As should be very clear, my comments are based on the article - the reviews make clear that there are three large chapters dealing with each of the three works I list, so it's hardly a big step to deduce that these are central to the argument. Regarding insinuation, that is the precise reason why these arguments (as presented in the article) seem so unconvincing, relying mostly upon vague resonances within a culture of which Brahms was by no means necessarily typical.

If you actually read what I posted, you'll see that comments on the book itself are reserved for after reading it - if the arguments in that article have changed in the intervening years, I'm perfectly happy to change my position.

I'm sure you have the facilities to download that article - why not actually read it and give your thoughts on it* (which takes a bit more work than copying and pasting publisher's blurb) rather than just sneering?

* For example, look at his incredibly contorted argument on the last page, relying heavily upon Taruskin, in which he takes Gardiner to task, for the latter's attempts to '"rescue"' the work 'from a "crypto-Wagnerian" [read German] performance tradition'; from this Beller-McKenna concludes that Gardiner paradoxically ends up reinscribing the Hanslickian type of absolute music agenda that 'carried with it a heavy dose of nineteenth-century Germanism, precisely the thing from which Gardiner proposes to rescue the piece' - a thoroughly circular argument. Gardiner strives for a distinct non-Wagnerian tradition, which may in some ways also have been common in German-speaking lands, thus in Beller-McKenna's terms it becomes equated with the thing he is supposedly avoiding, just because he has decided (or rather, Taruskin has before him), that Wagner=German, Absolute Music/abstraction=German, thus the two things are basically the same! 'Germany' has to be a monolith for the purposes of these types of arguments, despite the fact that all the German-speaking lands nurtured a plurality of traditions. It is Beller-McKenna's agenda that is motivated by a type of nationalism (anti-German) rather than Gardiner's.

With respect to allusions to Bach in general* entailing a nationalistic agenda, in the sense of celebrating a national tradition, is it any different to Debussy citing Rameau, Tippett alluding to English music from the Renaissance, or any composer employing the folk traditions of their native land (which in the 19th century in particular had very strong political connotations)?

*EDIT: thinking about this, I can see how the connotations are different if this was done in the 1930s (or even in the post-war era), but not in pre-Nazi times (when nationalism was widespread all over Europe and elsewhere, not just in Germany, and could be equally sinister in many of its guises).

This information comes from the reminiscences of Albert Dietrich, written in 1899, saying 'The piano concerto in D minor was one of the grandest of his youthful compositions. I have seen the original sketch of this concerto in the form of a sonata for two pianos. The slow scherzo was afterwards used as the Funeral March in the 'German Requiem.' (Albert Dietrich and J.V. Widmann, Recollections of Johannes Brahms, translated Dora E. Hect (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2000), pp. 49-50).

Actually, the fact that it was intended in such a context might be taken to suggest how it could be played with a certain lilt (so as to maintain some sort of 'scherzo' quality?), rather than thoroughly ponderous (which we may imagine to be 'funereal', but there are numerous ways of expressing such a thing in music)?

Fair point. I was just having a look through two books that deal with music and musicology during the Third Reich, to see what I could find out about how that anniversary was dealt with within the Third Reich itself. Michael Kater (The Twisted Muse) doesn't say anything specifically about the anniversary; Pamela M. Potter (Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich) concentrates more on Handel's anniversary in the same year, in which there was a concerted attempt to locate the specifically German elements in Handel's music (arguing that his oratorios in particular revealed 'Germanic sensitivity to nature' as well as '"the high ethos of Nordic men" to seize and retain political power'). Certainly there were attempts to propagate Bach from a hard-line nationalistic point of view, including by Friedrich Blume, who extrapolated on the 'Nordic moments' in the B minor Mass, and claim that Bach was eager to study with Buxtehude because the latter was 'purely or almost purely of the Nordic race'; also claiming that 'the creative use of polyphony is unequivocally Nordic, and that the individuals of the Notre Dame school and the Franco-Flemish composers were Nordic and "of Germanic blood."' (Potter, p. 187, citing Blume, Das Rasseproblem in der Musik (1939)). But from what I can tell, these were not specifically associated with the anniversary (I will check what Erik Levi (Music in the Third Reich) has to say, but my copy of that is in my office, and I'm at home at the moment).

On a tangent, the next big anniversary, in 1950, 200 years after Bach's death, is dealt with very interestingly (in the context of both the FDR and DDR) in Toby Thacker's Music After Hitler: 1945-1955. There were some worries about how to present Bach at this particular historical moment, and in the DDR in particular, his ecletic and international dimensions of Bach's work were partially stressed (as well as a particular attempt to present him in Marxist terms, by the composer and writer Ernst Hermann Meyer), but at the same time more nationalism came in, as in the following:

In the Bach Year, 1950, we will defend our national culture against all destructive and divisive efforts of American imperialism. Through dogged and indefatigable struggle against all efforts to falsify Bach, and to present him, in the fashion of cosmopolitan propaganda, as a "supra-national" church musician or formalist, we will show the national importance of Bach to the whole German people.

(also try the following)

The liberal bourgeoisie saw Bach exclusively as the church musician, and every connection with the people was deliberately overlooked or covered up. In the period of imperialism the bourgeoisie falsified Bach as a formalist or an advocate of a cold, contentless splendour.

(both Stalinist and nationalist rhetoric about 'the people' can be alarmingly similar)

Things were somewhat milder in West Germany (though their own celebrations had to compete with those in the East), but the rhetoric was generally of Bach's music representing some types of universal sentiments for all time. It was this context that inspired Adorno to write his counter-polemic 'Bach Defended Against his Devotees'.

Interesting post, Ian. I wonder how Friedrich Smend's revisionist and highly controversial edition of the B minor Mass (published in 1954?) fits into this picture?

The "Nordic" aspect conjures up some, er, interesting pictures of authentic Bach performance: OVPP in viking helmets?

Shamefully, I haven't read Erik Levi's book, but he gave a fascinating paper a few years ago about Janacek's music under the Third Reich (not sure if this figures in the book). Jenufa -- alone among the operas -- was widely and frequently performed, as its folk-based subject matter (unambiguously Slavic from the composer's own perspective) fitted in with Nazi ideologies of das Volk. Thank heaven Janacek wasn't around to see this misappropriation.

Awesome! Love that Klemperer, especially on Brahms, actually!

No mention of that in any of the books I cited before - could you tell me more?