How "deutsch" a Requiem?

Absolute Music, Universality, and the Reception of Brahms's "Ein

deutsches Requiem," op. 45
Author(s): Daniel Beller-McKenna
Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1998), pp. 3-19
Published by: University of California Press
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How deutsch a Requiem?
Universality, and the Reception
of Brahms's Ein deutsches
DANIEL BELLER-MCKENNA
As concerns the text, I must admit, I very happily also would omit the
These words penned by Brahms in a letter con-
cerning the premiere of his Requiem are among
his most frequently cited. And not surprisingly,
since Brahms's suggestion that he would re-
place "German" with "Human" resonates be-
yond 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 earlierversion of this article.
Absolute Music,
Requiem, op. 45
"Deutsch" and simply put "Menschen."
-Johannes Brahms
hand, pointing toward the future. Arnold
Schoenbergarguedthe latter point in his semi-
nal 1947 essay "Brahmsthe 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 empha-
sis on the word "Human" in Brahms's quota-
tion also supports the commonly held view
that the work is aimed at "Humanity" by com-
forting those who remain in this world rather
'Schoenberg,"Brahmsthe Progressive,"in Style and Idea
(Berkeleyand Los Angeles, 1975), pp. 398-441. This case
has been made more recently by Peter Gay in "Aimez-
vous Brahms?On Polaritiesin Modernism,"in Freud,Jews,
and Other Germans (New York, 1978), pp. 232-56, and by
J. Peter Burkholderin "Brahms and Twentieth-Century
Classical Music," this journal8 (1984), 75-83.
3
 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 "capturesthe essence
of the work,"2while John Eliot Gardinerduti-
fully integrates it into a 1991 essay entitled
"Brahmsand the 'Human' Requiem." Gardiner
goes a step further, however, to insist that
Brahms's Requiem is "'German' not in a na-
tionalistic sense, but because [it is] rooted in
the language of the LutheranBible."3Gardiner
does not clarify what he means by "nationalis-
tic" here, but his assertion seems to adopt the
late-twentieth-century view of Humanity as
something transnationalistic and transre-
ligious.4 WinfriedD6bertin arguedthis case yet
more emphatically in a 1990 essay on the Re-
quiem:
That was the expressintention of the composer.
Brahmswished to serve not only the membersof
one confessionwith his music, also not only Chris-
tians, but ratherall people.Indeed,he namedit a
GermanRequiembecausehe usedLuther'sBiblefor
his text selection,but wouldhavegladlydeletedthe
word"German"in orderto expressthat the workis
dedicatedto peopleof all racesandreligions.5
D6bertin went on to assert that Ein deutsches
Requiem is "universally Human"-he uses the
formulation allgemein-menschlich at least ten
2MichaelMusgrave,Brahms:Ein deutsches Requiem(Cam-
bridge, 1996), p. 1.
3JohnEliot Gardiner,"Brahmsand the 'Human'Requiem,"
Gramophone(April 1991), 1809-10 (quote, 1810).
4Inhis biographyof one year earlier,Malcolm MacDonald
makes exactly the same point: "It is 'German' in no na-
tionalistic sense but because it is rooted in the languageof
the LutheranBible" (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 Brahmsmit
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 Ausdruckzu bringen,dag das Werk
den Menschen aller Volker und Religionen gewidmet ist"
(WinfriedDobertin, "JohannesBrahms'Deutsches Requiem
als religioses Kunstwerk,"Brahms-Studienvol. 8, ed. Kurt
and Renate Hoffmann [Hamburg,1990],p. 9).
4
times in his fifteen-pageessay-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
Gardinerand 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. Farfrom 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 mean-
ing 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 simi-
lar readings of the Requiem were expressed by
Brahms'scontemporaries,almost none of those
early critics doubted the work's essentially Ger-
man character. The nineteenth-century con-
cept 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 separatefrom press-
ing issues of pan-Germannational 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 repertoireduring 1869-70, on the eve
of the Franco-PrussianWar,a reexamination of
the references to universality in the early re-
ception of the piece is warranted.
