(Ger. Deutschland).
Country in Northern Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea and the North German Plain to Lake Constance and the Bavarian Alps and Plateau, and from the North Sea and the French border to the Oder and Neisse rivers and the mountainous eastern regions of the Erzgebirge and the Fichtelgebirge. It is bordered by Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. After World War II, from 1949 to 1990, Germany was divided, with Bonn as the capital of West Germany; the historic capital Berlin was restored after reunification in 1990 (East Berlin having served as the capital of East Germany from 1949 to 1990).
JOHN KMETZ (I, 1), LUDWIG FINSCHER (I, 2–4), GISELHER SCHUBERT (I, 5), WILHELM SCHEPPING (II, 1, 3), PHILIP V. BOHLMAN (II, 2, 4)
Exactly when German history began has been a matter of debate ever since Goethe and Schiller felt obliged to ask the question ‘Germany? But where is it?’. Some modern historians start with the anointing of the first Carolingian king, Pippin the Short, in 751; or the re-foundation of the ‘Roman’ Empire in the West by his son Charlemagne (768–814) when he was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800. Other scholars have suggested the division of the Carolingian Empire in 843 by the Treaty of Verdun, or 911, the year that Conrad I, Duke of Franconia, was elected as the first king of the East Franks; and still others look to the coronation of Otto I, king of the East Franks, in 936, or to his imperial coronation in Rome in 962 as the country’s birthdate. It is clear, however, that by the end of the 10th century the four East Frankish peoples – the Franks, Swabians, Bavarians and Saxons – formed what was known as the land of the Germans (terra teutonica). From the 11th century such terms as regnum Alamannae, regnum Germaniae, Teutonicae or Romanorum were encountered frequently enough in contemporary historical accounts to conclude that a German land did exist. However, any account of German history must commence with Charlemagne, whose reign marked the beginnings of what was later to become known as the First Reich; by 800 Charlemagne’s empire included much of present-day Germany and Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as a narrow strip of northern Spain and most of northern Italy.
During the reign of Pippin the Short (751–68) attempts were made to introduce the Roman liturgy and its chant into the Frankish Church, a policy that was continued with particular vigour by Charlemagne and his successor, Louis the Pious (814–40). Through the efforts of several leading churchmen the various native Gallican traditions were gradually replaced and a single rite and chant repertory established throughout the Empire. Although this repertory was intended to be identical to that sung in the Church of Rome, it is clear from contemporary accounts that by 840 the ‘Roman’ music taught in the Carolingian Empire had significantly diverged from its origin. This Frankish version of the Roman repertory is known as Gregorian chant (see Plainchant, §II). During the late 8th century and the 9th a systematic method of classifying liturgical melodies was developed in Francia based on the eight psalm tones and a means of recording the music evolved in the form of neumatic notation. Many of the earliest surviving sources of notation originate from monastic houses in the Germanic areas of the Empire; the oldest known example (D-Mbs clm 9543) is thought to have been written at the monastery of St Emmeram, Regensburg, by the scribe Engyldeo between 817 and 834. Other ecclesiastical centres in the German-speaking lands that are known to have been important in the cultivation of liturgical chant are Aachen (where Charlemagne established his court), Augsburg, Cologne, Einsiedeln, Reichenau and St Gallen. German monasteries also played a significant role in the expansion of the Gregorian repertory and in the development of new plainchant forms (see Trope (i) and Sequence (i)). As early as the 9th century the practice of appending or interpolating long, untexted melismas into pre-existing chants, which seems to have originated in centres in present-day France, made its way to the German-speaking lands in East Francia, especially St Gallen. Here, in the hands of the monk Notker Balbulus (c840–912), the sequence repertory was refined. By assigning a syllable of text to each tone of a melisma, Notker produced sequentiae cum prosae that were fully syllabic, a style that continued to flourish in Germany and elsewhere throughout the Middle Ages.
German monastic houses also contributed significantly to the development of music theory and pedagogy. The earliest known treatises dealing with polyphony and containing examples of parallel organum are the Musica enchiriadis and the Scolica enchiriadis, both dating from the late 9th century. Although it is now reasonably clear that these sources originate from a northern part of West Francia (i.e. northern France and the Netherlands), and not from a southern part of East Francia (i.e. German-speaking Switzerland), there is no question that they were produced in the wake of the intense cultural and musical activities fostered earlier under Charlemagne’s reign. Many important works on medieval music theory, however, were composed by writers from the Germanic areas of the Empire; they include the treatise and tonary of the Benedictine monk Regino of Prüm (c842–915). Written in about 900, this tonary is one of the largest that is still extant. Other theorists of the 10th and 11th centuries, many of whom lived in the Rhineland, were Hucbald, abbot of St Amand (c850–930), Berno, abbot of Reichenau (d 1048), Hermannus Contractus, also of Reichenau (1012–54) and Wilhelm of Hirsau, a monk of St Emmeram (d 1091), who, like his contemporaries, wrote on the species of intervals and their relationship to octave scales and the eight church modes. Although these theorists all wrote in Latin, several works dating from this period were written in German. The earliest treatises on music in German have been attributed to the monk of St Gallen, Notker Labeo (c950–1022). Among Labeo’s five essays in Old High German, his treatise on the measurement of organ pipes is especially noteworthy in that it represents one of the first in a long line of works on this subject written by German speakers.
Aside from the many medieval German writings on plainchant, mode, the monochord and organ building, one of the most important theoretical discussions of polyphony and of mensural notation can be attributed to the German-speaker Franco of Cologne (fl mid to late-13th century), who, while working in Paris, established a system of musical notation in his Ars cantus mensurabilis that formed the foundation upon which mensural notation emerged. Franconian notation, however, had little influence on the musical scene of medieval Germany. Only one of the eight extant copies of Franco’s treatise is of German origin (F-SDI 42, ff.43–53v), and this one is late, dating from the 14th century. Indeed, there is little evidence of Franco’s writings having any influence in Germany or, for that matter, that Germans had any interest in composing polyphony until the second half of the 14th century. The Engelberg Codex 314, written predominantly by the monks Walter Mirer and Bartholomaeus Fridower between about 1360 and 1400, contains examples of polyphony, as does the Mondsee-Weiner Liederhandschrift (A-Wn 2856), which dates from around 1460 but contains polyphonic songs written at least a half a century earlier by the Monk of Salzburg (fl late 14th century). However, these examples of German polyphonic writing were isolated and, compared to their French counterparts, primitive. That polyphony was slow to develop in Germany could be attributed to the fact that Germany, unlike France, was slow to develop as a unified nation. By the 13th century France had a centre of commerce and of culture, wherein the so-called Parisian organum of Notre Dame and the motets of the Ars Antiqua flourished. Germany, on the other hand, had at this time no commercial or cultural centre, nor a musical genre that it could call its own. It is true that the earliest vernacular hymns developed from Gregorian chant (e.g. Christ ist erstanden and Nun bitten wir den heiligen Geist), as well as some important liturgical dramas with music (e.g. Hildegard of Bingen’s Ordo virtutum), are of German origin. Yet when one compares these musical accomplishments with those produced in France at this time, they are neither progressive nor particularly original. Ironically, under the Ottonian (919–1024), Salian (1024–1125) and Hohenstaufen (1138–1254) dynasties, it was Germany, not France, that was the pre-eminent power in Europe in the Middle Ages. But the German empire was inherently weak, because it was too large to be effectively ruled. Rivalry between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen dynasties further abraded the empire and, from the beginning of the 13th century when France grew predominant in Europe, Germany became a power vacuum controlled by territorial princes, several of whom looked to France for their cultural inspiration. However, despite the political chaos of the Hohenstaufen period, the population of Germany grew from an estimated eight million in 1200 to around 14 million in 1300, and the number of towns increased tenfold. Indeed, it was at this time that German cities like Augsburg, Cologne and Nuremberg began to develop, and a prosperous merchant class began to emerge. Within the walls of these urban centres civic bands were formed, a class of professional singers developed, dance halls were built and penitential processions of flagellants heard who, in the wake of the Black Death of 1349, sang Geisslerlieder for their salvation. A number of German universities that are still renowned centres of scholarship were also founded at this time. They included not only Prague (1348), but also the universities of Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1386) and Leipzig (1409). Here music was taught in the context of the Quadrivium to a new class of professional bureaucrats, lawyers and secular scholars, including Johannes Klein, whose extant books document the musical interests and abilities of this 15th-century Leipzig professor.
As universities began to replace monasteries as centres of learning in the 14th century, we also see castles and secular courts replacing ecclesiastical communities as centres of culture. Growing out of this courtly life, German medieval literature reached its peak in the narrative epic poems of Tristan, Parzivâl and the Nibelungenlied as well as in the lyrical love poetry of the Minnesinger. These German poet-musicians of noble birth produced a monophonic song repertory that unquestionably represents the primary manifestation of German music during the high Middle Ages, though they were inspired by French troubadours. Yet the Minnesang differs considerably from its French counterpart. While both the French and German texts are amorous or idyllic, the German texts tend to be more narrative and devotional, with many in praise of the Virgin. The German melodies are demonstrably more modal and, given their narrative style, often take on extensive proportions which, in turn, make the rhythms of the trouvères difficult to apply. The French refrain forms are replaced in the German repertory by both the Leich, derived from the French lai, and the bar form, derived from the French ballade, the latter of which, with its Stollen (section a) and Abgesang (section b), became the dominant form for the Meistersinger and Tenorlied composers of the 15th and 16th centuries. Among the more prominent Minnesinger were Walther von der Vogelweide (c1170–c1230), Neidhart von Reuental (c1180 – after 1237) and Heinrich von Meissen (d1318), whose many poems in praise of courtly women and of the Virgin earned him the nickname ‘Frauenlob’ (‘Praiser of women’). Manuscript transmission of the poetry dates from the 13th century, the primary source being the Manesse Codex (D-HEu), whose illuminations demonstrate that the Minnesang was accompanied by instruments. Manuscript transmission of the music, however, dates from the 14th and 15th centuries, with the sources preserved in Jena (D-Ju El.f.101, Jenaer Liederhandschrift), Munich (Mbs Cgm 4997, Colmar Liederhandschrift) and Vienna (A-Wn 2701, Frauenlob Codex or Wiener Leichhandschrift) being the chief witnesses. Since polyphony was slow to develop within the German-speaking realm, it is not surprising that a monophonic song repertory continued to flourish in Germany far longer than elsewhere in Europe. By the beginning of the 15th century Hugo von Montfort (1357–1423) was still writing monophonic songs in the Minnesang tradition. By the end of the century, a middle-class version of this noble art emerged in the hands of the Meistersinger. These conservative songwriters, whose activities could be heard especially in the civic singing schools of Augsburg and Nuremberg, organized themselves into Guilds. Its most famous practitioner was the Nuremberg craftsman Hans Sachs (1494–1576; fig.2).
