David Brodbeck

David Brodbeck’s research and teaching focus on Central European music and culture in the long nineteenth century and on rock music.

He has published on topics ranging from Schubert’s dances and Mendelssohn’s sacred vocal music to Brahms’s chamber works, as well as intertextuality in recordings by the Beatles and the Beach Boys. His book on Brahms’s First Symphony examines questions of genesis, allusion, and autobiographical meaning, themes that also inform his essays on Brahms’s counterpoint studies and later chamber music. More recently, his work has turned to social and political contexts, with publications including “Goldmark’s ‘Thoughts about Form and Style’ . . . and the Wagnerians’ Antisemitism” (Nineteenth-Century Studies), “‘You Don’t Just Stick It Together’; or, Things Paul (and John) Pinched from Brian” (Rock Music Studies, 2021), “Carl Goldmark and Cosmopolitan Patriotism” (Music History and Cosmopolitanism, 2019), and “Heimat is Where the Heart Is; or, How Hungarian Was Goldmark” (Austrian History Yearbook, 2017).

His monograph Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2014) won the Virgil Thomson Award from the ASCAP Foundation for Outstanding Book in the Field of Music Criticism and the Award for Excellence for a Book on Jewish Studies and Music from the American Musicological Society. His forthcoming book, Brahms Patriotic and Political, will be published by the University of Rochester Press in June 2025.

Brodbeck has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. He is a past president of the American Brahms Society.

Before joining the UC Irvine faculty, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Southern California.