German music

“ BUT NOW WHAT BECOMES OF OUR GREAT AND GLORIOUS GERMAN MUSIC? It is the fate of our music that really concerns us. We have little reason to grieve if, after a century of wondrous productivity, nothing particular happens to come to light for some little time. But there is every reason to beware of suspicious persons who set themselves up as the trustees and conservators of the "true German spirit" of our inheritance. ”

“ The essence and perennial charm of German music lies in its melodious harmony. Nothing is more absurd than the notion that there is more melody in Italian than in German music. The only difference is that in Italian music the melody is more prominent, being unencumbered by complicated harmonies and accompaniments, while in German music the melody is interwoven with the various harmonic parts, which makes it difficult to follow at first. ”

“ I have never bothered myself in art with questions of nationality. I have not even concealed my preference for German music; and I consider, even to-day, that Richard Strauss is the foremost musical composer in Europe. Having said this, I am freer to speak of the strange impression that I had at the Strasburg festival—an impression of the change that is coming over music, and the way that French art is silently setting about taking the place of German art. ”

“ With regard to German music I consider precaution necessary in various ways. Assuming that a person loves the South (as I love it) as a great training-school for health of soul and sense in their highest potency, as an uncontrollable flood and glamour of sunshine spreading over a race of independent and self-reliant beings;—well, such an one will learn to be more or less on his guard against German music, because, while spoiling his taste anew, it undermines his health. ”

“ What is really disquieting is that, in spite of all the talent that still abounds, Germany is fast losing her chief musical endowments. Her melodic charm has nearly disappeared. One could search the music of Strauss, Mahler, or Hugo Wolf, without finding a melody of any real value, or of any true originality, outside its application to a text, or a literary idea, and its harmonic development. And besides that, German music is daily losing its intimate spirit ”

“ Germany—equally with Italy the land of music, but of harmonious in contra-distinction to melodic music, which belongs most properly to Italy, well named the land of song—was much later in developing her musical powers than Italy, but she cultivated them to grander and nobler proportions; for to Germany we owe the magnificent development of instrumental music, which culminates in the form of the sonata for the piano, and in that of the symphony for the orchestra, in the hands of such masters as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. ”

“ If the leaders of German music—such as the Bachs, Rust, Gluck, Graun and Hasse—were affected to such an extent by the influence of Italian art, [35] how should German music hold out against the foreign spirit? Where was its genius to find salvation? ”

“ This composer seemed destined, in his earlier works, to carry still a stage further the great line of German music; the mind that could produce the beautiful sextet Verklärte Nacht and the splendid Gurrelieder at the age of twenty-five or so seemed certain of a harmonious development, bringing more and more of its own to build with upon the permanent German foundation. ”

“ Oh for a literature set free, conterminous with the interests of life itself.
In music, it might be thought, Germany had already vindicated its spiritual liberty. One and another of those North-german towns were already aware of the youthful Sebastian Bach. The first notes had been heard of a music not borrowed from France, but flowing, as naturally as springs from their sources, out of the ever musical soul of Germany itself. And the Duke Carl was a sincere lover of music, himself playing melodiously on the violin to a delighted court. ”

“ I have followed German music closely, and I claim that German musicians, or rather let me say German producers of music, lack ear just about half of the time. Their students cannot compare with our college singing, their pedestrian parties, which one meets all through the country, singing, often from notes (and if you take the trouble to inquire, they will frequently tell you with pride that they belong to such and such a singing society) almost drive sensitive ears crazy. ”

“ It has been an ever-flowing spring, not only for my emotional life, but also for the interpretation of life. For, to him who can rightly listen, music is a language that can interpret the subtlest emotions of the soul, and reveal manifold secrets which literature has never been able to express. If in any degree I understand the German soul, it is due to music. ”

“ Music, by its very want of precision, which in this special case is a quality, goes where the German soul proceeds.
If the German spirit had as much density as expansion,—that is to say, as much will as power,—she could, at a given moment, lift up and save the human race. Such as she is, she is sublime. ”

“ A nation that can produce those folk-songs has got unusual gifts for the world. And, of course, we envy the Germans their music. Of all the contemptible utterances that this war has produced (and it has produced a good many) none has been worse than the silly blathering against German music just because it is German. What have Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner got to do with the politics of the present war? Leaving the arts aside, it is quite certain that in any region where careful observation and painstaking thought are required, no one can afford to neglect Germany. ”

“ Probably few composers have been more splendidly rewarded by contemporary fame and wealth, or been more idolised by their admirers. No less may it be said that few have been the object of more severe criticism. His youth was spent amid the severest classic influences of German music, and the spirit of romanticism and nationality, which blossomed into such beautiful and characteristic works as those composed by his friend and fellow-pupil Weber, also found in his heart an eloquent echo. ”

“ German music seems to be too universally indulged in to be good. It is performed with more earnestness than skill and the programme is gone through with with more fervour than taste. The musicians of a typical German band dig through the evening's numbers with the same dogged perseverance and perspiration that they would exercise in tunnelling through a mountain. In this connection I am not speaking of any of the trained orchestras, but solely of the band music that one hears all through the Rhine land. ”

