University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

A cultural history of Georg Friedrich Daumer's Polydora and Johannes Brahms's Liebeslieder waltzes, op. 52

(USC Thesis Other)

A cultural history of Georg Friedrich Daumer's Polydora and Johannes Brahms's Liebeslieder waltzes, op. 52

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF GEORG FRIEDRICH DAUMER’S POLYDORA
AND JOHANNES BRAHMS’S LIEBESLIEDER WALTZES, OP. 52

By

Seth Farwell Houston

___________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC THORNTON SCHOOL OF MUSIC
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS
(CHORAL MUSIC)

DECEMBER 2014

Copyright 2014 Seth Houston
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments viii
Abstract ix

1. Introduction 3

Introduction 3
Literature Review 8
Daumer Sources and Scholarship 9
Brahms, Daumer, and Hafiz 13
Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes 19
Overview and Argument 22

PART 1: GEORG FRIEDRICH DAUMER AND POLYDORA

2. Early Life and Education 31

Childhood and Early Education 31
Naturphilosophie and Oriental Literature at Erlangen 35
“Awakened” Neo-Pietism and Other Traumas 41

3. Daumer and Religious Reform 51

4. Paradigms and Archetypes 71

Kaspar Hauser 71
Daumer on Women 75
Hafiz 89

5. Ein weltpoetisches (und weltliterarisches) Liederbuch 111

“The Universality of the German Spirit” 115
“This Lost Paradise… Progressing to the Higher Level of Culture” 125
“The World-Poetic Idea at the Foundation of Them All” 130
vi
PART 2: JOHANNES BRAHMS AND THE LIEBESLIEDER WALTZES

6. Brahms and Waltzes 147

Brahms and the Viennese Waltz 147
Brahms’s Waltzes and Schubert’s Ländler 152
The Ordering of Brahms’s Waltzes 154
The Ordering of Brahms’s Songs 161

7. Brahms and Women 165

8. Brahms, Julie Schumann, and the Liebeslieder 180

Julie Schumann 180
Julie Schumann and Brahms 186
Julie Schumann, Brahms, and Daumer 190
Dating the Liebeslieder 192
Julie Schumann and Brahms’s Earlier Songs, 1864-68 196

9. Brahms and Liberalism 221

Brahms and German Liberalism in Germany 221
Brahms and German Liberalism in Austria-Hungary 229
Shifting Origins of the Indo-European Peoples 242

10. Frames and Perspectives 254

Central European Texts and Romantic Love 254
German Frames: Mörike, Schack, and Goethe 256
Zum Schluß 260

Bibliography 263

vii
LIST OF FIGURES

1: Keys of Brahms’s Edition of Twenty Ländler, by Franz Schubert, 1869 156
2: Keys of the Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 52 157
3: Brahms’s Love Interests and Dedications, 1852-69 167
4: Julie Schumann’s Winter Caretakers, 1860-68 181
5: Songs Composed by Brahms in 1868 or Published in 1868 214
with No Record of Having Been Composed Earlier
6: Source Nationalities/Languages of Brahms’s 1868 Songs 237
7: Source Nationalities/Languages of Brahms’s Liebeslieder, Op. 52 241
8: Solos, Duets, and Quartets in the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder 251
9: Nationalities/Languages in the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder 252

viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No project of this scope would be possible without the support and assistance of many.
I would like to thank:

The library staff at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University,
and the University of Southern California;

My committee members—Jo-Michael Scheibe, Nick Strimple, and
Bryan Simms—for their insightful comments and guidance through the
writing process;

Other faculty members at the University of Southern California and the
University of Colorado—Morten Lauridsen, Cristian Grases, Donald
Brinegar, Sheila Woodward, Beatriz Ilari, Rotem Gilbert, Larry
Livingston, Lucinda Carver, Joan Conlon, Larry Kaptein, and others—
for their mentorship and support;

Donald S. Lopez, Leonard van der Kuijp, Paula Richman, and Robert
Sharf for their mentorship in academic writing and the study of Asian
religions;

Marion Gutwein, Christopher Turner, Barbara Stone, and Lauren
Greaves for their assistance with the German translations;

Francis C. Farwell II and the rest of my family for their love and
support;

and Adele Gratiot Stichel for her patience, steadfast love, and
penetrating insight.

ix
ABSTRACT

Johannes Brahms finished composing the original six movements of Ein
deutsches Requiem just months before Prussia defeated Austria in 1866. He composed
the Triumphlied in 1870-71 as Prussian forces were advancing on France. Daniel
Beller-McKenna, in his 2004 book Brahms and the German Spirit, outlined the
“confluence of Germany’s emergence as a powerful political state, Brahms’s emergence
as a major figure, and the culmination of his early period in large works on great
German literature.” Beller-McKenna argued: “Brahms chose to reach out to larger
audiences with masses of assembled performers, singing the words of Luther’s Bible,
Goethe, and Hölderlin at the very moment in Germany history when a nation was
transforming its identity from that of a culture to that of a state. Add to this the
religious underpinnings of German cultural nationalism, and the direct connections
between Brahms’s sacred vocal music and German nationalism become clear” (10-11).
At the same time, however, Brahms moved from Hamburg to Vienna and
composed a large body of music in more intimate forms: lieder, vocal chamber music,
and piano four-hands. These works incorporated texts and musical styles from non-
German peoples that reflected the ethnic diversity and political complexity of Austria-
Hungary. The poet Brahms turned to most often was Georg Friedrich Daumer.
Daumer (1800-1885) was seen in his time as an important philosopher and
poet. His works impressed Young Hegelians such as Ludwig Feuerbach, who credited
Daumer with influencing his critique of religion. Daumer’s translations and original
works in the guise of the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz were widely acclaimed;
x
Arnold Ruge dubbed him the “Persian Heine.” Scarred during his student years by
extreme ascetic practices associated with Neo-Pietism, Daumer committed his career
to religious reform and renewal. He expressed his visions for a future religion, in
which perception of the divine in nature shifted increasingly toward sensuality,
through inspired individuals including Kaspar Hauser, Betinna von Arnim, Hafiz, and
the women depicted in his poetry volumes Frauenbilder und Huldigungen and Polydora.
Brahms drew on these depictions to express his unspoken infatuation for
Robert and Clara Schumann’s daughter Julie, starting as early as 1864 and
culminating in the Liebeslieder and Alto Rhapsody (1869). Brahms’s obsession with Julie
combined elements of his youthful infatuations—with women such as Agathe von
Siebold and Ottilie Hauer—with the longevity and seriousness of his love for her
mother.
In the Liebeslieder and other vocal music from the late 1860s, Brahms also
engaged a host of broader issues relating to German identity. Complementing the
connections outlined by Beller-McKenna and building on ideas proposed by Daumer
himself, Brahms’s settings supported the political ambitions of Hungarian, Poles,
Czechs, and other “historical-political entities” in Austria-Hungary; challenged
prevailing liberal views; supported German Austrian claims to cultural hegemony; and
articulated contemporary notions of German identity in accord with evolving
understandings of the Indo-European language group and peoples. Through framing
his Daumer settings with Goethe, finally, Brahms rendered Polydora worthy of its
world-poetic ambition and created enduring reflections on love, loss, and the human
condition.

3!

INTRODUCTION

Daniel Beller-McKenna’s pioneering volume Brahms and the German Spirit,
following important works by Margaret Notley, Leon Botstein, and others, has played
a major role in redirecting Brahms research since its publication in 2004.
1
Burdened by
the devastating effects of German nationalism, and following in the footsteps of
nineteenth century hermeneutical models such as Franz Brendel’s “new German
school” and Eduard Hanslick’s “absolute music,” Brahms scholars for much of the
twentieth century detached Brahms from his historical milieu. They interpreted him,
instead, with respect to more universal narratives of musical development in which
Brahms reviewed and brought to fruition classical procedures while pointing the way
forward, as Schoenberg argued in his seminal essay “Brahms the Progressive,” to the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Daniel Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004); Margaret Anne Notley, “Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nineteenth-
Century Vienna,” Nineteenth-Century Music 17, no. 2 (Autumn 1993): 107-23; Notley, Lateness and Brahms:
Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Leon
Botstein, The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes Brahms (New York: Norton, 1999).
4!
modern.
2
Beller-McKenna, on the other hand, sought to explore the “interpenetration
of spirituality and nationalism” in Brahms’s works, with a special emphasis on Ein
deutsches Requiem, Op. 45, and Triumphlied, Op. 55.
3
Brahms finished composing the
Requiem (with the exception of the fifth movement) in spring 1866, just months before
Prussian troops would defeat the Austrians at Königgrätz on July 26 and
fundamentally alter the course of German history.
4
The victory of Bismarck’s Prussia
over the Hapsburgs settled “the German question”—i.e. whether a united Germany
would be led by Austria and be majority Catholic (grossdeutsche solution), or be led by
Prussia, exclude Austria, and be majority Protestant (kleindeutsche solution)—decisively
in favor of the latter. Brahms composed the Triumphlied in 1870-71 as Prussian forces
were advancing on France. Cementing Prussia’s victory—a powerful reversal of
Napoleon’s earlier invasion of German lands, which had sparked German
nationalism—Bismarck declared the German Empire (Kaiserreich) in 1871 and had
Wilhelm I crowned emperor at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.
Brahms’s rise to prominence coincided, more or less, with Bismarck’s. As
Beller-McKenna explains, “Brahms moved on from a cappella or lightly scored choral
works to larger works for chorus and orchestra during the years 1866-72—
significantly, the very years during which Prussia emerged as the leader of the klein
Deutschland solution to national unity.” Beller-McKenna notes that Brahms chose texts
for these works from among the finest exemplars of German literature: Martin
Luther’s Bible (Requiem and Triumphlied), the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Arnold Schoenberg, “Brahms the Progressive (1947),” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold
Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 398-441.
3
Beller-McKenna, 5.
4
The Battle of Königgrätz is also known as the Battle of Sadowa.
5!
(Rinaldo and Rhapsodie) and the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (Schicksalslied). These
choral-orchestral works, according to Beller-McKenna, “fixed Brahms’s place at the
forefront of German music around 1870.”
Beller-McKenna continues:

The confluence of Germany’s emergence as a powerful political state,
Brahms’s emergence as a major figure, and the culmination of his early
period in large works on great German literature cannot be
overemphasized. Brahms chose to reach out to larger audiences with
masses of assembled performers, singing the words of Luther’s Bible,
Goethe, and Hölderlin at the very moment in Germany history when a
nation was transforming its identity from that of a culture to that of a
state. Add to this the religious underpinnings of German cultural
nationalism, and the direct connections between Brahms’s sacred vocal
music and German nationalism become clear.
5

Beller-McKenna’s pioneering work is convincing and continues to inspire. But
it leaves out important parts of the story. What are we to make, for example, of the fact
that Brahms left Germany during those same years and moved to Vienna, the capital of
Austria-Hungary? (The term “Germany” refers, in this study, to the Prussian-led
German Confederation, reorganized in 1871 as the German Empire. The Hapsburg-
ruled Austrian Empire was reorganized in 1867, following its defeat by the
Confederation, as a dual monarchy called Austria-Hungary.) How do we interpret the
vast output of Brahms’s compositions in smaller forms—lieder, vocal chamber music,
and piano four-hands, for example—that appeared during those same years and whose
popularity rivaled or even eclipsed Brahms’s choral-orchestral works, both in the
concert hall and in the home? Between setting Luther’s Bible, Goethe, and Hölderlin,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
Beller-McKenna, 10-11.
6!
Brahms chose texts for these smaller pieces from Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and
Persian sources, among others, and published whole collections of music that drew on
Hungarian and Austrian musical styles. The cultures that Brahms represented in these
works map, to an intriguing extent, both the ethnic makeup of the dual monarchy and
changing understandings of the Indo-European language group and family of peoples.
A companion to Beller-McKenna’s book, perhaps titled Brahms and the Austro-
Hungarian Spirit, might profitably be written. Indeed, portions of such a study have
been completed already. These include Jonathan Bellman’s and Adam Gellen’s
research on Brahms’s engagement with Hungarian music and the Style hongrois,
Natasha Loges’s work on Brahms’s settings of Slavic poetry, and Margaret Notley’s
studies of Brahms and Viennese liberalism.
6
The present study, however, is more
limited in scope. It outlines a cultural history of Brahms’s 1869 Liebeslieder. Walzer für
Pianoforte zu 4 Händen und Gesang: Sopran, Alt, Tenor, Baß, ad libitum, Op. 52, and their
poetic source: Polydora. Ein weltpoetische Liederbuch (1855), by Georg Friedrich Daumer
(1800-1885).
Brahms’s Liebeslieder are longstanding and beloved staples of the choral
repertoire. Since Brahms first presented them to Clara Schumann, they have been
widely acclaimed. On July 16, 1869, Schumann recorded in her diary: “At the
beginning of this month Johannes brought me some charming waltzes for 4 hands and
4 voices, sometimes two and two, sometimes all four together, with very pretty words,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Jonathan Bellman, “Toward a Lexicon for the Style Hongrois,!” The Journal of Musicology 9, no. 2
(Spring, 1991): 214-37; Bellman, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1993); Adam Gellen, Brahms und Ungarn: Biographische, rezeptionsgeschichtliche,
quellenkritische und analytische Studien (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2011); Natasha Loges, “Singing Lieder
with a Foreign Accent: Brahms’s Slavic Songs,” Indiana Theory Review 26, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Fall 2005):
73-103; Notley, “Brahms as Liberal”; and Notley, Lateness and Brahms.
7!
chiefly of the folk-song type.… They are extraordinarily attractive (charming even
without the voices) and I very much enjoy playing them.”
7
On August 24, after hearing
a reading of the waltzes with voices, she wrote: “They are delightfully dainty and
charming, of really remarkable musical form and melody.”
8
The Liebeslieder quickly
became popular. Together with Brahms’s 1868 Ungarische Tänze (WoO 1), they
brought Brahms international attention and financial stability. However, their cultural
significance, especially in terms of the political changes of the day, has not been fully
explored.
Moreover, the poet whose poems and translations Brahms set in the cycle,
despite being the poet whose poems and translations Brahms set in greater number
than any other, is largely unknown. This is especially surprising because Daumer was
seen in his time as an important philosopher and poet. His philosophical works
impressed, among others, the Young Hegelians Arnold Ruge and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Feuerbach credited Daumer with influencing his blistering critique of religion, which
in turn was important for Karl Marx. Daumer’s free translations and original works in
the guise of the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz, first published in 1846, were
wildly popular, far eclipsing similar works by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and
Friedrich Rückert. Ruge hailed Daumer as the “Persian Heine.”
9
Daumer was also
known, both in his time and in at least two recent feature-length films, for his role in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters,
trans. Grace Hadow (London: MacMillan, 1913), 266.
8
Ibid., 266.
9
Karlhans Kluncker, Georg Friedrich Daumer. Leben und Werk, 1800-1875, trans. Christopher Turner
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1984), 37.
8!
caring for the foundling Kaspar Hauser.
10
Hauser appeared in Nuremberg in 1828,
apparently having been raised in total isolation. His murder was never solved.
Daumer’s legacy lives on, in addition to his fifty-four poems set by Brahms, in his
tracts on vegetarianism.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Although Brahms set more poems and translations by Daumer than by any
other poet, scholarship on him in German is not extensive and in English is virtually
non-existent. Research on Daumer includes several dissertations, all written before
World War II, and one excellent book. Several articles and a dissertation explore the
relationships between Daumer, Brahms, and sometimes Hafiz. Some of Brahms’s
Daumer settings for solo voice, especially Opp. 32 and 57, have received significant
analytical attention. Research on the Liebeslieder has been limited, on the whole, to
general analytical studies and explorations of connections between the Liebeslieder and
Viennese dance music traditions. Recent studies have considered the Liebeslieder in
relation to music-making in the home.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, directed by Werner Herzog with Walter Ledengast playing the
part of Daumer (Vienna: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1974), and Kaspar Hauser, directed by Peter
Sehr (1993; distributed in the United States by Leisure Time Features, 1996).
9!
DAUMER SOURCES AND SCHOLARSHIP

The best source for information about Daumer is his voluminous literary
output. His philosophical views and strategies for religious reform are laid out in
dozens of books.
11
Most of Daumer’s poetry collections include prefaces or epilogues
that explain his rationale for each.
12
A few years after publishing Polydora, Daumer
wrote the autobiographical Meine Conversion in 1859.
13
He also included numerous
autobiographical articles in his series Aus der Mansarde, which he published from 1860
to 1862.
14
Daumer’s works were amply reviewed at their time of publication, and
letters and diaries of philosophical and literary acquaintances such as Ruge and
Feuerbach provide valuable insights.
15
Information about Daumer can also be found in
his letters. Few of these are published, and those written before 1850 appear to be lost.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
See, for example, Georg Friedrich Daumer, Über den Gang und die Fortschritte unserer geistigen
Entwicklung seit der Reformation und über ihren Standpunkt in der gegenwärtigen Zeit. Geschrieben zur Feier des drei
und zwanzigsten Maies als des Stiftungstages des vor dreihundert Jahren gegründeten Gymnasiums zu Nürnberg
(Nuremberg: Riegel and Wiessner, 1826); Urgeschichte des Menschengeistes. Fragment eines Systems
speculativer Theologie mit besonderer Beziehung auf die Schellinng’sche Lehre von dem Grunde in Gott. Erste
Abtheilung (Berlin: Reimer, 1827); Andeutung eines Systems speculativer Philosophie (Nuremberg: Campe,
1831); Philosophie, Religion, und Alterthum (Nuremberg: Campe, 1833); and Die Religion des neuen Weltalters.
Versuch einer combinatorisch-aphoristischen Grundlegung, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1850).
12
See, for example, Daumer [anon.], Semiramis (Frankfurt: Schmerber, 1836); Daumer, Bettina.
Gedichte aus Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Nebst erläuternden und vergleichenden Ammerkungen
(Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1837); Daumer [Eusebius Emmeran, pseud.], Die Glorie der heiligen
Jungfrau Maria durch Eusebius Emmeran. Legenden und Gedichte nach spanischen, italienischen, lateinischen und
deutschen Relationen und Originalpoesien (Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1841); and Daumer, Hafis: Eine
Sammlung persischer Gedichte. Nebst poetischen Zugaben aus verschiedenen Völkern und Ländern, 2 vols.
(Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1846-52); Frauenbilder und Huldigungen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Wigand,
1853); Polydora. Ein weltpoetisches Liederbuch (Frankfurt: Rütten, 1855); and Marianische Legenden und
Gedichte (Münster: Aschendorff, 1859).
13
Daumer, Meine Conversion. Ein Stück Seelen- und Zeitgeschichte (Mainz: Kirchheim, 1859).
14
Daumer, Aus der Mansarde: Streitschriften, Kritiken, Studien und Gedichte (Mainz: Kirchheim, 1860-62).
A mansard is the top floor of a building, with sloping walls that double as the “mansard roof.” The title
refers to Daumer’s living in isolation in a top floor apartment.
15
See, for example, Karl Marx, revied of Daumer, Religion des neuen Weltalters, in Neue Rheinische
Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue, no. 2 (Feb. 1850): 57-61, reprinted and translated in Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels 1859-1851, vol. 10 of Karl Marx Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, trans.
Richard Dixon et al. (New York: International, 1978).
10!
Daumer’s letters to his niece Helene, however, are extant and were published in
2009.
16

Other early sources of information about Daumer include biographic entries in
various references books at the time, such as Rudolf Gottschall’s 1855 Die deutsche
Nationalliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts;
17
David August Rosenthal’s 1866 Convertitenbilder
aus dem 19. Jahrhundert;
18
J. Kehrein’s 1868 Biographisch-litterarisches Lexikon der
katholischen deutschen Dichter;
19
Franz Brümmer’s 1876 Deutsches Dichterlexikon;
20
and
Julian Schmidt’s 1886-96 Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit.
21

Several sources were written by people who were close to the poet. These include an
entry on Daumer by his nephew Veit Valentin, a Goethe scholar and art historian, in
his 1886 Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. Valentin also published several newspaper pieces
about his uncle.
22
Daumer’s student and friend Franz Alfred Muth (1839-90), many of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Daumer, Briefe an seine Nichte Helene ( Offenbach: Kaspar-Hauser-Verlag , 2009).
17
Rudolf Gottschall, Die deutsche Nationalliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Breslau: Treyendt, 1872; first
published 1855).
18
David August Rosenthal, Convertitenbilder aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Schaffhausen, 1864), 923-
55.
19
J. Kehrein, Biographisch-litterarisches Lexikon der katholischen deutschen Dichter, Volks- und
Jugendschriftsteller im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 1. (Zurich, 1868), 66ff.
20
Franz Brümmer, Deutsches Dichterlexikon. Biographische und bibliographische Mitthelungen über deutsche
Dichter aller Zeiten: unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Eichstätt: Verlag der Krüll’schen
Buchhandlung, 1876-77).
21
Julian Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1886-
96).
22
Veit Valentin, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1876) 4: 771-75. Other books by Valentin
include Die klassische Walpurgisnacht: eine litterarästhetische Untersuchung (1901) and Erläuterung zu Goethes
Faust. Valentin’s son, also named Veit, was the eminent German historian who emigrated to England
and then the United States during World War II. His publications include The German People: Their
History and Civilization from the Holy Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: Knopf, 1946). Other
works by the younger Veit Valentin include Frankfurt am Main und die Revolution von 1848/49 (Stuttgart:
Cotta, 1908) and Bismarck und seine Zeit (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1915).
11!
whose poems were set by Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901), wrote about Daumer in his
1887 Dichterbilder und Dichterstudien aus der neueren und neuesten Literatur.
23

During the twentieth century, at least four dissertations, two books, and
numerous articles were written about the poet. Michael Birkenbihl’s 1902 dissertation
“Georg Friedrich Daumer. Beiträge zur Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner
westöstlichen Dichtungen,” though only 35 pages long, is a good introduction to
Daumer’s work.
24
Hans Effelberger’s 1923 dissertation, “Georg Friedrich Daumer und
die westöstliche Dichtung,” situates Daumer’s work in the intellectual milieu of his
time and is a good source for personal communications and critical reviews.
25
Wilhelm
Kunze intended his short work Georg Friedrich Daumer und die Fortführung der Reformation
(1933) to be the first volume in his planned series Studies in Frankish Intellectual
History.
26

Agnes Kühne’s 1936 dissertation, “Der Religionsphilosoph Georg Friedrich
Daumer. Wege und Wirkungen seiner Entwicklung,” is an excellent survey of the
poet’s life and work, especially as it relates to his lifelong commitment to religious
reform. Kühne also traces the likely sources and inspiration for many of Daumer’s
ideas. In her introduction, Kühne alludes to the increasing focus on the nature of the
“German spirit” that had developed after World War I, especially with the National
Socialists’ rise to power. Kühne wrote: “For today’s pressing questions about the German
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
Franz Alfred Muth, Dichterbilder und Dichterstudien aus der neueren und neuesten Literatur (Frankfurt,
1887), 126-40. See also Michael Birkenbihl, “Georg Friedrich Daumer. Beiträge zur Geschichte seines
Lebens und seiner westöstlichen Dichtungen,” trans. Marion Gutwein (PhD diss., Munich, 1902), 2-3.
24
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein.
25
Hans Effelberger, “Georg Friedrich Daumer und die westöstliche Dichtung” (PhD diss.,
Marburg, 1923).
26
Wilhelm Kunze, Georg Friedrich Daumer und die Fortführung der Reformation (Nuremberg: Spindler,
1933).
12!
spirit, however, an analysis of Daumer as a philosopher of religion is equally important
as one of Daumer as a poet.”
27
Nonetheless, Kühne’s work avoids any overt nationalist
agenda and her readings still hold. Maria Virnich’s 1942 article “Über Georg Friedrich
Daumer als Philosoph” discusses Daumer’s philosophy in relation to broader
philosophical currents of the time.
28
Virnich appears to wear rose-colored glasses,
though, in her accounts of Daumer’s benevelont nature and his affirmative
philosophical outlook.
After World War II, Daumer continued to attract some attention. Georg
Schneider’s 1961 Leben und Gedicht provides biographical information about the poet
including Daumer’s social relations with other literary figures of his time.
29
Karlhans
Kluncker’s 1984 Georg Friedrich Daumer. Leben und Werk is the most comprehensive
treatment of Daumer to date.
30
Kluncker, well versed in German philosophy and
Marxist thought, richly traces philosophical and literary connections between Daumer,
his predecessors, his peers, and later writers whom he inspired. Especially nuanced are
Kluncker’s depictions of Daumer’s relationships with members of the Young Hegelian
movement such as Ruge, Feuerbach, and Marx. Unfettered by Virnich’s overly
generous outlook and the wartime context that perhaps required it, Kluncker offers a
balanced and critical assessment of the poet and philosopher’s work that includes
extensive documentary and bibliographical resources. Kluncker also wrote a book on
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Agnes Kühne, “Der Religionsphilosoph Georg Friedrich Daumer, Wege und Wirkungen seiner
Entwickung,” trans. Marion Gutwein (PhD diss., Friedrich Wilhelms University, 1936), 1, emphasis
added.
28
Maria Virnich, “Uber Georg Friedrich Daumer als Philosoph,” trans. Marion Gutwein,
Philosophisches Jahrbuch 55 (January 1, 1942): 417-30.
29
Georg Schneider, Leben und Gedicht (Erlangen: Fränkische Bibliophilengellschaft, 1961).
30
Kluncker, Leben und Werk.
13!
Daumer’s relationship to Kaspar Hauser. This was likely a key resource for the two
feature films made on the mysterious foundling.
31

Very little about Daumer has been written in English. The two-paragraph entry
on Daumer from the 1913 editon of Catholic Encyclopedia, reproduced with small
additions in Wikipedia, ranks among the most substantial descriptions of the poet-
philosopher.
32
Several sources about Brahms, drawing on Max Kalbeck’s biography of
the composer, have related Brahms’s visit to the poet in his later years.
33

BRAHMS, DAUMER, AND HAFIZ

Numerous articles and a dissertation explore the connections between Daumer,
Brahms, and sometimes Hafiz. In 1979 and 1980, Eberhard Otto published a pair of
articles in a journal on Bavarian music.
34
The first, “Dichter in Bayern und ihre
Komponisten,” discusses poets native to or active in Bavaria, including Daumer and
Rückert, and settings of their texts to music. The second, “Georg Friedrich Daumer
und Johannes Brahms: Ein fränkischer Dichter und sein Komponist,” provides a good
overview of Daumer’s works with an emphasis on the poems set by Brahms. Otto
compares Daumer with his college classmate August von Platen and includes
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Karlhans Kluncker, Georg Friedrich Daumer und Kaspar Hauser (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini
Press, 1984).
32
Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913 ed., ed. Charles Herbermann (New York: Robert Appleton Company,
1913), s.v. “Georg Friederic Daumer.”
33
Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms II: Erster Halbband 1862-1868 (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-
Gesellschaft, 1921), 137-38.
34
Eberhard Otto, “Dichter in Bayern und ihre Komponisten,” Musik in Bayern: Halbjahresschrift der
Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte 18-19 (1979): 95-109 and “Georg Friedrich Daumer und
Johannes Brahms: Ein fränkischer Dichter und sein Komponist,” Musik in Bayern 21 (1980): 11-18.
14!
numerous quotations from letters and other sources that illustrate perceptions of
Daumer’s work.
Elizabeth Blanton Momand’s 2001 dissertation, “Finding the Connection:
Hafez—Daumer—Brahms,” explores, as its name suggests, the connections between
these three figures.
35
Momand attempts to discern which of Hafiz’s poems served as
models, filtered through Daumer and earlier translators, for Brahms’s Hafiz settings.
Momand outlines parallels between Daumer’s and Hafiz’s personal lives, their
religious and artistic outlooks, literary Romanticism and Sufi poetry, and other issues.
She also compares the German Romantics’ interpretations of Hafiz with what she
understands to be “actual” interpretations of the Persian poet.
Karl-Peter Kammerlander’s 2008 article “Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst:
Brahms-Daumer-Hafis” is a good overview of Brahms’s Daumer settings, especially
his seven settings of poems from Daumer’s Hafis. While lacking the depth of musical
analysis seen in the articles by Gerstmeier, Braus, and Hoag (see below),
Kammerlander’s article provides the best literary context, of the articles discussed so
far, for Daumer’s Hafiz translations.
36

Kammerlander starts his article by suggesting that Daumer played a similar
role for Brahms as Wilhelm Müller had for Franz Schubert.
37
He then discusses
Daumer’s Hafiz poems in relation to Daumer’s biography, literary and philosophical
trends of the time, and other Hafiz translators. Kammerlander includes relevant quotes
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Elizabeth Blanton Momand, “Finding the Connection: Hafez—Daumer—Brahms” (DMA diss.,
University of Texas, 2001).
36
Karl-Peter Kammerlander, “Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst: Brahms-Daumer-Hafis,” Brahms-
Studien 15 (2008): 149-81.
37
Ibid., 150.
15!
from Daumer’s introductions, critical commentary by Daumer’s contemporaries, and
comparisons of Daumer’s “translations” with other renderings in German of the same
poems. He notes, for example, that Daumer copied the first two verses of one of his
Hafiz poems directly from Hammer-Purgstall, whose translations were his primary
model.
38
Kammerlander also makes some musical observations about Brahms’s
settings—derived, at least in part, from Braus. He comments on motives, musical
gestures, and key relations and relates these to Brahms and Daumer’s biographies.
39

Several studies have examined Brahms’s Daumer settings from a music
analytical perspective. Peter Jost’s edited volume Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum
Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung, published in 1992, contains two articles on Brahms’s
setting of Daumer poems for solo voice and piano.
40
August Gerstmeier’s article
“Brahms und Daumer” expands on Otto’s articles to include musical analysis of five of
Brahms’s Daumer settings.
41
Gerstmeier takes as his starting point the notion that
Brahms’s interest in folk song stemmed from the belief that it functioned as an antidote
to the “escalation of individualism and subjectivism” in poetry and music and as a way
to connect with what is real, original, and worthy of preservation. Gerstmeier
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Ibid., 155. The poem reads, in part:

Dark shadows of the night!
Danger of heaving and whirling,
Will you ever be understood by those
Who live, easily protected, on the shore?

Kammerlander, trans. Gutwein, notes that Daumer “he may have liked [the poem] due to [its]
alliteration of surges and eddies, as well as the assonance of night and danger.”
39
Ibid., 168-70.
40
Peter Jost, ed., Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner, 1992).
41
August Gerstmeier, “Brahms und Daumer,” in Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum Verhältnis von
Text und Vertonung, ed. Peter Jost (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992), 116-36.
16!
continues: “With their brief, poignant formulations and the naïve experiences
expressed in their images, [Daumer’s poems] must have seemed to Brahms like newly
invigorated folk poetry, an ideal he also hoped to achieve with his music. Daumer’s
poetry, more than any other, awakened in Brahms a musical imagination of the highest
degree.”
42
Gerstmeier’s article centers on poetic, musical, and musical-rhetorical
analyses of five of Brahms’s Daumer settings for solo voice and piano (thus excluding
the Liebeslieder and other vocal quartets): Op. 32, no. 3; Op. 57, nos. 3 and 5; Op. 95,
no. 7; and Op. 96, no. 2.
Brahms’s Daumer-Hafiz setting “So stehn wir, ich und meine Weide” (Op. 32,
no. 8) is analyzed in Ira Braus’s article “Skeptische Beweglichkeit: Die Rhetorik von
Wort und Ton in So stehn wir, ich und meine Weide op. 32.8,” also in Jost’s volume.
43

Braus’s dissertation, “Textual Rhetoric and Harmonic Anomaly in Selected Lieder of
Johannes Brahms” (1988), had investigated the interplay between text, tone, and
tonality in twelve Brahms lieder.
44
It also included an excellent discussion of Friedrich
Schlegel’s understanding of poetry and rhetoric, a cultural history of Platen’s poetry
(including a discussion of attitudes toward his homosexuality), and other topics.
Building on insights developed in his dissertation, Braus’s article provides a detailed
analysis of Brahms’s setting of Daumer’s Hafiz poem “So stehn wir, ich und meine
Weide.” Braus considers tonality, long-term pitch direction (à la Schencker), and the
Persian poetic form, adopted by several German poet-translators, of the ghasal.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Gerstmeier, trans. Marion Gutwein, 116, 118.
43
Ira Braus, “Skeptische Beweglichkeit: Die Rhetorik von Wort und Ton in So stehn wir, ich und
meine Weide op. 32.8,” in Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung, ed. Peter
Jost (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992), 156-72.
44
Braus, “Textual Rhetoric and Harmonic Anomaly in Selected Lieder of Johannes Brahms” (PhD
diss., Harvard University, 1988).
17!
Melissa Hoag examines one of Brahms’s later Daumer settings in her 2011
article “Multiply directed moments in a Brahms song: Schön war, das ich dir weihte
(op. 95, no. 7).”
45
Hoag argues that “Nearly every parameter and time point in the song
can be identified as multiply-directed; a spectrum of possible continuations or
meanings is presented at every turn. Brahms’s setting thus focuses our attention on the
multiply-directed moments in the song by meeting expectations with various levels of
denial or surprise.”
46
Daniel Brian Stevens’s dissertation, “Brahms’s Song Collections:
Rethinking a Genre” (2008), includes a fifty-page chapter on authorial intention in
Brahms’s settings of eight Daumer poems in Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 57.
47

While Otto, Momand, and Kammerlander illustrate important aspects of the
literary history of Daumer’s poems and Brahms’s settings thereof, and Gerstmeier,
Braus, and Hoag provide compelling musical analysis, few of these scholars engage
deeply with broader cultural issues raised by the works. Natasha Loges, on the other
hand, has written several excellent articles that examine Brahms, Daumer, Hafiz, and
the painter Anselm Feuerbach in relation to critical issues of translation, impersonation,
and Orientalism, and the intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. (The
terms “Orientalist” and “Orientalism” are used here to refer both to the nineteenth
century field of study and to European and American representations and
constructions of Asian and African cultures, discussed most famously in Edward Said’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Melissa Hoag, “Multiply directed moments in a Brahms song: Schön war, das ich dir weihte (op.
95, no. 7),” Gamut: The online journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic 4, no. 1 (2011): 93-116.
46
Ibid., 112.
47
Daniel Brian Stevens, “Brahms’s Song Collections: Rethinking a Genre” (PhD diss., University
of Michigan, 2008).
18!
1978 Orientalism.)
48
Loges’s 2004 article “The Notion of Personae in Brahms’s ‘Bitteres
zu sagen denkst du,’ op. 32, no. 7: A Literary Key to Musical Performance?” explores,
among other things, the notion of taking on alternate personalities through “translating”
texts and setting them to music.
49
Drawing on nineteenth century conceptions of
translation, Loges offers a detailed analysis of Brahms’s setting of Daumer’s
“translation” of the Hafiz poem “Bitteres zu sagen denkst du.”
Loges’s 2005 article “Singing Lieder with a Foreign Accent: Brahms’s Slavic
Songs” explores Brahms’s attempts, starting circa 1877, to capture the acoustical
effects of Josef Wenzig and Siegfried Kapper’s translations of Slavic poetry into
German.
50
This article is an interesting postscript to the present study. Brahms’s
numerous settings of translations of central European by Wenzig, Daumer, and others
in the 1860s will be discussed below. While some of Brahms’s song settings from the
1860s convey a slightly “Eastern feel,” and one uses a Hungarian melody, Brahms did
not attempt in a rigorous way to convey the linguistic-acoustical sound of translations
such as Wenzig’s until the following decade.
Loges’s 2006 article “Exoticism, Artifice and the Supernatural in the Brahmsian
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Also see Raymond Schwab, The
Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and
Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism:
History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); A.L. Macfie, Orientalism
(London: Longman, 2002); Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Todd Curtis Kontje, German
Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Nicholas Saul, Gypsies and Orientalism in
German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Modern Humanities Research
Association and Maney Publishing, 2007); and Edmund Burke III, “The Sociology of Islam: The
French Tradition,” in Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, ed. Edmund Burke III and David
Prochaska (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 154-73.
49
Natasha Loges, “The Notion of Personae in Brahms’s ‘Bitteres zu sagen denkst du,’ op. 32, no. 7:
A Literary Key to Musical Performance?,” in Music and Literature in German Romanticism, ed. Siobhán
Donovan and Robin Elliott (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 183-200.
50
Loges, “Foreign Accent.”
19!
Lied” explores how Brahms’s and Anselm von Feuerbach’s interests in the Orient,
especially in Hafiz, were both filtered through Daumer.
51
Feuerbach, a classicist
painter, met Brahms in Baden-Baden in 1865, shortly after Brahms first encountered
Daumer’s poetry. They were introduced by Julius Allgeyer, who would later write
Feuerbach’s biography. As will be discussed below, Feuerbach’s father, also named
Anselm, was one of Daumer’s closest friends at Erlangen. Feuerbach’s uncle, the great
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, was close with Daumer in the 1830s. Loges’s article
compares Brahms’s mid-1860s interest in Daumer’s Hafiz with Feuerbach’s roughly
contemporaneous paintings Hafis vor der Schenke and Hafis am Brunnen.
Taken together, Loges’s articles comprise an extended meditation on Brahms’s
engagement with non-German peoples and cultures, especially those of central Europe
and Persia.
52
Loges’s work, together with Jonathan Bellman’s extensive writing on
Brahms and the Style hongrois and Adam Gellen’s documentary research on Brahms
and Hungarian music more generally, points the way toward a fuller appreciation of
Brahms the Viennese, Brahms the cosmopolitan, and Brahms the internationalist.
53

BRAHMS’S LIEBESLIEDER WALTZES

Given their great popularity, it is not surprising that Brahms’s Liebeslieder have
attracted scholarly attention. Shirley Ann Neugebauer’s 1982 dissertation “Johannes
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Loges, “Exoticism, Artifice and the Supernatural in the Brahmsian Lied,” Nineteenth-century Music
Review 3, no. 2 (2006): 137-68.
52
Loges has also written on Brahms’s engagement with the German Volkslied tradition. See Loges,
“How to Make a ‘Volkslied’: Early models in the songs of Johannes Brahms,” Music and Letters 93
(August 2012): 316-49.
53
Bellman, “Toward a Lexicon;!” Bellman, The Style Hongrois; Gellen, Brahms und Ungarn.
20!
Brahms’s ‘Liebeslieder’ Waltzes, Op. 52: A Conductor’s Analysis” is a good
introduction to the Liebeslieder. Neugebauer includes in her study both musical analysis
and suggestions for performance practice.
54

Several studies have explored the relationship between the Liebeslieder and
Viennese waltz traditions. David Brodbeck’s 1986 article “The Waltzes of Brahms,”
though short, is an excellent introduction.
55
Brodbeck outlines biographical
connections between Brahms and Strauss, the growth of the Viennese waltz tradition,
arrangements of Schubert Ländler by other composers, and the temporal relationship
between Brahms’s editorial essays and his waltz composition. Peter Ackermann’s 1995
article “‘Liebeslieder—’ Brahms und der Wiener Walzer” is another good survey.
56

Brodbeck’s dissertation and several articles explore the connection between
Brahms’s composition of waltzes and his editions of Schubert Ländler, an older
Viennese traditional dance that is also in triple time. In his dissertation, “Brahms as
Editor and Composer: His Two Editions of Ländler by Schubert and His First Two
Cycles of Waltzes, Opera 39 and 52” (1984), Brodbeck showed how Brahms used a
similar approach to editing and arranging into cycles Schubert’s Ländler as he did to his
own waltzes.
57
He expanded on these ideas in the articles “Compatibility, Coherence,
and Closure in Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes” (1988), “Primo Schubert, Secondo
Schumann: Brahms’s Four-Hand Waltzes, Op. 39” (1989), and “Brahms’s Edition of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
54
Shirley Ann Neugebauer, “Johannes Brahms’s ‘Liebeslieder’ Waltzes, Op. 52: A Conductor’s
Analysis” (DMA diss., University of Miami, 1982).
55
David Brodbeck, “The Waltzes of Brahms,” The American Brahms Society Newsletter 4, no. 2
(Autumn 1986): 1-3.
56
Peter Ackermann, “‘Liebeslieder—’ Brahms und der Wiener Walzer,” Musiktheorie 10, no. 1
(1995): 11-20.
57
David Brodbeck, “Brahms as Editor and Composer: His Two Editions of Ländler by Schubert
and His First Two Cycles of Waltzes, Opera 39 and 52” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1984).
21!
Twenty Schubert Ländler: An Essay in Criticism” (1990).
58
In 2001, Glen Albert
Olsen published a short article that considered rhythmic particularites of the waltzes
and appropriate conducting gestures.
59

The most thorough treatment of Brahms’s waltzes, including the Op. 39 waltzes
for piano four hands as well as the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder, is Marina
Caracciolo’s 2004 monograph Brahms e il Walzer: Storia e Lettura Critica.
60
Caracciolo
includes in her excellent work both historical and analytical notes as well as a chapter
on interpreting Brahms’s waltz tempi. The Liebeslieder are also discussed in Lucien
Stark’s Brahms’s Vocal Duets and Quartets with Piano. Stark includes composition,
publication, and reception history, illustrated with a well curated selection of quotes
from primary sources, together with musical descriptions and excellent translations of
the poems.
61
Additional information about the Liebeslieder is found in biographies of
Brahms, from Max Kalbeck’s early opus to Jan Swafford’s more recent and colorfully
written account;
62
Margaret McCorkle’s thematic catalog;
63
and in letters and diaries.
64

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
58
Brodbeck, “Compatibility, Coherence, and Closure in Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes,” in
Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard D. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and
Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988), 411-38; “Primo Schubert, Secondo Schumann:
Brahms’s Four-Hand Waltzes, Op. 39,” Journal of Musicology 7, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 58-80; and
“Brahms’s Edition of Twenty Schubert Ländler: An Essay in Criticism,” in Brahms Studies I: Papers
Delivered at the International Brahms Conference, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 5-8 May 1983, ed.
George S. Bozarth (London: Clarendon Press, 1990), 229-50.
59
Glen Albert Olsen, “The ‘Liebeslieder Walzer, Op. 52’ of Johannes Brahms: Rhythmic and
metric features, and related conducting gestures,” Choral Journal 42 (September 2001): 9-15.
60
Marina Caracciolo, Brahms e il Walzer: Storia e Lettura Critica (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana,
2004).
61
Lucien Stark, Brahms’s Vocal Duets and Quartets with Piano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998), 29.
62
Kalbeck; Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). Other
good biographies include Walter Niemann, Brahms, trans. Catherine Alison Philips (New York: Knopf,
1929) and Karl Geiringer, Brahms: His Life and Work, trans. H.B. Weiner and Bernard Miall (London:
Oxford University Press, 1947).
22!
Several recent articles consider the Liebeslieder in the context of music performed in the
home.
65

OVERVIEW AND ARGUMENT

The first part of this dissertation traces the life and thought of Georg Friedrich
Daumer as it leads to his 1855 collection Polydora. Ein weltpoetisches Liederbuch. Chapter 2
introduces our poet-philosopher through his early life and education. Daumer studied
with two of the leading philosophers of the early nineteenth century: Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (at the Aegidian School in Nuremberg) and Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling (at the University of Erlangen). Daumer was deeply influenced by
the latter’s early Naturphilosophie, both as laid out by Schelling and as developed by one
of Daumer’s other teachers, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert. Many of Daumer’s
philosophical and poetic works strive for an awareness of and appreciation for the
creative unfolding of the universe through nature and its expression. This expression
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
Margit L. McCorkle, Johannes Brahms: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis (Munich: G.
Henle Verlag, 1984).
64
These include Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, 16 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1907-
22); Johannes Brahms, The Herzogenberg Correspondence, ed. Max Kalbeck, trans. Hannah Bryant
(London: John Murray, 1909); Theodor Billroth and Johannes Brahms, Billroth und Brahms im
Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Gottlieb-Billroth (Berlin: Urban and Schwarzenberg, 1935); Hans Barkan, trans.
and ed., Johannes Brahms and Theodor Billroth: Letters from a Musical Friendship (Oklahoma City: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1955); Alfred Orel, Johannes Brahms und Julius Allgeyer: Eine Künstlerfreundschaft in
Briefen (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1964); Berthold Litzmann, ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes
Brahms, 1853-1896 , vol. 1. (London: Edwin Arnold, 1927); Litzmann, Artist’s Life; Dieter Lohmeier, ed.,
Johannes Brahms – Klaus Groth: Briefe der Freundschaft (Heide: Boyens and Co., 1997); George S. Bozarth,
ed., The Brahms-Keller Correspondence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); and Styra Avins,
Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
65
See, for example, Katy Hamilton, “Music inside the home and outside the box: Brahms’s vocal
quartets in context,” in Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Public and Private Performance, ed.
Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, 279-99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Helen
Paskins, with Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, “Brahms and his arrangers,” in the same volume, 178-
220.
23!
of nature would include, in Daumer’s later works, sensuality and eroticism. Daumer’s
enduring interest in “Oriental” literature was sparked by his teacher Johann Arnold
Kanne and his classmate August von Platen.
Daumer was deeply traumatized at Erlangen, though, by extreme and
sometimes fatal ascetic practices associated with the Awakening movement, or neo-
Pietism. Burschenschaften, recently formed and stridently nationalist student fraternities,
also contritubed to the toxic atmosphere at the school. Daumer arrived at Erlangen in
the shadow of intrafraternal violence involving Karl-Ludwig Sand, who left Erlangen
around the time of Daumer’s arrival to help lead the Burschenshaft movement at the
Wartburg Festival. There, he participated in the burning of books by authors including
August von Kotzebue, whom he would murder two years later.
Daumer was scarred by his experiences at Erlangen. Fellow students died, his
best friend suffered a mental breakdown, and Daumer fasted for nine days in an
aborted suicide attempt. Daumer’s hatred of Pietism and what he understood as its
suppression of natural sensory pleasures would burn fiercely through much of his
career. It would also expand to include an almost manic hatred of Christianity,
including allegations in the late 1840s of Christian cannibalism. Perhaps owing to
Daumer’s association at Erlangen of Pietist extremes with nationalist ones, he had little
interest in nationalist thought. He was much more interested in religious reform and
renewal.
Daumer’s views on religious reform, the central passion of his life, are outlined
in chapter 3. Throughout his career, Daumer interwove calls to destroy the old—in
increasingly broad and vitriolic terms—with envisionings of the new. In his first major
speech and his first publications, Daumer advocated for a reworking of the Christian
24!
church based on German philosophy. With time, Daumer would shift his goal from
reform of the Christian church to the establishment of a new non-Christian religion.
He would also shift the source of inspiration for this new or renewed religion from
German philosophy to natural perception, Islam, and charismatic and sensually
expressive women.
Starting in the late 1820s, Daumer focused his vision for religious reform on a
series of inspired individuals who functioned as paradigms and archetypes for his
evolving ideals. These are discussed in chapter 4. After a truncated teaching career,
Daumer was assigned the custody of Kaspar Hauser, who claimed to have been raised
in confinement with virtually no human contact. Daumer was entranced by the young
foundling and saw him as an embodiment of the ideal of natural revelation that he had
developed from the teachings of Schelling. After Hauser’s mysterious death, Daumer
transposed this paradigm—of an incarnation of a new religious understanding based
on revelation through sensation—onto a series of figures, mostly female and
increasingly eroticized, from literature, religion, mythology, and his own life. These
included the Babylonian queen Semiramis, Bettina von Arnim (in semi-fictional form),
the Virgin Mary, the beloved of the Persian poet Hafiz, his own niece Helene, and
other women who he collected and arranged, like mystical pinups, in volumes of
poetry that stand the test of time only because they sparked the lovestruck interest of
Johannes Brahms.
Of these paradigms and archetypes, the most important was Hafiz. Hafiz, for
Daumer, was the prophet of a new religion where spiritual understanding stemmed
from, rather than suppressed, sensual stimulation. Daumer went beyond Goethe’s
claiming Hafiz as his twin brother; Daumer identified with Hafiz and wrote in his
25!
persona. Daumer’s two volumes of Hafiz poetry, published in 1846 and 1852, marked
the height of his literary career, far eclipsing earlier “translations” of the Persian poet
by Hammer-Purgstall and Platen.
66
It was through his engagement with Hafiz that
Daumer established the paradigm of sensual love as central to religious experience that
would inform his later poetry about women, including Polydora. Brahms’s first settings
of Daumer, whose books he first encountered in a second-hand bookstore in 1863, are
from his Hafiz poetry. It was Daumer’s Hafiz who gave voice, it seems, to Brahms’s
unspoken affection for Robert and Clara Schumann’s beautiful daughter, Julie.
Interspersed with his visions for a new religion centered on various charismatic
personas, Daumer continued to publish critiques of the existing religious order.
Daumer’s rants against Pietism, now ensconced in the repressive Prussian court, and
his celebration of literary eroticism aligned him in the 1830s and early 1840s with the
Young Hegelians. He enjoyed close ties for some time with Ludwig Feuerbach and
Arnold Ruge, among others, and shared with some of them a great appreciation for
Bettina von Arnim and her passion for Goethe.
Daumer’s understanding of Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, or “World-
literature,” stems from this movement. It, together with Johann Gottfried Herder’s
earlier concept of Weltpoesie, or “World-poetry,” underlies Polydora’s claim to be “a
national work… that does justice to the universality of the German taste and spirit.”
67

Chapter 5 explores Weltpoesie and Weltliteratur in relation to dialectical historical
narratives of golden ages lost and soon to be restored, cosmopolitan and nationalist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
Daumer, Hafis.
67
Daumer, Polydora, v.
26!
visions of Germany’s place in these narratives, and evolving understandings of the
Indo-European language group and family of peoples.
Following the success of Hafis in 1846, Daumer enraged the literary
establishment, authorities, and public with the publication in 1847 of Die Geheimnisse des
christlichen Alterthums.
68
In this book, Daumer alleged, among other charges, that early
Christians engaged in ritual cannibalism. Moreover, according to Daumer, the practice
was continuing. Daumer was excoriated by the press, abandoned by his former
colleagues, and accused of fomenting the 1848 revolutions. Karl Marx had little good
to say about his former fellow Young Hegelian. He called Daumer a coward who
“flees before the historical tragedy that is threatening him too closely to alleged nature,
i.e. to a stupid rustic idyll, and preaches the cult of the female to cloak his own
womanish resignation.” Marx continued: “it would be desirable that Bavaria’s sluggish
peasant economy, the ground on which grows priests and Daumers alike, should at last
be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines.”
69
Eichendorff called
Daumer’s ideas “the peak of godlessness in this century” and the “symbol for the ruin
of the Occident.”
70
Daumer became a recluse and turned his thoughts, even more than
he had before, to unattainable women.
Although Daumer had married in 1834, his wife was not well educated and had
little interest in philosophical, literary, and increasingly lascivious pursuits. Daumer’s
Frauenbilder und Huldigungen (1853), in which he described twenty-two women, often in
erotic terms, was widely criticized as indecent. It was Brahms’s settings of poems from
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Daumer, Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1847).
69
Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 60-61.
70
Effelberger, quoted in Kammerlander, trans. Gutwein, 159.
27!
this volume in Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 57, that caused controversy among many of his
friends but was defended by Elizabeth von Herzogenberg. Daumer carried on an
amorous correspondence for twenty years with his young niece Helene, whom he saw
as unattainable beloved, philosophical confidante, and nature-prophet all in one. He
imagined starting a new religion based on a small community of women he had
gathered around him, including his mother, his daughter, and Helene. He wrote about
eremital philosophy, considered converting to Judaism, and again considered suicide.
He would convert to Catholicism in 1858. In 1855, while in the depths of seclusion, he
published Polydora.
Although Polydora was never the literary sensation that Hafis had been, Brahms
saw in the poems a perfect vehicle for the expression of Viennese spirit, Schubertian
tradition, Austro-Hungarian plurality, and romantic love that is the Liebeslieder, the
subject of part 2. Chapter 6 situates the Liebeslieder in relation to the Viennese waltz
tradition, Schubert’s Ländler, and Brahms’s approach to arranging and ordering cycles.
Chapter 7 explores Brahms’s relationships with women, which ranged from lifelong
soulmates to youthful infatuations, and how these shaped his song production in the
late 1850s and 1860s; these songs were important precursors to the Liebeslieder.
Brahms’s earlier relationships also set the stage for his obsession with Julie Schumann,
which would inspire the Liebeslieder, other Daumer settings (in Opp. 32, 46, 47, and
possibly 57), and Rhapsodie, Op. 53. These are explored in chapter 8.
As noted above, scholars such as Margaret Notley have situated some of
Brahms’s works from the 1870s and ’80s with respect to Viennese liberalism. Chapter
9 expands that discussion to consider Brahms’s relation to liberalism at an earlier
time—the 1860s—and to distinguish liberal thought in Prussian Germany from that in
28!
Austria-Hungary. Brahms’s Requiem and Triumphlied will be shown to reflect shifting
north German liberal values. The Ungarische Tänze, 1868 songs, and Liebeslieder, on the
other hand, embody but also challenge aspects of German liberal thought in Austria-
Hungary. In particular, they suggest that Brahms supported some degree of self-
determination, within the Austro-Hungarian imperial framework, for non-German
peoples such as Hungarians, Poles, and Czechs. This was directly counter to liberal
policy in the empire at the time. Brahms’s approach can also be read as a challenge to
the incipient Kulturkampf campaign, supported by both Bismarck and north German
liberals, of persecuting Catholics and “Germanizing” Poles.
Chapter 9 closes with a reconsideration of the Indo-European language group
and family of peoples, both in terms of the Liebeslieder and the Neue Liebeslieder (Op. 65,
1874). Through the 1860s, philologists came to understand the Indo-European (also
called Indo-Germanic or Aryan) peoples as originating not in Asia, as previously
believed, but in northern Europe. Brahms’s waltz cycles may reflect not only political
tensions in Austria-Hungary (and perhaps Germany), but also contemporaneously
shifting notions of German ethnic and linguistic heritage and identity.
For Brahms, the political and the personal are often closely intertwined. While
his choices of texts and musical settings leading up to and including the Liebeslieder
seem to comment on Austro-Hungarian politics and may reflect changing ideas about
Indo-European ancestry, they also speak to Brahms’s concepts of romantic love.
Chapter 10 illustrates how Brahms shifted, over the course of the 1860s, from German
folk poetry to central European poetry as his preferred source for expressing the
experience of romantic love. At the same time, Brahms often chose contemporary
German poets such as Eduard Mörike, Adolf Friedrich von Schack, and especially
29!
Goethe to frame and reflect upon that experience. Following the Neue Liebeslieder,
which concludes with a setting of Goethe’s “Zum Schluß,” this study concludes by
considering how Brahms, through his evocation of Goethe, renders Polydora worthy of
its universal-poetic ambition and transforms heartbreak into an enduring reflection on
the human condition.

30!

PART 1

GEORG FRIEDRICH DAUMER AND POLYDORA

31!
CHAPTER 2
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION

Born in Nuremberg on March 5, 1800, Daumer’s childhood reflects the turmoil
and hardship of the Napoleonic wars and occupation. Georg’s father Peter Daumer
was a prosperous furrier and fur salesman. He traveled to Paris on business and held
Enlightenment views. Due to the wars and Napoleon’s Continental blockade, though,
the fur business declined and Peter Daumer declared bankruptcy. Concurrent with
their economic downturn, the family shifted from Enlightenment views toward
Christianity, apparently a trend among the “less intellectual” classes at the time.
1
Peter
Daumer’s fall from fortune continued as he suffered a mental breakdown and slid into
a state between madness and stupor. He died on the day after Christmas, 1826.
Georg was the third of six children. Several of his brothers inherited their
father’s entrepreneurial spirit and went on to achieve significant wealth. Georg,
however, did not get along with his father. As Birkenbihl describes it, “The sober,
realistic personality of the father repelled Georg’s idealistic spirit; the two opposed
each other like strangers.”
2
Georg was, however, very close with his mother. She was
his primary teacher during his childhood years and lived with him for much of his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 7.
2
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 1.
32!
adult life. Georg respected both the kindness and intelligence of his mother. It was she
who, despite the family’s poverty, would make it possible for him to attend university.
Daumer’s interest in social outcasts can also be traced to his childhood. He
became friends with a poor and blind furrier, who taught him Greek and other topics.
As Daumer describes him in Meine Conversion:

He was very faithful and devout, but simpler, louder, without false piety
or ostentation, and thus instilled in me a respect and reverence – quite
unlike the old pastor, a man who was certainly friendly toward me, but
about whom I heard rumors of great wealth and greed, and a coal
business he ran only for profit, so that they used to call him the coal
farmer; or that vain, coquetting rationalist I heard at St. Aegidien.… In
[the furrier’s] youth, he had learned the old languages, and he owned a
Greek New Testament, which he also gave to me, and which I still make
use of today; it had accompanied him on his travels; he understood it
and almost knew it by heart. He gave me my first Greek lessons, and
under the leadership of this poor, blind man, I read the New Testament
in its original language, before I ever learned Greek in school – they
were thus very surprised in school about how much I already knew of
this language, as everyone else was only beginning to learn the
alphabet.
3

The older man’s areas of learning, as recounted by Daumer, foreshadow his own:
classical languages, philology and the study of scripture. Daumer also appreciated the
unpretentious faith of the blind furrier, comparing him favorably to the wealthy local
pastor and the preachers he would hear at St. Aegedin (Egidienkirche), the church that
was associated with the school he would later attend. These tendencies, too, would
resonate throughout Daumer’s long intellectual career.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Daumer, Meine Conversion, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 2-3.
33!
In addition to languages and theology, Daumer was drawn to music at a young
age. He was given a small violin and would play for farmers at a local fruit market. He
also received piano lessons before the family became poor. At age eleven, he composed
the first song that he would keep, a setting of Goethe’s “Ihr verblühet, schöne Rosen.”
4

Later, he taught piano lessons to contribute to his family’s finances.
Daumer seriously considered becoming a composer and musician. He
recounted that his mother had sent him with some of his compositions to an “old cantor,
who unfortunately knew hardly more than I did.” The cantor was not encouraging and
Daumer gave up on his musical ambitions. “At this point,” Daumer recalled,

I... threw myself into poetry and philology, wrote whole volumes of
lyrical, epic, and didactic poetry, translated Homeric chants metrically
into Latin and Horace into Greek, perhaps only to distract myself from
the music that was brewing and heaving in me, to which, certainly, I still
devoted myself productively, but only for my own pleasure and without
making any further use of it.
5

In his later years, Daumer would claim that music was his main disposition.
6
In 1864,
he published a musical catechism. In addition to commenting on musical esthetics, the
small book contains a love prayer of gratitude to music, which, Daumer states, helps
man to make life bearable.
7

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 3-4; Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 7. Also see Daumer [anon.],
“Musikalischer Katechismus. Fragen und Antworten über Wesen, Wirkung und Bedeutung der Musik
und über ihr Verhältnis zu den übringen Künsten,” in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift 107, no. 1 (1864): 43-89.
5
Daumer, Aus der Mansarde, 3rd letter, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 11.
6
Ibid., 12.
7
Daumer, “Musikalischer Katechismus,” quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 114-15.
34!
Daumer was a sickly child. He eschewed the rough and tumble of many games
that boys played, including fencing, which was popular with his peers.
8
As an adult,
illness would force him to retire from teaching while still in his twenties. Participating
in few physical actitivies, Daumer’s childhood was occupied instead with reading
poetry, reading the Bible, studying languages, and composing and playing music.
After attending preparatory school for two years, Daumer enrolled at the
Aegidian School (Aegidianum) in Nuremberg, now the Melanchthon-Gymnasium.
Founded in 1526 at the urging of the great Lutheran reformer, theologian, and
educator Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), a close colleague of Martin Luther and
author of the Augsburg Confession (1530), the school was headed from 1808 by Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Three centuries after its founding, the school
still retained its original focus on classical, humanistic education. Hegel, whose own
interest in the classics was encouraged by his close friendship with Hölderlin, set the
tone for the school in one of the first speeches of his rectorship. He advised students
that “the perfection and magnificence of the Greco-Roman masterpieces must be the
mental bath, the profane baptism that would give the soul that first and ineradicable
tone and tincture for taste and science.”
9
This focus on the classics resonated strongly
with Daumer, as did the strong religious orientation of the school. Catholic students
were required to attend mass every day, Protestants attended services at the St.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
Fencing was popular at the Aegidian School. See Birkenbihl, 6-7.
9
Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin: Rudolph Gaertner, 1857), quoted in Birkenbihl, trans.
Gutwein, 5.
35!
Aegidia church every Sunday, and all students were asked every semester if they had
been to confession. Religion courses at all age levels were taught by Hegel himself.
10

As a child, Daumer had imbibed much of his mother’s deep religiosity. In the
deeply theological environment of the Aegidian School, his interest in religion
blossomed. His poems and essays took on a biblical character. He excelled in his
religion classes and became the favorite student of one of his teachers, an older cleric
who could trust Daumer to be able to answer his questions right away. On the other
hand, Daumer’s critical attitude toward the religious establishment can also be seen
during his school years. As he recounted in Meine Conversion, “When my father made
me go, as was the case on Sundays, into the tightly packed St. Aegedian church in
Nuremberg, and listen to a flat and empty speaker of the latest fashion, I got so awfully
bored that I began to bring a pocket-sized travel story, and would read it secretly
during the sermon.”
11

Such incidents notwithstanding, Daumer was seen as holding great religious
promise. His mother and other relatives believed that he would become “a great
theological light and a pillar of the Protestant church.” With that in mind, Daumer
enrolled in 1817 at seminary in Erlangen.

