by Michael Haas
Hitler, however, turned Wagner's view of the ‘dynamic versus the static’ onto its head and by 1935 had ushered in a period of stifling conventionalism. Furthermore, the Nazis’ racist conclusions, extrapolated from selectively chosen anti-Semitic polemics by Wagner, resulted in banning the very composers, who though Jewish, had regularly reflected the conviction that German music was predestined in its unique superiority – the very view held by Wagner himself. Decades before the rise of Nazism, Jewish Wagnerians, in their capacities as performers, writers and musicologists, were leading the fight for the musical dynamism that they believed to be uniquely German. They rejected what they saw as the static conformity of the past. Thus, nineteenth-century Jewish composers were removed by Jewish programmers not because they were Jewish but because they were deemed to represent the conventional. With Hitler's arrival, composers were suppressed not because they were conventional but because they were Jewish.
With the exceptions of Mendelssohn and Offenbach, prominent Jewish composers of the nineteenth century have largely disappeared from today's concert halls and opera houses. To Meyerbeer and Moscheles, one could add also the once popular Jacques Fromental Halévy (1799–1862), Ferdinand Hiller (1811–85), Ferdinand David (1810–73), Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–88), Anton Rubinstein (1829–94), Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), Karl Goldmark (1830–1915) and Camille Erlanger (1863–1919). To these should be added the virtuoso performing-composers: Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925), Karl Davidov (1838–89), Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–69), Henryk Wieniawski (1835–80), Józef Wieniawski (1837–1912), Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), David Popper (1843–1913) and Ignaz Brüll (1846–1907). Most of these musicians had a closer sympathy with Brahms than with Wagner. Why these composers have virtually disappeared from the repertoire, and what influence, if any, they might have had on a musical legacy not conditioned by Wagnerian anti-Semitism followed by 12 years of National Socialism, asks more questions than answers can provide. Wagner's anti-Semitism is something to which we shall often return. Not only did he represent the view of a particular time and place, but his writings, more than those of almost anyone else, contributed to shaping Hitler's opinions. Yet, when we place his rambling polemics in context, what emerges most strikingly is the anger, resentment and, above all, the jealousy that Wagner felt at having to share his natural musical inheritance with people he saw as interlopers in German culture.
CHAPTER 3
An Age of Liberalism, Brahms and the Chronicler Hanslick
…this was carried out by a Viennese lawyer [Hanslick], who was a great music enthusiast and expert of Hegelian dialectics, who by virtue of his Jewish origins, which he kept elegantly hidden, wrote much that was easily accessible. […] He went on to author a pamphlet on the subject of ‘Musical Beauty’ in which he cleverly proceeds to propagate Jewish musical ambitions.
…dies ward durch einen Wiener Juristen erreicht [Hanslick], welcher großer Musikfreund und Kenner der Hegel'schen Dialektik war, außerdem aber durch seine, wenn auch zierlich verdeckte jüdische Abkunft besonders zugänglich befunden wurde. […]
Dieser schrieb nun ein Libell über das ‘Musikalisch-Schöne’, in welchem er für den allgemeinen Zweck des Musikjudenthums mit außerordentlichem Geschick verfuhr.
Letter from Wagner to Frau Muchanoff, née Countess Nesselrode, Tribschen bei Luzern, 1869
The Political Movement of Liberalism
The years 1867 to 1897 were defined by the central role played by the Austrian Liberal Party and matched almost precisely the period that Brahms was resident in Vienna (1868–97). Economically, these years of Liberalism financed the burgeoning Industrial Revolution and promoted open markets, unregulated trade, a liberal economy, and easy access to finance. It shunned institutions that put barriers in place and inevitably began showing tendencies of anti-clericalism and anti-nationalism, both seen as impediments to unhampered capital growth. Its emergence, following the creation of the Austro-Hungarian dual Monarchy in 1867, picked up where the missed political opportunities of the Revolution of 1848 had left off. The Revolution had at least been followed by a boom in Moravia, Bohemia and Austria, and demanded an economic environment in which it could continue to flourish. This was only possible with the arrival of a political class sympathetic to widening wealth-creation. Until the Vienna stock market crash of May 1873, Liberalism, with its values placed more highly on the individual than on the broader social community, had created the basis for a strengthened, confident, yet still emerging, middle class that was demanding greater participation in affairs. With the crash of 1873, a general disenchantment with the capitalist model demanded concessions from the ruling party, leading to enfranchisement being increased to approximately 6 per cent of all Austrian males, followed by several further reforms until 1907, when all men over the age of 24 were eligible to vote. This right was extended to women in 1919. The December Constitution of 1867, which opened the way for full Jewish emancipation, along with progressive extensions of enfranchisement, gave increasing opportunities to an ever expanding Jewish middle class.
