In this engaging and thought-provoking study, musicologist David Brodbeck explores the shifting understandings of “being German” (Deutschtum), as expressed through music criticism in Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century. Spanning the decades from Austro-German Liberal dominance to its collapse in the face of challenges both from rising nationalism among the non-German nationalities of Vienna's empire and from ethnically and racially nationalist German voices, Brodbeck argues that music criticism provides a window onto the ideological understandings of Deutschtum and the ways they changed during this era. In doing so, he goes beyond the once traditional view of Vienna's musical politics, in which Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner (or at least their supporters and followers) represent respectively the traditional cosmopolitan Liberal, on the one hand, and the ethnic, racial, and antisemitic nationalist views, on the other, of what was thought to be “German.” Though Brahms and Wagner do appear in the discussion, the book focuses on other figures, notably Eduard Hanslick, the leading Viennese music critic for the liberal Neue Freie Presse, along with selected colleagues and competitors from other papers, as well as the composers Carl Goldmark, Antonín Dvořák, and Bedřich Smetana. In the reviews of performances of works by these composers (the first an assimilated Jew from western Hungary, the latter two Czechs), Brodbeck traces the expression of and changes in the understanding of what it meant to be German in the eyes of three generations of influential critics, and, by extension, in the cultural world of nineteenth-century Vienna.

The book is organized in two halves of four chapters each, framed by an introduction and an epilogue. The first half covers the period from the Vormärz era through the heyday of German Liberal predominance in Austrian politics, and begins with a discussion of Hanslik's early life. Born in Prague to a Czech-speaking father and a Jewish mother, he grew up in a milieu that shaped his identity as German when he could just as easily have chosen to be Czech. In the second chapter, Brodbeck provides a similar discussion of Goldmark's background and choice of a German identity. The third chapter investigates the reception of Goldmark's music during the 1860s and 1870s, when liberal critics expressed reservations about whether he could, as a Jew, truly be seen as a “German” composer.

The fourth chapter turns—somewhat unexpectedly, since he was neither a composer nor a music critic—to a discussion of the “Billroth Affair,” polemics concerning Jewish medical students that were set off by passing comments in a footnote in Über das Lehren und Lernen der medicinischen Wissenschaften an den Universitäten der deutschen Nation nebst allgemeinen Bemerkungen über Universitäten. Eine culturhistorische Studie (1876) by Theodor Billroth, a member of the faculty at the Vienna Medical School. Billroth was a decent amateur musician and friend of Brahms (it is he who joins Brahms and Hanslick in the pencil sketch used for the unidentified illustration on this book's dustjacket), but music here is incidental. Brodbeck uses Billroth's comments about the “gulf between pure German and pure Jewish blood” (120) to discuss the attitudes toward Jews that were characteristic of many German Liberals at the time. In spite of the reference to “blood,” this was not, he argues, the racial antisemitism that emerged in Vienna beginning in the 1880s. Instead he interprets it as a reflection of traditional Liberal attitudes toward the possibility of assimilation and acceptance into Deutschtum, open to “worthy” individuals of non-German background and to be evaluated in terms of “conviction and achievement”—attitudes that also underlay the critics’ reception of Goldmark.

The second half of the book, also composed of four chapters, adds two Czech composers, Dvořák and Smetana, to the musical mix with Goldmark, whose later career is also considered; it closes with an epilogue that looks at attitudes toward these composers in “Mahler's Vienna.” Dvořák's reception there in the 1870s reflected new tensions in the political sphere between Slav (mostly Czech) nationalist parties and their nationalist German counterparts—tensions that created changes in German Liberal discourse as its predominance in Austria waned: whereas Hanslick was willing to see Dvořák as fully German in the traditional sense of mid-century Liberalism, other critics, notably Theodor Helm, insisted on Deutschtum as a “cultural property” (Nationalbesitzstand) to which a Slav could not aspire. Goldmark's later career in Vienna was marked by another new element in the discourse of Deutschtum: the racial antisemitism of the younger radical German nationalist critics, who denounced Goldmark (and the Liberal musical establishment in Vienna) as essentially Jewish and non-German—just at the moment when Hanslick and other older Liberals finally bestowed upon Goldmark the accolade of being German.

By contrast, during the early 1890s, Smetana's works found favor with each strain of thought in Viennese musical criticism: traditional Liberals saw him as an acculturated German, national Liberals as drawing inspiration from Wagner and the New German School, and German nationalists as providing an example of what their own “German” (as opposed to “Jewish”) composers could hope to achieve. The last chapter closes the book as it began: with the question of Deutschtum—this time with Goldmark's vigorous assertion against the claims of his racially nationalist critics that “I wrote … German music” (301). The epilogue takes the reader to the first years of the new century, reviewing the themes explored in the book as they were expressed when Gustav Mahler was director of the Court Opera and conducted the Philharmonic. In spite of the vehemence with which the radical nationalists railed against threats to German Nationalbesitzstand in their musical criticism, “the Czechs Smetana and Dvořák and the Germanized Jew Goldmark made out quite well in Mahler's Vienna,” Brodbeck notes, warning that “we should not overestimate what day-to-day music criticism can tell us about musical life per se” (328).

While it was not Brodbeck's goal to provide a survey of musical life in general, his arguments might be expanded and complicated by going beyond the musical life of elite venues and the discourse of critics writing for social groups whose members could afford season tickets to the Court Opera and the Philharmonic. A fuller appreciation of the discourses of national identity in music might be achieved by considering Vienna's wider musical life (perhaps in comparison to other capitals in the Habsburg realm) and the meanings assigned there to Deutschtum (or češství, in the case of Smetana and Dvořák). Brodbeck has nevertheless provided a thoroughly researched, closely argued, and well-written study of competing definitions of Deutschtum, illuminating the tensions and changes in conceptions of identity for German speakers in the Habsburg capital during a crucial half-century. It will be of value to anyone interested in the intersections of culture, politics, and nationalism.