NATURPHILOSOPHIE AND ORIENTAL LITERATURE AT ERLANGEN

At Erlangen, Daumer was exposed to two topics that would remain important
throughout his intellectual life: a philosophy based on nature and Oriental, especially
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 6.
11
Daumer, Meine Conversion, quoted in ibid., 8
36!
Persian, literature. Daumer’s primary teachers were Johann Arnold Kanne (1773-
1824), Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780-1860), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling (1775-1854). Kanne, a linguist and translator, lectured on the Koran in
winter 1818-19 and on Jahn and Rosemüller’s Arab chrestomathy (an anthology
designed to illustrate the development of language and literary style) in summer 1819.
12

He also espoused Pietist religious views and claimed to have had a personal vision of
Christ.
Schubert was trained in the medical and botanical sciences but also had a deep
interest in religion and philosophy. He studied with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-
1803) at Wiemar, where he began a lifelong friendship with Herder’s son Emil, and
with Schelling at Jena. He attempted to fuse Schelling’s Naturphilosophie with Christian
teachings. In the words of Roland Hoermann, Schubert “belonged to a curiously
Romantic breed of medical scientist who sought in nature a unifying moral principle
underlying the development of all life forms.”
13
These diverse interests came together
in his first major work, Ahndungen einer allgemeinen Geschichte des Lebens (1806). Here,
Hoermann explains, “Schubert delineates how the total existence of Earth’s organic
and inorganic realms comprises a single mighty organism which aims at a higher
consummation by means of its polarized interactivity and the revelatory design of a
supreme intelligence.”
14
Schubert studied Pietist teachings in Nuremberg and became
associated with the Awakening (Erweckung) movement. Pietist teachings also informed
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 54.
13
Roland Hoermann, “Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 90:
German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789-1832, ed. James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer (Detroit:
Gale Research, 1989), 305.
14
Ibid., 306; see also Tod Russel Heath, “A Mysterious Path: The Circumstances and Substance of
G. H. Schubert’s Naturphilosophiche Psychology” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1985), 114-28.
37!
his 1815 book Die Symbolik des Traumes, which argued that the premonitional quality of
dreams is an echo of mankind’s earlier ability to directly perceive God’s revelation.
15

Schubert joined the faculty at Erlangen in 1819 and reported that the years he spent at
Erlangen were the happiest of his life.
16

Schelling, who accepted a post at Erlangen in 1820, was a contemporary, one-
time roommate, and later rival of Hegel. He was also close with Hölderlin, who had
also lived with him and Hegel during their student years in Württenberg. Many see
Schelling as a bridge between Fichte and Hegel. Schelling taught in Jena between
1798 and 1803, where he became close with Goethe and overlapped with the Jena
Romantics. While at Jena, he developed his concept of Naturphilosophie, which would
have a profound impact on Daumer. Simply put, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie rejects
Kant’s division of nature into what can be understood rationally, on the one hand, and
purely “sensory” aspects of nature that elude rational analysis, on the other.
Naturphilosophie, according to Andrew Bowie, “includes ourselves within nature, as part
of an interrelated whole, which is structured in an ascending series of ‘potentials’ that
contain a polar opposition within themselves.” Nature is simultaneously an almost
limitless cascade of possible effects and a self-limiting phenomenon that results in the
expressions of nature that we perceive. Nature encompasses both “an absolute
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Hoermann, 308, writes: “Anticipating Jung’s theories of depth psychology and the collective
unconscious, Schubert was convinced that a premonitory knowledge of the holistic truth revealed in
these extrasensory states resides in the primal myths of all people. It is the task of a new era of
humankind to raise this knowledge to the level of conscious, spontaneously assimilated truth in everyday
life.” Also see Heath, 187-210.
16
Hoermann, 309; Heath, 226.
38!
producing subject” and a spontaneously thinking subject. The challenge, for Schelling,
was how to reconcile these opposing aspects.
17

In 1803, Schelling took a position at Würzburg, where he made his final break
with his former roommate Hegel. Starting in 1806, he taught at Munich. Under the
influence of Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841), who would also influence Schubert
and Kanne, he became so captivated by elements of Catholicism that he was widely
believed to have converted. This would not have been unusual for the time; Friedrich
Schlegel converted in 1808. Schelling did not convert, however, but was drawn to the
religion’s mystical qualities. Schelling’s interest in Catholicism also led to his being
seen as the philosophical representative of southern, Catholic Bavaria, in opposition to
Hegel’s northern, Protestant Prussia.
18
Daumer’s interest in Catholic mysticism,
imagery, and lore, especially the cult of the Virgin Mary, was likely inspired and/or
reinforced by Schelling.
Schelling taught at Erlangen from 1820 to 1827, during which time he was
deeply interested in world mythology and religious symbols. It was while teaching at
Erlangen that Schelling wrote System der Weltalter (1827-28), upon which Daumer
would expand in Religion des neuen Weltalters (1850).
19

Daumer’s classmates included Anselm Feuerbach (1798-1851) and August von
Platen (1796-1835). Feuerbach was the eldest son of the eminent jurist and legal
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Andrew Bowie, “Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, last modified Winter 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
win2010/entries/schelling/.
18
John Laughland, Schelling versus Hegel: From German Idealism to Christian Metaphysics (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2007), 60.
19
For more on Schelling’s philosophy, see Ryan J. Foster, “The Creativity of Nature: The Genesis
of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, 1775-1799” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2008); Thomas O’Meara,
Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1982); Laughland; and Bowie.
39!
scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775-1833), one of the “Northern
Lights” who had been invited to Bavaria to reform the legal system there. During the
time that Daumer was a student at Erlangen, he was president of the Bavarian Court
of Appeals. The younger Anselm Feuerbach, Daumer’s classmate, went on to become
an archaeologist and esthetician. His younger brother Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72)
would become one of the leading philosophers of his generation. His son, the classicist
painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829-80), was introduced to Brahms in 1865 by his future
biographer Julius Allgeyer and became a lifelong, if complicated, friend.
Count August von Platen, son of a civil servant, was recognized for his poetic
talents while a student at the Kadettenhaus (School for Cadets) in Munich. He served in
the Königliche Pagerie (Royal School of Pages) and as a lieutenant with the Bavarian
lifeguards, with whom he campaigned in France in 1815. After leaving the military, he
studied at the University of Würzburg, where he his classmates included Friedrich
Rückert (1788-1866). He then transferred to Erlangen, perhaps to follow Schelling.
He would publish five books of translations of Persian poetry, including two by Hafiz,
between 1821 and 1823.
Both Kanne and Schubert would make a positive initial impact on Daumer and
his peers, although Platen was initially skeptical about Kanne’s reputed Pietism.
Shortly after arriving at Erlangen, Platen recorded in his journal:

Yesterday, I made the acquaintance of Kanne, perhaps the deepest
linguist ever to have lived, and certainly decried due to his theological
mysticism and Pietism. Regardless, he is quite a cheerful and interesting
man. I myself noticed nothing Pietistic about him, I only noticed a
40!
religiosity that returns everything to its highest point, and occasionally
skips some important middle steps.
20

Platen offered effusive praise for Schubert in several journal entries from 1820:

Made the acquaintance of Schubert, that wonderful man.... The appeal
of this man is matchless, and the more one gets to know him, the more
one is saturated with love.... Two days ago I was at Schubert’s, where I
have been going more and more often to relax. He read Hans Sachs to
me, and really gave me a taste for him that I did not have before. But
what wouldn’t sound lovely when read by Schubert?
21

A deep consideration of nature was central to Daumer’s early philosophy of
religion. In addition to the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, Daumer absorbed Schubert’s
neo-Romantic speculations about nature, his teachings about nature’s soul, and his
theory of dreams.
22
His first publications, discussed below, would expand on
Schelling’s work.
It was at Erlangen that Daumer developed what would become a lifelong
fascination with Oriental, especially Persian, literature. This came from Kanne and,
perhaps more importantly, from Platen. The personal connections between the
pioneering Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Rückert, Platen, and Daumer,
all of whom published translations of Hafiz but with different approaches and different
agendas, will be explored in chapter 4.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
August von Platen, Die Tagebücher des Grafen August von Platen, vol. 2, ed. Georg von Laubmann
and Ludwig von Scheffler (Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1896-1900; repr.,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), 363, 371, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 8.
21
Platen, quoted in ibid., 8-9.
22
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 9.
41!
Despite these positive experiences, Daumer was deeply scarred at Erlangen by
extreme—sometimes even fatal—forms of Pietist asceticism that were practiced there.
A brief review of the German Pietism, with a focus on the early nineteenth century,
will help contextualize the experiences that Daumer recounted.

“AWAKENED” NEO-PIETISM AND OTHER TRAUMAS

Pietism arose out of a wave of mysticism that swept through Germany during
the Thirty Years War (1618-48) as a reaction to overly dogmatic church leadership
and entrenched aristocratic interests in the church.
23
The movement began in earnest
in 1675 with the publication of Philipp Jakob Spener’s Pia desideria oder herzliches
Verlangen nach gottgefälliger Besserung der wahren evangelischen Kirche. Spener (1635-1705)
argued that the goals of the Reformation had not yet been fully accomplished.
24
He
called for an emphasis on works rather than doctrine and encouraged private
assemblies of believers.
25
August Hermann Franck (1663-1727) helped develop
Spener’s impulse into a movement, establishing institutions such as the Collegia biblica
and eventually forming a Pietist society in Halle.
26
The term “Pietist” was first used in
1689 as a derogatory term for the members of Francke’s Collegia. As the movement
grew, however, the term lost its negative connotation.
27

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
Koppel Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York: Octagon, 1968), 14.
24
Frederick Herzog, European Pietism Reviewed (San Jose: Pickwick Publications, 2003), 2.
25
Pinson, 15.
26
Ibid., 15, compares Francke’s systematization of Spener’s impulse to Melancthon’s contributions
to Lutheranism.
27
Ibid., 12-13.
42!
In general, eighteenth century Pietism can be described as having the following
characteristics. First, it was a more inward-looking, emotional, and enthusiastic form
of Christianity than mainstream Lutheranism of the time. Second, it emphasized
Christian practice over doctrine, valuing purity of life, saintliness of behavior, and a
mystical conversion experience from passive to active faith. Third, the doctrine of
universal priesthood strove to diminish, if not abolish, the divide between laity and
clergy.
28

Pietism grew out of opposition and often presented itself as opposed to church
alignment with state interests. However, Richard Gawthrop, in his 1993 study Pietism
and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia, argued that Pietism was also a crucial
cultural factor in the rise of the Prussian state under Friedrich Wilhelm I (r. 1713-40).
According to Gawthrop,

the Pietists, especially under the leadership of August Hermann
Francke, ultimately came to depend on the patronage of the
Hohenzollerns, who allowed them to build up their own mini-society in
the city of Halle. In this setting, the potentialities for social activism in
early Pietism were fully realized, and Halle Pietism developed into an
ideological and pedagogical force capable of fulfilling the role it was to
assume in post-1713 Prussia.
29

Gawthrop argued that relationship between Halle Pietists and the court not only
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Ibid., 14; Werner Conze, The Shaping of the German Nation: A Historical Analysis, trans. Neville
Mellon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 46; Tenzan Eaghill, “From Pietism to Romanticism: The
Early Life and Work of Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, ed. Christian T.
Collins Winn, Christopher Gehrz, G. William Carlson, and Eric Holst (Eugene: Pickwick Publications,
2011), 223; and Kathleen Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 143.
29
Richard Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 11.
43!
allowed Pietists to pursue their agenda of societal reform, but Pietism also “powerfully
reinforced and helped legitimate Frederick William I’s fundamental restructuring of
the administrative, political, and military life of his kingdom.”
30
The first half of the
nineteenth century would see a renewed alignment of Pietism with Prussian state
interests.
The first flowering of Pietism, inspired by Spener and Francke, was in decline
by 1740.
31
Pietist influence continued, however, and revived in the following century.
32

Scholars have noted strong Pietist tendencies in both Herder and Schleiermacher, who
had a Pietist heritage.
33
A “second wave of Pietism,” parallel to Methodism and
evangelical movements in England and closely associated with the Awakening
movement in Germany, arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The
first two decades of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of several missionary
training centers that sent missions to China, Danish colonial holdings in southern India,
and other locations.
34
Second-wave Pietists also became involved in politics. In the
words of Kathleen Curran,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Ibid., 11.
31
Hartmut Lehmann, “Pietism and Nationalism: The Relationship between Protestant Revivalism
and National Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Church History 51, no. 1 (March 1982): 41.
32
Lehmann, in “Erweckungsbewegung as Religious Experience or Historiographical Construct: The
Case of Ludwig Hofacker,” in Pietism, Revivalism, and Modernity, 1650-1850, ed. Fred van Lieburg and
Daniel Lindmark (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 274-85, notes that
another prominent Pietist of the time, Ludwig Hofacker (1798-1828), was fond of drinking and dancing.
Hofacker converted to Pietism in 1818 (shortly after Daumer enrolled at Erlangen), to the shock of
many. His sermons became very popular.
33
Eaghill, 107; Conze, 67; Pinson, 12, 164.
34
Richard V. Pierard, “German Pietism as a Major Factor in the Beginnings of Modern Protestant
Missions,” in The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, ed. Christian T. Collins Winn, Christopher Gehrz, G.
William Carlson, and Eric Holst (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 294-95. Pierard locates the
center of the movement in Württemberg, whereas Curran centers it in Berlin.
44!
Berlin was the center of the new orthodoxy in Germany. In the first two
decades of the [nineteenth] century conservative forces there developed
a small but influential group of “Awakened” Pietists, who joined with a
minority of anti-Rationalist clergy to form a conservative political force
that more or less remained in place until its explosive disintegration in
1918. The manifestation was part of a mood of religious awakening that
swept throughout Europe and America in the nineteenth century. This
spirit of revival—for instance, the Oxford Movement in England or the
Second Great Awakening in the United States—was often connected
with a romantic reaction against the mechanistic thinking of the
rationalist Enlightenment, which had spawned the feeling, justified or
not, that lethargy had permeated the established church. The romantic
reaction in Germany, called the Erweckungsbewegung, or ‘Awakening,’
drew from Pietism, a current within German Protestantism, although
the so-called New Pietism of the early nineteenth century radically
altered some of the basic tenets of the older movement.
35

Like their earlier brethren with Friedrich Wilhelm I, these second wave Pietists, or
Neo-Pietists, established strong ties with the Prussian court. By the time Daumer was
a student, Neo-Pietism was becoming de rigueur for aspiring bureaucrats. As Curran
explains:

By the early nineteenth century, a conservative Neo-Pietist movement
had infiltrated the Prussian government, which paradoxically revived
earlier aspects of Pietism while assuming characteristics that were
anathema to it. On the one hand, Neo-Pietism shed Pietism’s
traditionally anti-institutional distrust of state-dominated religion and
became, instead, a steadfast partner of the state. On the other hand, the
Neo-Pietists retained and amplified the Pietist emphasis on doing good
deeds and the “priesthood of all believers.” By the 1820s, a newly
activated Neo-Pietism became the religion of choice for Junker
aristocrats and a bureaucratic clergy who hoped to rid the universities of
theological rationalism and an even more baleful interloper, the “dragon
seed of Hegelianism.” It was at this time, too, that Friedrich Wilhelm IV
was drawn into the Neo-Pietist circle, which, after the revolution of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Curran, 143.
45!
1848, included the Kamarilla, his ultraconservative advisers, who
increasingly influenced the mentally weakened sovereign.
36

While Neo-Pietism was gaining force in the Prussian political establishment, it
was also becoming influential in southern German-speaking lands among very a
different political faction: radical student fraternities known as Burschenschaften.
Members of the Burschenschaften, many of whom had fought in the wars against
Napoleon, were committed to German nationalism, progressive constitutional reform,
and religious reform.
37
They placed a premium on personal morality and saw the
Burschenschaften as alternatives both to traditional student fraternities
(Landsmannschaften), which they saw as overly interested in carnal pursuits, and to a
corrupt adult world.
38
They sought to promote new national symbols and mythology
through gatherings such as the Wartburg Festival of 1817.
The Erlangen Burschenschaft was led and perhaps founded by Karl-Ludwig
Sand (1795-1820), best known as the murderer of the prominent playwright August
von Kotzebue (1761-1819). Sand enrolled at Erlangen in 1816 after serving in the
Battle of Waterloo. He suffered from moodiness and depression, perhaps from what
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
Ibid., 143.
37
The connection between Pietism and German nationalism was not new. Conze, in Shaping of the
German Nation, 47, notes that Pietism “prepared an intellectual and spiritual milieu favorable to the
development of nationalism. Its emphasis on emotion, on variety and individuality, on popular schooling,
could readily be applied to nationality, and prominent Pietists of the eighteenth century did so.”
38
George S. Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the
Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789-1819,” The Journal of Modern History 72, no. 4
(December 2000): 915-16, writes: “With the defeat of France, student veterans of the wars of liberation
had returned to their universities and founded Burschenschaften, fraternities dedicated to the moral and
spiritual reform of the German university and, ultimately, the German nation. These students rejected
the carnal pursuits of traditional fraternity life, pledging themselves to the values of ‘Germanness,
militancy, honor, and chastity.’ Many also participated in Friedrich Ludwig Jahn’s gymnastics
associations (Turnvereine), where they cultivated an ideal of masculinity based on inward purity, physical
strength, and willing self-sacrifice for the fatherland.”
46!
we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. His melancholy might also have
stemmed from his disappointment at the failure of the recently-liberated German states
to adopt more progressive constitutional reforms or move more meaningfully toward
German unification at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. Perhaps inspired by the tale
of William Tell, Sand organized moonlight ceremonies on the ruins of an old castle and
burial site that he dubbed Rütly (also spelled Ruttli) on the outskirts of Erlangen.
39

While Sand failed to attract large numbers to his group, he did attract “a certain circle
of Puritans, composed of about sixty to eighty students,” to his nationalist and
moralizing Pietist organization.
40
Sand’s Burschenschaft competed for student attention
with the Landsmannschaft. When Sand and his close friend and co-leader Dittmer
returned from a holiday in May 1817, they found the structure they had built at the
Rütly destroyed by Landsmannschaft members.
When Dittmer fell into a river later that year and drowned, members of the
Landsmannschaft, according to one source, could have saved him but chose not to.
41

Another source reports that members of the Landsmannschaft criticized Sand for not
being able to rescue his friend.
42
Frustrated and sad, Sand decided to leave Erlangen in
1817 for Jena, which was the center of the Burschenschaft movement.
43
Before enrolling
at Jena, however, he attended the Wartburg festival, where he distributed a nationalist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Ibid., 921. The figure of William Tell, a Swiss folk hero from the fourteenth century, captured the
imagination of German nationalists in the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic eras. Friedrich Schiller
published a play based on William Tell in 1804.
40
Pere Alexandre Dumas, Karl-Ludwig Sand (1910), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2745/2745-
pdf.pdf, accessed June 12, 2014, xviii.
41
Ibid., xix.
42
Carl Ludwig Sand, dargestellt durch seine Tagebücher und Briefe von einigen seiner Freunde (Altenburg,
1821), summarized in Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue?,” 921.
43
Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue?,” 922.
47!
pamphlet calling for the establishment of a national Burschenschaft. At Wartburg, too,
he participated in the burning of several books, including one by Kotzebue, whom he
would murder two years later.
The influence of Pietism on the Erlangen campus was not limited to radical
student organizations. Both of Daumer’s primary teachers were committed Pietists.
44

Schubert had developed close ties with the Pietists while living in Nuremberg, where
he had served as director of the Nuremberg Polytechnic Academy from 1809 to 1816.
He read Jakob Böhme and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, exchanged letters and
books with Franz Xaver von Baader, and, following the death of his wife Henriette in
1812, converted to active faith.
45
Kanne also espoused Pietist views and claimed to
have had a personal vision of Christ. Pietism also was central to the university’s
pedagogy. According to Kühne, “The students in Erlangen were encouraged to seek
ecstatic-religious experiences, which for many of them resulted in a pathological
awareness of sin, and in some cases led to ascetic self-injury.”
46
Kanne, in particular,
encouraged his students to take part in extreme prayer practices.
47

In any case, Daumer reported being deeply troubled by, even as he became
swept up in, extreme forms of Pietist asceticism including self-mutilation and suicide.
In Meine Conversion, he recalled:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 8, called Kanne and Schubert dangerous and controversial:
“Protestant theology was not experiencing fortunate times back then. On the one hand, rationalism was
watering down and furthering the decay of the comforting and lively Christianity, on the other hand, a
sickly, degenerate Pietism was on the rise. The University of Erlangen, especially, hosted two dangerous
and controversial representatives of Pietistic Christianity, Kanne and Schubert.”
45
Heath, 172. He also consoled himself for his loss, apparently, by marrying his wife’s niece, Julie,
in 1813. See Hoermann, 308, and Heath, 171.
46
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 9.
47
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 10.
48!
A young boy who had fallen for these dark goings-on, which were now
marked by vulgar lust, then by fanatic atrocities, mutilated himself in
such a horrible way that he died wretchedly from it. Another, the poet
and archeologist Anselm von Feuerbach, my dearest and most trusted
friend, was also close to his downfall, due to the dismal Pietistic worries
that plagued him. I wrote about it, in shock and despair, to his father,
the president [of the Bavarian Court of Appeals] von Feuerbach of
Ansbach, and informed him about the situation. He immediately came to
Erlangen to get his son away from that dangerous place forever, for he
would otherwise have likely been lost. Even before that, there was
among the Pietists in Nuremberg – though I had not yet been a part of
that group when I was in Nuremberg – similarly sad things occurred,
and shameful deeds were committed, by representatives of Christian and
ecclesiastical devoutness. A Pietistic gardener cut off his own head in a
moment of religious fear and desperation; an acquaintance of mine, a
very popular and much sought out preacher from St. Sebald, was guilty
of an unnatural sin and was therefore let go. All of this combined could
have, or indeed must have had a depressing and disturbing influence on
my life and soul.
48

Much about Daumer’s experience of Pietism was not unique. Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804), for example, had been frustrated several generations earlier by what he
saw as oppressive Pietism in his own educational experience. Pietism, as Kant had
experienced it, strove for “possession of the whole human being, of his opinions, and
convictions, of his feeling, and his will. This scrutiny of the ‘heart,’ in the pietistic sense,
was practiced incessantly. There was no inner stirring, be it ever so hidden, that could
escape or elude this examination, and that perpetual supervision did not attempt to
control.”
49
Max Weber (1864-1920), similarly, criticized what he saw as an excessive
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Daumer, Meine Conversion, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 9-10. Birkenbihl, 10, continues:
“Additionally, there was the unfortunate influence of Kanne, with whom Daumer was particularly close.
Kanne prided himself in having witnessed a personal appearance of the savior, and tortured his students
by making them take part in this grace through unsettling prayer practices. Like his close friend Anselm
von Feuerbach, Daumer, too, may have spent his nights in mad prayers, worsening his already sickly
condition by adding stress to his excitable nature.”
49
Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1981), 16.
49!
emphasis on emotion in Pietism which distracted, he felt, from the ascetic virtues of
Calvinist or Puritan Protestantism. This emphasis on emotion, he argued,

led religion in practice to strive for the enjoyment of salvation in this
world rather than to engage in the ascetic struggle for certainty about
the future world. Moreover, the emotion was capable of such intensity,
that religion took on a positively hysterical character, resulting in the
alternation which is familiar from examples without number and neuro-
pathologically understandable, of half-conscious states of religious
ecstasy with periods of nervous exhaustion, which were felt as
abandonment by God. The effect was the direct opposite of the strict
and temperate discipline under which men were placed by the
systematic life of holiness of the Puritan.
50

The Pietist interest in cultivating intense emotional experiences, as was
promulgated at Erlangen, was coupled during the years that Daumer was there with
intense political partisanship. This could be seen not only in the rivalry between Sand’s
Burschenschaft and the Landsmannschaften but also, more broadly, between radical
nationalists and conservatives who sought to preserve the Metternichian status quo.
The universities and Burschenschaften were primary sites for this debate. Following
Sand’s murder of Kotzebue in 1819, Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich used
the murder as a pretext for issuing the Carlsbad Decrees, which banned the
Burschenschaften, fired liberal professors, expanded censorship, and established a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1930), first published 1905, emphasis added. Weber continues: “It meant a weakening of the
inhibitions which protected the rational personality of the Calvinist from his passions. Similarly it was
possible for the Calvinistic idea of the depravity of the flesh, taken emotionally, for instance in the form
of the so-called worm-feeling, to lead to a deadening of enterprise in worldly activity. Even the doctrine
of predestination could lead to fatalism if, contrary to the predominant tendencies of rational Calvinism,
it were made the object of emotional contemplation. Finally, the desire to separate the elect from the
world could, with a strong emotional intensity, lead to a sort of monastic community life of half-
communistic character, as the history of Pietism, even within the Reformed Church, has shown again
and again.”
50!
McCarthy-like commission to investigate revolutionary plots. The following year, the
Final Act of the Viennese Ministerial Conferences limited constitutional government
and established monarchical rule throughout the Confederation.
51

If Daumer overlapped with Sand at Erlangen in 1817, it would have been only
for a few months. In any event, the aftershocks of Sand’s Burschenschaft and Dittmer’s
drowning, coupled with broader political turmoil and intensified in the crucible of
radical asceticism, soured the once-bright-eyed young theologian. Moreover, Daumer
started to feel rejected both intellectually, for the particular understanding of
Christianity he was developing, and because of his overall personal style. His mentors
found his sermons too pedantic, too mystical, and too sympathetic to the cult of the
Virgin Mary. Kanne did not approve of his poetry.
52
His peers felt uncomfortable in
Daumer’s presence and tried to avoid him.
53

Turned off by the rationalists and disgusted by the Pietists, Daumer was
desperate to escape. He feared his own failure, especially given his desire to support
his mother amidst his family’s continuing poverty. He harbored suicidal thoughts and
fasted for nine days. During this time, he decided not to end his own life after all and
to leave Erlangen.
54
Daumer enrolled at the University of Leipzig as a student of
philosophy.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue?,” 891.
52
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 9.
53
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 9.
54
Ibid., 10.
51!
CHAPTER 3
DAUMER AND RELIGIOUS REFORM

For most of his career, Daumer’s primary concern was religious reform and
renewal. His early philosophical works argued that Protestantism and German
philosophy would form the basis of the new religion. Later, he proposed that the new
religion would arise out of Islam. He also argued that an embracing attitude toward
human sensuality was important for bringing about the new religion. Daumer’s passion
for religious reform underlies his approach to Hafiz and his poetry on women,
including the love songs in Polydora.
Daumer coupled his visions for the new religion with increasingly strident
critiques of Christianity. These arose, in part, from his early experiences of Pietism. In
the early 1830s, Daumer abandoned Christianity altogether and published a series of
polemical tracts against the religion. Though controversial, these endeared Daumer to
Ludwig Feuerbach and other Young Hegelians. Daumer’s polemics from the late
1840s, though, were so extreme that his former associates abandoned him, despite the
recent success of his Hafis poetry. Daumer found himself shunned by all quarters. It
was in this state that Daumer wrote Polydora.
Daumer’s intellectual outlook when he left the Aegidian school and enrolled at
Leipzig can be seen in his first publication, Auswahl des Besten, was vorzügliche Denker und
Dichter über die höchsten Angelegenheiten des Menschen ausgesprochen haben, als Stoff sowohl zur
Bildung des Geistes und Veredlung des Herzens als auch zu Denkmalen für Stammbücher, which
52!
he assembled at age eighteen.
1
The collection reflects the humanist influence of his
former teacher Hegel, seen in verses by Herder and by Hegel’s friend Hölderlin,
passages from the Greek and Latin, and an overall desire for a higher state of being.
With these are mixed Oriental quotes, inspired by Kanne and Platen, and Pietist
exhortations to reject sensuality and turn to Christ.
2
The book is organized in a format
that would become one of Daumer’s favorites: a collection of quotes and translations.
Daumer’s respect for his teachers seems to have soured permanently after his
experience at Erlangen. He did not attend lectures at Leipzig and was known to mock
his professors. Instead of attending class, he holed up, hermit-like, and developed his
own philosophical and religious worldview, an endeavor that would occupy him for
the rest of his life. Daumer’s many poems from that period reflect the inner turmoil
that he was experiencing. In keeping with his studies with Schubert and Schelling,
many of his poems celebrate nature—as the mother to whom human children should
return, or as the queen of a future of harmony.
3
Nature would continue to be an
important theme in Daumer’s later works. Most of his early poems were never
published.
After passing the philological exams in Leipzig, Daumer took his first teaching
job in 1823 at the Aegidian School, his alma mater. He was granted tenure in 1825 and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Daumer, Auswahl des Besten, was vorzügliche Denker und Dichter über die höchsten Angelegenheiten des
Menschen ausgesprochen haben, als Stoff sowohl zur Bildung des Geistes und Veredlung des Herzens als auch zu
Denkmalen für Stammbücher (Nuremberg: Bieling’sche Verlansgandlung, 1819).
2
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 8.
3
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 10.
53!
served for some time as assessor for the school’s rector, the eminent pedagogue Karl
Ludwig Roth (1790-1868). Roth had succeeded Hegel in 1821.
4

Roth’s personality and that of Daumer could hardly have been more opposed.
Daumer described Roth as a “school tyrant full of dark orthodoxy and pedagogical
strictness.”
5
Roth reportedly “once startled a child so much that it fell sick and died.”
6

Roth and Daumer also held conflicting religious views. Relations between Daumer
and his superior deteriorated into open hostility, culminating in 1826 in Roth’s
rejection of a speech that Daumer was to give on the occasion of the school’s
tricentennial that May. Roth rejected it on the grounds that it denigrated
Protestantism.
7

Daumer longed to leave the Aegidian School and saw employment elsewhere as
a way out from his toxic relationship with Roth. However, Daumer never obtained
another academic position. Having been sickly all his life, he developed an eye
infection in 1826 which none of the six doctors he consulted could cure. He was also
plagued by other health problems that left him unable to read or write. By 1828, he
could no longer teach. Early retirement, not promotion, enabled him to leave the
Aegidian School and Roth. In 1732, he was granted a pension of 560 gulden.
8

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Ibid., 12.
5
Daumer, Meine Conversion, quoted in ibid., 12.
6
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 13.
7
The speech was to have been given on May 23, 1826. It was published later that year as Über den
Gang und die Fortschritte unserer geistigen Entwicklung seit der Reformation und über ihren Standpunkt in der
gegenwärtigen Zeit. Geschrieben zur Feier des drei und zwanzigsten Maies als des Stiftungstages des vor dreihundert
Jahren gegründeten Gynasiums zu Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Riegel and Wiessner, 1826).
8
Handwritten notes by Daumer’s mother, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 18-19, and owned
(at the time) by Birkenbihl.
54!
Daumer’s planned tricentennial speech was the opening salvo in his lifelong
pursuit of religious reform. After being rejected by Roth, it was published later that
year as Über den Gang und die Fortschritte unserer geistigen Entwicklung seit der Reformation
und über ihren Standpunkt in der gegenwärtigen Zeit. In it, Daumer argued that
Protestantism was not the highest form of Christianity, or even of religious
development in general: “the Reformation as such has created and fixed nothing, and
that rather, the actual struggle was only beginning with it.”
9
Daumer argued that the
main achievement of Martin Luther and other leaders of the Reformation had been to
open the door to continuing investigation and development:

What the Reformation has really done and executed, and what is indeed
more than those who seek to preserve it at all costs and ban it into its
first articulation are able to see in it, is this: it has opened the door for
those searches and attempts which the world has pursued since then; it
has broken down the layer of authority which had previously covered
the Christian worldview; it has, though itself negative, given direction
toward a positive truth to that consciousness which had been disturbed
and imbalanced in the old faith – the spirit of the Reformation is the
spirit of the scientific method and the absolute freedom of progressive
thought, and it has not fallen short of spreading into all directions and
challenging the entire world.
10

As Birkenbihl explains, “By assigning to Protestantism an exclusively negative and
temporary role, Daumer also expresses the idea of religious progress, the hope that a
newer, better religiosity might replace the incomplete previous one. He held on to this
thought until his death; the realization of a higher religion became the center of his life-
long struggle and suffering.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Daumer, Über den Gang und die Fortschritte, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 13-14.
10
Ibid., quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 14.
55!
In his published speech, Daumer continued: “it cannot be everyone’s calling to
dig through the rubble and seek a deeper truth, but there will be some among us who
still carry within us something original, like a spark among the ashes… to finally
approach that great goal which the best and greatest of men, since the earliest times,
have sought to achieve.”
11
That “something original, like a spark among the ashes,”
refers at least in part to the idea that early humans had a clearer vision, or memory, of
the original divine influence that created the world; Schubert had also proposed that
these early memories are revealed to us in dreams. Recovering the clarity of early
paradisiacal societies would be a motivating factor in Daumer and other Orientalists’
efforts to translate ancient Persian and Sanskrit poetry and religious texts into modern
German.
In the following year, Daumer published two essays, likely with the goal of
bolstering his credentials for alternate employment. One was a philological essay,
Grundriß der griechischen Formenlehre in tabellarischen Übersichten zum Schulgebrauche. The
other was a philosophical essay, Urgeschichte des Menschengeistes. Fragment eines Systems
speculativer Theologie mit besonderer Beziehung auf die Schelling’sche Lehre von dem Grunde in
Gott. Erste Abtheilung.
12
In this essay, Daumer built on his earlier ideas of religious
reform, discussed the relationship between the divine and nature, outlined a history of
mankind’s religious development, and called for a new “absolute religion” that would
replace Christianity.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Ibid., quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 14-15.
12
Daumer, Urgeschichte des Menschengeistes. Fragment eines Systems speculativer Theologie mit besonderer
Beziehung auf die Schelling’sche Lehre von dem Grunde in Gott. Erste Abtheilung (Berlin: Reimer, 1827).
56!
In the essay, Daumer attempted to trace “the transition, the middle and
mediation between the divine and the natural, the infinite and the finite, the eternal
and the finite, or however else one wants to call it; it constitutes, in one word, the study
of the birth of a universal spirit of the world and of mankind.”
13
Daumer would
continue to explore the relationship between the divine and the natural in his later
works.
Daumer sharply criticized his former mentor and the former rector of his place
of employment. On the first page of the foreword, Daumer called Hegel’s philosophy
“something antiquated.” A few pages later, he commented that Hegel “has confused all
our thinking and feeling.”
14
Nonetheless, Daumer seems to have drawn on Hegel’s idea,
also rooted in the writings of Herder, of an evolving spirit of humanity. Daumer’s
efforts to dislodge Protestantism from its status as the final goal of Christian
development and reposition it, instead, as just a stage in the progress of humanity, to
be superseded by efforts such as his own, fits squarely within Hegel’s idea of an
evolving world-spirit.
15

The historiography of religion outlined in Daumer’s treatise, as summarized by
Birkenbihl, is as follows:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Ibid., quoted in Birkehbihl, 16. Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 15, summarizes Daumer’s central
argument, given in the essay’s introduction, as follows: “Through the abstraction from the material
world, thought can arrive at a pure being. This is where most philosophy stops, where there seems to be
a limit to the mind. The task of reason, however, is to see this apparent limit as itself secondary to a
higher Absolute. And this Absolute is what we must strive to know.”
14
Ibid., vi, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 17.
15
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 21, argues that Daumer’s Andeutung eines Systems speculativer Philosophie
“draws from (but exceeds) Hegel regarding the basic principle and progressive development of the
world [and] remained the philosophical cornerstone of Daumer’s thought throughout his life.”
57!
Man was still part of nature and lived his life in harmony with it during
a pre-historical time of an original world. The religion of that time was a
pure, recognizable, natural pantheism. Once the spirit had lifted this
unity in order to find back to itself as spirit, history began. History is the
struggle of creation of a world born from the spirit, and it encompasses
two eons: 1) That of the separated nations, the divisions of
consciousness into the extremes of Judaism and paganism, 2) the
reunification into a unity which is now the reverse of the original,
natural unit of the spirit; the eon of Christianity.
16

Through much of the work, Christianity and the figure of Christ are of key importance.
Daumer argued, as summarized by Kühne, that “In Jesus Christ, the original being
recognized itself clearly. Through his suffering and death, it was taken back from its
externalization and returned to God. Christ is the bridge from God to man and from
man to God, and in crossing that bridge, man can return to the divine center.”
17
Kühne
also describes as within the Christian tradition

Daumer’s lively understanding of salvation: Jesus as mediator, salvation,
revelation, reconciliation, rebirth – his faith in God’s leading hand,
which will return the lost creature back to himself – and finally the great
eschatological perspective of his worldview, when God is, once again,
everything in everything, and will be, in the worldly being, a devoted
and knowing love.
18

At the same time, however, Daumer also distanced himself from the Christian
church. In the final chapter of the essay, as in his earlier speech, he argued that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 23
17
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 18.
18
Ibid., 20.
58!
Christianity is not the culminating religion in mankind’s development. Rather, he
wrote, it is

only of passing importance. It is meant to prepare the youthful
generations that were chosen by the spirit to develop its new principle,
to break the force and resistance of the nations, and turn them toward
inward contemplation.... The world will feel this and rid itself of the
church’s chains, for the latter will no longer be able to provide an image
of the divine; the spirit will continue to find to itself, and from the new
philosophy will emerge the absolute religion.
19

Foreshadowing a trend that he would develop in his later works, Daumer
couched his interpretations of the Bible in relation to comparative world “myths,” or,
as he described them, “universals of mankind.” In doing so, he drew on Schelling, who
claimed that ancient “myths” contained scientifically pure insights, as well as Kanne,
who provided him with much of his mythological material. Daumer compared the
Biblical fall of man, for example, to the stories of Adam Kadmon (from the Kabbalah),
Prometheus, and Narcissus.
20

Daumer again argued that the German people were uniquely suited to bring
about the new absolute religion. According to Daumer, Germans possessed both the
philosophical rigor and the speculative courage—the “candor of inquiry and confession
that does not tremble in the face of force or authority”—necessary for this break-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 24.
20
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 18-19. According to Kühne, 18-19, Kanne argued in his Pantheum that the
earliest testaments mention the externalization of God, and the striving of the thusly conceived beings
“for their origin, which they try to find by abandoning their selfhoods.” Daumer also drew on Creuzer
for mythological material.
59!
through.
21
Whereas the first blossoming of Christianity arose in Roman times from
among the Jews, Daumer proposed that “the new salvation in this sense can only
originate with the Germans.”
22
In this vision from 1827, then, Daumer saw Christianity,
even Lutheran Protestantism, as but a stepping-stone in mankind’s religious
development. Germany was uniquely situated to bring out the new “absolute” religion,
which would arise from German philosophy.
23

Daumer did see some value in the Protestant church. “Protestantism is the
decayed spirit,” he wrote, “but it is the spirit.” For Daumer, the value of Protestantism
lay in its capacity to lead to the religion yet to come: “Everything in the history of the
new age remains dark and confusing when we look at Protestantism as a closed entity;
everything clears up, however, when we look at it as the transition to something
entirely new.”
24

Roth’s objection notwithstanding, this idea was not especially new. Numerous
thinkers from the turn of the nineteenth century had called for a new religion that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
21
Quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 24. Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 30, notes that in Andeutung,
“Daumer proudly believed that the German people were especially predestined to develop the new,
thought-based religion, because they combined the philosophical and religious depths necessary with the
courage to express their thoughts. The new religion was to rise from Christianity like Christianity rose
from Judaism.”
22
Quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 24. Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 30, notes: “Daumer compared
his own time to late antiquity. Much like Rome was unable to revive the Roman religion, Christianity
will not be able to assert itself against the new.”
23
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 24, summarizes Daumer’s argument as follows: “That nation which
must think the final liberating thought from which this religion is to arise is the German one. The force
of the divine being has been focused on this people, to bring about the principle of a new world.
Additionally, the German people combines in its nature the necessary unity of two traits: A
philosophical and religious depth, above both improvidence and frivolousness, and a speculative courage,
a candor of inquiry and confession that does not tremble in the face of force or authority. The old
salvation came from the Jews, ‘the new salvation in this sense can only originate with the Germans.’ The
new religion is thus supposed to derive from German philosophy; any new realization of God, the world,
and mankind developed at the time had to, so Daumer hoped, eventually come to express itself as new
religion.”
24
Quoted in ibid., 26-27.
60!
would succeed Protestantism, or even Christianity itself. Spener himself, the founder
of Pietism, had proclaimed that the Reformation had fallen far short of its aims.
25

Many of the Jena Romantics had called for the establishment of a new religion. As
early as 1799, Novalis had called for a new Christianity that would move beyond the
Protestant Reformation and its natural successors, the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution.
26
A year earlier, Friedrich Schlegel had written to Novalis: “Perhaps you
have the choice, my friend, to be either the last Christian, the Brutus of the old religion,
or the Christ of the new gospel.” Schlegel also confided to Novalis that he wished “to
write a new Bible and to wander in the footsteps of Mohammed and Luther.”
27

Daumer’s teachers Hegel and Schelling both described Protestantism as a
passing stage,
28
as did their contemporary Johann Jakob Wagner (1775-1841).
Wagner had studied with Fichte at Jena and later taught at Würzburg, where his
students included Platen. After transferring to Erlangen, Platen enthused about
Wagner to Daumer and their other friends. For Wagner, Protestantism was a
temporary phenomenon whose historical purpose was to bring about a German
philosophy that would shine a light on Christianity.
29

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Herzog, 2
26
Novalis, Christianity or Europa (unpublished essay, 1799), discussed in George S. Williamson, The
Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 55.
27
Letter to Novalis, Dec. 2, 1798, in Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, 35 vols.,
ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958-), 24:183, 205-6, quoted and translated in Williamson,
The Longing for Myth, 55.
28
See Kühne; Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), published in
English as On University Studies, ed. N. Guterman, trans. E. S. Morgan (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1996); and Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophy der Weltgeschichte (Leipzig: F. Mainer, 1920).
29
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 26-27.
61!
Schelling had also described the future emergence of a new, post-Christian
religion. In his and Hegel’s 1802 Critical Journal of Philosophy, Schelling wrote:

Whether this moment in time, which is such a turning point for all of
man’s sciences and works, might not also be such a point for religion,
and whether the true unity of God with the world might not express
itself in the external decay and disappearance of Christianity’s forms, is
a question that each person who understands the signs of the future
must ask for himself. – The new religion, which has already be
announced in several manifestations… will be recognized in the rebirth
of nature as a symbol of eternal unity; the first unification and
overcoming of an age-old struggle must be celebrated by philosophy,
whose meaning can only be understood by him who recognizes the life
of the risen God in it.
30

Daumer seems to have followed Schelling in his call for the “external decay and
disappearance of Christianity’s forms” and taken it further. Daumer celebrated
German philosophy, not because it reveals the “life of the risen God” but because its
intellectual rigor would be the foundation of the new religion.
31
Daumer also followed
Schelling in basing his new religion on nature.
In the following years, Daumer would shift his conception of the source of the
new religion from contemporary German philosophy to ancient mythological traditions
from around the world. In the preface to his 1833 Philosophie, Religion, und Alterthum, he
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 25. For a good discussion of the Critical Journal, see Henry
Silton Harris, “Skepticism, Dogmatism, and Speculation in the Critical Journal,” in Between Kant and
Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, edited by George Di Giovanni and H.S. Harris
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1985), 252-71. The Critical Journal was Schelling’s
brainchild. Schelling asked Fichte to serve as co-editor, but Fichte declined, partly owing to
philosophical differences with Schelling which had become increasingly apparent in the latter’s 1800
System of Transcendental Idealism. Schelling then invited Hegel to be co-editor, and Hegel accepted. Hegel,
who had recently joined Schelling in Jena (1801), was then relatively unknown. His essay Difference
articulated key differences between Fichte and Schelling, and was approved by Schelling. See Andrew
Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1994).
31
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 13-14.
62!
wrote, “The mythological survey is intended to lead to the conviction that the system I
develop is incredibly old; it already served as a system for the pre-historical humans,
and is thus only the reinstatement of ancient teachings, which in the oldest times could
only be expressed symbolically.”
32
Daumer devoted an entire chapter to identifying key
portions of the Bible, especially the story of Christ, with recurring motifs in world
mythology. He connected elements of the Christian narrative with stories from Tibetan,
Indian, Persian, Chinese, Mongolian, Thracian, Greek, Roman, German, Brazilian,
and other traditions.
33
In his 1831 Andeutung eines Systems speculativer Philosophie,
similarly, he identified similarities between the stories of Jesus and Krishna.
34
“It is not
hard to see,” Daumer wrote,

that the biblical stories of Christ are mostly an ascription of old sagas to
the founder of Christianity. The embodiment of God in a human
individual, with the purpose of appearing in the world as a teacher and
savior, the miracle virgin birth, the murder of children to destroy the
divine child, the rescue and escape of the latter, his stay among
shepherds, the obeisance of the mages, the songs of heavenly armies, the
retreat of the divine man into solitude, his fight against a hellish
opponent, the abundance of his miracle deeds, the Last Supper, his
descent into hell, his rising from the dead, his transfiguration and
assumption – those are elements that can already be found in pre-
Christian Asian and other documents, and as much as the various
religions gives them different colorations, they are still without a doubt
of a single origin, and must be considered an often renewed and
modified, ancient common good of religious imagination and
symbolism.
35

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 28. In this book, Daumer advances a number of arguments.
He proposes that God’s son descended to the material world, and died in the act of its creation. He also
proposes two fundamental powers whose opposition underlies the workings of the world. One is a
creative, affirming universal power. The other is generally subdued, allowing the creative power to do
its work, but occasionally bursts out in revolutionary force, thus sublating the creative power into/as a
disturbing or life-annihilating power.
33
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 30.
34
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 36.
35
Daumer, Andeutung, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 30.
63!
Daumer’s school-age disgust with Pietism and his arguments with Roth and
other theologians notwithstanding, Daumer had maintained so far a respectful stance
toward Christianity, seeing it as either a framework for continuing religious reform or
an important precursor to the new absolute religion. This changed, however, following
an outbreak of cholera in 1831 that took the life of Hegel, among thousands of others.
In response to a Nuremberg cleric who claimed that the epidemic was a lesson from
God about man’s sinfulness, Daumer penned the polemical Ist die Cholera Morbus ein
Strafgericht Gottes? Sendschreiben an Herrn Pfarrer Kindler zu Nürnberg.
36
This essay
triggered a harsh response, which further fueled Daumer’s wrath. He followed the
essay with a barrage of other polemics, in which he castigated one aspect of
Christianity after another. In 1833, he published Über die Entwendung ägyptischen
Eigenthums beim Auszug des Israeliten aus Ägypten. Als vorläufiges Bruchstück eines die durch
des Sendschreiben an Kindler veranlaßten Gegenschriften der Herren Götz, Wild und Höfling
betreffenden Werks über Bibel und Christenthum, which Protestant authorities confiscated.
37

They also confiscated Daumer’s 1834 Polemische Blätter betreffend Christenthum,
Bibelglauben und Theologie. Eine Schrift für gebildete Leser aller Stände, which argued that
Christianity was never, even in its earliest years, the religion of humanity.
38
Daumer
cited the burning of heretics, persecution of Cathars, persecution of Jews, Spanish
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
Daumer, Ist die Cholera Morbus ein Strafgericht Gottes? Sendschreiben an Herrn Pfarrer Kindler zu
Nürnberg (Leipzig: Müller, 1832). Also see Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 31.
37
Daumer, Über die Entwendung ägyptischen Eigenthums beim Auszug des Israeliten aus Ägypten. Als
vorläufiges Bruchstück eines die durch des Sendschreiben an Kindler veranlaßten Gegenschriften der Herren Götz,
Wild und Höfling betreffenden Werks über Bibel und Christenthum (Nuremberg: Campe, 1833).
38
Daumer, Polemische Blätter betreffend Christenthum, Bibelglauben und Theologie. Eine Schrift für gebildete
Leser aller Stände (Nuremberg: Campe, 1834).
64!
inquisition, witch trials, and the Thirty Years’ War as evidence.
39
Other polemical
works of this period include Entdeckung eines Complots wider Religion und Christenthum.
Gemacht durch Eschenmayers Schrift ‘Conflict zwischen Himmel und Hölle an dem Dämon eines
besessenen Mädchens beobachtet’ (1837); Anti-Satan. Sendschreiben an Professor Eschenmayer
betreffend dessen Entgegnung auf die Schrift ‘Entdeckung eines Complots wider Religion und
Christenthum’ (1838); and Sabbath, Moloch und Tabu. Eine historisch-theologische Andeutung
mit Rücksicht auf die neuesten Auffassungen der christlichen Sonntagsfeier (1839).
40
Entdeckung
and Anti-Satan were written under the pseudonym Amadeus Ottokar.
Just as Daumer’s experience of Christianity at the Aegidian School was
colored by the Pietistic excesses of the day, his experience of Christianity in his early
thirties was marred by tendencies he perceived as vulgar and self-serving. As
Birkenbihl notes, “The development of the philosopher might have been a different
and less painful one if the sick direction of the church had not stood out so much,
racing him along from one aggressive step to the next.”
41
As a result, his early critiques
of Protestantism grew into a wholesale assault on Christianity. “The fight,” Daumer
later observed,

digressed further and further into general questions and matters of
principle, and I grew within me an increasing bitterness and antipathy
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
According to Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 32, Daumer studied Arnold’s Nonpartisan History of the
Church and Heretics and cited it extensively.
40
Daumer [pseud. Amadeus Ottokar], Entdeckung eines Complots wider Religion und Christenthum.
Gemacht durch Eschenmayers Schrift ‘Conflict zwischen Himmel und Hölle an dem Dämon eines besessenen
Mädchens beobachtet’ (Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1837) and Anti-Satan. Sendschreiben an Professor
Eschenmayer betreffend dessen Entgegnung auf die Schrift ‘Entdeckung eines Complots wider Religion und
Christenthum.’ (Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1838); Daumer, Sabbath, Moloch und Tabu. Eine historisch-
theologische Andeutung mit Rücksicht auf die neuesten Auffassungen der christlichen Sonntagsfeier (Nuremberg:
Bauer and Raspe, 1839).
41
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 34.
65!
toward theology and Christianity. While in the beginning, I made some
admissions from a speculative perspective, I later took those back and
began to see in the whole affair nothing but barbarianism, devilry, and
the decay of mankind. At this time, I turned to the study of the Bible
and the history of the church, but only to gain further weaponry for my
attacks against religion, which I hated, and which I intended to ruin and
embarrass to the utmost.
42

Between 1827 and 1833, then, Daumer shifted his understanding of the source
for the new religion to come from German philosophy to world mythology. In the early
1830s he also turned his back on Christianity. At some point in the 1840s, Daumer
started exploring Islam as the possible source for the new religion. He published his
views in abbreviated form in the introduction to Hafis (1846) and more extensively in
Mahomed und sein Werk. Eine Sammlung orientalischer Gedichte (1848).
43

In glorifying Islam, Daumer was going against the grain of philosophers like
Hegel, who saw Islam as subordinate to Christianity. However, he was not alone in
idealizing Islam. Islam was also held in high regard by the writers and activists
associated with the Young Germany movement. Young Germany (Junges Deutschland)
was a precursor to the Young Hegelian movement with many of the same personnel.
Some of these were friends with Daumer. The Young Germans generally opposed
Christianity.
44

Daumer appreciated the fact that Islam, as he understood it, did not associate
naturalness with sin. “As tradition has it,” he wrote in the preface to Mahomed,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Daumer, Meine Conversion, quoted in Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 34-35.
43
Daumer, Hafis, and Mahomed und sein Werk: Eine Sammlung orientalischer Gedichte (Hamburg:
Hoffman and Campe, 1848).
44
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 80. Also see Ian Almond, History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz
to Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 2009), 108-34, and Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
66!
“Mohammed himself announced that he had not been sent to preach the abstinence
from the joys of life – unlike Christianity.”
45
As noted above, Daumer had seen
Protestantism as the bridge that would lead to the new religion, as Judaism had led to
Christianity. Now, however, “the Koran seemed like the Old Testament of the New
Religion, whose Moses was now Mohammed.”
46
The religion to come would be a
renewal not of Protestantism, but of Islam.
Daumer’s Mahomed, following its introduction, consists of quotations and
prayers by the prophet Mohammed, historical and poetic fragments, of historical and
poetic motives from Mohammed’s life and surroundings, and contemporary writings
about Islam.
47
Daumer’s primary source was Conrad Engelbert Oelsner’s 1810
monograph Mohamed, which celebrated the religion’s social ethics.
48
Daumer also drew
on Alexander von Humboldt’s 1845 Kosmos, which highlighted Arab achievements in
the natural sciences.
49

Following the success of his Hafiz poems, Daumer lost any good will he had
accumulated in the broader culture by launching another broadside at Christianity. In
his 1847 Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums, which was censored but lated re-
published as Wahres Christentum under the pen name Ägidius Jais, Daumer argued
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Daumer, Mahomed, quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 80-81.
46
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 80. In Mahomed, as described by Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner,
120, Daumer “takes Islam as moral system and religion to be sublime and beyond Christianity, making it
out to be precursor to a new religious tendency.... He saw the new religion to come as a renewal of
Islam.”
47
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 81, notes that Daumer’s study of the Koran began in Kanne’s colloquium.
“The impulses from those days live on in Daumer – but his return to them is founded in interests quite
unlike those Kanne had intended to teach.”
48
Konrad Engelbert Oelsner, Mohamed: Darstellung des Einflusses seiner Glaubenslehre auf die Völker des
Mittelalters (Frankfurt: Warrentrapp and Wenner, 1810)
49
Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung von Alexander von
Humboldt, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1845-62). See also Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 80.
67!
that there existed an underground cannibalistic tradition in Christianity, represented in
the Eucharist, that had started in ancient times but persisted into the modern era.
50

Naturally, this caused a scandal, not only in Christian circles but also among the most
liberal of the German intelligentsia. Figures from Eichendorff to Julian Schmidt
condemned Daumer’s conclusions. Perhaps the most favorable review came from Karl
Marx, who wrote: “Daumer’s hypothesis on the Christian Eucharist as a
anthropophagic event must remain undecided.”
51

Daumer’s increasingly strident critique of Christianity reflected not only his
association with scientific thinkers of the time, but also, and more significantly, the
intensifying political tone leading up to the 1848 revolutions. With his sharply anti-
Christian rhetoric and his glorification of Islam, Daumer proved a convenient
scapegoat, if nothing else, for fierce sectarian rivalries of the era. Later conservatives
even accused him of playing a leading role in laying the groundwork for the 1848
revolutions.
52

For Daumer, though, political revolution was beside the point. Perhaps because
of the negative associations he had with the Neo-Pietist nationalist student fraternities
at Erlangen, Daumer was never a strong nationalist. Rather, he was far more
interested in religious reform. In 1845, just a few years before the revolutions, Daumer
wrote:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Daumer, Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums, republished as Wahres Christentum. The book
appeared in France in 1850. See Kluncker, Leben und Werk, 38.
51
Quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner, 38.
52
See, for example, the anonymous authors of an 1856 tract on the Austrian Concordat of the
previous year (in which the Hapsburgs released vast areas of Catholic church activites from imperial
oversight and control), Genesis des Concordates zwischen dem Kaiserthume Österreich und dem päpstlichen Stuhle
(Leipzig, 1856), 7, quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner, 38. Kluncker, 38, notes: “Im
konservativen Lager galt er später auch als der Vorbereiter der Revolution.”
68!
If not merely the fatherland but the world is to be helped one ought not
disregard all religious people, a battle must be waged to the end in this
realm.… Germany is the Judea of our modern world-epoch, which one
cannot come to grips with by means of flat atheism and communism. It
has at bottom only one desire, only one demand, that of unhindered
progress from the ancient religion having become impossible for it, to
founding a new one, in part negatively [through breaking free from
Christianity] and in part positively [by developing a new religion].… It
all comes down not to a political but rather to a religious revolution and
the latter is fortunately not bound up with the former. Worldly power
would dissolve the union that has for a long time unsettled it and
become untenably closed off spiritually, [such that] it would no longer
imagine that it possessed in this union an essential and irredeemable
guarantee of its existence, [and] it would give room to becoming, to the
unfolding of new, religious consciousness, [and] would not oppose to
this most important and necessary of all developmental processes any
kind of resistance and hindrance, [but] would rather demand the very
same thing to the best of its ability, and will thereby lose nothing, [but
rather] will only win. An infinite discontent, a limitless bitterness
disappears; the main disagreement that sickens our existence is
alleviated and the other problems would then easily be resolved.
53

Daumer put these words to practice in April 1848 by submitting for publication Die
Religion des neuen Weltalters.
54
This three volume opus, his primary work on religious
reform, was published by Hoffmann and Campe in 1850. “Completely new world
conditions and world relations can arise only through new religions,” Daumer argued.
“Examples and proofs of what religions are capable of are Christianity and Islam; most
clear acid palpable evidence of the powerlessness and futility of abstract, exclusive
politics are the movements started in the year 1848.”
55
Daumer intended the book,
which took the form of a massive anthology, to function as both bible and catechism
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Daumer, Die Stimme der Wahrheit in den religiösen und confessionellen Kämpfen der Gegenwart
(Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1845), 64, quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner, 39.
54
Daumer, Die Religion des neuen Weltalters.
55
Ibid., 1: 313, quoted and translated in Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
69!
for his new Naturreligion.
56

Die Religion des neuen Weltalters failed to bring about a new religion, though.
Instead, Daumer became, as Marx proclaimed and helped make so, the religion’s “first
and only martyr.”
57
Marx published a sharply critical review of the work in the
January-February 1850 issue of Neue Rheinischen Zeitung: Politisch-ökonomische Revue No.
2. Daumer, Marx wrote,

summarises the whole content of German culture in the pithiest sayings
that the casket of his erudition contains and thus discredits German
culture no less than German philosophy. His anthology of the loftiest
products of the German mind surpasses in platitude and triviality even
the most ordinary reading book for young ladies in the educated walks
of life.…
The entire class struggle of our times seems to Herr Daumer
only a struggle of “coarseness” against “culture.” Instead of explaining it
by the historical conditions of these classes, he finds its origin in the
seditious doings of a few malevolent individuals who incite the base
appetites of the populace against the educated estates.…
[All] our world-wise man can do is to invent a new religion, after
long barking against the old. But this new religion is confined… to a
continuation of the anthology of maxims, album verses and versus
memorials of German philistine culture.…
The “world-wise” Daumer reduces the whole complicated social
struggle, the first skirmishes of which were fought between Paris and
Debrecen, Berlin and Palermo in the last two years, to the fact that “in
January 1849 the hopes of the constitutional societies of Erlangen were
postponed indefinitely” (Vol. I, p. 312).…
We see that this cult of nature is limited to the Sunday walks of
an inhabitant of a small provincial town who childishly wonders at the
cuckoo laying its eggs in another bird’s nest (Vol. II, p. 40), at tears
being designed to keep the surface of the eyes moist (Vol. II, p. 73), and
so on, and finally trembles with reverence as he recites Klopstock’s Ode
to Spring to his children (Vol. II, p. 23 et seqq.). There is no mention, of
course, of modern natural science.… instead we get mysterious hints
and astonished philistine notions about Nostradamus’ prophecies,
second sight in Scotsmen and animal magnetism.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56
Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner, 39-40.
57
Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 241. Also see Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner, 40.
70!
It is the same with the cult of the female as with the cult of
nature. Herr Daumer naturally does not say a word about the present
social position of women; on the contrary it is a question only of the
female as such.… In order to find the necessary ideal women characters
for his male devotion in his native country, he is forced to resort to
various aristocratic ladies of the last century. Thus his cult of the woman
is reduced to the depressed attitude of a man of letters to respected
patronesses—Wilhelm Meister.…
Herr Daumer is the dry, absolutely humourless continuation of
Hans Sachs. German philosophy, wringing its hands and lamenting at
the deathbed of its foster father, German philistinism—such is the
touching picture opened up to us by the religion of the new age.
58

In Karlhans Kluncker’s more generous assessment, Daumer’s efforts to “establish a
world-historical influence and impact of the greatest and most universal kind” failed
because he lacked the charisma of Luther or the philosophical rigor of Michael
Kohlhaas.
59

After these rejections, Daumer increasingly withdrew from society. As will be
discussed below, he did continue his efforts at religious reform in the form of a small
group of women he gathered around him, mostly relatives, who he hoped would bring
about the new religion. Daumer also considered converting to Judaism. He converted
to Catholicism in 1858 but failed to find solace there. Within ten years, he would feel
disconnected from the church and rootless. Daumer’s quest for religious reform, the
centerpiece of his life’s work, remained unfulfilled.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
58
Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 241-46.
59
Daumer, “Herr Julian Schmidt, der Kritiker und Literaturhistoriker. Ein Charakterbild. Nebst
einigen historischen, religiösen, ethischen und ästhetischen Erörterungen,” In Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft
und Kunst, vol. 1, ed. Otto Wigand (Leipzig: Wigand, 1854), 59, quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk,
trans. Turner, 120.
71!
CHAPTER 4
PARADIGMS AND ARCHETYPES

Daumer expressed his visions for a new religion, in large part, through a series
of paradigms or archetypes—idealized figures, real or imaginary, who embodied his
evolving ideals. The first of these was Kaspar Hauser, the foundling who came into
Daumer’s care in 1828. Hauser was followed by a series of idealized women, from
religious and mythological figures such as the Virgin Mary and Semiramis to Bettina
von Arnim’s semi-autobiographical character Bettina, the beloved of the Persian poet
Hafiz, and the erotically charged poetic inventions of Daumer’s Frauenbilder und
Huldigungen. Because unfettered apprehension of the divine in nature was an
increasingly important part of Daumer’s religious vision, and because Daumer
understood this in increasingly erotic terms, his archetypal figures centered
increasingly on sensual attraction. The love poems in Polydora are direct successors to a
long series of visions of religious renewal expressed through idealized figures and their
romantic utterances.

