburg.Footnote 17 With the fourth largest seaport in the world and a thriving merchant class, the city’s primary agenda was to safeguard the freedom to run its own economic affairs. Understanding Hamburg’s identity in the nineteenth century is to recognize its reputation as a notably un-German city. Many of the most prominent local families were of non-German origin. As one Bavarian diplomat noted in 1845, ‘I can find next to nothing that is German in Hamburg, apart from the language … There can be no question of German blood here.’ If anything, because of the dominance of maritime trade, many of Hamburg’s elites felt a greater affinity with the global economic community than with the German nationalist cause. Senator Julius von Eckardt recalled the 1870s, the early years of German unification, as a time when there were ‘in Hamburg in those days dozens of older gentlemen who knew “every town on the Mississippi” from personal experience, and had been ‘”twenty times in London”, but had never visited Berlin at all’. The irony of Hamburg’s purported ‘provincialism’ is that it was rooted in a sense of outward-facing cosmopolitanism and individualism that resisted Prussian hegemony. The city’s lingering scepticism toward the centralizing impetus of unification was best expressed by an ambassador who in 1879 told a gathering in London: ‘The citizens of Hamburg are the worst Germans we have’.Footnote 18 Despite his deep, lifelong connection to and identification with Hamburg, Brahms’s ambivalence about his ‘stuck in the mud’ hometown, with its dubious Germans, became even more acute after his experience in the thoroughly Prussian city of Düsseldorf.
Brahms’s upward mobility shaped his political sensibilities. The composer’s doubts about the 1866 Austro-Prussian war – inflected by the conflict’s ‘strong religious overtones’ that pit north German Protestantism against Austrian Catholicism – were rooted in his initial uncertainty about Prussian ambition.Footnote 19 It was not an uncommon position. Prussia and the Austrian Empire were among 39 sovereign states that comprised the Deutsche Bund, or German Confederation, established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Hamburg, always protective of its independence, was the last to join, in 1820. Having determined that ‘dualist’ compromise was incompatible with a sustainable German unity, Prussia’s powerful Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) framed the ‘German question’ in terms of conflicting Prussian and Austrian interests and pressed for a showdown. Public opinion was decidedly in opposition to military conflict between the two superpowers within the German Confederation. This reticence reflected an aversion to war but also wariness of Prussian hegemony. John Breuilly observes that strong sentiment in favour of unification was largely the private reserve of a ‘minority of intellectuals [who] had little impact upon the vast majority of Germans’. Even ‘by the mid 1860s one could say that there was a large minority, mainly but not exclusively urban middle class and largely Protestant, which regarded itself as German and wanted to see greater national unity’.
But Bismarck’s surprising conciliatory gesture following Prussia’s defeat of Austria, shrewdly taking the long view by offering constitutional democracy to member states instead of over-aggressively suturing absolute power to the Hohenzollern monarchy, won over many sceptical liberals who could now envision politically tenable stakes in a unified nation.Footnote 20 Brahms seems to have recognized the significance of this improbable development because he highlighted Sybel’s discussion of it in a book in his library:
To all Conservatives, universal suffrage meant nothing less than political ruin. If any one had at that time prophesied that … the Prussian Government would itself offer this to the German People, he would have been ridiculed as a madman, or very likely have been incarcerated.Footnote 21
We might then recognize the denouement of the Austro-Prussian War as a transitional moment within the trajectory of Brahms’s political views. A consequence of Brahms’s residence away from Hamburg and growing middle-class identification, which increasingly aligned his politically sympathies with those of German liberals warming to unification under Prussia, was a deepening of nationalist sensibilities that only grew more fervent in the lead up to the decisive Franco-Prussian war.
