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Description          BRAHMS AND THE GERMAN SPIRIT       This book highlights the intersection of religion and nationalism in the music of Johannes Brahms, particularly as it manifests itself in his large-scale sacred choral music. Although “nationalism” is a subject that arises more commonly in discussions of his contemporary Richard Wagner, Brahms's musical style, his aesthetic, and his compositional choices were also strongly determined by his identity as a German. This view runs counter to the traditional understanding of Brahms’s place in music and cultural history.  Brahms’s music has long been valued for its classicizing detachment from its cultural milieu.  Accordingly, Brahms's instrumental compositions are deemed models of "absolute" music whose meaning is self-derived, independent of its time and place, while his vocal works—especially the more “public” large-scale choral works—are ascribed “universal” meaning in nearly all accounts by modern writers.  This book challenges the universality of these pieces, arguing instead for their essential German-ness.       A political impulse underlies the critical urge to isolate Brahms and his music from his late nineteenth century German context.  In light of the tragic political history of Germany in the last century, we prefer to see Brahms as a representative of the good and noble in German musical art in distinction to Wagner, whose ideology dovetails too neatly with—and was so eagerly embraced along with his music by—the National Socialists.  In order to shield Brahms from any similar stigma, the reception of his music across the twentieth century turned the very real classicizing tendencies in his art into a tool for denying its strongly marked Germanic character.  That character derives from several sources: Brahms’s affinity for German folk song; his deep sense of patriotism; his adherence to the Austro-German derived musical language of Viennese classicism;  and his abiding engagement with music of the German past.       More than one of these sources of German character is directly connected to religious concerns, nowhere more so than in the choral traditions in which Brahms composed.  In particular, his settings of biblical texts access the historical role of Luther’s Bible in German language and literature.  In comparison to the overtly nationalistic element in Wagner’s musical legacy, the German elements in Brahms style have been easy to overlook, and, I argue, deliberately downplayed since the second third of the twentieth century.  But nationalism comes in many guises and the lack of an overt political agenda on Brahms’s part does not obviate the need to understand how nationalism affected his works.  For Brahms, nationalism is expressed more clearly in cultural terms, and this point emerges most poignantly in three large scale choral works on biblical texts: Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45; the Triumphlied, op. 55; and the Fest- und Gedenksprüche, op. 109.  Using these three works as a core repertoire (in separate chapters), this book focuses on the neglected intersection of nationalism and spirituality in Brahms’s music. CHAPTER SUMMARIES Chapter 1: Introduction: Brahms And The German Spirit I begin this chapter by assaying the long-standing and deep connections between religion and nationalism in German culture.  A distinction is drawn between the virulent völkisch nationalism from the late nineteenth century through the National Socialist period and cultural nationalism, which has a longer, less immediately threatening tradition in German arts.  Through reference to several of Brahms’s folk-song settings that carry religious connotations, romanticism and its spiritual underpinnings are posited as the source for Brahms’s connection between Germanic culture and spirituality.  The second half of the chapter comprises an analysis of Brahms song "Geistliches Wiegenlied," for alto, viola and piano, which includes an instrumental obbligato on the old German Christmas hymn, "Josef, lieber Josef mein," thereby providing a rich intersection of culture, spirituality, and art. Chapter 2: Religion, Language, and Luther's Bible This chapter broadly considers Brahms's religious convictions as reflected through his engagement with the Bible.  Brahms's use of Luther's translation of the Bible as a basic source of the German language is compared with the veneration of the German language by early proponents of nationalism: Ernst Moritz Arndt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and linguistic scholar Wilhelm Scherer.  Brahms's own ideas about the Bible and language are reflected in various sources from his Nachlass, including: several books on religion in his personal library; his own baptismal copy of the Bible (with Brahms's annotations); and a pocket notebook of biblical texts that he collected during the last twenty years of his life.  The latter two sources are analyzed for how Brahms creates connections among specific biblical texts. Particularly in the pocket notebook, overt references to contemporary political events are evoked through Brahms's textual choices. Chapter 3: Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45 and the Apocalyptic Paradigm Whereas the potential religious meaning of Ein deutsches Requiem, a work based on texts from Luther's Bible, is self-evident, the potentially nationalist meaning of the work has long been overlooked—even denied.  By focusing on the work's basic dichotomies (topical, temporal, and formal) I construct an argument for understanding the Requiem against prevailingly apocalyptic modes of historical thought in nineteenth-century Germany. Under the apocalyptic paradigm, the present world is conceived separately from the awaited kingdom.  Stripped of its specific spiritual meaning that expectation was mapped onto the drive towards German unification.  Whereas the Requiem is not an overtly political work, its apocalyptic underpinnings strongly relate it to the German nationalistic program of the 1860s when it was composed. Chapter 4: Brahms Triumphlied, op. 55 and the Sense of an Ending Whereas Ein deutsches Requiem expresses an apocalyptic paradigm from the perspective of an individual, the Triumphlied, op. 55, written in 1871 to celebrate the founding of the German Kaiserreich, provides a public expression through a large-scale choral-orchestral work on a biblical text, in this case from the apocalyptic book of Revelation.  Unlike the more private, philosophical apocalypticism of Ein deutsches Requiem, Brahms celebrates the Kaiserreich in op. 55 by musically depicting the apocalyptic moment through compositional means foreign to his basic style.  That change of compositional voice partly accounts for the work’s singular lack of popularity today, and in this chapter I analyze what in particular is un-Brahmsian about this work that is still recognizably by Brahms, thereby shedding light on why the work was, despite our modern aversion to it, ranked on a par with op. 45 during Brahms’s lifetime. Chapter 5: Gebet eines Königs: The Fest- und Gedenksprüche, Op. 109 and the end of Apocalypse In 1889, Brahms produced two last groups of sacred choral works, the biblically texted Fest- und Gedenksprüche, op. 109 and the Three Motets, op. 110.  Through chorale settings, biblical passages, and the normative use of polychorality, Brahms evokes a sense of the German community yet more strongly than in earlier works.  Surprisingly, however, the separation of a mythical Volk and the modern political state is problematicized, even blurred in these works. Composed in the aftermath of the politically tumultuous "Drei-Kaiser-Jahr" of 1888, these works demonstrate Brahms's post-apocalyptic doubt and his own brand of political pessimism.  Brahms uses polychorality in the Fest- und Gedenksprüche as a means of constructing the plural voice of a people who call for God's help through prayer and pleading. Polychoral texture in these works, then, is more than a historical reference to the German musical past, it is simultaneously a reflection of the modern German community and its threatened political fragmentation. Chapter 6: Beyond the End Although Brahms wrote no new choral works after the Fest-und Gedenksprüche, he turned to several compositional projects during his last eight years that looked back to German folk culture and German spirituality: Even in such ostensibly “absolute” works as the several collections of piano “Intermezzi” (opp. 116-199), a sense of nostalgia is ever present.  His own backward glance set the stage for his early posthumous legacy: in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Brahms, who had often been criticized for his “Modernist” style during his lifetime, became a tool for conservative and increasingly nationalistic voices in German music criticism. This chapter examines some of the best-known German writers on Brahms from the first half of the twentieth century (Walther Niemann, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Geiringer, and others) and traces an increasingly nationalistic and at times even racist trend in Brahms reception. Finally, I argue that our quite different modern perception of Brahms is partly a reaction against the German-Brahms portrayed in those years.