KASPAR HAUSER

After retiring early from the Aegidian School, Daumer entered into one of the
most fascinating chapters of his life, and one that has held the popular imagination for
well over a century. The mysterious life and death of Kaspar Hauser, still an unsolved
mystery, has been immortalized in two films: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, directed by
72!
Werner Herzog (1974), and Kaspar Hauser, directed by Peter Sehr (1993).
1
Hauser
was discovered wandering the streets of Nuremberg in May 1828, at the age of sixteen
or seventeen, with verbal skills that were apparently extremely limited. After being
questioned by the mayor and kept for two months in the local jail, Hauser was
assigned in July by Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach (the father of Daumer’s
friend Anselm; see chapter 2) to Daumer’s care. Given the fact that Daumer had
helped save his son from possible suicide at Erlangen and was now in need of a job,
Feuerbach’s choice seems logical. Daumer would care for, teach, study, and have his
religious views shaped by Hauser for the next eighteen months. Following an attempt
on Hauser’s life in 1829, Hauser was transferred to another guardian. He died under
mysterious circumstances in 1833.
The circumstances of Hauser’s life and death, wildly disputed, have been the
subject of both rumors and scientific research. Rumors that he was a prince and heir to
the Baden throne, but swapped out by the Countess of Hochberg for another child
(her son) in a succession controversy, were popular when he was alive and given as
possible motives for his murder. These have been widely discredited but still carry
enough legitimacy that recent researchers have conducted blood and DNA analyses,
with mixed results. Hauser’s story—that he was held in a small dungeon for most of
life, fed nothing but bread and water, and given no human contact except with a
caretaker who kept his face masked—has been dismissed by many as implausible and a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, directed by Werner Herzog, and Kaspar Hauser, directed by Peter
Sehr. For more on Kaspar Hauser, see Daumer, Enthüllungen über Kaspar Hauser. Mit Hinzufügung neuer
Belege und Documente und Mittheilung noch ganz unbekannter Thatsachen, namentlich zu dem Zwecke, die Heimath
und Herkunft des Findlings zu bestimmen und die vom Grafen Stanhope gespielte Rolle zu beleuchten. Ein wider
Eschricht und Stanhope gerichtete historische, psychologische Beweisführung (Frankfurt: Meidinger, 1859) and
Kluncker, Georg Friedrich Daumer und Kaspar Hauser.
73!
likely lie. Indeed, Hauser was accused by Daumer and other caretakers of being a
pathological liar. Unanswered too are the conditions of his death: was he murdered,
perhaps by his former guardian Lord Philip Henry Stanhope, or did he stab himself?
Daumer and others accused Stanhope of the murder, but this has never been
definitively substantiated. Although Hauser is not believed to have been suicidal, he
did have several unexplained incidents involving stabbings and pistol shots; it is
possible that he stabbed himself intending only to self-injure, but miscalculated, and
thus died from his own wounds.
In any case, Daumer was fascinated by the young foundling.
2
Hauser, who
Daumer tells us had never heard of God, proved a receptive and critical student of
Daumer’s teachings on religion. As Kühne explains:

Kaspar was enchanted by the world around him, and took joy in
exploring spiritual questions and connecting them to his experiences
with nature. Daumer read this as a confirmation of his speculative
results. Here he had found a child of nature who had never heard of any
philosophical theories, yet carried the basic speculative truths in himself
with visionary power. Kaspar turned myths into events. He [Daumer]
saw in him the original man in whom paradisiacal memory had not yet
been tainted by hard-hearted human isolation; that man who, without
any knowledge of good and evil, lives in innocent harmony with nature,
in good will toward all people, and connected to all animals.
3

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Daumer wrote several accounts of his time with Kaspar Hauser and on the case in general. See, in
addition to Enthüllungen über Kaspar Hauser, his Mitteilungen über Kaspar Hauser (Nuremberg:
Haubenstricker, 1832), reprinted in Kaspar Hauser. Augenzeugenberichte und Selbstzeugnisse, ed. Hermann
Pies (Stuttgart: Lutz, 1928), 137-244; “Mittheilungen über Kaspar Hauser,” Athenäum für Wissenschaft,
Kunst und Leben (July 1838): 3-8 and (September 1838): 1-4.
3
Daumer, Enthüllungen über Kaspar Hauser, summarized in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 23.
74!
Hauser was a probing student of religion who questioned Daumer’s teachings. He was
perplexed as to why God, allegedly a just and loving father, would let so many people
suffer. Why did he not answer their prayers? Why did he require Jesus to suffer on
the cross? Why could he not make time flow backwards?
4

Hauser was deeply moved by suffering, both human and animal. He could not
stand the sight of the crucifix, and asked that Jesus and his fellow executionees be
taken off the crosses so that their torture might end.
5
This sensitivity to the sacrifice
made a strong impression on Daumer, who would later write that the Eucharist was a
remnant of cannibalistic practices.
6
Hauser was outraged that animals were
slaughtered for meat. Why not eat fruit instead?, he wondered. When Hauser started
eating meat, animals in his life reportedly expressed their disapproval: his loving cat
scratched him and the neighbor’s dog barked angrily. Daumer took this as a lesson and
became a lifelong vegetarian and advocate for animal rights.
7

Since his days with Schubert, Daumer had been interested in dreams. Schubert,
we recall, had proposed in Die Symbolik des Traumes that the premonitional quality of
dreams is an echo of mankind’s earlier ability to directly perceive God’s revelation.
8
In
this spirit, Daumer tried to explore Hauser’s dream life and other unconscious
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 23-24.
5
Daumer, Enthüllungen über Kaspar Hauser, summarized in ibid., 24.
6
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 24.
7
Daumer, Mitteilungen über Kaspar Hauser, summarized in ibid., 23.
8
Hoermann, 308, writes: “Anticipating Jung’s theories of depth psychology and the collective
unconscious, Schubert was convinced that a premonitory knowledge of the holistic truth revealed in
these extrasensory states resides in the primal myths of all people. It is the task of a new era of
humankind to raise this knowledge to the level of conscious, spontaneously assimilated truth in everyday
life.” Also see Heath, 187-210.
75!
thoughts.
9
These explorations, like Daumer’s later forays into erotic poetry, were
widely criticized in their time but point forward to the work of Sigmund Freud several
decades later.
Daumer’s relationship to Hauser was complex. Hauser was, for Daumer, a
student, ward, mystery, legal case, research subject, foil for his evolving ideas, and
spiritual inspiration. Hauser established the paradigm for the child of nature, prophet
of a new religion, and, in a sense, beloved, that Daumer would encounter, elaborate,
and evolve in the poetry of Hafiz and the love poems in Frauenbilder und Huldigungen
and Polydora. This paradigm would resonate for Brahms, too, in his selecting and
setting to music of Daumer and Daumer-Hafiz poems in songs and quartets, including
the Liebeslieder.

DAUMER ON WOMEN

After caring for Kaspar Hauser, Daumer never held another professional
position. He devoted the rest of his life to writing: philosophical tracts, religious
diatribes, political commentary, and poetry. As soon as circumstances permitted, he
invited his mother and sister to live with him. His mother’s intelligence and care lasted
through her old age.
In 1834, Daumer finally married. His wife, Marie Friederike Rose, was the
daughter of a Nuremberg optician.
10
Their marriage, however, was largely loveless. As
Kühne describes it, Marie
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 24.
76!

was lacking the inner joy that a life-long companion to Daumer would
have had to possess. She did not know any more than a “better daughter”
from a small town was able to know at the beginning of the last century.
Her reputation of having “particularly firm morals” as a young girl
meant, on the other side of the coin, that she was frigid in marriage; she
was sickly and had turned bitter with disappointment—she had married
a hard-working school professor and now lived by the side of a
philosophical romancer who had fallen out with everyone around him.
As in most such cases, there were no “sufficient grounds” for divorce,
and Daumer felt especially tied down by his child, who was born in
1844.
11

Nevertheless, when Brahms visited Daumer in May 1872, the only time they
ever met, Daumer introduced Marie Rose to Brahms as the only woman he had ever
loved. As Kalbeck recounts:

On the way from Nuremberg to Karlsruhe, he [Brahms] interrupted his
journey in Würzburg, where Daumer lived in the last years of his life
(he died there in 1875). After great effort, he found the street and the
house, and was surprised when a shrivelled little man introduced
himself as the German Hafiz. Brahms, who noticed during the
conversation that Daumer didn’t know anything about him and his
songs, jokingly inquired about his many treasures, by which he meant
the so-passionately sung portraits of women. The old man smiled to
himself and called to his similarly old, little, and shriveled wife to come
in from the next room, saying: “I never loved anyone other than this
wife of mine.”
12

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Birkenbihl, trans. Gutwein, 19.
11
See Daumer, Aus der Mansarde and Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 92-93.
12
Kalbeck, trans. Barbara Stone, 137-38. Kalbeck cites personal communication with Brahms as his
primary source for this story. The story is also related by Groth, who misidentifies the city as Munich.
77!
While Daumer’s relationship with his wife remained frigid, elaborations of
literary and religious women were central to his prose and poetry for over twenty
years. These culminated in the love songs in Frauenbilder und Huldigungen and Polydora.
As noted above, Daumer was criticized during his Erlangen years for his sermons on
the Virgin Mary, which were deemed inappropriate by the Protestant and Pietistic
faculty there. Kühne has suggested that Daumer may have felt an especially close
connection with Mary given his close relationship with his mother and his apparent
difficulty in relations with the fairer sex.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it was shortly after marrying Marie Rose that
Daumer started writing poems about women. These include Semiramis (1836) and the
collections Bettina (1837), Glorie der heiligen Jungfrau Maria (1841), Hafis (1846 and
1852), Frauenbilder und Huldigungen (1853), and Polydora (1855). Also significant are his
1836 review of Karl Gutzkow’s Wally and his essay on sensuality, in the afterword to
Frauenbilder und Huldigungen.
13
In addition, Daumer wrote many letters to his niece
Helene, with whom he maintained a Platonic relationship for twenty years.
14
In these
letters, he views her as a philosophical ideal and confidante as well as an object of his
affection.
Daumer was attracted to these characters on several levels. Following his
experience of Kaspar Hauser, he seems to have sought out other individuals that had a
similar sense of naïveté—representative, in a sense, of his religion of nature. Most of
these were idealized, virginal women. On a philosophical and moral level, Daumer
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Daumer [anon], Semiramis, and Daumer, Bettina, Gutzkow und Menzel, Die Glorie der heiligen Jungfrau
Maria, Hafis, Frauenbilder und Huldigungen, and Polydora.
14
Daumer, Briefe an seine Nichte Helene ( Offenbach: Kaspar-Hauser-Verlag , 2009).
78!
seems to have celebrated open acknowledgement of sensual pleasure as an expression
of nature and a religion of nature that stood in stark contrast to the Pietist asceticism
that scarred him at Erlangen. On a personal level, these poems about women seem to
have allowed him to imagine sensual and philosophical connections with idealized
women who were not his wife. Daumer also continued to celebrate motherhood,
inspired, no doubt, by his close and enduring relationship with his own mother.
Bettina, in whose voice Daumer would write a volume of poetry in 1837, first
appeared as a self-named and semi-autobiographical character in Bettina von Arnim’s
controversial 1835 Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. In this book, a fictional series of
letters, Bettina is portrayed as a twenty-two-year-old “child” who sits on the older
poet’s lap. Arnim’s Bettina embodies an expended vision of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie,
affirms human sensuality, exalts genius (in the form of Goethe), and foreshadows a
new religion. The book caused scandal, but Daumer was captivated. For Daumer,
Bettina seems to have been a transitional archetype, a bridge between his conception
of Hauser and that of Hafiz. As he would the following decade with Hafiz, who had
already been presented to the German readership by translators such as Hammer-
Purgstall, Rückert, and Platen, Daumer would re-create Arnim’s Bettina in his own
words to advance his own vision.
Arnim, née Brentano (1785-1859), was close with the Young Hegelians but not
a member of the group. Her focus was literary, not philosophical. She rigorously
rejected reason, preferring sensual experience instead. In Arnim’s words, “the balance
79!
of the senses is the gate to all wisdom.”
15
In 1840, she followed Goethes Briefwechsel mit
einem Kinde with Die Günderode an die gemeinsame Zeit, a fictionalized account—again in
letter form and interspersed with poetry—of her childhood friendship with Karoline
von Günderrode (1780-1806). Günderrode, herself a talented poet, flouted gender
expectations and was called the “Sappho of the Romantics.” She committed suicide
after Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858), the great Bavarian Orientalist and
mythologist, wrote to her to end their passionate affair. In Die Günderode, Arnim
presented herself as the prophet of a new religion.
Arnim was celebrated by the Young Hegelians as a bridge between the
Romantic tradition and the future. Eduard Meyen, writing in the Berlin Athenäum,
praised Arnim as being, in many ways, “a better representative of German
Romanticism than the poets of the Romantic School themselves, because she has made
herself the subject of her poetry, herself with her fancies, her feelings, thoughts and her
entire natural being.”
16
For Moriz Carrière,

Bettina’s Romanticism is the Romanticism of the future, the all-pervading
breath of spring’s rapture. She does not live in the past: For her only the
eternal prevails. It has its roots there and flowers in the present.… The
Romanticism of the past looks for firm ground to anchor its own idées
fixes. It turns to Catholicism in whose affirmative attitude its sensual
restlessness achieves a finite external satisfaction; the Romanticism of
the future consists of a floating religion from the premonitions of the heart,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
Bettina von Arnim, “An Julius Döring,” ed. Werner Vordtriede, in “Bettina von Arnims Briefe an
Julius Döring,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1963): 364, quoted and translated in Heinz Härtl,
“Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Relations to the Young Hegelians,” in Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: Gender
and Politics, ed. Elke Frederiksen and Katherine Goodman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1995), 148.
16
Eduard Meyen, “Die neueste belletristische Literatur,” Athenäum: Zeitschrift für das gebildete
Deutschland 2 (January 9, 1841): 29, quoted and translated in Härtl, 152.
80!
the experiences and thoughts of the present as a joyful temple to living
beauty.
17

The “main idea of this wonderful book,” Carrière continues, is that “everything in
nature strives toward the infinite and finds itself in the spirit.”
18

There was debate among the Young Hegelians as to whether or not Arnim was
the prophet of a new religion. Theodor Mundt proclaimed that she was. Edgar Bauer,
on the other hand, claimed that her book had “renounced all religion.”
19
Heinrich
Bernhard Oppenheim, while weighing in on the issue, seems to have anticipated
Daumer’s later understanding of Bettina as a Hafiz of her time. In a letter to Ruge,
Oppenheim suggested that Bettina was for contemporary German readers what Jalāl
ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207-73), the other most highly renowned classical Persian
poet, was for thirteenth century Persians: “with all respect for her in other matters, I
do not see Bettine as the canonical work of a new religion. But that it contains much of
this religious pantheism, a version of which is appropriate for a strong people, like that
of Schelaleddin-Ranis [Rumi] was for Persia, I cannot deny.”
20

It was Bauer, perhaps, who best summarized what were understood to be
Bettina’s religious views:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
17
Moriz Carrière, review of Die Gunderröde, Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst
(March 1841): 283-84, reprinted in Carrière, Achim von Arnim und die Romantik. Die Günderode, vol. 1 of
Studien für eine Geschichte des Deutchens Seites (Grünberg: W. Levysohn, 1841), 30, quoted and translated
in Härtl, 152.
18
Ibid., quoted in Härtl, 153.
19
Härtl, 156.
20
Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim, letter to Arnold Ruge, quoted in ibid., 153.
81!
Only the genius in us, if we allow it free reign, gives us divine freedom;
only when it lives in us, do we live in a divine element. This genius has
no need of a mediating revelation, it speaks to us in everything, in the
bloom and scent of the rose, in moonshine and the gurgling brook, in the
rustling treetops. Therefore the life of nature which explores wild
abysses, ignorant of divine genius but not denying it either, is not what
is objectionable. It is the cultivated life of virtue which is objectionable
when it shuts out genius and practices virtue in its own wisdom.… You,
and the genius in you, have to free yourself from the selfish “I” by
following your inner voice. Find your own self and you will shed all
fetters.
21

Humanity is the redemption not just of itself, moreover, but also of nature. Bauer
quotes Bettina: “At night, all alone in the open, it seems as if nature were a spirit that
seeks redemption from humanity.” He continues: “genius shall evolve from nature,
flesh shall become spirit.”
22

In 1837, Daumer published his own Bettina, a collection of poetry based on
Arnim’s semi-fictional exchange of letters. Daumer’s Bettina is a child of nature,
unfettered and naïve, an embodiment of the divine creative force, the inner poet and
artistic genius in each person through which, though stifled, the creative spirit of
nature and the universe is trying to unfold itself. “We encounter here a great depth of
human nature,” Daumer wrote,

that “hidden poet” and artistic genius in us, who, sharply separated from
our common, actual ego and self, has its dwelling in the dark,
unexplored depths of our being and soul and whose more or less
fragmentary and incomplete manifestation is the essence of all poetic
productions of humanity. It is the god in us, the indwelling and
universal creative spirit and artist of nature and the universe, who by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
21
Quoted in ibid., 156.
22
Edgar Bauer, quoted in ibid., 156-57.
82!
means of our ego that is dissolved into it is striving for a new
manifestation and freedom of appearance and wants to come into the
light of day.
23

Bettina embodied Daumer’s increasingly nature-centered theology, derived from his
studies with Schubert and Schelling, in which the primordial person, having separated
from nature and developed individuality, wants to be re-suffused. Bettina, in her
dreams and intuitions, reveals the original unity of the primordial person with the
natural world. Bringing to fruition the religion of nature and spirit that had revealed
itself through Goethe, she is the prophet and high priestess of Daumer’s new religion.
24

As noted above, Daumer’s fascination with Bettina sprang in part from his time
with Kaspar Hauser, whom he admired and by whom he was profoundly affected for
similar reasons. But Daumer was also fascinated, at least in a literary and philosophical
sense, with sensual aspects of women. Likely fueled by his intensely negative
experience with ascetic Pietism at Erlangen, Daumer celebrated sensuality as a
window into the natural, God-created universe. One senses that Daumer’s voluminous
writings about women were also, for him, a fantasy, a way to escape the hardship and
loneliness of his condition by imagining relationships with idealized young women who
would nourish his soul and gratify his senses.
Through Daumer’s research on the Kaspar Hauser case, he had become closer
with Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72), the younger brother of his classmate Anselm von
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
Daumer, “Über Bettina Nacht- und Traumleben in Beziehung auf die Gedichte aus Goethes
Briefwechsel mit einem Kind,” Athenäum für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben (February 1839), 2-14, quoted
in Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner, 99.
24
For more on Bettina, see Härtl; Kühne, 55-57; Kluncker, Leben und Werk, 98-103; and Edward
Walden, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved: Solving the Mystery (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011).
83!
Feuerbach and one of the leading philosophers of his generation. Feuerbach was an
important influence on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who credited his 1841
publication The Essence of Christianity as the end of German Idealist philosophy.
25
Marx
expanded on Feuerbach’s views in his own 1845 essay “1) ad Feuerbach”, later
published as “Theses on Feuerbach.”
26
Feuerbach was impressed by Daumer’s critique
of religion in Polemische Blätter betreffend Christenthum, Bibelglauben und Theologie. Eine
Schrift für gebildete Leser aller Stände (1834), which was censored. Feuerbach credited
Daumer with influencing his anti-Pietist and anti-Christian views.
27

In addition to Feuerbach and Ruge, Daumer became acquainted with Karl
Gutzkow (1811-78), the Young Hegelians’ leading literary voice, who published Wally
in 1835.
28
Gutzkow was charged with making irreligious statements in the book and
spent several months in prison. Given the growing influence of Neo-Pietism at the
Prussian court and the censorship policies of the national assembly in Frankfurt—
which in 1835 banned all future works by Gutzkow, Leibe, and Heine—such a fate
could have awaited Daumer too. Indeed, two of his own books had already been
confiscated.
29

Gutzkow’s Wally was controversial, in part, because of its overt eroticism,
especially a scene in which the title character disrobes for her beloved, Caesar. The
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Todd Gooch, “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward
N. Zalta, last modified Winter 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/ludwig-
feuerbach/.
26
Marx’s essay, edited by Engels, was first published as an appendix to Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach
(Berlin: Dietz, 1888). There, it was titled “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marx’s original text was first
published in Marx-Engels Archives, book 1 (Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1924).
27
Ausgewählte Briefe von und an Ludwig Feuerbach, 285, quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans.
Turner, 35.
28
Karl Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin (Mannheim, 1835).
29
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 53-54.
84!
book had been castigated by Wolfgang Menzel (1798-1873), who wrote that the scene
ranked among the meanest “brothel-related nudity [scenes] and brothel reminiscences.”
Daumer defended the scene, however, writing that it showed a level of spiritual vitality
and a beautiful soul-mood (Seelenstimmung), which corresponds to how we apprehend
the starry sky.
30
Daumer’s understanding of erotic pleasure as an aspect of
apprehending the divine spirit in the beauty of the natural world would underlie his
writings on women for the next twenty years.
Defending Gutzkow also gave Daumer an opportunity to criticize Pietistic
prudery. Indeed, fighting Pietism was a passion he shared with Feuerbach, who
appreciatively called Daumer that same year “that brave crusher of Pietists.”
31

Daumer’s writings on women and visions for a religiosity that celebrated sensuality
would dovetail with his increasingly strident critiques of religion.
In 1841, Daumer published Die Glorie der heiligen Jungfrau Maria durch Eusebius
Emmeran. Legenden und Gedichte nach spanischen, italienischen, lateinischen und deutschen
Relationen und Originalpoesien under the pseudonym Eusebius Emmeran. As noted above,
Daumer had had a strong interest in the Virgin Mary since his student days at
Erlangen; he would publish another collection of Marian material, Marianische Legenden
und Gedichte, in 1859.
32
Interspersing Marian lore from across Catholic Europe with his
own original poetry, Daumer attempted in his 1841 book to portray Mary as close to
nature and close to humanity, and thus a positive aspect (perhaps the only one, in his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Daumer, Darlegung des religiösen und religionsgeschichtlichen Charakters und Verhältnisses der Herren
Gutzkow und Menzel nebst Bemerkungen über den Ausgang und das Ziel der Weltgeschichte in Beziehung auf
Menzel’s Ansicht darüber (Nuremberg: Schneider and Weigel, 1836), quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk,
trans. Turner, 113.
31
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 54.
32
Daumer, Marianische Legenden und Gedichte (Münster: Aschendorff, 1859).
85!
view) of the Christian church. Refashioned as a Christian Venus, she was to occupy a
central position in Daumer’s new religion.
33
Daumer closed the work with a quote by
Feuerbach: “God’s love seems the most magnificent when we feel in God the beating
heart of a mother. The highest and deepest love is the love of a mother.… faith in
God’s love is faith in femininity as a divine principle.”
34

The book precipitated an abrupt end, however, to the close friendship between
Daumer and Feuerbach and revealed their divergent views on religion. In a review,
Feuerbach called the collection a purely aesthetic work, thus invalidating Daumer’s
religious aims.
35
He also wrote harshly about the Virgin figure herself, describing her
as “nothing but the personified nature-adverse Catholic chastity” and the subject of
vulgar fantasies of celibate monks.
36
While Daumer and Feuerbach retained their
professional colleagueship and Feuerbach helped Daumer find a publisher for one of
his later works, their friendship never fully recovered. Daumer continued in his quest
to forge a new religion based on the spirit of nature as expressed through the feminine.
Feuerbach, who had published his influential Das Wesen des Christentums the same year
as Daumer’s Glorie, pursued an anthropological and atheist reworking of Christianity.
Following the widespread condemnation of Daumer’s denigration of
Christianity in Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums and his relative withdrawal
from society, Daumer published a collection of poems in 1853 that elicited controversy
both in their original form and through Brahms’s setting of them in Lieder und Gesänge,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
33
For the idea of Christian Venus, see Kluncker, Leben und Werk, 36. For the center of the new
religion, see Kühne, 58.
34
Quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 58.
35
The review was published in the January 1842 edition of Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche
Wissenschaft und Kunst. See ibid., 58-59.
36
Ibid., 59.
86!
Op. 57. The poems and epigrams in Frauenbilder und Huldigungen, published in three
volumes, are arranged into twenty-two sections, each dedicated to a different female
figure. An outgrowth of the literary revolution of the 1830s, but out of step with the
changed cultural climate, Daumer’s poems pushed the limits of socially acceptable
portrayals of erotic attraction.
Anticipating, perhaps, that his poems would be controversial, Daumer included
as an appendix to the poems an essay called “Die Sinnlichkeit: zur Berichtigung ihres
Begriffs.”
37
This essay outlines his longstanding celebration of sensual pleasure as an
expression of the divine in nature and his continuing reaction against the traumatic
asceticism of his student years. As Kühne explains, Daumer “opposes the
understanding of sensuousness as the ignoble part of the human essence. This idea, he
writes, stems from the re-valuation based on Judeo-Christian spiritualism, and he
demonstrates this by returning to the original connection of sinnlich and Sinn (sinnig,
sinnvoll, sinnreich, neg.: sinnlos).”
Although Brahms was drawn to the poems, perhaps as an expression of his
feelings for Julie Schumann, modern observers have found these poems to lack the
inner fire of Daumer’s Hafiz settings. Kühne, for example, complains: “these dream-
like figures lack the heartbeat of true life. A comparison with the glowing songs in
Daumer’s Hafis shows that his strengths were recreating and choosing, rather than
creating on his own.”
38
The poems never achieved the popularity of Hafis, and were
instead bitterly condemned. One critic, Giessen professor Ludwig Noack, wrote: “The
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
“Die Sinnlichkeit: Zur Berichtigung ihres Begriffs,” in Daumer, Frauenbilder und Huldigungen, 3:
221 ff.
38
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 93.
87!
master enemy of shrews writes accolades for women – a psychological antithesis
between Schopenhauer and Daumer in Frankfurt am Main.” Noack seems to have
assumed that both Schopenhauer’s and Daumer’s attitudes toward women stemmed
from sexual deviance: homosexuality in Schopenhauer’s case and overindulgence in
Daumer’s. Nothing but syphilis, which Noack assumed Daumer must have contracted
over the course of his exploits, would explain, Noack wrote, the poet’s deteriorating
emotional condition.
39
Daumer was frustrated that his poems, and the forward-looking
ideals he held them to represent, were not appreciated by the broader community. He
complained bitterly about the awful Philistines that surrounded him.
40
He retreated
further from public life, again contemplated suicide (but decided against it after
reading Charles Nodier), and two years later published Polydora.
41

From the 1850s through the 1870s, Daumer exchanged amorous and
philosophical letters with his niece Helene. Daumer’s letters to Helene were published
by the Kaspar Hauser publishing house and bookstore in 2009.
42
Unfortunately, none
of Helene’s letters to Daumer survive. Helene, for Daumer, seems to have been the last
in a string of individuals—like Kaspar Hauser, Bettina, and Hafiz’s beloved—who
embodied his ideals of naïve unfettered perception of the divine in nature. She was also
young, female, relatively real (although one wonders how much of Daumer’s
understanding of her was just in his imagination), and proximate. In addition, Helene
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Ludwig Noack, “Die Meister Weiberfeind und Frauenlob. Eine psychologische Antithese
zwischen Schopenhauer und Daumer in Frankfurt a. M.,” in Noack, Psyche: Zeitschrift für die Kenntniss des
menschlichen Seelen-und Geiteslebens, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1860): 144-69, quoted and summarized
in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 93.
40
Daumer, letter to a Göttingen professor, quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 93.
41
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 99.
42
Daumer, Briefe an seine Nichte.
88!
seems to have functioned as Daumer’s confidante, the primary person with whom he
shared his many anxieties and tribulations.
In January 1855, the year in which he lived nearly alone and wrote Polydora, he
lamented to Helene: “They have discarded me forever.” Three years later, he confided
to her: “A mere awaiting of the events that are yet to come, and that cannot be
imagined in any way other than terrible and awful to the utmost, goes against my
innate urge to work and create, so much so that I am hoping there might be a milder
way of looking at this. Once I believe to have found something of the sort, I will let
you know.”
43

Daumer’s overwhelming sense of doom, both for himself and for the world at
large, was tempered by the promise of youth, especially as he could see it in Helene,
his daughter, and his sister’s children.
44
Daumer considered that there might be
exceptions to the unremitting decline he witnessed all around him. Some people, he
imagined, might carry within themselves the essence of the new idea and thus be able
to carry it into the new era. Daumer gathered a small group of women around him,
including his wife, his daughter, and Helene, as a religious microcommunity that
would bring about the new era. “I still have one dream,” he wrote, “the one about a
small, calm community, which separates itself from the entire remaining human world,
and turns deeply inward, with an avoidance of all demands for wealth and luxury.
From this, I hope the new being will originate.”
45

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
43
Quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 101.
44
Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 101-2. Also see Daumer, Meine Conversion.
45
Daumer, letter to Helene, Spring 1858. Quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 102.
89!
HAFIZ

Among Daumer’s roster of paradigms and archetypes, the most significant was
the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz (full name Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn
Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī). Hafiz catapulted Daumer in the 1840s to literary fame.
In the poetry of Hafiz, Daumer found a perfect vessel for expressing his ideas about
Islam, the new religion to come, and the place of sensuality and the natural world
therein. Brahms set seven of Daumer’s Hafiz poems: in the last three songs in Op. 32,
the first two in Op. 47, the second in Op. 57 (“Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst”), and
the second in the Neue Liebeslieder, Op. 65 (“Finstere Schatten der Nacht”).
46

Daumer’s interest in Hafiz brought together numerous strands of his
intellectual work: celebrating naïve perception of the divine, erotic sensuality, religious
reform, Islam as a source for the new religion, and Persian literature and challenging
religious asceticism. Daumer upheld Hafiz as a model for the new religion he
envisioned, which would build on the heights of religious and literary development
that had been achieved under Islam. In this religion, an embracing attitude toward
sensuality would replace the ascetic outlook that caused Daumer such trauma at
Erlangen. Daumer represented Hafiz as a crusader against ascetic excesses such as
were dictated by Amir Mohammad Mozaffar and thus an important forebear in his
fight against Pietism. As will be shown, Hafiz negotiated the treacherous politics of his
time with considerably more nuance and success than Daumer. On the positive side,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Brahms also set one of Rückert’s Hafiz translations, “Einförmig ist der Liebe Gram,” Op. 113, no.
13, as a six-voice canon.
90!
Daumer’s Hafiz embraced sensuality, functioning as a distant, exotic, and ultimately
more appealing update to his rendering of Bettina.
The popularity of Persian literature in Germany in the first half of the
nineteenth century rested, in part, on philological theories concerning German’s
linguistic descent from Persian, Sanskrit, and an imagined earlier source language.
Translating Persian poetry into German was a way of reclaiming Germany’s literary
heritage and paving the way for a new golden age of world literature in German
translation. Hafiz, then, was not simply exotic and foreign; his work was a pillar of
Indo-European literature that modern Germans could claim as their own. Daumer’s
subsequent shift, seen in Polydora, from Persian literature to literature from broader
groups of nationalities, including those from Eastern Europe, paralleled shifts in
philological research. These connections will be developed in the next chapter.
Hafiz functioned, in short, as a bridge between Daumer’s early paradigms and
archetypes, such as Kaspar Hauser and Bettina, and his later literary works such as
Frauenbilder und Huldigungen and Polydora. In Hafiz, the connection for Daumer between
naïve perception of the divine, religious renewal, and erotic sensuality is most clear.
Naïve perception was strong in the case of Kaspar Hauser, for example, but no longer
present in Polydora. Religious reform was strong in Bettina and Hafiz, but again absent
from Polydora. (As has been shown, though, during the time that he wrote Polydora
Daumer was still very interested in religious renewal in the form of a small group of
women he gathered around him.) Erotic sensuality is absent from Daumer’s discussion
of Kaspar Hauser, but central to his Hafiz, foregrounded in Frauenbilder und
Huldigungen, and echoed, less provocatively, in Polydora.
91!
Hafiz was also Brahms’s gateway to Daumer’s ouevre, as will be discussed in
the second half of this dissertation. Brahms’s first Daumer settings were from his Hafis,
which Brahms encountered in a used bookstore in Vienna in 1863. More particularly,
Daumer’s Hafiz seems to have been the poetic vessel through which Brahms first gave
voice to his forbidden feelings for Julie Schumann, the daughter of his lifelong
soulmate Clara Schumann and his late mentor, champion, and close friend Robert.
Later, Brahms would express his feelings for Julie through poems from other
collections by Daumer, including the eighteen poems from Polydora that Brahms set in
the Liebeslieder. Daumer’s Hafis also drew on philologically based notions of German
identity, subsequent versions of which would underlie both Polydora and Brahms’s
song and quartet settings in the 1860s.
Hafiz hailed from Shiraz, from the province of Fars, Persia (now in Iran), a city
that was known for its great learning, religious asceticism, sufi mysticism, poetry, and
fine wines.
47
Important personages in recent centuries had included the ascetic Ibn-I
Khafīf (d. 982) and the mystic Rūzbihān Baqlī (d. 1209).
48
Shiraz was also the
birthplace of the first community of sufi “whirling” dervishes, which was formed in the
eleventh century by Abū Ishāq-i Kāzarūni (d. 1035).
49
Shiraz was an important trading
city whose population during Hafiz’s time was about sixty thousand. Contemporary
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
47
Situated at 29° latitude with an altitude of about 4,900 feet and only twelve inches of annual
rainfall, Shiraz has an ideal climate for wine cultivation. Wine was produced in Shiraz as early as the
ninth century. By the seventeenth century, Shirazi wine was known as the finest in the western Asia and
was exported by the British to India. The name lives on in the Shiraz grape varietal. The love of wine
expressed in Hafiz’s poetry, whether understood as alcoholic or spiritual intoxication, has a tradition of
fine vintages at its root. See Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press 2006), 512-13, and Hugh Johnson, The Story of Wine, new illustrated edition
(London: Mitchell Beazley, 2004), 58, 131.
48
Annemarie Schimmel, “Hafiz and His Critics,” Studies in Islam (1979): 253.
49
Ibid., 258.
92!
London and Paris, by comparison, had populations of about one hundred thousand
each before being decimated by the Black Plague.
The fourteenth century, during which Hafiz lived, saw an efflorescence of
Persian poetry. Edward Granville Brown calls it the richest period in Persian literature
and ascribes its success to the profusion of small courts that competed with each other
to attract eminent literati.
50
Of all the literary and religious figures to emerge from
Shiraz, however, none rivaled Hafiz. In the words of Annemarie Schimmel,

to speak of Shiraz in the 14
th
century, even to mention the city’s name at
all among educated Westerners, means to recall immediately the one
name that has become the epitome of Persian lyrics for both Oriental
and Western readers, that of Muhammad Shams ad-Dīn Hāfiz.
Superseded in popularity, particularly in the English speaking world,
only by Umar Khayyām, the name of Hāfiz stands in the West for
everything Persian; for the apogee of uninhibited sensual delight;
enjoyment of the prohibited wine; and the predominance of love in all its
shades, while most of the Oriental interpreters see in him “the tongue of
the Unseen World” singing of Divine Love and spiritual intoxication. In
the German speaking world, Hāfiz’s name has become almost a
household word since the days of Goethe.
51

Despite the popularity of his poems, our knowledge of Hafiz’s biography is
quite limited. Hafiz is believed to have been born around 1319.
52
His father was a
merchant who migrated from Isfahan to Shiraz and died early, leaving his family in
difficult financial circumstances. According to some sources, Hafiz was sufficiently
poor that he apprenticed himself to a doughmaker. He also worked for many years as a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Edward Granville Brown, A Literary History of Persia, vol. 3 (Bethesda, MD: Iranbooks, 1997; first
published 1902), paraphrased in ibid., 254.
51
Schimmel, “Hafiz and His Critics,” 255.
52
Peter Avery, in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz (Cambridge: Archetype, 2007), suggests 1325-
26 as a likely birthdate, with 1317-18 and 1320 as other possibilities.
93!
copyist, perhaps even into his thirties—another sign, perhaps, of his limited means.
Hafiz received a traditional education in a madrasa and seems to have enjoyed it. He
developed an excellent command of Arabic and of the Qur’an. His pen name, Hafiz,
refers to one who has memorized that sacred text. In his later years, he taught exegesis
and other theological courses.
53
Hafiz seems to have married and to have had a son.
The son died, probably in 1364.
Hafiz’s poetry attracted attention from his early years. He received invitations
from Baghdad and from the Bahmanid kingdom in South India.
54
His poetry was
known during his lifetime as far away as Bengal. Although we do not know if he
belonged to any of the sufi orders that were active at the time, his poetry aligns well
with a sufi outlook.
55

Much of Hafiz’s poetry centers, at least on the surface, on pleasures of the
grape and the flesh. His poems can generally be understood as operating on three
levels. These levels—often simultaneous, multivalent, and intertwined—are the
sensual-erotic, the mystical-scriptural, and the political.
56
The sensual-erotic, which
generally prevailed among European readers in Daumer’s time, and the mystical-
scriptural, which prevailed in Persia and India, will be discussed below. Here, we
consider the political, especially Hafiz’s skillful negotiation of the politics of patronage
in the violent and shifting quicksands of the Shirazi court.
57

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 256.
54
Ibid., 257, and Avery, 8. Hafiz did not accept either invitation.
55
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 257.
56
Momand, 26, and others.
57
For more on the history of Persia at the time, see Avery, 7-11; John Limbert, Shiraz in the Age of
Hafez: The Glory of a Medieval Persian City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Parvin Loloi,
Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 3; The Hafez Poems of
94!
Hafiz’s life coincided, more or less, with a brief hiatus in foreign control of
Persia between the end of the Mongol-ruled Ilkhanate, a remnant of Genghis Khan’s
empire, and the conquest of Persia by Timur, also known as Tamerlane. The Ilkhanate
was founded by Genghis Khan’s grandson Hülugü who, after a Mongol coup in 1251,
was dispatched to reassert Mongol control over Persia, Iraq, and parts of Azerbaijan.
Hülugü and his descendants would rule the Ilkhanate for seventy years.
58
The
Ilkhanate was a vassal state, of sorts, to the Mongolian empire in China (Yuan
dynasty), which was ruled by Hülugü’s brother Kublai Khan. Hülugü’s great-
grandson Abu Sa’id died in 1335 without an heir. Mongol attempts to install another
descendant of Genghis Khan failed and the Ilkhanate disintegrated.
59

Of the several family dynasties that vied for power after Abu Sa’id’s death, the
most important for the history of Shiraz were the Injus and the Mazaffarids. The Injus’
rise to power began during Sa’id’s reign, when Sharaf al-Din Mahmoud, then a tax
agent, was sent to Shiraz. By 1325, Mahmoud was promoted to governor, given the
title Shah, and paid a handsome salary. He also secured a marriage alliance with the
Ilkhan’s minister.
60
In 1334, however, he was removed from his governor’s post. After
a failed attempt to kill his appointed successor, he was imprisoned but quickly
released.
61

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gertrude Bell, ed. E. Denison Ross (Bethesda: Iranbooks, 1995); David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040-
1797 (London: Longman, 1988); Edward Granville Brown, A Literary History of Persia, vol. 3 (Bethesda,
MD: Iranbooks, 1997; first published 1902); and B. Spuler, “The Disintegration of the Caliphate in the
East,” in Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, 162-71.
58
Morgan, 58-61. The Ilkhans converted to Islam in 1295, although Hülugü and others maintained
a strong interest in the state religion of the Mongol empire, Tibetan Buddhism. See ibid., 64-65.
59
Ibid., 62-65, 78-79.
60
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics“ (for date of 1325).
61
Limbert, 26-28.
95!
Following Sa’id’s death, when Hafiz was probably a teenager, the former
Ilkhanate was ravaged by nearly ten years of violent struggle. In Shiraz, Mahmoud’s
sons (from the Inju family) and members of the Chupani family fought a series of
battles, with none of the contestants holding Shiraz for more than two years and most
of them being killed. Not until 1343, when Hafiz was probably in his twenties, was
Mahmoud’s youngest and only surviving son Abu Eshaq able to establish clear and
undisputed control of Shiraz and the surrounding areas. Abu Eshaq’s Fars, with its
capital in Shiraz and its territory extending from Isfahan to the Persian Gulf, became
one of six successor kingdoms to the Ilkhanate.
62

Abu Eshaq was an intelligent and generous ruler who loved art, literature, and
religious scholarship. His eleven-year reign saw “brilliant achievement,” in the words
of John Limbert, “in all those fields.”
63
Hafiz thrived under Abu Eshaq and his vizier,
Qiwam al-Din Hasan, both of whom he praised in his poems.
64
Abu Eshaq was less
successful on the battlefield, though. A series of losing campaigns, coupled with
mismanagement of key local alliances and a fondness for drink, culminated in the
successful siege of Shiraz in 1352-53 by Amir Mohammad Mozaffar (Shah Mubariz
al-Din Muhammad).
65

It is hard to imagine a sharper contrast to Abu Eshaq than Amir Mohammad. A
ruthless tactician and a “fanatically orthodox” Sunni,
66
he imposed a strict
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
62
Ibid., 28-32.
63
Ibid., 33.
64
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 253-58. Avery, 8, called Hafiz’s life under this ruler and his
vizier “halcyon.”
65
Limbert, 34-36.
66
Avery, 9.
96!
interpretation of Islam on the inhabitants of Shiraz. He enjoined his subjects to listen
and closely adhere to Islamic teachings and jurisprudence. He also closed wine shops,
opium houses, and brothels, earning him the nickname of muḥtasib, or inspector (of
bazaars; the term also encompasses “censor” and “police”).
67
The many poems by Hafiz
that deride the muḥtasib are generally understood to refer to Amir Mohammad.
68
In
one example, Hafiz writes:

Though wine gives delight and wind distills the perfume of the rose,
Drink not wine to the strains of the harp, for the inspector is awake.
69

Hide the goblet in the sleeve of the patchwork cloak,
For the times, like the eye of the decanter, pour forth blood.
Wash the wine-stain from your dervish-cloak with tears,
For it is the season of piety and the time of abstinence.
70

The poem concludes with the thought that Hafiz might seek more hospitable
patronage elsewhere: “For now it is time for Baghdad and Tabriz.”
71

Not all references to the muḥtasib, though, are negative. In a different poem,
Hafiz wrote:

Don’t tell the muḥtasib my faults
For he, too, is continually, like me, in search of wine.
72

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
67
Limbert, 36.
68
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics”; Avery, 9.
69
Schimmel translates this couplet as: “Even though the wine is pleasure-granting and the wind
scattering rose-petals, / Don’t drink wine at the sound of the harp, for the muḥtasib is impetuous.”
70
Hafiz, Brockhaus No. 57, Ahmad-Nai’ni No. 68, quoted and translated in Limbert, 37.
71
Ibid., quoted and translated in Schimmel, 259.
72
Hafiz, Brockhaus No. 34, Ahmad-Nai’ni No. 57. The latter is slightly different, ending with “in
search of good life.” Quoted and translated in Schimmel, 259.
97!
Perhaps this was written when another ruler was in power. Hafiz leaves the question
unanswered.
Among the critics of Mohammad’s harsh rule was his son, Shah Shoja, who,
together with his son and brother, arrested, imprisoned, and blinded him in 1358. Shah
Shoja’s reign endured, except for a brief exile (when the city was besieged by his
brother, Shah Mahmud, in 1363-66), for twenty-five years. Hafiz’s fortunes improved
significantly under the new ruler, and he wrote:

At dawn, glad tidings reached my ear from the voice of the Unseen world:
It’s the time of Shah Shoja—drink, boldly, wine!
73

Hafiz was apparently close to Shah Shoja. He even wrote poems complaining
of his separation from him during the Shah’s exile.
74
Over time, their relation became
strained because the Shah, himself an amateur poet and apparently jealous of Hafiz’s
success, banned him from court.
75

Toward the end of his life, Shoja, realizing the inevitability of Timur’s conquest,
sent the conqueror a delegation with generous gifts and promises of loyalty. Timur
welcomed the gifts and arranged for a marriage between his grandson and the Shirazi
ruler’s granddaughter.
76
Shiraz was thus spared the fate of nearby Isfahan, where
70,000 inhabitants were slaughtered. In addition to his military prowess and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Hafiz, Brockhaus No. 327, Ahmad-Na’ini No. 251, quoted and translated in Schimmel, “Hafiz
and his Critics,” 259.
74
Ibid.
75
Hafiz was banished from the court c. 1372-74. Avery, 8.
76
Limbert, 41.
98!
ruthlessness, Timur was also known for his interest in gathering leading Muslim
scholars and artists. Not surprisingly, he is said to have invited Hafiz for an audience.
Their reported dialog is the subject of a popular anecdote.
77
According to one telling:

There is a story that the invader Timur angrily summoned him [Hafiz]
and demanded if he was the poet who would exchange two of Timur’s
great cities, Samarkand and Bokhara, for the mole on his mistress’s
cheek. “Yes, sir,” replied Hafiz, “and it is through such acts of
generosity that I have reached a state of destitution that forces me to
solicit your bounty.” Timur was amused enough to send the poet away
with a gift. The truth of this story is questioned by those who claim
Timur arrived at Shiraz after Hafiz had gained his tomb.
78

Regardless of its veracity, this anecdote shows the kind of wit with which Hafiz
negotiated his position with powerful, and sometimes ruthless, rulers.
Hafiz, then, spent his childhood and early adulthood in the constant shadow of
violent conflict, following the fall of the Mongol Ilkhanate, in which political and
military control of Hafiz changed no less than eight times in the space of five years
(1339-44).
79
Violence was not limited to soldiers and their leaders. Entire
neighborhoods, and even cities, were put to death from time to time. Hafiz was
supported by two arts-loving rulers, Abu Eshaq (Inju family) and Shah Shoja
(Mazaffrid family), but even during their relatively benevolent reigns he had to
persevere when Shoja was exiled or dismissed him from service. Hafiz also had to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
This anecdote was popularized by Daulatshah, from which other writers took it over. See
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 261.
78
http://www.humanistictexts.org/hafiz.htm and http://www.urdumovies.net/2012/04/hafiz-shirazi-
3-end-poet-of-love.html, both accessed May 29, 2014.
79
Limbert, 32.
99!
survive the oppressive regime of Amir Mohammad, the muḥtasib, and—anecdotally, at
least—an interrogation by Timur.
Much of Hafiz’s poetry can be read in the context of these diverse and high-
stakes political relationships: praising, supplicating, criticizing, entreating, seeking new
employment, or threatening to leave. The “beloved” in Hafiz’s poems often refers to his
ruler, or patron; poems that at first glance seem to be about erotic love may in fact
have been understood by their small but powerful audiences as referring to themselves.
In commenting on the politics of the time, Hafiz was also commenting on religious
practice. He railed against Muslim orthodoxy, especially as enforced by the muḥtasib,
and celebrated the openness to sex and alcohol (as a metaphor for divine intoxication,
at least) of the Sufis. Daumer saw in Hafiz an inspiring precursor to his own rants
against Pietism. Hafiz has been called a “political animal,” and indeed he was.
80
But the
genius of Hafiz, and part of his attraction for Daumer, is that any political reading of
his poetry overlaps, dovetails, and intertwines with other readings, especially the
spiritual and the sensual.
Around the time of Hafiz’s death, Sultan Murad I of the Ottoman Empire (r.
1362-89) was embarking on a successful military campaign. He defeated the Serbs at
Kosovo, thus subjugating the Balkans and expanding his empire. The ascendant
Ottoman leaders sought to develop a Turkish literature, and Turkish literati looked to
Persian literature as a model for their own development. Persian letters thus exerted a
major influence on the emerging Turkish literature, especially the Divan edebiyatı, or
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Vladimir Minorsky, personal communication to Peter Avery, 1947, cited in Avery, 14.
100!
Divan literature. Fifteenth century Turkish poets including Shaiki and Ahmad Pasha
were deeply influenced by Hafiz’s lyrical style.
81

Some orthodox Turks were suspicious of Hafiz, though, and asked the eminent
mufti Abu Su’ud (d. 1578) for a fatwa on the appropriateness of Hafiz’s poetry for
religious Turks. Su’ud delivered an “elegantly ambiguous” answer: Hafiz’s poetry, he
determined, was not objectionable on the whole, but some passages were subject to
incorrect interpretations. Su’ud did not specify which passages these were or which
interpretations were incorrect. Goethe was familiar with Su’ud’s fatwa, and it inspired
one of the poems in Goethe’s own Divan.
82

Following Abu Su’ud’s fatwa, three Turkish commentaries on Hafiz were
written, all of which became widely influential. Two of them, by Sham’i (d. c. 1601-2)
and Sururi (d. c. 1561), emphasized a mystical interpretation. This approach became
prevalent in Iran and east to India, where Hafiz’s admirers

allegorized his verse by applying the standard equations as laid down by
authors like Muhsin Faid-i Kashani: every curl of the beloved means the
dark manifestations of contingent beings which veil and yet enhance the
radiant Absolute Beauty of the Divine Face, or may pertain to God’s
jalal-side, His Majesty and Wrath, while every wine was only the Wine
of Love, every tavern represented non-qualified Unity, etc. This kind of
mystical interpretation is the reason for some Indian sufi leaders keeping
only three books in their libraries, viz. the Qur’an, Maulana Rumi’s
Mathnawi, and the Diwan-i Hafiz.
83

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 264.
82
Ibid., 264.
83
Ibid., 264.
101!
The other commentary, by Bosnian translator and commentator Ahmed Sudi (d. 1592-
98), avoided such mystical interpretations and emphasized grammatical forms instead.
“Considered authoritative and outshining earlier works by Shem’i and Sururi,”
according to Kathleen Burrill, “it was used for editions by Persian scholars as well as
for studies by Western orientalists.”
84
Sudi’s commentary, which was studied by
Hammer-Purgstall in the 1790s, formed “the basis for most European interpretations
of the Shirazi poet.”
85

The first known European contact with Hafiz, according to Schimmel, was
Pietra della Valle’s mention of his name in a 1650 travel account, printed in Venice.
86

On the other hand, it seems almost certain that Paul Fleming—whose poem “O
liebliche Wangen” (Op. 47, no. 4) was set by Brahms probably just a year before he
composed the Liebeslieder—would have encountered Hafiz’s poetry while stationed in
Isfahan on a displomatic mission in 1636-38.
87
In 1690, Thomas Hyde of Oxford made
the first known translation of a Hafiz ghasal into a European language, but this was not
published for nearly a century. Franz Meninski, an Austrian Orientalist who published
a Turkish lexicon in 1680, translated a ghasal into German in 1697.
Hafiz’s ghasals became better known in Europe in the late eighteenth century
through the combined efforts of the Austrian diplomat Count Rewiczki, who served as
ambassador to England, and the British Orientalist and diplomat William Jones
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
84
Kathleen Burrill, “Sudi, Ahmed,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 9 (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1997).
85
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 264, and Burrill.
86
Schimmel, “Hafiz and his Critics,” 265.
87
Adam Olearis, The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors, from the Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of
Muscovy, and the King of Persia, trans. John Davies (London: Dring and Starkey, 1662). Fleming was part
of a diplomatic mission from Holstein-Gottorp to the Persian Empire headed by Otto Brüggemann and
Philipp Kruse.
102!
(1746-94), who also wrote about Sufism. The two exchanged views on Oriental poetry,
with a special interest in Hafiz, in a series of letters written between 1768 and 1770. In
1770, Jones published translations of thirteen Hafiz poems into French, after which
Rewiczki published translations of sixteen into Latin in 1771. In 1774, Jones
published the first European survey of Arabic and Persian poetry, Poeseos Asiaticae
Commantariorum libri sex, which contained an entire chapter on Hafiz’s poetry. In it,
Jones argued against a mystical understanding of the poems.
88
The first printed edition
of Hafiz’s Diwan was commissioned by William Johnson and printed in Calcutta,
where Jones was stationed and with Jones’s encouragement, in 1791.
The first European to translate Hafiz’s entire Divan was the Austrian
Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856). Hammer-Purgstall studied
Hafiz in Istanbul in the 1790s and relied heavily upon Sudi’s commentary, interpreting
the poems in an entirely non-mystical manner. Hammer-Purgstall’s non-poetic
translations, published in Stuttgart in 1812-13, inspired generations of German
Orientalists, most notably Goethe, whose West-östlicher Divan was inspired by
Hammer-Purgstall’s work.
89
Hammer-Purgstall was also the primary source for
Daumer’s Hafiz poems, and Daumer sometimes copied entire stanzas from Hammer-
Purgstall into his own “translations.”
90
Hammer-Purgstall accompanied his translations
with notes in which he pointed out some stylistic characteristics of Hafiz’s poems, such
as the frequent change in voice. He also maintained the original gender identity of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
88
For an overview of English translations of Hafiz, see A. J. Arberry, “Hafiz and his English
Translations,” Islamic Culture 20 (1946): 111-28.
89
Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis. Aus den Persischen zum
erstenmal ganz übersetzt, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1812-13).
90
Kammerlander, 155.
103!
beloved as frequently male, pointing out that he was “afraid of getting entangled in
contradictions by praising girls for their green sprouting beards.” Five years later,
Hammer-Purgstall published Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens (1818), which
Daumer noted reading at Erlangen. In this volume, Hammer-Purgstall underscored
his non-mystical reading of Hafiz; “his tongue translated only the doctrines of sensual
pleasure,” Hammer-Purgstall opined, “and not the mysteries of divine love.”
91
This
non-mystical reading of Hafiz would dominate German understanding of the poet
through much of the century.
Perhaps the best translator of Hafiz’s poetry into German was Friedrich
Rückert (1788-1866), the eminent Bavarian Orientalist who was also a favorite poet of
composers from Robert Schumann to Gustav Mahler. Inspired by Hammer-Purgstall’s
translations, Rückert turned to the original texts as early as 1820 and published free
adaptations of Hafiz’s verse in his 1822 collection Östliche Rosen. Rückert’s efforts, in
the words of Schimmel,

carry the fragrance of Shirazian poetry and are the only congenial
adaptations of Hafiz in German.… If one wants to understand how
Hafiz may sound to a native speaker of Persian, the elegant and singable
Östliche Rosen with their perfect harmony of images, masterly ghazals and
hidden puns are the best introduction.… A gifted linguist and versatile
poet, Rückert has been able to interpret Hafiz most correctly.
92

