We only know Max Bruch for three works, two for violin and orchestra, one for cello and orchestra. But the reason he is not as well known as Brahms is that his fundamental achievement and basis was as an oratorio composer, and choral music is a much harder sell to the orchestral crowd than symphonies.
The reason is simple, we're not a 'choral era.' I don't want to use the Pinchas Zukerman argument that we 'don't sing,' but compared to 19th century Northern Europe, singing is not a communal activity where as many as a thousand people pile onto a stage and sing about the biblical and classical stories that make them passionate.
Germany or England, it was a Victorian milleu in the late 19th century. The sex of Italian opera had no place, it was viewed as sinful. Unless you were Charles Darwin, or Richard Wagner, and arguably Karl Marx, any mention of human's animal urges was sublimated with retributive violence. The communion of love, be it erotic or simple expressions of affection, was put into community and public works (not to mention the brothels...). The Victorians have a bad name today, but in many ways we owe them our entire modern society. For all their excessive zeal, we owe them so much. They were the society which tamed the uglier side of human nature and set the stage for all our modern prosperity at least as much a the French enlightenment, if not more. For all their love of music, 19th century England did not produce much in the way of great composers; perhaps they were too inhibited to allow the subterranean instinct out which great music requires, or perhaps their true music was their incredible fiction and poetry. But we hear that old fashioned Victorian moral zeal all over Mendelssohn and Brahms, and in a later generation, in Elgar. Bruch is very much of their ilk, and if we may find Bruch a little too buttoned up and stuffy, perhaps the fault is ours rather than the music.
It's sometimes difficult to know how to approach such art. Their worldview is not ours. As much as I love Brahms (he might be my favorite composer), one can so hear the repression within it, the desire to tidy up human nature into something far more chaste and domesticated than it is. Still greater music like Mozart's has no such repression.
There is a kind of perversity in making Homer's extremely sensual epics into something so prim and inward, but within its straightjacket, one cannot deny the excitement and passion of its moral zeal. If one didn't know, one would think this a biblical story of divine retribution for sin like the story of Sodom or the Golden Calf. There is a kind of voyeuristic fascination with sin suffused in the the oratorio's entire genre. It is as though one can't get away from the ultimate nature of humans, and Victorians would not know what to do if they did not have sins and sex to punish.
Odysseus is only religious in that it embraced the 19th century religion of nationalism, and a very fervent religion it was. It is about love of country and homeland, and has an extraordinarily jingoistic undertone of the German 1870s, when the country finally united in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War after nearly a thousand years of division. After Odysseus, Bruch wrote a sequel celebrating the defeat of the Augustus Caesar's Roman Legions at Teuterberg Forest by the (eponymously named) Teutons.
Unlike later ages, the Victorians too had a fascination with all things German. Until World War I, Germany was thought the center of all that was progressive: the land of bildung (education) and science (wissenschaft). At World War I, Germany's nationalism demonstrated its dark side, and neither England nor Germany wanted reminders of it.
The irony of it all is that 19th century Germany, unprecedentedly friendly to Jews, sealed the undeserved doom of Bruch's reputation. Because of Bruch's famous setting of Yom Kippur's Kol Nidre prayer for cello and orchestra, he was wrongly thought to have Jewish ancestry and unofficially as banned by the Nazis as Mendelssohn. Never again would Bruch capture the world by storm.
It's a shame, Bruch's best music is rather impractical for our era, when classical choral societies are so much less important to the community fabric. But when one listens to the all too rare performances and recordings, one instantly realizes this is a truly great composer, scarcely less worthy of performance than the giants of the era. Any competent performance of Odysseus would be a truly worthwhile success. Now that Germany seems the world's greatest beacon of liberalism, it is most certainly time to celebrate Germany again, realizing that it is the only country in the world where liberals have fought a major attack of right-wing nationalism and definitively won. So let's hope that Bruch may be rediscovered. He, and we, deserve it.
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