Beller–McKenna, Daniel

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Beller–McKenna, Daniel

PERSONAL:

Education: Temple University, B.A., M.A.; Harvard University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Music Department, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of New Hampshire, Durham, instructor in the music department. Classical guitarist.

MEMBER:

American Brahms Society (president and member of the board of directors).

WRITINGS:

Brahms and the German Spirit, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Daniel Beller-McKenna is a classical guitarist who has played in the New Hampshire Seacoast area around Portland. A graduate of Temple University with degrees in journalism and music, he studied guitar and music history at Harvard University, from which he received a Ph.D. in musicology. Beller-McKenna has written about John Lennon and the Beatles and more widely on Johannes Brahms. He has served on the board of directors and as president of the Brahms Society.

Brahms and the German Spirit is Beller-McKenna's study of the composer who has been held up as representing German liberal ideals, as opposed to those of Richard Wagner, for example, by many historians, musicologists, and musicians. Wagner is seen as a political radical, "the exponent of a proto-fascist ideology whose innovations of the Tristan Chord and leitmotif unleashed the destructive furies of German nationalism and aided the rise of National Socialism," noted Jonathan Koehler for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

Beller-McKenna does not attempt to delve deeply into the relationship of these two men who were in opposition regarding both ideology and music, but rather concentrates on Brahms and the role of nationalism and religion in his work. Although Brahms left little behind to indicate his thoughts on religion, the jottings in the many bibles he collected in his study in Hamburg indicate that he was a Lutheran Christian. Like other German liberals after 1866, Brahms also supported the efforts of Bismarck to form a unified German nation state.

Brahms was a nationalist, but one who did not follow the fascist view, and since the end of World War II, the music of Brahms has been considered absent any indication of patriotism or nationalism so as to disassociate him from Nazi nationalism. Only his interest in German folk songs has been acknowledged to betray the conservative classicist's German pride. In this volume Beller-McKenna seeks to free Brahms of these restraints by analyzing three of his sacred choral works and commenting on how they reveal his political and religious views. They are Ein deutsches Requiem, Triumphlied, and Fest-und Gedenkspruche. Of note is the fact that Brahms used Martin Luther's translation of the bible in writing the Requiem.

Virginia Hancock reviewed Brahms and the German Spirit in Notes, commenting: "In the final chapter, ‘Beyond the End,’ Beller-McKenna turns to an account of Brahms reception after his death. Initially his music was seen in German sources as healing in times of trouble, but after World War I the emphasis was increasingly on the composer's specifically north German heritage and the intrinsic superiority of German music over that of other ‘races.’ There were also attempts to reconcile the old Brahms-Wagner dichotomy, with the composers presented ‘as two complementary sides of the German coin.’" Hancock noted that Beller-McKenna dismisses the idea that Brahms may have been Jewish, then cites statements made during the Nazi regime, during which time Brahms's music was played. "He continues to the post-war period and writings in English, which also have avoided the issue of nationalism. In sum, ‘Brahms reception from his own day down to the present [has been characterized by] the assertion that Brahms's music belongs to an idealized cultural realm that is untouched by the politics not only of its own time but also of the time in which that music is received.’"

"Focusing on the religious background of Brahms and unraveling his patriotic belief system, Beller-McKenna offers us not only a refreshing reconfiguration of Johannes Brahms by laying open his private political and social views, but also a work that echoes the recent trend of religious preoccupation so characteristic of our time," concluded Mark-Daniel Schmid in the Historian. Schmid found this book to be accessible to both the specialist and general reader.

"Brahms's national, cultural, and religious identities thus form the central strands of Beller-McKenna's complex, multilayered argument about the relationship between German nationalism, German Protestantism, and the German language," wrote Koehler. "The author's painstaking research in the Handschriftensammlung of the Wiener Stadt-und Landesbibliothek and the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde reveals the particular resonance of language, faith, and Volk within the composer's work." Noting Beller-McKenna's research and analyses of Brahms's compositions, Koehler commented: "There is much to recommend this book."