1 Many readers will recognize this argument from an earlier article by Rumph: ‘A Kingdom Not of this World: The Political Context of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Beethoven Criticism’, 19th-Century Music, 19 (1995–6), 50–67. Rumph's monograph reviewed here is a revision of his dissertation of the same title (University of California at Berkeley, 1997).Google Scholar

2 See, for instance, Nicholas Mathew, ‘Beethoven's Political Music and the Idea of the Heroic Style’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 2006).Google Scholar

3 Rumph might have cited Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–18o3 (London, 1995), although one suspects that her emphasis on Beethovens relations with the Viennese ruling classes before 1809 – that is, the date at which Rumph sees Beethoven's adherence to Revolutionary ideals going sour – may have been an unwelcome challenge to his schematic.Google Scholar

4 Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50 (1997), 387–420.Google Scholar

5 And the charge is even more absurd if by ‘Germany’ Rumph actually meant the Großdeutsch realm of both Germany and Austria prior to 1871, which his grafting of Beethoven's Vienna onto Hoffmann's Berlin might suggest. On regional and national identities, see Applegate, Celia, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Oxford, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory 1871–1918 (London, 1997); and, most recently, Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2001).Google Scholar

6 On this point, see most recently Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (London, 2003).Google Scholar

7 Katherine Aaslestad, Place and Politics: Local Identity, Civic Culture, and German Nationalism in North Germany during the Revolutionary Era (Leiden, 2005). See also Ute Planert, ‘Wann beginnt der “moderne” deutsche Nationalismus? Plädoyer für eine nationale Sattelze it’, Die Politik der Nation: Deutscher Nationalismus in Krieg und Krisen 1760–1960, ed. Jörg Echternkamp and Sven Oliver Müller (Munich, 2002), 25–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 This felicitous play on the ‘Beethoven hero’ trope comes from Michael P. Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn's Music and German-Jewish Culture: An Intervention’, Musical Quarterly 83 (1999), 31–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Jeffrey Sposato, ‘Creative Writing: The [Self-] Identification of Mendelssohn as Jew’, Musical Quarterly, 82 (1998), 190–209.Google Scholar

10 Leon Botstein, ‘Mendelssohn and the Jews’, Musical Quarterly, 82 (1998), 210–19. See also Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn's Music and German-Jewish Culture’; Botstein, ‘Mendelssohn, Werner, and the Jews: A Final Word’, Musical Quarterly, 83 (1999), 45–50; and Peter Ward Jones, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Musical Quarterly, 83 (1999), 27–30.Google Scholar

11 Botstein (‘Mendelssohn and the Jews’, 218) places it in a ‘long line of honorable and noble forgeries’.Google Scholar

12 Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn's Music and German-Jewish Culture’, 32. In many ways, much of the reaction to Sposato's article has been somewhat superseded by his book; I will return to this point later.Google Scholar

13 On Friedrich Wilhelm IV's project and its political and cultural contexts, see Toews, John Edward, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge, 2004). See also Amos Elon, The Pity of it All. A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743–1933 (New York, 2002), 142ff., for a brief account of Heine's run-ins with Friedrich Wilhelm IV.Google Scholar

14 Mosse, Werner E., ‘From “Schutzjuden” to “Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens”: The Long and Bumpy Road of Jewish Emancipation in Germany’, Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 59–93.Google Scholar

15 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews’, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, CT, 1977), 310, cited in Michael P. Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn and Judaism’, The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. Peter Mercer-Taylor (Cambridge, 2004), 26–41 (p. 27).Google Scholar

16 As Brian Vick puts it: ‘If the early nineteenth-century German culture of nationhood hardly presented even a façade of postmodern pluralism, it still roofed a national mansion having many rooms.‘ Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (London, 2002), 109.Google Scholar

17 On this point see Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT, 2003). Sadly, neither Sposato nor Rumph gives any indication that the Enlightenment was not a unified movement or force, much less that its ideals and effects have received rather prominent – and not always laudatory – treatment among intellectual historians. For a useful compendium ranging from the eighteenth century to the present day, see What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (London, 1996). See also Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 2003), for a timely reminder that we need to speak of Enlightenments, in the plural.Google Scholar

18 See Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity, 141.Google Scholar

19 Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (London, 1988), 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Williamson, George S., The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (London, 2004), 113.Google Scholar

21 Jost Hermand, ‘Das offene Geheimnis: Caspar David Friedrichs Christ-germanische Allegorien’, Revolutio Germanica: Die Sehnsucht nach der ‘alten Freiheit’ der Germanen, 1750–1820, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael Niedermeier (Frankfurt, 2002), 172–220.Google Scholar

22 Adolf Strodtmann (ed.), Heinrich Heine's Sämmtliche Werke, Rechtmäßige Original-Ausgabe, 21 vols. (Hamburg, 1862), xiii, 48.Google Scholar

23 Cited and translated in Keith Moore Chapin, ‘From Tone System to Personal Inspiration: The Metaphysics of Counterpoint in 18th- and 19th-Century Germany’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1002), 170.Google Scholar

24 Ibid.Google Scholar

25 Aside from some studies already cited in this review – Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity, Vick, Defining Germany, Elon, The Pity of it All – Sposato's account would also have benefited from work such as Shulamit Volkov's: for instance, Antisemitismus als kultureller Code: Zehn Essays (Munich, 2000) and Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne (Munich, 2001).Google Scholar

26 Leon Botstein has recently argued a similar point, suggesting that the heuristic of anti-Semitism can no longer serve as the catch-all historical explanation for all late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. ‘Music in History: The Perils of Method in Reception History’, Musical Quarterly, 89 (2006), 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 On the ‘Sattelzeit’, see most recently Planert, ‘Wann beginnt der “moderne” deutsche Nationalismus?‘Google Scholar

28 On Nietzsche's comment as well as a broader consideration of Mendelssohn's apparent liminality, see Peter Mercer-Taylor, ‘Introduction: Mendelssohn as Border-Dweller’, The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, ed. Mercer-Taylor, 1–7.Google Scholar

29 Steinberg, ‘Mendelssohn's Music and German-Jewish Culture’, 32.Google Scholar

30 Applegate singles out Friedrich Blume as an advocate of this secularization reading: Protestant Church Music: A History, rev. edn, in collaboration with Ludwig Finscher et al. (New York, 1974), 315. To be fair, Blume is but one of many to have designated the Passion performances an early exemplar of ‘art religion’.Google Scholar

31 Celia Applegate, ‘How German is it? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century’, 19th-Century Music, 21 (1997–8), 274–96.Google Scholar