I haven't actually read Beller-McKenna's book yet, but know some of his ideas from other articles he's written. Overall, his work does tend to accord with certain now almost-hackneyed American musicological strategies with respect to the much-despised Germany - find the slightest hints that a composer thought favourably about their country and culture (which could probably be found in just about any nineteenth-century composer of whatever country, if one looks hard enough), then it's only a small step to insinuations about the Third Reich, and so on (Debussy's rabid nationalism is rarely treated anything like as harshly). From what I gather in reviews, Beller-McKenna focuses primarily upon three works: the now-familiar whipping boy (as for example in Taruskin) of the
Triumphlied (undoubtedly a rather embarrassing nationalistic piece of bombast, though hardly representative of Brahms's works, and long regarded as one of his weakest compositions), the
Fest- und Gedenksprüche (a complicated case), and the
Requiem. Beller-McKenna wrote at length on the
Requiem in his article 'How "deutsch" a Requiem? Absolute Music, Universality and the Reception of Brahms's "Ein deutsches Requiem", op. 45', in
19th-Century Music, Vol. 22 No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 3-19. I don't know if his view of this work in the book is the same as that in the earlier article; anyhow, in the latter, he makes several arguments. One (also very like Taruskin) is to claim that Brahms's idea that the work was as much of a 'human' as 'German' requiem represents typical 19th-century German nationalism aspiring to universality (this argument constructs a convenient damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't clause).
For the second point Beller-McKenna makes, a bit of context is necessary. The majority of the work was composed in 1865-66 (the fifth movement was added afterwards, and the second movement may have been composed much earlier, in the 1850s); the Austro-Prussian War, to which Brahms was opposed, was fought in 1866. Brahms's comment about omitting the word 'German' from the title is thus (perhaps quite reasonably) interpreted by Beller-McKenna as a way of distancing himself from the current political turmoil (very different to in 1870-71, time of the Franco-Prussian War and the composition of the
Triumphlied). In a letter to Adolf Schubring of 1869, Brahms said with high sarcasm (as one often finds in his correspondence) 'Have you then not discovered the political allusions in my Requiem? "Gott erhalte" was begun precisely in the year 1866'. This is a reference to a possible similarity between the opening melody of the
Requiem and Haydn's "Gott erhalte unsere Kaiser", which, whilst it did not become the national anthem of Germany until 1922, was known much earlier as an appeal for German unification (though it has been argued that it had other liberal overtones - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_national_anthem ). Note that Brahms was familiar with attempts to uncover certain types of allusions in his music (a process that has not stopped right until the present day), one reason for his sarcasm. I get the impression that Beller-McKenna is trying to insinuate that this allusion did have political meaning just by including it in a musical example (he may be right), but this is a hunch; he does not say so explicitly. Anyhow, he goes on to point out that for many in Brahms's time, it was possible to view the inherited Lutheran tradition as 'as much a cultural tradition as a system of faith'. This certainly seems to have been the case with Brahms who, for example, rejected the doctrine of the immortality of the soul (and this from the composer of 'Selig sind die Toten'!). But then Beller-McKenna reasons from this, rather tenuously, that thus the use of a German rather than Latin text, and the associated interest in that cultural tradition, might therefore be a type of nationalistic or at least patriotic utterance (also drawing in such highly speculative reasons as that 'Language formed a central part of German identity for Romantic nationalists of the generation before Brahms'). However, he does also draw attention of Brahms's conscious attempts to distance himself from the type of
volkisch nationalism espoused by Wagner amongst others (Brahms may have had some time for a Herderian world-view in his early compositions, and set some of Herder's poetry, but I have not seen any reason to believe this ran particularly deep, certainly not compared with other composers of the same era).
Much of the rest of Beller-McKenna's article deals with the construction of the Bach-Beethoven-Brahms axis, again viewed in a nationalistic sense, suggestions that Brahms's particular type of individualism accorded with certain Lutheran ideals (this sort of argument has been made by various New Musicologists, including McClary, in an attempt to taint a celebration of abstract instrumental music itself with nationalism), and further stuff about how Brahms's claims to be speaking for humanity constitutes some manifestation of nationalistic Germanic claims to universality (again, this is a stick that Taruskin uses to bash Germans with, frequently). He even starts to associate Brahms's liberalism (explored in detail by Margaret Notley, in 'Brahms as Liberal', in
19th-century Music 17/2 (fall 1993), pp. 107-23), as somehow tied in with questions of German national identity.
I find these arguments highly unconvincing: for the most part, Brahms's having written a work that drew upon musical and cultural traditions that were common and developed in the German-speaking world in his time seems enough to taint him with nationalism. Indeed, the whole concept of 'Absolute Music' is held up in such a manner not just by Beller-McKenna, but also others - in the service, as I said before, of what I see as a pathological anti-German agenda which has come to run deep in certain strands of American musicology (and resounds well with wider anti-German sentiments that have developed in American political discourse especially since the end of the Cold War). But I've been meaning to read Beller-McKenna's full book for a while (it's not especially relevant to my own Brahms work, but I'm interested); I will report back when I have done so.
It's worth also pointing out that Brahms was passionately opposed to anti-semitism, especially of the type that was gaining much ground in the Vienna of the 1890s, and was horrified by the rise of politicians espousing such a creed, making his feelings clear to many. I don't want to deny that Brahms did exhibit some nationalistic tendencies - certainly he did at times - but this is hardly surprising given his historical time, with the establishment of Germany as a nation. Furthermore, I don't believe they were for the most part any more pronunced (and in some ways considerably less so) than those of many other composers from various countries during the same period. Certainly no worse than with, say, Verdi - but do we lead from that to an association of Verdi with Mussolini?