Brahms’s full-throated support for German unification under Prussian leadership was expressed most conspicuously in his Triumphlied, op. 55, a cantata for orchestra, double chorus, and baritone solo composed in 1870–71 to celebrate victory over the French. More than any other single piece in Brahms’s oeuvre, the work, which sets Biblical verses culled from Revelation 19, has attained the status of a pariah. Beller-McKenna summarizes this consensus when he describes the Triumphlied as ‘one of Brahms’s most problematic works’, one that ‘has been actively avoided, even disdained’ for its uncharacteristic bombast. Especially following the atrocities of the Third Reich, the Triumphlied became ‘both musically and ideologically unwelcome just about everywhere for the remainder of the twentieth century’.Footnote 22 Musically, there is justification for this reception; with the exception of isolated lyrical passages in the middle movement, it is difficult to find much subtlety or meaningful contrast in the cantata, which surges ahead at near full throttle from its opening measures. Yet the radical exceptionalism attributed to the Triumphlied is more broadly symptomatic of what Margaret Notley has characterized as ‘the common tendency to regard Brahms in neutralized, ahistorical terms’. The near-unanimous dismissal of the work implicitly affirms the high valuation of ‘absolute music’, aesthetic transcendence and compositional craftsmanship. Such ‘universalistic assessments’ prevalent in both scholarly literature and the music history classroom have come to represent what it means to ‘know’ Brahms. ‘Indeed, surveying Brahms scholarship generally’, Beller-Mckenna adds, ‘one finds that his name has become sequestered from the stigmatized term nationalism’. Even the linking of Brahms with ‘historicism’ tilts more toward philosophical abstraction or a more generalizable long-nineteenth-century ethos than the ‘deeply historical view of German nationality’ that Brahms came to share with Prussian nationalist historians.Footnote 23
The Prussian School
Faced with a mid-century climate of political uncertainty, gritty patriotism, and competing social desires following the outcome of the 1848 Märzrevolution, a growing contingent of German intellectuals, sceptical of the dogmatic teachings of philosophy or theology, became increasingly receptive to what they believed were the concrete lessons of the past, to a pragmatic acceptance of history as ‘hortatory memory’ (mahnendes Gedächtniß), in the words of historian Wilhelm Adolf Schmidt.Footnote 24 As Schorske has observed, historical consciousness was a hallmark of nineteenth-century European liberalism, but the appeal and stakes of historical knowledge were particularly high in Prussia during the 1850s. A decade that saw German universities offer the first historical seminars and that witnessed the growing status and intellectual seriousness of historical study was capped by the debut issue of the Historische Zeitschrift, a pioneering scholarly journal founded by Sybel in 1859.
The sharp rise in the number of self-identifying German historians, with varying types of expertise and professional affiliation, created a boom in the publication of historical books for both the academic and the layman, in notable contrast with the contemporaneous decline in the publication of philosophical texts. Historical scholarship intended for the general public became an important and influential form of literature in the 1850s.Footnote 25 But as the popular circulation of historical knowledge grew, many institutionally affiliated historians censured a lack of principles on which a historical profession might be based, a familiar pattern in a number of fields during this era of professionalization in Germany.Footnote 26 A testament to the growth and increasing professionalization of historical study in the 1850s is the initiation and appearance of major research projects by such esteemed nineteenth-century German historians as Sybel, Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Wilhelm von Giesebrecht and Theodor Mommsen. In the field of music history, Franz Brendel’s Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1852), A.B. Marx’s Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre Pflege (1855), and W.A. Ambros’s Geschichte der Musik (1862), as well as classical philologist-turned-musicologist Otto Jahn’s ground-breaking biography of Mozart (1856–59), are all important examples of this trend toward grand historical narratives by authenticated scholarly writers.
Amos Funkenstein has linked this expansion of historical scholarship to an even more pervasive culture of commemoration.
[T]he nineteenth-century, which witnessed the professionalization of history, was also the period in which the historian was given a special position in the establishment of its culture and justification of the nation-state … . The nation-state replaced the sacred liturgical memory with secular liturgical memory – days of remembrance, flags, and monuments. The national historian – who in the nineteenth century enjoyed the status of a priest of culture, and whose work, even professional, was still read by a wide stratum of the educated public – made the symbols concrete. It even created some of them, some almost from nothing.Footnote 27
German historians supportive of a Kleindeutsch solution to the ‘German question’ – that is, a unified, Prussian-led German state that excluded Austria – were particularly intrigued by the potential role of the study of history in apprehending the underlying logic of contemporary political events. Most exemplary of this outlook is a group of German historians identified with what has been called the ‘Prussian School’, represented principally by Sybel, Droysen, Ludwig Häusser, Max Duncker and Heinrich von Treitschke. Direct political engagement was not unusual among nineteenth-century German historians drawing sustenance from escalating nationalist energies. As George Iggers has written, ‘Never before had German historians played such an active part in the course of German events as in the decisive years between 1830 and 1871 which saw the struggle for German unification’. But the historians of the Prussian School – mostly university professors, many of whom were also dually employed in varying capacities by the Prussian government – were characterized above all by a highly politicized historiography that straddled a fluid boundary between scholarship and propaganda. Seeking to extract and apply the lessons of a usable past, Prussian School scholars sought an exegesis of applicable historical knowledge that validated their own moderate liberal political aims. Iggers provides a useful description of the ‘moderate’ or ‘classical’ liberals that made up the largest political bloc among the middle classes at mid century:
They called for a constitution, for the Rechtstaat, a state based upon law. Moreover, they demanded organs of representative government elected by districts rather than representing traditional estates. They advocated equality before the law and favored the abolition of legal inequalities which remained, such as the restrictions upon Jews. Furthermore, they considered freedom of the press and of inquiry a cornerstone of the free state and regarded the rights of the individual person as important … . [T]hey generally opposed universal suffrage and regarded socialism and democracy with a great deal of suspicion, … [and] they saw in constitutional monarchy the best protection of the rule of law against the despotism of the masses.Footnote 28
Especially after 1848, German moderate liberals were even more willing to yield some autocratic authority to the monarchy in exchange for the assurance that the government would subdue, by force if necessary, any unrest among the lower classes.
