Report: German Studies Association Conference 2003
Session 18: Music and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Moderator: David E. Barclay, Kalamazoo College

"The Spaces of Public Music-Making in Nineteenth-Century Germany"
Celia Applegate, University of Rochester

"Orchestra Wars: Civil Society, Official Culture and the Amateur Musician"
Margaret Eleanor Menninger, Southwest Texas State University

"Popular Song and the Political Public Sphere"
James M. Brophy, University of Delaware

Commentator: George S. Williamson, University of Alabama


For much of the nineteenth century, music was considered the most
"ideal" of the arts. In contrast to painting, sculpture, or even poetry,
music was seen as speaking directly to an interior realm of feeling or
disposition. In his famous review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, E. T.
A. Hoffmann wrote that "music unlocks for man an unfamiliar world having
nothing in common with the [world of the senses] that surrounds him."[1]
In a more polemical vein, Richard Wagner contrasted the "pure"
instrumental music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven with the Paris Grand
Opera's emphasis on artifice and spectacle, arguing that true music was
the exclusive province of the German people. As historians like Carl
Dahlhaus, William Weber, and David Gramit have shown, the "musical
idealism" espoused by Hoffmann, Wagner, and others reflected not just
the philosophical currents of their day but also the emergence of the
institution of music criticism, which emphasized the timeless
significance of music and sought to promote a canon of great composers
in order to educate the tastes of the musical public.[2] If there is a
common thread linking the papers of the GSA session on "Music and the
Public Sphere in the Nineteenth Century," it is the rejection of the
idealist image of music and the attempt to ground the practices of
music-making in the concrete, contested institutions of German cultural,
economic, and political life.

After a brief introduction by the moderator David Barclay, Celia
Applegate opened the proceedings with "The Spaces of Public Music-Making
in Nineteenth-Century Germany." Applegate considered space not as an
abstract problem ("zum Raum wird hier die Zeit") but in the quite
concrete sense of musical venue. "Having a public space in which to
perform--in which both to make the music accessible to a broader public
in the best possible way and in so doing to signal its importance and
the honor due to it--was not something to take for granted."
Non-operatic music, in particular, suffered from a dearth of adequate
performance space until the very end of the nineteenth century, when a
number of concert halls specifically dedicated to this purpose were
built. In the meantime, musicians had to make do with the odd room in a
palace or mansion, performances in taverns, and, of course, recitals in
private homes. All of this had an impact on the type of repertoire that
could be performed. Applegate notes, for example, that the Bach revival
of the early nineteenth century was almost exclusively centered on the
reception of his smaller-scale instrumental works. By contrast, his
choral works remained unsung even in churches, which were no longer used
for musical performance. Thus the revival of the St. Matthew Passion in
1829 by the Berlin Singakademie was due not only to Felix Mendelssohn's
enthusiastic advocacy of Bach, but also to the fact that two years
earlier the Singakademie had acquired its own concert space in a
prominent location near the Neue Wache.

Margaret Menninger approached a similar set of issues by focusing on the
competing musical institutions of a single city, Leipzig. In "Orchestra
Wars: Civil Society, Official Culture, and the Amateur Musician," she
showed that although Leipzig's musicians, city leaders, and bourgeois
philanthropists promoted music based on a common notion of aesthetic
education or Bildung, the nineteenth century actually witnessed a
gradual contraction in the institutions of orchestral music in that
city. The roots of this process went back to 1743 and the founding of
the Gewandhaus orchestra, named after its concert hall, which had
originally belonged to the city's cloth-makers' guild. Unlike the other
musical institutions in the city, the Gewandhaus orchestra was run not
by its musicians but by members of the city's mercantile elite. This
gave it a considerable advantage in terms of political support and
institutional resources during the "orchestra wars" of the nineteenth
century. Among the Gewandhaus Orchestra's major competitors was the
Musikverein Euterpe, supported by a group of professional musicians,
students, and lesser bourgeoisie. Euterpe was dedicated to performing
works by newer artists (such as Liszt), while making music available to
a wide swath of the public through inexpensive tickets and a program of
educational outreach. The other major institution was the
Dilettanten-Orchester-Verein, which performed smaller works using
amateur strings and hired wind instrumentalists. Competition among these
groups heated up in 1838, when the Gewandhaus orchestra forbade its
musicians from performing in other musical groups, a move that
effectively drew a line between "professional" and "amateur"
music-making in the city. Then in the 1880s, the city government helped
the orchestra purchase land on which to build its own concert hall,
allowing the old Gewandhaus to be demolished. With insufficient access
to concert space, professional musicians, or funding, both the
Dilettanten-Orchester and Euterpe went under during the last decades of
the century. Leipzig's citizens continued to take pride in the world
famous Gewandhaus orchestra, even if they never attended an actual
performance. In this sense, musical Bildung had been transformed from a
dynamic process of pedagogy and participation into a rather static
entity residing exclusively in the hands of the city's elites.

