David Brodbeck introduces his insightful study Defining Deutschtum as an inquiry into the politics of Brahms’s ‘Liberal Vienna’ as expressed in music criticism. That it is Brahms who stands for the embattled German Liberals at the close of the nineteenth century is not surprising: Brodbeck’s study, as he notes, is part of a larger reassessment of musical culture of this time and place, in which Brahms has most prominently figured. Yet it is perhaps false advertising for his own study, which largely concentrates on the reception of Goldmark, Dvořák and Smetana in Vienna. Brodbeck’s meticulous reading of the Viennese musical press (above all the writings of Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel) and study of the city’s musical institutions (primarily the Philharmonic and the Court Opera) allows him to draw a convincing and highly nuanced picture of the ‘national question’ as applied to late Austro-Hungarian musical life.

Brodbeck’s study is refreshing in a number of ways. His focus on composers often considered peripheral to Viennese musical life – in fact, his inquiry into the very construction of that marginality – expands the repertory of this subfield of musicology and dispels a good amount of the misty great man historiography which often surrounds this era. Since the classic works of Hermann Broch and Carl Schorske, the cultural sphere of ‘fin-de-siècle Vienna’ has frequently been not only studied but fetishized.Footnote ¹ In Schorske’s famous formulation, the Liberals’ fall from political power beginning in 1879 led to the cultural productivity which produced much early twentieth-century modernism, including artists and thinkers such as Freud, Klimt, Schnitzler and Schoenberg. Historians like John Boyer and Pieter Judson have frequently questioned Schorske’s political history and his implied cultural causality, arguing that Habsburg politics, particularly the world of post-1879 Liberals, were more diverse and complex than Schorske allowed.Footnote ² In the work of musicologists including Leon Botstein, Margaret Notley and Kevin Karnes, the contributors to the recent collection Rethinking Hanslick, and, of course, the present study, this reassessment has reached musicology.Footnote ³

In his introduction, Brodbeck offers a cogent summary of recent trends in historical scholarship, most of which will be familiar for the specialists who are this book’s obvious audience. He also sets his boundaries: the writings of what he refers to as three generations of music critics (beginning with Hanslick and ending with various writers for the anti-Semitic conservative press) who wrote in the mainstream liberal and, particularly in the book’s later chapters, German nationalist press. The book is divided into two symmetrical parts, the first four chapters considering the ‘liberal heyday’ of the 1850s to 1870s and the second quartet Eduard Taaffe’s ‘Iron Ring’ government and the immediate period following, an era which saw the radicalization of German nationalists, a precipitous increase in anti-Semitism (including the belated accession of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna), and the rise of Czech nationalism to both political and cultural prominence. Each section is ordered more or less chronologically and most chapters focus on a single composer.

Brodbeck’s first chapter, however, addresses his study’s most famous critic, Eduard Hanslick, and his oft-ignored youth in Prague with a Jewish mother and Czech father. We learn about the music and literature of the household, Hanslick’s early compositions, and the extent to which their Czech-ness were later concealed by the composer. Such detailed attention to his subjects’ Bildung – and the juxtaposition with their adult identities – appear throughout Brodbeck’s volume. Yet his goal is not the kind of Bildungsgeschichte practiced by, for example, William McGrath.Footnote ⁴ Rather he employs these intellectual biographies to illuminate the dynamics of language, cultural identity and assimilation, and the shifting, overlapping identities of German-ness, Czech-ness, and Judaism. Hanslick, Brodbeck argues, believed complete German cultural assimilation was achieved not through blood or baptism but rather the performance of a German identity – making Mendelssohn as German as could be. All of these identities, Brodbeck argues, were heard in music in a highly literal fashion. Brodbeck’s second chapter picks up this thread in an illuminating analysis of Goldmark’s heritage and the assimilative politics of Judaism. While far more culturally Jewish than Hanslick ever was, he also effaced his non-German background in the name of assimilation in an attempt to join the liberal elite.

In Chapter 3, Brodbeck considers how this played out in the reception of Goldmark’s opera Die Königin von Saba and other exotic works. While critics like Hanslick and Speidel saw the opera’s exoticism as derived from the composer’s Jewishness, Goldmark himself thought it something external and considered himself fully German. While the reviews offer ample support for this thesis, this chapter also reveals the limitations of Brodbeck’s method. He uses details to construct a web of associations, for example in this chapter it takes hardly a dozen pages for Goldmark’s Jewishness to expand around Rubinstein’s Der Thurm zu Babel and Die Maccabäer, Wilhelm Marr’s Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum, the West-östliche Divan, Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrew Nation and its successor by Karl Rosenkranz, cantor Salomon Sulzer and his Shir Zion, musicologists Alexander Christianowitsch and August Wilhelm Ambros, and Aida. The effect is virtuosic and often convincing, yet sometimes seems to surround the subject rather than puncture it, leaving Die Königin von Saba itself comparatively ignored. It also forces Brodbeck into occasional qualifying statements along the lines of ‘we have no reason to believe Hanslick knew Lowth’s work’ (p. 92).