Though their writings cannot be reduced to a single set of ideas, the published works and lectures of Prussian School historians unmistakably convey a strong nationalism and the desire for a constitutional monarchy under the Hohenzollern, the ruling family of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1701 until 1918. They were particularly emboldened when Wilhelm I (1797–1888), strongly supportive of unification, ascended to the Prussian throne following the death of his father Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1861. Approached with the tools of critical research, these scholars believed, historical practice would prove to be a path-lighting guide, indicating what political action should be pursued in the present to achieve these goals. Strategically conflating historiography and political activism, Prussian School historians came to embrace the inevitability of historical processes that pointed toward their vision of a historically determined and thus providentially sanctioned unified German nation-state. ‘The real driving force behind the creation of the Prussian School’, Robert Southard writes, ‘was a common desire to advocate unification and the active collaboration between government and citizens on the basis of historical certitude’.Footnote 29
Methodologically, Prussian School scholarship, which began to appear in print in the 1830s and 1840s in the build up to the mid-century revolutions, fused an idealist philosophy of history with a critical method indebted to August Böckh (1785–1867). For Böckh, the task of historical criticism, which emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth century, was ‘to distinguish the inappropriate from the appropriate in the tradition’.Footnote 30 On the one hand, the progression of history pointed toward the establishment of the first truly liberal European state: a Prussia-led Germany destined to complete the political project of the Protestant Reformation. On the other, these historians distanced themselves from a wholly idealist position by insisting on the primacy of empirical data, not speculation, to manifest history’s ideal. As Droysen, the principal theoretical architect of the Prussian School, wrote in 1837: ‘The foundation of all human knowledge is empirical’.Footnote 31 Prussian School patriotism was rooted less in Johann Gottfried Herder’s romantic cultural nationalism, based on the idea of a German Volk, than in an unshakable belief in an empirically determinable connection between past and present. Accordingly, these historians focused almost exclusively on political events, as documented in newly available government records, not cultural history.Footnote 32 The avowed empiricism and critical method of the Prussian School was also, Southard observes, a matter of ‘professional pride’. These historians supported their claims quasi-scientifically with evidence to which only they, as professional academics and political appointees, had access, thus shielding themselves from the charge that subjective views contaminated their objective analysis.Footnote 33
Prussia’s role during the Napoleonic Wars (1813–1815) – or the Befreiungskriege (‘Wars of Liberation’), as they were colloquially called – became a particularly rich site of historical memory. Christopher Clark describes one of the most popular pastimes in nineteenth-century central and northern Germany, the Turnervereinen, or gymnasts’ clubs, as ‘a cult of remembrance’ honouring the contributions of voluntary militias during the Wars of Liberation. Aside from their recreational function, these associations aimed ‘to evolve specifically civilian forms of bodily prowess and patriotic commitment’ as a symbolic, memorial re-enactment of German popular resistance during the Napoleonic wars.Footnote 34 Likewise, Prussian School historiography emphasized the nobility and courageousness of Prussian soldiers and statesmen in resisting French forces, heroic deeds that resonated with even earlier Germanic glory and presaged future greatness.Footnote 35 Droysen’s Vorlesungen über die Freiheitskriege (1846), Sybel’s Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1789 bis 1800 (1853–79), Häusser’s Deutsche geschichte vom tode Friedrichs des Grossen bis zur gründung des deutschen Bundes (1854–57), Duncker’s Aus der zeit Friedrichs des Grossen und Friedrich Wilhelms III (1876) and Adolf Schmidt’s Geschichte der deutschen Verfassungsfrage während der Befreiungskriege (1890) all document this period with a celebratory tone intended to cultivate national sentiment. As Treitschke observed, such scholarship sought ‘to look at the Wars of Liberation with German eyes’, fostering cultural identity by shaping German collective memory. A by-product of this orientation was frequent hostility toward France, Austria, Italy and Catholicism in Prussian School histories, especially in the work of Sybel and the youngest of these historians, Treitschke. In this respect, the Prussian School perpetuated a persistent bias in nineteenth-century Protestant-German historiography. After 1849, the scholarship of Sybel and Treitschke increasingly pursued utilitarian aims, embracing historiography as a technology that primed the middle classes for renewed efforts at national unification under Prussia. The lessons of the past were taught through historical accounts encouraging proto-countrymen to ready themselves for the future that history had promised.Footnote 36
For mid-nineteenth-century German historians seeking to link historical study and rigorous method, the model of the natural sciences was never far in the background. In his influential prescriptions for the field, Droysen situated historical study within the scientific movement of his age: ‘The essence of the historical method is understanding by means of investigation’ (emphasis in the original).Footnote 37 Significantly, many German historians advocated historical study not only as a form of science, but also as a superior substitute for philosophy, and, furthermore, as a dialectic synthesis of the two. Yet even as they professed belief in the certainties of scientism, Prussian School historians resisted an outright rejection of metaphysical concerns. Through investigation, the historian was able to divine the forces of history, which for Droysen were ‘moral forces’ (sittliche Mächten). ‘Historical things are the perpetual actualizations of these moral forces’, Droysen argued. ‘To think historically, means to see their truth in the actualities resulting from that moral energy’.Footnote 38 The goal of history as a discipline was therefore straightforward:
Scientifically to transcend the false alternative between moral and material, to reconcile the dualism of those methods and those views of the world, each of which insists upon ruling or denying the other, to reconcile them in that method which applies to the ethical and historical world, to develop them into the view of the world which has its basis in the truth of human existence and in the cosmos of the moral forces.Footnote 39
Even as historical consciousness became a critical marker of professional, political and class identities in mid-century Germany, the influential Prussian School embraced the very activity of historical inquiry as a distinctive dialogue between idealism and materialism and, more concretely, as an attempt to elucidate a priori historical forces, unfolding over the course of centuries, that would eventually give birth to a unified German nation.