While Applegate and Menninger focused on the production and reception of
art music, James Brophy examined the role of political songs in the
popular culture of the early nineteenth century. In his view, the
phenomenon of political song allowed liberal and nationalist ideals to
spread into social strata well beyond the traditional boundaries of the
bourgeois public spheres, as peasants, artisans, students, and Buerger
sang politically charged melodies in taverns, in homes, and in the
streets. In "Popular Song and the Political Public Sphere," Brophy
delineated three main periods and/or genres in the development of German
political song. The first corresponded to the era of the French
Revolution, as Germans in the Rhineland and elsewhere took up
revolutionary standards like the "Marseillaise" and "Ça ira" to protest
their own political situation. A second genre consisted of
anti-Napoleonic songs of liberation, including the famous songs of Arndt
and Theodor Koerner. These were sung well into the Vormaerz, when their
praise of "Teutsche Freiheit" was used to evoke liberal claims to
popular sovereignty. The last genre consisted of "Freiheitslieder," many
of which were generated in the tumultuous years 1830-1833. Among the
most important of these was "Fuersten zum Land hinaus!," whose stanzas
contained a "catalog of grievances against kings, princes, and
aristocrats" in the various states of Germany. In his analysis of these
political songs Brophy highlighted their role in cementing an "emotional
bond" to existing political positions, while noting the inherent
lability of song as a medium of political expression. In many cases, the
"original" meaning of a song was altered or reversed by changing just a
few lyrics (witness the ironic or satirical versions of Nicolaus
Becker's jingoistic "Rheinlied"). Yet this only confirms the role of
popular songs during the Vormaerz in sustaining a "political public
sphere" that penetrated beyond the institutions of bourgeois life into a
realm of popular culture that historians have often described as
pre-political or "elemental." For peasants, artisans, and others
excluded from more formal political associations, the Befreiunglieder
and Freiheitslieder became a means of publicly affirming the ideals of
civil society, equality, and freedom.

My comments focused on some of the issues discussed in the first
paragraph of this report. In addition, I asked the panelists to
elaborate on certain issues specific to their papers: how did problems
of performance space influence the understanding of music as an "ideal"
art? Did different instrumental groups in Leipzig promote differing
understandings of the meaning of musical Bildung? What made a political
song a "hit" in the early nineteenth century? The audience asked
questions about the nature of musical education in the nineteenth
century and about the similarity of Leipzig to other bourgeois-dominated
cities in Germany. Each of the papers was based on work in progress, and
the authors will no doubt incorporate these questions into the published
versions of their studies. A good time was had by all. Then at 10:15 we
scattered off in our separate directions, either to attend another
session, to browse the book exhibit, or to grab a cup of coffee.

NOTES

[1] Cited in David Gramit, _Cultivating Music: The Aspirations,
Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848_ (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
[2] Carl Dahlhaus, _The Idea of Absolute Music_ (repr. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); William Weber, "Wagner, Wagnerism,
and Musical Idealism," in _Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics_,
ed. David C. Large and Weber, in collaboration with Anne Dzamba Sessa
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 28-71; Gramit, _Cultivating
Music_, 1-26, 93-124.

George Williamson
University of Alabama


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2003 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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