Music & German national identity

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Whittall, Arnold

it was music, the 'best' German

culture has to offer, that made

Germany susceptible to the sort of

political and moral regression that he,

along with the entire civilized world,

had been witnessing in horror and

disbelief (p. 156).

Applegate and Potter are also relatively sparing in the space they devote to Germany since 1945. Gesa Kordes attempts to summarise the 'experimental', Darmstadt-derived initiatives as evidence of a 'West German search for a new musical identity', but there is too much repetition of the kind of material about the pre-1945 catastrophe found in other chapters, and instead of responding to recent large-scale texts on the 'Year Zero' era, like Henze's autobiography or Morag Grant's analysis of Die Reihe, Bordes fall into a rather woolly and over-simplifying survey mode. Essays on jazz (Uta Poiger), pop music (Edward Larkey) and the (in retrospect) farcical debates about opera in the early years of the GDR, when Brecht, Eisler and Dessau were still active (Joy Haslam Calico), while always readable and informative, seem more like dutiful exercises in local history to which the governing topic of German National Identity is not especially relevant. So it is left to the veteran Bruno Nettl and the hard-hitting duo of Bernd Sponheuer (Kiel) and Albrecht Reitmuller (Berlin) to provide the sharpest angles on the basics of this subject.

Nettl, whose father began his musicological career in pre-war Prague, writes tellingly about the kind of mobility between Czech, German and Jewish modes of expression in this central European melting pot. Sponheuer provides an entertaining example of what can be the most frustrating genre in scholarly writing: 'we can't expect to answer this question, but we must still ask it'. For Sponheuer,

the idea of the German in music consti

tutes little more than a sketch of ideal

types, ever vulnerable to excessive

reduction. But basic strands of thought

at least are discernible in a discourse that

has remained relatively stable throughout

history, even up to recent times (p.56).

There, in a nutshell, are the limitations of, and justification for, his chapter on 'Reconstructing ideal types of the "German" in music'. Reitmuller's concern is parallel, being in essence 'the illusion of [German] superiority in matters of music' (p.290). As far as National Identity is concerned, he goes to the heart of the matter when he singles out Droysen's claim that it was 'the [German] Protestant hymn, based on folk music' which 'became the point of reference and support for art music' (p.292) - bringing a culture of the sublime with it. Even if a distinctive 'national identity' can be demonstrated in German music from the Minnesingers to Matthias Pintscher, then, the challenge of determining to universal satisfaction which German compositions are superior to others, both in Germany and elsewhere - and why - remains tantalisingly open. If, as the editors in their introductory essay usefully observe, German music came to be perceived as superior 'precisely because of its universality and transcendence of national differences' (p.13), discussion of national identity is, in the end, a step in the wrong direction though probably for the right reasons. Or, to quote the much-and-rightly-despised Pfitzner's masterwork Palestrina: 'Warum das ganze Spiel? Wenn das nicht ware, Was ware dann?'