Reading Brahms Reading Sybel
There is substantial evidence of Brahms’s attraction to Prussian School historiography. His personal library contained multiple copies of both the Preußische Jahrbuch, the prestigious journal launched in Berlin in 1858 and dedicated to Prussian School scholarship, and the Sybel-edited Historische Zeitschrift. In addition, Brahms owned complete sets of two cornerstone Prussian School texts: Treitschke’s Historische und Politische Aufsätze (Historical and Political Essays, 1871) and Sybel’s seven-volume Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I (The Founding of the German Reich through Wilhelm I, 1889–95). Musgrave has raised the possibility of a personal acquaintance between Brahms and Treitschke.Footnote 40 There are risks in inferring too much from the mere fact that a historical figure had access to a particular body of writing. Needless to say, even with the knowledge that an individual read a given book, drawing firm conclusions about their reception of its contents can be a fraught task. In the case of Brahms’s reception of Sybel’s Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I, however, we might be indulged some speculation.
Brahms had a close working relationship with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna. From 1872 to 1875, he was the society’s Artistic Director, and shortly after he gave up conducting duties he served on its Board of Directors and was named an Honorary Member. Brahms was also a major financial donor and a close personal friend of the society’s erudite librarians Carl Ferdinand Pohl and Eusebius Mandyczewski. Upon his death in 1897, Brahms bequeathed half of his remarkable personal library, a wide-ranging collection that reveals ‘the breadth of the composer’s mental horizon’, to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, where it is still housed today.Footnote 41 Brahms regularly annotated books he read, underlining or bracketing passages he apparently found to be of interest. This practice is consistent with his lifelong habit of collecting quotations and aphorisms that were inspirational or that conveyed personally valuable pieces of wisdom.Footnote 42 The books in Brahms’s library reveal consistent marking patterns and marginalia in handwriting that is unmistakably his. Brahms’s markings in his copy of Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I are especially provocative, and here I offer a reading of Brahms’s reading of Sybel’s magisterial text, as suggested by his annotations. Though it is necessarily speculative, I would argue that this interpretation nonetheless adds some granularity to our understanding of Brahms’s personal and political values while also suggesting a continuity of his ruminations on history across the four decades spanning his ‘years of study’ and his final years.
Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches was Sybel’s magnum opus. Its seven volumes were in effect a sequel to Sybel’s Geschichte der Revolutionszeit, 1789–1800, a five-volume history of the French Revolution from a German nationalist perspective written in the wake of the 1848 Revolutions. From 1834 to 1837, Sybel (1817–1895) studied in Berlin with historian Leopold von Ranke, who influentially reoriented the historical profession around an empirical approach centred on close examination of archival documents. Sybel brought his mentor’s dogmatic empiricism, along with his own belief in progress and in ‘historically-based predictions of the national future’ to his scholarly work. At the same time, Sybel, appointed to the faculty of the University of Bonn in 1861, confessed his dual commitments, describing himself as ‘four sevenths a professor and three sevenths a politician’. In 1875, Bismarck appointed Sybel director of the Prussian national archives and Sybel’s unimpeded access to government records accorded his study its authority among German-speaking publics.Footnote 43 However much we might recognize how Sybel’s desire to place Prussia at the heart of German nationalist aspirations skewed his historical objectivity, Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches was widely received by many at the time as an official history of nineteenth-century Prussian policy, illuminating for readers like Brahms the inexorable and inevitable process leading from the 1848 revolutions to the crowning of Wilhelm I as emperor of the first unified German state.
