Defining Deutschtum

David Brodbeck is Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely on nineteenth-century topics ranging from the dances of Schubert and the sacred vocal music of Mendelssohn to various aspects of Brahms's music and the musical culture of Liberal Vienna. His article "Hanslick's Smetana and Hanslick's Prague" won the 2010 H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society.

• CONTENTS ; List of Plates ; Preface and Acknowledgments ; Note on Place Names and Orthography ; Introduction Viennese Critics and the "Habsburg Dilemma" ; From the Vormarz to the Liberal Heyday ; Chapter 1 Hanslick's Deutschtum ; Chapter 2 Becoming a German: Goldmark and the Assimilationist Project ; Chapter 3 Liberal Essentialism and Goldmark's Early Reception ; Chapter 4 Rethinking the "Billroth Affair" ; Plates ; From the "Iron Ring" to the Fin de siecle ; Chapter 5 Language Ordinances, National Property, and Dvo?ak's Reception in the Taaffe Era ; Chapter 6 Goldmark's Reception Revisited: Liberal Accreditation and Antisemitic Attack ; Chapter 7 "Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows"; or, Smetana's Reception in the 1890s ; Chapter 8 Goldmark's Deutschtum Revisited ; Epilogue Germans, Jews, and Czechs in Mahler's Vienna ; Bibliography ; Index

Throughout the convoluted twists and turns of this story, Brodbeck is always a clear and patient guide. The sheer density of detail might easily have become bewildering, but what emerges is a remarkably clear and finely drawn account. This is an impressive work of scholarship that reconstructs not only a musical but also a cultural and political history ... Brodbeck's analysis of how political tensions find an ideal areana in seemingly trivial disputes is both powerful and timely.