That leaves the question, How did reading
the Requiem as a work that transcends its con-
text develop since then? It is here that nine-
teenth-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
laternineteenth century.There,EduardHanslick
6"Mit seinem Deutschen Requiem will Johannes Brahms
Leidtragendealler Nationen und aller Religionen tr6sten"
(D6bertin,"JohannesBrahms'Deutsches Requiem,"p. 23).
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 state-
ment warrant a reappraisal-if only to de-em-
phasize the quotation in our current understand-
ing 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 perfor-
mance on Good Friday, 10 April 1868. In a let-
ter 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 every-
thing 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 move-
ment: "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"MeinGedankewar der:Sie stehenin dem Werkenicht
alleinaufreligi6sem,sondernaufganzchristlichemBoden.
Schon die zweite Nummerberuhrtdie Weissagungvon
derWiederkunft des Herrn,undin dervorletztenwirddas
GeheimnisderAuferstehung derToten'unddaBnichtalle
entschlafen'ausfuhrlichbehandelt.Es fehlt aberfur das
christlicheBewuBtseinderPunkt,um densich allesdreht,
namlichder Erlosungstoddes Herrn.'Ist Christusnicht
auferstanden,so ist EuerGlaubeeitel,' sagt Paulusim
Zusammenhangmit jenervon IhnenbehandeltenStelle.
Nun wareaberan derStelle'Tod,wo ist deinStachel'etc.
vielleicht der Punkt zu finden,entwederkurz im Satze
selbst vor der Fuge oder durchdie Bildungeines neuen
Satzes.OhnehinsagenSie im letzten Satz:'Seligsind die
Brahms responded immediately to Rein- DANIEL
BELLER-
thaler's suggestion in a letter of 9 October: "As MCKENNA
concerns the text, I must admit, I would very Reception of
Brahms'sop. 45
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 mean-
ing 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 1866.10It was
during these very months that the war between
Toten, die in dem Herrn sterben von nun an,' das heifit
doch nur, nachdem Christus das Erlosungswerkvollbracht
hat" (Carl Reinthaler, Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel
mit Carl Reinthaler [Berlin,1908],pp. 7-12).
8"Wasden 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
abdisputierenoder streichen kann" (ibid).
9Letterfrom Brahmsto Clara Schumann of April 1865 in
Clara Schumann-Johannes Brahms Briefe, ed. Berthold
Litzmann,vol. I (1853-71) (Leipzig,1927),p. 504. The com-
ment to Dietrich is recounted in his Erinnerungen an
JohannesBrahms in Briefen besonders aus seiner Jugend-
zeit (Leipzig,1898),p. 60.
'?Leviis quoted by Max Kalbeckin Johannes Brahms, vol.
II (3rd expanded edn. Berlin, 1921; rpt. Tutzing, 1976), p.
220. Accounts of the Requiem'sEntstehungsgeschichteare
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 broughtto 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 JohannesBrahms (Tutzing, 1971),pp. 91-108.
5
 19TH Prussia and Austria broke out. Although brief,
CENTURY
MUSIC 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 Francea 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 beforePrussia'sProtestantChurch
began to exert considerable influence in
Wilhelm's government and Bismarckembarked
on his Kulturkampfagainst 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 alreadyfought for
thirty and for seven years.""lBrahms'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 mis-
givings about Bismarck, despite the deep ven-
eration he later developed for the "IronChan-
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 January1866, quoted in
Alfred Orel, Johannes Brahms und Julius Allgeyer: Eine
Kunstlerfreundschaftin Briefen (Tiitzing, 1964),p. 39.
'2Kalbeck,JohannesBrahms,II, 218.