This newly assimilated bourgeoisie came to enjoy prominence far beyond their actual numbers within the general population, especially in the liberal professions of law, academia and medicine, though the Habsburg institutions of the civil service and military continued to remain resistant to full Jewish integration. Franz Joseph himself was seen by Jewish professionals as someone who represented their interests. In the long term, however, it was the inability of Liberals to deal with the effects of policies resulting in social disparities between the middle and lower orders that eventually caused their downfall: a benevolent, albeit not fully democratic, paternalism had been blind to the deprivation beyond their immediate class. One of the last reports of Brahms's political discussions was an account of his agitation at the election in 1895 of the populist, anti-Semitic Christian-Social mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, as something that he had foreseen and about which he had repeatedly warned his fellow Liberals. As Stefan Zweig relates in his memoirs, Die Welt von Gestern,1 it was only with the fall of Liberalism that ‘one became aware of how thin yet noble its veneer had been. With its passing, the conciliation found in public life was lost and divergent interests collided. From this point on, it would become a fight.‘2 Elsewhere, Zweig eloquently explains how the wealthy aristocracy, which under normal circumstances would have been the target of ‘the little man's’ social outrage, gave support to Lueger's stridently anti-Semitic Christian Social Party so that Jews, rather than aristocrats, would be seen as the wealthy exploiters of the labouring poor.3
Brahms and the Liberal Party
Until the fall of Liberalism in 1897, a confident Viennese bourgeoisie became increasingly culturally ambitious, valuing music and opera more than appeared to be the case in Paris, London or Berlin. What seems surprising from today's perspective is the apparent contradiction between Liberalism's progressive economic policies and its conservative cultural agenda throughout the 1870s and 1880s. It would be another ten years before this started to change in Vienna. With the still recent emergence of an educated middle class, it was inevitable that their cultural ambitions would affirm their social position. In art and architecture, this resulted in a wave of neo-classical paintings and buildings, the best of which still remain grand and impressive, radiating confidence in bourgeois stability. That such a movement would appeal to Austria's minuscule Protestant minority – including the Hanseatic Brahms – and to newly enfranchised Jewish professionals is hardly surprising. That it would become anathema to Pan-German nationalists, who worked themselves up into waves of mass conversions to Protestantism over the following decades in order to distance themselves from Catholic (seen as non-German) Austria, is perhaps less obvious.
Yet German nationalism was mixed with many other ideals and theories. At one extreme, it was socially inclusive, even Socialist, and could point to the Liberal Party's neglect of the proletariat, the agricultural labourers and the unemployed, who had no soci
al standing, nor any prospect of improving circumstances. The nationalism that grew out of the 1848 Revolution was progressive in that it was middle-class revolutionaries who saw a state, laboriously hewn out of a nation, as an instrument for everyone, regardless of class or position. It must be remembered that the aristocracy was largely supranational, with little sympathy for the people who made up the nations they administered. German academia, however, was overwhelmingly nationalist, and student unrest, in the modern sense, found its equivalent in the fiercely sectarian Burschenschaften (academic fraternities). Thus Brahms's own sense of ‘German-ness’ can be compared to that of millions of assimilated Jews, though works such as the Triumphlied and his Academic Festival Overture exude a sense of national pride that would have amounted to more than mere patriotism during the later years of the nineteenth century in Vienna.