Chapter 4’s detailed consideration of the so-called ‘Billroth Affair’, the brouhaha surrounding an 1875 anti-Semitic brochure on the education of doctors by surgeon Theodor Billroth, is the book’s most puzzling. Brodbeck introduces Billroth through his social relationship with Brahms. The relative tenuousness of this link – the chapter is introduced through a note in Brahms’s diary – speaks to some larger tensions in this book: music is taken as utterly representative of Viennese liberal culture in all its contradictions, yet still a discussion of non-musical material still must be justified with a roundabout musical connection. Brodbeck argues that, in contrast to Wagner, Billroth’s anti-Judaism was primarily cultural rather than racial. Yet it is unclear what is gained by Brodbeck’s evident eagerness to rehabilitate Billroth’s character. Billroth’s pamphlet touched off student disruptions in which Jewish medical students were forcibly evicted from classrooms. Damage had been done.Footnote ⁵

The fifth chapter of the book, the first of the second section, deals with the reception of Dvořák in Vienna and will already be familiar to many readers from its publication in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.Footnote ⁶ In a book of many short case studies, it is the longest and most sustained section and one of its most convincing; it also contains a section on Theobald Kretschmann’s Czech concerts in Vienna that did not appear in the earlier article. Dvořák’s rise in Vienna corresponded with that of Taaffe’s ‘Iron Ring’ government, a period during which Czech nationalists became more visible in Habsburg politics, leading in turn to German Liberals’ increasingly nationalist tendencies. Dvořák’s audibly Czech music received a mixed reception, but in his Symphony No. 6, Hanslick found that the composer had, in Brodbeck’s words, ‘grown into’ the symphony and thus ‘had joined the great German liberal nation’, (p. 173), crediting him with the cultural assimilation prized by the critic, a theme which Brodbeck highlights throughout the volume.

Chapter 6 returns to Goldmark, particularly his fate during the rise of anti-Semitism after 1882. But Goldmark was at the peak of his popularity at this point; he was accepted by both Hanslick and Speidel as a German composer rather than an ‘Oriental’ one (as discussed in Chapter 3). In Chapter 7, we move on to consider Smetana and the ‘strange alliance’ between the Young Czechs and radical Germans. Much to the dismay of Liberals, in the early 1890s Czech music became extremely popular in Vienna, and was seen by those liberals as an emblem of the growing visibility and political power of Czechs in general. As a Wagnerian, Smetana even offered a model of (a different) nationalism for radical Germans. Here is one of the first and only points in the book where audience members not equipped with their own Feuilleton sections seem to wield some influence. One immediate asks: among who else were these Czech operas so popular? For all his unusual qualities, Brodbeck’s study is typical in that it prizes the writings and views of a very small circle of critics.

In the final full chapter, Brodbeck returns again to Goldmark, this time in the 1890s, first describing his unsuccessful comic number opera Das Heimchen am Herd (1896) before considering a fragment of Goldmark’s memoirs dealing with Jewishness. Certain passages of this memoir were repressed by Goldmark’s daughter Minna, but Brodbeck located them in the archives of the Hungarian State Opera. Unsurprisingly, Goldmark’s words precisely echo Brodbeck’s thesis throughout the book: that the composer believed he had assimilated to a German musical identity. Returning to the reception of Die Königin von Saba, Brodbeck largely echoes his earlier interpretation: Brodbeck’s brief epilogue hints at the dramatic turn this reception would take in the following decades, describing Mahler’s performances of The Bartered Bride and Dalibor at the State Opera and similarly echoes his now-familiar themes.

Despite his ambition, Brodbeck is a hedgehog, not a fox. Time and again he returns to the reception of music criticism as a proxy of nationalist politics. This can make reading occasionally exhausting. Despite its breadth, the argument is made narrowly and closely. Brodbeck’s documentation is copious, his translations very helpful, and his arguments convincing. Yet despite his attention to detail, the force of his thesis also can become something of a blunt instrument, leaving him at a loss to explain a musical event’s reception in terms of anything other than nationality (on Dalibor: ‘Despite a storyline that could easily be read in nationalist terms, Czech audiences reacted coolly to the opera when it was introduced in Prague’, p. 320). In this, his book strongly differs from Benjamin Korstvedt’s recent call to consider this era of music criticism across multiple axes.Footnote ⁷ In Brodbeck’s study, music, style and personal relationships are all tied to a single political theory that, while often convincing, also gives the reader and the music no space to breathe. While clearly written, Brodbeck’s arguments can proceed along labyrinthine paths requiring the guiding hand of ‘we will return to this issue later’, ‘we will now turn to’ and the like. The book is well-produced, with its extensive documentation helpfully contained in footnotes rather than endnotes.

Brodbeck’s musical analysis also occupies a fraught position; despite the inclusion of numerous musical examples, most serve to represent fairly basic stylistic points. It is perhaps anticlimactic when he ends his book with the cautionary note that ‘we should not overestimate what day-to-day music criticism can tell us about musical life per se’ (p. 328). But telling us about music – or even musical life – has never been his aim, rather he is reading critics through music with fairly minimal attention to aesthetic debates (as evidenced by his Billroth chapter). Those who agree with Leon Botstein’s injunction that reception history tends ‘to bypass musical texts or fail to use them except to confirm generalizations’ are likely to find something missing in Brodbeck’s work.Footnote ⁸ For this reader, however, Brodbeck’s steadfast resistance to the aesthetic power of music – there is no fragment of reception he won’t politicize – gives his study a certain clear-eyed awareness of some realities of Viennese life which have often been neglected.

My most significant reservation is that Brodbeck’s expansion of the scope of this period is still rather modest. Musical culture in Vienna encompassed more than the Philharmonic, State Opera and elite press. While Brodbeck does much to expand our understanding of the flexibility and ambiguity of politics in this era, the German Liberals and their usual counterpoint of extremist German nationalist demagoguery remain the primary voices of musical history, and Brodbeck’s newspaper critics remain similarly constrained. But what of those audiences who so loved Czech opera? This was a period of massive immigration to Vienna from, indeed, Bohemia.Footnote ⁹ While many of the newcomers would not have had the resources or time to frequent the State Opera, some of them – those who were also, to Billroth’s chagrin, clogging up the Medical School – surely did. To go where Hanslick feared to tread remains, for musicology, a difficult step.