There are clearly highlighted blocks of text, usually with blue pencil, throughout all seven volumes of Brahms’s copy of Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches. When these selections are read in their entirety, and against each other, a fairly distinct picture of Brahms’s interests does emerge, one that hints at his reception of the book. Some inscriptions are merely pedantic: corrections of Sybel’s syntax and grammar. Brahms also marked several short excerpts in the text that refer to concisely stated facts about particular personae or events. For example:
The chairman of the Commission of Seventeen was [Friedrich Christoph] Dahlmann, the famous historian, and the leader of the celebrated Göttingen Professors, at this time one of the most prominent teachers as the University of Bonn.Footnote 44
or
[Prussian statesman Martin Friedrich Rudolph von] Delbrück, trained by industrious and widely extended study, has rapidly and brilliantly passed through all the grades of the Prussian government-service.Footnote 45
In such cases, Brahms’s reading seems more student-like, identifying key figures in Sybel’s historical narrative.
But of the roughly 50 highlighted passages across the seven volumes – some only a sentence long, others several pages in length – the overwhelming majority relate directly to one of the following topics:
1) Admiration for or character traits of Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm I
2) Extended quotations from Bismarck’s correspondence
3) Tributes to Prusso-German prestige
4) The historical significance of German unification
5) Austro-, Franco-, and Italophobia, or critique of ‘ultramontanism’
6) Defense of Prussian military action
7) Valuation of intellectual attainment
The first four categories, and especially the first and second, are consistent with what music-historical literature has already claimed about the composer. Brahms’s reverence for Bismarck is well documented. He owned two volumes of Bismarck’s parliamentary speeches and a well-marked copy of his complete correspondence, and he kept a photograph of the Prussian Chancellor, draped in laurel wreaths, on the wall of his study, alongside a bust of Beethoven, until his death.Footnote 46 Marked passages strongly indicated that for Brahms, as for Sybel, Bismarck was the central, heroic figure in the story of German unification. Sybel quoted lengthy, pages-long excerpts from Bismarck’s letters in Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches and Brahms highlighted many of these in their entirety. In volume two, Brahms marked an extended passage that cast Bismarck as a near Übermensch, but also as an autodidact who was a devoted student of history.
Bismarck was now in his thirty-sixth year, in the full bloom of his vigorous manhood. A tall and imposing figure, which towered by a whole head above the generality of the children of men, a face glowing with every sign of health, a glance enlivened with intelligence, in his mouth and chin the expression of an inflexible will – such he appeared to his contemporaries, enlivening every conversation with original thoughts, brilliant figures, and striking phrases, manifesting a charming affability in social life, and in business affairs a consummate superiority. He has been for the most part self-taught… .
He was afterwards, in the light of his broad experience, accustomed to say, that for every statesman a properly-directed course of study in history was the most important element in the foundation of his knowledge.Footnote 47
Folded between these pages was an article clipped from an 1890 issue of Frankfurter Zeitung on Bismarck’s forced resignation as Chancellor.
If Brahms was equivocal about the intra-Bund Austro-Prussian War in the 1860s, by the time he immersed himself in Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches in the 1890s, he may have been receptive to understanding the conflict in more affirmative, even necessary, terms. Bismarck, Sybel wrote, was certain ‘that the decision of the question [of unification] depended wholly upon the two important powers in Germany, upon the relation of Austria and Prussia’. Brahms highlighted the passage that immediately followed: ‘A peaceful transformation of these relations Bismarck regarded as wholly improbable: “Any other war”, he well said, “that Prussia might undertake before this Austria one, would be a pure waste of munitions”.’Footnote 48 In volume 4, Brahms conspicuously underscored a discussion of ‘the impossibility of attaining success without a life and death struggle with Austria’.Footnote 49 Brahms’s staunch support for the Prussian monarchy and particularly Wilhelm, ‘who, in spite of all obstacles and dangers, constantly held the great goal before his eyes’, is also apparent.Footnote 50 In one of the more notorious Brahms letters, written in 1888, he berated his friend Viktor Widmann for not conferring adequate ‘respect and honour … on a lineage like the Hohenzollers with F[rederick] II and W[illiam] I’.Footnote 51 Cumulatively, markings in Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches suggest that Brahms savoured the image of Bismarck and Wilhelm as something of dream team.