As the Minnesang tradition died out and the Meistergesang tradition began to take root in the first half of the 15th century, we see for the first time German musicians like the Monk of Salzburg taking an active interest in polyphonic composition, as evidenced by the contents of the Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift (A-Wn 2856) and by the earlier Strasbourg manuscript (F-Sm C.22) copied around 1410, but destroyed by fire in 1870. Indeed, it seems to be no coincidence that around the same time German speakers began composing polyphony, foreign composers who wrote polyphony began appearing in large numbers at German courts and chapels. In the 1440s, for example, we find Johannes Brassart and Johannes de Sarto on the payroll of the Habsburg Emperor Friedrich III, the father of the famous Weisskönig Maximilian I. These two Netherlandish composers are important because they represent the first in a long line of foreign musicians who served Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. It is also at this time that we begin to see large amounts of Burgundian and English music, both sacred and secular, appearing in German sources. The Aosta manuscript, the St Emmeram Codex, the Trent Codices and the Buxheim Organ Book, as well as the songbooks of Schedel, Glogau and Lochamer demonstrate that Germans had good musical taste. These sources also show that German-speakers were not yet able to compose music of their own that was of the quality of the music they were collecting. The German songs preserved in the Liederhandschriften contain all the distinctive signs of the emerging German Tenorlied, with its bar form and Hofweise sung by the tenor voice. Yet a song like the anonymous In feurs hitz from the Glogauer Liederbuch clearly lacks the refined handling of melody, rhythm and texture brought later to the genre by the South Netherlandish composer Henricus Isaac and his Swiss-born student Ludwig Senfl. Together, these composers transformed the Tenorlied from its woodcut-like texture into a sophisticated hybrid combining German and Franco-Flemish techniques. As Franco-Flemish and Burgundian songs began to appear in 15th-century German sources, we also see the Tyrolean knight Oswald von Wolkenstein creating German translations and contrafacta of this foreign song repertory, a tradition that continued in German-speaking lands well into the 17th century. At the same time, and with the same repertory, we also see Conrad Paumann transcribing the music of Du Fay and his contemporaries into German organ tablature, and later see Hans Judenkünig transcribing the next generation of foreign music into tablature for the lute. The interest in having foreign songs sung in German or performed on instruments that were plucked, blown, touched or bowed softly was related to the needs of a burgeoning merchant class, whose influence on German music history would prove decisive from the beginning of the 16th century onwards.
By the late Middle Ages, a macroeconomic change was clearly underway in central Europe. It entailed a steady shift from ecclesiastical goods to worldly goods, from a feudal system to a mercantile system, from an agrarian economy to a sophisticated urban society that promoted international trade and fostered investment in emerging technologies. In short, it signified the beginning of the capitalist world. This macroeconomic shift had a profound effect on the business of making, performing and transmitting music in early modern Germany. However, it must be emphasized that, with little more than 1% of the population musically literate, it was a business that at best could be categorized as microeconomic.
Between 1450 and 1550 musical culture in the German-speaking lands entered a new phase. During this period the region cultivated a polyphonic soundscape that could be classified for the first time as not only truly ‘Germanic’ but also musically sophisticated. By the middle of the 15th century, for example, the region witnessed the birth of its first important ‘school’ of polyphonic composers, represented by Adam von Fulda, Heinrich Finck and Paul Hofhaimer. Together, these three played a significant role in establishing the German Tenorlied as a viable genre, which finally secured Germany a respectable place among the musical nations of Europe. They also adapted the Franco-Flemish style of composition to secular and sacred music alike, and in so doing brought this ‘new art’ to the German courts, universities and cities where they were employed. At the court of Frederick the Wise of Saxony and at the newly founded University of Wittenberg (1502), Adam von Fulda took the lead. At the court of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, it was Heinrich Finck. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it was the internationally renowned keyboard virtuoso Paul Hofhaimer, working together with the Flemish master Henricus Isaac, who raised the level of music making to new heights in Germany at the court of Maximilian I. In the hands of Hofhaimer’s many students, including Hans Buchner, Dionisio Memo and Wolfgang Grefinger, Hofhaimer’s legacy and Germany's position as a land endowed with some of the best instrumentalists began to emerge. Aside from Hofhaimer and his school of ‘Paulomines’, Arnolt Schlick, Sebastian Virdung and Hans Neusidler set new standards in instrumental music. German instrumentalists like the Schubingers and German-made instruments produced by the Neuschel family were in demand outside Germany in much the same way that Franco-Flemish composers of vocal music were sought after in Germany and throughout Europe.
German speakers were also integral to the development of music printing as a viable commercial industry. In addition to the immense impact they had on the printing of chant from woodblock during the second half of the 15th century, they played an important role in the development of printing mensural music from type in the first half of the 16th century. Very soon after the Venetian printer Petrucci released his alphabet series of polyphonic songs between 1501 and 1503, the Augsburg printer Erhard Oeglin issued polyphonic settings of Horace's odes (1507) and the Basle printer Georg Mewes published four masses of Jacob Obrecht (c1510). Likewise, as volumes of frottolas and strambotti rolled off Italian presses during the second decade of the century, the publishing houses of Oeglin, Schoeffer and Arnt von Aich were also releasing large and important collections of German Tenorlieder. There were not only for courtly consumption but also for the educated nouveaux riches of German society, among whom were such dynastic houses of ‘corporate’ finance as the Fuggers, Welsers and Herwarts of Augsburg. By the third and fourth decades, when such printers as Attaingnant and Gardano were busy marketing the new style of chanson and madrigal by Sermisy and Arcadelt, the Nuremberg publishing houses of Petreius, Berg and Neuber, and Formschneider were busy printing the new style of German Tenorlied by Ludwig Senfl and his contemporaries, together with other music by a wide range of composers. In the case of the Nuremberg printer Johann Petreius, this included, in addition to the Tenorlied, chansons, madrigals, psalms, masses, motets, hymns, sequences, antiphones, odes, instrumental dances and intabulations, as well as numerous excerpts from these and other genres printed as examples in theoretical discussions.
The diversity of music printed by Petreius is matched by the diversity of the composers. Of the 172 represented, only 60 were German-speaking. While their reputations ran the gamut from important figures of the imperial court orbit (e.g. Hofhaimer and Senfl) to Kleinmeister attached to local parish churches (e.g. Rupert Unterholtzer), the remaining 112 international composers were mostly seasoned professionals whose talents were appreciated throughout Europe's emerging international economy. They hailed from France, Italy and the Low Countries and included such celebrated figures as Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin, Sermisy, Arcadelt, Verdelot, Gombert and Willaert. Indeed, if one compares the output of German music printers with that of contemporary French, Italian and Flemish printers, three aspects emerge which generally set German music printers apart. They published a repertory that was far more international in scope; they printed the works of composers whose careers spanned collectively nearly a century of Western music history; and they issued more pedagogical volumes intended to teach the art of singing to students at local Latin schools or, indeed, to anyone who could read Latin. Nikolaus Listenius’s Musica, Georg Rhau’s Enchiridion and Sebald Heyden’s De arte canendi were the first in a long line of practical music texts which appeared in the wake of the German Reformation.
Few people, and even fewer events, had such an impact on Germany as Martin Luther and his Reformation. Aside from causing religious, political and socio-economic upheaval, it was of musical significance in that the role of music was redefined both in terms of the Lutheran service and the Christian way of life in general. Unlike the Swiss reformers Zwingli and Calvin, who either banished music altogether or restricted its use in their reformed services, Luther saw music and theology as inextricably woven together. In keeping with his principle of congregational participation, his main vehicle for the delivery of the Word of God was the Protestant hymn, which was to be sung in the vernacular to simple, tuneful melodies. For his texts Luther resorted chiefly to Roman Catholic hymns, which he (or his collaborators) translated into German. These included Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland, a reworking of the Veni Redemptor gentium, and Komm Heiliger Geist, a translation of Veni sancte spiritus. Aside from capitalizing on a well-known Latin repertory, Luther relied heavily on the German folk tradition. Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ and Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist were either altered or considerably extended by Luther, whilst the famous 11th-century hymn Christ ist erstanden was completely rewritten to form Christ lag in Todesbanden. Luther also created newly composed hymns such as Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein and Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (see Lutheran church music). By 1523 broadsheets containing German hymns complete with melodies were printed in Wittenberg. In 1524 the ‘Achtliederbuch’, a collection of 40 monophonic hymns, over half of which were written by Luther himself, was issued in Nuremberg. This important publication was soon followed by numerous others which appeared not only in Nuremberg and Wittenberg, but also in Leipzig, Strasbourg, Worms and Erfurt. Although the Protestant chorale was conceived as a monophonic tune, it was quickly reworked into polyphonic settings by Johann Walter (i) who, working closely with Luther and the Wittenberg printer Georg Rhau, published the first polyphonic collection of Luther’s hymn repertory (Geystliches gesangk Buchleyn, 1524).
Walter’s partbooks, as well as others issued later by Rhau, were clearly intended for choral use in school and in church. Yet the complex polyphonic textures one finds in these collections would certainly have alienated most of Luther’s musically illiterate congregation. Indeed, it was not until 1586, when Lucas Osiander published his Fünffzig geistliche Lieder und Psalmen, that Luther’s dream of congregational singing began to be fully realized. Here Osiander took the melody and placed it in the descant voice and then adopted a simple homophonic style in the accompanying lower parts to support it. Osiander’s more user-friendly ‘cantional’ style was embraced by Sethus Calvisius (Harmonia cantionum ecclesiasticarum, 1597), Hans Leo Hassler (Kirchengesäng: Psalmen und geistliche Lieder, 1608) and Samuel Scheidt (Tabulatur-Buch hundert geistlicher Lieder und Psalmen, 1650) and later reached its zenith in the chorale harmonizations of Bach (see Chorale).
There is no question that Luther played an important role in shaping the curricula of musical education in the modern age and in establishing congregational singing in church. Yet his reformed music still remained heavily dependent on the traditional style of polyphony cultivated by Roman Catholic composers. For example, much of the so-called ‘Protestant’ music of Martin Agricola, Sixt Dietrich and Balthasar Resinarius is not remarkably different from music written by such Catholic composers as Arnold von Bruck, Lupus Hellinck, Ludwig Senfl and Thomas Stoltzer. Indeed, soon after the Peace of Augsburg was signed in 1555 (a treaty that granted equal rights to Lutherans and Roman Catholics alike), one begins to detect a reaction against congregational singing among some Protestant German strongholds. Latin again asserted itself. More complex polyphony began to be written by such composers as Jobst vom Brandt, Gallus Dressler and Matthaeus Le Maistre, who in 1554 succeeded Johann Walter as Kapellmeister to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden.
In fact, throughout the second half of the 16th century the lines of demarcation between Protestant and Catholic music often become blurred, as Protestant composers wrote music in Latin, and Catholic composers set Protestant German texts. This duplicity is perhaps best illustrated by the career of the Protestant organist Hassler who, while employed by the Catholic banker Octavian Fugger, wrote in all sacred genres, Protestant as well as Catholic, in German as well as in Latin. Indeed, Hassler’s collected works, when taken together with those of the Bavarian court composer Lassus, demonstrate how 16th-century musicians were able to adapt to ‘free market forces’ by diversifying their portfolio of musical assets.
From the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, Germany enjoyed a period of relative peace. At the same time, it witnessed the beginning of an economic decline compounded by rampant inflation. As the European economy shifted westward to the Atlantic states of Spain, France, England and the Low Countries, in search of such precious commodities as gold, silver and sugar from the New World, Germany was no longer at the centre of European commerce. Consequently, the thriving economies of many German towns in the late Middle Ages and in the first half of the 16th century gradually dried up. Germany as a whole entered a long period of economic recession that continued well into the 19th century.
Although Germany’s musical culture continued to flourish, its main practitioners were no longer composers like Senfl, writing in a style demonstrably German. Rather they were foreigners or native Germans who, like the Minnesinger before them, drew heavily on foreign influence. From the Netherlands came Lassus, who settled in Munich; Le Maistre, who moved to Dresden; Phillipe de Monte, who resided in Prague; and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck who, while never leaving the Low Countries, had an immense impact on several generations of German organists. From England came John Dowland, William Brade and Thomas Simpson, each of whom resided at German courts.