6
refers could be understood to represent north-
ern 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 pub-
lished the first substantial analytical commen-
taryof the piece in the Ailgemeine musikalische
Zeitung. In his essay, Schubring had observed
that the variousthemes of the third movement's
eight sections derive from three manifestations
of a basic contrapuntalconfigurationillustrated
in ex. 1. In a letter of 16 February1869, Brahms
thoroughlyrejectedSchubring'sanalysis, claim-
ing 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 patri-
otic hymn "Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser" (ex.
2b).Although Brahms'ssuggestion that his tune
had a political source is surely not to be taken
seriously, his comment does reveal his aware-
ness-perhaps even his anxiety-that his piece
could be rightly or wrongly construed in politi-
cal terms that had been associated with the
Austro-PrussianWar.
Yet a second context involving religious poli-
tics of a different kind may also shed light on
Brahms's misgivings about his title; namely,
13"Ichstreite, 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 Lobdafir, sondem bekennen, dai meine Gedanken
beim Arbeitennicht 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).
 II. III. DANIEL
i 111
dd ~
ftI d
i
d 1 1.
J \j -a
I
, i ?J 1.X1,
9
'o
EI2a
I ,
I
BELLER-
MCKENNA
Reception of
Brahms's op. 45
Sordas
Fugen-Them r
Sogar das Fugen-Thema:

- .iI 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'sreview in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1869).

a. p legato

I 1 I -II
aa. 0I Io I
p legato
b.
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 tra-
ditional 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 LutheranChurch 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 ra-
tionalism itself. The upshot of this revolution
was twofold: outside the church it had led to
various forms of secular religion (to be dis-
cussed presently), while within Protestantism
it had spurred a dramatic theological transfor-
mation, 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 compo-
nent in idealist philosophy but also to liberate
the believer from traditional Christian dogma.
As a result, Brahms and his German contempo-
raries inherited a culture in which it was pos-
sible 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 cul-
tural tradition as a system of faith.14 Along
14Inhis last,posthumouslypublishedtheoriesof national-
ism, ErnestGellnerexplainsthe complicatedstatusof re-
ligionas a culturalsymbolin the nineteenthcenturyand
suggeststhe nationalistramificationsof that status:"On
balance,the Ageof Nationalismin Europeis also the Age
of Secularism.Nationalistslove theirculturebecausethey
love their culture,not becauseit is the idiom of their
faith.They may valuetheirfaithbecauseit is, allegedly,
the expressionof their nationalcultureor character,or
they may be gratefulto the Churchfor havingkept the
nationallanguagealivewhenotherwiseit disappeared from
publiclife;but in the end they valuereligionas an aid to
community,andnot so muchin itself"(Gellner,Nation-
alism [NewYork,19971,pp. 76-77).

7
 19TH these lines of thought, Brahms might have as-
CENTURY
MUSIC 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 in-
terpretation 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 Germanvernacu-
lar. 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. Languageformed 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 lan-
guage 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 languageto both. "Bytrans-
lating scripture into the vernacular," wrote
Gellner,
Protestantismelevates the vernacularinto a high
culture.... ThusProtestantismachievesforits own
religiousends,that transformation of a peasantdia-
lect into a "real"language,codifiedand capableof
8
transmittingmessagesin a context-freemannerover
a largeanonymouspopulation.That which, later,
nationalismstroveto do, anddid,for overtlypoliti-
cal ends,Protestantismpracticedearlier.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'sBible. 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-Protestantorigin.16
Brahms himself draws attention to the im-
portance 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 reli-
gious 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 Reinthalernever 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.
Brahmsmay have feared being associated with
contemporaneousjingoistic proclamations con-
cerning 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
Charlemagnethat the name "Deutschland"made
as the collectivenameforall the
its firstappearance:
races who had stayed on this side of the Rhine.
Consequentlyit denotesthose peoplewho, remain-
ing in theirancestralseat, continuedto speaktheir
'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 "imaginedcommunities," whose origins he spe-
cifically 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
Spreadof Nationalism (London,1983),p. 43.
