Germany Music

German contributions to music have always been marked by three characteristic tendencies: striking creativity, thorough exploration, and a penchant for theory and explanation.

First Notes. Charlemagne introduced the Roman liturgy and its chant to German parts of his empire. German theorists aided in the development of Western musical notation and polyphony, which started as the addition of new musical lines to the original chant. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century mystic, writer, composer, scientist, and correspondent with popes and kings, composed elaborate chants and liturgical dramas. The love poetry of the Minnesänger was written around the same time as the narrative epics Tristan, Parzival, and the Nibelungenlied. Together with the northern French trouvère songs and Provençal troubadour songs, they expressed chivalry and other medieval ideals of love.

Burrowing From The Italians. In the 17th century, German composers were impressed by the elaborate forms developed in Italy that involved choruses, soloists, and large groups of instruments: cantatas, oratorios, and passions. Composers like Heinrich Schütz produced glorious works, sometimes called sacred symphonies. Oratorios were sacred dramas not meant for church performance. The situation in Germany was made more complicated by the different observances of Catholics and Protestants, both of whom wrote passions, narratives of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Famous Passions include J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion . A cantata could be either sacred or secular. German writers around 1600 developed an elaborate correspondence between music and the classical rhetoric of ancient Greece and Rome. They thought every musical setting of a text was designed to make a particular impression and elicit an emotional response from the listener.

Enlighten Me. In the 18th century, Germany imported a great deal of Italian opera, and one of the greatest German composers, George Frideric Handel, lived in London and wrote operas in Italian and oratorios, such as Messiah, in English. Frederick the Great liked the French style in instrumental music, though he had his German composer Johann Joachim Quantz write it. He also employed Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel. When J.S. Bach visited Frederick the Great, the King gave him a theme to improvise on that couldn’t be manipulated in the way Bach was famous for doing. Driven crazy by this, Bach wrote a collection of pieces based on the theme and sent it back to the King, calling it the Musical Offering , part of which was a trio sonata in the French style.

In Theory. Theory returned with a vengeance in the 18th century, when German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten invented aesthetics (coining the term aesthetica. ) German composers wrote treatises on how to play instruments, compose music, and develop musical taste. Bonn became a hotbed of enlightenment thought. Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although Austrian, were a crucial part of the Austro-German tradition of Classical and Romantic music. They developed and championed instrumental genres like the symphony and string quartet. Ludwig van Beethoven first made his name first as a brilliant improviser and pianist. When he was almost thirty years old, he wrote the long and difficult Eroica symphony, originally intending to dedicate it to Napoleon; however, with the latter’s declaration of imperial ambition, he turned the second movement into a funeral march and changed the title.

Romanticism And Its Aftermath. The ambition of German writers of the 1790s and early 1800s to create the “poetry of longing” (Schlegel) can be correlated with early 19th-century Romantic composers like Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, who distilled something ineffable in their Lieder (songs) and piano pieces. The era of the generalist composer was ending and the specialist composer was a new feature of the 19th century. The New German School loved music with a story or “program.” Richard Wagner wrote massive operas that reached back to the medieval German epics of Tristan, Parsifal, and the Ring of the Nibelung, as well as the stories of Tannhäuser and the Meistersingers; like Goethe in Faust, he wanted to create a uniquely national epic.

20th Century. The modern era saw a fragmentation of the grand dreams of the Romantics, and strong reactions to WWI. The Austrian Arnold Schoenberg took Wagner’s chromaticism and turned it into more controlled forms of “composing with twelve tones” that he said would “insure the supremacy of German music for a hundred years.” Paul Hindemith, on the other hand, headed a group of German Neoclassicists (a school of composing inspired by Russian Igor Stravinsky ) that embraced the older instrumental forms like the sonata and the variation. At the same time, the unstable Weimar economy encouraged smaller, cheaper musical forms like jazz. Music hall works bred the Singspiel, satiric operettas. Kurt Weill’s partnership with Bertolt Brecht mastered the genre with Die Dreigroschenoper (Three-Penny Opera) and the well-known song Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife). A new movement of Gebrauchsmusik (utilitarian music) engendered music for amateur players and film scores. Carl Orff, Hitler’s favorite living composer, is known for his Carmina Burana, a resurrection of bawdy 13th-century lyrics with a bombastic score. The immediate post-war period was dominated by schmaltzy Schlagermusik (pop music) on the popular side, and esoteric avant-garde “art” music of the Darmstadt school.

Current Trends. Today, Germany is known for its influential Krautrock of the 60s and 70s, a blend of rock instrumentation and electronic textures, featuring artists Can, Faust, Kraftwerk, and Neu!. Germany also pioneered techno, an umbrella term for electronic music. Now there is a vital rock scene, with such notable acts as Die Ärtzte, Wir Sind Helden, Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings), and The Notwist. After becoming a rock sensation in the 60s, Herbert Grönemeyer has enjoyed a comeback among younger generations. German hip-hop groups include Die fantastischen Vier, Fünf Sterne Deluxe, and Fettes Brot. Some popular Popular rappers include Sabrina Setlur, Xavier Naidoo, and Illmatic.