“ The music of the German speaking race has, until the new epoch that has just dawned, absolutely possessed the minds of our composers and public alike.
Not only have all or nearly all the most influential British musicians been educated in Germany, spending the most impressionable years of their lives there, but they have come back imbued with the spirit and technique of its music and, with the zeal of converts, anxious to impart the same ideals to their pupils. ”

“ UNIVERSAL MUSICIANS German music is undoubtedly the most universal music, especially that of Mozart and Beethoven. It seems as if there were fewer particles of their native soil imbedded in the works of these two masters than is common among their countrymen. They bring out in sharp relief the cultural internationalism of Germany. ”

“ Like German literature, German music is a comparatively recent growth. What little feeling existed for the musical art employed itself in cultivating the alien flowers of Italian song. Even eighty years after this Mozart and Haydn were treated like lackeys and vagabonds, just as great actors were treated in England at the same period. Handel's father looked on music as an occupation having very little dignity. ”

“ In music, Germany, so proud of its ancient glory, has only the successors of Wagner, neurotic jugglers with orchestral effects, like Richard Strauss, but not a single sober and virile work of the quality of Boris Godunov. No German musician has opened up new roads. ”

“ German Organists At this point, Germany came into the musical field, and soon became the artistic center of organ-playing. Up to this time, the country had produced less music than any of its neighbors: Italy had written the greatest Church music, and invented opera; France had followed closely in Italy’s footsteps; the Low Countries had helped in music’s growth by their early work in polyphony and had taught all Europe including Germany; England had led the world in her compositions for virginals and harpsichord, the forerunners of piano music. ”

“ Without going into particulars which would clog this issue, it may be stated that the tradition includes matters pertaining to scenery, staging, lighting, acting, singing, and even tempi in the orchestra. It is all-inclusive.
It must have been quite evident to even the casual concert-goer that German music has passed its zenith. It has had its day and it is not likely that post-bellum music will be Germanic. In an article in a recent number of “The Musical Quarterly,” Edgar Istel reviews German opera since Wagner with a consistent tone of depreciation. ”

“ Flat and empty pseudo-culture confronts us with a grin, and if we are not inclined to grin in return, as superficial observers of our civilization are wont to do, we may indeed grow seriously indignant. And German musicians now-a-days have good reason to be indignant if this miserable sham culture presumes to judge of the spirit and significance of our glorious music. ”

“ Oratorios and Passion music, cantatas and motets, masses and concertos, piano and other instrumental works, and, greatest of all, that priceless treasure of profoundly conceived and perfectly constructed preludes and fugues, which the German people claim, and always will claim, as their own most beautiful and intellectual musical possession, are the outcome of the comparatively brief Leipsic period. How rich, deep, and varied were the creations of his intellect! ”

“ Full of bold and surprising strokes of imagination, these operas are marked by the true atmosphere of national life and feeling, and we feel in them the fresh, rich colour of the popular traditions and song-music which make the German Lieder such an inexhaustible treasure-trove. As Weber was maturing into that fullness of power which gave to the world his greater works, Germany had been wrought into a passionate patriotism by the Napoleonic wars. ”

“ I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect. ”

“ Here, then, we see popular music beginning frankly to permeate the scholarly style. German music recruits itself by steeping itself in the music of the races which surround the German frontier; it is about to borrow from them something of their natural spontaneity, their freshness of invention, and to them it will in time owe a renewed youth.
From Sorau Telemann proceeded to the Court at Eisenach, where he again found himself in a musical environment permeated by French influences. ”

“ He could disclose the splendor of German music, and never before has anyone written of Mozart, Weber, and Beethoven with keener appreciation or profounder thought. Of the last named he proposed to write a comprehensive biography and entered into correspondence with a publisher in Germany. [A] He confronted the formal culture of the Latin races with the character of the German mind, as it were the head of the Medusa, and the consciousness of his mission kept up his spirits under the most trying circumstances. With Paris as an art centre he had done. ”

“ The writer of musical history is confronted at every point with the problem of classification. The men whom we have discussed can, though united by ties of nationality and even family, hardly be considered as of one school. We have taken them as the representatives of the North German musical art; yet, as we were obliged to state, Southern influence affected nearly all of them. Similarly, we should find in analyzing the music of the Viennese that a more or less rugged Germanism had entered into it. ”

“ It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little existing musical criticism—none as compared with the abounding German criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the sun. ”

“ The secular folk-song of the sixteenth century and earlier was a very prolific source of the German choral. This was after Luther’s day, however, for it does not appear that any of his tunes were of this class. Centuries before the age of artistic German music began, the common people possessed a large store of simple songs which they delighted to use on festal occasions, at the fireside, at their labor, in love-making, at weddings, christenings, and in every circumstance of social and domestic life. ”

“ Of such victories, which are always rare, one of the noblest examples is, in music, the classic German art of the close of the eighteenth century. This art has become the property, the food of all; of all Europeans, because all races have collaborated in it, all have put something of themselves into it. The reason why Gluck and Mozart are so dear to us is that they belong to us, to all of us. Germany, France and Italy have all contributed to create their spirit and their race. [32] ”