It is hardly likely that posterity will pass any other judgment than that such relation between monarch and minister, such a union of the consciousness of victory and the exercise of moderation, such an exhibition of genius and self-control hand in hand, has seldom been seen in all human history.Footnote 52
Passages relating to the third and fourth categories, reflecting strong Germanophilia, square with Brahms’s understanding of political unification as a fulfilment of Martin Luther’s eschatological vision. The unequivocal musical language of the Triumphlied may find resonance in a marked passage asserting the incontrovertible legitimacy of the new Reich: ‘Already in the course of a generation, the old life in the days of disunion has been forgotten, and existence in the national Confederation and Empire has become something that is taken for granted’.Footnote 53
Excerpts belonging to the fifth and sixth categories require a bit more context. There are numerous passages marked in Brahms’s copy of the Sybel text that either glorify German character through favourable comparison with other nations, or that justify Prussian hawkish bravado:
Once more, and in striking contrast to Italy, the strength of individualism was shown on German soil.Footnote 54
[Prussian army Chief of Staff Helmuth von] Moltke … replied with great calmness: ‘It is possible that before our forces can get to South Germany, its soil may be invaded by French troops, but I can assure you that not a man of them will ever get back to France’.Footnote 55
However striking the highlighting of such passages might appear, they do jibe with Brahms’s nationalist zeal, at times manifest as chauvinism. To Brahms, according to Beller-McKenna, France was ‘a hated foil against which to strive’. Avins attributes the virulence of Brahms’s anti-French sentiments to the ‘horrific’ Napoleonic siege of Hamburg in 1813–14 during which ‘Brahms’s mother lived through the economic havoc, starvation, forced marches through the freezing cold, and devastation of the countryside’.Footnote 56 But whatever Brahms’s personal Francophobia, his reading of Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches enabled him to apprehend both the stark necessity of vanquishing France and the apotheosis of German unification in historical terms. The Thirty Years War (1618–48), Sybel wrote in a passage that Brahms marked, ‘was the decisive epoch of our history because it elevated France and ruined Germany’.Footnote 57
Marked excerpts falling into category six – Sybel’s reference to ‘the shortsighted opposition to so-called militarism’, for instance – may also offer a sign of Brahms’s support for the endorsement for military force that characterizes much Prussian School writing.Footnote 58 Brahms seemed drawn to passages in Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches that cast military conflict as a means to a higher good, for Germans with aspirations for a nation-state to be sure, but also for the European continent more broadly, which Prussia was destined to defend from French aggression. ‘War in itself is always a calamity; but that it would be a greater calamity for us than for France, that we have more reason to avoid it than has France, is a view which we cannot understand’, wrote Bismarck confidently in the eve the Franco-Prussian War, in a letter quoted by Sybel and marked by Brahms. ‘It is this consciousness, united with a true love of peace, that actuates our whole bearing toward France’.Footnote 59 Brahms’s sympathy toward the productive functions of aggression emerged in other contexts. On more than one occasion Brahms defended those whom he considered ‘great and noble persons’ against criticism of their harsh rhetoric or severe action, on the basis of mitigating historical circumstances. In 1855, he wrote to Clara Schumann about Plutarch’s account of the perhaps apocryphal fifth-century bce Roman mercenary hero Coriolanus: ‘sometimes (when one reads it the first few times) one wishes he were different, gentler, more humane. If you read it more often, this vanishes, and in such a powerful hero you accept his roughness and hardness, if, in the appropriate situation he is therefore really hard’. Thirty years later, in the same letter to Widmann cited above, he found justification in the extreme ‘words and deeds’ of Napoleon and Louis XIV on similar grounds.Footnote 60
Avins takes pains to defend Brahms from the charge that he was ‘conservative’ or ‘politically authoritarian’ because of his at times lusty patriotism, calling attention instead to his ‘humanitarian leanings’.Footnote 61 Such a defence may, however, miss the essential point. Many seemingly incompatible ideas – the sanction of assertive military force and an enlightened concern for certain social inequalities, a glorification of individualism and a belief that individual freedom must be sacrificed for the good of state power, republicanism and reactionism – belong to the often-contradictory constellation of values that articulated German liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. An understanding of Prussian School ideology is of value precisely because it corresponds to such a remarkable degree with the political disposition we encounter in Brahms the liberal.Footnote 62
With this broader context in mind, I would like to close by examining what I believe to be four particularly revealing passages that Brahms highlighted in his copy of Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches sometime in the 1890s. These extended excerpts reward closer reading because of their particular relevance to the historical outlook that the youthful Brahms had already begun to cultivate 40 years earlier. The first is an excerpt from a 31 March 1824, letter written by then Prince Wilhelm, as quoted by Sybel.
If the nation had known in 1813, that within eleven years nothing but the memory would be left of that stage of prosperity, glory, and prestige that lay then within its reach, or rather which was reached, and that no actual trace of the same would remain, who would at that time have sacrificed everything in view of such a result? This question makes it the most sacred duty of a nation consisting of eleven million souls to maintain that position, which it gained by such sacrifices as the world had never seen before nor shall see repeated. But this is all forgotten now.Footnote 63
Wilhelm, who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, laments how despite Prussian valour in the Wars of Liberation heroic wartime deeds became obscured as Prussians became ‘resignedly subservient’ to Prince Klemens von Metternich’s Austria. Sybel uses Wilhelm’s voice – a stand-in for the voice of history – to deliver a cautionary warning to late nineteenth-century countrymen, declaring it ‘the most sacred duty’ of future generations to preserve the memory of German ‘prosperity, glory, and prestige’, lest it be lost in the annals of history. Sybel’s clever rhetorical device creates an instantaneous bond between the readers and their history through an appeal for an active, perpetual, collective remembrance of a tragically ‘forgotten’ German past.
The theme of historical redemption is also communicated in the second example, in which Sybel offers his postmortem of the ill-fated Frankfurt Parliament.