 Table 1 DANIEL
BELLER-
Early Critiques and Concert Reviews of Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45 (cited in this article) MCKENNA
Reception of
Brahms's op. 45
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
beforeBrahmsmade 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 Liberalsensibilities.
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 under-
stood as a straightforwardaffirmation of uni-
versal 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 is-
sues at the end of this article.
III
Brahms's remark may be brought into a still
clearer focus by a critical reading of the
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.18Although 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. EduardHanslick'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

'8Amore complete survey of early critiques and reviews of

17Richard Wagner,"Whatis German?"in Richard Wagner: op. 45 can be found in Angelika Horstmann, Untersuch-
Stories and Essays, ed. and trans. Charles Osborne (New ungen zur Brahms-Rezeptionder fahre 1860-1880 (Ham-
York, 1973), p. 41. burg, 1986), pp. 130-80.

9
 19TH correspondencewith Brahmsduringthe mid to
CENTURY
MUSIC late 1850s over musical issues in the composer's
early published works.19Deiters, 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 al-
though there is no evidence that Brahmsknew
Kleinert,the composerrecommendedKleinert's
review to his publisher (Johann Melchior
Rieter).21This review was, therefore, so posi-
tive and closely aligned with Brahms's own
sentiments as to gain his personal approval.
In these and nearly all other early commen-
taries, the Requiem was understood to be first
and foremost a "modern" work.22 Although
many critics ultimately attributed its moder-
nity at least in part to Brahms's musical style,
the overriding modern value that they identi-
fied 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:
19WalterFrisch discusses Schubring's relationship to
Brahmsas well as his critical writings on Brahms'smusic
in "Brahmsand Schubring:Musical Criticism and Politics
at Mid-Century,"this journal7 (1984),271-81.
20FlorenceMay, The Life of JohannesBrahms, vol. II (2nd
edn. London, 1948), p. 414. Deiter's relationshipto Brahms
is also discussed in his own biography of the composer,
JohannesBrahms (Leipzig,1880 and 1898).
2'Brahms'srecommendation of Deiter's review is cited in
Kalbeck,JohannesBrahms, II,273-74.
221use the word "modem"here in the spiritthat my sources
used it, to denote something current and up-to-date. I do
not intend-and I strongly doubt they intended-to sug-
gest that Brahmswas 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.
10
"breakingthe 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-
fordsBrahmsa certainartistic freedomand 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 free-
dom in the musical representation."23
According to the critics, however, Brahms
does not forge this artistic and religious free-
dom 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'sRequiem 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."24Although 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,
secularizedform of faith. In this way, Schubring
connects Bach's and Beethoven's religious con-
text to their musical significance for Brahms's
Requiem.
Such a pairing of Bach and Beethoven was
not without precedent and probablynot coinci-
23"Schonin dem Namen des deutschen Requiems hat sich
Brahmseiner gewissen kunstlerischen Freiheitbedient 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 aberzugleich eine volle Freiheit der musik-
alischen Darstellung" (Deiters, "Johannes Brahms'
geistliche Compositionen,"p. 277).
24"Esist in nuce der moderne Glaube des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts, der sich erst durch Zweifel zur um so
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."Variousnineteenth-
century critics recognized this new age in the
music of this or that contemporaneous com-
poser, 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 messi-
anic 1853 essay "Neue Bahnen," particularly
the passage "if he would only point his magic
wand to where the powers amassed in the or-
chestra 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 hindurchringenmuBf,Zweifel,
die weder dem naiven Spener'schenLutherthumeSebastian
Bach's,noch derphilosophischenNaturreligionBeethoven's
Anfechtung bereiteten" (Schubring, "Schumanniana"12,
as cited in Blum, Hundert JahreEin deutsches Requiem,
p. 81).