The most important influence, however, came from Italy, first with instrumental music and then the introduction of the madrigal and villanella. From the mid-1560s to the end of the century, expatriates and native Germans alike published collections of German songs which were so heavily influenced by the style of the villanella and madrigal that, but for the language of their texts, they were virtually indistinguishable from their Italian originals. The popularity of this new Italian style, which ultimately resulted in the collapse of the German Tenorlied, is evidenced not only by the makers of this music but also by its consumers. As early as 1566, the catalogue of Raimund Fugger’s music library in Augsburg recorded about 70 prints of Italian madrigals and villanellas. By 1586, when virtually the whole musical establishment of the Munich court hailed from Italy, Johann Heinrich Herwart, another Augsburg patrician and merchant, had 200 printed volumes of this Italian secular song repertory in his collection. These madrigalian songs were enjoyed not only at the courts and private homes of Germany’s élite, but also by its middle-class citizens. This is evident from the activities of the Musicalische Krentzleins-Gesellschaft of Nuremberg founded in 1568; from the collection of Italian music amassed by the Danzig merchant and bibliophile Georg Knoff; and from the German keyboard music belonging to the lawyer Christoph Leibfried, who singlehandedly created hundreds of intabulations of this Italian vocal repertory for his own enjoyment while living in Würzburg, Tübingen and Basle between 1585 and 1600.
Apart from the madrigal and villanella craze, German enthusiasm for foreign music, especially Italian, is evident in the reception of monody, of the concertato principle and stile rappresentativo, and of instrumental music. ‘The result of this assimilation of foreign influences’, as Christoph Wolff noted, ‘was a plurality of styles in German Baroque music not found in any other European country.’ That such Italian innovations as monody, figured bass and concertato were adopted in Germany more quickly than anywhere else and continued unabated well into the 17th century can be attributed to the strong trade routes that developed between the two countries, and especially between the cities of Venice and Nuremberg, the so-called ‘German Venice’. By 1620 the new style of Italian music could not only be heard throughout most of Germany, but read in theory as well. In the monumental treatise Syntagma musicum (1614–19), Michael Praetorius analysed the implications of the new style in remarkable detail. What one read in his treatise could be heard in his Musae Sioniae (1605–11), a veritable encyclopedia of chorale arrangements ranging from simple harmonizations to sensational polychoral settings in the Venetian style.
However, the most important German practitioner of the Italian style was the Venetian-trained composer Heinrich Schütz, one of Giovanni Gabrieli’s favourite students. In his first great work of German church music, the Psalmen Davids (1619), Schütz adopted the polyphonic concertato style of Gabrieli in compositions for two, three and four choruses with instruments. In his Kleine geistliche Concerte (1636–9) he demonstrated his ability to handle modern monody. In the Geistliche Chor-Music (1648), a retrospective collection of polyphony, Schütz succeeded in doing the apparently impossible by combining stile antico with stile moderno. And in the three instalments of his Symphoniae sacrae (1629, 1647 and 1650), he proved that each one of these different styles and approaches to composition could co-exist. That German music soared to unprecedented heights in the works of Schütz could also be attributed in part to the delight that he derived from setting German speech rhythm within the musical-rhetorical context of the musica poetica. The relationship between text and music found in his vocal works represents as perfect a union of words and music in the German language as was ever achieved.
The first half of the 17th century also witnessed important developments in the history of German keyboard music, especially as the already highly developed German organ came to assume a leading position within the church. At this time, three regional schools of organ playing emerged: a southern school conditioned by the Italian influence of Gabrieli and Merulo; a northern school influenced by the unique English-Dutch style of Sweelinck; and a central school around Samuel Scheidt, Sweelinck’s student in Halle.
It was with Scheidt that the central style of German organ music came into its own. In his epoch-making Tabulatura nova (1624), Scheidt abandoned traditional German organ tablature and the colourist style of Leipzig’s Elias Nikolaus Ammerbach (Ein new künstlich Tabulaturbuch, 1575), and in its place adopted a fresh new approach to composition which he transcribed into Italian keyboard partitura. Within this modern notational framework employing a separate staff for each voice, Scheidt composed variations on chorales, secular songs and dances, produced chorale fantasies and wrote elaborate fugues. His music marked the beginning of a new age in German organ composition that was to continue up to the death of Bach. In harpsichord music, German keyboard composers also looked to Italy and France for examples on which to base their works, as is evident in the music of Johann Jacob Froberger, who combined the bold harmonic language of his teacher Frescobaldi with the delicate agréments of French dance music.
The musical accomplishments of such dominating figures of the early German Baroque as Schütz, Scheidt and Schein are unquestionable. Yet to appreciate their achievements fully and to place them within a context, account must be taken of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) through which they lived. Schütz wrote only vocal music. Yet in the case of this vocal music, as in that of Scheidt and Schein, sacred music far outnumbers secular works. This to some extent underscores the differences between German and Italian musical life and the circumstances that produced these differences. As Italy staged spectacles of music, dance and drama in a peaceful political climate, Germany was devastated by three decades of war. The courts were often impoverished and had to improvise. Citizens were almost always afraid for their lives. Consequently, it seems to be no coincidence that German composers, like Schütz, frequently sought refuge in the south. When they returned, they felt more compelled to write music of religious observation and solace than to write opera. Ironically, Dafne (1627), the only opera composed by Schütz, is now lost.
The Thirty Years War was the greatest political, economic and cultural watershed in the German territories before World War II. Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Thuringia and parts of Saxony, the Palatinate and Württemberg lost about half their population; Brandenburg, Hesse, Franconia and Swabia lost a third, while the Catholic south-east and Protestant north-west remained largely spared. However, the speedy recovery of most urban areas after the war, assisted by very swift demographic growth in the second half of the 17th century, created favourable conditions for the rapid regeneration of cultural life in towns, cities and courts. A large number of cultural centres emerged within a wide variety of political structures which remained fundamentally stable until 1803. Some of these centres were free imperial cities or trading centres such as Hamburg, Lübeck, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Nuremberg, others were small principalities under ecclesiastical or secular rule, others again were territorial states. The variety of the cultural structures themselves and the rivalry between them encouraged mobility, stylistic diversity and a receptiveness to outside influences. These factors are all evident in German music of the time, with its eclecticism and readiness to adopt foreign styles, forms and techniques, a process which was to lead to J.J. Quantz’s famous discussion of the ‘mixed’ or ‘German’ style in his Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversière zu spielen (1752); according to Quantz, this ‘German’ style derived from a combination of the best elements of the music of other nations.
The wide variety of German musical culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, which had no counterpart in other countries, was further increased by two specific phenomena: the schism between the mainly Protestant north and the mainly Catholic south, and the co-existence until well into the 18th century of the most up-to-date music from outside Germany (especially Italy) with the continuing traditions of the 16th century. In short, the varied development of music in Germany during the 17th and 18th centuries arose from religious, political and economic conditions: differences between Catholic and Protestant regions on the one hand, and between rural, urban and court musical cultures on the other.
We have very little direct information about the music of the lower classes, although a certain amount can be inferred from literature, the visual arts and (in the 19th century) folksong collections. We can be sure, however, that there was much singing, music-making and dancing in towns and villages during the 17th and 18th centuries, both in daily life and on festive occasions. Many performances were also given by itinerant musicians, often war veterans, who played the dulcimer, bagpipes and fiddle. The novels of Grimmelshausen, in particular Simplicissimus (1669), present a vivid picture of such musicians. There was some blurring of the distinctions between traditional music, expecially folksong, and melodies composed by professional musicians, particularly for hymns in which the whole community could join. Akin to the simple hymns were numerous sacred songs in which poets deplored the troubles of the times and expressed their hopes for modest happiness on earth and bliss in the life to come. The 17th century was a century of song in Germany; some 10,000 sacred poems were written and about 3000 of them set to music. Notable Catholic poets included Friedrich von Spee and Angelus Silesius; their Protestant equivalents were Johann Rist and Paul Gerhardt. Silesius collaborated with the musician Georg Joseph, who was in the service of the Prince-Bishop of Breslau and wrote melodies for most of Silesius’s poems. The poems of Rist and Gerhardt were sung to both new and traditional hymn tunes, and sometimes had more elaborate settings with basso continuo. The most important composers of such songs included Johannes Crüger, S.T. Staden, Andreas Hammerschmidt, Johann Schop (i), Thomas Selle and Heinrich Scheidemann.
The extraordinary flowering of sacred song in the 17th century reflected the need of many people, particularly in the towns, for spiritual consolation, while the dissemination of more musically demanding songs attested to the new culture of middle-class music-making, combining the tradition of the strophic song with such Italian innovations as the basso continuo. The same is true of secular song, which also flourished in the second half of the century; its principal exponents included Heinrich Albert and Johann Sebastiani of Königsberg, the court Kantor J.P. Krieger of Weissenfels and the organist Andreas Hammerschmidt of Zittau.
Hymn-singing was not the only link between the musical cultures of town and country in the 17th century. Lay choirs were formed to sing sacred music on the model of the urban Kantorei (and encouraged by the progressive spread of literacy), and lay musicians made up instrumental ensembles to play at festivals and ceremonies for a fee. Resentment of these lay musicians by professional town musicians led to a number of decrees towards the end of the century stating that only performers of sacred music might ‘serve’ within a parish.
In urban musical culture the traditions and organizations of the 16th century persisted independently of all stylistic change, especially in Protestant areas. (17th-century urban musical life was richer and more varied in Lutheran than in Catholic regions, and the role of music was naturally even smaller in Reformed Church areas.) The town musicians, who regarded themselves as a kind of guild, played for ceremonial occasions such as festivals and civic receptions and signalled the hours from church towers. They also performed in church and at private ceremonies. Their ‘official’ instruments were cornetts and trombones, with some string instruments, although initially these were not highly regarded. Oboes were added at the end of the century. Sacred music was provided by the Kantor and the organist, and the Kantor would very often teach at local schools. At the bottom of the musical hierarchy in Protestant towns was the choir of Kurrende, schoolboys who walked the streets singing for alms, a custom not abolished until the middle of the 18th century.
The development of urban musical life organized in this way depended directly on the economic power of the town or city concerned. It found its clearest expression in the creation of collegia musica, which incorporated the scholarly and humanistic ideals of the Italian academies and frequently concerned themselves with language and poetry as well as music. The first collegia musica had been founded in the 16th century, particularly in Nuremberg, the leading commercial metropolis of its time. After (and in some cases during) the Thirty Years War they were concentrated in trading cities that had been spared in the hostilities (Nuremberg, Elbing, Königsberg) or had made a swift recovery (Sagan, Görlitz, Memmingen, Leipzig). Königsberg was a special case because of the literary and musical talents in the circle around Simon Dach and Heinrich Albert. The musical societies of Frankfurt and Hamburg were notable for their swift acceptance of the latest music from Italy. They were financed by merchant patricians, and in Hamburg the musical society was a joint stock company. Nuremberg was almost the only place where the 16th-century tradition of music printing continued, although on a small scale. Music was generally transmitted in manuscript form, in marked contrast to the situation in Italy; and musicians, working in near-isolation, tended to produce music for specific local conditions. These circumstances hardly favoured stylistic uniformity, as did the different conditions prevailing in the 18th and especially the 19th centuries. On the other hand, the small scale and the diversity of these musical ‘urban landscapes’ meant that a composer had considerable scope to develop his individuality.