The number of Viennese (predominantly from the servant classes) who spoke Czech as a first language was significant enough to lead to proposals for the city to become officially bi-lingual in the manner of Prague, with a minimal demand that at least all municipal documents and forms should be available in both languages. Even this tiny, yet practical concession resulted in German nationalists virtually taking to the barricades and the proposal was dropped. One of Brahms's closest friends, the noted surgeon Theodor Billroth, was not only a prominent Liberal, but also an unashamed apologist for German as the official first language throughout the Empire. Despite Brahms's admiration for Bismarck, he was not an obvious supporter of any of the pan-German movements. Like many Liberals, he felt that unrestricted capital would eventually allow those at the bottom of the social ladder to join in the general prosperity of the age. Brahms's philo-Semitism has entered into legend, with the journalist Daniel Spitzer even joking that it was his friendship with the composer that had led to speculation that Brahms himself was a Jew.4 He was clearly fond of socialising with Vienna's haute-bourgeoisie, which was largely made up of banking and industrial families. This was itself a philo-Semitic environment and included such prominent Jewish families as the Mautners, Gutmanns and Todescos, as well as the non-Jewish brothers von Miller zu Aichholz. The Jewish pianists Julius Epstein and Ignaz Brüll were among Brahms's closest friends, and, of course, he had a long friendship with Joseph Joachim; his private physician was Robert Breuer, one of the principal specialists at Vienna's Jewish Hospital. He was the son of Josef Breuer, one of the first doctors to treat neurosis, whose work was eventually developed by his young colleague Sigmund Freud. Other prominent non-Jewish friends and supporters included the surgeon Billroth, the critic and writer Max Kalbeck, and the composer and archivist at Vienna's Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Eusebius Mandyczewski. All of them shared Brahms's religious scepticism, and supported the Liberal Party and its policies of social tolerance.
Arthur Schnitzler describes the kind of society in which Brahms moved in his novel Der Weg ins Freie.5 It tells the story of a non-Jewish composer (though Brahms is definitely not the model) who moved in Vienna's circles of wealthy Jewish families. In one revealing passage, the father of one of the protagonists in defending his Zionist position makes the observation that it was the Jews who had founded the Liberal Party, only to be betrayed by non-Jewish Liberals; and it was the Jews who had supported pan-German nationalism, only to be betrayed by non-Jewish nationalists. He goes on to say that one could expect the same to be true of the Social Democratic and the Communist Parties in the fullness of time. It was a prescient observation in what Schnitzler saw as a social drama from the late 1890s, though the book was not published until 1908.6
Brahms's Musical World and Jews
If Brahms was accused of philo-Semitism in the German nationalist press, it was more because he stood in opposition to Wagner and Bruckner rather than because of the company he kept. In his diaries, the composer and journalist Richard Heuberger recalls Brahms both despairing of Viennese anti-Semitism and at the same time suggesting it was time to call a halt to the influx of Jews from the East. Since most such arrivals were members of the poor, devout kaftan-wearing community, similar observations were made by middle-class Jews as well; it was more a question of class than of race
Brahms's notoriously curmudgeonly nature most likely extended to everyone, regardless of race and religion. One recalls his remark to a hostess upon departing for the evening: ‘My apologies to any of the guests whom I may have forgotten to offend.‘7 The composer Karl Goldmark relates in his memoirs an unpleasant encounter in which Brahms addressed him in an anti-Semitic tone when he discovered that Goldmark had set a text by Luther that Brahms had intended for himself. But just as well documented is Brahms's angry outburst at the election of the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Dr Karl Lueger. In short, Brahms was a North German Hanseatic Protestant in South German Catholic Austria, and was seen as the sober antithesis to the Romantic Movement's tribal German nationalism. Despite his own Teutonic pride, or even the nationalist tone struck in his Academic Festival Overture, he fundamentally had little sympathy for the ideas of ‘German soul’ and ‘German spirit’ that were often violently disseminated by German Burschenschaften, making middle-class Jews, who failed to understand why Burschenschaften did not see them as German, feel both nervous and exposed.
The Romantic view of spirit, soul and nation was, on one level, a visceral identification with a geographical place and culture, while on another it was a thinly disguised lever with which to remove those perceived as not belonging. To recently enfranchised Jews, there was no contradiction in being both Jewish and German. Romantics, however, saw the individual blessed by the Almighty with a unique ‘racial’ identity founded on nationhood, using the more emotive description of ‘blood’. To them, to be Jewish and German was not only a contradiction but a physical impossibility. While some Jews were swept away by the fervid nationalism represented by Wagner, others were intoxicated by Wagner's music alone. Meanwhile, many non-Jews were drawn to the more soberly ordered world of Brahms. Thus the perception of Brahms and Wagner as polar opposites led to Brahms being thought to hold particular positions merely because they were not held by Wagner.
Brahms's Liberal sympathies and his circle of friends and colleagues brought many important representatives of Jewish assimilation into his orbit. These included both patrons and musicians. Within this circle was the first generation of Jews who were able to participate in musical life without restriction. It is fascinating to differentiate between those who helped shape the age, and those who merely tried to fit in. There are two principal sources associated with Brahms that facilitated or documented Jewish entry into German and Austrian musical life. One is the musical movement that grew out of Mendelssohn's Music Academy in Leipzig and which became the bastion of the so-called ‘Old German School’, as opposed to the ‘New German School’ deriving from Liszt and Wagner in nearby Weimar. The other source is from the writings and reviews of Brahms's friend and principal apologist, Eduard Hanslick. The following short excerpt by Hanslick from his obituary of the composer Robert Franz in the Neue Freie Presse on 1 November 1892 joins these two sources together in a single and succinct résumé:
With the death of Robert Franz, the last of the glorious circle has now departed which in youthful enthusiasm rallied around the banner of Romanticism unfurled by Mendelssohn and Schumann. These two masters have long since left us, but following them were [Ferdinand] David, Moritz Hauptmann, [Julius] Rietz, [Robert] Volkmann, [Sterndale] Bennett, [Ferdinand] Hiller and latterly, [Niels] Gade. Only Clara Schumann remains as the Madonna of the Davidsbündler – and God grant her a long life! The last fading lights are now extinguishing from Leipzig's golden age. Robert Franz was one of the most appreciated and talented of this circle.8
As with the visual arts, architecture and literature that grew from the dominant, liberal middle classes, much of the music was stolid, respectable and often quite derivative. Today, re-acquaintance with the works of some of these minor composers offers frustratingly limited rewards. Yet the conventionality of much of
this music tells its own intriguing tale and sets the tone for developments that would come later in the following century.
Hanslick's Musical World
Hanslick was the centre of Brahms's circle and although he was raised Christian, his mother had been born into the Kisch family, who were prominent Jewish merchants by royal appointment in Prague. Hanslick reported in his memoirs how his father was the only parent from whom he received an education, avoiding any in-depth mention of his mother's family apart from confirming that her parents were originally Viennese. He circumnavigates the issue of his Jewish ancestry by devoting an entire chapter to his mother in his autobiography where he maintains that it was through her and her parents that he developed a love of French literature. This at least indicated, if only vicariously, the enlightened, outward-looking model of those rational ideals and beliefs typical of the age of Liberalism. He was dismissive of many of the emotive, as opposed to expressive, qualities that were beginning to define music in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His rigidly Rationalist view of art and music made him suspicious of showmanship and empty virtuosity, which, as we know from Wagner, was in itself often seen as a near diversionary tactic of Jewish instrumentalists. Hanslick's ideals harkened back to the purity of the age of classicism and had no time for the portentous matters of nation and spirit being crow-barred into music or, indeed, into opera. His book, a Hegelian aesthetic thesis from 1854 entitled Vom Musikalisch-Schönen,9 underwent numerous reprints and, with a doctorate of law in his pocket, he was able to begin lecturing on music history and aesthetics in 1861 with a piano at his side and an auditorium full of curious students from all disciplines. As pointed out by Hanslick's English translator Henry Pleasants, it probably constituted the very first ‘music appreciation’ course.10 It, along with his Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien11 from 1870, became prime documents for drawing intellectual battle-lines between the Wagnerian Romantics of the so-called ‘New German School’ on the one side and the 'Old German School’ Romantics, represented by Brahms and the Conservatory in Leipzig, on the other. That Brahms was a full generation younger than Wagner only heightens the tone of the dialectic that was bandied about: the younger composer represented the old, the older composer represented the new.