Rückert devoted great attention to reproducing the meter of Persian poetry in German,
having developed the ghazal as a German poetic form in his 1819 translations of Rumi.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
91
Quoted and translated in Schimmel, “Hafiz and His Critics,” 267.
92
Ibid., 267-68.
104!
In later years, Rückert translated an additional eighty-five poems by Hafiz into
German ghazals. However, Rückert’s translations of Hafiz did not become popular
during his lifetime and were mostly published only after his death.
93

Count August von Platen, who was Rückert’s classmate at the University of
Würzburg before transferring to Erlangen and becoming one of Daumer’s closest
friends, is the closest direct personal link between Rückert and Daumer. Despite
Rückert and Daumer’s mutual association with Platen, the present author has not
encountered any evidence that Rückert and Daumer ever met. Inspired by Rückert,
Platen published a collection of ghazals, his first publication, in 1821. This was
followed over the following two years by five more Eastern-inspired publications,
including Spiegel des Hafis in 1822 and a second collection of ghazals in 1823. In Spiegel
des Hafis, Platen, who was gay, “used the form of the ghazal and the name of the
Persian poet… to express his melancholia and his homoerotic feelings under a foreign
garb.”
94
From the opening line of the collection, “Wach auf, wach auf, o Hafis—wir lieben
den Wein,” Platen outlines a worldly, non-mystical understanding of the poet.
95

Hammer-Purgstall’s non-mystical interpretation, informed by Sudi’s Turkish
commentary, and Hindley and Rückert’s free approach to “translation”—which
encompassed creating original works in the guise of Persian ghazals—informed
subsequent writers. As Schimmel colorfully explains, Platen’s “Anacreontic
interpretation remained the rule for all the later poets who used the name of Shiraz,
threw in some roses and !nightingales, proclaimed free love and drinking, and poured
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
Ibid., 268.
94
Ibid., 268. For more on Platen’s homosexuality, see Robert Aldric, The Seduction of the
Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993), 41-68.
95
Schimmel, “Hafiz and His Critics,” 268-69.
105!
out their !aversion to the clerics under the mask of Hafiz.”
96
The leading example of this
trend would be Georg Friedrich Daumer.
Daumer’s representations of Hafiz draw on prior models and understandings,
especially that of Hammer-Purgstall, but he makes the Persian poet his own. As noted
above, Daumer identifies with Hafiz and writes in his voice. Daumer paints Hafiz in
his own image, as a relentless critic of the religious establishment. He describes Hafiz
as “not only a poet in the narrow sense of the word, but also is a thinker and polemicist
of greatest significance… in his own way a theologian, philosopher and moralist… the
sworn enemy of all clerics, monks, mystics and school pedants.”
97
One can imagine
Daumer’s Hafiz railing against the Neo-Pietistic excesses at Erlangen, or against Roth
at the Aegidian. It is more difficult, on the other hand, to imagine Daumer’s Hafiz
accommodating himself to shifting power structures of historical Shiraz.
Daumer also describes Hafiz as full of life-affirming clarity. Daumer was not
yet universally reviled—indeed, it was Ruge who persuaded Hoffman and Campe to
publish the collection—so it is possible that Daumer still imagined himself to be such a
light for his generation. As Daumer describes him, Hafiz

reveals such an infinite lack of inhibition and such a clear, unadulterated,
divine bliss and confidence in himself. He develops such a magnificent,
uplifting, objective worldview and is simultaneously so extraordinarily
elegant in his phrasing and form, that one can truly say that nobody else
in the world has more thoroughly overcome the deep-rooted evil of the
abstract and negative thought processes of their tiresome
representatives in both the East and West who exert their life-dulling
influence.
98

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
96
Ibid., 269.
97
Daumer, Hafis, 3.
98
Ibid., 3.
106!
Daumer cast mystical interpretations of Hafiz’s poetry as attempts by the
orthodoxy to censor his message:

Since they found it impossible to destroy his liberated and life-affirming
verses and their beguiling effects on the sensibilities of the faithful
through external, brutal acts of violence, the verses were then
interpreted as spiritual allegories, which under the guise of speaking
about the sensual and earthly were really speaking about the opposite,
i.e. about transcendence and the heavenly, in the same way as our
theologians interpreted the Song of Solomon.... But it is precisely such
ascetic and ethical abstractions in regards to the transcendent and
heavenly that Hafez, at least in the majority of his verses and utterances,
decisively denies.
99

Daumer does not deny allegorical interpretations altogether, though. Daumer
casts Hafiz as a prescient proponent of Schelling’s Naturreligion. “To be sure,” he writes,

one can recognize a certain mysticism here, but it is of a very different
kind than an ascetic, bleak and Pietistic one. Namely, when he [Hafiz]
damns sobriety and praises drunkenness, he understands the former
[sobriety] to refer to the withdrawal of a person’s “ego” from what is
naturally real and objective inside of him, i.e. as an abstract, subjective
attitude, which is correctly considered an evil and is designated as the
source of all evil; and the latter [drunkenness] doesn’t refer to the actual,
common intoxication from wine, but rather to an enthusiastic immersion
of the soul into nature and reality, a drunkenness, which is very likely
conceivable without even tasting any wine.
100

Daumer is far from transparent about his poetic sources and the influences of
his predecessors. “What pertains to my predecessors’ work on this topic,” he wrote,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
99
Ibid., 3-4.
100
Ibid., 4.
107!
“on the whole I wasn’t able to use them as models, despite the fact that they are held in
high esteem in terms of their intellectual powers and poetic arts. There is hardly
anything here, with a few rare exceptions, which calls for giving thanks to any of
them.”
101
Although Daumer may have studied some Persian, his main source was
Hammer-Purgstall’s Hafiz translations. Kammerlander, as noted above, has shown
that Daumer copied entire stanzas from Hammer-Purgstall.
102
Daumer, however,
obscures the influence of Hammer-Purgstall, Goethe, Rückert, and other prior
translators and interpreters.
Daumer included in the Hafis volumes, in addition to “translations” of Hafiz, a
selection of other non-German poetry. Daumer notes that these “products of strange
and distant places… seemed at least to a certain extent worthy of having the honor of
being included in a book with Hafiz’s highly poetic verses.” Daumer praised Latvian
and Lithuanian folksongs, in particular, for possessing “a beauty, tenderness, and
loveliness that arouses wonder.”
103
Daumer seems especially fascinated by the mixture
of mythology, eroticism, and folk-like presentation of these songs:

One encounters a mythology in these, which consists of a wondrous, but
also extremely charming mixture of heathen and Christian images. The
sun has daughters, but God has sons, and these produce erotic
relationships; God’s sons, full of youthful fire, love the beautiful,
marvelous daughters of the sun; they approach them at every
opportunity, grant them favors, drive them in sleighs, and, going
overboard in their enthusiasm, they throw them too quickly and wildly
into the snow. The sun gets angry about this, is dissatisfied with our
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
101
Ibid., 6.
102
Kammerlander, 155.
103
Daumer, Hafis, 6.
108!
dear God, who doesn’t keep his children under better control; he scowls
and he makes a very gloomy day.
104

Daumer quotes Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s praise of the naïve expression in
Lithuanian folksongs. Lessing had remarked, in a letter, that while leafing through the
preface of a Lithuanian dictionary, he happened across “some Lithuanian ditties or
little songs that gave me endless amusement, like the ones the common maidens sing.
What naïve humor! What charming simplicity! One can learn from this that poets are
born everywhere under the heavens, and that tender feelings are not a privilege of
educated people.”
105

Daumer’s presentation of Hafiz, like his presentation of Bettina, has a
significant basis in prior understandings. Hafiz’s poems do in fact celebrate
drunkenness and sensual pleasure and rail against orthodoxy. Daumer’s Hafiz is not
fundamentally different from that of Hammer-Purgstall, Rückert, or Platen. But
Daumer does shape Hafiz, like Bettina and the others, to conform to his ideals and
advance his agenda of religious reform. Moreover, he is not content to celebrate these
inspiring figures, to follow them, and to write about them. He appropriates their voices
and has them speak through him. Daumer’s Bettina failed to achieve the critical acclaim
of Arnim’s original. Daumer’s translations of Hafiz, though, vastly eclipsed in
popularity those of his predecessors. It was Daumer’s Hafiz, not Hammer-Purgstall’s,
Rückert’s, or Platen’s that Brahms chose to give voice to his forbidden feelings for
Julie Schumann. Goethe, though, would stand close by. The “genius” who inspired
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
104
Ibid., 6-7.
105
Ibid., 7
109!
Arnim’s youthful passions would add perspective for Brahms when his own youthful
passions failed.
In Hafiz, Daumer found the perfect voice for his critique of orthodox
asceticism, his vision for a new religion, and his celebration of sensuality. Daumer’s
interest in Hafiz was sparked during his student years by Platen and Kanne, who
introduced him to Persian literature including Hafiz and his ghasals. Hammer-
Purgstall’s translations, upon which Daumer based his own later works, were also
published at that time. Daumer’s interest in Persian literature and Islam seems to have
been rekindled by his association with the Young Hegelians, some of whom prefigured
Daumer in their view that the new religion yet to come should derive from Islam.
Paradigmatic figures such as Kaspar Hauser were important precursors for Daumer’s
Hafiz. Bettina, especially, was an inspiring model of a charismatic prophet of a new
religion with an open approach to sensuality. Hafiz brought together, for Daumer, the
key passions of his life in a way that resonated with German society and brought him
his greatest literary success.
While Hafis was the summation of Daumer’s life’s work so far, it also pointed
forward to future works such as Frauenbilder und Huldigungen and Polydora. In his Hafiz
poetry, Daumer perfected the art of the amorous poem, which would remain central to
his work. While the overt eroticism of Frauenbilder und Huldigungen scandalized readers
when the work was first published, not to mention audiences of Brahms’s settings from
that collection (especially Op. 57), Daumer took a tamer approach in Polydora.
In Hafis, Daumer also cemented the philologically based international approach
that he would continue in Polydora. Hafis was premised, in part, on philological theories
concerning the shared ancestry of German and Persian—and the peoples who spoke
110!
them. Hafis also included poetry from Lithuania and Latvia, relatively new additions to
the Indo-European language group. The shift in emphasis from Hafis to Polydora, from
predominantly Persian poems to a more Eurocentric body of work, reflected changing
views of the Indo-European language group and peoples.
It was through Hafiz that Daumer achieved his greatest literary success. His
subsequent critique of Christianity, though, would turn the world against him. Even
such ardent critics of organized religion as Feuerbach and Marx felt that Daumer had
gone too far. Daumer lost his newfound fame and turned to a life of isolation. It was in
this state that he wrote Polydora.
111!
CHAPTER 5
EIN WELTPOETISCHES (UND WELTLITERARISCHES) LIEDERBUCH

In 1855, while living in a lonely tower and before finding solace in Catholicism,
Daumer compiled, translated, and wrote a collection of poetry entitled Polydora. Ein
weltpoetisches Liederbuch. Building on his earlier forays into classical literature in Greek
and Latin, Oriental literature, other poets’ translations of poems from other cultures,
and Daumer’s own earlier volumes of poetry on women, Polydora consists of poems,
mostly amorous in nature, from around the world and from the ancient to the present.
In the preface to the book, Daumer lays out his intentions and aspirations and draws
connections with his earlier works, especially Bettina, Hafis, Mahommad, Glorie, and
Frauenbilder und Huldigungen. In this chapter, key ideas from Daumer’s understanding of
Polydora are identified and connected to broader currents in German literary culture
and self-understanding. Such ideas include the universal significance of German
literature, the place of Germany in world history, the nature of an imagined ancient
golden age and its prospects for renewal, and the role of Weltpoesie (“world-poetry”)
and Weltliteratur (“world-literature”). Implicit in these are ideas about the origin of the
German language and people and an evolving understanding of world history.
The opening and concluding sections of Daumer’s preface to Polydora read as
follows. Emphasis is added.

For many years, I have entertained the thought of creating a
collection of songs like this one, which would draw from everything that
is poetically appealing and meaningful, and thoroughly document my
own interpretation. In the case of its success, I hoped to put into place a
112!
national work, i.e. one that does justice to the universality of the German taste and
spirit. Some elements of this work have already made their way out into
the world, as concerns the two Hafezian anthologies, Mahomed, the
marianische Blütenlese, and Bettina, because those, indeed, were originally
intended as singular elements of an all-encompassing, world-poetic
pantheon, yet they grew—as I devoted my particular attention to
them—in such a way that they could stand for themselves and unfold
their occasional effects. My intention, more specifically, was this. The
work was meant to begin with a purposefully structured representation of the
ancient world, this lost paradise of aesthetic-humanist culture, then cover a
similarly mirrored delineation of later stages of development, beginning with the
great, universal relapse to cruder conditions, and progressing to the higher level of
culture that has, on the one hand, been achieved in the Orient through Persian
poetry and, on the other hand, is in the process of receiving explicit representation
in the Occident by means of our more recent historical processes and literatures.
The new elevation of the human spirit in the Orient was portrayed in
Mahomed, the perfection of this course, stripped of all its retained or
newly added heterogeneous or antagonistic elements, in Hafis. From the
romantic night of the Occident, sunk into barbarianism, I extracted
Catholicism’s Marian service as its most peculiar and most interesting
detail, and distinguished it, with the use of a whole series of authentic
materials, with as much charm and dignity as I could master, in the
Marian edition, which will likely not cause any further confusion and
inaccurate interpretation, given the universal-poetic ambition of the work.
Bettina characterized a modern phenomenon of relevance—if I were
allowed to draw from a work that was my own not only in style, but
also in content, then Frauenbilder und Huldigungen would well be able to
serve as the next element in this series. But since the poetic genius,
which with its drives and deeds is immanent to man, in no way only
appears as tied to a specific sequence of developmental stages, floating
through time and history in a linear way, but rather exists everywhere,
at all times, and loves to extend and manifest itself, flowering every
possible bloom, sideways across the earth, so that even those places that
are the most remote from the world historical processes will not have to
go empty-handed—there was a need to pay attention to the poetic
phenomena surrounding those points and do justice to the most diverse
folk poetries, as I had already done on occasion in preludes, addenda,
and various publications, as well as, even more comprehensively, in the
work at hand, where sprinklings of Greek and Roman poetries are
accompanied by a colorful series of “people’s voices,” which are
traversing the world from faraway nations to the West, not without
expanding towards the North and the South on their journeys.
It will be sufficiently clear how all of the above mentioned
literary works, as much as they differ in their specific spirits and
characters, still constitute, thanks to the world-poetic idea at the foundation of
them all, a coherent and structured whole; yet to finally let this idea
stand out with explicit determination and to add quite a few things that
113!
had thus far been missing—such is my purpose. Certainly, this effort is
still far from complete, and a critique proceeding by strict standards will
still find gaps and lacks. There are reasons that must be mentioned,
however, for they may transform such a rebuke, which our edition
might elicit in various ways, into a rather approving judgment….
The genius of poetry is the same everywhere; it is a universal human
property, in which the “mine” and “yours” cannot be as clearly divided as a
superficial examination may suggest; it may continue and bring to perfection in
one individual what it has begun and executed to a certain degree in another; and
both of them, in such a case, may only be understood as a single poetic subject; in
this way, not only can one poem be created through the involvement of several
individuals, but through several generations and periods of national and human
history. What matters in any such case is only that the resulting poems
be authentic and nourished to perfection, and that there be a truly
poetic life; everything else is irrelevant and only matters for pedants.
1

The first section of this chapter traces the genealogy of ideas evoked by Daumer in his
statement, “I hoped to put into place a national work, i.e. one that does justice to the
universality of the German taste and spirit.” The section outlines German attempts to
articulate German identity, especially through the development and historicization of a
shared language. Central to this enterprise was the field of philology, which attempted
to trace the ancestry of the German language to ancient languages such as Persian,
Sanskrit, and an even earlier common ancestor. During the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, this effort expanded to include the ancestry of the German people in
addition to the language they spoke. Terms such as Indo-European, Indo-Germanic,
and Aryan were developed to illustrate the connections between modern Germans and
other peoples, both ancient and modern. The Germans’ place of origin was plotted
onto points spanning from India to eastern Europe. Daumer’s choices of source
material, from ancient Greek to Persian to central and eastern European texts, reflect
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Daumer, Polydora, trans. Gutwein, v-ix, xii.
114!
changing views about the origin of the Germany people. Hafiz, for instance,
represented an earlier flowering of Indo-European culture to which nineteenth century
Germany was a clear successor. Literatures such as Lithuanian and Latvian, which
Daumer included in both his Hafiz collections and Polydora, were part of the Indo-
European family of whom Germany was destined to be leader.
The second section explores nineteenth century German narratives of a
paradisiacal golden age and the need for its revival. These narratives were often closely
intertwined with philological theories discussed in the first section. Many thinkers
understood reviving the primordial paradise as a central part of Germany’s destiny.
Narratives of a golden age lost and needing to be restored were mapped onto
dialectical understandings of history, which were articulated most famously by
Daumer’s teachers Schelling and Hegel. Daumer viewed his literary endeavors, like
his efforts at religious reform, as part of a broader effort to restore the level of culture
that had existed in the lost golden age. The new golden age would not be a simple
restoration of the primordial paradise, however, but would be enriched by
contemporary historical understanding. While this ambition was universal in scope, it
was to be particularly German in its manifestation. Germany’s unique combination of a
grammatically rich language, with close ties to Sanskrit and the supposed Ursprache,
and its recent developments in philosophy and historical understanding made it
uniquely suited, and indeed mandated, to bring about the new golden age.
The third section explores the notions of Weltpoesie and Weltliteratur as they
relate to Daumer’s project. Weltpoesie was used by Herder as early as 1778-79 to
describe his folk song collections. Weltliteratur came into use much later. Goethe’s main
work on the topic was not published until afer his death, in 1836. Weltliteratur was
115!
taken up enthusiastically by the Young Hegelians, with whom Daumer had close ties.
It was used to support both internationalist and German nationalist agendas. Although
Goethe upheld Heine as the world-literary author par excellence and Ruge called
Daumer’s Hafiz the Persian Heine, Daumer avoided any direct reference to Heine,
perhaps because of a vitriolic exchange that took place between Heine and Platen
during Heine’s final two years in Germany. By highlighting Herder’s older term
Weltpoesie rather than Goethe’s Weltliteratur, Daumer signaled a connection between
his project and older proto-Romantic and Romantic sensibilities. If Daumer
downplayed the connection between Polydora and Weltliteratur, though, Brahms re-
established that connection by framing Daumer’s poems in the Liebeslieder with a poem
by Goethe, “Zum Schluß.”

“THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE GERMAN SPIRIT”

Questions about the provenance, nature, and destiny of the German people
(Volk) have occupied German thinkers at least since the Renaissance. Lacking a
unified German state until 1871, German speakers turned to ideas about German
character, religion, and, most importantly, language as underpinnings for cultural and
national identity.
During the Renaissance, German thinkers looked to classical texts in Greek
and Latin for cultural validation. Humanists such as Konrad Celtis (1459-1508) and
Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), for example, selected passages from the Roman
historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56-after 117) that illustrated the virtue, valor,
116!
and simplicity—in contrast to their more urbane neighbors to the south—of the
ancient Germans. Cherusci’s military victory over Varus in the Teutoburg forest, in 9
CE, was also seen as revealing the “true character” and heroic virtue of “the Germans.”
German writers of the Renaissance looked to the legend of Barbarossa (twelfth
century) and the early Holy Roman Empire as ideal German kingdoms.
2
Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), in his seminal nationalist tract Reden an die deutsche Nation
(1808), cited the character of the German people as a reason they should throw off the
yoke of French occupation. Germans, Fichte declared, were capable of the highest
perfection and deserved to be cultural leaders of the whole world.
Religion was also seen as an integral part of the German identity. Martin
Luther saw the achievement of what he considered the truest form of Christianity a
German cultural achievement.
3
Schleiermacher, in the impassioned sermons he gave in
Berlin (1812), represented German nationalism as a new religion, the true heir of the
Reformation.
4

Language, though, was central to German understandings of what it meant to
be German. The importance of Luther’s translation of the Bible for establishing a
common written language throughout German-speaking lands is widely known.
Baroque philologists equated German culture with the establishment of a mother
tongue, and some attempted to make German a “better” language than Latin.
5

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716), best known for his contributions to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 196.
3
Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 13.
4
Leah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),
361.
5
Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 13-14.
117!
calculus but also a founder of comparative linguistics, noted that the German language
“bore as many marks of the primitive, if not more, than Hebrew itself.” Leibniz also
advocated strengthening the teutsche Nation through cultivating the German
vernacular.
6

Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766) is credited with transforming the
Upper Saxon dialect, which Luther had used in his Bible, into a fully functioning
literary language. Gottsched arrived in Leipzig in 1724, shortly after Bach. Once there,
he transformed the local Deutschübende Gesellschaft into a national literary society
(Deutsche Gesellschaft) and established Leipzig as the literary center of Germany.
Gottsched sought to make literary German a language that could express universal
ideals. The eighteenth century, then, saw a growing awareness of a common literary
tradition starting to unite at least Protestant parts of Germany.
7

By the turn of the nineteenth century, components of Germany national
identity—language, literature, religion, cultural identity, and even chauvinistic disdain
for all things French—had been in place for centuries. However, it was not until
Napoleon’s invasion in 1806 that these coalesced into distinct feelings of nationalism.
In the colorful words of Louis Snyder, “The flame of German nationalism was lit from
Paris.”
8
Following the French defeat of Prussian armies, especially at Jena and
Auerstedt, German intellectuals, many of whom were centered in Jena, feverishly
proclaimed what they believed to be the essence of German national identity.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Ibid., 67.
7
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2005; first published 1944), 346-48.
8
Louis L. Snyder, Roots of German Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 59.
Greenfield, 358, similarly wrote: “It was the defeat of Prussia in the course of the French revolutionary
wars that finally ushered German nationalism into the world.”
118!
Language was integral to this quick-setting formulation. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-
1860), for example, in his popular patriotic song Des Deutschen Vaterland (1813), defined
the German fatherland as the area where German is spoken:

Where is the German fatherland?!…
Wherever is heard the German tongue,!
And German hymns to God are sung!
9

Fichte, in Reden an die deutsche Nation, cited language as an important reason Germans
should take pride in their identity. Germans, he proclaimed, spoke a pure and
uncorrupted version of one of the world’s ancient original dialects.
10

Luther, Gottsched, and others had helped develop German as a literary
language whose written version, at least, was relatively standard throughout German-
speaking lands. Ancestry was needed, though, to lend credence to the language as a
basis for nationalist claims. The emerging field of philology was well suited to
exploring possible lineages and developing narratives of ancientness. Germans sought
roots for their language in classical languages (Latin and Greek), in medieval Teutonic
culture, and in Oriental languages: Sanskrit, Avestan, and Persian.
11
Among the early
nationalists were numerous Orientalists with a strong interest in the languages,
literature, and religious philosophies of India and/or Persia. These philologists, many
of whom were also poets, philosophers, translators, folklorists, or theologians, would
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 4; see also Greenfield, 368, and Snyder, 60.
10
Snyder, 61.
11
Avestan, an ancient Iranian language, is also known as Zend.
119!
harness their skills to the nationalist cause and develop genealogies for the German
language—and people—in the ancient East.
12

Philology began as an offshoot of theology and was one of the first academic
disciplines other than theology to gain acceptance in the German universities. Early
philologists focused their efforts on Biblical languages. Their quest to discover a
linguistic ancestry for German evolved from theological questions such as: Where was
the Garden of Eden? Where did Noah land his ark? Where was the tower of Babel,
and what language as spoken before its destruction? In what language did God first
reveal His word?
Philology became a driving force in German nationalist thought in the first half
of the nineteenth century. Its influence started to decline in the middle of the century,
after the 1848 revolutions, as questions of racial identity and heritage overtook
questions of language and Germans looked more to fields such as comparative
physiology, ethnology, and Volkspsychologie. Philologists developed terms such as Indo-
European, Indo-Germanic, Aryan, Hellenic, and Semitic to describe families of
languages and peoples.
Leibniz, whose contributions to linguistics were mentioned above, expressed
the views of many Renaissance and post-Renaissance thinkers when he wrote in 1704
that European languages derived from Scythia, a vast area stretching from eastern
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
As Benedict Anderson has noted in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 86, philologists were “incendiaries” in the German nationalist
movement, as well as later nationalist movements in central Europe which followed, to varying degrees,
it model. Also see Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 5.
120!
Europe, north of the Black Sea, to western and central Asia, north of Tibet.
13
As will
be discussed below, a variation of this viewpoint would regain currency in the middle
of the nineteenth century.
With British colonial developments in India and the resultant efflorescence of
Sanskrit studies, scholars starting in the late eighteenth century located the cradle of
civilization in India. Herder, with whom Schelling studied, located the original Garden
of Eden in the Himalayas and proposed that Asians invented language and writing.
14

William E. Jones, whose translations of Hafiz were discussed above, proposed the
existence of an “Indo-European” language group in his 1786 presidential address to
the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, which he had founded two years earlier. Jones
explained:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin
and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a
stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so
strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which,
perhaps, no longer exists.
15

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (Amsterdam: Raspe, 1704), quoted in Maurice
Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, A Match Made in Heaven, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(New York: Other Press, 1992), 2, 145-46.
14
Seth Houston, “Philology, Orientalism, and the Quest for the Rediscovered Poetic: Reading
Robert Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri” (MM thesis, University of Colorado, 2009), 20.
15
Jones’s comments, from his “Third Anniversary Discourse” to the Asiatic Society, which he had
founded, were reprinted in William Jones, “On the Hindus: The Third Discourse,” Asiatic Researches 1
(1799): 422-23, quoted in Olender, 6. See also Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 71, and Michael J. Franklin,
“Orientalism: Literature and Scholarship,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, vol. 1, ed.
Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 833.
121!
Jones further noted that Persian may well stem from the same language family.
In Germany, this interest in Indian language, literature, and religion was
enthusiastically taken up by the early Romantics. Inspired by Herder and by Friedrich
Majer (1772-1818), who lectured on India in Göttingen in 1796, many of them became
early nationalists. Unlike British Orientalists, whose scholarly pursuits lent ideological
support to colonial enterprises, German Orientalists’ efforts were aimed at bolstering
German assertions of cultural validity and leadership among the European family of
nations.
16
Their quest to find the primordial language (Ursprache), spoken before Babel,
became a quest to find the earliest ancestors of the German language. Their search for
the Garden of Eden shifted to a search for the primordial homeland (Urheimat) of the
German people.
In the early nineteenth century, it was widely agreed that India was the
primordial source of the German language. Friedrich Schlegel, in an 1802 letter to
Ludwig Tieck, wrote that Sanskrit “is actually the source of all languages, thoughts
and history of the human spirit; everything stems from India without exception.”
17
In
his 1808 book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, Schlegel presented India as the
Urheimat. He also expected to find evidence of a primordial religion (Urreligion) there.
18

Johann Christoph Adelung (1732-1806), in his 1806 book Ältere Geschichte der Deutschen,
ihrer Sprache und Literatur, explored German-Farsi connections and suggested that their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
This would change over the nineteenth century, as certain strands of British Orientalist
scholarship started to complicate rather than support British colonial activities, and as Germans
established their own colonies in the 1880s. German Orientalism would also become ensnared in
political issues between Bavaria, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire from the 1820s through the 1850s.
17
Axel Michaels, “Wissenschaft als Einheit von Religion, Philosophie und Poesie. Die Indologie
also frühromantisches Projekt einer ganzheitlichen Wissenschaft,” in Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die
Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, ed. Gabrielle Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumannm, trans.
Christopher Turner (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004), 325-40.
18
Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 73-74.
122!
common Gothic ancestors had resided at some point on the Black Sea. At the same
time, Adelung followed Herder in suggesting that the very earliest people lived in an
earthly “paradise,” comparable to the Garden of Eden, in eastern Kashmir, near
Tibet.
19

While India was the primary focus, some Orientalists were also interested in
the connections between German and Persian or its predecessor Avestan, the ancient
language of Zoroastrian texts. Bamburg Othmar Frank (1770-1840) found “the light
of the primordial German nationality still burning” in the ancient religious teachings of
Iran. Heinrich Friedrich Link (1767-1851) argued that Avestan was originator of both
Sanskrit and German and, in 1821, suggested that ancient Germans had once
inhabited the mountains of Media, Armenia, and Georgia.
20
Bernhard Dorn (1805-81)
wrote in 1827 that German and Farsi are like two rivers in which one blood flows.
Recalling Leibniz, Dorn located the origin of the Germano-Farsi people in the
Caucasus region (the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas; now
southern Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan).
21

In the third decade of the century, linguistic questions came to intersect with
questions of ethnic and geographical origin. The supposed point of origin also started
to move west: first, by fits and starts, toward the Caucasus mountains and eventually,
in the 1860s, to Germany itself. The term “Indo-Germanic” was coined by Julius
Klaproth (1783-1835) in 1823 to refer to the languages and peoples he believed had
descended from a common central Asian Urheimat. He and other German scholars
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Ibid., 69-70.
20
Ibid., 72-73.
21
Ibid., 90.
123!
journeyed to the Caucasus, scouring the area for linguistic and physiological
evidence.
22
By 1834, Klaproth’s “Indo-Germanic” had supplanted “Indo-European” as
the preferred name for the linguistic (and proto-racial) family, and there was near
scholarly consensus that the original Indo-Germans had lived not in India but in
central Asia.
23
(“Indo-European” would return as the preferred term by the 1860s.)
This shift coincided with the increasing inclusion of central and eastern
European languages in the Indo-European linguistic pantheon, as evidenced in the
expansion of scope between the two major publications of linguist Franz Bopp (1791-
1867). Bopp’s first major work, Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in
Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache,
published in 1816, compared Sanskrit with Greek, Latin, Persian, and German. His
later Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen,
Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen, published in six volumes between 1833 and 1852,
also included “Lithuanian,” “Slavonic,” and “Gothic” languages.
24

The term “Aryan” (Arisch) was introduced to German philological circles in
1819 by Friedrich Schlegel. The word is based on the German Arier, related to the
French Ariens, and ultimately derived from ancient Indian and Persian sources
including the Rig Veda and Zend-Avesta.
25
Schlegel, who had converted to Catholicism,
suggested that word of God had been imparted to early humans, who had lived in the
mountains between Iran and India, in an “Aryan language” closely related to Avestan
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
Their travels were sponsored by the Russian Empire, which was arrogating land in these border
regions from the declining Persian and Ottoman empires.
23
Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 84, 66.
24
See ibid., 82.
25
Ibid., 201-2.
124!
and Sanskrit. The term “Aryan” was not widely used by philologists, however, until
the 1830s. In a footnote to an 1830 article published in Indische Bibliothek, Christian
Lassen (1800-1876) recommended using “Aryan” rather than “Indo-Germanic”
because it better conveyed the common lineage and geographical spread of the Indo-
Germanic peoples.
Daumer’s Polydora, then, like some of his earlier works, draws on and advances
philological and other related narratives about the origin and destiny of the German
language and people. A collection of poems collected and translated from languages
including ancient Greek, Arabic, Malagasy, and Hungarian can be a national work
because it reflects the historical sweep and contemporary breadth of the Indo-
European people—and indeed world culture—and the Germans’ leadership position
therein. Daumer’s shift in emphasis from classical Greek, to Persian, to a more broadly
international group of literatures parallels Bopp’s expansion of the Indo-European
language group to include Lithuanian, Gothic, and Slavonic tongues. As will be shown
in the second half of this dissertation, the supposed original homeland of the Indo-
European people continued to shift westward such that in 1869, the year that Brahms
composed the Liebeslieder, Lazarus Geiger would argue that the Indo-Europeans
originated not in India, Kashmir, or the Causasus, but in Germany itself.

125!
“THIS LOST PARADISE… PROGRESSING TO THE HIGHER LEVEL OF
CULTURE”

The work was meant to begin with a purposefully structured
representation of the ancient world, this lost paradise of aesthetic-
humanist culture, then cover a similarly mirrored delineation of later
stages of development, beginning with the great, universal relapse to
cruder conditions, and progressing to the higher level of culture that has,
on the one hand, been achieved in the Orient through Persian poetry
and, on the other hand, is in the process of receiving explicit
representation in the Occident by means of our more recent historical
processes and literatures.
—Daumer, Preface to Polydora
26

The possibility of restoring a lost golden age was a recurring theme among
German Romantics and nationalists. It also underlies much of Daumer’s work,
including Polydora. As Anthony Smith aptly notes, nineteenth century Germans sought
their cultural origins in a “disparate set of golden ages,” including ancient Greece,
ancient India, and medieval Teutonic culture.
27
Smith continues:

For nationalism may be described as the myth of the historical
renovation. Rediscovering in the depths of the communal past a pristine
state of true collective individuality, the nationalist strives to realise in
strange and oppressive conditions the spirit and values of that distant
Golden Age.… The Golden Age… is an ideal state, not a primordial
one.… it is chosen not by detached empirical analysis but for the
satisfaction of present yearnings for an ideal community.… Of course,
the community of the future will not replicate that of the Golden Age,
but it will recapture its spirit and set man free to be himself.
28

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Daumer, Polydora, v-vi.
27
Smith, Chosen Peoples, 195.
28
Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 1971), 22-23. Benes, in In Babel’s
Shadow, 11, similarly writes: “On the one hand, philology idealized distant moments in the past as models
for German cultural rebirth. This sustained a quasi-religious longing for the salvation promised by
126!
Early Romantics and proto-Romantics regarded the golden age with nostalgia and
imagined returning to it from the cataclysmic environment of their time, which was
marked by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as a beautiful but
unattainable goal.
Johann Gottfried Herder set the stage for India to function as an object of
Romantic nostalgia. For Herder, India was a land of innocence, of poetry and nature,
untainted by civilization, Islam, and modern Europe. Herder’s India became, for the
Romantics, a symbol of a primordial golden age where philosophy, poetry, and religion
wove together with nature.
29
Friedrich Majer imagined India as a paradisiacal Garden
of Eden and a fountainhead of continuing civilization: “It becomes understandable how
from the wonderful voices that speak from this paradisiacal nature to the heart of its
first human inhabitants… that early divine flame of the human spirit could be brought
about, by whose rays of light, later after they have been spread in all directions over
the earth, were the cause of all higher life, weaving, and existence of humanity.”
30
For
Majer, India was also a palliative that helped him escape the reality of Napoleonic
occupation: “I live now entirely in India and often feel thoroughly and benevolently
carried away from the sad present.”
31

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
providential history. A focus on formative foundations anchored what were often messianic narratives of
fall and redemption. The primeval past was likened to a Gold Age; the naïve innocence of youth enjoyed
a moment of purity and respite before succumbing to an inevitable process of cultural degeneration. The
prospect of return encouraged nationalists to model the imagined community on memories of archaic
cultural essences.”
29
Michaels, 330.
30
Friedrich Majer, Brahma oder die Religion der Indier als Brahmanismus (Leipzig, 1818), 17-18, quoted
in ibid., 332-33.
31
Majer, quoted in Michaels, 332.
127!
Majer lectured on India at Göttingen in 1796 and exerted a profound impact on
Friedrich Schlegel and other early Romantics.
32
Schlegel, whose passion for India
became so serious that he traveled to Paris in 1802 to study Sanskrit, wrote: “In the
Orient, especially India, we must seek that which is most highly Romantic.”
33
In a
letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel, c. 1799, Novalis expressed a typical Romantic
association of India with the poetic and an understanding of the subcontinent as an
antidote to Enlightenment rationality: “Poetry is more charming and colorful like an
adorned India compared to the cold, dead Spitzbergen of that parlor-understanding
[of rationalism].”
34

After Napoleon’s invasion, the restoration of a lost golden age was transformed
from the vague longing of the Romantic early nationalists to the mission of the German
people. Friedrich Schlegel proclaimed: “Nothing is so important as that the Germans…
return to the source of their own language and poetry, and liberated from the old
documents of their ancestral past that power of old, that noble spirit which,
unrecognized by us, is sleeping in them.”
35
Friedrich Rückert, who first achieved fame
with his 1814 patriotic songs, based his conception of German national identity on the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Romantics influenced by the India craze included Jean Paul, Wilhelm Wackenroder, Ludwig
Tieck, Novalis, Hölderlin, Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph von Görres, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling,
and Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel.
33
Friedrich Schlegel, Europa I, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler with Jean-
Jaques Anstett, Hans Eichner, et al. (Munich: 1958-), 36 ff., quoted in Michaels, 331.
34
Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], “Die Christenheit oder Europa,” 1799, in Werke, ed. P.
Kluckhold and R. Samuel (Leipzig: 1928), 2:80, quoted in Michaels, 332.
35
Friedrich Schlegel, Jugendschriften, 1794-1802, ed. J. Minor (Vienna, 1882), 2:353, quoted in
Carlton J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 102-3.
According to Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 76, Schlegel “privileged German speakers as a chosen people
destined to recreated the lost religious knowledge of divine revelation following an enlightened return to
the paradise from which they had been expelled.”
128!
restoration in German of the spiritual harmony that had existed in the golden age.
36

Scholars as late as Adolphe Pictet (1799-1875) were animated by this desire to
resurrect in Germany a golden age, although by his time it had become subliminal
again rather than at the forefront of nationalist thought. Ferdinand de Saussure, in
reviewing the work of his teacher, wrote: “underneath [Pictet’s] research on the Aryas,
that people of the golden age brought back to life by scholarly thought, was certainly
an almost conscious dream of an ideal humanity.”
37
Pictet’s research in the 1850s and
early ’60s contributed to the theory that the Indo-Europeans originated in Europe, to
be discussed in chapter 9.
38

With the expansion of German philological activities into more remote
languages such as Kawi (court Javanese) and Malaysian, new questions were raised
about the location of the primoridal paradise.
39
Indian, central Asian, or Caucasian
provenance were no longer assured. Daumer was deeply interested in such questions.
In an 1838 magazine article, “Über den Zusammenhang der amerikanischen Indianer
mit den Hebräern,” he wondered if the Pacific Islands might be, after all, the original
paradise. In the article, he discussed reports of travelers who had recently visited the
Pacific Islands and discovered cultural and linguistic similarities between the Pacific
Islanders and the Semites. These similarities included songs that sounded like a
Hallelujah. Daumer asked: “Was the biblical paradise located in the Pacific? Was this
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
Benes, In Babel’s Shadow, 76.
37
Quoted in Olender, 8.
38
Adolphe Pictet, Les Origines Indo-Européennes, ou, les Aryas Primitifs: Essai de Paléontologie Linguistique,
vol. 2 (Paris: Joël Cherbuliez, 1863), discussed in Lazarus Geiger, “On the Primitive Home of the Indo-
Europeans,” in Contributions to the History of the Development of the Human Race: Lectures and Dissertations by
Lazarus Geiger, trans. from the 2nd German edition by David Asher (London: Trübner, 1880), 128.
39
Kawi and Malayasian were studied by Humboldt and Bopp, respectively.
129!
the place of origin of the Semitic race? Is this where the deluge happened? Is the ‘New
World’ in America simply a rediscovery of what is actually the ‘Old World?’ Were
these events only later transcribed to take place in Asia or Africa?”
40

Narratives of paradise lost and needing to be restored were mapped, especially
during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, onto dialectical understandings of
history. Although Hegel is popularly credited with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis
framework, it was actually outlined by Fichte, who drew extensively on the work of
Kant. Schelling adopted the terminology and Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus (1796-1862)
applied it to Hegel. Thus the term “Hegelian dialectic” gained currency even though
Hegel himself preferred the terms “abstract-negative-concrete.”
41

While the content of dialectical historical narratives varied greatly, their form
remained remarkably consistent. Since Daumer studied with both Hegel and Schelling
and associated closely with the Young Hegelians, it is not surprising that his efforts at
religious reform rested on a dialectical framework. In Daumer’s vision, the primordial
people’s clear apprehension of the divine in nature was the thesis, or abstract.
Christianity, the object of Daumer’s unremitting attack, was the antithesis, or negative.
The religion yet to come, the new golden age enriched by consciousness of historical
development, would be the synthesis, or concrete.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
40
Daumer, “Über den Zusammenhang der amerikanischen Indianer mit den Hebräern,” Athenäum
für Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Leben (August 1838): 32-81, quoted in Kühne, trans. Gutwein, 63-64.
41
Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). See also Gustav E.
Mueller, “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 3
(June 1958): 411-14.
130!
“THE WORLD-POETIC IDEA AT THE FOUNDATION OF THEM ALL”

In the preface to Polydora, Daumer writes that his preceding literary corpus,
leading up to and culminating in the present work, is based on the “world-poetic”
principle. This term, of course, is also included in Polydora’s subtitle: Ein weltpoetisches
Liederbuch. This section traces Weltpoesie and its younger cousin, Weltliteratur, to shed
light on the meaning, connotation, and resonance that these terms would have had for
Daumer and his readers, including Brahms. In so doing, it highlights connections
between Polydora and Herder, the early Romantics, Goethe, and the Young Hegelians,
noting along the way nationalist, universalist, and cosmopolitan connotations.
Before adopting the term Weltpoesie, Herder used Volkspoesie in the early 1770s
in relation to James Macpherson’s Ossian.
42
Ossian, one of the greatest literary hoaxes
of all time, was presented by Macpherson (1736-96) as the legendary author of Gaelic
epic poetry that Macpherson “collected” and published in 1760. Macpherson’s poetry,
in the guise of Ossian, was exquisitely suited to satisfy the taste of Sturm-und-Drangers
such as Herder who were seeking more “authentic” and “primitive” alternatives to
Enlightenment artifice. Ossian was wildly popular.
43

Herder’s concept of Volkspoesie encompassed both Naturpoesie and Nationalpoesie.
It reflected the essence, or genius, of a national group and was also a natural product
of its poetic activities, uncorrupted by civilizing refinement. Volkspoesie, for Herder,
was immediate, vital, sensuous, and free from artifice. It spoke directly to the senses
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Herder, Briefwechsel über Ossian, discussed in Maike Oergel, Culture and Identity: Historicity in
German Literature and Thought 1770-1815 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 52. Also see Herder’s Über die
Würkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in alten und neuen Zeiten (1778), discussed in Oergel, 53.
43
Oergel, 52.
131!
and the heart. For Herder, it was the only true and genuine poetry, and he upheld it as
his poetic ideal.
44

This definition of Volkspoesie corresponded well with Herder’s understanding of
nations, or peoples (Völker). Herder understood peoples to be products of nature
inhabiting a given place and time, much as a plant might inhabit a particular ecosystem,
and participating in mankind’s overall cultural development.
45
“The human race is
destined to progress through [different] scenes of education and customs,” he wrote.
“All scenes are part of the ongoing drama: each presents a new and particular side of
humanity.”
46
Herder believed that Volkspoesie typically thrived at the early stages in a
culture’s development, before it lost its connection to its original impetus, or place in
nature.
47
While Herder located peoples along a developmental scheme, he also saw
them as organic and complete in and of themselves, and all having equal validity.
Herder’s belief in the validity of all peoples did not prevent him from
encouraging his own—especially vis-à-vis France, which he, like so many other
Germans at the time, despised. Herder extolled the virtues of the German language
and culture and encouraged his compatriots to take pride in their heritage. Herder
called his Alte Volkslieder (1774) a collection “not for the scholar… but for the nation!
People! A body called fatherland.” He hoped it would inspire a new and revitalized
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Ibid., 52; Hoffmeister, 13.
45
Hoffmeister, 16.
46
Herder, “Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Oßian und die Lieder alter Völker,” in Herders
Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1891) 5:168, quoted and trans. in Oergel, 55.
Hoffmeister, 13-14, explains that according to Herder, peoples “develop like individuals, with the spirit
of culture moving from one manifestation to the next, from nation to nation, reaching a specific level of
cultural achievement in one society and then selecting a new people with the aim of further progress.”
47
Oergel, 54.
132!
national literature.
48
At the same time, Herder translated extensively from languages
including Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic and was an enthusiastic reader of translations
of Oriental literature by Jones and others. As noted above, he was especially fond of
the Persian poet Sa’adi.
Herder outlined his concept of Weltpoesie in his 1778-79 Volkslieder-Sammlung,
retitled Stimmen der Völker in Liedern in the second and subsequent editions.
49
Herder
portrayed the collection of folk songs as a “gallery” of “voices of the people.”
50
Since
poetry, for Herder, represented the “genius” of a people, a “world-poetic” collection
would illustrate the essence of different cultures and thus portray the stream of human
development.
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), in his later years, echoed Herder and seems to
have almost predicted Daumer’s Polydora project. In his 1802-3 Philosophie der Kunst,
Schiller wrote that the “new poesy” would have to be “poesy for the entire species and
be generated out of the material of the entire history of this species with all its
multifarious colors and tones.”
51
This would result, Schiller continued, not in a simply
“German” phenomenon, but rather in a new culture that would be valid for all
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Williamson, The Longing for Myth, 75.
49
Herder’s collection, first published in 1778-79, was originally titled Volkslieder. The second edition,
edited by Johannes von Müller (1752-1809), was published in 1807. Its title, Stimmen der Völker in
Liedern, was retained in subsequent editions. Herder also wrote about Weltpoesie in his 1793-96 Briefe zur
Beförderung der Humanität. See Sandra Pott and Sandra Richter, Poetiken: Poetologische Lyrik, Poetik und
Ästhetik von Novalis bis Rilke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 178.
50
Hoffmeister, 16.
51
Schiller, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), 72. Schiller was writing in a clearly Christian context here, seeking a renewed mythology
that would revitalize Christianity and was, indeed, already being prepared. Schiller was also partial to
Catholic mysticism.
133!
Europeans. This universal poetry, though, seemed to Schiller a distant goal.
52
In the
meantime, Schiller advised that each aspiring poet “should form into a whole that part
of the world that is revealed to him, and from the subject matter of his own age, its
history and its science, create his own mythology.”
53
Daumer’s Polydora, published over
fifty years later, seems to answer Schiller’s call for a “poesy for the entire species” that
is “generated out of the material of the entire history of this species with all its
multifarious colors and tones.”
For the Jena Romantics, engaging with literature from around the world was
not just a way to view and apprehend the steady stream of cultural evolution across
societies. Rather, it was dedicated to the proposition that Germans, and the German
language, were uniquely suited to bringing about a new world culture under a German
aegis. At the same time, Romantics insisted on the universality of their poetic endeavor.
Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, wrote in his Atheaeum Fragment # 116 that “Romantic
poetry is a progressive, universal poetry.”
54
He understood Goethe’s novel Wilhelm
Meister to be its germinative model.
Schlegel’s poetic vision corresponds well with his and other early Romantic-
nationalists’ declarations of German universality and German historical consciousness.
Arndt, for instance, asserted that the German was “a universal man, to whom God has
given the whole earth as a home” and that Germany would become “the greatest
world-nation of the present earth.” Fichte connected German universalism to the
German people’s unique ability to apprehend their place in the sweep of world cultural
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52
Williamson, The Longing for Myth, 67.
53
Schiller, History of Art, 240, and Williamson, The Longing for Myth, 67-68.
54
Greenfield, 337; also see Pizer, 41, 51.
134!
development. In Der Patriotismus und sein Gegenteil (1806), he proclaimed that “the
German alone, by possessing this knowledge [of the purpose of humanity] and
understanding the age through it, can perceive… the next objective of humanity.”
Fichte continued: “The German alone can therefore be a patriot; he alone can for the
sake of his nation encompass the whole of mankind; contrasted with him from now on
the patriotism of every other nation must be egoistic, narrow and hostile to the rest of
mankind.”
55

Translation was central to the Romantics’ endeavor. Many believed that
literature could be improved by being translated into German. Novalis considered
A.W. Schlegel’s 1796 translations of Shakespeare to be better than their English
originals. Rückert felt, in Benes’s words, that “his translations could improve on the
originals by raising their poetic content to a higher power.”
56
Anticipating works such
as Daumer’s Hafis, Friedrich Schlegel proposed that a translator of ancient texts
“would have to understand antiquity so well that he would be able not just to imitate it
but, if necessary, recreate it.” John David Pizer, summarizing Andreas Huyssen’s
reading of Schlegel and other early Romantics, notes that these Germans hoped to
achieve a universal literature in Germany through translation:

Translation for the Romantics is an act imbued with a kind of patriotic
eschatology; Germans are master translators, and they translate not only
world literature, but also the past into the future. German talent at
translation and, thereby, appropriation, preordains the German nation
to lead Europe into a future Golden age. Thus, Huyssen closes his book
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke, 3:234, quoted and trans. in Hans Kohn, “The Paradox of Fichte’s
Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 10, no. 3 (June 1949): 326.
56
Kveta Benes, “German Linguistic Nationhood, 1806-66: Philology, Cultural Translation, and
Historical Identity in Preunification Germany” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001), 379.
135!
with a reference to a “literary spiritual utopia of ‘German Weltliteratur’
conjured by the Romantics.”
57

Of the early Romantics, it was perhaps August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-
1845) who became the most “cosmopolitan,” pointing the way toward Goethe and
Weltliteratur. Hoffmeister called him the “chief mediator between German
Romanticism and Europe.”
58
For Schlegel, poetic language was still important, and he
drew on his brother Friedrich’s notion of universal and progressive poetry in his own
concept of romantische Universalpoesie.
59
Schlegel saw a leadership role for Germany in
developing a world literature. Prefiguring Goethe, though, he was less chauvinistically
nationalistic in his vision than his fellow Romantics. Schlegel saw Germany as
obligated to “find a cosmopolitan center for the human mind in the realm of the spirit.”
He followed his brother and Novalis in noting that “universality [and]
cosmopolitanism are the true German characteristics.”
60

Friedrich Rückert shared a similarly cosmopolitan outlook but also saw
German as the language destined to lead the new literary paradise that he envisioned.
He referred to the presumed original language not just as Ursprache but also as
Idealsprache (ideal language). This original language, Rückert believed, expressed the
“complete idea of man” that was revealed in ancient times. Modern German’s affinities
with the Idealsprache made it the ideal language with which to reconstitute that ancient
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
57
Pizer, 43.
58
Gerhart Hoffmeister, “Nationalism and Cultural Identity: The Dialectic of National and Global
Views in Herder, A.W. Schlegel, and Goethe,” in Romanticism Across the Disciplines, ed. Larry Peer
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), 18.
59
Hoffmeister, 18. See also Berman, 131.
60
A.W. Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Edouard Böcking (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846-47), 4:36,
quoted in Hoffmeister, 18.
136!
languages and thus recover the primeval poetic and the lost “idea of man.” While
claiming a special status for German, Rückert also asserted that “World-poetry alone is
world reconciliation.”
61

No thinker is more important for understanding Weltliteratur than Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The term was coined by Goethe in 1827 and
gained broader cultural currency in 1836 with the posthumous publication of his
Gespräche mit Goethe.
62
For Goethe, Weltliteratur referred neither to the world’s total
literary output nor to the best of world literature, i.e. a literary canon expanded to
include the best of Sanskrit and Persian literature. Rather, it was an aspirational term
that described an epoch that was yet to come. “National literature is now rather an
unmeaning term,” Goethe wrote; “the epoch of world literature is at hand, and each
must strive to hasten its approach.”
63
Weltliteratur referred, for Goethe, to a process of
intercultural exchange through which the different “nations” of the world might
strengthen mutual understanding. In “venturing to announce a European, indeed a
world literature,” he wrote, “we did not mean merely to say that the different nations
should inform themselves about one another and about each other’s works.… No! It is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Schimmel, “Weltpoesie Allein ist Weltversöhnung: Gedanken einer Orientalistin zu Johann
Gottfried Herder,” Via Regia: Blätter für internationale kulturelle Kommunikation 21, vol. 21 (1995): 7.
http://www.via-regia.org/bibliothek/pdf/Heft2122/schimmel_weltpoesie.pdf/
62
Gespräche mit Goethe was published in 1836, four years after Goethe’s death, by Johann Peter
Eckermann. Eckermann was Goethe’s secretary during latter’s last nine years of life. John Oxenford’s
English translation, first published in 1850, has been widely reprinted. See, for example, Goethe,
Conversations with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984). It was in
this book, according to Pizer, 61, that Weltliteratur “received its most famous articulation.” Also see Pizer,
33, 52, and Berman, 54-56.
63
Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 133.
137!
rather a matter of living… men of letters getting to know each other and, through their
own inclinations and sense of community, to find occasion to act socially.”
64

Unlike the early Romantics, for whom translation into German improved upon
the original but not vice versa, Goethe was excited about the more general
transformation of language through translation. Examples of this include the ghasal,
the Persian poetic form that was transformed by Rückert and Platen into a German
one, and translations of German literature into languages such as English and
French.
65
Goethe saw this kind of translational interchange, in which the characteristic
of the target language are suppressed in order to accommodate the source language, as
pointing to a literary synthesis.
66
In his own epoch, he wrote, “an exchange had taken
place between foreign and native literature producing translations that had given up
their national features in favor of a higher synthesis.”
67
These early indicators
notwithstanding, Goethe saw himself as standing on the threshold of the world-literary
epoch.
Weltliteratur did not, for Goethe, imply a loss of differentiation between nations
and languages. Goethe had no use for bland globalism or a generalized Romantic
poetic “other.”
68
By dancing across but not flattening difference, Goethe felt, one could
engage foreign literary figures in “conversation.” A leading example was Goethe’s
“dialogs” with his “twin brother” Hafiz. Through respecting the particular, Goethe
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
Ibid., 23-24. Also see Pizer, 59-60.
65
Goethe was especially enthusiastic about translations into other languages of his own work.
66
See Pizer, 40, 45. For a fascinating study of “translingual practice“ as it relates to a later and more
easterly intersection of language, nation, and modernity, see Lydia He Lui, Translingual Practice:
Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995).
67
Hoffmeister, 22.
68
Pizer, 41.
138!
hoped to enable a rich and conversational universal. In his review of German Romance
(1827), German stories collected and translated by Scottish philosopher and writer
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Goethe wrote: “In every particular, be it historically,
mythologically, fabulously, more or less arbitrarily conceived, one will see that
universal radiate and shine through nationality and personality.”
69

His celebration of translation both into and from the German language
notwithstanding, Goethe did see a special place for Germany in the emerging epoch of
Weltliteratur. Germany’s heterogeneous political structure, its rich translating tradition,
and its complex grammatical structure (which can accommodate, for example, the
related grammars of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian), made it an excellent
linguistic host, he felt, for literary exchange.
70
“Here the German finds his most
effective function,” Goethe wrote; “he will play a beautiful role in this great coming
together.… it is the destiny of the German to raise himself to the state of representative
for all world citizens.”
71

In step with the expansion of German linguistic and literary interest and
knowledge, as described above with respect to Franz Bopp, the geographical range
encompassed by Goethe’s Weltliteratur was wider than that of Herder’s Volkspoesie and
Weltpoesie. Whereas Herder focused on German, Scottish, and Spanish, in addition to
Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit, Goethe welcomed the addition of modern Greek,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
69
Goethe, 14:932, quoted and translated in Pizer, 36; also quoted in Hendrik Birus, “Goethes Idee
der Weltliteratur: Eine historische Vergegenwärtigung,” in Weltliteratur Heute: Konzepte und Perspektiven,
ed. Manfred Schmeling (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1995), 23.
70
See Berman, 57-58.
71
Hoffmeister, 22; Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 30.
139!
Serbian, Lithuanian and Czech to the world-literary conversation: “Every addition to
this large and general celebration will only be desirable.”
72

Goethe developed Weltliteratur during a relative lull in German nationalist
sentiment, between the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the 1830 revolutions, and the
concept has political implications. Gerhart Hoffmeister has argued that the concept of
Weltliteratur, for Goethe, contained an implicit recommendation of German stateless
cultural nationalism as a model that might be replicated throughout the world.
73

Weltliteratur became incorporated into the radical politics of the Young
Hegelians, many of whom associated with Daumer, in the mid 1830s. The Young
Hegelian movement was sparked by the 1835 publication of Das Leben Jesu kritisch
bearbeitet, by David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), in which Strauss described the
gospels as “historical myth” imagined by early Christian writers in the second
century.
74
As noted above, 1835 also saw the publication of Karl Gutzkow’s Wally,
which contained not only nudity but also frank discussions of suicide, and Bettina von
Arnim’s Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Between 1835 and 1844, Arnim and the
Young Hegelians published texts that were “more emancipatory and revolutionary
than anything that had ever been kindled in the minds of the German bourgeoisie.”
75

