Music and German National Identity

by Applegate, Celia

• ISBN13: 9780226021317
• ISBN10: 0226021319
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Is it merely a coincidence that the three "Bs" of classical musicBach, Beethoven, Brahmsare all German composers? Why do concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire? Over the past three centuries, supporters of German music ranging from music scholars to politicians have nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music. This book explores the questions of how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated as "the most German art." Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars in German history, musicology, and German literature, the essays assembled here examine philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents, as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, and pop to explore the ways in which music has continued to play a central role in the German national imagination and in shaping German identity.

Author Biography

Celia Applegate is an associate professor of history at the University of Rochester. She is the author of A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat.

Pamela Potter is an associate professor in the musicology and German departments at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
List of Abbreviations	ix
Germans as the ``People of Music'': Genealogy of an Identity	1	(35)
Celia Applegate
Pamela Potter
Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ``German'' in Music	36	(23)
Bernd Sponheuer
Einheit---Freiheit---Vaterland: Intimations of Utopia in Robert Schumann's Late Choral Music	59	(19)
John Daverio
Wagner's Die Meistersinger as National Opera (1868--1945)	78	(27)
Thomas S. Grey
Landscape---Region---Nation---Reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity	105	(23)
Philip V. Bohlman
Kein schoner Land: The Spielschar Ekkehard and the Struggle to Define German National Identity in the Weimar Republic	128	(12)
Bruce Campbell
Hosanna or ``Hilf, O Herr Uns'': National Identity, the German Christian Movement, and the ``Dejudaization'' of Sacred Music in the Third Reich	140	(15)
Doris L. Bergen
National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of ``German'' Music	155	(23)
Hans Rudolf Vaget
Culture, Society, and Politics in the Cosmos of ``Hans Pfitzner the German''	178	(12)
Michael H. Kater
``Fur eine neue deutsche Nationaloper'': Opera in the Discourses of Unification and Legitimation in the German Democratic Republic	190	(15)
Joy Haslam Calico
Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, and the West German Search for a New Musical Identity	205	(13)
Gesa Kordes
American Jazz in the German Cold War	218	(16)
Uta G. Poiger
Postwar German Popular Music: Americanization, the Cold War, and the Post-Nazi Heimat	234	(17)
Edward Larkey
On the History of the ``Deutschlandlied''	251	(18)
Jost Hermand
Ethnicity and Musical Identity in the Czech Lands: A Group of Vignettes	269	(19)
Bruno Nettl
``Is That Not Something for Simplicissimus?!'' The Belief in Musical Superiority	288	(17)
Albrecht Riethmuller
List of Contributors	305	(4)
Index	309