25Dahlhaus,The Idea of Absolute Music, trans.RogerLustig
(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"Undwenn wir von einem Genius erwarten,daBfer 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
Brahmsnach diesem Requiem den Ehrennamenschwerlich
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 DANIEL
BELLER-
seen the wings of the young eagle grow and MCKENNA
unfold, were not prepared for such an ascent Reception of
Brahms's op. 45
[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
overarchingphilosophical, historical, and theo-
logical 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
Marxon the conservative side, to FranzBrendel
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."30For 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 ap-
pears in the form of the musically universal,
28"Selbstwir, 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
Freudemischte 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 JahreEin 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?CarlDahlhaus, "Die Kategoriedes 'Charakteristischen'
in der Aesthetik des 19. Jahrhundert,"in Klassische und
romantische Musikisthetik (Laaber, 1988), pp. 219-30
(quote, p. 225).
11
 19TH . . . while in Beethoven the many facets of the
CENTURY
MUSIC 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 in-
tention of easily recognizable artistic physiognomy,
but rather the purely musical manner of expression
and formation .... Just as the particularis based on
the universal, so too does the musically characteris-
tic 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 es-
sentially 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 univer-
sality through the musical particular (or the
"musically characteristic"). Whereas other crit-
31"Bei Bach der verkorperten musikalischen Vernunft
erscheint auch das Charakteristischeimmer noch in der
Formdes allgemein Musikalischen,... wahrendBeethoven
die ganze Fulle der Gesichter, die Mannichfaltigkeit der
Empfindungswelt als einzelne Momente innerhalb des
allgemeinen musikalischen Stimmungsgehaltesentfaltet"
(Maczewski, "Ein deutsches Requiem . . . von J. Brahms,"
p. 20).
32"Nichtdie Tendenz, nicht die Intentionensind es, welche
seinen Sch6pfungen die leicht erkennbarekunstlerische
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 musik-
alische Vernunft voraus, die, von Zeit und Individuum
unabhangig-eine, endgiiltig und bleibend ist" (ibid., p.
20).
33"Beialler Vertiefung in die feinsten Schattirungeneiner
charakteristischenAuffassungsteht die Brahms'scheMusik
doch wesentlich auf dem Boden einer durchausallgemein,
rein menschlich religi6sen Empfindung"(ibid.,p. 35).
12
ics identify the modernity of op. 45 with its
sense of freedom, Maczewski defines moder-
nity in the Requiem as its capacity to express
the universal through the particular. He thereby
introduces the final strand of Romantic ideol-
ogy that renders Brahms's Requiem utterly Ger-
man in the minds of the critics; that is, the
ability of the particular to represent the univer-
sal. 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 secu-
lar 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 po-
litical significance of Renaissance individu-
alism, portending . .. the onset of the modern
nation state, populated and animated by indi-
vidual 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 indi-
vidual to the community. From the beginning,
Luther contended that the individual's relation-
ship 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
34Quotedas 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.
35JakobBurckhardt,Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein
Versuch, vol. I: Der Staat als Kunstwerk, vol. II:
Entwicklung des Individuums (Basel, 1860).
36TonyDavies, Humanism (London,1997), p. 17. Much of
the first half of Davies's book examines the degreeto which
the modem notion of Humanism was developed by and
for nineteenth-century Germans.
middle of the seventeenth century and, subse-
quently, the rationalism of the early enlighten-
ment, 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 re-
sources and deprivedof the sources of moral author-
ity in the mind inevitably turns to the group for
guidance. Indeed Pietism, which regardedthe 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 particularinterests and their
very selves. It represented a diminutive Kingdom of
God on earth and thus was the ideal community.37
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 prin-
ciples into the secular sphere and there articu-
lated, amplified and systematized them."38 Spe-
37LiahGreenfeld, 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" originatedwith 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. JarislovPerlikan(St.
Louis, 1956), p. 88. I thank my wife Catherine Beller-
McKenna for drawing my attention to the Lutheranroots
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 GermanMind (Detroit, 1961),
p. 249.
cifically, the Pietists' view of the individual's DANIEL
BELLER-
relationship to the many took on more con- MCKENNA
crete nationalistic significance in the early nine- Reception of
Brahms'sop. 45
teenth century, when Germans promoted cul-
ture and Bildung as the hallmarks of their
ascendance among European nations. As con-
sistently underscored by Romantic national-
ists 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 hu-
manity 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
39Greenfeld,Nationalism, p. 364. Greenfeldgoes on to cite
a wide array of Romantic-nationalists on the subject of
German-Humanuniversalismand furtherconnects the uni-
versalist idea of Germanyto contemporaneousveneration
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.