The reception accorded to foreign music, particularly from Italy, differed from genre to genre and from region to region, as did the nature of its adaptation to native German forms. Adaptation was most successful where older German traditions could be fused with the new, for instance in motets in the style of Palestrina and in the sacred madrigal, sung predominantly in Latin in the Catholic south and in German in the Protestant north (examples include Schütz’s Geistliche Chor-Music of 1648 and works by Hammerschmidt, W.C. Briegel and others). Out of these genres grew the polychoral motet designed for special occasions, a tradition leading from Sebastian Knüpfer and Johann Schelle through Johann Michael and Johann Christoph Bach to its culmination in the examples of J.S. Bach. The transformation of Italian traditions into the chorale concerto and choral cantata of northern and central Germany derived entirely from the role of sacred song in Protestant divine service, a development that had begun with Praetorius and was continued by Schein, Scheidt, Knüpfer and Buxtehude right through to J.S. Bach; the extension of the form by adding free textual commentary between the chorale verses shows that the sacred song had a central position in the Protestant church.
At the same time the cantata not based on a chorale was developing, with texts in German or Latin in the work of such composers as J.C. Kerll in Munich and Christoph Bernhard in Dresden and Hamburg (both of them pupils of Carissimi), the Dresden Kapellmeister Vincenzo Albrici and M.G. Peranda, and Matthias Weckmann, David Pohle, Dieterich Buxtehude and F.W. Zachow, the teacher of Handel. The cultivation of sacred concertos and symphoniae sacrae (a term first used by Schütz) for small forces originally reflected the needs of musical ensembles in and directly after the war (as in Schütz’s works of 1629, 1647 and 1650), just as the development of large-scale works, chiefly in the Carissimi tradition and including historiae (the Christmas and Easter stories) and Passions, is symptomatic of the recovery of some of the large Protestant courts, such as Dresden, and the relative prosperity of cities such as Breslau that had been little affected by the war. The composition of historiae seems to have been concentrated in central Germany (Schütz in Dresden) and eastern Germany (Tobias Zeutschner and others in Breslau). The Passion, a specifically Protestant genre and far more ambitious musically than the unassuming Catholic Passion music of the period, was widespread throughout central and northern Germany in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The genre included works by Schütz, Selle, Sebastiani, Johann Theile and J.V. Meder, reaching its culmination in the Passions of J.S. Bach. In the early 18th century the Passion oratorio developed in the progressive musical atmosphere of Hamburg. Keiser set the Passion poems of C.F. Hunold in 1704 and of B.H. Brockes in 1712; further settings of the Brockes text were composed by Telemann in 1716, Handel in 1716–17, Mattheson in 1718, G.H. Stölzel in 1720 and J.F. Fasch in 1723. Oratorios on subjects other than the Passion scarcely spread beyond the imperial court in Vienna; Das jüngste Gericht (c1680), attributed to Buxtehude, was a special case and had no perceptible influence. Sacred opera seems to have provided a substitute, but today its merits can be assessed only from the librettos of C.C. Dedekind and from accounts of performances.
Although it is difficult to draw strict distinctions between the history of musical composition in towns or cities and at court, some genres were clearly associated with the development of court culture. Those German courts that had emerged relatively unscathed from the Thirty Years War, like the electoral court of the Palatinate at Heidelberg, took advantage of a new start to look towards the French court of Louis XIV, which had become a paradigm for all Europe. However, the influence of French court music proved limited, probably because Italian influence on court music in Germany had become too deeply ingrained since the last third of the 16th century, and perhaps, too, because Italy, with its many small states and cities, provided an inexhaustible supply of musicians who were willing to travel, while the centralized court culture of France attracted all talents to Versailles. The few German courts that followed the French musical model included Celle and, at various times, Hanover, Schwerin, the court of the Palatinate at its alternative residence of Düsseldorf, and the court of the Margrave of Baden in Schlackenwerth and later in Rastatt. The types of music cultivated at a particular court were largely dictated by the taste and the economic circumstances of the ruler himself.
Hardly any musical genres were exclusively confined to courts in 17th-century Germany. An exception was the Italian chamber duet, whose principal exponent was Steffani. Concertante canzonets and concertante madrigals were written and performed at court, but the Kantor of the Thomaskirche, Sebastian Knüpfer, also composed such works; the chamber cantata was not cultivated in Germany until the end of the 17th century, and then by urban composers such as Keiser in Hamburg (1698 and 1717).
The situation is particularly complex in opera, ballet and Singballett, where French and Italian influences coincided with various attempts to create a German-language opera. These genres were chiefly performed at courts, in line with the widespread taste for French court culture, in which ballet, opéra-ballet and opera played a prominent part. Stylistically, however, only the ballet obviously imitated French models. Municipal opera on the Venetian model developed only in a few large commercial cities; those with opera houses of their own were Hamburg (from 1678 to 1738), Nuremberg (from 1668) and Leipzig (from 1693). In 1690 Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick tried to make opera both a highly subsidized form of court theatre and an economic enterprise in the form of a joint stock company (as in Hamburg), but without lasting success. Indeed, success eventually eluded Hamburg too. In the second half of the 17th century many halls were fitted out as theatres in the princely castles, Komödienhäuser were built for both spoken and music drama, and magnificent opera houses were constructed at the great courts (Munich, 1654, Dresden, 1667, Stuttgart, 1674, and Hanover, 1689).
The spread of the Singballett in Germany preceded that of opera, and as in opera (with his Dafne, 1627, Torgau), Schütz created the prototype: Orpheo und Euridice (1638, Dresden). The original programme indicates the work’s stylistic syncretism, typical of opera in 17th-century Germany: it was ‘written in German verse … composed in the Italian manner … performed in ten ballet dances’ (i.e. probably with French choreography). The Dresden court had given the lead and was followed – in each case with occasional works written for specific events at court – by Wolfenbüttel in 1646, Gotha in 1649, Gottorf in 1650, Altenburg in 1652, Celle in 1653 and Stuttgart and Brunswick in 1660.
Operatic style was shaped by the individual tastes of the princes who paid for opera, by the taste of the middle-class public in the cities and by the Kapellmeister themselves, who probably wielded greater influence here than in other genres of court music. This, combined with the large number of opera houses and competition between courts and cities which often entailed enticing famous Kapellmeister from one appointment to another, resulted in a plurality of styles. The style of J.S. Kusser, who had studied with Lully in France, left its mark on the repertory successively in Ansbach, Brunswick, Hamburg and Stuttgart; and at courts with a French-orientated musical culture, composers were encouraged to introduce French elements into their operatic style (as Steffani did in his works for Hanover and Düsseldorf). However, the repertory at most courts was predominantly Italian. The mixed forms produced for commercial reasons in Leipzig and Hamburg contained arias in the Italian style sung in Italian interspersed with recitatives in German.
In the last third of the 17th century efforts were made to develop an independent type of German opera sung in German. Musically, it was based on the Italian model, but it also included French elements. The first German operas were isolated works such as Schütz’s Dafne and S.T. Staden’s Seelewig (1644, Nuremberg). In most places the German and Italian and/or French repertories existed side by side; in many (for instance, in Darmstadt early in the 18th century) there were performances of German and Italian operas and French plays. In addition there were translations of French and Italian librettos, and Italian operas were performed in German translation (the six three-act works by Steffani, performed in Hamburg in 1695–9). The main centres of attempts to develop German opera were Altenburg (until 1738), Ansbach (from 1665), Bayreuth (1662–1726), Brunswick (1690–1730), Dresden (from 1671), Darmstadt (from 1673), Durlach (from 1712), Gotha (1681–1744), Hamburg (1678–1738), Leipzig (from 1693), Meiningen (1702–7), Nuremberg (from 1679 to c1685), Neuburg an der Donau (from 1678), Weissenfels (from 1680), Wolfenbüttel (from 1655) and Zeitz (from 1711). The final flowering of this type of German opera was in Rudolstadt in 1729–54. Elsewhere it was superseded around 1740 by the international system of Italian opera.
The development of instrumental music after the Thirty Years War was characterized by the gradual reduction of the variety of forms and ensembles of the 16th and early 17th centuries, and by the influence of Netherlandish, French and Italian models, from which independent forms and genres emerged towards the end of the century. Instrumental music was performed at court (solos and ensembles), in church (organ music) and to a lesser extent in towns and cities (ceremonial music, especially for wind instruments, and domestic chamber music). Lute music on the French model was primarily a courtly genre, although it was also written for domestic performance (Esaias Reusner (ii) in Brieg and Berlin; S.L. Weiss in Dresden). Italian influence dominated ensemble music. It was produced in large quantities, some of it for courts, some for the urban middle class (for instance, for the collegia musica and student musical societies). There was no strict line of demarcation between the sonata and the suite based on French dances in the work of such composers as Johann Rosenmüller and J.R. Ahle. The trio sonata did not become fashionable until the 18th century, in the wake of general European enthusiasm for Corelli; in the late 17th century, however, a number of trio sonatas were written by Reincken, Krieger, P.H. Erlebach and Buxtehude.
Not surprisingly, French influence was most pronounced in the ensemble or suite for several instrumentalists or solo performer, and in dance collections for ensembles, primarily intended for court performance but also written for the urban middle class. Keyboard music, also on the French model, saw the development of the keyboard suite and of an idiomatic harpsichord style (J.J. Froberger, Matthias Weckmann and Fischer). Gottlieb Muffat, with his ensemble suites and concerti grossi synthesizing the models of Lully and Corelli, stands alone, an epoch-making figure comparable to Buxtehude in the north. Muffat’s work marks the beginning of the great period when French and Italian music merged to create the characteristics of a ‘German’ mixed style, as defined by Quantz (see above), which reached a peak in Telemann and J.S. Bach.
In the 17th century organ building and organ composition developed particularly in northern Germany, an area little affected by the Thirty Years War. The prime influence here was the work of Sweelinck, with whom Scheidt, Jacob Praetorius (ii) and Heinrich Scheidemann studied in Amsterdam. Organ composers of the next generation included Reincken and Matthias Weckmann. 17th-century German organ music reached its peak in the works of Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel, with their wealth of forms and techniques, their independent and virtuoso treatment of the pedal, and their exploitation of the uniquely wide range of stops in the organs of north German organ builders such as Gottfried Frizsche, Friedrich Stellwagen, Jonas Weigel and, in particular, the internationally renowned Arp Schnitker.
The musical history of the German-speaking territories in the 18th century – leaving aside Austria and Switzerland, which followed paths of their own in line with local conditions – can be best understood by examining a number of significant aspects. Courtly musical culture centred on a few large courts, generally absolutist and influenced by the Enlightenment, while the many smaller courts were historically less important. Urban middle-class musical culture developed above all in the wealthy cities; new forms of communication evolved, and there were rapid developments in music written for domestic performance. Protestant church music declined after the middle of the century (which by chance coincided with the death of Bach), while Catholic church music continued to flourish.
These developments went hand in hand with what Quantz saw as the stylistic synthesis achieved in the first half of the century and the emergence of new forms and genres in the second half. The courts concentrated on Italian opera seria, which became the established norm in the first half of the century, while the German Singspiel developed after 1750. Instrumental music came to the fore with the genres of the concerto, symphony and sonata, composed on Italian models but with ever-increasing independence. Above all, there was a general stylistic change after the 1720s, when German music became a productive rather than a merely receptive force for the first time in its history. This development was fostered by the fact that outstanding individual artists could make their influence more widely felt through new, improved forms of communication (music journalism, music publishing and concert tours). Such musicians included Telemann, Johann Stamitz and C.P.E. Bach. In terms of musical history J.S. Bach, for 27 years Kantor at the Leipzig Thomaskirche, seems to stand alone, and his work influenced no major composer before Mozart and Beethoven. The vigour of German musical culture and the outstanding achievements of individual composers should not, however, disguise the fact that late 18th-century developments that would have a far-reaching effect on the future of music took place on the periphery of the German-speaking lands. Indeed, Viennese Classicism should be regarded as neither a German, nor even an Austrian, but as a purely Viennese phenomenon.