As a result, they were persecuted by the Prussian court (which, as noted above, was
strongly influenced by Neo-Pietism), by the southern kingdoms (Menzel wrote his
critiques from the University of Württemberg and Gutzkow was imprisoned in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
Goethe, letter to Carl Jacob Ludwig Iken, February 23, 1826, quoted in Birus, trans. Lauren
Greaves, 2. See Birus, 2-3.
73
Hoffmeister, 22.
74
Härtl, 145. A second volume was published in 1836.
75
Heinz and Ingrid Pepperle, ed., introduction to Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zur Philosophie und
Politik im deutschen Vormärz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1985), 25, quoted in Härtl, 145.
140!
Mannheim), and by the federal government in Frankfurt (which in 1835 banned all
future works by Gutzkow, Leibe, and Heine).
It was into this milieu that Goethe’s posthumous Gespräche mit Goethe, with its
“most famous articulation” of Weltliteratur, was published in 1836. Goethe, who had
wielded tremendous influence on German literary thought since the time of Herder,
was again in the air with Arnim’s adoring Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Several members
of the Young Hegelian movement wrote appreciative essays about the aging poet.
Ludolf Wienbarg (1802-72), in his 1835 Goethe und die Welt-Literatur, praised
Weltliteratur. Wienbarg noted that its cosmopolitan approach aligned well with the
Young Hegelians’ ideal of a universal brotherhood that would bring together peoples
form around the world. Karl Gutzkow, in 1836 (the same year he was imprisoned),
cautiously defended Weltliteratur by drawing connections with national literature—and
with a pragmatic appeal. Weltliteratur supports native German literature, Gutzkow
contended, because it provides a way for German literature to be celebrated abroad
even as it is censored at home.
76

As the decade progressed, the movement shifted its attention from the
international to the national, partly in response to criticism by Menzel, who
disapproved of Goethe’s universalist leanings.
77
Thus Theodor Mundt (1808-61)
turned his back on Weltliteratur in his 1840 Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart: “The
sharpest expression of characteristic nationalism is, rather, to be considered the true
essence and greatest charm in every literature, and an ever more predominating
universal spirit of accumulation, which is bringing about a leveling of nationality, can
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
Pizer, 61-62.
77
Ibid., 62.
141!
only bring out the ruin and deterioration of literature.”
78
In 1841, classicist August
Boeckh (1785-1867) proclaimed that translating Oriental and Greek literature back
into German would enable Germany, like ancient Greece, to become “a national
culture with universal significance.”
79
Because of its modern historical perspective,
moreover, Germany would surpass Greece in its level of cultural-spiritual achievement
and, in Boeckh’s words, “obtain universal domination.” Given Daumer’s hope that
Polydora would be “a national work, i.e. one that does justice to the universality of the
German taste and spirit,” it seems plausible to read the work as an attempt to answer
Boeckh’s call to revive Germany as “a national culture with universal significance.”
80

Even with this brief review, Daumer’s stance vis-à-vis the Young Hegelians
and with Weltliteratur should be clear. Mundt, as noted above, had heralded Arnim as
the prophet of a new religion, much as Daumer did.
81
We recall that Daumer had
defended Gutzkow from Menzel’s critique at around the same time (1836), and that
Daumer was close with Ludwig Feuerbach. Furthermore, Daumer visited regularly
with Arnold Ruge, who co-authored the movement’s manifesto, Der Protestantismus und
die Romantik (1839-40), and edited its primary literary organ, the Hallische Jahrbücher
für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst.
82
Although Arnim was not one of the Young
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78
Quoted in ibid., 63. This quote is from the second edition, published in 1853.
79
Boeckh’s speech was delivered at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Benes, “German Linguistic
Nationhood,” 438.
80
August Boeckh, “Über den Werth der Verbindung des Dynastischen mit Volksthümlichen,” 177,
quoted in ibid., 441. Boeckh also argued that “the German encounter with the foreign would enable
modern Germany to extend beyond the limitations of a single national tradition and come closest to the
universal ideals of humanity against which the cultural level (Bildungsniveau) of every people was judged.”
Ibid., 438.
81
Härtl, 156.
82
Ibid., 150-51. Ruge co-authored the manifesto with Ernst Theodor Echtermeyer (1805-44). Ruge
recounted his first meeting with Daumer as follows: “I find in these ruins [of Nuremberg] a lonely
142!
Hegelians, she shared their critical outlook toward state censorship and Protestant
orthodoxy, published innovative and controversial literature in line with their work,
was celebrated by Mundt as the prophet of a new religion, communicated with Bruno
Bauer (1809-82) on theological issues, and defended the Bauer brothers’ publishing
activities through personal correspondence with Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
83
In short,
Daumer aligned himself on many issues with the Young Hegelians and their allies,
many of whom praised Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur during those turbulent years.
The figure who best embodied Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, according to
John David Pizer, was Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Heine was closely associated
with Gutzkow, Weinbarg, Mundt, and other Young Hegelians as fellow leaders of
Junges Deutschland, the slightly earlier movement that started after the failed revolutions
of 1830. To be sure, some figures before Heine had attempted to foster international
literary exchange. Madame de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, 1766-
1817), whose 1810 and 1813 De l’Allemagne helped introduce other European
cognoscenti to German Romanticism, is a notable example, as is A.W. Schlegel, whose
translation activities and cosmopolitan approach were discussed above. Still, it was
only Heine, according to Pizer, who fulfilled Goethe’s vision. Despite a relationship to
Goethe that was frosty at best, Heine embodied Goethe’s world-literary ideals.
Heine traveled extensively, wrote some of the century’s most revealing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
person who interests me greatly. His name is Dr. Pollio [one of Daumer’s many pseudonyms]. He is
much more independent, much more political, much more practical than his books, and he has a future
in writing still ahead of himself. How rare are men like him! I am delaying my departure to hear more of
him. You, too, must meet him. Take your hat, come, memorize his expression, his demeanor, his
gestures, his excited conversations – they deserve it.” Ruge, Gesammelte Schriften. Mannheim 1847, vol. 5,
Studien und Erinnerungen as den Jahren 1843-1845, 6-13, quoted in Kluncker, Leben und Werk, trans. Turner,
37. Also quoted in Kammerlander, 158.
83
Härtl, 165.
143!
travelogues, and moved to Paris in self-imposed exile in 1831. He was a leading
translator of German ideas to France through journals such as L’Europe littéraire and
books including Die Romantische Schule (1833) and Zur Geschichte der Religion und
Philosophie in Deutschland (1834). He also translated French ideas to Germany,
especially in the journal Französische Zustände. Goethe wrote approvingly of such
literary organs as facilitating the Weltliteratur ideal.
84

Heine shared both Goethe’s cosmopolitanism and his commitment to upholding
the particularity of the world’s peoples and literatures. He criticized Friedrich
Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier for obscuring the particularity of
Indian culture, which allowed him to manipulate his representation of India to further
his Catholic agenda. He praised, on the other hand, Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, in
which Goethe engages in a literary “conversation” with his “twin brother” Hafiz, as a
genuine cultural exchange. Heine believed, according to Pizer, that Goethe’s Divan was
“capable of transporting the reader into a sensual space of genuine revivifying alterity
rooted in exotic particularities. This allows the reader, in Heine’s view, not only to
forget frigid Europe but also to critically reflect on the restrictions it sets to the life of
the spirit and the senses.”
85
Despite obvious similarities to Daumer and to Arnim,
Daumer did not draw on Heine’s work for reasons that will be discussed below.
In keeping with the Young Hegelians’ shift away from universalism, Heine too
shifted to a more overt German nationalism. In 1844, as the Young Hegelian
movement was reaching its breaking point, Heine wrote: “when we complete, what the
French have started, as we accomplished it already in the realm of ideas… the entire
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
84
Pizer, 49-53.
85
Quoted in ibid., 56-57.
144!
world will become German. Talking a walk under oak-trees, I keep dreaming of this
mission of Germany and its universal dominance. This is my kind of patriotism.”
86

Daumer did not write appreciatively of or share a private friendship with Heine,
as he did with Gutzkow, Arnim, Feuerbach, Ruge, and others associated with the
movement. This may be because Heine engaged in a mutually scarring public
exchange of bigoted vitriol with Daumer’s close friend from his school years, August
von Platen.
87
The exchange started innocently enough with a parody of the ghasal, the
Persian poetic form that Rückert had introduced to German readers in 1819 and
Platen used in his poetry in the early 1820s. Heine included a series of satirical ghasals
by Karl Leberecht Immerman (1796-1840) in the second volume of his 1827
travelogue Reisebilder. The most famous of these parodies reads, in part:

They steal from its gardens the fruits of Shiraz,
overgorge—poor souls!—and vomit ghasals.
88

Platen, who had earlier expressed misgivings about Young German poets such as Heine
and Immermann, was shocked at the impudence of Heine’s “ruthless treatment” of “an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
86
Heine, quoted in Hoffmeister, 23.
87
Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder III/IV, ed. Alfred Opitz, vol. 7, pt. 2 of Historisch-kritische
Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1986), 1068, quoted
and translated in Nancy Thuleen, “Poetics and Polemics of Heine’s Bäder von Lucca” (unpublished
manuscript, last modified 1996), www.nthuleen.com/papers/948Heine.html. For a good description of
the “Heine-Platen affair,” see Heine, Gesamtausgabe, 1066-90; Thuleen; and August Graf von Platen, Der
Briefwechsel des Grafen August von Platen, vol. 4 (Munich: G. Müller, 1911), 377 ff.
88
Karl Leberecht Immermann, quoted in Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder (1827), quoted and translated
in Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1992), 22.
145!
apparently greater” poet such as himself, “who could crush him.”
89
He responded with
an extensive satire of Immermann’s literary and theatrical style in his 1829 play Der
romantische Ödipus. The play included a cameo appearance by a character named “Heine,”
who was dubbed by Platen “the magnificent Petrarch of the Feast of the Tabernacles”
(i.e. Sukkot) and subjected to other anti-Semitic stereotypes. More damningly, Platen
circulated a poem called An den Dichterling Heine which centered on crude anti-Semitic
stereotypes. Heine fought back with a derogatory representation of Platen in his 1829
play Die Bäder von Lucca. In the play, Heine mocked Platen’s classicist interest in Greek
esthetics and, more personally, his homosexuality—which Heine represented as
pederastry—in such crass terms that the public and critics alike were generally
disgusted. Two years later, Heine left Germany for permanent exile in Paris.
Daumer’s short preface, then, connects Polydora to a rich tradition of thinking
about world-poetry and world-literature, spanning from Herder to Heine, through key
phrases such as “national,” “universal,” “German taste and spirit,” “lost paradise,”
“universal-poetic,” and “world-poetic idea.” Brahms, who was well read and maintained
close relationships with other cultural cognoscenti of his day, was deeply familiar with
this tradition. Brahms set many of Herder’s volkspoetisch and weltpoetisch poems and
doubtless read his prefatory notes. He turned to Goethe for many of his more important
works and would have understood Daumer’s allusions to Weltliteratur. He knew the
works of the Romantics, of course, as well as Rückert and Heine. But Brahms would
also interweave Daumer’s poems into other contexts, ranging from personal to generic
to political. It is to Polydora’s second life as Brahms’s Liebeslieder that we now turn.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
89
Platen, Briefwechsel, quoted in Heine, Reisebilder III/IV, ed. Opitz, 1068, quoted in Thuleen, 1.
146!

PART 2

JOHANNES BRAHMS AND THE LIEBESLIEDER WALTZES

147!
CHAPTER 6
BRAHMS AND THE WALTZ IDIOM

BRAHMS AND THE VIENNESE WALTZ

Brahms and waltzes! The two words stare at each other in positive
amazement on the elegant title page. The earnest, silent Brahms, a true
younger brother of Schumann, and just as North German, Protestant,
and unworldly as he—writing waltzes! There is only one word that
solves the enigma, and that is—Vienna.
1

Thus wrote Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904) concerning Brahms’s for piano four hands,
Op. 39 (1865), that Brahms had dedicated to him. In four short sentences, Hanslick
points to the apparent paradox of Brahms and the waltz idiom. The waltz idiom would
seem unintuitive, or even surprising, for the “North German, Protestant, and
unworldly” composer who would soon compose the ultimate embodiment of those
qualities, Ein deutsches Requiem. As Hanslick points out, the key to the apparent riddle is
the city in which Brahms was spending increasing amounts of time: Vienna.
2

Brahms, born and raised in the northern port city of Hamburg, was first
encouraged to move to Vienna by Agathe von Siebold (1835-1909), who visited
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Eduard Hanslick, review of Brahms’s Walzer, Op. 39, first published in the August 25, 1866, issue
of Neue Freie Press (Vienna) and reprinted in Leipziger allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1 (1866): 346-47 and
Kalbeck, 190-92, quoted and trans. in Niemann, 381.
2
For more on the cultural politics surrounding Hanslick’s views of the waltz, and of his relationship
to Brahms, see Chantal Frankenbach, “Waltzing around the Musically Beautiful: Listening and Dancing
in Hanslick’s Hierarchy of Musical Perception,” in Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and
Expressionism, ed. Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 2013), 108-31.

148!
Hamburg with her family and had a romance with Brahms. Brahms started spending
his winters in Vienna in 1862. On October 28, 1868, he wrote to pianist Amelie von
Bruch, espressing his desire to move there. In April 1869, he wrote to his father to tell
him of his plans to move to Vienna.
3
It was only after the summer of 1869—when his
amorous hopes vis-à-vis Julie Schumann were expressed in the Liebeslieder but then
dashed by news of her engagement to Marmorito—that he moved to Vienna. He gave
up his room in Hamburg and established permanent residence there in November
1869, taking a room at the “Zum Kronprinzen” hotel on the Donaukanal.
4

Vienna and Prussia represented opposing poles of the German cultural universe.
Vienna was the capital of the Austria-Hungary, a complex amalgamation of diverse
peoples and jurisdictions that contrasted with the more strictly “German” Prussia
(notwithstanding Polish speakers and other minorities). Vienna was southern,
cosmopolitan, Catholic, more influenced by Italy, and made famous by Joseph Haydn,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. Prussia was
northern, Protestant, and made famous by Martin Luther, Heinrich Schütz, and
Johann Sebastian Bach. The waltz was as quintessentially Viennese as the Wiener
Schnitzel or Sachertorte.
Brahms’s forays in the waltz genre in coincided with the final efflorescence of
the genre. As Andrew Lamb notes, it was during the 1860s, “under Johann and Josef
Strauss… that the waltz achieved its peak of perfection as a combination of dance form
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Swafford, 346.
4
David Brodbeck, “Compatibility, Coherence, and Closure in Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes,” in
Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard D. Meyer, ed. Eugene Narmour and
Ruth A. Solie (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988), 415.
149!
and musical composition, and as the symbol of a gay and elegant age.”
5
Waltzes
published at the time include Accelerationen (1860), Morgenblätter (1864), An der schönen
blauen Donau (henceforth Blue Danube, Op. 314, 1867), Künstlerleben (Op. 316, 1867),
Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Op. 325, 1868) and Wein, Weib und Gesang (Op. 333,
1869) by Johann Strauss II (1825-99), and Dorfschwalben aus Österreich (Op. 164, 1864),
Sphärenklänge (Op. 235, 1868) and Mein Lebenslauf ist Lieb’ und Lust (Op. 263, 1869) by
his brother Josef (1827-70).
6

The Viennese waltz had been established as a genre by Johann II and Josef’s
father Johann Strauss I (1804-49) together with Joseph Lanner (1801-43). It reached
its first heyday in the late 1820s and 1830s. Strauss and Lanner transformed the waltz
from a vernacular dance accompanied by dance bands, in which they played, into an
orchestral genre, still suitable for live dancing but also appropriate for the concert hall.
Under their leadership, the Viennese waltz became an international phenomenon. In
1830, Strauss established the orchestral waltz form, which consisted of introduction,
five waltzes in binary form, and a coda that reprised the best tunes. He first used this
formula in Gute Meinung für die Tanzlust (Op. 34), composed in that year.
7
Later waltzes
by the Strausses would keep the essential elements of the form—introduction, small
number of waltzes, and coda—and add only some transitional material.
8

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
Grove Music Online, s.v. “Waltz (i),” by Andrew Lamb, accessed July 6, 2014,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/29881.
6
Lamb. See also Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in
London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 123-27.
7
Scott, 120.
8
For more on the history, style, and performance practice of the Viennese waltz, see ibid., 120-35;
Lamb; and Stark, 30.
150!
Brahms was keenly aware of the Strausses’ waltz tradition. At one point, he
signed a photograph of himself and Johann Strauss II with the latter’s Blue Danube in
counterpoint with the opening theme of Brahms’s own fourth symphony. On another
occasion, he signed an autograph fan with a quote from the openings bars of Blue
Danube and the caption “Leider nicht von Brahms.”
9
More significant are Brahms’s
musical acknowledgments of the Viennese waltz tradition. Brahms’s Symphony No. 2
(Op. 73, 1877), according to David Brodbeck, opens “in the world of the Wiener
Volksgarten, in fair imitation of the evocative opening of many a Strauß waltz.”
Brahms’s orchestral version of the Liebeslieder (1870) also contains reminiscences of
Strauss waltzes.
10

All of Brahms’s waltz collections—Op. 39 and the two sets of Liebeslieder (Opp.
52, 65)—refer by their very nature to the Viennese waltz tradition. Brahms gives his
most specific nod to the tradition, particularly to Blue Danube, in the ninth waltz in the
Liebeslieder. Brahms refers to Strauss’s most popular waltz not only in the title of the
work, “Am Donaustrande,” but also with aspects of the music.
11

Brahms’s waltz collections, though, do not follow the form of the Viennese
waltz, and they have a distinctly different character. They contain no introduction,
transitional material, or coda.
12
Brahms’s waltzes are discrete pieces, arranged into
“bouquets.” Brahms paid close attention to which waltzes should open and close each
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
“Unfortunately not by Brahms.” Thanks to Barbara Stone for bringing to the author’s attention
the pun on leider and lieder.
10
David Brodbeck, “The Waltzes of Brahms,” The American Brahms Society Newsletter 4, no. 2
(Autumn 1986): 1.
11
Brodbeck notes that “Am Donaustrande” was influenced by Strauss’s Blue Danube “not only for its
essential imagery, but perhaps for certain musical details as well.” Ibid., 1. Also see Stark, 39.
12
For an excellent discussion, see Brodbeck, “Compatibility.”
151!
bouquet, and how the waltzes transition to one another, but they can be rearranged.
Brahms’s waltzes are generally slower than the typical Viennese waltz. He gives tempo
indications including Tempo giusto (Op. 39), Im Ländler-Tempo (Op. 52), and Lebhaft,
doch nicht schnell (Op. 65). Brahms also described “Der Gang zum Liebchen” (Op. 31,
no. 3), in a 1865 letter to Adolf Schubring, as “a pleasant waltz of middling tempo.”
13

Typical Viennese waltzes, on the other hand, were often very fast; one observer of a
Strauss waltz in 1833 described “its raging velocity.”
14

Despite the limitations of the form, Brahms employs sophisticated
compositional craft. For all their brevity and formal simplicity—often just in binary or
rounded binary form—the waltzes exemplify Brahms’s harmonic sophistication and
the technique that Schoenberg would later call “developing variation.” As John
Palmer explains with regard to Brahms’s Op. 39 waltzes for piano four-hands:

The limitations of the waltz form forced Brahms’s creativity to find
other means of expression, particularly in harmonic manipulation,
making each of the sixteen Waltzes a gem. However, nearly all of them
possess a few common characteristics, such as a rounded binary form in
which the first half moves to a new key and the “recapitulating” second
half begins with a quasi-developmental segment before returning to the
main theme and the home key. Many display the harmonic invention
and subtlety that mark Brahms’s later piano works as well as the large-
scale structures of the 1860s.
15

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Quoted in Stark, 28.
14
Heinrich Laube, 1833, quoted in Lamb. The passage reads, in full: “The couples waltz intoxicated
through all the accidental or intentional obstructions, wild delight is let loose.… The start of each dance
is characteristic. Strauss begins his quivering preludes…; the Viennese takes his girl low on his arm,
they ease themselves in the most wonderful way into the beat. One hears a whole while longer the long-
held chest notes of the nightingale with which her song begins and ensnares the senses, until suddenly
the warbling trill splutters out, the real dance begins with all its raging velocity, and the couple plunge
into the whirlpool.”
15
John Palmer, “Johannes Brahms, Waltzes (16) for piano, 4 hands (or piano), Op. 39,”
http://www.allmusic.com/composition/waltzes-16-for-piano-4-hands-or-piano-op-39-mc0002368533,
accessed June 24, 2014.
152!
BRAHMS’S WALTZES AND SCHUBERT’S LÄNDLER

While Brahms’s waltzes refer to the Viennese waltz tradition as exemplified by
Lanner and the Strausses, they hearken more strongly to an older Viennese dance in
triple time, the Ländler. Brahms drew especially on the Ländler tradition as interpreted
by Franz Schubert (1797-1828).
16
During his first decade in Vienna, Brahms edited
several of Schubert’s unpublished compositions. These included several books of
Schubert’s Ländler. Brahms edited a book of twelve Ländler in 1864 (D. 790), just
before compositing his Op. 39 waltzes, and a book of twenty more in 1869 (D. 366 and
D. 814). This second collection, which Brahms edited anonymously for his friend J. P.
Gotthard, was published in May 1869, just weeks before Brahms started composing
the Liebeslieder. Brahms considered editing a third book of Schubert Ländler in 1872,
but did not. Brahms followed each book of Schubert Ländler, including the 1872 one
that he considered but did not complete, with a set of waltzes: Walzer (Op. 39) in 1865,
Liebeslieder (Op. 52) in 1869, and Neue Liebeslieder (Op. 65) in 1874. Brahms made the
connection more explicit by marking Op. 52 “Im Ländler-Tempo.”
17
He also referred
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Other arrangements of Schubert waltzes include Liszt’s 1851 Soirées de Vienne and nine Schubert
waltzes arranged by Liszt in his virtuosic piano style. The 1860s saw several arrangements by other
composers of Schubert waltzes for orchestra with the “modern” formula, i.e. with introduction,
transitions, and coda. See Brodbeck, “Waltzes.”
17
Brodbeck, “Waltzes,” 2; “Compatibility,” 415; “Brahms as Editor and Composer: His two editions
of Ländler by Schubert and his first two cycles of waltzes, opera 39 and 52” (PhD diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1984); “Primo Schubert, Secondo Schumann: Brahms’s Four-Hand Waltzes, Op. 39,”
Journal of Musicology 7, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 58-80; and “Brahms’s Edition of Twenty Schubert Ländler:
An Essay in Criticism,” in Brahms Studies I: Papers Delivered at the International Brahms Conference, The
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 5-8 May 1983, ed. George S. Bozarth (London: Clarendon Press,
1990), 229-50.
153!
to the Op. 39 Waltzes, in a letter to Hanslick, as “little innocent waltzes in Schubertian
form.”
18

The Schubert connections are clear, though, even before the Op. 39 waltzes.
Brahms’s first vocal waltz seems to be a setting of Goethe’s “Wechsellied zum Tanze,”
composed in November 1859. Here, two couples—one indifferent and one amorous—
extol the virtues of different kinds of dancing. The indifferent couple, singing in
awkward, angular lines, extols the minuet, while the amorous couple, singing lyrical
lines in the Ländler style, recommends a more passionate approach. The song hearkens
back to Schubert’s fourth “Atzenbrucker Deutsch” (Op. 18, no. 2), composed in 1821.
The key, tonal structure, chord progressions, and melodic features are so similar that
Brodbeck calls it a “virtual quotation of Schubert, coming in the opening measures of
Brahms’s first waltz.”
19
The piece is widely seen as a precursor to the Liebeslieder.
20

On Christmas Eve 1863, the night before he planned to propose to Ottilie
Hauer (see chapter 7), Brahms composed two companion pieces to “Wechsellied zum
Tanze,” which he published together with the earlier song as Op. 31. One of these,
“Der Gang zum Liebchen” (Op. 31, no. 3), is a light, lilting waltz. In 1865, Brahms
repurposed the tune as the fourth waltz of Op. 39.
21

Brahms’s forays into the waltz, idiom, then, began with Op. 31, no. 1 (1859),
which owes much to Schubert’s “Atzenbrucker Deutsch.” “Der Gang zum Liebchen,”
written four years later as a companion piece, was incorporated thirteen months later
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
Brodbeck, “Waltzes,” 2.
19
Brodbeck, “Compatibility,” 415.
20
Brodbeck, “Waltzes,” 1-2.
21
Brodbeck, “Compatibility,” 412.
154!
into Op. 39. Opp. 39, 52, and 65 all followed Brahms’s editions (including one
considered but aborted edition) of Schubert Ländler. At every step of the way,
Schubert’s influence guided the north German composer in the ways of Viennese
tradition.
22

THE ORDERING OF BRAHMS’S WALTZES

Much has been made of Brahms’s ordering of the Liebeslieder waltzes. David
Brodbeck, in his 1984 dissertation “Brahms as Editor and Composer: His two editions
of Ländler by Schubert and his first two cycles of waltzes, opera 39 and 52” and
subsequent articles, showed that Brahms used a similar approach to arranging his
waltzes into series as he used for arranging Schubert’s Ländler: “when it came time to
try out various sequences of the eighteen Liebeslieder Walzer—an unordered set
comparable in this way to the batch of dances from which Brahms selected the twenty
Ländler—he must surely have drawn upon his recent editorial experience.”
23
As
Brodbeck describes it, “Brahms’s achievement in this publication was the forging of
tonally and motivically coherent groups from among an ‘unordered’ collection of
dances. The authorized arrangements of Brahms’s own Liebeslieder are marked by
similar groups.”
24

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
22
As Brodbeck, Waltzes, 2, explains, “being untried in the world of dance music, and by 1865
scarcely having veins already surging with wienerisch blood, Brahms quite naturally looked for guidance
to Schubert, native son of the Austrian capital, master of her dances, and a composer from who he had
already learned a great deal about the ‘serious’ forms, especially the sonata.”
23
Brodbeck, “Compatibility,” 415.
24
Ibid., 426.
155!
In arranging both Schubert’s Ländler and his own waltzes, Brahms seems to
have kept several factors in mind, including tonality, text, and texture. He also took
great care in choosing opening and closing numbers. For tonal relations, Brahms
generally followed one of the following strategies: tonic-dominant, mediant (which
includes relative major or minor), parallel minor or major, and “tonal” regions
spanning three or more consecutive numbers. In the edition of twenty Schubert Ländler
that he published in 1869 (shortly before composing the Liebeslieder), for example,
Brahms arranged the dances into the following key progression:
25

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Brodbeck, “Brahms as Editor,” 178.
156!
FIGURE 1: Keys of Brahms’s Edition of Twenty Ländler, by Franz Schubert, 1869

Number Key
1 A
2 A
3 a
4 a
5 a
6 C
7 G
8 D
9 B
10 b
11 B
12 eb
13 bb
14 Db
15 Db
16 Ab
17 Eb
18 Ab
19 c
20 c

The first five dances in this collection are centered on A and A minor. Brahms then
shifts by mediant to the relative major, C, moves up by fifths through G to D, and then
by mediant to B. Brahms keeps B as a tonal center for the next three dances, numbers
9-11 (B-b-B), before shifting by mediant again (or its enharmonic equivalent) to Eb
157!
minor in dance 12. Brahms moves up by a fifth to Bb minor in dance 13 and by
mediant again to Db in dance 14. Db seems to function as a tonal center for two
dances, but then comes to be heard as an extension of the Ab tonality which governs a
five-dance series, nos. 14-18: Db, Db, Ab, Eb, Ab. Brahms shifts by mediant again, to
c, to close the set.
Brahms used a similar strategy in his ordering of the waltzes of the Liebeslieder.

FIGURE 2: Keys of the Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 52

Number Key
1 E
2 a
3 Bb
4 F
5 A
6 a
7 C
8 Ab
9 E
10 G
11 c
12 c-Eb
13 Ab
14 Eb
15 Ab
16 f
17 Db
18 bb-C#
158!
As with Brahms’s edition of Schubert’s Ländler, almost all tonal transitions between
dances in the Liebeslieder involve tonic-dominant, mediant, parallel, or extended tonal
areas. The glaring exception is no. 3, “O die Frauen.” Brahms, in his own copy of the
first edition of the Liebeslieder, notes that this number should be in A, not Bb. The key
of A makes for a much smoother tonal progression and allows A to be a tonal center
that runs through the entire first six waltzes of the cycle, much like the Ländler
collection he had recently edited. In the Liebeslieder, as in his song collections, Brahms
switches keys more often and with a greater emphasis on mediant relations than in his
Ländler editions.
Brahms struggled with the order of the Liebeslieder and created several possible
orderings. The songs may be sung as a single cycle of eighteen songs, as two cycles of
nine each (1-9 and 10-18), or as three sets of six. In the latter case, the two central sub-
cycles of three songs each are switched, i.e. 7-9 with 10-12, such that the middle set of
six songs consists of numbers 10, 11, 12, 7, 8, and 9. Songs 10-12 center on the key of
C minor, so they function as a cohesive sequence that stays together even when the
broader order is switched.
As noted above, Brahms was very concerned with choosing effective opening
and closing numbers for each set.
26
Brahms clearly understood no. 9 (“Am
Donaustrande”), for example, to be a closing number. In the bipartite division, the
song closes the first group of nine. In the tripartite division, with 7-9 switched with 10-
12, it closes the second half. The sense of closure in the song is achieved by a rounded
binary form that reprises the opening couplet (most of the songs are in binary form);
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Brodbeck, “Compatibility,” 427.
159!
the soprano’s entrance on the reprise, after not singing for the first part of the song,
which allows for a new tenor countermelody; and the reference to Strauss’s famous
Blue Danube.
“Es bebet das Gesträuche” (no. 18), which closes every ordering of the cycle,
has strong concluding characteristics, although more in the sense of reflection than
climax. Unusually for the cycle, it switches keys, from Bb minor to written C# minor.
The addition of accidentals in the final twelve measures, though, gives it the feel of C#
major. It is preceded by “Nicht wandle, mein Licht” (no. 17), a lyrical number for solo
tenor in Db. As Lucien Stark explains, “Es bebet das Gesträuche”

serves admirably as a conclusion to the set. Like the others that Brahms
placed in ending positions (nos. 6 and 9), its relatively enlarged form
lends it weight among its simple binary neighbors. In combination with
no. 17, it also acquires gravity from the prolongation of Db as a tonal
center. The generally low dynamic level, the broadened note values of
the closing phrases, and the final diminuendo combine to create a quality
of epilogue. Just as the change to sharp keys recalls the beginning of the
cycle, the piano primo’s closing appoggiaturas sound as distant reminders
of those that figured so prominently in the first movement.
27

In addition to key, Brahms took textual and textural contrast into consideration
for his ordering decisions. The opening number, “Rede Mädchen,” contains alternating
duets between the men’s and women’s voices. This is echoed, in nos. 3-4, in “O die
Frauen” (no. 3) for tenor and bass, followed by “Wie des Abends schöne Röte” (no. 4)
for soprano and alto. This concept is echoed in nos. 13-15. “Vögelein durchrauscht die
Luft” (no. 13), set for soprano and alto, depicts birds seeking a branch on which to rest
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27
Stark, 47.
160!
with skipwise melodies that recall birdsong. (The birds’ quest functions a metaphor for
a heart seeking another to love.)
28
The lyrical stepwise lines of “Sieh, wie ist die Welle
klar” (no. 14), set for tenor and bass, illustrate the tranquil waves described in the
poem. All voices come together in “Nachtigall, sie singt so schön” (no. 15). The text
returns to the bird theme, but no longer restlessly flying to and fro. These birds sing
contentedly of love fulfilled under a starry sky.
Brahms also includes sharp contrasts in the cycle. “Nachtigall, sie singt so
schön” is followed, for example, by “Ein dunkeler Schacht ist Liebe” (no. 16), whose
faster tempo, louder dynamic, octave leaps, and relentless eighth note accompaniment
give it a more violent texture. This leads to the lovely “Nicht wandle, mein Licht” (no.
17) for tenor solo, described above. Similar contrast is found in songs 10-12, discussed
above as a coherent short sequence, tonally centered on C minor, whose position
Brahms exchanged with songs 7-9 in the tripartite division of the collection. “O wie
sanft” (no. 10) aptly illustrates the text—“Oh, how gently the stream meanders
through the meadow! Oh, how lovely it is when love is reciprocated!”—with imitative
treatment of flowing melodies over stepwise bass motion in G major. This is followed
by the harsh “Nein, es ist nicht” (no. 11) with a forte, staccato, homophonic, and
angular setting of “No, there is no getting along with people.” Brahms continues the
malicious mood with “Schlosser auf!” (no. 12), whose loud dynamic, melodic leaps,
and high tessutra reinforce the text: “Up, locksmith, and make padlocks… Because I
want to seal up the malicious tongues.”
29

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Brahms would represent birdsong similarly in his description of the nightingale in “O schöne
Nacht,” Op. 92, no. 1.
29
Quoted and translated in Stark, 40-41.
161!
THE ORDERING OF BRAHMS’S SONGS

Brodbeck’s argument that Brahms used a similar approach to editing
Schubert’s Ländler collections as he did for arranging his own waltzes into sets is
convincing. However, this was not unique to the Ländler and waltzes; rather, it reflects
Brahms’s approach to compiling and arranging his song collections more generally.
Clearly, Brahms’s experience editing Schubert’s Ländler inspired and influenced his
waltz composition and his approach to arranging his waltzes into “bouquets.” However,
Brahms’s overall approach to selecting and ordering his own songs into groups may
have shaped his approach to Schubert’s Ländler (and thus, by extension, his own
waltzes) more than his approach to the Ländler shaped his approach to his waltzes.
The integrity of Brahms’s song collections has long been a topic of debate. Most
scholars agree that none of Brahms’s collections is a true song cycle in the spirit of
Schubert’s Winterreise or Die schöne Müllerin. The closest Brahms came to composing a
cycle, it seems, is his Romanzen (Magelone-lieder), Op. 35, which he completed in 1865.
Opp. 32 and 57, which rank with the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder as Brahms’s most
substantial Daumer settings, also exhibit cyclic tendencies.
Brahms preferred to speak of his song collections as “bouquets” (Sträuße),
which aptly describes the integrity of their organization while distinguishing them
from cycles.
30
Brahms felt strongly about the integrity of his song collections even
though most singers rarely sang them in opus and number order.
31
Brahms complained
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
Imogen Fellinger, “Cyclic Tendencies in Brahms’s Song Collections,” in Brahms Studies: Analytical
and Historical Perspectives, ed. George S. Bozarth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 380.
31
Julius Stockhausen was a notable exception.
162!
to Heinz von Beckerath, for example, that “most male and female singers group his
songs together [on their programmes] in a quite arbitrary manner, considering only
what suits their voices, and not realizing how much trouble he had always taken to
assemble his songs into compositions like a bouquet.”
32

Through most of his song-writing career, Brahms did not plan the order of his
song collections in advance. Some of his collections, like the Liebeslieder, were clearly
intended as such and composed within a relatively short period of time. Others were
assembled out of songs that he composed years earlier, sometimes with a new
companion piece or several new pieces to round out the set. On one occasion, he
referred to a “frightful cleaning out at my home,” from which emerged, among other
mothballed works, the songs of Op. 59.
33
In typical Brahmsian understatement, most
of the songs of Op. 59, published in 1873, were actually composed that year.
For Brahms, ordering the songs into a collection was a distinct phase in the
composition and publication process that often involved collaboration with fellow
musicians. In the case of the Daumer settings in the Liebeslieder and Opp. 56 and 57,
that fellow musician was Hermann Levi.
34
Brahms submitted the latter—Opp. 56 and
57—with several possibilities as to how they might be arranged. He also included, in
the accompanying letter, a caveat that he or Levi had misplaced the scrap of paper on
which they had written down the best song order and promised to produce a definitive
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Heinz von Beckerath, Erinnungen an Johannes Brahms: Brahms und seine Krefelder Freunde (Krefeld:
Verein für Heimatkunde in Krefeld und Nordingen, 1958), 4, quoted in Fellinger, 380. Beckerath’s
article is reprinted, translated by Josef Eisinger and introduced and annotated by Styra Avins, as
“Remembering Johannes Brahms: Brahms and his Krefeld Friends,” in Brahms and His World, rev. ed.,
ed. Walter Frisch and Kevin C. Karnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 349-80.
Beckerath (1876-1964) was the son of Brahms’s friend Alwin von Beckerath.
33
Brahms, letter to Rieter-Biedermann, in Brahms Briefwechsel 14:222, quoted and translated in
Fellinger, 385.
34
Fellinger, 382.
163!
order if they were accepted for publication. In the letter, written to Rieter-Biedermann
on October 23, 1871, Brahms wrote:

During a few restless days in Karlsruhe Levi and I gathered together
songs for you.… There are 16 songs, 8 to each opus and of course
[Opp.] 56, 57.… They could appear in 2 volumes or in 4 (4 in each).
The first is called Lieder und Gesänge von G. Fr. Daumer, the second just
Lieder und Gesänge by J. Br.… The order, which Levi perhaps forgets
(losing the slip of paper regarding this), or I—, makes me somewhat
apprehensive; yet if you keep the ‘Lieder’, we will be able to order them
quickly.
35

Indeed, Brahms did reorder the songs of Op. 57, switching numbers 5 and 7 to effect a
more dramatic transition from the end of the first volume into the beginning of the
second.
Offering songs to publishers with several different options for arranging them
was not new to Brahms. He offered the Op. 32 songs, which set texts by Daumer and
Platen, as either a single set of nine songs or two sets of four and five each. Brahms
had started this practice early in his career; Op. 3 was offered to his publisher this way
too.
36

Once a set had been ordered, Brahms felt strongly that the order be maintained.
In addition to requesting that singers preserved the order of his “bouquets,” as
discussed above, he was also committed to preserving the orders of the songs even
when the music was absent. During Brahms’s later years, Gustav Ophüls was
commissioned to gather together all the texts Brahms had set for publication as a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Brahms Briefwechsel, 14:199, quoted in Fellinger, 382.
36
Fellinger, 382-83
164!
book.
37
Ophüls proposed gathering the songs alphabetically by author, with
philological footnotes describing the provenance and references of various poems.
Brahms strongly disagreed with this arrangement, preferring to have the texts of his
songs read in the order of the songs. In a letter to Rudolf von der Leyen in October
1896, Brahms objected to Ophüls’s “modern philological hairsplitting,” and noted that
he thought it would be pleasant to read the poems as they appeared in the song
cycles.
38
Even when the musical factors that influenced Brahms’s choices of song order
were absent, he still felt that the poems worked best in song order.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
Gustav Ophüls, ed., Brahms-Texte. Sämtliche von Johannes Brahms vertonten und bearbeiteten Texte
(Munich: Langeweische-Brandt, 1983).
38
Ophüls, Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1921), 63,
quoted in Fellinger, 379.
165!
CHAPTER 7
BRAHMS AND WOMEN

Brahms’s Liebeslieder, as stated in their name, are love songs. In particular, they
seem to be love songs written for Robert and Clara Schumann’s daughter Julie (1845-
72). To best understand Brahms’s affection for Julie and how it relates to the
Liebeslieder, we must step back to consider Brahms’s other loves and how they
manifested in his music.
Michael Musgrave has suggested that Brahms seems to have classified most of
the women in his life in one of two ways: either “as idealized, unattainable figures or as
playthings.”
1
He quotes the observations of Ethel Smyth, a composer and forward-
looking feminist whose circles included Elizabet von Herzogenberg (with whom
Brahms became infatuated when she was his teenage piano student and re-befriended,
together with her husband, years later) and Virginia Woolf. Smyth noted that that
Brahms’s attitude toward Herzogenberg “was perfect… reverential, admiring and
affectionate, without a tinge or amorousness.” However, she complained, “His ways
with other womenfolk… were less admirable. If they did not appeal to him he was
incredibly awkward and ungracious; if they were pretty he had an unpleasant way of
leaning back in his chair, pouting out his lips, stroking his mustache, and staring at
them as a greedy boy stares at jam-tartlets.” Smyth also noted that Brahms made
frequent jokes about women.
2

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Michael Musgrave, A Brahms Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 47.
2
Ethel Smyth, Impressions that Remained, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1919),
264.
166!
Musgrave’s schema, while illustrative, requires some modification. In the
present study, it is proposed that Musgrave’s categories of “idealized, unattainable
figures” and “playthings” be modified to “lifelong soulmates” and “youthful
infatuations.” It is suggested, moreover, that these two categories be seen not as
either/or alternatives but as poles on a spectrum; while some relationships neatly fit
one or the other, others draw on aspects of both.
The first category, “lifelong soulmates,” describes people with whom deep
musical and intellectual interchange formed the basis of a lifelong friendship, the early
stages of which also included amorous interest. Clara Schumann, of course,
exemplifies this model, followed by Elizabet von Herzogenberg (née von Stockhausen).
“Youthful infatuations” describes young women, almost all singers, with whom
Brahms played music and for whom he developed short-term amorous feelings that
lasted for less than a year. These include Agathe von Siebold, Bertha Porubsky, Luise
Dustmann, and Ottilie Hauer. The youth of Elizabet von Stockhausen and the brevity
of Brahms’s first love for her fit this category, although their adult relationship does
not. Brahms’s feelings for Julie Schumann, similarly, incorporate aspects of each. One
the one hand, Julie was young. She was twenty-three or twenty-four when Brahms
composed the Liebeslieder, and his feelings for her may have started when she was as
young as seventeen. On the other hand, Brahms’s feelings for Julie were more long-
lasting, likely spanning a period of five years or even longer. While Brahms was often
relieved when some external circumstance interrupted his dalliances or even
engagements, planned or actual, with his youthful infatuations, he was crushed when
he heard in July 1869 of Julie’s engagement to Count Victor Radicati Marmorito.

167!
FIGURE 3: Brahms’s Love Interests and Dedications, 1852-69

Name Descrip-
tion
Years of
Love
Interest
Pieces Dedicated Result
Clara
Schumann
Wife of
Robert
Schumann;
pianist
1854-58,
possibly
from
1852,
and
beyond
Sonata No. 2 (Op. 2, 1852),
Variations on a Theme by R.
Schumann (Op. 9, 1852),
Sarabandes (WoO 5, 1854-
55)
Shared a lifelong close but
complicated friendship and
musical colleagueship.
Agathe von
Siebold
Viennese
Soprano,
visited
Hamburg
1858-59 Op. 19, informally parts of
Opp. 14 and 20 (1858)
Engaged in January 1859, but
Brahms broke engagement
after premiere of first piano
concerto. Married Carl
Schütte.
3

Bertha
Porubsky
Soprano c. 1859-
60
“Wiegenlied” (Op. 49, no. 4) Married Arthur Faber. Stayed
friends with Brahms.
Luise
Dustmann
(née
Meyer)
Soprano c. 1860 Sang premieres of
“Wiegenlied” and others
Already married to Adalbert
Dustmann in 1858.
Elizabet
von Stock-
hausen
Piano
student
1862 Brahms withdrew from
teaching her piano lessons.
Married Baron Heinrich von
Herzogenberg, became lifelong
friends with Brahms.
Ottilie
Hauer
Soprano,
pianist
1863 “Neckereien” and “Der Gang
zum Liebchen” (Op. 31, nos.
2, 3, 1863)
Brahms planned to propose on
Chrismas 1863, but she was
already engaged that morning
to Edward Ebner. The couple
remained friends with Brahms.
Julie
Schumann
Daughter
of Clara
and Robert
Schumann
1869 Variations, Op. 23 (1861),
possibly Op. 32 songs (1864),
some songs from Opp. 46-49
(1867-68), Liebeslieder (Op.
52, 1869), Rhapsodie (Op. 53),
possibly Op. 57 songs
(possibly 1868)
Married Count Victor Radicati
Marmorito.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Kurt Hofmann and Jutta Fürst, Johannes Brahms, The Man and His Work: Catalogue of an exhibition of
rare and unique items drawn from the life and times of a great composer, Detroit Public Library, Biography Room,
April 1980 (Detroit: Detroit Symphony Orchestra, 1980), 19.
168!
Brahms’s first love, and perhaps his most defining, was with Clara Schumann.
Brahms made his famous first appearance at the Schumanns’ house in the fall of 1853.
Whatever his early feelings for her may have been, by 1854 he was smitten. This was
the year in which Robert attempted suicide and was admitted to Endenich. Brahms
would live with Clara and help manage their family’s affairs for the next two years.
Brahms acknowledged his love for Schumann in an 1854 letter to his friend
Joseph Joachim:

I believe that I do not respect and admire her so much as I love her and
am under her spell. Often I must forcibly restrain myself from just
quietly putting my arms around her and even—I don’t know, it seems to
me so natural the she would not take it ill. I think I can no longer love a
young girl. At least I have forgotten about them. They but promise
heaven while Clara reveals it to us.
4

In 1856, he wrote to Schumann herself:

My dearest Clara, I wish I could speak to you as tenderly as I love you,
and do as many good and loving things as I would like. You are so
infinitely dear to me that I can’t express it in words. I should like to call
you darling and lots of other names, without ever getting enough of
adoring you.… I regret every word which does not speak of love. You
taught me and are every day teaching me to recognize and marvel at
what love, attachment and self-denial are.… I wish I could always write
to you from my heart, to tell you how deeply I love you, and can only
beg you to believe it without further proof.
5

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
June 19, 1854. Published in Arthur Holde, “Suppressed Passages in the Brahms-Joachim
Correspondence Published for the First Time,” Musical Quarterly 45 (1959): 314, quoted in Musgrave,
Brahms Reader, 48-49.
5
May 31, 1856. Schumann-Brahms Briefe, 1:188-89, quoted and trans. in Musgrave, Brahms Reader, 48.
169!
Although Schumann was taken aback by Brahms’s relationship with Agathe von
Siebold in 1858, their deep affection for each other continued. In April 1860, Brahms
wrote to Schumann, while inviting her to visit him in Hamburg, “Let me assure you,
dear Clara, that I feel the greatest love both for you and for him who has left us
[Robert Schumann], and it is a love that will last for ever. How glad I should be to
prove it to you.”
6
The following summer, after Brahms had sent her some of his new
pieces, Clara wrote to him: “Let me embrace you in the spirit for them [the beautiful
new pieces that he sent her], dear Johannes. How much I should prefer to do it in the
flesh!... As always, Yours most affectionately, CLARA.”
7
In her diary a year later, after
playing through Brahms’s songs for women’s choir with horns and harp (Op. 17,
1861), she exclaimed: “How can one help loving such a man?”
8
In their later years,
Brahms could still write to Schumann: “I love you more than myself and more than
anything else in the world.”
9

Brahms and Schumann returned each other’s letters, at Brahms’s request, and
destroyed many of them. Fortunately, though, many still survive. Brahms and
Schumann’s letters through the 1860s cover topics such as recent compositions and
performances, including Schumann’s praise and occasional critique of Brahms’s new
works; travel and moving plans; news of their mutual friends; discussion of various
employment options; and news of Schumann’s children. Each also gave relatively
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
April 26, 1860. Translated in Berthold Litzmann, ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms,
1853-1896 , vol. 1 (London: Edwin Arnold, 1927), 118.
7
July 16, 1861. Litzmann, Letters, 135.
8
Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters
(London: MacMillan, 1913), 189.
9
March 19, 1874. Schumann-Brahms Briefe, 2:45, quoted and translated in Musgrave, 51.
170!
consistent and unsolicited personal advice. Brahms repeatedly advised Schumann to
curtail her performing career, culminating in a particularly hurtful letter in 1868.
Schumann advised Brahms in at least four letters to take a wife and settle down.
In November 1862, while commiserating with Brahms over his disappointment
at not obtaining a position he had hoped for at the Hamburg Singakademie, and his not
yet feeling at home in Vienna, Schumann advised him: “And yet, dear Johannes, you
are still so young. You will find a permanent niche yet and ‘if a man has a loving wife
with him he finds heaven in every town.’ My husband said that so beautifully in the
short poems, and you will certainly find not only a home but also domestic
happiness—and everything.”
10
After telling Brahms in November 1867 that she could
not play through his recent “Herbstgefühl” (Op. 48, no. 7) without bursting into tears,
Schumann continued:

No, dear Johannes, a man like you with all your gifts and in the prime
of life, with his career still before him, ought not to harbour such gloomy
thoughts. Make a home for yourself soon, find some well-to-do girl in
Vienna (there must surely be some one of this kind whom you could
love) and you will become more cheerful. Although you may continue to
have many cares of some sort, you will also learn to know joys which
you have not experienced hitherto, and will embrace life with fresh zest.
For after all the idea of earthly bliss will then become concentrated only
on your life at home. I do wish you would think about it, the time is
ripe.
11

In September 1868, Schumann recommended a particular young woman whom she
thought Brahms might pursue:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
November 21, 1862. Litzmann, Letters, 151.
11
November 13, 1867. Ibid., 212-13.
171!
I have heard the name of Rieter’s charming daughter coupled with
yours. They say she has grown up wonderfully pretty and is rich into
the bargain, which, for a composer, is very necessary. Haven’t you ever
thought of her? If there is any possibility of this union, which is so
suitable from every point of view (and I gather she is very partial to
you), I hope for your sake that it may come off, for it is high time in my
opinion. For many reasons you ought not to remain alone, that is what I
feel.
12

As will be explored below, Schumann’s admonitions that Brahms settle down
coincided, at least in part, with Brahms’s growing affection for her daughter Julie.
Whether she was aware of Brahms’s infatuation with her daughter or not, Schumann
suffered through two years of awkward and morose behavior on his part. Surely she
felt that not only would Brahms be happier, but he would also be better able to interact
with her family if he found marital satisfaction.
Brahms’s first great passion for Clara, during which he lived with her and
helped manage her family’s affairs, ended in 1856. After Robert Schumann’s death that
year, Brahms and Clara Schumann travelled together and then parted ways.
Nonetheless, their romantic affection for each other seems to have remained
reasonably strong through 1858, when the two accepted an invitation from Julius
Grimm to spend the summer with him near Göttingen. Schumann was accompanied
by all four of her daughters, including Julie, who was thirteen at the time. Brahms
gave the children arrangements of folk songs that he had made for them and was in a
playful mood.
Brahms’s 1854 assertion that he could “no longer love a young girl”
notwithstanding, at Göttingen that summer he became smitten by Agathe von Siebold.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
September 4, 1868. Ibid., 228.
172!
Siebold was a talented soprano, twenty-three years old, daughter of a Göttingen
professor, and a good friend of Grimm’s daughters. Jan Swafford describes their time
together:

It was one of those luminous, enchanted summers. In the quiet old
college town the friends felt merry and hopeful and secure in their talent
and their prospects for a pleasant course of life. Drunk with summer
and happiness, they played blindman’s buff and hide-and-seek and made
grown-up music. When the friends headed home in the twilight,
Johannes and Agathe would linger behind. Then he might whisper to
her that he had better go walk with Clara or she would be jealous.
13

Siebold sang the songs Brahms wrote for her (Op. 19 and some of the songs in Opp.
14 and 20), many of which described the feelings he seemed to be having for her:

Oh, if I could only forget her,
her beautiful, loving nature,
her glance, her friendly mouth!
—Herder, set by Brahms in “Sonnett” (Op. 14, no. 4)
14

Things came to a head in September, when Schumann saw Brahms and Siebold
embracing. She and her children left Göttingen the next day.
15

Brahms traveled for much of the fall, during which he maintained an active
exchange of romantic letters with Siebold. Upon returning to Hannover in January
1859, Grimm suggested that Brahms should propose to her, which he did. She
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Swafford, 184.
14
Quoted and translated in ibid., 184.
15
Ibid., 185.
173!
accepted.
16
Just weeks later, however, after the unsuccessful premiere of his first piano
concerto, Brahms had second thoughts.
17
Twenty years later, Brahms recounted to
Widmann his feeling at the time that he could endure public failure because he
believed in the value of his work. But, Brahms continued,

if at such moments I had to face a wife, her questioning eyes anxiously
meeting mine, and had to tell her that, again, “nothing,” that I could not
have endured. For no matter how much a woman may love an artist
who is her husband and, as the saying goes, have faith in him, she can
never know the full certainty of eventual victory that dwells in his
breast.… And if she had tried to console me—a woman’s commiseration
for her husband’s failure—bah! I would rather not think what a hell on
earth that would have been, at least that is the way I feel about it.
18

Brahms broke off the engagement, writing to Siebold: “I love you, I must see you again,
but I am incapable of bearing fetters. Please write me again whether I may come again
to clasp you in my arms, to kiss you and to tell you that I love you.”
19
Siebold accepted
the broken engagement on the condition that Brahms not contact her again.
In the very early 1860s, Brahms courted two other young singers: Bertha
Porubsky and Luise Dustmann-Meyer. Porubsky was seventeen when she visited
Hamburg with her family in 1859 and temporarily joined the Hamburg Frauenchor,
which Brahms was directing. She was from Vienna and encouraged Brahms to move
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Ibid., 188.
17
The concerto was premiered on January 22, 1859.
18
J. V. Widmann, Johannes Brahms in Erinnungeren (Berlin, 1898), 48, quoted in Musgrave,
Brahms Reader, 46.
19
Recollections of Agathe von Siebold, quoted in Geiringer, 60. Siebold’s recollections were later
published in Hans Küntzel, Brahms in Göttingen: Mit Erinnerungen von Agathe Schütte, geb. von Siebold
(Göttingen: Herodot, 1985).
174!
there. Brahms was relieved, though, to hear of her engagement to Arthur Faber. She
remained, together with her husband, lasting friends with the composer.
While they were courting, Porubsky had sung a popular Austrian tune to
Brahms, a Ländler by Alexander Baumann (Op. 3, no. 1).
20
When Porubsky, now Frau
Faber, had her first child, Brahms incorporated Baumann’s melody as contrapuntal
accompaniment to a beautiful lullaby he wrote for the baby, “Wiegenlied” (Op. 49, no.
4). One of Brahms’s most famous melodies, “Wiegenlied” is now popularly known as
“Brahms’s Lullaby.”
21
When he presented the piece, Brahms wrote to Arthur Faber in
the accompanying note: “Frau Bertha will realize that I wrote the ‘Wiegenlied’ for her
little one. She will find it quite in order… that while she is singing [the baby] Hans to
sleep, a love song is being sung to her.”
22
While tacitly acknowledging his former
romantic interest in Bertha Porubsky Faber, Brahms memorialized that feeling by
repurposing a Ländler that she had sung for him as a countermelody to a lullaby for her
child.
Shortly thereafter, Brahms developed friendly relations with Luise Dustmann
(1831-99, née Meyer), another soprano, who lived in Vienna.
23
She was already
married, however, to a bookseller named Adalbert Dustmann. Dustmann maintained a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
Sams, 158.
21
Musgrave, Brahms Reader, 53.
22
Max Friedlaender, in Brahms’s Lieder: An Introduction to the Songs for One or Two Voices, trans. C.
Leonard Leese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 79-80, gives a longer version of the quote:
“Frau Bertha will realize that I wrote the Wiegenlied for her little one. She will however find it quite in
order, as I do, that while she is singing Hans to sleep, a love song is being sung to her. Moreover, Frau
Bertha would do me a great favour if she would write out for me this same love-song Du meinst wohl, du
glaubst wohl with the words and music. I have it vaguely in my head. But you must now put appropriate
verses to it. My song, however, is beautiful for boys or girls, so you need not order a new one each time.”
23
Musgrave, Brahms Reader, 53, called her “a genuine German with Viennese connections.”
175!
good working relationship with Brahms and his circle. She premiered, among other
works, Brahms’s “Wiegenlied,” which she performed with Clara Schumann.
Brahms’s feelings were stirred much more deeply by Elizabet von Stockhausen
(1847-92), a fifteen-year-old blond piano prodigy who entered into his studies in 1862.
Ethel Smyth, who stayed with Stockhausen when they were both young women,
described Stockhausen as “not really beautiful but better than beautiful, at once
dazzling and bewitching.”
24
Julius Epstein, with whom she continued her piano studies
after Brahms, noted that one could not help but fall in love with her. Stockhausen was
also an extraordinarily talented young pianist who was known for her expressive
power and had a prodigious memory.
25
Recalling legends of the young Mozart,
Stockhausen was said to be able to play a symphony after hearing it just once.
Recognizing the intensity of his feelings for her and the inappropriateness of
expressing them, Brahms asked that she discontinue her studies with him and
arranged for her to study with Epstein instead. In 1874, more than ten years later,
Stockhausen, now Herzogenberg, renewed her friendship with Brahms and became
one of his most trusted and insightful musical confidantes and critics. Her husband,
Heinrich von Herzogenberg, also became a friend and supporter of Brahms. Brahms
and Elizabet von Herzogenberg were candid about the nature of their connection.
Years later, he wrote to her: “It was so beautiful with you. I still feel it today, as an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
Smyth, 192.
25
Clive, 216.
176!
agreeable warmth, and I should like to shut it up and lock it in, so as to keep it for a
long time.”
26

The next year, 1863, Brahms fell for another young soprano, perhaps his most
intense since Agathe von Siebold. Brahms would describe Ottilie Hauer, in a letter to
Clara Schuman, as “a very pretty girl with whom he, God knows, would have made a
fool of himself if, as luck would have it, someone had not snatched her up.”
27
Hauer
and Brahms also spent long hours together singing and playing solo lieder, both by
Schubert and by Brahms.
28
Hauer sang in the first public performance of “Wechsellied
zum Tanz,” Brahms’s first vocal waltz, in December 1863. Brahms had composed the
piece in November 1859, nearly a year after breaking off his engagement with Siebold.
Swafford called the piece “quite seductive for him.”
29
As noted above, many observers
see this piece as a precursor to the Liebeslieder.
30

On Christmas Eve, 1863, Brahms composed the two songs that he would
publish with “Wechsellied zum Tanz” as Op. 31. Both are amorous texts from central
European sources (Moravian and Bohemian), translated by Joseph Wenzig (1807-
76).
31
The next morning, Christmas 1863, Brahms visited Hauer’s house, songs in hand,
with the intention of proposing to her. However, “to his great disappointment and his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
Quoted in Geiringer, 118. For Brahms’s relationship to Stockhausen/Herzogenberg, see
Musgrave, Brahms Reader, 55, and Sams, 132.
27
Litzmann, Letters, 166-67. Also quoted in Musgrave, Brahms Reader, 54.
28
Grove Music Online, s.v. “Brahms, Johannes,” by George S. Bozarth and Walter Frisch, accessed
June 25, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/
subscriber/article/grove/music/51879.
29
Swafford, 279.
30
Stark, 24.
31
Ibid., 25-28. Also see Brodbeck, “Compatibility,” 412.
177!
even greater relief,” as Musgrave colorfully describes it, she had already accepted
another proposal that morning.
32

Although Brahms failed to secure in Ottilie Hauer a wife, he did secure, in the
music he had her sing and the music he composed for her, the relationship between
romantic interest, amorous poems, poems translated from central European languages,
and the vocal waltz. Hauer’s participation in the premiere of “Wechsellied zum Tanz,”
just weeks before Brahms intended to propose to her, and his composition of “Der
Gang zum Liebchen” the night before his intended proposition suggest that she played
an important role in the germination of the romantic vocal waltz that would come to
fruition in the Liebeslieder. Brahms made the connection of these early forays to his later
work in the genre more explicit by repurposing the melody of “Der Gang zum
Liebchen” as the fourth waltz in Op. 39.
33
As with the Fabers and the Herzogenbergs,
Brahms remained friends with both Hauer and her new husband, Dr. Eduard Ebner.
The preceding chapter opened with an epigram by Eduard Hanslick, who
wondered how the “North German, Protestant, and unworldly” Brahms could have
written a collection of waltzes. The answer, Hanslick proposed, was Vienna. Brahms
and Hanslick’s correspondence, though, and the remainder of his review suggest two
additional points of connection with Vienna and the waltz: lovely young women and
Hafiz! Less than eighteen months after his failed proposal to Hauer, Brahms
accompanied the copy of the Op. 39 waltzes he sent to Hanslick with a letter. Brahms
wrote:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
See also Hess, 72.
33
Brodbeck, “Compatibility,” 412.
178!
While writing the title of the four-hand waltzes, which are to appear
shortly, your name came to me spontaneously. I don’t know why, I
thought of Vienna, of the beautiful girls with whom you play four-hand
[music], of you yourself, [a] connoisseur of the same, [a] good friend,
and so on. Suddenly I felt the necessity of dedicating it to you.... They
are two books of little innocent waltzes in Schubertian form—if you do
not want them and would prefer your name on a proper, four-movement
work, then “Give the command, and I will follow.”
34

In this passage, part of which has been quoted above, Brahms pokes fun at his
new friend’s possible preference for a “proper four-movement work” but also makes
clear the connection between waltzes, attractive women, and the social pleasures of
playing music for piano four hands.
35

Hanslick’s review contines, after the excerpt quoted earlier, by charting
inspiration for Brahms’s new waltzes not only from Viennese musical styles but also
from other pleasures afforded by the cosmopolitian city. The pleasures Hanslick put at
the top of the list—“pretty girls” and “fiery wine”—were central to Hafiz’s poetry.
Hanslick even evokes the Persian poet himself!