40Ina recent posthumously published essay, "History of
Ideas and Political Theory," Isaiah Berlin traced the devel-
opment of the Individual/Universal relationship through
Western philosophy of the seventeenth through the nine-
teenth centuries, placing heavy emphasis on the Roman-
tics' transformationof Herder'scultural diversity into sub-
jectivism and German nationalism: "ForByronic Roman-
tics, 'I' is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adven-
turer, the outlaw, he who defies society and accepted val-
ues, and follows his own. . . . But for other thinkers 'I'
becomes something much more metaphysical. It is a col-
lective-a nation, a Church, a Party, a class an edifice in
which I am only a stone, an organismof 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 Firstand the Last,"New YorkReview of Books [April
1998], 56-57).
13
 19TH generationprecedingBrahms.41 Pedersonfocuses
CMNTURY on the reception history of the Beethovenian
symphony, particularly in the journalistic po-
lemics of A. B. Marx. When in 1828, for ex-
ample, Marx defines the task of German art as
"striving after the higher more comprehensive
point of view, properto 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 "understandingthe age through it, can per-
ceive . . . the next objective of humanity."42
Reverberationsof such thinking are not hard
to find in early critiques of Brahms'sRequiem.
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]."43Although we
may make a distinction in degreebetween such
remarks by Brahms's supporters and the more
chauvinistic rhetoric of Wagner et al., the un-
4ISannaPederson, "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 na-
tionalist aesthetics, the role of the string quartet should
also be mentioned, as this was seen to be the most intel-
lectual and thus purest type of instrumental music. The
significance of Beethoven's late style as demonstratedin
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 musik-
alische Zeitung 5 (1828), 493. The quoted passages from
Fichte appearin Greenfeld,Nationalism, p. 365.
43"EineMusik [die]wird und mufi eben so den Laienjeder
Nation wie den MusikkennerjederParteibefriedigen,weil
fur Jedendas darinenthalten 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
wunderbarreiche Harmonie"(Schubring,"Schumanniana"
12, as cited in Blum, Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Re-
quiem, p. 89).
14
derlying emphasis on German cultural superi-
ority must be recognized just the same. And
therefore, like the political and religious con-
text behind Brahms's"menschen"vs. "deutsch"
quotation, the musical politics in the early re-
ception of op. 45 demonstrate the nationalistic
exclusivity behind seemingly egalitarianwords
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 per-
formance had been held in Vienna on 1 Decem-
ber 1867, when JohannHerbeck conducted the
first three movements with the Singverein of
the Gesellschaft derMusikfreunde.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 in-
fluential 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 abso-
lute 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 performancehad met (at
best) with an uneven reception from Viennese
44Hanslick,Vom Musikalisch-Schonen:Ein Beitragzur 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).
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 move-
ment, 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 simi-
lar qualities in the 1867 rendition of the Re-
quiem, even in the successfully performedfirst
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 "GermanRequiem"is a work of unusualim-
portanceandgreatmastery.It strikesus as the ripest
fruit in the field of churchmusic to emergeout of
the style of Beethoven'slate works.Sincethe death-
massesandfunereal-cantatas of ourClassics,hardly
any music has presentedthe shudderof deathand
the seriousnessof transiencewith such force.The
harmonicandcontrapuntalartthatBrahmsacquired
in the school of SebastianBachand inspiredwith
the living breathof ourtime recedesforthe listener
completely behind the mountingexpressionfrom
touchinglamentto annihilatingdeath-cry.45
45Hanslick'sreview was originally published in the Neue
freie Presse of 3 December 1867 and then reprintedin the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2/15 (1867).Laterit 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
duiinktuns als eine der reifsten Friichte, welche aus den
Styl der letzten Beethoven'schen Werke auf dem Felde
geistlicher Musik hervorgewachsen.Seit den Todtenmessen
und TrauercantatenunsererKlassikerhat kaum eine Musik
die Schauer des Todes, den Ernst der Verganglichkeitmit
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 Horerganzzuruiick
hinter dem von ruhrender Klage bis zum vernichtenden
Todesgrauensich steigernden Ausdruck."