Most of the courts that were musically active in the 17th century continued to cultivate music, depending on their finances and the taste of the prince. New courts emerged with important musical establishments, notably the court of the princes of Thurn and Taxis in Regensburg and the court of Oettingen-Wallerstein. However, they were all outshone by the three royal residences at Dresden, Berlin and Mannheim. From the 1720s Dresden became a major centre for new Italian instrumental music (especially that of Vivaldi) and its assimilation by such composers as Bach and J.G. Pisendel. With the opening of Daniel Pöppelmann’s opera house in 1719 until 1763, opera seria and the music of the court church flourished in Dresden, especially in the Hasse-Bordoni era (1731–63). Even after this date Italian opera and italianate church music remained important and exerted an influence far beyond Dresden itself. The Italian court opera of Dresden survived as an institution until 1832. In the late 18th century the music of the Dresden court church developed an established repertory which included earlier works such as those of Hasse. Elector Friedrich August was a practising musician himself, and the Dresden court was one of the first places where the new Viennese repertory of Haydn and Mozart found an appreciative audience.
Matters were quite different in Berlin, which had very quickly become a great metropolis, its population growing from about 20,000 in 1688 to 172,000 around 1800. Court and civic culture were closely linked in the city, and music flourished at court, principally under Frederick the Great (1740–86) and to a lesser extent under Friedrich Wilhelm II (1786–97). Frederick the Great, himself a talented and prolific composer and librettist, promoted both opera seria and modern Italian instrumental music; his encouragement of opera was also politically motivated, since he sought to outshine the absolutist magnificence of the Dresden court opera. For similar reasons, the king took a close and detailed interest in the productions staged at the opera house built by his court architect G.W. von Knobelsdorff and opened in 1742. The court musicians of Berlin included a number of major talents, although none of Hasse’s significance and international reputation: C.H. Graun, J.F. Agricola and J.F. Reichardt in opera, Quantz, Franz and Georg Benda and J.G. Graun in instrumental music. Besides Reichardt, the leading musician to write for Friedrich Wilhelm II was Boccherini, who became his court composer.
The situation in Mannheim was different again. The city was unique in that musical activity was overwhelmingly centred on the court and depended entirely on a single ruler, Elector Carl Theodor of the Palatinate, who had little in common with Frederick the Great save a liking for playing the flute. Mannheim had been almost entirely destroyed in the Thirty Years War, and after a brief period of recovery was then devastated in the War of the Palatine Succession in 1689. The court of the Palatinate did not move back to the city until 1720. In 1742 the opera house built in the castle by Alessandro Galli-Bibiena was inaugurated, ushering in a period when opera and instrumental music flourished at court. There were more major virtuosos and composers working for the Hofkapelle than for any other musical ensemble in Europe, with Carlo Grua and Ignaz Holzbauer at the opera, and works commissioned from J.C. Bach, Jommelli, Traetta and Giuseppe de Majo. The members of the orchestra, besides Holzbauer from Vienna, included Johann Stamitz from Bohemia and his pupil Christian Cannabich, who was a brilliant orchestral trainer, C.J. Toeschi, F.X. Richter from Bohemia, Anton Fils from Bavaria, Ignaz Beck, Ignaz Fränzl, and Anton and Carl Stamitz. Other names that deserve mention are those of Franz Danzi and Peter Winter, who both studied composition with the Abbé Vogler. The fame of the Hofkapelle was spread by musical visitors to Mannheim, not least Charles Burney. The fact that its composers drew on varied European traditions probably contributed to the creation of a new style in Mannheim which made full use of the opportunities offered by a virtuoso orchestra. Mannheim musicians made a crucial contribution to the development of the symphony, in particular; and the treatment of the orchestra in Mannheim influenced many composers, including Mozart and Weber. The performances given from 1754 onwards by Mannheim virtuoso instrumentalists in Paris caused a sensation; subsequently the Mannheim School had a decisive influence on concert life there, notably with the new genre of the symphonie concertante which Carl Stamitz introduced to the French capital. This was the first time the influence of German music had extended beyond the German-speaking countries. Finally, there was a significant movement towards German opera in Mannheim, connected with the founding of an Academy of Sciences, and of the Nationaltheater in 1779, in emulation of similar efforts in Vienna. The great period of Mannheim court music came to an end early in 1778, when Carl Theodor succeeded as ruler of Bavaria and moved his court to Munich.
In terms of musical history, the three major German cities of the 18th century were Hamburg and Leipzig, with their commercial prosperity, and Berlin, a royal residence, an administrative seat and a middle-class metropolis. Hamburg, as a trading seaport, was much influenced by London; Leipzig was an international trade fair centre; and Berlin profited from the enlightened climate of the court and its role as the capital of a rapidly expanding power. Forms of public music-making tried and tested in London were further developed in Hamburg: civic ceremonies were repeated for a paying public, public concerts featured appearances by touring virtuosos, charity concerts were given, journalism flourished in Mattheson’s and Scheibe’s musical periodicals, and works were published by subscription. Musical enthusiasm was widespread among a relatively large class of wealthy patricians and merchants, and was at the root of the shift away from scholarly works of musical theory written for professionals, towards well-informed musical writings for the galant homme. Two of the greatest German composers of their day, Telemann and C.P.E. Bach, also lived and worked in Hamburg for several decades.
Leipzig came to rival Hamburg in musical importance in the second half of the century. In the first half of the century musical life in Leipzig was dominated by vocal and instrumental church music, in particular the music of J.S. Bach and by student and middle-class collegia musica. In line with the spirit of the Enlightenment, L.C. Mizler von Kolof tried to establish music (including musical history) as a department of study at the university, and founded the Neu eröffnete musikalische Bibliothek (1736), the journal of the Societät der Musicalischen Wissenschaften, in direct competition with Mattheson in Hamburg. The importance of church music declined after the death of Bach, but in 1743 a group of merchants founded a public concert organization to supersede the collegia musica. This organization in turn was replaced by the concerts of J.A. Hiller in 1778, and these were followed in 1781 by concerts organized by the city and given in the newly reconstructed Gewandhaus. At the end of the century Leipzig had 14 concert societies and was unequalled for its flourishing concert life.
The internationalism of Leipzig was particularly evident in the development of opera in the city. After the closure of the German opera in 1720, travelling theatrical companies such as those of Mingotti, Locatelli and Nicolini gave guest performances of the Italian repertory during the Leipzig fairs. An adaptation of the English ballad opera The Devil to Pay was performed in 1743 in Berlin and 1750 in Leipzig; the local poet C.F. Weisse then retranslated the work which, with new music by J.C. Standfuss, became the prototype of a new vernacular genre: the Singspiel. Leipzig was the major centre of Singspiel up to the foundation of the Stadttheater in 1817 and was visited by the theatrical troupes of Koch, Bondini and Seconda, as well as Domenico Guardasoni’s company, which brought the Italian repertory to the city between 1782 and 1794. But the most important development of all was in music publishing. A city famous for its trade fairs was the ideal location, and the leading figure in this field was J.G.I. Breitkopf, with his new system of printing notation (1755) and his music trade which collected and sold works from all over Europe. The firm became Breitkopf & Härtel in 1795, and in 1798 founded the influential Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In 1800 the rival firm of Hoffmeister & Kühnel was founded, publishing as Bureau de musique simultaneously in Leipzig and Vienna. The scene was set for Leipzig to become Europe’s most important centre of music publishing.
After the accession of Frederick the Great in 1740 and the flowering of musical culture in Berlin, there was a fruitful interrelationship, sometimes with a competitive edge, between court and civic musical life. The music of the court remained strongly orientated towards Italy and Italian opera. Private and public concerts of sacred and secular music were held from the 1720s, organized by court and cathedral musicians, and the influence of the Sing-Akademie, founded in 1791, extended far beyond Berlin itself. From about 1750 men of letters (K.W. Ramler, C.G. Krause), theorists (F.W. Marpurg) and composers developed the ideal of the simple, sensitive quasi-folksong with keyboard accompaniment, a genre further developed by the group of composers known as the Berlin Lieder School. The combination of theory and practice and a rationalistic character typified the vigorous musical journalism of Marpurg, Krause, Quantz and C.P.E. Bach, which culminated in J.G. Sulzer’s encyclopedic Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4). Notable musical figures in Berlin were Princess Anna Amalia, Frederick the Great’s youngest sister, and J.P. Kirnberger, who became her Hofkapellmeister in 1758. A fervent champion of the contrapuntal tradition against the galant style, he collected an extensive music library for the princess, including autograph manuscripts by J.S. Bach and works by Handel and Palestrina. Musical attitudes, and musical journalism, in Berlin were markedly conservative in any case, and these tendencies were further reinforced by Kirnberger and his circle. While the conservative attitudes that prevailed in Berlin were regarded (not least by Haydn in his autobiographical sketch of 1776) as inimical to the development of the new language of instrumental music that reached its peak in Viennese Classicism, the music-making that reflected those attitudes helped to create a historically based public concert repertory, exemplified in the programmes of the Sing-Akademie that culminated in the rediscovery of the St Matthew Passion in 1829.
After the 1720s there was an increasing distinction between styles in line with the functions of different musical genres. The new style developed most obviously in the galant keyboard piece and the undemanding song for social and private entertainment, especially in middle-class circles. More demanding chamber music for private or public performance by accomplished amateurs and professionals either imitated widely accepted models or combined Italian and French styles and genres, as in Telemann’s Musique de table (1733). Similarly, the French suite and the Italian concerto were sometimes kept strictly separate (in works by Bach, Telemann and many others), or sometimes combined into hybrid forms, as, again, in many works by Telemann. The trio sonata, a ‘learned’ genre par excellence, and the quartet sonata deriving from it, both of them north German specialities, remained the ‘touchstone of a true contrapuntalist’ (Quantz) even when their contrapuntal idiom was infused by galant elements.
Sacred vocal music and organ music also adhered to the Baroque tradition, but became less important in Protestant areas in the second half of the 18th century; Bach’s cantatas and organ works were anachronisms even in their own time, although the type of cantata pioneered by the poet and theologian Erdmann Neumeister was a relatively modern form. The tradition of ceremonial Catholic church music for Mass and Vespers survived unbroken into the 19th century, following the Habsburg and Italian examples. In Protestant Germany, music for divine service was replaced by edifying devotional music influenced by Rationalism and the aesthetic of Empfindsamkeit; the prototype for such works was Graun’s Der Tod Jesu, and later examples include the oratorios of Telemann and C.P.E. Bach. Handel’s oratorios, revived in Hamburg in the 1770s and subsequently elsewhere, were also regarded as sacred music to edify the Christian not as the member of a community but as an individual.
In instrumental music two genres dominated the second half of the century: the symphony and, to a lesser extent, chamber music with keyboard obbligato. The string quartet played a surprisingly small part, although the quartets of Haydn, in particular, were performed to enthusiastic audiences everywhere. As in Italy, the symphony initially grew out of the opera sinfonia; but the genre soon became independent as symphonies were written specifically for chamber or concert performance. Italian influence quickly dwindled as the symphonies of Austrian composers, especially Haydn, became increasingly popular. Until the end of the century the symphony in Germany (unlike in France and England) was primarily a court phenomenon, although many symphonies were played in the growing number of concerts for the urban middle classes. The most important symphonists, all of them court musicians, included C.P.E. Bach, J.G. Graun and Franz Benda in Potsdam, J.M. Molter in Durlach, Antonio Rosetti in Oettingen-Wallerstein and Schwerin, Christian Cannabich in Mannheim and Munich and Georg Benda in Gotha. Of these the outstanding figure was undoubtedly C.P.E. Bach, although his style, original to the point of eccentricity and highly rhetorical, does not fit into any general pattern of development. The ‘Hamburg Bach’ was also idiosyncratic in his chamber and keyboard music, which far surpassed anything produced by his contemporaries.