Brahms’s waltzes are the fruit of his residence in Vienna, and a fruit of
the very sweetest kind. It was not for nothing that this delicate organism
was exposed for years to the light, agreeable air of Austria; his waltzes
have much to tell us about this. Even when far from Vienna, he must
still have caught echoes of Strauss’s waltzes and Schubert’s Ländler, our
G’stanzl and yodellers, even of Farka’s gipsy music, and recalled the
pretty girls, the fiery wine, the wooded hills, and all the rest. Those who
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
34
April 1866. Quoted in Kalbeck 2:190, quoted and trans. in Brodbeck, “Brahms as Editor,” 93.
Brodbeck’s translation is also quoted in Chantal Frankenbach, “Waltzing around the Musically
Beautiful: Listening and Dancing in Hanslick’s Hierarchy of Musical Perception,” in Rethinking Hanslick:
Music, Formalism, and Expression, ed. Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2013), 121.
35
For more on Hanslick’s understanding of the social and political implications of four-hand piano
music, see Frankenbach and Hamilton.
179!
watch with sympathy the development of this straight-forward and deep
but previously, perhaps, one-sided talent will greet the waltzes as a
happy sign of a rejuvenated and refreshed receptivity, as a sort of
conversion to the poetic creed of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert—the
creed of Hafiz.
36

As we have seen, the years 1859 to 1864 marked not only the beginning of
Brahms’s geographical shift to Vienna. They were also peak years for Brahms’s nearly
annual afflictions of romantic attraction. 1863, moveover, was the year in which
Brahms discovered Daumer’s Hafis.
Hanslick could not have known how prescient his announcement of Brahms’s
conversion to a “poetic, Hafezian faith” would be. But Brahms’s attraction to Hafiz
and things Hafezian would center less on Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert than on
Schumann—Julie Schumann, that is. In the coming years, Brahms would bring
together not only the waltz, the vocal quartet, and romantic attraction, as he had in his
courtship of Hauer. He would soon add Hafiz and Daumer, the “German Hafiz,” to
the mix. Hafiz, filtered through Daumer, would be the point of entry through which
Brahms would express the culminating passion of that time period, and one of the
great romantic obsessions of his life: that for Julie Schumann.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36
Hanslick, review of Brahms’s Walzer, Op. 39, quoted and trans. in Niemann, 381.

180!
CHAPTER 8
BRAHMS, JULIE SCHUMANN, AND THE LIEBESLIEDER

JULIE SCHUMANN

For it was for Julie that Brahms seems to have composed the Liebeslieder.
Because she appears to have inspired the work, and information about her is not well
known, a brief biographical introduction is in order.
Julie Schumann, the third of Robert and Clara’s seven children, was born on
March 11, 1845. After Robert’s death in 1856, Clara decided to resume her performing
career so that she could support her family, promote Robert’s works (as well as those
of Brahms), and pursue her life’s calling; she was one of the finest pianists of her time.
Arranging for places for her children to stay and study was a major and ongoing
concern. In 1862, she purchased a home at 14 Lichtenthaler Alle in Baden-Baden,
nicknamed the “Kennel,” where her family might gather together for the summers.
37

John Burk describes the Schumann children’s situation as follows: “In and out of
schools, in and out of the houses of friends and relatives, the young Schumanns led
uneven, necessarily haphazard lives. All lived to wait for the next summer, Baden and
the ‘Kennel,’ where the more fortunate ones would gather, to become a happy family
once more.”
38

Starting at age nine, Julie lived with at least five families other than her own,
typically joining her mother and siblings for the summers. Between 1854 and 1857 she
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 209.
38
John N. Burk, Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography (New York: Random House, 1940), 375.
181!
lived, at least part time, with her grandmother Bargiel in Berlin.
39
From 1860 through
1868, she spent her winters as follows:

FIGURE 4: Julie Schumann’s Winter Caretakers, 1860-68

Year City Host/Caretaker
1860 Munich Emily von Pacher (née List), close childhood friend of
Clara Schumann. The two had been confirmed together,
and Schumann had stayed with List in Paris during her
teenage years.
40

1861 unknown
1862 Guebwiller (fall);
Nice (winter)
Frau Schlumberger
41

1863 Düsseldorf Bendemann family
42

1864 Nice Frau Schlumberger (at Julie’s “urgent desire”)
43

1865 Munich Emily von Pacher
44

1866 Mannheim Frau Fidel, aunt of Hermann Levi
45

1867 Divonne Frau Schlumberger, at least for part of the time. Received
medical treatment at this spa town near Geneva. Suffered
terrible health crisis after Christmas.
1868 Venice
(October);
Divonne (winter)
Visited Venice in October 1868 with Frau Schlumberger
before spending winter in Divonne. Met future husband,
Count Vittorio Amadeo Radicati di Marmorito.
46

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 76; Burk, 343.
40
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 183, 186; http://www.schumann-portal.de/1361.html, accessed July 5, 2014.
41
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 211.
42
Ibid., 219.
43
Ibid., 229, 240.
44
Ibid., 244.
45
Ibid., 252-53.
46
Ibid., 256.
182!
As noted above, Julie spent summer 1858 with her mother in Göttingen, where she
also overlapped with Brahms and Siebold.
47
In June and July 1862, she took the
waters with her mother and her sisters Marie and Eugenie at the baths at Münster am
Stein, near Berne. Brahms visited them there for a fortnight, and Clara Schumann
recorded that they had a grand time.
48
Later that summer they traveled to Baden-
Baden, where Clara made an offer on the cottage at 14 Lichtenthaler Alle.
49
After 1862,
Julie spent most of her summers with her family at Baden-Baden.
Julie suffered from poor health for most of her short life. Julie’s health
concerns were an ongoing theme in Clara Schumann’s diary and letters. In June 1863,
Schumann reported to Brahms that Julie

is very cheerful though her cough is just the same. But what makes me
most anxious about her is that from time to time she has a sort of
cataleptic fit during which she will remain for several hours quite
motionless. It does not happen very often, about every five of six
weeks.… All the doctors agree that the cough is purely nerves, for her
chest and lungs are quite sound and her attacks are due both to her
nervous condition and her tendency to anaemia. God grant that she will
improve. I certainly do all I can for her.
50

Julie suffered an acute health emergency shortly after Christmas 1867. Clara
described it to Brahms in a letter dated January 14, 1868:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
47
Burk, 363.
48
c. June 2-July 28. See Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 208.
49
Ibid., 209.
50
June 14, 1863. Litzmann, Letters, 156-57.
183!
Our Julie has been very ill in Divonne, so ill that she was not able to
come for the holidays and in the end I sent Marie to her (a twenty-four
hours’ journey), so that she could see for herself how she was. The
doctors still say that organically she is quite sound, and that only her
nerves are below par. But isn’t that bad enough? No one knows how to
get at them. She has been taking the cold-water cure and has been
rather overdoing it; in spite of my most earnest entreaties that she
should not do so, she insisted on taking two plunge baths a day, and I
feel certain that it is owing to this excess that she has become so weak
that she has not been able to walk for a month now, and has to be
carried from the bed to the sofa. The terrible part of it was that she
always had an aching desire to be with us, and was in a constant state of
excitement as long as I was in Frankfurt because she thought she would
be able to come to us. But they are quite mad on the water cure where
she is, and the last doctor says that she has reached the crisis, etc. For
the last few days the news has been better and I am now feeling a little
bit more easy.
51

After getting marred and giving birth to two sons, Julie became weaker still. In 1872,
she returned to Baden-Baden to visit her family. Clara recorded:

Our dear one stayed with us [in Baden-Baden] until Sept. 27
th
. We saw
her growing worse and worse by the day, and could do nothing. No
doctor could help her; she had worn out her delicate frame in all the
cares of household and children.… I knew indeed that this loss must
come, but I little guessed how soon the blow was to fall. How I had been
looking forward to providing little distractions for her by asking people
in, taking her to concerts etc. but all intellectual enjoyments were
mingled with physical suffering…. The latter days of September were
dreadful — my heart bled continually. Julie pressed on to Paris, to Frau
Schlumberger, who had promised to go South with her — there she
hoped to fine alleviation or cure.… We often asked her if she would not
stay quietly in our house for the winter, and await her confinement there,
but her thoughts always turned toward the South, and she fixed her
hopes on it — poor doomed child.
52

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
January 14, 1868. Litzmann, Letters, 216-17.
52
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 292.
184!
Just months later, three years into her marriage and at the age of twenty-seven, she
died of tuberculosis. Clara Schumann wrote to Levi:

I have to tell you the sad news that our dear Julie passed away quietly
on the evening of the 10
th
[of November 1872]. You can imagine what
grief it is to us, but I am calm, for since the first day that I saw the dear
child again in Baden, I felt convinced that she had not long to live. Her
first kiss struck me to the heart — I have never lost this feeling of
anxiety for a moment, and from this springs my calmness now, from this
and from the fact that I suffered so terribly in the loss of my dear child
three years ago — it seemed to me then that she was gone from me for
ever.
53

Julie is reported to have been exceptionally beautiful. Her younger sister
Eugenie described her as follows:

I seek in vain for words to describe her. How easy it is to recall her eyes,
blue as the blue of heaven, beautifully formed, the eyelids delicately
veined. Her hair was silken, luminous gold, framing her white forehead,
her nose finely shaped, her mouth not too small, the lips sensitive in line.
All of her features combined to form a face which one could not behold
without inward delight. How could one convey in words the nobility of
those features—the radiance of their owner, her sweetness of character,
the alertness of her mind and heart?
54

She was also, especially during her teen years and early twenties, quite affectionate
with her mother. Clara often commented on her sweetness of character. Like several of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Letter to Levi, November 12, 1872. Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 292.
54
Eugenie Schumann, Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann, trans. Marie Busch (London: William
Heinemann, 1927), 61.
185!
her siblings, she seems to have been a serious musician. Her teachers included
composer and conductor Vincenz Lachner in Mannheim.
55

Julie’s husband, Count Marmorito, was a widower who already had two
children. He spoke little German and, more concerning to Clara Schumann, was
Catholic.
56
Schumann wrote in her diary: “Sunday, the 1
st
. At present we can think of
nothing but our Julchen and my mind continually conjures up the difficulties she will
have to encounter. I am sorry that the man is Italian, with whom I shall never be able
to hold any real conversation.” Schumann also wrote: “I have told her all my fears,
though mainly for my own satisfaction, since love is not to be frightened, as I know
from my own experience. Seldom can anyone have had greater obstacles to overcome
than Robert and I.”
57

Clara’s concerns notwithstanding, Marmorito seems to have been a devoted
husband who adored his beautiful and ethereal wife.
58
Julie, too, seems to have risen to
the part. “Composite of aristocratic graciousness and inward dignity,” according to
Burk, “the new Contessa carried her title well.”
59
Julie had two sons with Marmorito:
Duaddo and Robert. She hoped for a daughter, whom she planned to name Chiarina
in honor of her mother; Chiarina is an Italian variant of Clara.
60
Clara was impressed
by how well her daughter took to mothering. After Julie died, Marmorito centered his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
Lachner served as Kapellmeister in Mannheim from 1836. See Clive, 278, and Litzmann, Letters,
208.
56
Burk, 384.
57
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 261. Also see Burk, 384.
58
For more on Julie’s life in Piedmond, see Claudia de Vries, “‘- da war mir ja schon, als habe ich
sie verloren ...’: auf den Spuren von Julie Schumann in Piemonte,” in Schumanniana nova: Festschrift Gerd
Nauhaus zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Bernhard R. Appel and Gerd Nauhaus (Sinzig: Studio Verlag, 2002),
149-68.
59
Burk, 388-89.
60
Ibid., 389-90.
186!
love on their son Duaddo, who apparently looked like his mother. Five years after
Julie’s death, Duaddo died too.

JULIE SCHUMANN AND BRAHMS

Brahms had known Julie, of course, since she was a child. She would have
been eight or nine years old when he first knocked on the Schumanns’ door and fell in
love with her mother. According to Swafford, Brahms had had amorous feelings for
Julie by 1861. “In fact,” Swafford writes, “he had fallen in love with Julie, who was
now sixteen and in full bloom. Though he was prepared to wait patiently for the right
time to declare it—whatever inconceivable time he imagined that to be—he wanted to
be around her, watch her, admire her from a decent distance.” Swafford cites two
pieces of evidence for this claim. First, Brahms dedicated his 1861 Variations on a Theme
by R. Schumann for piano four hands, Op. 23, to Julie.
61
Second, Brahms wrote in a
letter to Clara Schumann in October that year: “I assure you that I shall be really
furious if you refuse to be my guest here with Julie. If you will not do it, I shall throw
all my money out the window.”
62

Let us evaluate this evidence. Although Brahms dedicated other music to the
Schumann children collectively (such as the folksong arrangements, published
anonymously, that he gave them in 1858), the Variations is the only piece of music that
Brahms dedicated to a particular Schumann child. He did not dedicate pieces to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Swafford, 229.
62
October 11, 1861. Litzmann, Letters, 139.
187!
Schumann’s other daughters, even though some of them, especially Marie, became
quite serious musicians. The dedication, thus, is exceptional and would seem
significant.
The letter stands out, among the surviving letters that Brahms wrote to
Schumann after the late 1850s, as one of the most jocular and insistent in its affections.
It follows a period of relative warmth in Brahms and Clara Schumann’s relationship. It
was on July 16 of that year, for example, that Schumann had written to Brahms: “Let
me embrace you in the spirit for [the beautiful pieces you sent me], dear Johannes.
How much I should prefer to do it in the flesh!”
63
A few days before his birthday that
year, on September 13, Brahms had written Schumann to ask him to “surprise” him
with a visit—and to bring her daughters: “I should love to have a letter now in which I
could find that you and Julie or Marie and J.J. [Joachim] would be here on the
13
th
.”
64
One wonders why Brahms mentioned sixteen-year-old Julie first—before her
older sister Marie and his close friend Joachim.
Brahms’s hope for a birthday visit from the Schumanns and Joachim, however,
was not fulfilled. In fact, it seems that Julie was not even with her mother at the time.
Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms on September 17 that Julie would be home in
October from Schönau (near Württemberg).
65
Nine days later, she wrote to Brahms
again, apologizing that she had had so much to deal with: “I have so much to do and so
many thousand things to see to and letters to write that I feel quite giddy. So I must
leave a good deal until we meet. After all, perhaps it is better that I should keep
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
July 16, 1861. Ibid., 135.
64
September 11, 1861. Ibid., 136.
65
September 17, 1861. Ibid., 137.
188!
something back.”
66
One wonders what Schumann thought better to keep back. Might
it be that Brahms had written something to Julie, perhaps with the Variations he
dedicated to her, that had made daughter and/or mother uncomfortable? Or did Clara
Schumann just have too much happening in her life to express in a letter? The letter is
tantalizingly vague.
It was after this letter than Brahms wrote the October letter cited by Swafford.
Brahms put forth a tantalizing proposal, complete with a place to stay and paid
concerts to play.
67
It seems that Schumann, again, did not accept. The intensity and
ardor of Brahms’s letters to Schumann then diminished and they settled in to the
pattern they would retain for the next five years: Schumann wishing Brahms would
write letters more often, Brahms wishing Schumann would perform less, and
Schumann wishing Brahms would find a wife and settle down.
There is no doubt that Julie was one of the greatest loves, albeit the least
reciprocated, of Brahms’s life. It seems to have ranked in intensity only behind the love
he felt for her mother and perhaps Elizabet von Stockhausen. His infatuation with her
in 1868-69, when she was twenty-three to twenty-four, is beyond doubt. It is also true
that Brahms could develop intense feelings for a girl of sixteen or seventeen; Bertha
Porubsky had been seventeen when Brahms first met her and he would fall for
Stockhausen just a year later. However, given Brahms’s attraction to Stockhausen and
Hauer over the next two years, whatever affection he felt for Julie in 1861 could not
have been enduringly overwhelming. Swafford’s claim that Brahms “fell in love” with
Julie in 1861 seems to be something of an overstatement. Nevertheless, his dedication
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
September 26, 1861. Ibid., 138-39.
67
Ibid., 139-40.
189!
of the Variations to her, the unusual intensity of his attempts to arrange for her to visit
him that fall, and, perhaps, Clara Schumann’s apparent reluctance to visit and her
need to “keep back” some of her thoughts, suggests some form of affection by the
twenty-eight-year-old composer. Brahms may have had a strong crush on the beautiful
teen but known that it was not actionable. Perhaps Brahms kept Julie in the back of
his mind while he swooned for Stockhausen and courted Hauer.
Since Brahms does not appear to have seriously pursued any other women after
Hauer, it seems possible that Julie was the primary focus of Brahms’s romantic
interest starting as early as 1864. In that case, she would have been the last and most
serious in the series of youthful infatuations that caught his attention, almost one per
year, from 1859 to 1864.
It should be noted that Stockhausen and Julie Schumann stood apart from the
rest in several ways. They were both more serious: Stockhausen became a lifelong
friend and confidante at a level just short of Clara Schumann, and Brahms would be
devastated by Julie’s engagement to someone else. They were younger: sixteen or
seventeen at time of first attraction, rather than twenty-three-or-so for most of the
others. They were not singers. They also were not what we might think of as real
relationships; Brahms did not, so far as we know, take romantic walks or accompany
lieder with them. Brahms asked Stockhausen to transfer to Epstein’s piano studio
before any awkward situations might arise. Brahms and Julie Schumann do not seem
to have socialized in a romantic way. Though Julie may have been aware of Brahms’s
attraction to her,
68
and Clara may have suspected it, Brahms kept his affections for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Swafford, 323.
190!
both women covert. Nobody seems to have expected engagement to Stockhausen or to
Julie Schumamn as a possible outcome. Schumann did, however, inspire an
outpouring of romantic music, including the Liebeslieder, and one piece of absolute
devastation, the Rhapsodie.

BRAHMS, JULIE SCHUMANN, AND DAUMER

At some point between 1864 and 1869, after Brahms’s courtships of Porubsky,
Dustmann, and Hauer, Brahms’s feelings for Julie Schumann rekindled and gained
force to such an extent that he was visibly devastated by the news of her engagement
to Marmorito in July 1869. Swafford has suggested that Julie was the inspiration
behind all of Brahms’s Daumer settings during that time, starting with Brahms’s eight
Lieder und Gesänge (Op. 32), on texts by Daumer and Platen, composed in September
1864. “Nearly every lyric from that period,” Swafford writes, “mostly by his favored
poet G. F. Daumer, seems to echo his undeclared infatuation for Julie Schumann. In
those songs a mélange of images of obsession and flight poured out of him.”
69
If this
were the case, then Julie would have been the primary lens through which Brahms
was attracted to and understood Daumer’s poetry. It is a compelling idea, and one
worth considering. Let us begin with what is clear.
In a sharp departure from Brahms’s relief when previous love interests became
engaged to other men, Brahms was devastated by the news of Julie’s engagement to
Marmorito. Schumann recorded in her diary:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
69
Ibid., 337.
191!
On Sunday, the 11
th
[of July, 1869; see below], we told our
acquaintances of Julie’s engagement. Of course I told Johannes first of
all; he seemed not to have expected anything of the sort, and to be quite
upset…

July 16
th
. Johannes is quite altered, he seldom comes to the house and
speaks only in monosyllables when he does come. And he treats even
Julie in the same manner, though he always used to be so specially nice
to her. Did he really love her? But he has never thought of marrying,
and Julie has never had any inclination toward him.
70

Brahms expressed this devastation in the Rhapsodie (commonly referred to as Alto
Rhapsody, Op. 53), a setting of Goethe’s Harzreise im Winter. In a letter to Simrock,
Brahms wrote: “Herewith I have composed a bridal song for the Countess Schumann,
but with rage do I write such things — with anger!”
71
Clara Schumann was
immediately struck by the rawness of emotion in the piece that Brahms called a “post
script” to the Liebeslieder. Given the connection of the Rhapsodie to Brahms’s crushing
disappointment at Julie’s engagement to Marmorito, the connection between the
Liebeslieder and its “post script,” and the temporal relationship—the Rhapsodie was
composed shortly after the Liebeslieder—it seems clear that the Liebeslieder were inspired
by Brahms’s affections for Julie.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 266.
71
Hofmann and Fürst, 24.
192!
DATING THE LIEBESLIEDER

Immediately, though, we are presented with two dating problems. When did
Brahms start composing the Liebeslieder, and by when did he finish? Max Kalbeck,
citing a memoir by Viennese contralto Rosa Girzeck (c. 1850-1915), suggests that
Brahms had at least conceived of the idea of vocal waltzes in the summer of 1868.
72
In
her memoir, Girzeck notes that she had sung a concert with Brahms and baritone
Julius Stockhausen in summer 1868, in which Brahms had played some of his Op. 39
waltzes. Brahms told her that he wanted to compose nothing but waltzes and would
compose some for her to sing. According to Kalbeck, Brahms immediately went to
work composing some of the melodies.
73
David Brodbeck, however, noting that
Brahms’s Liebeslieder manuscripts are in the thick purple ink that he only used while in
Baden-Baden between May and September 1869, confirms that Girzeck’s remarks
aside, Brahms did not compose the Liebeslieder until he arrived in Baden-Baden that
year.
Let us consider the chronological record in greater detail. On May 3, 1869,
Clara Schumann arrived at her summer home in Baden-Baden. She was joined on
May 8 by her children Julie and Ludwig. The next night, May 9, Brahms visited the
Schumanns’ home together with Julius Allgeyer (1829-1900), who would write a
biography of painter Anselm Feuerbach, the son of Daumer’s classmate of the same
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
Girzeck, also spelled Girzick, took the married name Bromeissl.
73
Kalbeck, 273. As recounted by Kalbeck, trans. Stone, “Brahms said to [Ms. Girzick] that, for the
time being, he only wanted to compose waltzes, Viennese waltzes, and he gushed about his beloved
Imperial City along the Donau, which he deeply missed. ‘Next,’ he assured her, ‘you will receive
something to sing from all this!’ The idea of his Liebeslieder had come to him, and now new melodies were
daily arising within him, and he had difficulty writing them all down.” Also see Brodbeck,
“Compatibility,” 413-14.
193!
name. Schumann recorded in her diary that Brahms “was very nice.” On the 12
th
, the
Schumanns attended a performance of Brahms’s Requiem in Karlsruhe. On the 13
th
,
Brahms visited with Allgeyer and Levi. Clara recorded that he had “taken his old
rooms at Frau Becker’s.” Thus Brahms and Julie were both in the Baden-Baden area
by May 9 of that year, and Brahms was settled in by May 13. Brahms probably started
composing the Liebeslieder, then, sometime after May 9, 1869.
Less clear, however, is the date by which Brahms probably completed the
Liebeslieder. Swafford reports that Clara Schumann told Brahms of Julie’s engagement
to Marmorito on May 11.
74
If that were the case, could he have really completed the
Liebeslieder by then? Even so adept a composer as Brahms would have had difficulty
composing the Liebeslieder in just one or two days. On the other hand, it is hard to
imagine Brahms continuing to compose the Liebeslieder after hearing the news; his
emotional state would have already been pointing toward the Rhapsodie.
Swafford’s date, though, is clearly a mistake. His primary source appears to be
Berthold Litzmann’s Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries
and Letters, first published in 1906, with Grade Hadow’s abridged and translated
version first published in 1913.
75
Litzmann’s narration of Schumann’s life through her
diary entries and letters, in Hadow’s translation, seems to suggest June 11 as the day
she told Brahms of Julie’s betrothal. Schumann’s diary entry on June 10, 1869,
reports that Brahms brought her two movements of a quartet that day (probably parts
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
Swafford, 348.
75
Litzmann, Artist’s Life.
194!
of Op. 51, no. 2, published in 1873).
76
According to Schumann’s diary, she, Brahms,
Brahms’s host Becker, and perhaps one or more of the Schumann children played
through the new quartet that evening, together with Robert Schumann’s Trio in D
minor. Schumann also recorded that “Julie bears the uncertainty of her fate [i.e.
expecting but not having received the Marmorito’s proposal] with extraordinary
patience.”
77

Litzmann’s presentation of Schumann’s diary then segues directly into the
following entry:

At last, on Saturday, the 10
th
, came Marmorito’s formal proposal for
Julie, and on Sunday I wrote him my consent — but God knows my
heart bled as I wrote.
In the evening Elise took up by surprise. She had come with
Felix, and brought champagne, and so we celebrated Julie’s betrothal
day among ourselves.
On Sunday, the 11
th
, we told our acquaintance of Julie’s
engagement. Of course I told Johannes first of all; he seemed not to
have expected anything of the sort, and to be quite upset.
78

Litzmann then gives a section break, and continues: “July 16
th
. Johannes is quite
altered.”
Litzmann’s presentation seems to suggest that Marmorito’s proposal came on
June 10, and Schumann told Brahms of the news on June 11. But this version of
events is confusing on several fronts. First, it is hard to imagine the two sets of events
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
There is, however, a key discrepancy. Schumann reports the quartet as being in A major, while
the published version is in A minor. Nonetheless, significant parts of the quartet are in A major;
presumably Brahms had thought at the time that A major would be the overriding key.
77
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 264-65.
78
Ibid., 265-66.
195!
that Schumann seems to ascribe to June 10, 1869—reading through the quartet and
trio with Brahms and Becker; and receiving the proposal, welcoming Elise, and having
a private family celebration with champagne—as both happening on the same date.
Second, why would Schumann wait a month and five days to record that “Johannes is
quite altered”? Third, the dates do not match with the days of the week. June 10, 1869
was a Thursday, not a Saturday. June 11 was a Friday, not a Sunday. The dates and
days of the week do match, however, in July: July 10 was a Saturday that year and
July 11 a Sunday.
The ambiguity in Litzmann’s presentation is not unique to Hadow’s English
translation, which is also slightly abridged. In the German original, Litzmann also
segues directly from Schumann’s June 10 description of Julie’s uncertain fate (arising
from the formal proposal not having arrived yet) to “Endlich am Sonnabend den 10.
fam Marmoritos formelle Anträge wegen Julie.” The German original also includes,
however, Clara Schumann’s July 13 letter to Amelie Joachim, in which she tells her
the news of Julie’s engagement. This comes directly after Schumann’s “Sunday the
11
th
” description of Johannes being quite upset and directly before Schumann’s July
16 entry that Brahms is “quite altered.”
79
The letter was omitted from the English
abridged translation. Hadow replaced it with the heading “FROM THE DIARY,”
giving the false impression that Schumann’s description of events on “Saturday the 10
th
”
and “Sunday the 11
th
” belonged with the June 10 events, not those that started on July.
In any case, we can be certain that Brahms learned about Julie’s engagement to
Marmorito on Sunday, July 11.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
79
Litzmann, Clara Schumann: ein Künstlerleben: nach Tagebüchern und Briefen (Leipzig: Breitkopf and
Härtel, 1902), 3:229.
196!
Schumann’s diary entry for July 16, 1869, after describing Brahms’s altered
state and wondering if he really loved Julie, continues: “At the beginning of the month
Johannes brought me some charming waltzes for 4 hands and 4 voices, sometimes two
and two, sometimes all four together, with very pretty words, chiefly of the folk-song
type… They are extraordinarily attractive (charming even without the voices) and I
very much enjoy playing them.” Thus Brahms had composed at least some, if not all, of
the Liebeslieder waltzes by early July. In any case, it seems almost certain that he
completed at least most of them before July 11, after which his emotional state turned
in a very different direction. Brahms likely composed the Liebeslieder, then, between
May 9 and July 11, 1869.
80

JULIE SCHUMANN AND BRAHMS’S EARLIER SONGS, 1864-68

The Liebeslieder and Rhapsodie represent, respectively, the pinnacle of Brahms’s
romantic aspiration vis-à-vis Julie Schumann and his crushing realization that this
hope was just a fantasy. To what extent, though, do Brahms’s earlier settings of
Daumer, starting in 1864, relate to his feelings for Julie? Recall Swafford’s assertion
that “Nearly every lyric from that period, mostly by his favored poet G. F. Daumer,
seems to echo his undeclared infatuation for Julie Schumann.” Let us consider
Brahms’s other Daumer settings of 1864 to 1869 in relation to his affections for Robert
and Clara’s daughter.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Brodbeck, “Compatability,” 420, suggests May-July 1869.
197!
Brahms first encountered Daumer’s poetry in 1863 in a second-hand bookshop
in Vienna.
81
The following year, he set four Daumer poems from Hafis, including one
“from the Moldavian.” Brahms combined these with five Persian-inspired poems by
Daumer’s classmate August von Platen in Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32. Two of the poems,
one by Platen and one by Daumer, are ghasals (nos. 4 and 9).
82
Brahms composed the
entire collection in September 1864, presumably while he was in Baden-Baden. In
1864, Brahms probably also composed “Die Kränze,” on a poem from Polydora,
“translated” by Daumer from the Greek. He would publish “Die Kränze” as the
opening song in Vier Lieder, Op. 46, in October 1868.
83
In January 1865, four months
after composing Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, Brahms composed the Op. 39 waltzes.
Brahms, we recall, had intended to propose to Ottilie Hauer on Christmas Day,
1863. The next summer, he probably saw Julie many times in Baden-Baden, where he
was in the habit of taking his meals with the Schumanns. She was then nineteen years
old. Although Julie spent a month with Clara that summer in Graubünden, taking the
“open-air cure,” she presumably would have been at 14 Lichtenthaler Alle for much of
the rest of the season. Julie was in relatively good health that summer, and it is
possible that Brahms’s affections for her, whatever they had been in 1861, rekindled.
84

He composed the Op. 32 songs as summer was turning to fall, perhaps during or just
after an imagined summer romance.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Otto, “Ein fränkischer Dichter,” 11.
82
Sams, 82, 89.
83
Ibid., 130.
84
1864. Litzmann, Letters, 170-71. Schumann wrote: “I found Julie very lively and very much
stronger and I hope that after a month’s stay with me in St. Moritz in Graubünden this summer (which
both of us have been prescribed for the open-air cure) she will be quite well.”
198!
The texts Brahms chose to set that year, mostly in September, revolve around
themes of unrequited, unreturned, and sometimes even unstated affection. “Nicht mehr
zu dir zu gehen” (Op. 32, no. 2), for example, reads: “Never to visit you again, so I
decided and vowed; and yet I go every evening, for I have lost all my strength and will-
power.… Oh, speak to me, say but one word, one single clear word; give me life or
death, only reveal to me your feelings, your true feelings.”
85
“Du sprichst, dass ich mich
täuschte” (Op. 32, no. 6) begins: “You say I was mistaken… yet I know you once
loved me, though you love me no longer.” Brahms includes in the set a favorite Hafiz
poem, rendered by Daumer as “Bitteres zu sagen denkst du” (Op. 32, no. 7). Here, in
quintessentially Hafezian style, the poet declares that even harsh words from the
beloved are sweet because they pass through her (or his) mouth.
86
In “So stehn wir”
(Op. 32, no. 8), Daumer (as Hafiz) laments: “All my attempts to show I love her are in
vain; in vain are all her attempts to hurt me.”
87
“Die Kränze” (Op. 46, no. 1) describes
the poet crying because his beloved is so “ungentle” (ungelind) to him. The poem
concludes: “Then let it suddenly be showered down on to the golden glory of her head,
and let her sense that these are tears shed by my eyes in this distressful night.”
88

Sams asserts that “Die Kränze” was inspired by Stockhausen: “in 1864 the
immediate golden age for Brahms was his adoration of the beautiful blonde seventeen-
year-old Elizabet von Stockhausen.”
89
Sams’s chronology, though, is simply incorrect.
Stockhausen studied with Brahms in 1862 and early 1863. After asking her to study
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
85
Quoted and trans. in Sams, 80.
86
Ibid., 86-87.
87
Ibid., 87-88.
88
Quoted and trans. in ibid., 131.
89
Ibid., 131.
199!
with another piano teacher, Brahms did not resume his friendship with her until 1874,
more earnestly in 1877. Later in 1863, Brahms courted Hauer and attempted to
propose to her on Christmas. Brahms was at peace—even relieved, according to
Musgrave!—at Hauer’s engagement to Ebner. “Die Kränze” cannot have been
composed for Stockhausen or Hauer.
Sams also states that the Op. 32 Lieder und Gesänge was “no doubt… inspired by
a devoted love for Clara Schumann.”
90
Sams notes, as partial evidence, several
prominent instances of the “Clara” motif in “So stehn wir,” no. 8.
91
(Sams identifies the
“Clara” motif, devised by Robert Schumann and included in many compositions by
Brahms, as C-B-A-G-A, with the G raised to G# or other accidentals ad lib, and freely
transposable.)
92
Despite the musical motif, however, Sams’s suggestion that the
collection was inspired by Clara Schumann seems unlikely. Brahms’s romantic love for
Schumann—the kind of love that might find expression in the Daumer and Platen
poems he selected—had wound down by 1858, when Brahms met Siebold. Brahms’s
letters with Schumann after 1861, when he jovially insisted that she and Julie come
visit, are friendly and collegial but not passionate. Might Brahms have incorporated
the Clara motif as a veiled reference to her daughter, to whom his attention had
shifted?
Swafford’s assertion that all of Brahms’s Daumer settings were inspired by
Julie, while not verifiable as early as 1864, seems plausible. While there is no
indication that Julie had any interest in him, or even knew of his interest in her, she
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90
Ibid., 77.
91
Ibid., 88.
92
Ibid., 16-18.
200!
seems the most likely target of Brahms’s romantic attraction (or fantasies). Certainly,
after a five year period of one serious flirtation per year, there is no evidence of any
love interests other than Julie between 1864 and 1869. Julie’s silence on the matter,
probably because she understood him simply as a close friend of her parents, in much
the same category as Joachim or Levi, fits with the themes in the poems that Brahms
chose to set: “Oh, speak to me, say but one word… reveal to me your feelings… All my
attempts to show I love her are in vain.” In any case, Sams’s identification of
Stockhausen and Clara Schumann as the romantic inspirations for Brahms’s 1864
Daumer settings stands in need of revision.
Brahms composed the Op. 39 waltzes for piano, four hands, four months after
the Op. 32 Lieder und Gesänge, while he was living back in Vienna. Brahms dedicated
the collection to Eduard Hanslick, who had been a strong (though occasionally
critical) supporter of Brahms since he first wintered in Vienna in 1862. The waltzes, as
noted above, pay tribute to Vienna, the Viennese waltz tradition, and Schubert, whose
Ländler Brahms had just edited. No. 4 in the collection also repurposed “Der Gang zum
Liebchen” (Op. 31, no. 3), which Brahms had composed for Hauer. Many of Brahms’s
waltzes, as we have seen, were inspired by some love interest, and one wonders if Julie
might have been part of Brahms’s inspiration for Op. 39. Incidentally, Clara
Schumann did give copies of Brahms’s Op. 39 waltzes to three of her children, perhaps
including Julie, for Christmas 1865.
After his outpouring of emotion through song in 1864, Brahms seems not to
have set much in the way of Daumer poetry, or love songs in general, again until 1867.
The composer was drawn by other emotional concerns. His mother died in February
1865, he composed the first and fourth movements of the Requiem later that year, and
201!
he completed most of the remaining movements of the work between February and
April 1866. In 1865, moreover, Julie was fairly weak again.
93
All was not lost in
Baden-Baden that summer, though. Julius Allgeyer introduced Brahms to Anselm
Feuerbach (III), the artist whose biography Allgeyer would later write. It seems likely,
given Brahms’s newfound interest in Daumer’s poetry, that conversations with the
classicist painter would have turned to Feuerbach’s father’s close friend from college,
who had helped rescue him during his dark years at Erlangen. In any case, Brahms
and Feuerbach reinforced in each other a strong interest in Hafiz, who both of them
understood primarily through the lens of Daumer.
94

In December 1865, Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms that Julie was getting
better: “She has got over the danger of typhoid, but it will be a long time before she
has completely recovered.”
95
In March 1866, while Brahms was completing the
Requiem, Schumann was able to report: “Julie has quite recovered.”
96
Julie was in
good health in the summer of 1866 (during which Prussian armies defeated Austria at
Königgratz) and was able to diligently pursue her musical studies while in Mannheim
the next winter.
97
The only evidence the present author has found of independent
communication between Brahms and Julie, outside of the family context, was in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 240.
94
Natasha Loges, “Exoticism, Artifice and the Supernatural.”
95
December 23, 1865. Litzmann, Letters, 193.
96
March 15, 1866. Ibid., 199.
97
January 1, 1867. Litzmann, Letters, 205. On January 11, 1867, Clara Schumann wrote: “Julie is
not going with me [to England]. She feels very comfortable at Frau Feidel’s [Levi’s aunt’s, in
Mannheim]. She is learning a good deal of ensemble playing with Lachner and also with Koning. But,
alas, she has been ill again for a fortnight, because she has over-exerted herself with all kinds of work.
We were all the more shocked to hear about it because she had been quite well all though the summer.
So it will do her more good to be quiet than to go on this journey” (ibid., 205); “Julie is being well
looked after and cared for, and is studying diligently with Lachner” (ibid., 208). In spring 1867, Julie’s
health gave Clara cause for great anxiety. Clara wanted to take Julie to Carlsbad, but Julie’s doctor
prohibited it (Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 252-53).
202!
fall of 1866. In November that year, Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms: “I fancy you
must be in Switzerland, as Julie told me you had returned there.”
98
One wonders if
Brahms and Julie exchanged letters. Brahms had been in Baden-Baden that year from
mid-August to mid-October. Perhaps he had spent some time alone with Julie there
then. This intriguing snippet from Schumann’s letter raises more questions than it
answers.
From 1867 through 1869, Brahms’s feelings about Julie were tangled up with
concerns about Julie’s health, Brahms’s ongoing criticism of Clara Schumann’s
performing schedule, Clara Schumann’s recommendations that Brahms find a wife and
settle down, Brahms’s unpleasant behavior at the Schumanns’ house in Baden-Baden,
his thoughts of moving to Vienna, and the Requiem premiere. In the summer of 1867,
Julie was again in poor health. Clara Schumann recorded in her diary, in August: “It
makes me wretched to see Julie, she looks so miserably ill.”
99
Brahms, who had
recently completed most of the Requiem, was also on bad behavior with respect to the
Schumann household.
Tensions in Baden-Baden with the Schumann family had existed as early as
1864. After a falling-out that summer, Brahms wrote to Schumann expressing joy and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
98
November 24, 1866. Litzmann, Letters, 201.
99
In July 1867, Clara Schumman wrote in her diary: “I have such a longing for Julie’s dear loving
glance… she has a way of always showing her affection for me, and that is such a comfort to me. Love is
as necessary to me as air—it is the sunshine of my life.” Litzmann, Artists’s Life, 254.
In August 1867, however, she recorded: “It makes me wretched to see Julie, she looks so miserably
ill” (ibid., 254). That fall, she wrote, “A few days ago Julie left for Divonne [a spa town near Geneva]
where she has met Frau Schlumberger. She is to take the open-air and cold-water cures there. She was
very bad this summer, but all the doctors (even the one in Divonne) are agreed that her organs are all
sound and that she only needs to have her nerves strengthened. Heaven grant her a speedy recovery!
We drew so close to each other this summer that I found the parting terribly hard, as she did too. I must
say that altogether I find my intimate relationship to my children a source of ever greater happiness to
me” (Litzmann, Letters, 212).
203!
relief that “love cannot kill”.
100
Although the reasons for their disagreement are not
known, one wonders, given that Brahms composed the Op. 32 Lieder und Gesänge in
September that year, whether the awkwardness around his affection for Julie played a
part.
While Brahms and Schumann were able to resolve their 1864 disagreement
amicably, his behavior had become chronically uncomfortable by 1867. As Schumann
described it in a letter to Brahms from Baden-Baden on September 4, 1868:

The fact that for the last two years… I have held aloof was owing to
your last visit here. You appeared to be so uncomfortable with us and
were so disagreeable, not now and then, which among friends would
have been passed over, but continuously day after day, for weeks at a
time; and gave so little thought to cheering me or to making your visit as
a friend at all pleasant, that it really was a most uncomfortable not to say
miserable time for all of us. Such a relationship was too abnormal for me
to wish to repeat it—it would have been beneath my dignity.
101

Schumann, perhaps suspecting that Brahms’s obsession with Julie was a reason for his
awkward rudeness, went on in the letter to recommend that Brahms court his
publisher Rieter’s daughter, who was pretty, well off, and apparently interested in
him.
102

Brahms replied in a letter later that month that, “I too had reason to complain
that I had not been as successful as usual in my endeavor to win sympathy at your
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
100
Brigitte Höft, “Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms in Baden-Baden,” in Johannes Brahms in
Baden-Baden und Karlsruhe, ed. Joachim Draheim et al. (Karlsruhe: Badischen Landesbibliotek, 1983), 23.
101
September 4, 1868. Litzmann, Letters, 228.
102
Ibid., 228.
204!
house. It always seemed to me as if I had first to overcome some obstacle.”
103
One
wonders if the “sympathy” Brahms was attempting to win included some
acknowledgment from Julie, or ever reciprocation, of his romantic interest in her.
Certainly, he had become very awkward with the Schumann children, most of whom
were now in their twenties. Clara Schumann shot back, on October 15:

What a terrible suspicion is implied when you refer to my children’s
aversion. Let me remind you of the correspondence in which Marie
apologized through me for a remark she had quite thoughtlessly made
(an apology she would have tendered on the spot if you had not
rebuffed her in the most dreadful way). And what was your answer on
that occasion? So where is this aversion you speak of? When one is
conscious of such a feeling one does not ask forgiveness for a trifling
offence. But I confess that my children were often angry when they saw
how I suffered from your unfriendliness on many occasions, and when
they found so many an hour pass sadly by, which you might have made
happier for us—hours of which I have all too few in the bosom of my
family. Think over all this and ask yourself whether it is conceivable
that a friendship can continue with the mother when it does not extend
to the children. How can there be any question of such a thing (as I
understand it and wish it to be) when for whole periods of time you
ignore my children?
104

It was during this time of Julie’s poor health and Brahms’s strain with the
Schumann family that Brahms composed “Herbstgefühl” (Op. 48, no. 7) and probably
“Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst” (Op. 57, no. 2). If Brahms was feeling slighted by
Julie because his “endeavor[s] to win sympathy” were not reciprocated, Daumer’s
Hafiz text “Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst” may have expressed his emotions well:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
103
September 1868. Ibid., 229.
104
October 15, 1868. Ibid., 231. See also ibid., 227.
205!
If, just sometime, you’ll smile
and just sometimes fan coolness
on to this measureless fire,
then in patience I’ll compose myself
and let you do all those things
that cause love pain.
105

“Herbstgefühl” is one of the most heart wrenching songs of Brahms’s oeuvre.
Schumann told Brahms, after he sent it to her later that year, “I have not yet succeeded
in playing through the F sharp minor song without bursting into tears.”
106
Brahms
included the song in his 1868 collection Sieben Lieder (Op. 48; see below). The poem, by
Adolf von Schack (1815-94), was from his recent publication Gedichte (1867).
107

Schack’s poetry was yet not widely known but would be most famously set two
decades later by Richard Strauss in his Ständchen (Op. 17, no. 2, 1887). The poem
reads:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
105
Sams, 163.
106
November 13, 1867. Litzmann, Letters, 212-13. Philipp Spitta wrote to Brahms on March 1, 1869,
that “the song Herbstgefühl is wonderful in its atmosphere of sadness, and I find it in complete accord
with my own feelings. Whoever has felt the weird melancholy of dying nature in autumn must be deeply
moved by the faltering accompaniment which persists almost throughout the song, by the undercurrent
of sighs in the bass, and the original harmonic construction.” Carl Krebs, “Johannes Brahms und
Philipp Spitta: Aus einem Briefwechsel,” Deutsche Rundschau 35, no. 7 (April 1909): 21, quoted in
Friedlaender, 75.
107
See Sams, 159-60, 179-80, and Grove Music Online, s.v. “Brahms, Johannes.”
206!
Autumn feeling

As when summer’s last flower
Falls fatally ill in the freezing wind,
108

And only here and there, yellow and reddish,
A solitary leaf stirs in that breeze,

So there shudders over my life
A darkly cold and sombre day;
Why do you still tremble at the thought of death,
O heart, with your eternal beating!

See the shrubs all stripped of leaves!
Why still trifle, like the wind in the bushes,
With the withered happiness that remains?
Surrender to rest, soon that happiness too will die.
109

Brahms’s austere setting in F# minor “ennobles,” as Sams states, the tragic text,
creating an enduring masterpiece that has moved not only Schumann but many more
listeners to tears.
Brahms told Schumann, when he sent her the song, that the song matched his
mood.
110
Graham Johnson has suggested that Brahms’s sadness stemmed from the
recent loss of his mother and by Brahms’s professional disappointments at Hamburg.
These are plausible motivations, but they seem insufficient. Brahms’s mother died in
February 1865, more than two years before he composed “Herbstgefühl.” Brahms
would compose the fifth movement of the Requiem, which is widely interpreted as an
elegy to his mother, in May of the following year (1868), after the Bremen premiere.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
108
“from” the freezing wind, not “in,” according to Brahms’s slight modification to the text.
109
Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack, Gedichte, 1867, quoted in Graham Johnson, notes to Angelika
Kirchschlager and Graham Johnson, The Songs of Johannes Brahms, vol. 1, trans. Richard Stokes,
Hyperion CDJ33121, 2010, compact disc, 14.
110
See Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 567.
207!
This part of Johnson’s reading seems plausible, but one wonders, if this were the main
motivation, why Brahms did not compose such a song earlier.
111
Moreover, Brahms
combined “Herbstgefühl” with songs of unrequited love, suggesting a romantic rather
than a maternal association for the tragic pathos of the poem.
The position at Hamburg that Brahms had been most troubled by was the
associate conductor position at the Hamburg Philharmonische Konzertgesellschaft.
But Brahms’s primary disappointment regarding that position, according to his letters,
had been in 1862; recall Schumann’s advice to Brahms that year, while consoling him
for not being offered the position, that he should settle down: “if a man has a loving
wife with him he finds heaven in every town.”
112
Brahms was again passed over for the
position in 1867, perhaps cementing his decision to leave Hamburg permanently. The
growing realizing that he would be unable to pursue his career to its full potential in
his hometown may well have contributed to Brahms’s gloomy outlook. Again, however,
it seems insufficient.
Swafford, on the other hand, reads the poem as an expression of despair for
Julie Schumann’s frightening health situation. This reading seems to fit the text most
closely, especially the opening couplet, which refers to “summer’s last flower.” Might
Brahms have understood this image as referring to his one-sided summer romance?
Might the tragedy of the poem be the tragedy of Julie’s declining health, and thus the
possible death of Brahms’s dream of love? Given that Brahms told Clara Schumann
that the poem matched his mood, that his mood that year had been particularly cranky
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
111
Johnson, 15, also notes Brahms’s nods in the song to Schubert, including a quote from
Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger and a textural quotation of Erstarrung, from Winterreise; Brahms had
accompanied Julius Stockhausen on the songs on many occasions.
112
November 21, 1862. Litzmann, Letters, 151.
208!
in relation to the Schumann household, and that his possible anxiety about Julie not
returning (or even acknowledging) his love combined with his anxiety about her very
vitality, Swafford’s reading is compelling.
Schumann’s letter to Brahms on November 13, 1867, quoted above, in which
she thanked Brahms for sending her the song and told him that it made her cry, segued
directly into proposing marriage (and settling down in Vienna!) as the solutions to
Brahms’s woes.
113
It seems that Schumann believed that Brahms’s continuing bachelor
status was an underlying factor for the unhappiness that he expressed in the song.
Schumann’s alleged surprise at Brahms’s reaction to Julie’s engagement two years
later notwithstanding, it is reasonable to suppose that she suspected that Brahms was
interested in her daughter. If this were true, then Schumann’s persistent
encouragement of Brahms to marry may have been a way for her to suggest that he try
to satisfy his legitimate loneliness with someone who actually wanted to marry him.
Schumann was surely aware that her communications, both private and public, might
double as a historical record; ones imagines that she may have censored some thoughts
that could have led to an ungenerous impression of Brahms or herself.
Schumann’s November 13 letter, in addition to advising Brahms to find a
Viennese wife, also included some good news about Julie. “The cure is apparently
doing her good”, Schumann reported, “and she is to remain in Divonne until
Christmas.”
114
Sadly, though, Julie suffered a severe health emergency just after
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113
November 13, 1867. Ibid., 212-13.
114
November 13, 1867. Ibid., 213
209!
Christmas that year. On January 14, 1868, Schumann wrote to Brahms, quoted above,
“Our Julie has been very ill in Divonne.”
115

Brahms’s reply, dated February 2, marked a low point in his relationship with
Schumann. In this letter, Brahms, in direct succession: 1) invited Schumann to attend
the Requiem premiere in Bremen, 2) came as close as he ever did in prose to
expressing his love for Julie, 3) told Schumann that he was thinking of finally moving
full time to Vienna, and 4) accused Schumann of prioritizing her performing career
over caring for her family. Brahms wrote:

If only you could be a listener [at the Requiem premiere] on Good
Friday I should be more happy than I can say. It would be as good as
half the performance for me.… I never thought that you had spent your
Christmas without Julie. How sad for you that the poor girl (of whom one
cannot think without a certain emotion) was so far away and ill into the
bargain.
For when one sees Julie one thinks of all illness as being far away,
although she is so delicate. But I still hope that at a certain period of her life
she will improve. It is true that she is now grown up, but if I were in your
place I should still have this comforting hope. Only I can’t very well talk to you
about it. I am now feeling sorely tempted to find an unfurnished
apartment for myself in Vienna, and that means making up my mind for
once. How much it would help me to know whether you may not be
thinking of moving there sooner or later.
116

Brahms then segued directly into his most strident critique of Schumann’s performing
career. He insinuated that she was no longer at the peak of her musical abilities, and as
everyone must stop playing sooner or later, she should now. Brahms seemed to have
been especially troubled that Schumann was not at Julie’s side during her health scare.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
115
January 13, 1868. Ibid., 216-17.
116
February 2, 1868. Ibid., 218, emphasis added.
210!
Schumann was understandably hurt by the letter. She shot back in a letter
dated March 19. She did actually need the income, she told Brahms, but more
importantly:

The present moment when my powers and success are at their zenith is
hardly the time to retire from public life as you advise me to do. The
whole of the past year I have been received so enthusiastically
everywhere, all my concerts have been so packed (and people hardly
pay to go to concerts out of pity), and with but few exceptions I have
played so well, that I can hardly understand why I should stop precisely
now.… It was inconsiderate of you, I shall say no more.
117

Schumann also noted, in the same letter, that Julie was now in Frankfurt and was
doing better.
118

Schumann did attend the Requiem premiere, of course, but she and Brahms
argued the next morning and the tension in their relationship continued. It was in
September 1868 that Schumann told Brahms that she had remained aloof in recent
years because his presence at their household made them so uncomfortable, and
Brahms complained that he felt that he always had to overcome some obstacle.
119
On
October 15, Schumann wrote: “What a terrible suspicion is implied when you refer to
my children’s aversion.” In the same letter, she also continued to defend her decision to
continue performing. “I feel I have a mission to reproduce beautiful works,” she wrote,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
117
March 3, 1868. Ibid., 220. Schumann continued: “But I will think the matter over, for I cannot
weigh it properly until I know what reasons you could have had to say all these things to me, and why
you should have done so at a time when they might possibly make such an impression upon me as to
paralyse my powers, if what you said were not disproved on all sides by the extraordinary appreciation I
have met with, which has confirmed my confidence in myself.”
118
March 19, 1868. Ibid., 220.
119
September 4, 1868, Ibid., 228-29.
211!
“and particularly those of Robert so long as I have the strength to do so, and even if I
were not absolutely compelled to do so I should go on touring, though not in such a
strenuous way as I often have to now. The practice of my art is an important part of my ego,
it is the very breath of my nostrils.”
120

In the same letter, Schumann also reported hearing “nothing but good news
from Julie,” and told Brahms that she was at the time in Venice with Frau
Schlumberger.
121
Presumably, Julie was enjoying not just the Italian scenery but also
the friendly attention of Count Marmorito, who just a fortnight later asked for her
hand.
When Clara Schumann received the news of her daughter’s planned
engagement, she was in the midst of several days of shared performances with Brahms.
Brahms and Schumann performed together in Oldenburg on October 30, concluding
the concert with some of Brahms’s Op. 39 waltzes. At a party on November 1, they
premiered some of Brahms’s Ungarische Tänze and “were fêted with laurels and
toasts.”
122
Brahms left on November 4 and Schumann returned to Berlin.
Brahms was on his best behavior for the entire visit. When he arrived,
Schumann recorded in her diary, “He is as nice to me as ever can be.”
123
On the day he
departed, Schumann wrote, he “has been charming from beginning to end.”
124
This
visit seems to have marked the end of the accusatory and defensive tone that had
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
120
October 15, 1868. Ibid., 231-32, emphasis added.
121
October 15, 1868. Ibid., 233.
122
Grove Music Online, s.v. “Brahms, Johannes;” Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 261.
123
October 30, 1868. Quoted in ibid., 261.
124
December 4, 1868. Quoted in ibid., 261.
212!
defined Brahms and Schumann’s letters to each other for the better part of the
preceding year.
Interestingly, though, Schumann and her family chose not to tell Brahms of
their most significant family news. On October 31, the night after Brahms and
Schumann’s concert in Oldenburg and the night before the party, Schumann heard
that Julie had met Marmorito and that he had asked her to be his wife. It was on the
next day, November 1, that Schumann wrote in her diary: “Sunday, the 1
st
. At present
we can think of nothing but our Julchen and my mind continually conjures up the
difficulties she will have to encounter.”
125

Schumann and her family refrained from telling Brahms of Julie’s engagement
plans until eight months later, the day after Marmorito’s formal proposal arrived.
Given the importance of the issue, the amount of time they were spending with
Brahms when they received the news, and the amount of time they spent together in
Baden-Baden the following summer, this seems like an intentional decision. To be sure,
Schumann also refrained from telling other close friends, such as Amelie Joachim,
until the engagement had been formalized. But given Schumann’s awareness of
Brahms’s interest in her daughter’s welfare, if not more, it seems surprising at the least.
This author suspects that Schumann, having lived through two years of
unpleasant behavior by Brahms in Baden-Baden and nearly a year of accusatory and
hurtful letters from him, was relieved to be able to finally spend enjoyable time
together with her former love and lifelong friend. Her silence to Brahms on the topic
suggests that she believed that his abrasiveness may have stemmed, in part, from his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
125
October 31, 1868. Quoted in ibid., 261.
213!
frustrated longing for her daughter. Schumann may have also been trying to project
Julie, whose health was always precarious, from having to deal with Brahms’s moods
until her engagement was formalized. Luckily for posterity, Schumann allowed
Brahms to let his fantasies for Julie grow through the summer of 1869, resulting in
both the Liebeslieder and the Rhapsodie.
While 1868 marked a long low point in Brahms and Schumann’s relationship, it
was also an extraordinarily productive year for Brahms’s songwriting, including and
perhaps especially his settings of Daumer. Following the success of Vier Gesänge (Op.
43), published earlier in the year, Brahms completed and published four “bouquets” of
songs that fall: Vier Lieder (Op. 46), Fünf Lieder (Op. 47), Sieben Lieder (Op. 48), and
Fünf Lieder (Op. 49). The first two sets were published in October and the latter two in
November. In addition, Brahms may have composed some of the Daumer settings that
he would publish in 1871 as Lieder und Gesänge (Op. 57). Each of the new “bouquets,”
Opp. 46-49, combines earlier songs with apparently new works. Op. 43 contained no
new works. Figure 5 lists songs from these sets that are either known to have been
composed in 1868 or may have been composed as late as 1868, i.e. were published in
1868 with no record of them having been composed earlier:

214!
FIGURE 5: Songs Composed by Brahms in 1868 or Published in 1868 with
No Record of Having Been Composed Earlier

Op./
No. Title First Line Poet Text Source
46 Vier Lieder
2 Magyarisch
Sah dem edlen
Bildnis
trad. Hungarian,
trans. Daumer Polydora (1855)
3
Die Schale der
Vergessenheit
Eine Schale des
Stroms
Ludwig Hölty, ed. J.
Voss
Musenalmanach (first
printed 1777)
4
An die
Nachtigall Geuss nicht so laut Hölty, ed. Voss Gedichte (1804)