According to Hanslick, the Viennese did not DANIEL
warm up to the piece until 1875. In that year, BELLER-
MCKENNA
Brahms,in his final season of a three-year stint Reception of
as director of the Singverein, conducted op. 45 Brahms'sop. 45
on 28 February in the concert hall of the
Gesellschaft derMusikfreunde.Only three days
later a Wagner concert was held in the same
hall featuringexcerpts 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
"originalityand the most noble naturalness and
simplicity." Hanslick barely left any space to
discuss Wagner'smusic except to set up (once
again) the Requiem's lineage in Bach and
Beethoven: "Wagnerbegins completely anew
on the debris of all music earlier than his own;
Brahmsbelieves one should not be ashamed of
proper ancestors like Bach and Beethoven."
Without mentioning politics or nationalities,
Hanslick alreadytips 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 preferredanother vehicle
with which to make his comparison: a sym-
phony. 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"Diemusikalische Saison in Wien 1874-1875," Deutsche
Rundschau, book 8 (May 1875), 307-14. Hanslick's essay
is reprintedin 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
Gotterdimmerungalso is reprintedin Blum, HundertJahre
Ein deutsches Requiem, pp. 135-36.
15
 19TH Without a Brahmssymphony at his disposal,
CENTURY
MUSIC Hanslick described op. 45 in terms one might
reserve for an autonomous work like a sym-
phony.47Already, the previously quoted phrases
like "purestartistic means" and "completetech-
nical mastery" set this tone. Then, after taking
Wagner to task for ignoring his musical ances-
tors, 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 stir-
ring 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 mu-
sical qualities of Brahms's Requiem are pre-
sented as relatively timeless, and the piece is
sooner to be compared with Bach's B-Minor
Mass and Beethoven'sMissa solemnis than with
contemporaneous sacred music, from which,
according to Hanslick, nothing has been writ-
ten that can take its place beside it.
The previously cited, pro-Brahmscritics 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, how-
ever, 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 retreatfrom Wagnerismwith
a retreat from the Germanic: the absolute mu-
sic 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.
47PeterGay considers Hanslick's aesthetic dilemma with
vocal music in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, chap. 6,
"ForBeckmesser: EduardHanslick, Victim and Prophet,"
pp. 272-73. See also Dahlhaus,"Reine,absoluteTonkunst,"
in Klassische und romantische Musikasthetik, pp. 298-
303.
16
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: "Itcasts 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 inti-
mate participation."48Here there is no mention
of modern religious freedom, but freedom from
anything confessional or ecclesiastical alto-
gether, as the text's sacredconnotations 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 sacredmusic 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
Wagnerianterm absolute musical art reflected
"an esthetic presented in an attitude of dry
empiricism in the spirit of disenchantment af-
ter the collapse of Hegelianism around 1850."49
Indeed, Hanslick's reputed formalism reins in
the metaphysicalside of aesthetic theories about
instrumental music that he inherited from the
Romantics, theories that had posited music's
ability to approachthe 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 ances-
tors 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 originalconclusion to Vom Musikalisch-Schonen,sup-
pressedfrom 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 appearsin the first edition of Vom Musikalisch-
Schonen (Leipzig,1854),p. 104.