It was, after all no disgrace, but an honour, for those men to have been so far ahead of their contemporaries; and although for that reason the efforts of the National Assembly were bound to be futile for the time, it was truly the sowing of seed which was to ripen in the glorious future. This was the work of the national Assembly; and by doing it, its members have earned an honourable name in the records of history. The impulse and direction which they gave to patriotism and to love for the Fatherland have been eradicable. Even a more propitious future could not have seen the success of the idea, had not our first Parliament, in spite of all its mistakes and confused notions about the means to be employed, pointed out to the people with such force and emphasis the true goal of the nation – the maintenance of Freedom among its members, and of Union in its attitude to foreigners.Footnote 64
A national assembly formed during the 1848 revolution, the Frankfurt Parliament represented the first democratic attempt create a unified Germany. The rejection by Wilhelm’s father, Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, of both the parliament’s constitution and its offer of the office of emperor – a crown tainted, the king reportedly said, by ‘the hussy smell of revolution’ – effectively ended the movement in 1849. Characteristically viewing the events in relation to the larger sweep of history, which he believed successfully completed the mid-century revolution through German unification in 1871, Sybel praised the parliamentary delegates for their visionary aims, despite what might have at first appeared to be ‘futile’ efforts. In taking up the mantle of destiny, these revolutionaries placed themselves ‘far ahead of their contemporaries’ thus earning ‘an honourable name in the records of history’. Throughout Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches, Sybel mobilized similar values – historical consciousness, patriotism, self-sacrifice, loyalty to state interest, political vanguardism – to inspire his readers. More importantly, he once again emphasized how human activity in the present, undertaken with an acceptance of the primacy of historical processes, functions as a compass for future generations.
Brahms embraced a similarly Janus-faced historicism, one that conveyed his personal anxieties over posterity’s judgment. In an 25 October 1859, letter to Bertha Porubsky, Brahms noted the recent death of composer Louis Spohr, among the most esteemed German composers of his time. By the end of his life, Spohr was deeply sceptical of modern music; his 1842 Symphony No. 6, a ‘Historical Symphony’ with movements written ‘im Styl und Geschmack vier verschiedener Zeitabschnitte’ (in the style and taste of four different time periods), was intended to lampoon in-vogue compositional practices. Brahms, who shared Spohr’s dissatisfaction, wrote:
Spohr is dead! He may well be the last one who still belonged to a more beautiful era of art than the one we are now suffering through. In those days one could eagerly keep a look out every week for what new and even more beautiful work had come from this or that person.
Now it is different. In a month of Sundays I see hardly one volume of music that pleases me, but on the other hand many that even make me physically ill.
Possibly at no other time has an art form been maltreated as badly as our dear music nowadays.
I hope better things are quietly maturing, otherwise, in the history of art our era will look like a trash heap.Footnote 65
In these reflections, we see Brahms honouring the ‘beautiful’ musical past represented by Spohr in order to identify the artistic malady of the present and express his dread about how future generations might choose to represent his own. Past, present, and future are conceptualized and unified through historical memory, as Brahms seems well aware that his own era and its participants would, like the leaders of the Frankfurt Parliament, eventually be studied as historical. His comments, resonant with Wilhelm’s call for Germans to act as they would like to be remembered, convey a historical consciousness that is never static, but always involves a telescoping of the past inward to the present and its extension outward toward the future.
The third example is a tribute to Wilhelm. It is representative of the many passages in which Sybel delineates what he believes to be appropriate German values – self-renunciation, political commitment, thoroughness, industriousness, steadfastness – highlighted by Brahms almost as object lessons.
As a matter of fact, the young officer did give himself up to his military duties body and soul, and Prussia gained by it; for under a vigorous leadership the military calling affords an excellent training-school for a future ruler, by accustoming him to quick decision, to firm command, and to unconditional obedience. It is true that his education was, for a long time, somewhat one-sided, but owing to his earnest industry, it was all the more thorough within its sphere; and thorough work of any sort calls forth all the energies of the mind, making it ready, when the occasion comes, to find itself at home even in unaccustomed occupations, while dilettante buzzing in all directions dissipates the force of the intellect and weakens the judgment.Footnote 66
Here Sybel draws explicit contrast between ‘thorough work’ and ‘dilettante buzzing in all directions’, calling attention to the superior intellectual fruits of serious-mindedness. In certain respects, Sybel argues implicitly for the specialization that was a product of modern German professionalization; even a ‘one-sided’ self-education within one’s chosen field, if thorough and undertaken with ‘earnest industry’, is a surer means of honing ‘the force of the intellect’ than the false lure of what John Stuart Mill once described as ‘superficial knowledge’.Footnote 67
A belief in intellect as cultural capital is even more strongly asserted in the final example. This passage was part of Sybel’s more extended discussion of the Communist movement, a discussion in which Brahms seems to have taken special interest, since there are markings in multiple spots. Southard has described Prussian School historians as
members of a small, urban, and highly educated elite in a still overwhelmingly agrarian and traditional society … . In other words, they were nationalists who were divided by education and occupation from most of the nation and who had little to say about the conduct of affairs.Footnote 68
It is perhaps in this light that we might understand Sybel’s fundamental critique of Communism: its mistaken valuation of manual labour (Handarbeit) at the expense of intellectual labour (Kopfarbeit). Sybel rectifies Karl Marx, whose theory, he believed, ‘turns truth on its head’ (stellt die Wahrheit auf den Kopf):
The manufacturer by his intellectual labour, unremitted during the entire process of production, is in reality the creator of the surplus value [of the product] which therefore justly belongs to him alone. The operatives have no greater influence upon it than have the machines which they manipulate according to his instructions, without understanding the connections or purpose of the various stages of the process.