47 Fünf Lieder
1 Botschaft Wehe, Lüftchen Hafiz, trans. Daumer Hafis (1852)
2 Liebesglut Die Flamme hier Hafiz, trans. Daumer Hafis (1846)
4 O liebliche Wangen Paul Fleming
Geist- und weltliche Poemata
(1660)

48 Sieben Lieder
1
Der Gang zum
Liebchen
Es glänzt der Mond
nieder Czech, tr. Wenzig
Slawisches Volkslieder
(1830)
4
Gold überwiegt
die Liebe
Sternchen mit dem
trüben Schein Czech, tr. Wenzig
Westslawischer
Märchenschatz (1857)

49 Fünf Lieder
1
Am Sonntag Morgen
zierlich angetan
Italian, trans. P.
Heyse
Italienisches Liederbuch
(1860)
2 An ein Veilchen Birg, o Veilchen
G.B.F. Zappi, trans.
Hölty, ed. Voss Gedichte (1804)
3 Sehnsucht
Hinter jenen dichten
Wäldern
trad. Bohemian,
trans. Wenzig
Westslawischer
Märchenschatz (1857)
4 Wiegenlied
Guten Abend, gute
Nacht
Anon. (ed. Simrock)
(1
st
v.), Georg
Scherer (2
nd
v.)
Das deutsche Kinderbuch
(1857), Die schönsten
deutschen Volkslieder (1868)
215!
Of these twelve new or possibly new songs, three are translations by Daumer (two
from Hafis and one Hungarian text from Polydora), three are translations of central
European poetry by Wenzig (two Czech and one Bohemian), three are by Ludwig
Hölty (1748-76), a member of the Göttingen circle of poets whose works were taken to
embody Prussian virtues, and three are from other sources.
“Magyarische” (Op. 46, no. 2), sets one of the fifty-one poems by Hungarian
poet and revolutionary leader Sándor Petöfi (1823-49) that Daumer adapted, without
attribution, in the “Magyarische” section of Polydora.
126
Its political implications will be
discussed below. Here, we will discuss the personal. Sams, noting the presence of the
“Clara motif” asserts that Brahms was “surely thinking of Clara” in this song.
127

However, given the tension between Schumann and Brahms that year, such a reading
seems highly unlikely. As with the songs in Op. 32, though, it may be the case that
Brahms included the Clara motif as a veiled reference to Julie. The song was a favorite
of baritone Julius Stockhausen, who performed it in many of his concerts.
128

Brahms’s other two Daumer settings from (or before) 1868 are from his Hafis
collections. “Liebesglut” (Op. 47, no. 2) reads, in part: “How can I conceal this wild
flame, and all the sorrows that torment me.” Sams, noting that the rhyme scheme is a
ghasal, in which every other line, plus one additional line, ends with the same rhyme
scheme, writes: “the effort of finding a rhyme has weakened the sense of the words,
leaving only a feeling of passionate yet prostrate self-abasement. The setting sounds
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
126
R. Boros, “Petöfi — in der Vertonung von Brahms,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae 8 (1966): 391. The most famous Petöfi poem to be “translated” by Daumer and set by
Brahms is “O schöne Nacht” (Op. 92, no. 1).
127
Sams, 133.
128
Hofmann and Fürst, 19.
216!
commensurately convoluted. Perhaps this is another private and personal confession
about Brahms’s life and loves; its intense artificiality is palpable, even in perfect
performance.”
129
Sams’s reading notwithstanding, the present author finds “Liebesglut”
to indeed convey the passion of Hafiz’s poem, likely inspired by Brahms’s feelings for
Julie. At the same time, the song clearly functioned for Brahms as an exploration of
poetic form and genre.
“Botschaft” (Op. 47, no. 1) is a more direct setting of a surprisingly optimistic
text that ends: “now he [the unfortunate lover] can hope for a glorious revival, because
you, sweet one, are thinking of him.”
130
Brahms expresses this optimism with a lovely
climax on Holde (“sweet one”). Although “Botschaft” is more reflective and lacks the
dance-like quality of the Liebeslieder, composed a year later, its directness and hopeful
spirit point in their direction. If the song represents Brahms’s hope for a loving
relationship with Julie, it is less urgently passionate than the despair of “Herbstgefühl”
or the exuberance of the Liebeslieder.
While many of Brahms’s other songs from 1868 deal with themes of hoped-for
and unrequited love, and some are quite touching, one gets the sense that Brahms is
continuing to explore genre, perhaps with his feelings for Julie and other past loves in
the background, rather than pouring out his heart. Brahms may have also had
practical matters in mind: he had a backlog of older, unpublished songs, many on Volk-
related texts or themes. After the success of the Requiem and the Op. 43 songs, he
knew he had a ready market. Publishing four volumes of songs in two months is no
small feat, and it seems that Brahms composed some of his songs to round out sets of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
129
Sams, 139.
130
Ibid., 137-38.
217!
songs he had on the shelf. As will be discussed below, his text choices, with their mix
of German, Persian, and especially central European works, all in German translation,
speaks to other concerns.
Brahms’s feelings for Julie, whatever they were that year, seem less
foregrounded in his 1868 song output. Perhaps Brahms felt betrayed by Clara
Schumann’s defensive reaction to his February 2 letter that year, in which he hinted at
his feelings for Julie but also suggested that she pull back from her performing career.
Perhaps, after his outpouring of emotion in late 1867 and early 1868, he saw little of
Julie that summer and thought that he might be getting over her.
It is possible, on the other hand, that Brahms composed at least some of the
Daumer settings of Op. 57 in 1868, in which case his feelings for Julie then would
seem to have been quite strong. The poems Brahms set in the “bouquet”—five from
Frauenbilder und Huldigungen, two from Polydora, and one from Hafis—are among the
most overly erotic texts he ever set. Not surprisingly, the songs were controversial and
even opposed. Elizabet von Herzogenberg, one of the staunchest defenders of the
songs, wrote to Brahms: “You think me prudish, and it is useless to defend myself,
although nothing could be more unjust. If you only knew how many lances I have
broken for your Daumer songs, even the much-abused Unbewegte laue Luft.”
131
As
Swafford notes, “If 1868 is their date, they show the kind of fantasies occupying him
near the denouement of an infatuation that seemed to possess him even as he
recognized its unreality.”
132
Further musicological research may confirm the date of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
131
Johannes Brahms, The Herzogenberg Correspondence, ed. Max Kalbeck, trans. Hannah Bryant
(London: John Murray, 1909), 34.
132
Swafford, 341-42.
218!
composition. If 1868 is confirmed, then the texts that Brahms chose and the ardor of
his settings would confirm the intensity of his feelings for Julie Schumann that
summer.
While the specific nature of Brahms’s feelings for Julie Schumann in 1868 may
never be known, his feelings were rekindled—again!—in the summer of 1869. As
noted above, both Brahms and Julie were in Baden-Baden starting around May 9.
Julie was in better health that summer, and as charming as ever. On April 28, Clara
Schumann wrote to Brahms: “I found Julie looking much better and her old trouble
seems to have disappeared. She is able to work and run about, etc., etc.”
133
In her diary
entry from the same day, Schumann noted that “Julie was as merry and dear as ever,
there is a charm about her which is irresistible and at the same time she has depth of
feeling which draws one to her.”
134
One imagines that Julie, now betrothed to
Marmorito, may have exuded a certain confidence, which perhaps rendered all the
more attractive. Julie was now twenty-four, an entirely appropriate age for Brahms to
imagine courting and marrying her. After losing much of his welcome at the Schumann
residence for two summers, Brahms’s friendship relationship with Clara Schumann
was now restored. Thus, he was able to see more of Julie, to whom Clara said he was
especially nice. In all these ways, it seems that Julie rekindled the composer’s romantic
imagination. Whether he simply thought of her as a fantasy or imagined that he was
laying the groundwork for actually courting and possibly marrying her is uncertain.
What is certain is that his feelings for Julie were a significant factor in inspiring the
charming, lovely, and quintessentially Viennese Liebeslieder waltzes.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
133
April 28, 1869. Litzmann, Letters, 236.
134
April 28, 1869. Litzmann, Artist’s Life, 265.
219!
In conclusion, the exact nature and duration of Brahms’s affections for Julie
Schumann will probably never be known. It seems that he had a certain interest in her
in 1861, when he dedicated the Variations to her and so insistently and jocularly invited
Clara to visit with her. Certainly the dedication and the tone of the letters were
unusual, although Brahms and Clara Schumann were still on warmer terms than they
would be in 1868. Julie seems likely to have been the romantic inspiration behind
Brahms’s Daumer and Platen settings of 1864. Brahms’s feelings for Julie, including
his anxiety that she was not interested in him, were probably among the primary
inspirations for Brahms’s songs of 1867. Moreover, they may have played a part in the
foulness of his moods in the Schumann household that summer. Brahms’s concern
about Julie’s ill health also seems to be at the core of the tragic mood of “Herbstgefühl.”
Brahms also expressed his concern for her health, which suffered a terrible setback at
the end of 1867, by criticizing Clara Schumann for neglecting her daughter for her
professional ambitions; he intimated to her his feelings for her daughter in the same
February 1868 letter in which he suggested that she cease her performing career. The
frostiness of his relationship with Clara Schumann lasted for most of the year,
including the Requiem premiere in April. It only stopped the weekend that Julie told
Clara of her betrothal to Count Marmorito. Brahms’s feelings for Julie were probably
a significant factor in Brahms’s prolific and often passionate song output in 1868, when
he published four song collections. Daumer’s poetry provided an important outlet for
these feelings, but no more significant than the translations by Wenzig and other poetic
sources. It is possible, however, that Brahms also composed at least some of the Op. 57
Daumer songs, whose forthright eroticism caused scandal, while inspired by Julie in
1868. In any event, Brahms’s feelings for Julie climaxed during the summer of 1869,
220!
resulting in the Liebeslieder. They were dashed on July 11, after which he composed the
Rhapsodie.

221!
CHAPTER 9
BRAHMS AND LIBERALISM

Brahms’s relationship to liberalism in 1880s Vienna has been documented,
albeit not without controversy, by Margaret Notley in her 1993 article “Brahms as
Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna” and her 2007
book Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism.
1

Brahms’s relationship with liberal political thought in earlier decades, however, has
received little attention. Moveover, Brahms’s associations with the divergent
expressions of liberalism in Prussian Germany, Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, and other
German-speaking lands has not been substantially investigated. This chapter outlines
liberalism in Prussian Germany and the Hapsburg Empire, with a focus on the 1860s,
and situates Brahms’s Liebeslieder in relation to broader strands of liberal political
thought.

BRAHMS AND GERMAN LIBERALISM IN GERMANY

During the Vormärz period (before 1848), liberalism became a potent force in
German-speaking lands and indeed throughout much of central Europe. Liberals in
the 1840s advocated for constitutional reform and general social uplift. They were
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Notley, “Brahms as Liberal,” Lateness in Brahms.
222!
successful at working with local and regional governments to achieve liberal reforms.
2

The revised Prussian constitution of 1848, issued during the National Assembly (Bund)
in Frankfurt, met numerous liberal demands in an effort to build support for the
Prussian position at the assembly.
3

The kleindeutsch solution to the problem of German unification, first sketched
out by Heinrich von Gagern in 1846, appealed primarily to Protestant liberal deputies
at the Assembly.
4
Catholics and Austrians opposed it because a Germany that included
Austria would have a Catholic majority but a Germany without Austria would not.
Catholics were also concerned about state interference in domains that had been
traditionally those of the church, such as education and control over church lands.
The National Assembly, however, failed to achieve either German unification
or liberal constitutional reform. Moreover, the Hapsburgs succeeded in quashing the
numerous revolts that erupted throughout their empire. After a brief period of
uncertainty, repressive policies were implemented in Prussia and in the Hapsburg
Empire alike. By the late 1850s, however, liberalism was again on the rise. Liberals
won significant victories in the Landtage (parliaments) in Prussia and other states.
Even relatively conservative states such as Bavaria saw the rise of vocal liberal factions.
One observer in 1858 noted a “happy sense of relief” that was enveloping the land.
5

The reinvigorated liberal movement of the late 1850s, though, was different
than its earlier iteration from the more idealistic Vormärz days. North German
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 51
(May 1971): 119.
3
John Breuilly, Austria, Prussia, and the Making of Germany, 1806-1871 (Harlow: Pearson, 2002), 52.
4
Ibid., 52-53.
5
Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
95.
223!
liberalism was a now distinctly middle class phenomenon. The agenda centered on
economic development and protection of class interests, not constitutional reform and
social emancipation. According to Michael Gugel, “liberalism lost its original
progressive, emancipatory characters and became an exclusive, bürgerlich class
movement.”
6
In the 1860s, middle class liberals became interested in working class
issues, but primarily as a way of protecting their own interests. Liberals were anxious
that universal suffrage would undermine the influence of the cultured elite. (This
“universal” suffrage was for men only; women’s suffrage was not seriously considered.)
The liberals’ concerns were justified: changes to voting rules in 1867 indeed
empowered not only working class Germans but also Catholics and ethnic Poles (see
below).
7
Liberal interests diverged more sharply from those of the working class after
1866.
8

Liberals also saw the middle class as the carrier of German Bildung (education,
or cultivated character) and values. As Schulze expressed it in 1862, “Because we must
have Mittelstand in Germany through which our character, consciousness, and
education can develop according to the deepest roots of Germany’s nature as a Volk—
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Michael Gugel, in Industrieller Aufstieg und bürgerliche Herrschaft: Sozioökonomische Interessen und
politische Ziele des liberalen Bürgertums im Preußen zur Zeit des Verfassungskonflikts 1857-1867 (Cologne: Pahl-
Rugenstein Verlag, 1975), summarized by Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and
the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2004), 13. Gross, 12, notes that with the rise of industrialization, the rise of the working class, and the
demise of petit bourgeoisie, liberals rejected their original goals and/or reinterpreted them to protect
social status. Lothan Gall, in his 1975 essay “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’: Zur Charakter
und Entwicklung der liberalen Bewegung in Deutschland,” Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324-56,
similarly argued that the 1848 revolution transformed liberalism from a constitutional movement that
was committed to a bürgerliche Gesellschaft (“classless society of burghers”) into a bourgeois ideology
centered on economic development and free-market capitalism. Also see Sheehan, Liberalism, 84-90.
7
Sheehan, Liberalism, 107.
8
Ibid., 94.
224!
for that reason we need a working class whose existence is no longer in danger.”
9

German liberals supported German cultural activities, such as singing groups and
gymnastic societies, with the intent of continuing to develop a sense of German Volk
that liberals would embody and represent.
10
Protestant societies such as the Deutscher
Protestantenverein, founded in 1863, aimed to further national and liberal goals from a
religious perspective.
Liberals were anxious about the rise of Chancellor Bismarck and Prussian
militarism.
11
When Bismarck took office in 1862, he declared: “Not by parliamentary
speeches and majority votes are the great questions of the day determined—that was
the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.” Bismarck made it clear
that he had little use for liberalism in Prussia: “Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden may
indulge in liberalism.”
12
Liberals opposed Bismarck with a barrage of parliamentary
measures, such as withholding approval for his budget requests. While some Germans
longed for a modern-day Caesar, an “armed redeemer who will lead it to the promised
land of national unity and independence, even if we must go through the Red Sea of an
all-out war,” liberals were hesitant about a military solution to the “German
problem.”
13
Even in 1866, on the eve of the war, liberals remained ambivalent about
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Ibid., 93-94.
10
Ibid., 97.
11
Ibid., 115.
12
Snyder, 68.
13
Karl Bollman, quoted in Sheehan, Liberalism, 117. Sheehan, Liberalism, 117, notes that this idea
also found popular expression in Theodor Mommsen’s recent volume on Roman history.
225!
their leader. While they supported a kleindeutsch solution, they were anxious about
Bismarck’s consolidation of power and his authoritarian approach.
14

The swift Prussian victory over the Austrian armies at Königgratz, however,
quickly brought liberals in line behind their historic chancellor. “It is a wonderful
feeling,” Theodor Mommsen wrote in 1866, “to be present when world history turns a
corner. It is no longer a hope but a fact that Germany has a future and that the future
will be determined by Prussia.”
15
Liberals came to see Bismarck as the leader who
could finally turn their dreams into realities. As James Sheehan explains,

The impact of these great events on the liberal movement must be seen
against the backdrop of the liberals’ own theoretical certainty and
tactical paralysis. Suddenly, the victory of Prussian arms and
Bismarckian statecraft seemed to make possible what liberals themselves
had failed to attain: a unified nation, a constitutional system, and a set of
uniform laws governing social and economic life.… liberals wanted to
believe that a new political age had dawned, an age in which goals of
liberal society, Volk, and Staat might be successfully pursued.… Once
again, as in the spring of 1848 and the first years of the “new era,” men
basked in the warm promise of a liberal future.
16

Sheehan identifies 1866-77 as the “Liberal Era.” After 1866, liberals
retroactively approved Bismarck’s budget requests from the preceding years and were
able to achieve many of their desired reforms.
17
Bismarck, too, was able to coopt liberal
support in a relationship that was at once antagonistic and symbiotic. By the mid-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
Sheehan, Liberalism, 119, writes: “Even on the eve of the German civil war… a great many liberals
had begun to feel that they had played all of their cards without winning the game.”
15
Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte (Berlin: Weidmannsche Büchhandlung, 1866), quoted in
ibid., 123.
16
Sheehan, Liberalism, 121.
17
These included freedom of resistance (1867), increased freedom to marry (1868), new liberal
trade regulations (1869), and other reforms between 1872 and 1876. See ibid., 124, 135.
226!
1870s, liberals came to be viewed by the ascendant progressive party (Fortschrittspartei)
as too complicit with the state and started to lose their influence.
18

Following new voting rules in 1867, which extended the right to vote to all
adult men with no property requirement, there was a resurgence of Catholic political
influence.
19
This, together with other factors in the 1860s and ’70s, led to the
Kulturkampf campaign to persecute Catholics, many of whom were Polish, and curtail
their power.
20
It is unclear to what extent Kulturkampf (c. 1871-78) was a liberal idea
that was enacted by Bismarck, or a Bismarckian idea that found traction among
liberals.
21
Bismarck used Kulturkampf as a tool to attempt to “Germanize” the
kingdom’s peripheral Catholic populations, especially Polish speakers in the East.
22

Liberals, according to Michael Gross, “conceived of the anti-Catholic campaign as
nothing less than a war to save the new empire from its most powerful enemy within
its own territorial borders.”
23
In any event, liberals were strong supporters of
Kulturkampf, and liberalism in the new German Empire came to be closely associated
with anti-Catholic sentiment.
24

Brahms’s political views in the 1860s and early ’70s were typical of north
German liberals of the time, but without the anti-Catholic and anti-Polish fervor that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
18
This was especially seen in the Catholics’ Center Party. See ibid., 125.
19
Ibid., 141.
20
The Kulturkampf effort included a series of laws passed in the early 1870s. These culminated in the
Prussian May Laws of 1873 that restricted Catholic influence in education, control of clergy, and other
matters. Ibid., 136.
21
Some scholars have argued that Kulturkampf was part of a strategy by Bismarck to coopt liberals’
interests and agendas by aligning them with the state, thus avoiding having to enact other liberal
reforms. Others see Kulturkampf as a move by liberals to solidify their support. See Gross, 6-7.
22
Ibid., 8.
23
Ibid., 3.
24
Sheehan, Liberalism, 159, notes that a new kind of anti-Semitism emerged in the 1870s that
identified Jews with liberalism.
227!
led to Kulturkampf. Though staunch in his support for Bismarck, he was skeptical
about war as the means to achieve German unification. He had no fondness for
Catholicism but supported Polish aspirations.
Brahms sometimes expressed his support for the chancellor in distinctly
unpolitic ways. In spring 1868, shortly before the Requiem premiere, Brahms and
Julius Stockhausen were on tour in Denmark, which had recently been defeated by
Prussia and lost the duchies of Holstein and Schleswig.
25
At a party hosted by Niels
Gade (1817-90) in Brahms and Stockhausen’s honor, Brahms extolled Bismarck’s
virtues and suggested that a museum devoted to Denmark’s greatest sculptor be
moved to Berlin—much to the shock of the assembled company and Danish local
media. Brahms’s tour was cut short.
26
On the other hand, Brahms was skeptical about
Bismarck’s plan for a military solution to the German question. During preparations
for the war in 1866, Brahms wrote to Allgeyer, “Whether they fight for thirty or for
seven years, it will be fought as little for humanity now as when they already fought
for thirty and for seven years.”
27

Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (Op. 45) can be seen, among other things, as a
perfect embodiment and expression of 1860s north German liberal values. Brahms
built the libretto for the Requiem out of passages from Luther’s translation of the Bible,
an iconic German text. In doing so, he made use of favorite motet texts that had been
set by German baroque composers such as Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) and Johann
Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). He also continued the Lutheran tradition of self-directed
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Denmark lost the territories to Prussia in the Second Schleswig War, 1864. See Snyder, 70.
26
Swafford, 318.
27
Orel, Johannes Brahms und Julius Allgeyer, 39, quoted and translated in Beller-McKenna, 76.
228!
Bible study, seen, for example, in Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss’s selection of texts
for his sarcophagus; these texts were set by Schütz in Musikalische Exequien (1635-36).
Brahms also incorporated German baroque musical idioms, including chorales (such
as “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten” and/or “Freu’ dich sehr, O meine Seele”),
fugues, and the Lutheran funerary tradition represented by works such as Musikalische
Exequien and Bach’s Cantata No. 106. Brahms packaged all of these references in a
choral-orchestral communal music experience that was widely seen as the fulfillment of
Robert Schumann’s prophesy, published in 1853 in Neue Bahnen. The Requiem
advanced a specifically Protestant, north German, educationally cultivated, historically
resonant, Mittelstand vision of the German Volk that aligned with a kleindeutsch
understanding of German national identity and a pre-Kulturkampf Prussian liberal
agenda.
28

After Prussia’s victory in Königgratz, just after Brahms finished composing
most of the Requiem, German liberals aligned themselves more closely with the
chancellor. With the promise of victory over the French in 1870-71, reversing
Napoleon’s humiliating defeats of Prussia and other German entities earlier in the
century, liberals joined with progressives to rally behind and celebrate Bismarck.
29

Brahms’s own patriotism reached a fevered pitch; he even talked about joining the
troops. Brahms’s Triumphlied (Op. 55, 1870-71) expresses the uncomplicated
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Liberals in the Grand Duchy of Baden, where Brahms spent his summers, struggled with issues
including: should Baden support a Prussian-led Germany? To what degree should the Duchy be hostile
to Catholicism? Should the Duchy privilege economic freedom or protectionism? See Sheehan, 99.
Liberal issues were an important part of the political discussion in both Baden and Bavaria, where
Catholics organized into the so-called Patriot Party. See ibid., 126.
29
Sheehan notes, “Both the liberal Faktionen in Berlin celebrated the triumph of Prussian power in
the Reichsgründung and both were reluctant to challenge Bismarck’s conduct of German foreign affairs
after 1871.” Ibid., 134.
229!
nationalism that accompanied the defeat of France and the establishment of the
Reichsgründung in Versailles.
30

BRAHMS AND GERMAN LIBERALISM IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

While Brahms’s Requiem and Triumphlied track the changing outlook of north
German liberals from before the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 to the establishment of
the German Empire in 1871, Brahms’s other compositions at the time reflect his
engagement with other political realities, especially those of Vienna, the city that he
would increasingly call home. Brahms’s gradual move from Hamburg to Vienna was
accompanied by an expansion of his political outlook to include issues of concern to
German liberals in the capital of the Hapsburg Empire.
While Prussian liberals were focused on issues of class, culture, and religion,
with worries about ethnic Poles folded into broader anxieties about Catholics, German
liberals in Austria had additional concerns relating to ethnic identity and imperial
structure: self-determination and federalism versus hegemony and centralism. Like
their northern counterparts, whose influence in the Prussian-German government
peaked between 1866 and 1877, German liberals in Austria were the largest faction in
the Austrian parliament from 1867 to 1879.
31
They represented the interests of the
German-speaking middle class, supported civil freedoms and constitutional reform,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
30
See Snyder, 73.
31
Robert Kahn, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy,
1848-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 88.
230!
opposed federalism (ceding autonomy to other ethnic groups in the empire), and
sought to curtail the influence of the Catholic Church.
32
In the words of John Mason:

Drawn from the business and professional classes, [German liberals in
Austria] supported laissez-faire economic policy, efficient administration,
restrictions on the church, improved education and a limited franchise.
Under two aristocratic brothers, Karl Auersperg (Prime Minister, 1867-
68) and Adolf Auersperg (Prime Minister, 1871-79) the Austrian
parliament passed an impressive programme of liberal reforms, similar
to that put through by Bismarck in Germany. Anti-clericalism stood at
the heart of the programmes: education and marriage were brought into
the secular sphere, legal equality of all denominations was recognized
and the government won limited control over the legal status of the
Catholic Church.
33

The internal politics of the Austrian empire were shaped by its declining
position vis-à-vis Prussia and other European powers. While the Hapsburgs were able
in 1850 to force the Prussians to recognize the Austrian-led German Confederation,
34

their relative influence faded in subsequent decades. The empire lost most of its Italian
holdings in the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859.
35
Bismarck’s diplomatic cunning and
military prowess, combined with Prussia’s faster industrialization and economic
growth, led to Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866.
36
The Austro-Hungarian
Compromise, concluded the following year, reorganized the empire as two kingdoms
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Arthur J. May, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965),
47.
33
John W. Mason, The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1867-1918, 2nd ed. (London:
Longman, 1997; first published 1985), 33.
34
The Agreement of Olmütz (known by the Prussians as the “humiliation of Olmütz”) on Nov 29,
1850, forced the Prussians to recognize the Austrian-led German Confederation. See Snyder, 65.
35
May, 28.
36
For a good description of events, see Snyder.
231!
with shared leadership and expenses for foreign policy, defense, and other mutual
concerns.
37
Franz Joseph was crowned King of Hungary, in addition to Emperor of
Austria, and the new entity was named Austria-Hungary.
38

Unlike Prussia, whose population was relatively ethnically homogeneous (with
the most notable exception of Polish speakers in the east), the Hapsburg Empire was
an ethnically diverse and politically complicated conglomeration of peoples and
institutions. As Arthur May described it, “The Hapsburg empire of 1848 consisted of a
grotesque collection of odds and ends—Austria proper, the core of the realm, Hungary,
Bohemia, parts of Italy and Poland—which by some of the strangest of political whims
had fallen into the possession of a certain dynasty, the Hapsburg.”
39
In 1869, Grant
Duff, a member of the British House of Commons, commented on the empire’s
extraordinary political complexity: “What statesman inside or outside the Empire
knows anything at all of the facts of Austria? It is a science in itself. Nay, it is half a
dozen sciences, and the ablest politician can only move timidly and tentatively like a
mule among slippery and crumbling rocks.”
40

Managing the political ambitions of such diverse entities was a challenge not
only for outsiders but also for leaders within the empire itself. In 1848, the empire was
rocked by no less than five revolutions: Hungarian, Czech, Serbian, Croat, and Italian.
Although imperial forces, coupled with a strategic foreign invasion, were able to quash
the revolts and institute repressive rule, ethnic-nationalist ambitions continued to grow.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
37
Kahn, 19.
38
Ibid., 26-27; May, 31.
39
May, 1-2.
40
From Joy to Fish, June 22, 1869, U. S. National Archives, Dept. of State, MMM, Austria,
Despatches, VIII, quoted in ibid., 46.
232!
Ethnic-nationalist leaders within the empire did not, generally speaking, seek
independent statehood. Rather, they jockeyed for increasing recognition, autonomy,
and power within the imperial framework.
41
After the Austro-Sardinian War in 1859,
the term “historical-political entities” (historisch-politischen Individualitäten) was used to
describe ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and geographical areas. Historical-political entities
recognized by the empire included the Croat, Czech, German, Italian, Magyar, Pole,
Romanian, Ruthenian, Serb, Slovak, and Slovene. Political leaders in the 1860s
attempted to find ways to channel the aspirations of these historical-political entities
without challenging the broader context of imperial control.
Imperial politics centered on privileging, and withholding privilege from,
various groups so as to preserve the balance of power and German-Austrian
hegemony.
42
Once the dual monarchy was established, imperial policies also favored
the Magyar minority in Hungary. As Robert Kahn explains, “The rule of a Magyar
minority in the Hungarian lands, based on the fiction that Hungary was not a multi-
national state, as Austria was, but, rather, a Magyar national state, was politically
tenable only if Austria, too, did not grant autonomous rights to her nationalities.”
43

In 1868, the Austrian cabinet granted additional privileges to the Poles, who
used their new powers to dominate and even “Polonize” the Ruthenian and Ukrainian
populations in Galacia. Thus coopted, the Polish elite found it in their interest to
support Austria-Hungary. Aware that Poles in Austria-Hungary enjoyed a stronger
position than their brethren Russia and Prussia, Prince Władysław Czartoryski was
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41
The Czech reformer Palacky wrote, for example, “If the Austrian Monarchy did not exist, it
would be necessary to create it quickly, in the interest of Europe and of humanity.” Quoted in May, 25.
42
Kahn., 35-38.
43
Ibid., 23. See also May, 24
233!
not alone among Polish leaders in his assertion that “the first duty of Galician Poles
was to uphold and defend the Hapsburg Monarchy as a haven of liberty between
Muscovite barbarism and Prussian militarism.”
44

At the same time, Czech leaders mounted a sustained effort to secure greater
rights and privileges. In May 1867, Czech leaders attended a Pan-Slav congress in
Russia. The following June, Czechs boycotted Franz Joseph’s visit to Prague and, the
next month, staged massive demonstrations. Czech soldiers refused to serve the
imperial army against Czech interests, and street protests shut down Prague for six
months. In September, Czech deputies in the Bohemian Diet published a detailed
Declaration of Rights and Expectations. Viennese authorities, however, offered only
token concessions and pursued a policy of persecution.
45

Following Prussia’s victory over France in 1871, Franz Joseph proposed a
rapprochement with the Bohemian Diet as part of an attempt to solidify domestic
support for his increasingly weak regime. He offered to be crowned, thus giving the
Czechs a position in the empire comparable to that of the Magyars. Against stiff
reaction from German liberals, though, as well as from Magyars who did not want to
compromise their privileged position, Franz Joseph rescinded the offer. Czech leaders
were furious. Palacky, who had earlier spoken strongly in defense of the empire,
declared: “the Dual Monarchy is a despotism ruled by Germans and Magyars, who,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
May, 52-53.
45
Ibid., 51-52.
234!
like the Mongols, betray the spirit of the conquistadors.”
46
German liberals took over
Austrian foreign policy and continued a policy of persecuting the Czechs.
47

In addition to the Poles and Czechs, other groups also attempted to gain
autonomy during the aftermath of Austria’s defeat by Prussia. Italians formed patriotic
societies, sent entreaties to the emperor, and boycotted the Viennese parliament from
1867 to 1877. Croats also sought an autonomous state. In 1869, a revolution broke out
in southern Dalmatia.
48

While the Prussian government attempted to disenfranchise Poles through
Kulturkampf, management of “historical-political entities” in Austria and Austria-
Hungary was far more complex. Some groups, like the Magyars and Poles, were given
powers that they used to dominate their neighbors. Others, like the Czechs, Yugoslavs,
and Italians, as well as non-Magyar Hungarians and non-Polish Galacians, were
disenfranchised, persecuted, and/or assimilated. German liberals in Austria argued for
a strong, centralized, and German-controlled state, with concessions granted for
Magyars and Poles. They opposed a decentralized federal system that would have
granted increased autonomy to non-German and non-Magyar historical-political
entities. They also supported liberal constitutional reforms. Conservatives, often
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
Quoted in ibid., 62. Palacky also wrote: “If it is decided to reverse the natural policy of Austria, if
this empire, composed of a medley of different nationalities, refuses to accord equal rights to all, and
organized the supremacy of certain races over the others; if the Slavs are to be treated as an inferior
people, and handed over to two dominant peoples as mere material to be governed by them; then nature
will assert herself and resume her rights. An inflexible resistance will transform hope into despair, and a
peaceful into a warlike spirit; and there will be a series of conflicts and struggles of which it will be
impossible to foresee the end. We Slavs existed before Austria; and we shall continue to exist after
Austria has disappeared.” Quoted in ibid., 61-62.
47
Ibid., 62.
48
Ibid., 57-58.
235!
supported by and representing aristrocratic interests, supported a more federalist
approach that preserved aristocratic control over Crown Lands and other privileges.
49

Vienna, then, was in a state of extraordinary upheaval in the late 1860s and
early 1870s as the shock of Prussian victory was followed by massive ethnic agitation
and political reorganization. Brahms’s compositional activities after the Requiem
reflected the concerns of the city that he would increasingly call home.
It seems to be no coincidence that Brahms wrote and published his first book of
Ungarische Tänze in 1868. Brahms, of course, had had a close connection with the
Hungarian Gypsy style (Style hongrois) since his days of touring with Eduard Reményi
(c. 1828-98) in 1852-53. Hungarian violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, who Brahms met
in 1853, was another early connection to the style. During that time, in the early 1850s,
Brahms developed the notebook collection of Ungarische Volksweisen that he would use
as source material for his 1868 Ungarische Tänze and his setting of Daumer’s
“Magyarische” (Op. 46, no. 2). Once he moved to Vienna, Brahms again encountered
Hungarian Gypsy music, in a more vernacular form, played by Gypsy bands in cafes.
As Swafford describes it, Brahms “could still sit for hours under the trees at the Café
Czarda in the Prater, nursing mugs of beer and listening to gypsy bands, who seemed
to play with particular fire when the Herr Professor showed up.”
50

Brahms premiered the first book of his Ungarische Tänze with Clara Schumann
on November 1, 1868, the day after Schumann found out about Julie’s engagement.
The fact that Brahms finally arranged, wrote out, and published the Ungarische Tänze in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
49
Kahn, 37.
50
Swafford, 343.
236!
1868 should be read, at least in part, as acknowledgment of Hungary’s improved
position within the dual monarchy.
1868 was also, as discussed above, a banner year for song composition for
Brahms. As illustrated in the figure 6, the twelve songs that Brahms composed in 1868
or as late as 1868 (excluding the Daumer settings of Op. 57), set poems from the
following nationalities or source languages:

237!
FIGURE 6: Source Nationalities/Languages of Brahms’s 1868 Songs

4 German
• “Die Schale der Vergessenheit” (Op. 46, no. 3), by Ludwig Hölty, ed. Voss,
from Musenalmanach (first printed 1777)
• “An die Nachtigall” (Op. 46, no. 4), by Hölty, ed. Voss, from Musenalmanach
Gedichte (1804)
• Untitled (“O liebliche Wangen,” Op. 47, no. 4), by Paul Fleming, from Geist-
und weltliche Poemata (1660)
• “Wiegenlied” (Op. 49, no. 4), from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” anon., edited
by Ludwig Achem von Arnim and Brentano in Das deutsche Kinderbuch (1857),
and by Georg Scherer, Die schönsten deutschen Volkslieder (1868)
3 Czech/Bohemian
• “Der Gang zum Liebchen” (Op. 48, no. 1), trans. Wenzig, from Slawische
Volkslieder (1830)
• “Gold überwiegt die Liebe” (Op. 48, no. 4), trans. Wenzig, from Slawische
Volkslieder (1830)
• “Sehnsucht” (Op. 49, no. 3), from Westslawischer Märchenschatz (1857)
2 Persian
• “Botschaft” (Op. 47, no. 1), by Hafiz, trans. Daumer, from Hafis
• “Liebesglut” Op. 47, no. 2), by Hafiz, trans. Daumer, from Hafis
2 Italian
• Untitled (“Am Sonntag Morgen zierlich angetan”; Op. 49, no. 1), trans. Hayes,
from Italienisches Liederbuch (1860)
• “An ein Veilchen” (Op. 49, no., 2), by Giovan Battista Felice Zappi, trans.
Hölty, ed. Voss, from Gedichte (1804)
1 Hungarian
• “Magyarisch” (Op. 46, no. 2), by Petöfi (see below), trans. Daumer, from
Polydora (1855)

These songs present a reasonable, though incomplete, reflection of the
multinational makeup of the Hapsburg Empire, now Austria-Hungary. Germans,
Bohemians/Czechs, Italians, and Hungarians all were part of the empire and all were
238!
striving at the time for greater recognition and power. Brahms did not include Polish
texts in these collections but would feature them prominently in the following year’s
Liebeslieder.
Brahms’s inclusion of these non-German texts suggests an affirmation, or
honoring, of the diverse historical-political entities that comprised Austria-Hungary.
As noted above, Brahms’s completion of the Ungarische Tänze in 1868 seems to honor
the Hungarians’ new position within the Dual Monarchy. “Magyarische,” completed
the same year, similarly tips the hat. Brahms set the poem to a tune that he had
included, with figured bass, in the same collection of Hungarian folksong melodies that
he had used as source material for the Ungarische Tänze. The setting does not, however,
incorporate the Style hongrois that animates the dances and would, in smoothed-out
fashion, underlie his later Zigeunerlieder (Op. 103 and Op. 112, nos. 3-6, c. 1887-88).
51

Rather, it sounds almost like a hymn.
Brahms probably did not know that “Magyarische,” like the other fifty poems
that Daumer included without attribution in the “Magyarische” section of Polydora,
was written by the Hungarian poet and revolutionary leader Sándor Petöfi.
52
The
original poem, which J. Turóczi-Trostler has identified as “Barna menyecskének,” was
written in June or July 1846 and included in the second volume of Petöfi’s Összes
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
See Valerie Errante, “Brahms Civilizes the Gypsy: The Zigeunerlieder and Their Sources,” The
Pendragon Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 46-73, and Seth Houston, “Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder:
Naturalization, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Race and Feeling in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna,”
paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Brahms Society, New York, NY, March 25,
2012.
52
Boros, 391.
239!
Költeményei, published in Pest in 1848.
53
Petöfi was one of the leading voices in the
Hungarian literary movement leading up to the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. His
Talpra Magyar became an anthem for the movement. Petöfi served as aide-de-camp to
the Transylvanian general Jozef Bem and is believed to have died in the Battle of
Segesvár in July 1849.
54
According to Boros, Daumer significantly condensed many of
the Petöfi poems that he included in Polydora, stripping them of dissonance and realism
and focusing instead on the rapture and pain of love.
55
Although Brahms probably did
not know that the original poet was closely affiliated with Hungarian radical politics,
and he did not draw on the musical “lexicon” of the Style hongrois, Brahm’s inclusion of
a Hungarian poem and his setting it to a tune from his Ungarische Volksweisen collection
reinforces his implicit recognition of the Hungarians’ new status in the dual monarchy.
Brahms’s settings of Wenzig translations, on the other hand, had clear political
implications. Wenzig, who had served the Hapsburg administration as director of
Czech schools, was known as an advocate of Czech linguistic rights. In 1857, he had
written a letter to Franz Joseph calling for increased attention to developing national
cultures in the school system. He also helped draft an 1864 law on language equality in
the schools. Wenzig is best known in music for writing the libretti for Bedřich
Smetana’s patriotic operas Dalibor (1867) and Libuše (1872). Wenzig’s libretti, in
German, were translated into Czech by Ervin Špindler.
56
Brahms would return to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53
Turóczi-Trostler, “G. Fr. Daumer, hegeliánus író es Petöfi-fordító,” Világirodalmi Evkönyv
(Budapest, 1953), quoted in ibid., 393. For the original poem, see Sándor Petöfi, Petöfi Sándor Összes
Költeményei: 1842-46, vol. 2 (Budapest: Emich Gustáv Sajátya, 1848), 291.
54
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Sandor Petofi,” accessed July 21, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/454072/Sandor-Petofi.
55
Boros, 392-93.
56
Dalibor Janota and Jan P. Kučera, Malá Encyklopedie České Opery (Prague: Paseka, 1999), 295.
240!
Wenzig’s translations in 1877 after hearing the music of Antonín Dvořák. His later
settings, unlike those considered here, would try to convey a sense of the acoustic
properites of the Slavic poetry.
57

Brahms’s 1868 Wenzig settings would have been understood as lending support
to the Czech cause.
58
In doing so, they went against the grain of prevailing German
Austrian liberal thought. The timing of the songs, composed at the height of the Czech
uprising and within a few months of the Dalibor premiere in Prague on May 16, 1868,
underscores their message.
In the Liebeslieder, composed the following year, Brahms turned his attention to
a different historical-political entity in the empire, this one also represented (and soon
to be persecuted) in Prussia: the Poles. The eighteen songs in the Liebeslieder, all using
texts from Daumer’s Polydora, are distributed as follows:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
57
Loges, “Foreign Accent,” 85. Brahms would also set translations of Serbian and Slavic poetry by
Siegfried Kapper.
58
Loges notes that both Wenzig and Siegfried Kapper “sought specifically to educate their German
readership in both the ideas and the unique aural qualities of Slavic poetry. This task had an underlying
agenda—to persuade their Austro-Hungarian rulers that the smaller satellite groups within the Empire
deserved, if not autonomy, then at least a degree of political recognition.” Loges also notes that Germans
had been aware of the nationalist implications of Czech poetry since before the 1848 revolutions. Ibid.,
75, 81.
241!
FIGURE 7: Source Nationalities/Languages of Brahms’s Liebeslieder, Op. 52

8 Russian-Polish
• 2. Am Gesteine rauscht die Flut
• 3. O die Frauen
• 4. Wie die Abends
• 10. O, wie sanft
• 12. Schlosser auf!
• 13. Vögelein
• 14. Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar
• 15. Nachtigall, sie singt so schön
5 Hungarian
• 6. Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel
• 9. Am Donaustrande
• 16. Ein dunkeler Schacht
• 17. Nicht wandle
• 18. Es bebet
3 Polish
• 7. Wohl schön bewandt
• 8. Wenn so lind
• 11. Nein, es ist nicht
2 Russian
• 1. Rede, Mädchen
• 5. Die grüne Hopfenranke

As noted above, Poles were given special status in Austria-Hungary in 1868,
not at the level of the Magyars but much more than was afforded to any other non-
German, non-Magyar group in the empire. Starting then, the status of the Poles was
much better in Austria-Hungary than it was in Russia or Prussia. In Russia, a
242!
sustained Polish insurrection in 1863-64 had been quashed. Russian authorities
successfully pitted Polish peasants against the Polish aristocracy, who owned most of
the land and led the nationalist struggle. Russian Poles were placed under the
dictatorial jurisdiction of Mikhail Muravev, nicknamed the “Hangman of Vilna,” and
assimilated into the Empire.
59
In Prussia, Poles were soon to be persecuted through
Kulturkampf policies.
Brahms may have chosen to include a large number of Polish, Russian-Polish,
and Russian poems in the Liebeslieder as a way to honor the Poles’ new status in
Austria-Hungary, much as he did with the Hungarians in Ungarische Tänze and
“Magyarische” the previous year. Knowing that his songs would be sung and played
throughout Germany as well as in Austria, Brahms also seems to have been adding a
voice of moderation and accommodation to the Prussian cultural landscape. In the
Liebeslieder, composed between Ein deutsches Requiem and Triumphlied, two works that
reinforce north German liberalism, Brahms seems to have outlined a position of Polish
accommodation that departed significantly from the north German liberal agenda.

SHIFTING ORIGINS OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLES

Through selecting and foregrounding central European poems and musical
styles in 1868 and 1869, then, Brahms added a voice of accommodation and respect for
the political aspirations of non-dominant “historical-political entities” that departed
from prevailing liberal positions in both Austria-Hungary and Prussian Germany. In
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
59
Lucjan Blit, The Origins of Polish Socialism: The History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist Party, 1878-
1886 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1-10.
243!
addition, Brahms’s songs from 1868 to 1869, culminating in the Liebeslieder, may reflect
changing understandings of the origin of the Indo-European language group and
peoples. As discussed above, Daumer clearly positioned Polydora in relation to
philologically based narratives of German linguistic and ethnic history. In the fourteen
years between the publication of Polydora and the composition of Brahms’s Liebeslieder,
these narratives changed significantly.
Although most scholars in the 1850s and early 1860s agreed that the origin of
the Indo-European language group and its associated peoples was in Asia, either near
the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus or near Kashmir, this was starting to be questioned.
As early as 1851, Robert Gordon Latham (1812-88), in the prolegomena and
epilegomena to his annotated edition of Tacitus’s Germania, left the question
intentionally open. He wondered whether the Indo-Europeans had migrated by a
northern or southern route, whether from Asia to Europe or vice versa.
60

In 1862, Latham rocked the philological world with his proposition that Europe,
not Asia, was the birthplace of the Indo-Europeans and their languages. In Elements of
Comparative Philology, he wrote:

Has the Sanskrit reached India from Europe, or have the
Lithuanic, the Slavonic, the Latin, the Greek, and the German reached
Europe from India? If historical evidence be wanting, then à priori
presumptions must be considered.
I submit that history is silent, and that the presumptions are in
favour of the smaller class having been deduced from the area of the
larger rather than vice versa. If so, the situs of the Sanskrit is on the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
60
Robert Gordon Latham, prolegomena and epilegomena to Cornelius Tacitus, The Germania of
Tacitus, with Ethnological Dissertations and Notes by R. G. Latham., M.D., F.R.S. (London: Taylor, Walton,
and Maberly, 1851). Latham also addressed these questions in The Native Races of the Russian Empire
(London: H. Bailliere, 1854).
244!
eastern, or south-eastern, frontier of the Lithuanic, and its origin is
European.
As I know of no one else who maintains this hypothesis, and as
the opposite doctrine of the Asiatic origin of the so-called Indo-
European languages is dominant throughout all the realms of philology,
I must be allowed to explain what I meant by it.
61

In the later 1860s, scholarly consensus shifted toward the theory of European
origin.
62
Theodor Benfey (1809-81), in his preface to August Fick’s 1868 Wörterbuch der
indogermanischen Grundsprache, declared: “Since geological investigations have made it
certain that Europe has been the abode of man for inconceivable ages, all the reasons
which have hitherto been regarded as proving that the Indo-Europeans came from
Asia, and which really have their basis in the prejudices instilled into us with our
earliest education, fall to the ground.”
63
Benfey elaborated his views the following year
in his eight-hundred-page tome Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und orientalischen
Philologie in Deutschland. Here, he argued that Indo-Europeans could not have
originated in Asia because they do not share common words for specifically Asian
animals such as lions, tigers, and camels; therefore, must have encountered those
animals after they separated.
64
Lazarus Geiger (1829-70) found Benfey’s conclusions
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
61
Latham, Elements of Comparative Philology (London: Woodfall and Kinder, 1862), 611.
62
Questions, though, remained. W. D Whitney’s, Language and the Study of Language (1867) while
noting more doubts about the hypothesis of Asian origin, argued against ground for any conclusion
whatsoever. See Otto Schrader, Prehistoric antiquities of the Aryan peoples, a manual of comparative philology
and the earliest culture. Being the “Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte” of O. Schrader, trans. Frank Byron
Jevons (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1890; first published 1886), 86.
63
Theodor Benfey, preface to August Fick, Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Grundsprache (Göttingen,
1868), viii-ix, quoted in Schrader, 86-87.
64
Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und orientalishen Philologie in Deutschland (Munich, 1869),
quoted in Schrader, 87.
245!
“very appropriate.”
65
Benfey added further geographical specificity in his 1875
Allgemeine Zeitung. Here, he proposed that the early Indo-Europeans lived north of the
Black Sea, between the mouth of the Danube and the Caspian Sea. The salty swamps
on the banks of the Aral and Caspian seas would explain, Benfey argued, the
familiarity with salt that linguistic evidence showed the early Indo-Europeans to have
had.
66

J. G. Cuno, in his 1869 Forschungen im Gebiete der alten Völkerkunde, vol. 1, Die
Scythen, noted that such a heterogenous group as the early Indo-Europeans must have
inhabited a very large area. The only place on earth that would have been large enough,
he argued, was northern Europe. The Indo-Europeans developed, then, at the latitude
of northern Germany and France, in an area extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the
Ural Mountains. As further support for his theory, Cuno noted especially close
linguistic ties between Lithuanian and Greek, and between Indo-European languages
and Finnish. Cuno concluded that “the primeval Indo-Europeans lived… where the
main body of them are to be found at the present day, and that the movements which
took place were from South-East Russia through the Turanian steppes to Persia, and
not, reversely, to South-East Russia.”
67

Lazarus Geiger, also in 1869, located the primeval home of the Indo-Europeans
in Germany itself. In “On the Primitive Home of the Indo-Europeans,” he wrote, “My
own present conviction, [is] that the primitive home of the Indo-Europeans is to be
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
65
Geiger, “On the Primitive Home of the Indo-Europeans,” 131.
66
Benfey, Allgemeine Zeitung (1875), 32, quoted in Schrader, 87.
67
J. G. Cuno, Forschungen im Gebiete der alten Völkerkunde, vol. 1, Die Scythen (Berlin: Gebrüder
Borntraeger,1869), quoted and discussed in Schrader, 89-90.
246!
looked for in Germany, perhaps more especially in its central and western parts.”
68

Geiger’s argument incorporated research from recently popularized ethnographic and
racial sciences, marshaling such evidence as skin color: “We are, from the ethnological
point of view, certain more justified in regarding the fair type, wherever we meet it, as
the unalloyed Indo-European type. This view favours the assumption that the Indo-
Europeans have remained most unmixed where the blonde type shows itself purest.”
69

Indians are more “alloyed,” in this scheme, because they have darker hair and darker
skin. Geiger proposed several “strata” of ethnic descent:

One of the latest strata is represented by the time when Indians and
Persians still formed one people, and which may be called the Aryan
period. An older stratus shows us the time when the Aryan people was
united with the Greeks. Let us call this the Aryo-Hellenic period. A good
deal of what has been thought to belong to the Indo-Europeans
collectively is merely Aryo-Hellenic. The Aryo-Hellenes were a highly
cultivated people in a quite different sense from the Indo-Europeans.
They had real, doubtless sacerdotal, poetry in well-developed regular
metres.
70

Geiger’s wide-ranging discussion interweaves philology with theories of, among
other things, historical forest succession. “Now for this first starting-point of the
original home of the Indo-Europeans,” he writes, “we have a tolerably good guide in
the tree vegetation, such as it is exhibited in languages which have been separated so
long as German and Sanskrit or German and Greek.” Geiger discusses oak, beech, and
birch, and incorporates evidence from excavated Danish and Dutch peat bogs. He
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Geiger, 123.
69
Ibid., 126.
70
Ibid., 131.
247!
notes that the “supersedure of the oak by the beech is notoriously neither an isolated
occurrence in Denmark nor a merely antediluvian one, or even altogether an
accomplished fact.”
71
Geiger’s philological foray also encompasses the etymology of
small creatures such as the fat dormouse, garden squirrel, and redfinch, as well as
buckwheat.
72

Geiger continues from forestry to climate:

The presumption that the primitive Indo-European stock was of
Northern origin is likewise in perfect agreement with what language
reveals to us as to the climactic conditions.… If the home of the
primitive Indo-Europeans was not Germany, it must, at least, as regards
the temperature and impression of the seasons, have fully resembled the
Germany as Tacitus still knew it.
73

Based on evidence from language to skin color to forestry, Geiger concludes that the
early Indo-Europeans inhabited either Germany or someplace climactically similar.
Brahms composed the Liebeslieder in the same year that Cuno and Geiger
published their philological findings, and just a year after Benfey. As discussed above,
the geographical provenance of the poems that Brahms set in 1868 and 1869 and the
musical style represented in the Ungarische Tänze reflect the ethnic composition of
Austria-Hungary at the time and implicitly honor the aspirations of various historical-
political entities in the realm. At the same time, these works also reaffirm a central role
for German Austrian culture, particularly Vienna, in representing and mediating these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
Ibid., 141.
72
Ibid., 133.
73
Ibid., 152-53.
248!
diverse cultures and peoples. In addition to addressing the political concerns of the day,
as tumultuous and urgent as they were, it seems that Brahms also had more existential
questions in mind. These included questions about the nature of German identity—and
indeed about the human condition.
German composers in the nineteenth century engaged deeply with
contemporary notions of national, cultural, and linguistic history. Robert Schumann’s
1843 oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri, for example, presented Thomas Moore’s tale of a
Persian peri’s quest to regain her lost place in paradise as a story of the German people.
Schumann drew on specifically German musical idioms such as the chorale and the
fugue, using a subject that recalls the Thema Regium from Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer, to
identify Moore’s “Oriental romance” as a story of the German people, especially at the
moment of the peri’s own realization and redemption.
74
Felix Mendelssohn, in his
unfinished oratorio Christus, Op. 97 (1846-47), juxtaposed the Advent story with
Balaam’s prophesy, from the Old Testament, that the ancient Israelites would rise to
power. Through the use of a favorite Lutheran chorale, he identified both as stories of
the German people, thereby advocating for a place for Jews in the German national
narrative and, by extension, in contemporary German society.
75

Brahms’s Liebeslieder seems to continue this tradition. The nationalities
represented in the collection map perfectly onto the primeval homeland of the Indo-
Europeans as theorized by Cuno and close to that described by Geiger. Brahms
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
Schumann’s understanding of Moore’s “Oriental romance” Lalla Rookh seems to have been
mediated by Rückert’s 1823 poem “Dichterselbstlob.” See Houston, “Philology.”
75
Seth Houston, “‘There Shall a Star’ by Felix Mendelssohn,” paper presented at Lycoming College,
Williamsport, PA, January 29, 2013. Balaam’s prophesy is from Numbers 24:17. The chorale is “Wie
schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” with words and harmonization by Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608).
249!
identifies these diverse peoples as genetically German—cousins, as it were, in the
Indo-European family—by giving their lyrics voice in a quintessentially Viennese
musical idiom, the Ländler-inspired waltz. While recognizing these peoples as fellow
Indo-Europeans, Brahms affirms Germany’s role as their representative and cultural
mediator on the world stage. In doing so, he supports earlier calls by Rückert and
Boeck and exceeds Daumer’s ambition for Polydora, namely that it become “a national
work… that does justice to the universality of the German taste and spirit.” Brahms’s
Liebeslieder, in this sense, can be read as representing the totality of the Indo-European
languages and peoples through a specifically German Austrian idiom, thus affirming
German Austria not only as the leader of Austria-Hungary but also as the leader and
mediator of Indo-European, hence nearly universal, culture.
The connection between Brahms’s waltzes and theories of Indo-European
descent are even closer with Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder, Op. 65, composed five years
after the Liebeslieder. While the focus of the present study is on the earlier work, a few
words about the Neue Liebeslieder are in order. Unlike the Liebeslieder, the Neue
Liebeslieder do not seem to have been inspired by romantic attraction. If anything, they
coincide with Brahms’s renewed and matured love for Julie Schumann’s mother, Clara.
Having lost Julie in 1872, Clara Schumann was lamenting the decline in health of her
son Felix, who would die of tuberculosis in 1879. In March, 1874, Brahms wrote to
her, “I feel your pain and anxiety [about Felix] all much too deeply to be able to
express it to you in words.… Let this deep love of mine be a comfort to you; for I love
you more than myself, and more than anybody or anything on earth.”
76
Brahms
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
March 19, 1874. Quoted in Swafford, 392. Also in Litzmann, Letters, 282.
250!
completed the Neue Liebeslieder in Rüschlikon, a resort town on Lake Zurich, that
summer.
77

As noted earlier, Brahms composed the Neue Liebeslieder, like Op. 39 and Op. 52,
after planning to edit a set of Schubert Ländler. Unlike the first two, however, Brahms
did not finish this Ländler collection. Still, the precedent of Schubert’s Ländler served as
an important inspiration for the Neue Liebeslieder as it did for the earlier collections.
The Neue Liebeslieder feel qualitatively different, on the whole, than the earlier
Liebeslieder. As Kalbeck describes them, the Neue Liebeslieder “have a less popular effect.
They reveal themselves to be more formal and more exclusive and therefore some
musicians grow very fond of them, whereas the layperson and the general public prefer
the melodic freshness and folksy naïve directness of the older ones.”
78
In Stark’s
assessment, “in comparison to the generally amiable Liebeslieder, the Neue Liebeslieder
deal with darker, harsher emotions, among them dread, jealousy, rejection, lust, and
despair. The two works complement, rather than duplicate, each other.”
79
Given that
one was composed during Brahms’s last and perhaps greatest peak of romantic hope
and imagination, and the other was composed after the beloved’s marriage to another,
her untimely death, the fatal sickness of her brother, and the composer’s renewed
pledge of love to her depressive mother, the difference in emotional outlook is
understandable.
In addition to the overall difference in tone, amost half of the numbers in the
Neue Liebeslieder are for solo voice. The set contains seven solo songs and one duet out
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
Swafford, 392. Also see Stark, 63-64.
78
Kalbeck, trans. Stone, 297.
79
Stark, 64.
251!
of a total of fifteen numbers. The Liebeslieder, on the other hand, contain two solos and
four duets out of a total of eighteen numbers. While the Liebeslieder consists exclusively
of settings of poems from Daumer’s Polydora, Brahms adds to these, in the Neue
Liebeslieder, a setting of Goethe: the last verse of his Alexis und Dora.

FIGURE 8: Solos, Duets, and Quartets in the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder

Liebeslieder Neue Liebeslieder
Total number of songs 18 15
Number of solo songs 2 7
Percentage of solo songs 11.1 46.6
Number of duets 4 1
Percentage of duets 22.2 6.6
Number of quartets 12 7
Percentage of quartets 66.6 46.6

Equally striking, perhaps, is the shift of nationalities. While the Liebeslieder, as
discussed above, set texts from the Russian, Polish, Russian-Polish, and Hungarian,
the Neue Liebeslieder evince a wider geographical scope. With the exception of
Malaysian, the nationalities represented in the Neue Liebeslieder correspond well with
contemporary conceptions of the Indo-European language group. While the Liebeslieder
show Brahms to be attuned to the same cultural winds that helped shift the origin of
252!
the Indo-Europeans to northern Europe, the Neue Liebeslieder reflect this new
understanding more explicitly.

