Composition in Vienna from the <i>Vormärz</i> to the Anschluss, 1830–1938

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-02-12

Vienna

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-02-12

What is behind Vienna's world-wide reputation as a 'city of music'? Vienna's images of itself and outside opinions of its significance as a musical city capture internal and external preoccupations with the intricate details and ambitious visions that collectively articulate its unique ambience and status, This wide-ranging study of Viennese music, musicians, traditions, institutions and cultures provides a historical background and conceptual framework for understanding the centuries of musical accomplishments that underlie the city's mystique. The book explores questions of identity and place, and local traditions and practices, before considering musical networks, organizations, associations and businesses, and the musicians who thrived in them. Encompassing classical music from medieval liturgy to Mozart, Beethoven's symphonies to Strauss's waltzes, from Schubert to Schoenberg, the city is also well known for its musical theatre, live music in cafes and hostelries, klezmer, jazz, pop, rock, and hip-hop. The story continues.

Brahms Patriotic and Political

2025-01-01

Offers a historical context in which to understand how Brahms's three most intensely political and nationalistic works interact with questions of German patriotism, liberalism and nationalism. Johannes Brahms rarely composed music that engaged the national-political issues of the day. Three of his works, though, do precisely this: the Fünf Lieder für Männerchor; the Triumphlied for eight-part chorus and orchestra; and the Fest- und Gedenksprüche for eight-part chorus a cappella. In Brahms Patriotic and Political, David Brodbeck challenges notions that Brahms's political music evinces embarrassing anticipations of later Prussian militarism and German chauvinism. Instead, he provides a thick historical context in which to read these works and offers a more nuanced understanding of the intersections of Brahms's music and questions of German patriotism, liberalism, and nationalism than has been customary in the field of historical musicology. In particular, Brodbeck relates the Männerchor-Lieder to the debate over how and in what form a German nation-state might be achieved; he relates the Triumphlied to the euphoria but also the solemnity that attended the foundation of the German Reich; and he relates the Fest- und Gedenksprüche to the necessary work of instilling in the diverse German people a genuine sense of national belonging. At the same time, he traces Brahms's changing attitude toward Otto von Bismarck, the "Blacksmith of the Reich," whom he originally loathed but, in time, came to venerate. Brahms Patriotic and Political will appeal to readers with interests in both nineteenth-century German music and Central European history.

Brahms Patriotic and Political

2025-04-17

Brahms Patriotic and Political

Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2025-06-10

Offers a historical context in which to understand how Brahms's three most intensely political and nationalistic works interact with questions of German patriotism, liberalism and nationalism. Johannes Brahms rarely composed music that engaged the national-political issues of the day. Three of his works, though, do precisely this: the Fünf Lieder für Männerchor ; the Triumphlied for eight-part chorus and orchestra; and the Fest- und Gedenksprüche for eight-part chorus a cappella. In Brahms Patriotic and Political, David Brodbeck challenges notions that Brahms's political music evinces embarrassing anticipations of later Prussian militarism and German chauvinism. Instead, he provides a thick historical context in which to read these works and offers a more nuanced understanding of the intersections of Brahms's music and questions of German patriotism, liberalism, and nationalism than has been customary in the field of historical musicology. In particular, Brodbeck relates the Männerchor-Lieder to the debate over how and in what form a German nation-state might be achieved; he relates the Triumphlied to the euphoria but also the solemnity that attended the foundation of the German Reich; and he relates the Fest- und Gedenksprüche to the necessary work of instilling in the diverse German people a genuine sense of national belonging. At the same time, he traces Brahms's changing attitude toward Otto von Bismarck, the "Blacksmith of the Reich," whom he originally loathed but, in time, came to venerate. Brahms Patriotic and Political will appeal to readers with interests in both nineteenth-century German music and Central European history.

„WOLLEN WIR DOCH NIE VERGESSEN, DASS WIR ARME DEUTSCHE KOMPONISTEN SIND.“

2022

• Philosophy

Settling for Second Best

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022

• Political Science
• Literature
• History

Abstract The Five Songs for Four-Voice Male Chorus, Op. 41 (1867), was the only essay Brahms published in a genre that had been a prime medium for the expression of liberal-nationalist sentiment dating back to the years of Napoleonic domination of the German lands. Modern commentators, more apt to think of Hitler’s Germany than of the unified Germany the liberal nationalists dreamt about, have been critical of, not to say appalled by, the songs’ supposedly “aggressive-chauvinistic” and “ideologically questionable” texts (Meischein) and have interpreted Brahms’s decision to compose them as evidence of “how far toward military enthusiasm [his] youthful patriotism could lean” (Beller-McKenna). This chapter suggests that it is high time to rethink these assumptions. What has been missing is the careful delineation of the historical context in which the music was written. Only with that established can we hope to hear the songs with the ears of Brahms’s contemporaries.

Goldmark’s “Thoughts on Form and Style”—and on the Wagnerians’ Anti-Semitism

Nineteenth Century Studies · 2021

• Political Science
• Art history
• Religious studies

Abstract In the summer of 1896, Carl Goldmark (1830–1915), a Viennese Jew of Hungarian origin, drafted an essay in which he wrote bitterly about fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism as he experienced it in the critical reception of his operas Das Heimchen am Herd and Die Königin von Saba. The late Austrian musicologist Gerhard J. Winkler characterized this extraordinary text “as [a] private confession of disillusionment, namely, the destruction of the lifelong illusion that Jews could seamlessly ‘assimilate’ . . . into German culture.” Yet Goldmark’s cri de coeur did not, in fact, remain off the record. In the spring of 1911, the Neue freie Presse, Vienna’s most influential assimilationist organ, published the bulk of it as “Thoughts on Form and Style (a Defense).” As I show through a close reading of this text and others in which the Jewish Question figures prominently, “Thoughts on Form and Style” eventually served as a spirited, public defense of Goldmark’s self-perception as a German composer—and this in an age of not only increasing anti-Semitism but also, because of that seemingly intractable prejudice, growing doubts in a younger generation of Central European Jews about the viability of the acculturation project itself.

“You Don’t Just Stick It Together”: The Beach Boys and the Beatles in the Mid-1960s

Rock Music Studies · 2021-09-02

Paul McCartney’s admiration for the work of Brian Wilson is well known, and the inspiration he took from Wilson’s Pet Sounds (1966) during the period of Sgt Pepper(1966–67) has been often noted. What has hitherto gone unremarked is that some of the most striking features of McCartney’s work already on Revolver (1966) can likewise be traced to Wilson’s mid-decade project of musical experimentation, beginning with the single “The Little Girl I Once Knew” (1965). In four case studies, this article explores how McCartney “nicked” ideas from Wilson and made them his own.

Korngold Father and Son in Vienna’s Prewar Public Eye

Princeton University Press eBooks · 2019-08-27

This chapter describes the early life of Erich Korngold. As a child, Korngold was a prodigy the likes of which had rarely been encountered before. He was not only an accomplished pianist but also a composer of preternaturally mature and astonishingly modern-sounding music. He was even called “the little Mozart.” In 1907, at the age of ten, Korngold began contrapuntal studies with Robert Fuchs, a venerable teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, and Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942). From there, Korngold embarked on his early musical career. The chapter also describes the reviews and criticisms of Korngold's work, as well as the controversies surrounding the boy and his growing fame, during this period.