In a country as enamoured of theory as Germany, it was inevitable that the body of instrumental music composed after the stylistic changes around 1720 should be defined within a theoretical system. Elements of traditional rhetoric were used at first, relating an apparently autonomous form back to the rhetorical arts (Mattheson, Joseph Riepel and H.C. Koch). The rhetorical theory of form was abandoned in the early 19th century in favour of ideas from English musical aesthetics and formal theory going back to Shaftesbury (as formulated by Charles Avison, Adam Smith and A.F.C. Kollmann). These ideas, deriving from theories of architecture and the visual arts, were concerned with the analytical understanding of instrumental forms of music, and were developed by C.G. Krause (Von der musikalischen Poesie, 1752), Moses Mendelssohn (Über die Empfindungen, 1755), Leonhard Euler (Lettres à une princesse d’Allemagne, 1768), in various writings by J.C. Forkel, and above all by C.F. Michaelis (Über den Geist der Tonkunst, 1795; Zweyter Versuch …, 1800; Über die wichtigsten Erfordernisse und Bedingungen der Tonkunst, 1805). In the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann these theoretical ideas were combined with the Romantic aesthetic of feeling.
The official end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 was a less significant date in musical history than the Edict of the Deputation of the German Estates of 1803. The dissolution of many small courts and the closure of most monasteries, with their wealth of musical culture, set in train a process of cultural standardization that continued until the founding of the German Reich in 1871. Culturally, Austria became further and further removed from Germany, although Austrian, or rather Viennese, influence on German music (as opposed to the other arts) increased enormously, through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and later Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss. These developments were fostered by industrialization, the accumulation of wealth in the big cities, the German Customs Union of 1834 and greatly improved communications. The musical landscape changed rapidly in the first half of the 19th century, although the Napoleonic Wars and the failed revolution of 1848–9 had remarkably little influence on the structures of musical life. The second half of the century was an era of consolidation, and the end of World War I in 1918 brought no essential change to musical institutions and public musical life.
Important social developments included the spread of musical culture among the urban middle classes, the increasing numbers of cities where music played an important role, and the standardization of musical culture, together with its separation from mass culture. As music at the princely courts diminished, music-making in the cities became increasingly dominant. After the Wars of Liberation in the second decade of the century, political conflicts between court and bourgeois society could still manifest themselves through opera, as in the confrontation between Spontini and Weber at the première of Der Freischütz in Berlin in 1821. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s attempts to mould the opera and theatre of Berlin to suit his own tastes were strongly criticized by the public and particularly the press, a force to be reckoned with by 1900. The musical interests of rulers now held sway at only a few, usually minor, courts such as Weimar, which became a musical centre principally through Liszt and his circle and retained that status until the abdication of the grand dukes in 1918, and Meiningen, particularly under Duke Georg II (ruled 1866–1914), who made the Hofkapelle a model institution with an up-to-date repertory and retained the court theatre for the performance of classical German drama.
Court opera aside, musical life in the major German cities during the 19th century was much as it is today. Opera, ballet and drama, and later operetta, were performed in municipal theatres that were usually subsidized by the civic authorities. The repertory was international and the large music publishing houses (particularly Schott in Mainz) published translations of foreign-language works, both Italian and French (opéra comique and the grand operas of Meyerbeer). German opera did not feature significantly until the time of Wagner, when there was an increase of national feeling in music generally, especially after 1860. Opera featured far more prominently in musical life than in the 18th century because it now reached large sections of the population, and its significance was reflected in the building of many municipal opera houses and some magnificent court opera houses (notably in Dresden). This development reached its peak in the economic boom after the founding of the Reich in 1871.
Rivalling opera in popularity were the public concerts given by the orchestras of opera houses, by independent orchestras, by local or touring ensembles (especially string quartets), by visiting virtuosos and sometimes by touring ensembles such as the Meiningen Hofkapelle. Concerts were often performed in handsome buildings containing a large concert hall and a more intimate hall for chamber music (as in the new Leipzig Gewandhaus, opened in 1884).
Growing prosperity also brought a rise in domestic music-making, which stimulated the composition of lieder, piano music and chamber music (fig.11). Domestic music-making also encouraged the industrial manufacture of pianos on the American model, and piano factories were opened by Bechstein in 1860, Blüthner in 1864, Grotrian in 1865 and Steinway in 1880. The rapidly growing popularity of the piano, however, meant that the needs of amateur pianists (and singers) had to be met with the mass production of technically and aesthetically undemanding music. In reaction to this, attempts were made towards the end of the century to introduce reforms, through a higher standard of private music-teaching, through popular music libraries intended to supersede the purely commercial lending institutions, through educational writings and through public campaigns against ‘cheap trashy music’. Public music libraries to which anyone could have free access were founded in many cities after 1894. Conservatories, organized privately or by the civic authorities, had been providing professional musical training since the founding of the Academisches Musikinstitut in Würzburg in 1804. Until 1871 there were only a few foundations in the major musical centres (in Berlin in 1822 and 1833, in Leipzig in 1843, in Munich in 1846, Cologne in 1850 and Dresden and Stuttgart in 1856). After 1871, however, there was a boom in the creation of conservatories, as there was in the building of theatres. By far the most influential conservatory was in Leipzig, which, under the directorship of Mendelssohn and his successors, attracted composition pupils from all over Europe, particularly Scandinavia and Russia, and from the United States. In general, the high standards of institutionalized musical education did as much as the great composers, conductors and interpreters to ensure the worldwide reputation of 19th-century German music.
The musical and intellectual climate of 19th-century Germany was also shaped by the growth of music publishing, music journalism, music theory and aesthetics, and the acceptance of musicology as an academic discipline. German music publishing firms dominated large sections of the market in Europe and the USA; they played an important role in the dissemination of mass-produced music and the spread of musical education through the cheap editions published from 1864 by Litolff, Peters and Breitkopf & Härtel, and the miniature scores published by Payne and later Eulenburg. One far-sighted music publisher, Oskar von Hase, was also active in promoting musical copyright. The major musical periodicals, mostly belonging to the large publishing firms, greatly influenced public opinion and taste, often employing a partisan approach deplored by many composers, including Brahms and Bruckner.
The 19th century, a period of progress and belief in science, saw the construction of the last comprehensive systems of music theory, from A.B. Marx to Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Schenker. Musical aesthetics and the philosophy of history were shaped by philosophical aesthetics. Franz Brendel, who made Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik the mouthpiece of modern German music, was influenced by Hegel; Wagner and Nietzsche by Schopenhauer; the hermeneutics of Hermann Kretzschmar and Arnold Schering by Dilthey. Musicology also developed independent concepts of the aesthetics of autonomy (Eduard Hanslick, 1854) and the aesthetics of heteronomy (Friedrich von Hausegger, A.W. Ambros and Otakar Hostinský). The profound changes of attitude to composition that occurred in the years before World War I were accompanied by the pioneering writings of Busoni and A.O. Halm. All these developments were of great significance to the German-speaking countries, in particular Germany itself, ever ready to indulge in speculation and theory. However, they had little effect elsewhere in Europe or in the USA. The growth of musicology, deriving from a historical view of the repertory, had been prepared by the first major works of musical history (Kiesewetter and Ambros) and biography (Otto Jahn, Friedrich Chrysander, J.G. Gervinus and Philipp Spitta), and by memorial publications and scholarly critical complete editions of Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Schütz and Lassus.
The establishment of musicology in universities began with the appointment of musical directors who could lecture on the history of music as well as carrying out their more practical musical duties; they included J.N. Forkel in Göttingen and D.G. Türk in Halle, both appointed to their posts in 1779. The first professorship was the appointment of Carl Breidenstein to Bonn in 1826; Berlin followed suit in 1830 with A.B. Marx, Munich in 1865 with K.F.L. Nohl, Leipzig in 1872 with Oscar Paul and Strasbourg in 1875 with Gustav Jacobsthal. The first full university lectureships were awarded in Vienna in 1856 (Eduard Hanslick) and in Heidelberg in 1860 (Nohl). However, the subject was not fully recognized until professorial chairs and institutes were founded: in Vienna in 1898 (Guido Adler), in Bonn in 1915 (Ludwig Schiedermair) and in Halle in 1918 (Hermann Abert). German musicology attracted foreign students for many decades, and was a model for the development of the subject in other European countries and the USA. Only with the Nazis did Germany lose its pre-eminence in the field of musicology.
During the 19th century traditional folksong continued to decline, though this decline was partly counteracted by the efforts to renew folksong in the wake of Herder’s writings (see §II, 4 below). In urban areas folksong was replaced by such genres as the street ballad, which saw its heyday in the 19th century, stimulated by the production and distribution of broadsheets. Offshoots of the street ballad were the political song and the worker’s song, the latter reaching a peak under the Weimar Republic. The male-voice choir movement was also political in origin, and it was in a spirit of patriotism that Zelter founded the Berlin Liedertafel. The new democratic impetus was especially strong in student choral societies; Metternich described the male-voice choir as the ‘plague from Germany’, and had it suppressed in Austria. After the failure of the 1848–9 revolution, the middle-class male-voice choir adapted more and more to the prevailing circumstances and became a merely social institution.
The rapid standardization of an increasingly commercialized middle-class musical culture after the 1830s encouraged the dissociation of the more challenging genres of art music from any functional purpose, placing them in a realm of quasi-autonomous art, as postulated by the aesthetics of Romanticism. Such functional genres as church music became less important, despite such attempts at historically inspired reform as Cecilianism in the Catholic church and its Protestant counterpart in Prussia. The standardization of musical culture also brought with it the increasing importance of generic norms and the growing influence of the works of the acknowledged masters. Schumann’s Piano Quintet had its counterpart in the Piano Quintet of Brahms, and together they inspired an explosion in the genre during the second half of the century, including the Piano Quintet of César Franck, written partly in protest against the hegemony of German music.
That hegemony, against which opposition had been developing in neighbouring countries since around the middle of the century, was dominated by instrumental music. German operas hardly travelled abroad at all during the first part of the century; the success of Der Freischütz in Paris was an exception. The situation changed only with the European influence of Wagner, whose early works are a perfect example of the way German operatic composers adapted foreign models: Die Feen can be viewed as a German Romantic opera and Das Liebesverbot as an opéra comique (Wagner himself thought it an Italian melodramma), while Rienzi draws on the models of French and Italian grand opera. Der Freischütz itself owes much to opéra comique and attained the status of a national opera for political reasons as much as for its Romantic forest setting. However, it was through its stylistic syncretism that Romantic opera became a specifically German genre in the works of Weber, Spohr, Marschner, Lindpaintner and other composers, with an offshoot in the Spielopern of Lortzing and Flotow, a form of comic opera derived partly from German Singspiel and from opéra comique. Romantic opera remained a central part of the repertory even when few new Romantic operas were being composed.