What follows, bracketed by Brahms, is similarly framed in its entirety by a hierarchical dichotomy of mind versus body, mental processes versus physical activity, the ‘understanding’ versus the ‘passions’.
[T]he scholarly Marx, who was never a wage-earner himself, exhibits a strange want of appreciation of intellectual as compared with manual labour, a tendency which ever since that day has been steadily growing in the Communistic Party. Notwithstanding the many years of wearisome preparation by which intellectual power can alone be gained, notwithstanding the incalculably great achievements which under proper direction it can render, he concedes to it no higher merit than that which he attributes to the generally meanly regarded exertions of the day labourer.
The adequate remuneration of the intellectual producer lies in his greater appreciation of the production itself, has recently been said by a wiseacre. This is all of a piece with the utterance heard in the Reichstag in connection with the dotations to our military leaders in connection with their services. ‘Every soldier imperils his life for his country; what more can a general do?’ He can do that which every soldier can by no means do, lead our armies to victory, and save our country.
That the fallacious reasoning of the communistic theory should secure a lasting hold upon the minds of millions of people might appear strange if we did not remember that the arguments are clothed in the obscure language of philosophy, unintelligible to the half or wholly uneducated public to whom it appears most impressive, and to whom, moreover, the conclusions drawn are perfectly intelligible, since they appeal not to the understanding, but to the strongest passions of those whom they are addressed.Footnote 69
Sybel does not so much demean the ‘day labourer’ – though he does liken such a worker to a mere ‘machine’ – as he does glorify underappreciated intellectual labour. He notes the ‘years of wearisome preparation’ that produce erudition and the ‘incalculably great achievements’ possible through the powers of intellect. It is through the exercise of mental capacity, not physical labour, that the leadership on which a nation’s foundation, prestige and survival depends is cultivated.
Walter Wiora has described the correspondence between the nineteenth-century idea of meaningful, ‘serious’ music and the notion of the ‘cultured musician’ who endeavoured to develop artistic individuality through an engagement with humanistic culture.Footnote 70 One can imagine how Sybel’s description of ‘industrious and widely extended study’ by notable Prussians and his acknowledgement of the ‘wearisome labour’, ‘thorough work’, and ‘earnest industry’ requisite for intellectual attainment justified Brahms’s conscious labour in the 1850s to make himself into what he called a ‘proper musician’. In 1896, around the time he was reading Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches, Brahms told his friend Richard Heuberger, ‘Neither Schumann, nor Wagner, nor I learned what was proper … None of us went through the proper school’. By school Brahms certainly meant formal education in the grammar of composition. That same year, he expressed similar sentiments to Gustav Wendt: ‘Mendelssohn had a great advantage compared with us: the excellent school. What indescribable efforts it has cost me to recover this lost ground as a man’.Footnote 71 These lifelong efforts, involving laborious self-education and critical-historical inquiry began four decades earlier during Brahms’s years of study, activity prompted initially, perhaps, by a desire to hone compositional technique, but that over time became increasingly freighted with political salience.
Brahms’s reading of Sybel’s text in the 1890s makes legible a longer trajectory leading from his years of study. It was during the 1850s that moderate liberal political demands began to take definitive shape and greatly influence the conditions under which German unification and German national identity emerged. Beyond the overt nationalist agendas in Sybel’s Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches, there are strong political claims about historical consciousness and intellectual endeavour that affirmed an ethos that Brahms had already embraced by his early twenties. Reading Brahms reading Sybel adds specificity and motivation to more amorphous claims of his ‘interest’ in history, but it also helps us reconcile Brahms the ‘ahistorical’ historicist composer of absolute music and Brahms the German nationalist. During his years of study, Brahms was undoubtedly in search of a musical language that enacted a dialectic synthesis of past and present and he conveyed an uncompromising wilfulness to cultivate his professional identity as a composer of art music. But Brahms’s apparent reception of Sybel’s text conveys how the studious historicism of his youth became the basis for an aesthetic stance densely interwoven with, and at the end of his life ratified by, the cultural and political agendas of Prussian School ideology and the meanings of the past forged in the crucible of the German historical imagination.