 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-Germanconcert 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 spe-
cific brandof 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 reactionarynationalism 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 compo-
sitional 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.51Indeed, to the extent that this decline
was associated with the rise of Modernism,
Hanslick's disinclination to call op. 45 "mod-
ern" in his review could be a stylistic corollary
to the anti-Wagneriancontent 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?Horstmannnotes a concomitant emphasis on patriotic
sentiment in reviews of op. 45 around 1870 and 1871
(Untersuchungenzur Brahms-Rezeption,p. 159).Hanslick,
though a Prague-bornCatholic 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; MargaretNotley,
"Brahmsas Liberal:Genre, Style, and Politics in LateNine-
teenth-Century Vienna," this journal 17 (1993), 107-23;
and SandraMcColl, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896-1897:
Critically Moving Forms (Oxford,1996).
52OnHanslick, Wagner, and Modernism, see Gay, "For
Beckmesser,"Freud, Jews, pp. 257-77. I cannot agreewith
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 DANIEL
BELLER-
Musikverein's memorial performance of the MCKENNA
Requiem on 11 April 1897 (eight days after Reception of
Brahms's op. 45
Brahms'sdeath), Max Kalbeck complained:
Therewerelargespacesin the hall,andthe standing
room,which is in the habitof beingoverfilledat a
Bruckner- was justaboutempty.Even
orStrauss-fest,
at the funeralneitherthe universitynorthe student
bodywas represented.The "GermanNationalists"
celebrate the servile, weak-whited Romeling
Bruckner.Modernyouthhasno time forthe greatest
Germanartist.Onehas 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-nesswas essentially cultural
and linguistic rather than political.54Kalbeck,
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-cen-
tury cultural nationalism to which Kalbeck
owes his Liberalism was anything but apoliti-
cal. 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 lin-
guistic-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-Wagnerdichotomy. 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 po-
larities between Brahms and Wagner in politi-
cal 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 frequentlydownplayed
altogether. Although this judgment resonates
53Ascited 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 Brahmsand his mu-
sic in this positive political light.
A failure to reflect in said manner may in
partaccount for why, in orderto 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 (de-
fining it instead in terms of Luther'sBible) and
offered to "rescue" it from a "crypto-Wagne-
rian" (readGerman)performancetradition.
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-reverentialattitude,
unwieldy forces and a crypto-Wagnerianapproachto
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 suprahis-
torical paradigmfor 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 approachhis music
55Gardiner,"Brahmsand the 'Human'Requiem,"p. 1809.
18
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 can-
not 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 cor-
rect performance but a politically correct per-
formance."57 While Taruskin has in mind the
"politics" of the early music movement,
Gardiner's comments have more general politi-
cal 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 abso-
lute 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
p. 1810.
56Ibid.,
57Taruskin,"Traditionand Authority,"in Text and Act
(NewYork,1995),p. 174.
 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
Hauptwerkederbeiden hervorragendstenTondichter
der Gegenwart! Gr6ofereGegensatze 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, grogfeGedanken und
bei allem Reichtum, aller Originalitat die edelste
Natiirlichkeit und Einfachheit.Bei WagnerjederSatz
in Maniergetaucht, bei Brahmskein 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. Wahrenddie 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
DANIEL
BELLER-
MCKENNA
Reception of
Brahms's op. 45
Bibelwortewahlt, und zwar so wahlt, daBdie eigenste
Natur der Musik und damit zugleich das Gemiith
des H6rers in intimere Mitwirkung gezogen wird.
(Whatan 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 hardlyconceivable. In Brahms'sRequiem 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 orches-
tral 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 Brahmsnone is. Wagnerbegins
completely anew on the debris of all music earlier
than his own; Brahms believes one should not be
ashamedof properancestorslike Bachand Beethoven.
While with Wagnermusic gives up the power of its
inwardness to become Malerei, it remains with
Brahms the most properlanguage of a strong spirit,
and shows us how a musical composition can stir
every heart, without stirring the foundations of mu-
sic. Today one can calmly declare that since Bach's
B-MinorMass and Beethoven'sMissa solemnis, noth-
ing 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 ecclesi-
astical 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.)
19