If the works of Wagner’s middle period, for all their originality, remained within the genre of German Romantic opera, his works after Das Rheingold changed the course of the history not only of opera but of music in general. The Wagner phenomenon, however, extended far beyond music. It was European in nature and encompassed the arts, intellectual thought and even politics. In operatic history, the indirect effects of Wagnerian music drama were greater than any direct imitation. The symphonic leitmotif technique could be transferred to very different genres, including the fairy-tale operas of Humperdinck and Siegfried Wagner, the verismo operas of Max von Schillings and Eugen d’Albert, and the fantastic operas of Franz Schreker. The intellectual ambitions of Wagner’s librettos from the Ring onwards encouraged both the emergence of ‘literary opera’, culminating in Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909), and the tendency to use opera as a means of examining issues such as the role of the artist in society, beginning with Die Meistersinger (1868) and continued in Pfitzner’s Palestrina (1917) and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (second version, 1916). On the other hand, the works of Wagner’s direct successors were usually epigonal and in the long term unsuccessful, as in such monumental works as August Bungert’s Homerische Welt (of which only the tetralogy Die Odyssee (1896–1903) was completed), and in operas where ambitious débutant composers declared their adherence to Wagnerism, such as Strauss’s Guntram (1894) and Pfitzner’s Der arme Heinrich (1895). Wagner’s influence was naturally easier to escape in comic opera, for instance in Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad (1858) and Goetz’s Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung (1874). It was no coincidence that Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Strauss began their stylistic change of direction with a comedy, Der Rosenkavalier (1911), although they returned to a Wagnerian type of mythology in Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919). The material expense of staging the large-scale works of Wagner’s successors had risen constantly, sustained on a wave of optimism engendered by the apparently stable political and social order of the Reich and the economic boom that had continued unbroken since about 1890. A radical change began before World War I, when German variants of the international movement towards classicism renounced such extravagance; examples were Busoni’s Die Brautwahl (1912), Arlecchino and Turandot (both 1917), and the opere buffe of Wolf-Ferrari, which had their first success on German stages.
In the first half of the century, especially, the decline of church music went hand in hand with the growing popularity of the non-ecclesiastical sacred oratorio, whose finest examples were Mendelssohn’s St Paul (1836) and Elijah (1846). Oratorio was promoted by the choral societies popular at the time, and by festivals such as the Niederrheinisches Musikfest which, in addition to new works, also encouraged the performance of Handel’s oratorios, continuing the process of reclaiming Handel as a ‘German’ composer that had begun in the 18th century. The most important composers of sacred oratorio in the first half of the century, after Mendelssohn, were Spohr, Friedrich Schneider, Bernhard Klein and Carl Loewe. Secular oratorios were much rarer, but included Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri (1841–3) and Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (1851). The second half of the century saw a marked decline in the composition of oratorio and such smaller related forms as the choral cantata and choral ballad; the only works of lasting influence were Liszt’s Heilige Elisabeth (1857–62) and Christus (1862–7).
The decline in native German comic opera in the later 19th century, together with the emergence of a mass audience seeking lavishly staged musical entertainment, led to the growing popularity of Parisian and, especially, Viennese operetta, and in the final years of the century to the creation of an independent Berlin operetta, incorporating elements of farce, burlesque and even cabaret. The works of the first generation of Berlin operetta composers, who included Paul Lincke, Victor Hollaender, Rudolf Nelson, Walter Kollo, Jean Gilbert and Leon Jessel, remained popular even during the Weimar Republic.
The 19th century was the century of the symphony in Germany par excellence, and German symphonic influence extended throughout Europe and to the USA. Romantic musical aesthetics (J.H. Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck) made the symphony the paradigm of ‘pure’ instrumental music; E.T.A. Hoffmann, a fervent admirer of Beethoven, postulated on the one hand the autonomy of instrumental music, and on the other the ‘transcendental language’ of the symphony. This divergence in the aesthetics of the symphony lasted into the 20th century; it is reflected in concepts of the symphony as an instrumental choir (H.C. Koch); as an ‘opera of instruments’ (Hoffmann) or an instrumental drama; in Wagner’s pronouncement that the symphony ended with Beethoven’s Ninth; in discussion of the symphony, from Wagner to Paul Bekker and T.W. Adorno, as ‘a public discourse to mankind’; and not least in attempts in the second half of the century to reformulate the symphony by incorporating programmatic elements and verbal texts.
The 19th-century symphony grew from the examples of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, with the influence of Haydn swiftly declining, the influence of Beethoven shifting from the practical to the aesthetic sphere (except in a few undistinguished imitators), and that of Mozart becoming scarcely perceptible except in the works of Spohr; at the same time, however, Mozart’s late symphonies and the symphonies of Beethoven formed the core of an established concert repertory. The German contemporaries of Beethoven, such as Friedrich Witt and J.F.X. Sterkel, modelled themselves on Haydn; Beethoven’s direct influence is to be found in the symphonies of Ferdinand Ries and Friedrich Schneider, and the C major Symphony of Wagner (1832). Most composers of symphonies, however, sought to avoid confronting the mighty example of Beethoven, declining a pathetic or heroic tone in favour of a lighter, Biedermeier style, as in the works of Nicolai, J.W. Kalliwoda, C.G. Müller and A.F. Hesse. Other composers, such as Spohr and Lachner, composed symphonies based on a poetic idea, often expanded into an explicit programme. The development of the ‘poetic’ symphony culminated in the works of Schumann and Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony (1832) commemorated the Augsburg Confession in programmatic terms, while his Lobgesang (1840) created in effect a new genre, the symphonic cantata.
Drawing on the examples of Beethoven and Berlioz, Mendelssohn also introduced the concert overture into Germany. It was immediately recognized as a potentially fruitful genre, somewhere between the overture and the symphony, and was cultivated by many composers. The symphonic poems of Liszt (12 works, 1848–57), based on great works of literature, took programme music a stage further and were immensely influential, not only in Germany but also in France, the Czech lands and Russia. Most programmatic symphonies followed Liszt’s aesthetic lead in his symphonic poems and Faust and Dante symphonies, but did not adopt his technical and formal innovations; works such as Anton Rubinstein’s Second Symphony, Ocean (1857), J.J. Abert’s Columbus (1865), Carl Reinecke’s Second Symphony, Hakon Jarl (1875), and, in particular, the 11 symphonies by Joachim Raff (1859–76) expressed their programmes in relatively traditional forms. The claim that a unique form was being developed from programme music, using the most advanced techniques, was fulfilled in the symphonic poems of Strauss who, like Liszt, eventually returned to the concept of the symphony in the Symphonia domestica (1902–3) and Eine Alpensinfonie (1911–15).
Carl Dahlhaus coined the term ‘second age of the symphony’ to denote the age of Brahms and Bruckner, beginning with Brahms’s First Symphony (1855–76) and Bruckner’s Third Symphony (1873–7); but contemporary listeners would have been just as likely to speak of the age of Bruch (three works, 1867–82) or Felix Draesecke (five works, 1868–1912). On the other hand, it was already clear to some perceptive critics that Brahms’s First Symphony was something fundamentally new: a direct confrontation with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from which Brahms developed a new symphonic style in his second, third and fourth symphonies (1877, 1883 and 1884–5). His younger contemporaries, influenced by the later works rather than the First Symphony, included Heinrich von Herzogenberg, the young Richard Strauss (his Symphony in F minor of 1884), Wilhelm Berger, Felix Woyrsch and Waldemar von Baussnern. The symphonies of Bruckner had very little influence on other composers, an exception in Germany being the three symphonies of Richard Wetz (the first written in 1914–17).
The paradigm ‘from darkness to light’, developed from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, determined most of the ‘great’ symphonies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was adopted by most symphonic composers in the tradition of Liszt and Wagner, who included Hugo Kaun, Siegmund von Hausegger, Paul Graener, Paul Juon, Max Trapp, Ernest Bloch and Heinz Tiessen. A change in approach came with the radical subjectivity of the so-called Weltanschauungs-Symphonie, where the distinctions between symphony and cantata are blurred (in Mahler’s Viennese works and in Germany in J.L. Nicodé’s Gloria! (1900–04). A reaction to the gargantuan scale and forces of Nicodé’s work and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony produced works such as the sinfoniettas of Reger (1904–5), Korngold (1912) and Hindemith (1916) and the chamber symphonies of Schoenberg (1906) and Schreker (1917).
Compared with the symphony, chamber music played a relatively small role in the 19th century. Many works for various ensembles were produced for domestic music-making, together with a small group of more demanding works, notably the chamber music of Schumann and Mendelssohn, for performance in the concert hall. As with the Viennese Classical composers, the string quartet was the pre-eminent chamber genre in the first part of the 19th century, giving rise to professional quartets such as that led by Karl Möser in Berlin (from 1813). However, as chamber music moved into the concert hall, the string quartet lost its pre-eminence to chamber works with piano.
Brahms dominated chamber music in the second half of the century to such an extent that chamber music became synonymous with conservatism in music. The works of Brahms and his followers exerted a profound influence throughout Europe; and it was in reaction to this influence that Franck and his circle founded a new French school of instrumental music.
As the importance of the string quartet declined, so did that of the piano sonata, which after the sonatas of Beethoven was regarded as an essentially German genre. The few major 19th-century sonatas, including those by Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Julius Reubke, are clearly related to Beethoven’s late sonatas in their intellectual demands, if not their keyboard techniques. Piano music was dominated quantitatively by virtuoso concert music and light salon pieces, and qualitatively by the poetic piano pieces of Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. Outside Germany, Schumann’s works exerted the strongest influence; in the 20th century the late piano works of Brahms were to prove influential through their use of techniques which Schoenberg and his school regarded as avant-garde. Conversely, no area of German music in the 19th century was as open to external influence, above all that of Chopin.
Diametrically opposite was the situation with the lied, so clearly identified as a German genre that the word ‘lied’ itself was adopted in English and French for this type of German art song. The unique flowering of the genre and the impossibility in principle of transferring it to other national cultures are explained by the way in which German Classical and Romantic lyric poetry came together with a later, poetically sensitive group of composers anxious to make music more lyrical, and by the cultural prominence of Classical and Romantic poetry in the minds of the educated middle classes. In the background, particularly with Brahms, stood the great example of Schubert; Beethoven had inspired the idea of the song cycle itself (An die ferne Geliebte, 1815–16). The dependence of the genre on poetry found its clearest expression in the many new settings of the same major lyrics. Its generic development followed the emergence of the lieder recital as a concert form and the lieder singer as a specialist interpreter (for instance Julius Stockhausen).
The linking of the genre to the Classical and Romantic canon of great poetry, however, was at first restricted; in Reichardt and Zelter the connection is evident, especially in setting Goethe, but it is considerably less in Zumsteeg, Loewe, Marschner, Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny Hensel. A consciously literary approach to lied composition began with Schumann, who was also the greatest master of the song cycle after Schubert, and, to a lesser degree, with Robert Franz and Cornelius. As the genre developed, two distinct types of lieder composers emerged: on the one hand those who set great poems by great poets and accepted the principle of textual primacy (Pfitzner and, supremely, Wolf), on the other hand composers such as Brahms, Strauss and Reger who avoided great poetry (notably Goethe) and laid the prime emphasis on broad-spanned melody. It is arguable that lieder represent the finest and most characteristic achievement of 19th-century German music.
The defeat of Germany in 1918 plunged the country into a crisis that brought far-reaching changes to political, social and cultural life. There was a general feeling that, as Karl Mannheim put it, ‘all ideas were discredited, all utopias subverted’. In music the Expressionism of the Schoenberg school, in particular, rapidly lost its influence, although major Expressionist works such as Schoenberg’s one-act opera Erwartung, his Die glückliche Hand and Berg’s opera Wozzeck had not yet been performed. The revolutionary sense of liberation from tradition that had accompanied Expressionism in the years around 1910, leading to the disintegration of tonality, yielded after 1918 to feelings of perplexity and disillusionment, which in turn led to a partial renaissance of traditional compositional techniques.