FIGURE 9: Nationalities/Languages in the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder

Liebeslieder Neue Liebeslieder
Hungarian 5 0
Latvian-
Lithuanian
0 1
Malayan 0 1
Persian 0 1
Polish 3 2
Russian 2 3
Russian-
Polish
8 2
Serbian 0 1
Sicilian 0 1
Spanish 0 1
Turkish 0 1

Brahms’s representation of diverse literatures in the Liebeslieder and Neue
Liebeslieder, then, is both cosmopolitan and uniquely German. More particularly, it is
quintessentially Viennese. If the Requiem and Triumphlied lend support to a kleindeutsch
vision of Prussian leadership, the Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder, together with other
253!
works from that period, conjure a vision of German culture that draws on the diverse
and recently reformulated ancestry of the Indo-Europeans and is led by the empire
that includes many of the same peoples: Austria-Hungary.
254!
CHAPTER 10
FRAMES AND PERSPECTIVES

CENTRAL EUROPEAN TEXTS AS EXPRESSIONS OF ROMANTIC LOVE

As noted in chapter 7, Brahms composed Fünf Gedichte (Op. 19) for Agathe von
Siebold, who also seems to have inspired some of the songs in Lieder und Romanzen (Op.
14) and Drei Duette (Op. 20). While these “bouquets” include three settings of English
or Scottish poems (collected and translated by Herder) and two from southern Europe
(one Italian and one Spanish), the majority of songs Brahms composed for Siebold are
settings of German poetry. Many of the poems Brahms chose derive from the German
Volkslieder tradition, especially from collections by Herder and by Kretzschmer and
Zuccalmaglio.
1
Others, although original, are inspired by Volkslieder. These include
“Der Kuss” (Op. 19, no. 1) by Hölty and several poems by the poet, nationalist,
philologist, folklorist, and liberal reformer Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862).
2
Uhland’s
Vaterländische Gedichte, the source for at least one of the three Uhland poems in Op. 19,
gained immediate popularity when it was first published in 1815. Uhland also served
as a delegate in the 1848-49 Frankfurt Assembly.
3

In the 1860s, though, Brahms increasingly turned to central European poetry,
in addition to Persian, to express romantic sentiments. The two quartets that Brahms
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Andreas Kretzschmer and Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio, Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Original-
weisen (Berlin: Bereins Buchhandlung, 1840).
2
Brahms would return to Hölty for three song settings in 1868.
3
Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Uhland, Johann Ludwig.”
255!
composed for Ottilie Hauer the day before his planned proposal are settings of Wenzig
translations from the Moravian and the Czech. Brahms returned to Wenzig
translations for three more songs in 1868. These were almost certainly inspired, on a
personal level, by Brahms’s feelings for Julie Schumann and, on a geopolitical level, by
Smetana’s operas and recent political developments in Prague. Brahms would return
to Wenzig in later works, often juxtaposing Wenzig’s translations of central European
poetry with poems translated from the Persian (by Goethe) or original poems by
Persianists (such as Rückert).
4

The first lieder Brahms composed to express a specific love interest, then, drew
largely on poems either from or inspired by the German Volkslieder tradition. In the
1860s, Brahms turned to central European poetic sources to express his affections for
Ottilie Hauer and Julie Schumann, and additionally Persian texts for Julie. Later, he
would draw from a truly global gallery of poems for the Neue Liebeslieder, which seem to
be inspired by Schubert, Vienna, and the success of his first Liebeslieder more than any
particular love interest. In the late 1880s, Brahms would again draw on non-German
texts, this time from the Hungarian Gypsy tradition, to express youthful romantic
passion in the Zigeunerlieder.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
See, for example, “Die Boten der Liebe” (Op. 61, no. 4, 1873-74), “So lass uns wandern!” (Op. 75,
no. 3, 1877), and “Verlorene Jugend” (Op. 104, no. 4, by 1888).
256!
GERMAN FRAMES: MÖRIKE, SCHACK, AND GOETHE

Despite their diverse origins, all of the texts discussed in the precedeing section
are translated into German and presented—the use of a “Hungarian folk” melody for
“Magyarische” notwithstanding—in a specifically German lieder idiom. Moreover, the
German songs that Brahms set in 1868 are more likely than the non-German songs to
be placed at the end of a cycle, as if the German tradition sums up the preceding foray
into the foreign and has the last word. Leon Botstein, in his commentary on the song
collections Brahms completed in the summer of 1868, observed:

In organizing the songs from this period into collections, Brahms had a
particular dramatic and emotional strategy in mind. One might say that
in Opp. 47-49, and particularly Opp. 48 and 49, there is the hint of a
nascent philosophy of history. Contemporary texts, or at least as in the
case of Op. 47 a more modern text (Goethe), are juxtaposed to more
archaic poetry and folklike sentiments. The contemporary and the
modern emerge as the bearer of the profoundly sad, the melancholic,
and the pessimistic. They offer a bittersweet recognition of the elusive
character of happiness, the loss of innocence, the overwhelming
presence of death, and the pain of desire.
5

While Brahms drew on German Volkslieder in the late 1850s and folk-like songs from
non-German traditions in the 1860s to express the experiences of youthful passion, he
selected poems by poets such as Möricke, Schack, and Goethe to reflect on, comment
on, or sum up the preceding poems and conclude the bouquets. It is not just the
German who has the last word, but the modern, cultivated German; Schack was best
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
Botstein, 240.
257!
known as an art collector. It is the modern, cultivated German who makes sense of the
diverse peoples of the realm, organizes them, and gives them meaning. The songs, in
this sense, celebrate the diversity of the Vienna-centered realm while reinforcing
German cultural hegemony, thus reflecting and affirming the German Austrian liberal
agenda.
Let us examine Botstein’s claim in greater detail. Op. 19, which Brahms
composed for Siebold in 1858, opens with a völkisch text by Hölty and continues with
three by Uhland. Brahms closes the “bouquet” with “An eine Äolsharfe,” by Eduard
Mörike (1804-75). Perhaps anticipating Goethe’s “Zum Schluß,” with which Brahms
closes the Neue Liebeslieder, Mörike’s poem begins by invoking the muses—or at least a
muse’s lyre: “You, mysterious lyre played by a muse born of air.” The poem speaks of
mourning one’s recently buried beloved, even during the blossom of spring. In the last
stanza, the mood suddenly shifts to terror, and “the ripe rose, shaken, strews all its
pedals at my feet.”
6
The poet reflects on youthful love in this collection not from old
age but from a Romantic sense of tragedy. Ironically, it would be Brahms’s own
anxieties, not premature death, that would bring this episode of young love, which
even included an engagement, to an abrupt end.
Brahms closed Fünf Lieder (Op. 47, 1868) with a Goethe setting that he had
composed ten years earlier, “Die Liebende schreibt.” The poetry of Persia permeates
this “bouquet.” The first two numbers, as noted above, are both from Daumer’s Hafis.
The first, cautiously hopeful, asks the wind to deliver a message to the beloved. The
second embodies the fiery ardor of Hafiz’s passionate text. Brahms then returns to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Quoted and translated in Sams, 76.
258!
German territory with the lovely and hopeful transcription of an “anonymous” text by
Uhland. The fourth poem, by Paul Fleming, both continues the Germanic trajectory of
the Uhland poem and, perhaps, evokes Persia. Fleming, as noted above, almost
certainly encountered Hafiz’s poetry in 1636-38 while stationed in Isfahan.
7
Whether
or not Brahms knew of Fleming’s Persian connection, he set the poem with
uncomplicated, earnest ardor. Ending with Goethe—the pre-eminent world-literary
mediator, especially of Persian culture to Germany—seems especially appropriate.
Even though Brahms may have written the lines with Siebold in mind, the last triplet
of Goethe’s sonnet represents well the feelings Brahms probably felt for Julie
Schumann when he was compiling the collection: “Hear the whispers of my breaths of
love… give me a sign!”
8

Sieben Lieder (Op. 48), after two Wenzig settings (nos. 1 and 4) that frame two
selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (nos. 2 and 3), seems to move toward closure
with Goethe’s “Trost in Tränen” (no. 5). Although both text and music evoke folklike
styles, the text is reflective, looking back on the passions of youth from older age. Like
“Die Liebende schreibt,” Brahms composed “Trost in Tränen” in 1858, probably for
Siebold. Rather than ending here, though, Brahms continues with “Vergangen ist mir
Glück und Heil.” The anonymous text, perhaps from Franz Mittler’s 1855 Deutsche
Liebeslieder, laments the poet’s unrequited love and begs the beloved for “comfort.”
Brahms sets the entire piece like a chorale, with root position chords throughout.
Although composed by 1859, the text expresses well the despair of Brahms’s feelings
for Julie Schumann: “I cry for your help, my highest refuge; hear my passionate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
Olearis.
8
Quoted and translated in Sams, 143.
259!
lament, answer me directly, my fair love, or sorrow will undo me.… I fear that death
will triumph over me and take my life away; give me your comfort.”
9
The unremitting
sadness of the song sets up the devastating effect of the next and final song of the set,
Schack’s “Herbstgefühl,” discussed above.
In this set, then, a first half, consisting of Wenzig translations from the Czech
that surround selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, leads to a powerful closing
triptych of Goethe, anonymous Volk, and Schack. The extension of the closing
sequence to nearly half the length of the set adds gravitas to Brahms’s complaint that
he felt as miserable as the mood he conveyed in “Herbstgefühl,” the song that made
Clara Schumann cry.
Brahms used another poem by Schack to close Fünf Lieder (Op. 49), the last
song collection that he published in 1868. The opus begins with two völkisch songs from
the Italian, transitions to Czech (again from Wenzig), and continues with Brahms’s
justly famous “Wiegenlied,” discussed in chapter 7. Schack’s “Abenddämmerung”
immediately presents a more “artful” tone, with a prominent lowered seventh in the
melody on the third word, Zwielichtstunde. Like Goethe’s “Trost in Tränen,” the poem
reflects on youth from later in life. It sounds contrived, though, and Levi found
Brahms’s setting to be contrived and false too. Nevertheless, the poem fulfills its
structural purpose: to reflect on and frame the folk-like texts through which Brahms
conveys youthful amorous experience.
Brahms closed the Neue Liebeslieder, of course, with an epilogue by Goethe,
“Zum Schluß.” The poem reads:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
Ibid., 151-52.
260!
Now you Muses, enough! In vain you struggle to describe
how misery and gladness alternate in the loving breast.
You cannot heal the wound inflicted by Cupid;
but relief comes only, you kind-hearted ones, from you.
10

The song is set in a quiet (ruhig) 9/4—a meta-Ländler, perhaps—with a ground bass
underlying the outer parts of the ternary form. Might the form suggest yet another
layer of nested threefoldness, perhaps even a primordial Trinity? One imagines the
godfatherly poet communing with Greek mythological figures, looking down from
Mount Olympus on the amorous travails of hopelessly besotten mortals. Brahms might
also have imagined the culture-crossing poet, the world-literary dean, the twin of Hafiz,
nodding with approval at the gathering of world cultures singing in that most
quintessential idiom of the capital city of Europe’s most diverse empire: the Viennese
waltz.

ZUM SCHLUß

For Goethe re-ennobles Daumer’s verses, which were often borrowed without
attribution and stripped of their particularity to fulfill Daumer’s lonely and
increasingly sentimental fantasy of a religion of nature centered on sensual women.
Weltpoesie, for Herder as for Brahms, embodied the primeval, the natural, the youthful,
and the passionate. Brahms drew on world-poetic texts to express young love, both
when he was in the thick of it and later, when reflecting back on the experience. He
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
Translated in Stark, 77.
261!
drew on world-literary texts, on the other hand, to frame, reflect on, and contextualize
the world-poetic experience.
Hafiz, Goethe’s twin, raised the exciting possibility of poetry being both world-
poetic and world-literary at the same time. For Daumer, this involved both direct
apprehension of the divine in nature (and in feminine sensuality, of which Daumer had
little experience) and critical awareness of the unfolding of history, especially religion.
For Brahms, it was the passion of young love (which he experienced, at least in part,
through his youthful infatuations) and the lifelong unfolding of intellectual and musical
communion. He imagined this fusion, I suggest, in Julie Schumann, the beautiful
young daughter of his soulmate Clara. Who other than Hafiz could have written
poems that would embody this ideal? For whom other than Julie—as she existed in
Brahms’s imagination—could Brahms have set Hafiz’s poetry to music?
As Daumer’s views grew too extreme even for the Young Hegelians, and then
too trite, he seems to have lost the world-literary perspicacity that propelled, in part,
his Hafis to fame. His religious criticism devolved from an approach that inspired
Ludwig Feuerbach to absurd denigration. His vision for a new religion fell from the
heights of Hafiz and Muhammad to something like pornography, something like incest,
and, as Marx pointed out, bland sentimentality. Polydora, for all its “universal-poetic
ambition,” its desire to “put into place a national work… that does justice to the
universality of the German taste and spirit,” and its mission to paint the literary and
religious progress of humanity from the paradisiacal past to an emergent future, falls a
little short. Polydora is no world-literary masterpiece. It is just a world-poetic songbook,
and a somewhat stale one at that.
262!
But Brahms makes it work.
11
The Liebeslieder sparkle with charm, as if Brahms
were once again a teenager, falling in love for the first time. They speak to concerns of
the day—to identity and politics, to cultural hegemony and mutual respect—so
disarmingly that a person would not realize that he or she had just called off
Kulturkampf or shifted the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans from the Indus to the
Danube. The Neue Liebeslieder expand to a more global vision that encompasses darker
emotional shades. But what they gain in seriousness they lose in charm. It takes a
boost from Goethe for them to succeed.
Brahms was not a teenager, though, when he composed the Liebeslieder for Julie
Schumann, the Hafezian beloved of his dreams. Here, again, Goethe provides the
frame. His “Harzreise im Winter” gives Brahms the words to express, in the Rhapsodie,
the depth of despair that complements and adds dimension to the Liebeslieder’s imagined
bliss. It is Goethe, in the end, who enables Brahms to make the waltz world-literary, to
transfigure Daumer into Hafiz.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
An expression of Brahms’s confidence in the pieces can be seen in his letter to Simrock on
October 5, 1869: “I’ll risk being called a jackass if our Liebeslieder don’t bring some joy to some people.”
Briefwechsel, 9:85, quoted and translated in Stark, 32.
263!
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackermann, Peter. “‘Liebeslieder—’ Brahms und der Wiener Walzer.” Musiktheorie 10,
no. 1 (1995): 11-20.

Aldric, Robert. The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy.
London: Routledge, 1993.

Almond, Ian. History of Islam in German Thought: From Leibniz to Nietzsche. London:
Routledge, 2009.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Arberry, A. J. “Hafiz and his English Translations.” Islamic Culture 20 (1946): 111-28.

Avery, Peter. The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz. Cambridge: Archetype, 2007.

Avins, Styra. Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Balacon, Maria. “Style Hongrois Features in Brahms’s Hungarian Dances: A Musical
Construction of a Fictionalized Gypsy Other.” DMA diss., University of Cincinnati,
2005.

Barkan, Hans, trans. and ed. Johannes Brahms and Theodor Billroth: Letters from a Musical
Friendship. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.

Bauer, Thomas. “‘Abraham ist mein Väterchen.’ Eine Auswahl aus den ‘Dichtungen
des Morgenlandes’ von Georg Friedrich Daumer. In Kinder Abrahams. Religiöser
Austausch im lebendigen Kontext, edited by Thomas Bauer and Thorsten Gerald
Schneiders, 97-138. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005.

Bell, Gertrude. The Hafez Poems of Gertrude Bell. Edited by E. Denison Ross. Bethesda:
Iranbooks, 1995.

Beller-McKenna, Daniel. Brahms and the German Spirit. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004.

Bellman, Jonathan. “Toward a Lexicon for the Style Hongrois!.” The Journal of
Musicology 9, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 214-37.

_____. The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe. Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1993.

264!
Benes, Kveta Emilie. “German Linguistic Nationhood, 1806-1866: Philology, Cultural
Translation, and Historical Identity in Preunification Germany.” PhD diss.,
University of Washington, 2001.

Benes, Tuska. In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century
Germany. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008.

Berman, Antoine. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic
Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992. Originally published as L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans
l’Allemagne romantique (Gallimard, 1984).

Beyschlag, Karlmann. Die Erlanger Theologie. Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 1993.

Billroth, Theodor and Johannes Brahms. Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel. Edited by
Otto Gottlieb-Billroth. Berlin: Urban and Schwarzenberg, 1935.

Birkenbihl, Michael. “Georg Friedrich Daumer. Beiträge zur Geschichte seines
Lebens und seiner westöstlichen Dichtungen.” PhD diss., Munich, 1902.

Birus, Hendrik. “Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur: Eine historische Vergegenwärtigung.”
In Weltliteratur Heute: Konzepte und Perspektiven, edited by Manfred Schmeling, 5-23.
Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1995.

Blackbourn, David. Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History. London:
Allen and Unwin, 1987.

Blit, Lucjan. The Origins of Polish Socialism: The History and Ideas of the First Polish Socialist
Party, 1878-1886. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Bohrer, Frederick N. Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-
Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Boros, R. “Petöfi — in der Vertonung von Brahms.” Studia Musicologica Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 8 (1966): 391-400.

Botstein, Leon. The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes Brahms.
New York: Norton, 1999.

Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London:
Routledge, 1994.

_____. “Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Stanford University, 1997-. Article published winter 2010.
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/schelling.

265!
Bozarth, George S., ed. The Brahms-Keller Correspondence. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996.

Bozarth, George S. and Walter Frisch. “Brahms, Johannes.” Grove Music Online.
Oxford University Press. Accessed August 17, 2014.
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/
music/51879.

Brahms, Johannes. Drei Quartette für vier Solostimmen (Sopran, Alt, Tenor, und Bass) mit
Pianoforte componirt von Johannes Brahms, Op. 31. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel,
1864.

_____. Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32. Leipzig: Rieter-Biedermann, 1865.

_____. Romanzen, Op. 35. Leipzig: Rieter-Biedermann, 1865-69.

_____. Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45. Winterthur: Rieter-Biedermann, 1868.

_____. Vier Lieder, Op. 46. Berlin: Simrock, 1868.

_____. Fünf Lieder, Op. 47. Berlin: Simrock, 1868.

_____. Sieben Lieder, Op. 48. Berlin: Simrock, 1868.

_____. Fünf Lieder, Op. 49. Berlin: Simrock, 1868.

_____. Liebeslieder. Walzer für Pianoforte zu 4 Händen und Gesang: Sopran, Alt, Tenor, Baß, ad
libitum, Op. 52. Berlin: Simrock, 1869.

_____. Alt-Rhapsodie. Berlin: Simrock, 1870.

_____. Ungarische Tänze, WoO 1. 1869-80.

_____. Triumphlied, Op. 55. Berlin: Simrock, 1871.

_____. Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 57. Leipzig: Rieter-Biedermann, 1871.

_____. Neue Liebeslieder. Walzer für vier Singstimmen und Pianoforte zu 4 Händen von
Johannes Brahms, Op. 65. Berlin: Simrock, 1874.

_____. Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, 16 vols. Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft,
1907-22.

_____. The Herzogenberg Correspondence. Edited by Max Kalbeck. Translated by Hannah
Bryant. London: John Murray, 1909.

_____. Johannes Brahms in Briefwechsel mit Philipp Spitta. Edited by Carl Krebs. Berlin:
Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1920.
266!
Brandes, Georg. Young Germany. Translated by Diana White and Mary Morison. Vol.
6 of Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. New York: MacMillan, 1901.

Braus, Ira Lincoln. “Textual Rhetoric and Harmonic Anomaly in Selected Lieder of
Johannes Brahms.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1988.

_____. “Skeptische Beweglichkeit: Die Rhetorik von Wort und Ton in So stehn wir, ich
und meine Weide op. 32.8.” In Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum Verhältnis von Text
und Vertonung, edited by Peter Jost, 156-72. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992.

Breuilly, John. Austria, Prussia, and the Making of Germany, 1806-1871. Harlow: Pearson,
2002.

Brodbeck, David. “Brahms as Editor and Composer: His two editions of Ländler by
Schubert and his first two cycles of waltzes, opera 39 and 52”. PhD diss.,
University of Pennsylvania, 1984.

_____. “The Waltzes of Brahms.” The American Brahms Society Newsletter 4, no. 2
(Autumn 1986): 1-3.

_____. “Compatibility, Coherence, and Closure in Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes.” In
Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard D. Meyer, edited by
Eugene Narmour and Ruth A. Solie, 411-38. Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988.

_____. “Primo Schubert, Secondo Schumann: Brahms’s Four-Hand Waltzes, Op. 39.”
Journal of Musicology 7, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 58-80.

_____. “Brahms’s Edition of Twenty Schubert Ländler: An Essay in Criticism.” In
Brahms Studies I: Papers Delivered at the International Brahms Conference, The Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C., 5-8 May 1983, edited by George S. Bozarth, 229-50.
London: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Brown, Edward Granville. A Literary History of Persia, vol. 3. Bethesda, MD: Iranbooks,
1997. First published 1902.

Brose, Eric Dorn. German History 1789-1871: From the Holy Roman Empire to the
Bismarckian Reich. Providence: Berghahn, 1997.

Brümmer, Franz. Deutsches Dichterlexikon. Biographische und bibliographische Mitthelungen
über deutsche Dichter aller Zeiten: unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gegenwart. 2 vols.
Eichstätt: Verlag der Krüll’schen Buchhandlung, 1876-77.

Burk, John N. Clara Schumann: A Romantic Biography. New York: Random House, 1940.

Burke, Edmund, III. “The Sociology of Islam: The French Tradition.” In Genealogies of
Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, edited by Edmund Burke III and David
Prochaska, 154-73. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
267!
Burrill, Kathleen. “Sūdī, Ahmed.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd , vol. 9. Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1997.

Caracciolo, Marina. Brahms e il Walzer: Storia e Lettura Critica. Lucca: Libreria Musicale
Italiana, 2004.

Cassirer, Ernst. Kant’s Life and Thought. Translated by James Haden. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981.

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Uhland, Johann Ludwig.”
London: Cambridge University Press, 1911.

Clive, Peter. Brahms and His World: A Biographical Dictionary. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow,
2006.

Coen, Deborah R. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Conze, Werner. The Shaping of the German Nation: A Historical Analysis. Translated by
Neville Mellon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979.

Cramer, Kevin. The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Curran, Kathleen. The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

Daumer, Georg Friedrich. Auswahl des Besten, was vorzügliche Denker und Dichter über die
höchsten Angelegenheiten des Menschen ausgesprochen haben, als Stoff sowohl zur Bildung des
Geistes und Veredlung des Herzens als auch zu Denkmalen für Stammbücher. Nuremberg:
Bieling’sche Verlagshandlung, 1819.

_____. Über den Gang und die Fortschritte unserer geistigen Entwicklung seit der Reformation
und über ihren Standpunkt in der gegenwärtigen Zeit. Geschrieben zur Feier des drei und
zwanzigsten Maies als des Stiftungstages des vor dreihundert Jahren gegründeten
Gymnasiums zu Nürnberg. Nuremberg: Riegel and Wiessner, 1826.

_____. Grundriß der griechischen Formenlehre in tabellarischen Übersichten zum Schulgebrauche.
Nuremberg: Riegel and Wiessner, 1827.

_____. Urgeschichte des Menschengeistes. Fragment eines Systems speculativer Theologie mit
besonderer Beziehung auf die Schellinng’sche Lehre von dem Grunde in Gott. Erste Abtheilung.
Berlin: Reimer, 1827.

_____. Andeutung eines Systems speculativer Philosophie. Nuremberg: Campe, 1831.

268!
_____. Ist die Cholera Morbus ein Strafgericht Gottes? Sendschreiben an Herrn Pfarrer Kindler
zu Nürnberg. Leipzig: Müller, 1832.

_____. Mitteilungen über Kaspar Hauser. Nuremberg: Haubenstricker, 1832. Reprinted
in Kaspar Hauser. Augenzeugenberichte und Selbstzeugnisse, edited by Hermann Pies,
137-244. Stuttgart: Lutz, 1928.

_____. Philosophie, Religion, und Alterthum. Nuremberg: Campe, 1833.

_____. Über die Entwendung ägyptischen Eigenthums beim Auszug des Israeliten aus Ägypten.
Als vorläufiges Bruchstück eines die durch des Sendschreiben an Kindler veranlaßten
Gegenschriften der Herren Götz, Wild und Höfling betreffenden Werks über Bibel und
Christenthum. Nuremberg: Campe, 1833.

_____. Polemische Blätter betreffend Christenthum, Bibelglauben und Theologie. Eine Schrift für
gebildete Leser aller Stände. Nuremberg: Campe, 1834.

_____ [anon.] Semiramis. Frankfurt: Schmerber, 1836.

_____. Darlegung des religiösen und religionsgeschichtlichen Charakters und Verhältnisses der
Herren Gutzkow und Menzel nebst Bemerkungen über den Ausgang und das Ziel der
Weltgeschichte in Beziehung auf Menzel’s Ansicht darüber. Nuremberg: Schneider and
Weigel, 1836.

_____. Bettina. Gedichte aus Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Nebst erläuternden und
vergleichenden Ammerkungen. Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1837.

_____ [pseud. Amadeus Ottokar]. Entdeckung eines Complots wider Religion und
Christenthum. Gemacht durch Eschenmayers Schrift ‘Conflict zwischen Himmel und Hölle an
dem Dämon eines besessenen Mädchens beobachtet.’ Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1837.

_____. “Mittheilungen über Kaspar Hauser.” Athenäum für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben
(July 1838): 3-8 and (September 1838): 1-4.

_____ [pseud. Amadeus Ottokar]. Anti-Satan. Sendschreiben an Professor Eschenmayer
betreffend dessen Entgegnung auf die Schrift ‘Entdeckung eines Complots wider Religion und
Christenthum.’ Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1838.

_____. “Über den Zusammenhang der amerikanischen Indianer mit den Hebräern.”
Athenäum für Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Leben (August 1838): 32-81.

_____. Sabbath, Moloch und Tabu. Eine historisch-theologische Andeutung mit Rücksicht auf die
neuesten Auffassungen der christlichen Sonntagsfeier. Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe,
1839.

269!
_____. “Über Bettina Nacht- und Traumleben in Beziehung auf die Gedichte aus
Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kind.” Athenäum für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben
(February 1839): 1-14.

_____ [pseud. Eusebius Emmeran]. Die Glorie der heiligen Jungfrau Maria durch Eusebius
Emmeran. Legenden und Gedichte nach spanischen, italienischen, lateinischen und deutschen
Relationen und Originalpoesien. Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1841.

_____. Die Stimme der Wahrheit in den religiösen und confessionellen Kämpfen der Gegenwart.
Nuremberg: Bauer and Raspe, 1845.

_____. Hafis: Eine Sammlung persicher Gedichte. Nebst poetischen Zugaben aus verschiedenen
Völkern und Ländern. 2 vols. Hamburg: Hoffman and Campe, 1846-52.

_____. Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums. 2 vols. Hamburg: Hoffmann and
Campe, 1847.

_____. Mahomed und sein Werk: Eine Sammlung orientalischer Gedichte. Hamburg: Hoffman
and Campe, 1848.

_____. Die Religion des neuen Weltalters. Versuch einer combinatorisch-aphoristischen
Grundlegung. 3 vols. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1850.

_____. Frauenbilder und Huldigungen. 3 vols. Leipzig: Wigand, 1853.

_____. “Herr Julian Schmidt, der Kritiker und Literaturhistoriker. Ein Charakterbild.
Nebst einigen historischen, religiösen, ethischen und ästhetischen Erörterungen.”
In Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, vol. 1, edited by Otto Wigand, 36-86.
Leipzig: Wigand, 1854.

_____. Polydora. Ein weltpoetisches Liederbuch. Frankfurt: Rütten, 1855.

_____. Marianische Legenden und Gedichte, Münster: Aschendorff, 1859

_____. Meine Conversion. Ein Stück Seelen- und Zeitgeschichte. Mainz: Kirchheim, 1859.

_____. Enthüllungen über Kaspar Hauser. Mit Hinzufügung neuer Belege und Documente und
Mittheilung noch ganz unbekannter Thatsachen, namentlich zu dem Zwecke, die Heimath und
Herkunft des Findlings zu bestimmen und die vom Grafen Stanhope gespielte Rolle zu
beleuchten. Eine wider Eschricht und Stanhope gerichtete historische, psychologische
Beweisführung. Frankfurt: Meidinger, 1859.

_____. Aus der Mansarde: Streitschriften, Kritiken, Studien und Gedichte. Mainz: Kirchheim,
1860-62.

270!
_____ [anon.]. “Musikalischer Katechismus. Fragen und Antworten über Wesen,
Wirkung und Bedeutung der Musik und über ihn Verhältnis zu den übringen
Künsten.” Deutsche Vierteljahrs-Schrift 108, no. 1 (1864): 43-89.

_____. Briefe an seine Nichte Helene. Offenbach: Kaspar-Hauser-Verlag , 2009.

Daverio, John. Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.

Dumas, Pere Alexandre. Karl-Ludwig Sand. 1910.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2745/2745-pdf.pdf, accessed June 12, 2014.

Eaghill, Tenzan. “From Pietism to Romanticism: The Early Life and Work of
Friedrich Schleiermacher.” In The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, edited by Christian
T. Collins Winn, Christopher Gehrz, G. William Carlson, and Eric Holst, 107-19.
Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

Effelberger, Hans. Georg Friedrich Daumer und die westöstliche Dichtung. PhD diss.,
Marburg, 1923.

Emmeran, Eusebius. See Daumer, Georg Friedrich.

Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Sandor Petofi.” Accessed July 21, 2014.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/454072/Sandor-Petofi.

Errante, Valerie. “Brahms Civilizes the Gypsy: The Zigeunerlieder and Their Sources.”
The Pendragon Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 46-73.

Fehn, Ann C. and Jürgen Thym. “Repetition as Structure in the German ‘Lied:’ the
Ghazal.” Comparative Literature 41, no. 1 (January 1989): 33-52.

Fellinger, Imogen. “Cyclic Tendencies in Brahms’s Song Collections.” In Brahms
Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, edited by George S. Bozarth, 379-88.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Fick, August. Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Grundsprache. Göttingen, 1868

Finscher, Ludwig. “Brahms’s Early Songs: Poetry Versus Music.” In Brahms Studies:
Analytical and Historical Perspectives, edited by George S. Bozarth, 331-44. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990.

_____. Review of Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung,
edited by Peter Jost. Music and Letters 79, no. 2 (May 1998): 285-86.

Fischer, Bernd. Review of Georg Friedrich Daumer. Leben und Werk, 1800-1875, by
Karlhans Kluncker. German Studies Review 8, no. 1 (February 1, 1985): 150.
271!
Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism,
1848-1884. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

Fochécour, Charles-Henri de. “Hafiz and the Sufi.” In Hafiz and the Religion of Love in
Classical Persian Poetry, edited by Leonard Lewisohn, 143-58. London: Taurus, 2010.

Foster, Ryan J. “The Creativity of Nature: The Genesis of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie,
1775-1799.” PhD diss., Rice University, 2008.

Franklin, Michael J. “Orientalism: Literature and Scholarship.” In Encyclopedia of the
Romantic Era, 1760-1850, vol. 1, edited by Christopher John Murray, 832-35. New
York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004.

Frankenbach, Chantal. “Waltzing around the Musically Beautiful: Listening and
Dancing in Hanslick’s Hierarchy of Musical Perception.” In Rethinking Hanslick:
Music, Formalism, and Expressionism, edited by Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan,
and Wolfgang Marx, 108-31. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

Friedlaender, Max. Brahms’s Lieder: An Introduction to the Songs for One or Two Voices.
Translated by C. Leonard Leese. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928.

Frisch, Walter, and Kevin C. Karnes. Brahms and His World. Rev. ed. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009. First published 1990.

Gall, Lothan. “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’: Zur Charakter und
Entwicklung der liberalen Bewegung in Deutschland.” Historische Zeitschrift 220
(1975): 324-56.

Garlington, Aubrey S., Jr. “‘Harzreise als Herzreise:’ Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody.” The
Musical Quarterly 69, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 527-42.

Gawthrop, Richard L. Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Geiger, Lazarus. “On the Primitive Home of the Indo-Europeans.” In Contributions to
the History of the Development of the Human Race: Lectures and Dissertations by Lazarus
Geiger, translated from the 2nd German edition by David Asher, 117-56. London:
Trübner, 1880.

Geiringer, Karl. Brahms: His Life and Work. Translated by H.B. Weiner and Bernard
Miall. London: Oxford University Press, 1947.

Gelbart, Matthew. The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from
Ossian to Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Gellen, Adam. Brahms und Ungarn: Biographische, rezeptionsgeschichtliche, quellenkritische
und analytische Studien. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2011.
272!
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Gerstmeier, August. “Brahms und Daumer.” In Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum
Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung, edited by Peter Jost, 116-36. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner, 1992.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Conversations with Eckermann. Translated by John
Oxenford. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. Originally published as
Gespräche mit Goethe, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1836-48).

Gömöri, Geroge. “Petöfi, Sándor.” In Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, vol. 1,
edited by Christopher John Murray, 865-67. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004.

Gooch, Todd. “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Stanford University, 1997-. Article published winter 2013.
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/.

Gottschall, Rudolf. Die deutsche Nationalliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts. 4 vols. Breslau:
Treyendt, 1872. First published 1855.

Gramit, David. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical
Culture, 1770-1848. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Green, Lowell C. The Erlangen School of Theology: Its History, Theory, and Practice. Fort
Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2010.

Greenfield, Leah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1992.

Gross, Michael B. The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2004.

Gugel, Michael. Industrieller Aufstieg und bürgerliche Herrschaft: Sozioökonomische Interessen
und politische Ziele des liberalen Bürgertums im Preußen zur Zeit des Verfassungskonflikts
1857-1867. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1975.

Guibernau, Monteserrat. Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth
Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.

Gutzkow, Karl. Wally, die Zweiflerin. Mannheim, 1835

Hamilton, Katy. “Music inside the home and outside the box: Brahms’s vocal quartets
in context.” In Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Public and Private
Performance, edited by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, 279-99. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014.

273!
Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von. Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis. Aus den
Persischen zum erstenmal ganz übersetzt. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1812-13.

Hancock, Virginia. “Brahms, Daumer und die Lieder op. 32 und 57.” In Johannes
Brahms: Quellen – Text – Rezeption – Interpretation. Internationaler Brahms-Kongreß,
Hamburg 1997, edited by Friedhelm Krummacher and Michael Struck, 377-88.
Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1999.

Harris, Henry Silton. “Skepticism, Dogmatism, and Speculation in the Critical
Journal.” In Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism,
edited by George Di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, 252-71. New York: State
University of New York Press, 1985.

Härtl, Heinz. “Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Relations to the Young Hegelians.” In
Bettina Brentano-von Arnim: Gender and Politics, edited by Elke Frederiksen and
Katherine Goodman, 145-84. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

Hayes, Carlton J. H. The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism. New York:
Macmillan, 1950.

Heath, Tod Russel. “A Mysterious Path: The Circumstances and Substance of G. H.
Schubert’s Naturphilosophiche Psychology.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1985.

Heine, Heinrich. Reisebilder III/IV. Edited by Alfred Opitz. Vol. 7, pt. 2 of Historisch-
kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1986.

Herbermann, Charles, ed. Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Georg Friedrich Daumer.” New
York: Robert Appleton Company, 1913.

Herzog, Frederick. European Pietism Reviewed. San Jose: Pickwick Publications, 2003.

Herzog, Werner. Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle. Directed by Werner Herzog. Film.
Vienna: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1974.

Hess, Carol. “Als wahres volles Menschenbild: Brahms’s Rinaldo and Autobiographical
Allusion.” In Brahms Studies, vol. 2, edited by David Lee Brodbeck, 63-90. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Hoag, Melissa. “Multiply directed moments in a Brahms song: Schön war, das ich dir
weihte (op. 95, no. 7).” Gamut: The online journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-
Atlantic 4, vol. 1 (2011): 93-116.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

274!
Hoermann, Roland. “Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography,
vol. 90 of German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789-1832, edited by James Hardin
and Christoph E. Schweitzer, 303-10. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989.

Hofmann, Kurt, and Jutta Fürst. Johannes Brahms, The Man and His Work: Catalogue of
an exhibition of rare and unique items drawn from the life and times of a great composer,
Detroit Public Library, Biography Room, April 1980. Detroit: Detroit Symphony
Orchestra, 1980.

Hoffmeister, Gerhart. “Nationalism and Cultural Identity: The Dialectic of National
and Global Views in Herder, A.W. Schlegel, and Goethe.” In Romanticism Across the
Disciplines, edited by Larry Peer, 11-26. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1998.

Höft, Brigitte. “Clara Schumann und Johannes Brahms in Baden-Baden.” In Johannes
Brahms in Baden-Baden und Karlsruhe, edited by Joachim Draheim et al., 17-34.
Karlsruhe: Badische Landesbibliothek, 1983.

Holt, P. M., Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds. The Cambridge History of
Islam, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Hourani, Albert. Islam in European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991.

Houston, Seth. “Philology, Orientalism, and the Quest for the Rediscovered Poetic:
Reading Robert Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri.” MM thesis, University of
Colorado, 2009.

_____. “Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder: Naturalization, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Race and
Feeling in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna.” Paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the American Brahms Society, New York, NY, March 25, 2012.

_____. “‘There Shall a Star’ by Felix Mendelssohn.” Paper presented at Lycoming
College, Williamsport, PA, January 29, 2013.

Humboldt, Alexander von. Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung von Alexander
von Humboldt. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1845-62.

Huyssen, Andreas. Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung : Studien
zur frühromantische Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur . Herrsching: Atlantis Verlag,
1969.

Ilahi-Ghomshei, Husayn. “The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian
Poetry.” In Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, edited by Leonard
Lewisohn, 77-106. London: I.B. Taurus, 2010.

275!
Irani-Tehrani, Amir. “Persian Figures in German Letters (1700-1900).” PhD diss.,
New York University, 2008.

Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents. Woodstock, NY:
Overlook Press, 2006.

Jaeger, Jacques, ed. Wiener Almanac: Jahrbuch für Literatur, Kunst, und öffentliches Leben
1901. Vienna: Buchhandlung E. Bensinger, 1901.

Jarausch, Konrad H. and Larry Eugene Jones. “German Liberalism Reconsidered:
Inevitable Decline, Bourgeois Hegemony, or Partial Achievement?” In In Search of
a Liberal Germany: Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present,
edited by Jarausch and Jones, 1-23. New York: Berg, 1990.

Johnson, Graham. Notes to The Songs of Johannes Brahms, vol. 1. Translated by Richard
Stokes. Angelika Kirchschlager and Graham Johnson. Hyperion CDJ33121, 2010,
compact disc.

Johnson, Hugh. The Story of Wine. New illustrated edition. London: Mitchell Beazley,
2004.

Janota, Dalibor, and Jan P. Kučera. Malá Encyklopedie České Opery. Prague: Paseka,
1999.

Jost, Peter, ed. Brahms als Liedkomponist: Studien zum Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung.
Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992.

Kahn, Robert. The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg
Monarchy, 1848-1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 1950.

Kaiser, Gerhard. Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland; ein Beitrag zum
Problem der Säkularisation. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1961.

Kalatehseifary, Masoomeh. “Joseph V. Hammer Purgstall’s German Translation of
Hafez’s Divan and Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan.” MA thesis, University of Waterloo
(ON), 2009.

Kalbeck, Max. Johannes Brahms II: Erster halbband 1862-1868. Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-
Gesellschaft, 1921.

Kalmar, Ivan. Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power. London:
Routledge, 2012.

Kammerlander, Karl-Peter. “Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst: Brahms-Daumer-Hafis.”
Brahms-Studien 15 (2008): 149-81.

276!
Kantzenbach, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Erlanger Theologie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung im
Rahmen der Geschichte der Theologischen Fakultät, 1743-1877. Munich: Evang.
Presseverband für Bayern, 1960.

Kaufmann, Walter. Hegel: A Reinterpretation. New York: Anchor Books, 1966.

Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism. London: Hutchinson, 1960.

Kluncker, Karlhans. Georg Friedrich Daumer. Leben und Werk, 1800-1875. Bonn: Bouvier,
1984.

_____. Georg Friedrich Daumer und Kaspar Hauser. Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini Press,
1984.

Kohn, Hans. “The Paradox of Fichte’s Nationalism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 10,
no. 3 (June 1949): 319-43.

_____. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 2005. First published 1944.

Kontje, Todd Curtis. German Orientalisms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2004.

Krebs, Carl, ed. “Johannes Brahms und Philipp Spitta: Aus einem Briefwechsel.”
Deutsche Rundschau 35, no. 7 (April 1909): 15-40.

Kretzschmer, Andreas, and Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio. Deutsche Volkslieder mit
ihren Original-weisen. Berlin: Bereins Buchhandlung, 1840.

Kühne, Agnes. “Der Religionsphilosoph Georg Friedrich Daumer, Wege und
Wirkungen seiner Entwickung.” PhD diss., Friedrich Wilhelm University, 1936.

Küntzel, Hans. Brahms in Göttingen: Mit Erinnerungen von Agathe Schütte, geb. von Siebold.
Göttingen: Herodot, 1985.
Lamb, Andrew. “Waltz (i).” In Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed
July 6, 2014. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/
article/grove/music/29881.

Lambton, Ann K. S. Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia. Albany: Bibliotheca
Persica, 1988.

Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000.

277!
Latham, Robert Gordon, ed. The Germania of Tacitus, with Ethnological Dissertations and
Notes by R. G. Latham., M.D., F.R.S. London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1851.

_____. The Native Races of the Russian Empire. London: H. Bailliere, 1854.

_____. Elements of Comparative Philology. London: Woodfall and Kinder, 1862.

Laughland, John. Schelling versus Hegel: From German Idealism to Christian Metaphysics.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2007.

Lehmann, Hartmut. “Pietism and Nationalism: The Relationship between Protestant
Revivalism and National Renewal in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Church
History 51, no. 1 (March 1982): 39-53.

_____. “Erweckungsbewegung as Religious Experience or Historiographical Construct:
The Case of Ludwig Hofacker.” In Pietism, Revivalism, and Modernity, 1650-1850,
edited by Fred van Lieburg and Daniel Lindmark, 274-85. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Lewisohn, Leonard. “Prolegomenon to the Study of Hafiz.” In Hafiz and the Religion of
Love in Classical Persian Poetry, 3-76. London: I.B. Taurus, 2010.

Limbert, John W. Shiraz in the Age of Hafez: The Glory of a Medieval Persian City. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2004.

Litzmann, Berthold. Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries
and Letters. Translated by Grace Hadow. London: MacMillan, 1913.

_____, ed. Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853-1896 , vol. 1. London:
Edwin Arnold, 1927.

Liu, Lydia He. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity,
China 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Loges, Natasha. “The Notion of Personae in Brahms’s ‘Bitteres zu sagen denkst du,’ op.
32, no. 7: A Literary Key to Musical Performance?” In Music and Literature in
German Romanticism, edited by Siobhán Donovan and Robin Elliott, 183-200.
Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2004.

_____. “Singing Lieder with a Foreign Accent: Brahms’s Slavic Songs.” Indiana Theory
Review 26, vols. 1-2 (Spring-Fall 2005): 73-103.

_____. “Exoticism, Artifice and the Supernatural in the Brahmsian Lied.” Nineteenth-
century Music Review 3, no. 2 (2006): 137-68.

_____. “How to Make a ‘Volkslied’: Early models in the songs of Johannes Brahms.”
Music and Letters 93, no. 3 (August 2012): 316-49.
278!
Lohmeier, Dieter, ed. Johannes Brahms – Klaus Groth: Briefe der Freundschaft. Heide:
Boyens, 1997.

Loloi, Parvin. Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography. London: I.B. Tauris,
2004.

Macfie, A.L. Orientalism. London: Longman, 2002.

MacKenzie, John M. Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1995.

Mann, Golo. The History of Germany Since 1789. Translated by Marian Jackson. New
York: Praeger, 1968.

Marx, Karl. Review of Daumer, Religion des neuen Weltalters. In Neue Rheinische Zeitung
Politisch-ökonomische Revue, no. 2 (Feb. 1850): 57-61. Reprinted and translated in
Marx and Engels 1859-1851, vol. 10 of Karl Marx Friedrich Engels, Collected Works.
Translated by Richard Dixon et al. New York: International Publishers, 1978.

Mason, John W. The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1867-1918. 2nd ed.
London: Longman, 1997. First published 1985.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005.

May, Arthur J. The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1965.

McCorkle, Margit L. Johannes Brahms: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis.
Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1984.

Michaels, Axel. “Wissenschaft als Einheit von Religion, Philosophie und Poesie. Die
Indologie als frühromantisches Projekt einer ganzheitlichen Wissenschaft.” In
Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, edited by
Gabrielle Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann, 325-40. Würzburg: Königshausen
and Neumann, 2004.

Momand, Elizabeth Blanton. “Finding the Connection: Hafez—Daumer—Brahms.”
DMA diss., University of Texas, 2001.

Morgan, David. Medieval Persia, 1040-1797. London: Longman, 1988.

Mueller, Gustav E. “The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.’” Journal of the
History of Ideas 19, no. 3 (June 1958): 411-14.

279!
Musgrave, Michael. The Music of Brahms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

_____. Brahms: A German Requiem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

_____. Cambridge Companion to Brahms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

_____. A Brahms Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Muth, Franz Alfred. Dichterbilder und Dichterstudien aus der neueren und neuesten Literatur.
Frankfurt, 1887.

Neugebauer, Shirley Ann. “Johannes Brahms’s ‘Liebeslieder’ Waltzes, Op. 52: A
Conductor’s Analysis.” DMA diss., University of Miami, 1982.

Nipperdey, Thomas. Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800-1866. Translated by
Daniel Nolan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Noack, Ludwig. “Die Meister Weiberfeind und Frauenlob. Eine psychologische
Antithese zwischen Schopenhauer und Daumer in Frankfurt a. M.” In
Psyche: Zeitschrift für die Kenntniss des menschlichen Seelen-und Geiteslebens, vol. 3, 144-
69. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1860.

Notley, Margaret Anne. “Brahms as Liberal: Genre, Style, and Politics in Late
Nineteenth-Century Vienna.” Nineteenth-Century Music 17, no. 2 (Autumn 1993):
107-23.

_____. Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Oelsner, Konrad Engelbert. Mohamed: Darstellung des Einflusses seiner Glaubenslehre auf die
Völker des Mittelalters. Frankfurt: Warrentrapp and Wenner, 1810.

Oergel, Maike. Culture and Identity: Historicity in German Literature and Thought 1770-1815.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006.

Olearis, Adam. The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors, from the Duke of Holstein, to the
Great Duke of Muscovy, and the King of Persia. Translated by John Davies. London:
Dring and Starkey, 1662.

Olender, Maurice. The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, A Match Made in Heaven.
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Other Press, 1992.

Olsen, Glen Albert. “The ‘Liebeslieder Walzer, Op. 52’ of Johannes Brahms:
Rhythmic and metric features, and related conducting gestures.” Choral Journal 42,
no. 2 (September 2001): 9-15.

280!
O’Meara, Thomas. Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.

Ophüls, Gustav, ed. Brahms-Texte. Sämtliche von Johannes Brahms vertonten und
bearbeiteten Texte. Munich: Langeweische-Brandt, 1983.

Orel, Alfred. Johannes Brahms und Julius Allgeyer: Eine Künstlerfreundschaft in Briefen.
Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1964.

Otto, Eberhard. “Dichter in Bayern und ihre Komponisten.” Musik in Bayern:
Halbjahresschrift der Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte 18-19 (1979): 95-109.

_____. “Georg Friedrich Daumer und Johannes Brahms: Ein fränkischer Dichter und
sein Komponist.” Musik in Bayern: Halbjahresschrift der Gesellschaft für Bayerische
Musikgeschichte 21 (1980): 11-18.

Ottokar, Amadeus. See Daumer, Georg Friedrich.

Palmer, John. “Johannes Brahms, Waltzes (16) for piano, 4 hands (or piano), Op. 39.”
Accessed June 25, 2014. http://www.allmusic.com/composition/waltzes-16-for-
piano-4-hands-or-piano-op-39-mc0002368533.

Paskins, Helen, with Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges. “Brahms and his arrangers.”
In Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Public and Private Performance,
edited by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, 178-220. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014.

Pepperle, Heinz and Ingrid Pepperle, eds. Die Hegelsche Linke: Dokumente zur Philosophie
und Politik im deutschen Vormärz. Leipzig: Reclam, 1985.

Petöfi, Sándor. Petöfi Sándor Összes Költeményei: 1842 - 1846, vol. 2. Budapest: Emich
Gustáv Sajátya, 1848.

Pictet, Adolphe. Les Origines Indo-Européennes, ou, les Aryas Primitifs: Essai de Paléontologie
Linguistique, vol. 2. Paris: Joël Cherbuliez, 1863.

Pierard, Richard V. “German Pietism as a Major Factor in the Beginnings of Modern
Protestant Missions.” In The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, edited by Christian T.
Collins Winn, Christopher Gehrz, G. William Carlson, and Eric Holst, 285-95.
Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

Pinson, Koppel. Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism. New York:
Octagon, 1968. First published 1934.

Pizer, John David. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

281!
Platen, August Graf von. Der Briefwechsel des Grafen August von Platen. 4 vols. Munich: G.
Müller, 1911.

_____. Die Tagebücher des Grafen August von Platen. Edited by Georg von Laubmann and
Ludwig von Scheffler. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger,
1896-1900. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969.

Pott, Sandra and Sandra Richter. Poetiken: Poetologische Lyrik, Poetik und Ästhetik von
Novalis bis Rilke. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004.

Radano, Ronald Michael, and Philip Vilas Bohlman, eds. Music and the Racial
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Reinalter, Helmut. “Liberalism (Germany).” Translated by James Chastain. In
Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions. Accessed May 26, 2014.
http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/ip/libgerm.htm.

Remy, Arthur Frank Joseph. “The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of
Germany.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1901.

Reynolds, Christopher. “Brahms Rhapsodizing: The Alto Rhapsody and Its Expressive
Double.” The Journal of Musicology 29, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 191-238.

Richter, Sandra. A History of Poetics: German Scholarly Esthetic and Poetics in International
Context, 1770-1960. Berlin: de Greuter, 2010.

Rij, Inge van. Brahms’s Song Collections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Robinson, Jancis, ed. The Oxford Companion to Wine. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University
Press 2006.

Rosen, Michael. Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982.

Rosenthal, David August. Convertitenbilder aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, vol. 1. Schaffhausen,
1864-66.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Salmen, Walter. Geschichte der Rhapsodie. Zürich: Atlantis Musikbücherei, 1966.

Sams, Eric. The Songs of Johannes Brahms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Saul, Nicholas. Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long
Nineteenth Century. London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney
Publishing, 2007.

282!
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. The Philosophy of Art. Translated by Douglas
W. Stott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Originally published
as Philosophie der Kunst (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1802-3).

_____. On University Studies. Edited by N. Guterman. Translated by E. S. Morgan.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996. Originally published as Vorlesungen über die
Methode des akademischen Studiums (Tübingen: Cotta, 1803).

Schimmel, Annemarie. “Hafiz and His Critics.” Studies in Islam (1979): 253-85.

_____. As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press,
1982.

_____. A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1992.

_____. “Weltpoesie Allein ist Weltversöhnung: Gedanken einer Orientalistin zu
Johann Gottfried Herder.” Via Regia: Blätter für internationale kulturelle
Kommunikation 21/22 (1995): 1-8. http://www.via-regia.org/bibliothek/pdf/
Heft2122/schimmel_weltpoesie.pdf.

Schmidt, Julian. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols.
Berlin, 1886-96.

Schneider, Georg, ed. Leben und Gedicht. Erlangen: Fränkische Bibliophilengesellschaft,
1961.

Schoenberg, Arnold. “Brahms the Progressive (1947).” In Style and Idea: Selected
Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, edited by Leonard Stein, translated by Leo Black, 398-
441. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.

Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Knopf, 1981. First
published 1961.

Schott, Robin May. Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1988.

Schrader, Otto. Prehistoric antiquities of the Aryan peoples, a manual of comparative philology
and the earliest culture. Being the “Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte” of O. Schrader.
Translated by Frank Byron Jevons. New York: Scribner and Welford, 1890. First
published 1886.

Schumann, Eugenie. Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann. Translated by Marie Busch.
London: William Heinemann, 1927.

283!
Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East,
1680-1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984.

Scott, Derek B. Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in
London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Sehr, Peter. Kaspar Hauser. Directed by Peter Sehr. 1993. Distributed in the United
States by Leisure Time Features (New York), 1996. Film.

Sheehan, James J. “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Past
and Present 51 (May 1971): 116-37.

_____. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978.

Sijbrand, Linda. “Orientalism and Sufism: An Overview.” In Orientalism Revisited: Art,
Land, and Voyage, edited by Ian Richard Netton, 98-112. London: Routledge, 2013.

Slenczka, Notger. Der Glaube und sein Grund. Vol. 1 of Studien zur Erlanger Theologie.
Göttingen: Vandenhock and Ruprecht, 1998.

Smith, Anthony D. Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth, 1971.

_____. Chosen Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Smith, Woodruff D. Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840-1920. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991.

Smyth, Ethel. Impressions that Remained, vol. 1. London: Longmans, Green, and
Company, 1919.

Snyder, Louis L. Roots of German Nationalism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1978.

Stark, Lucien. Brahms’s Vocal Duets and Quartets with Piano. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998.

Stevens, Daniel Brian. “Brahms’s Song Collections: Rethinking a Genre.” PhD diss.,
University of Michigan, 2008.

Swafford, Jan. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Tacitus, Cornelius. The Germania of Tacitus, with Ethnological Dissertations and Notes by R.
G. Latham, M.D., F.R.S. Edited by Robert G. Latham. London: Taylor, Walton, and
Maberly, 1851.

284!
Tillich, Paul. A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to
Existentialism. Edited by Carl E. Braaten. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Tipton, Frank B. A History of Modern Germany Since 1815. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003.

Thuleen, Nancy. “Poetics and Polemics of Heine’s Bäder von Lucca.” Unpublished
manuscript, last modified 1996. www.nthuleen.com/papers/948Heine.html.

Valentin, Veit. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Leipzig, 1876.

Virnich, Maria. “Über Georg Friedrich Daumer als Philosoph.” Philosophisches Jahrbuch
55 (January 1942): 417-30.

Vries, Claudia de. “‘- da war mir ja schon, als habe ich sie verloren ...’: auf den Spuren
von Julie Schumann in Piemonte.” In Schumanniana nova: Festschrift Gerd Nauhaus
zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Bernhard R. Appel and Gerd Nauhaus, 149-68.
Sinzig: Studio Verlag, 2002.

Walden, Edward. Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved: Solving the Mystery. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2011.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott
Parsons. London: Unwin Hyman, 1930. First published 1905.

Welch, Stuart Cary. Persian Painting. New York: Braziller, 1976.

Williamson, George S. “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of
Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789-1819.” The Journal
of Modern History 72, no. 4 (December 2000): 890-943.

_____. The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to
Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Winter, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Erlanger Theologie und die Lutherforschung im 19.
Jahrhundert. Güterslog: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Johannes Brahms finished composing the original six movements of ""Ein deutsches Requiem"" just months before Prussia defeated Austria in 1866. He composed the ""Triumphlied"" in 1870-71 as Prussian forces were advancing on France. Daniel Beller-McKenna, in his 2004 book ""Brahms and the German Spirit,"" outlined the “confluence of Germany’s emergence as a powerful political state, Brahms’s emergence as a major figure, and the culmination of his early period in large works on great German literature.” Beller-McKenna argued: “Brahms chose to reach out to larger audiences with masses of assembled performers, singing the words of Luther’s Bible, Goethe, and Hölderlin at the very moment in Germany history when a nation was transforming its identity from that of a culture to that of a state. Add to this the religious underpinnings of German cultural nationalism, and the direct connections between Brahms’s sacred vocal music and German nationalism become clear” (10-11). ❧ At the same time, however, Brahms moved from Hamburg to Vienna and composed a large body of music in more intimate forms: lieder, vocal chamber music, and piano four-hands. These works incorporated texts and musical styles from non-German peoples that reflected the ethnic diversity and political complexity of Austria-Hungary. The poet Brahms turned to most often was Georg Friedrich Daumer. ❧ Daumer (1800-1885) was seen in his time as an important philosopher and poet. His works impressed Young Hegelians such as Ludwig Feuerbach, who credited Daumer with influencing his critique of religion. Daumer’s translations and original works in the guise of the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz were widely acclaimed

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Frank Martin's Le vin herbé: a critical analysis and guide to performance

PDF

A survey of the unaccompanied choral music of Wolfram Buchenberg

PDF

Music of reformed worship: a guide and resource for organists, choirs, and congregations

PDF

The motets of Georg Philipp Telemann: a study of their sources, musical style, and performance practice

PDF

Howard Swan, Charles Hirt, and Roger Wagner: their influences and the building of choral culture in southern California

PDF

Troisieme Magnificat a 4 voix avec instruments, H. 79 by Marc-Antoine Charpentier: a modern urtext edition with commentary

PDF

The sacred choral works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

PDF

The influence of the Australian landscape and indigenous Aboriginal music and traditions on Australian choral music: a study of choral works by nine Australian composers

PDF

Theology as a basis for golden section analysis: a model of construction for Johann Sebastian Bach's St. John Passion

PDF

Music in worship in the Churches of Christ and choral music performance in Church of Christ affiliated colleges and universities

PDF

Charles C. Hirt at the University of Southern California: significant contributions and an enduring legacy

PDF

Fortuna desperata: a study of symbolism

PDF

An analysis of two choral compositions with strings by Tarik O'Regan

PDF

Refined gold from along the Royal Highway: musical training at the California Missions as a model for present-day pedagogy

PDF

David Ward-Steinman and his oratorio The Song of Moses: an appreciation and analysis

PDF

Anglican chant in the twentieth-century: Genesis, harmonic development, and style

PDF

A companion guide to Nick Strimple’s Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century: a research and repertoire guide for nineteenth century small form choral works for mixed voices

PDF

Musical landscape in Northern Germany in the early seventeenth century: musica poetica and its application in the settings of Komm, Heiliger Geist, Herre Gott by Heinrich Schütz, Johann Hermann S...

PDF

Fauré's Requiem re-examined: a study of the work's genesis, influences, and influence

PDF

The Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America: vocal music and choral practice

Asset Metadata

Creator Houston, Seth Farwell (author)

Core Title A cultural history of Georg Friedrich Daumer's Polydora and Johannes Brahms's Liebeslieder waltzes, op. 52

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Doctor of Musical Arts

Degree Program Choral Music

Publication Date 11/19/2014

Defense Date 11/03/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Brahms,Choral Music,cultural history,Daumer,Germany,liberalism,Liebeslieder,music,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orientalism,Philosophy,Pietism,religious reform,Vocal quartets

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Scheibe, Jo-Michael (committee chair), Simms, Bryan (committee member), Strimple, Nick (committee member)

Creator Email seth.houston@usc.edu,seth@sethhouston.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-519290

Unique identifier UC11297693

Identifier etd-HoustonSet-3095.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-519290 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HoustonSet-3095.pdf

Dmrecord 519290

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Houston, Seth Farwell

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA