Brahms’s Triumphlied in Context
Around twenty-five years ago, scholars in the United States, starting with Leon Botstein and Margaret Notley, began to take notice of the “political Brahms,” focusing on the composer’s ties to the Viennese liberal establishment in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Others, including Daniel Beller-McKenna and Ryan Minor, subsequently addressed Brahms’s attitudes vis-à-vis the German Empire and the man who, in 1871, largely willed it into creation, the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Yet our understanding of Brahms’s political ideology remains hampered by a failure to situate his thinking adequately within its own time. The Triumphlied, op. 55, a setting for double chorus and orchestra of three texts drawn from the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Revelations, offers a case in point. This “triumphal song” celebrates both the German military victory over France in 1870 and the establishment of the German Empire made possible by it. Brahms’s full-throated support of the German side in the war, both in private utterances and in the musical form it took in the first movement of the Triumphlied, has been read as evidence of the kind of unsettling German chauvinism that would lay heavily on the century to come. Measuring Brahms’s attitudes in terms of a supposed Sonderweg that historians have increasingly come to doubt, however, leaves us with an incomplete and in some respects faulty image of the composer. In this paper, I seek to offer a more nuanced account of the Triumphlied by grounding the work in a thick historical context that dates back to the Napoleonic occupation of much of North German during the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century, a consideration that has too often been missing in the modern reception of the work.
Around twenty-five years ago, scholars in the United States, starting with Leon Botstein and Margaret Notley, began to take notice of the “political Brahms,” focusing on the composer’s ties to the Viennese liberal establishment in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Others, including Daniel Beller-McKenna and Ryan Minor, subsequently addressed Brahms’s attitudes vis-à-vis the German Empire and the man who, in 1871, largely willed it into creation, the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Yet our understanding of Brahms’s political ideology remains hampered by a failure to situate his thinking adequately within its own time. The Triumphlied, op. 55, a setting for double chorus and orchestra of three texts drawn from the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Revelations, offers a case in point. This “triumphal song” celebrates both the German military victory over France in 1870 and the establishment of the German Empire made possible by it. Brahms’s full-throated support of the German side in the war, both in private utterances and in the musical form it took in the first movement of the Triumphlied, has been read as evidence of the kind of unsettling German chauvinism that would lay heavily on the century to come. Measuring Brahms’s attitudes in terms of a supposed Sonderweg that historians have increasingly come to doubt, however, leaves us with an incomplete and in some respects faulty image of the composer. In this paper, I seek to offer a more nuanced account of the Triumphlied by grounding the work in a thick historical context that dates back to the Napoleonic occupation of much of North German during the first decade and a half of the nineteenth century, a consideration that has too often been missing in the modern reception of the work.