After 1924, when political stability was established under the Weimar Republic, musical life split into various mutually hostile tendencies. Older composers like Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner sought an aesthetic revival in a return to Romantic and pre-Romantic ideals, or in the evocation of a traditional, specifically German culture (as in Pfitzner’s cantata Von deutscher Seele), a tendency that was to develop increasingly aggressive nationalist features. On the other hand Schoenberg, who had been teaching at the Preussische Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1925, had codified certain technical aspects of Expressionist music (total chromaticism, atonality and the emancipation of dissonance) in developing dodecaphony as a principle which he believed would ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years.
Younger composers who emerged in Germany after 1921, notably Paul Hindemith, Philipp Jarnach, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, developed a fundamentally new concept of how music was to be composed under the radically changed social conditions of the time. The term Neue Sachlichkeit (‘new objectivity’) was borrowed from the visual arts of the period to describe their stance. In the words of Hindemith: ‘A composer today should write only if he knows for what purpose he is writing; the days of composing for oneself alone may be gone for ever’. These young composers supported the new democratic order of society – although by no means uncritically – and sought to make themselves ‘useful’ in their profession. They developed a functional concept of music, often defined by the term Gebrauchsmusik (‘music for use’), and wrote for well-defined purposes: for the new media of cinema and radio, for amateurs, for children, politically committed music for the working class, and music for such traditional institutions as the opera house and the concert hall. They chose their technical and stylistic methods according to functionalist criteria, extending (sometimes even within a single work) from Expressionism to the neo-Baroque (Hindemith’s song cycle Das Marienleben), from street ballads to cabaret chansons and jazz (Weill’s Dreigroschenoper), from parody to light music (‘Zeitopern’ by Krenek, Hindemith and Weill). They preferred to use small, soloistic ensembles and harsh, stark sonorities (Hindemith in his series of Kammermusiken). The Jugendmusikbewegung was also influential in the musical culture of the time. Its adherents sought to create a new genre that was neither serious art music nor light music, had a particular sympathy for early music and folk music, and emphasized the importance of amateur musical performance. The movement recruited an increasing number of young composers.
With its new political and social stability and the flourishing diversity of its musical life, Germany quickly emerged from its isolated position of the immediate postwar years. Works by such composers as Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Milhaud and Honegger received important premières in Germany. Due to Leo Kestenberg’s progressive musical policy, Berlin gained a reputation as one of the major musical centres of the time. Between 1927 and 1932 Schoenberg, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber, Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Artur Schnabel, Hindemith, Weill and Eisler were all in the city. Yet thanks to the federal structure of the Reich, many other centres, notably Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich, had a flourishing and progressive musical life. There was great international acclaim for the festival of chamber music (Kammermusikaufführungen zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Tonkunst) held first in Donaueschingen (1921–6) and then in Baden-Baden (1927–9); the content of the festivals was largely determined by Hindemith, and their programmes centred on the study and performance of specific musical genres. Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky and Webern performed their own works at the festivals, while composers such as Berg, Hauer, Toch, Schulhoff, Hindemith, Martinů, Milhaud, Weill, Eisler, Antheil and Krenek first attracted international attention here.
The splintering of musical developments led to irreconcilable controversies, which Schoenberg even protrayed in one of his works (Drei Satiren op.28). Traditionalists attacked the late Expressionism of the Schoenberg school and the Neue Sachlichkeit movement as the betrayal of a specifically German tradition; the Expressionists condemned the traditionalists and the adherents of Neue Sachlichkeit as conformists whose compositional techniques were anachronistic; the practitioners of Neue Sachlichkeit accused the traditionalists and Expressionists of aesthetic conservatism, criticizing them for failing to sense the needs of the time; and the Jugendmusikbewegung could hear nothing but ‘decadent’ sounds ‘alien to the people’ in all recently composed music. Thus the opposing musical tendencies of the 1920s inadvertently developed the arguments that the National Socialists would deploy after 1933 in attacking all the music of this period.
The Wall Street crash of October 1929 plunged the pluralistic and cosmopolitan musical life of Germany into a crisis that led to a significantly changed intellectual climate and paved the way for many of the musical developments of the 1930s. The composers of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, in particular, feeling less and less in sympathy with a time of radical political change, reacted by excluding anything contemporary from their music. In 1930 Hindemith could still write: ‘In recent years I have almost entirely turned away from concert music, writing instead music for educational or social purposes: for amateurs, for children, for the radio, for mechanical instruments, etc. I believe this kind of composition is more important than writing for concert performance, since the latter is little but a technical exercise for the musicians and does hardly anything for the further development of music’. But in 1931 he wrote: ‘It seems as if the tide is gradually turning towards serious music on a large scale again’. The reversion to serious, large-scale music after 1930–31 quickly made itself felt, as composers turned to traditional genres such as the symphony (Weill’s Second Symphony) and the oratorio (Hindemith’s Das Unaufhörliche).
While the totalitarian Nazi regime established in January 1933 appeared from the outside to have a strict, hermetically sealed hierarchy, chaos prevailed among the party authorities, with rival institutions obstructing each other and proclaiming allegiance to Hitler alone. The system did in fact offer a certain latitude, but it was hardly ever exploited. Instead, a climate of suspicion, denunciation and intrigue prevailed. All Nazi musical policies had a common aim: the suppression and exclusion of Jews from public musical life and the banning of those composers who had been influential during the Weimar Republic. The exclusion of Jews from Germany’s musical life was smoothly accomplished, with minimal resistance, by the setting up of a Reichsmusikkammer to which all musicians were obliged to belong, and which decreed who was allowed to practise a musical profession in Germany. Innumerable Jewish musicians were forced to emigrate, and those unable to escape abroad could practise only within the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, which became the Reichsverband Jüdischer Kulturbünde in 1935, coming to a violent end in 1941 with the so-called ‘final solution’. Those musicians who were not Jewish but were identified with the Weimar Republic usually had a chance of ‘probation’, which with few exceptions they took; among leading figures only Fritz Busch, Erich Kleiber and Hindemith preferred to emigrate. The depths of this state-sanctioned process of humiliation and denunciation were reached in 1938 with the Düsseldorf exhibition of Entartete Musik (‘degenerate music’). Some of the major works of the time were banned in Germany, among them Berg’s Lulu and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, which had their premières in Zürich in 1937 and 1938 respectively.
G. Knepler: Musikgeschichte des XIX. Jahrhunderts, ii: Österreich – Deutschland (Berlin, 1961)
P. Schleuning: Das 18. Jahrhundert: der Bürger erhebt sich (Reinbek, 1984)
M. Geck: Von Beethoven bis Mahler: die Musik des deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart, 1993/R)
R. Münster and H. Schmid, eds.: Musik in Bayern, i: Bayerische Musikgeschichte (Tutzing, 1972)
H. Beck, ed.: Oberpfälzer Dokumente der Musikgeschichte (Regensburg, 1976)
F. Krummacher and H.W. Schwab, eds.: Gattung und Werk in der Musikgeschichte Norddeutschlands und Skandinaviens (Kassel, 1982)
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: Musikgeschichte Schlesiens (Dülmen, 1986)
K.-P. Koch, H. Loos and H.-J. Winterhoff, eds.: Deutsche Musik im Osten: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für deutsche Musik im Osten (Bonn, 1991–)
E. Eggli: Probleme der musikalischen Wertästhetik im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich, 1965)
C. Dahlhaus: Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel, 1976, 2/1987; Eng. trans., 1989)
I. Keldany-Mohr: Unterhaltungsmusik als soziokulturelles Phaenomen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1977)
B. Sponheuer: Musik als Kunst und Nicht-Kunst: Untersuchungen zur Dichotomie von hoher und niederer Musik im musikästhetischen Denken zwischen Kant und Hanslick (Kassel, 1987)
T. Widmaier and A. Ballstaedt: Salonmusik: zur Geschichte und Funktion einer bürgerlichen Musikpraxis (Stuttgart, 1989)
A. Beer: Das musikalische Werk zwischen Komponist, Verlag und Publikum: die Rahmenbedingungen des Musikschaffens in Deutschland im ersten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts (Habilitationsschrift, U. of Münster, 1995)
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T. Widmaier: Der deutsche Musikalienleihhandel: Funktion, Bedeutung und Topographie einer Form gewerblicher Musikdistribution vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken, 1997)
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W. Rihm and others: ‘Junge Avantgarde: sieben junge Komponisten geben Auskunft über inhren Standort’, NZM, Jg.140 (1979), 5–24
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G. Borio and H. Danuser, eds.: Im Zenit der Moderne: die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt 1946–1966 (Freiburg, 1997)
M.H. Kater: The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich (New York, 1997)
W. Rihm: Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche (Winterthur, 1997)
P.M. Potter: Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven, CT, 1998)
N. Grosch: Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit (Stuttgart, 1999)
4. Modern and postmodern contexts.
Germany, §II: Traditional Music
Historical and ontological concerns are fundamental to understanding what German folk music is and how it relates to and interacts with other types of German music. German scholars were among the earliest to identify and then to develop theories of folk music, beginning with Johann Gottfried Herder's coining of the term ‘Volkslied’ (‘folksong’) in the late 18th century (Herder, 1778–9). The historical concerns of German scholars address both the ways in which folk music persists across time and the processes of change that occur from performance to performance. The ontological concerns arise because of conflicting views about the fundamental nature of folk music, whether it is an object with its own identity – a folksong or dance – or whether it is a set of social, performative practices with identifiable functions. German scholars have debated extensively the ways in which it is possible to delimit and define folk music, and it is therefore necessary to survey the field of German folk music scholarship by first distinguishing the predominant definitions and approaches that constitute its subject area (cf. Levy, 1911; Pulikowski, 1933).
Germany, §II: Traditional Music
Germany, §II: Traditional Music
Both religious and secular traditions underwent a radical popularization in the late 18th century, effecting a profound change in the forms and styles of German-language folksong traditions throughout the 19th century (Objartel, 1988). Enlightenment reforms in Catholic regions led to the composition of ‘German masses’, many of which had vernacular texts. In Protestant areas, a parallel movement of religious awakening stimulated the creation and increased availability of folk hymns (ex.1). Because all of these songs were largely strophic and relied on the harmonic structure of choral performance, they spilled beyond religious practices alone, influencing almost all forms of secular song: couplets and ballads, school songs, soldiers' songs, patriotic songs, student songs, waltzes and urban dance forms, and even operetta and music for the popular stage (Erk and Böhme, 1893–4).
Germany, §II: Traditional Music
(ii) Regionalism and nationalism.
(v) Other folk musics and the folk musics of others.
Germany, §II, 4: Traditional Music: Modern & Postmodern Contexts
Germany, §II, 4: Traditional Music: Modern & Postmodern Contexts
Germany, §II, 4: Traditional Music: Modern & Postmodern Contexts
Germany, §II, 4: Traditional Music: Modern & Postmodern Contexts
Germany, §II, 4: Traditional Music: Modern & Postmodern Contexts
A General. B Musical issues. C History. D 20th century.
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E. Funk-Hennigs: ‘Skinheadmusik, Oi-Musik, Nazi-Rock?’, ibid., 84–100
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E. Renner: Und wir waren auch Naturmenschen’: Der autobiographische Bericht des Sinti-Musikers und Geigenbauers Adolf Boko Winterstein und andere persönliche Dokumente von und über Sinti und Roma (Frankfurt, 1997)
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K. Teutsch, ed.: Siebenbürgen und das Banat: Zentren deutschen Musiklebens im Südosten Europas (Sankt Augustin, 1997)
P.M. Potter: Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven, CT, 1998)
P.V. Bohlman and O. Holzapfel, eds.: The Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-America (Madison, WI, 2000)
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Landscape/Region/Nation/Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity’, Music and German Nationalism, ed. C. Applegate and P.M. Potter (Chicago, forthcoming)