Music and society in France and Germany: a historical overview

Before revolutionary ideas took hold, music in France followed the evolving demands of the royal court. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) wrote music for court festivities. In the 1720s–1730s, the harpsichord suite reached its height, marked by refined imagery, subtlety, and elegance. François Couperin (1668–1773) represents the peak of French classicism. During the eighteenth century, musical and theatrical genres held the foremost place in French music. From the 1730s to the 1760s, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) held a leading position in court opera. He also made major theoretical contributions, setting out his harmony doctrines in the "Treatise on Harmony" (1722) and "The Origin of Harmony" (1750). Musicians sought an ideal consistency of life expressed through sound, but these searches were confined to a small elite. French classicism in this sense remained idealistic, detached from everyday reality.

During the Enlightenment, the heroic and mythological operas of Lully and Rameau gave way to action-packed fairground spectacles. A new French opera genre, the opéra comique, matured within the fair theatre. This genre gained strength when an Italian opera company arrived in Paris in 1752, performing Pergolesi's opera buffa. Intense debates erupted. French Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Rousseau sided with the Buffonists. Sharp polemical pamphlets and scholarly treatises attacked the conventions of the French court theatre. Rousseau wrote articles on music for the "Encyclopedia" and the "Musical Dictionary", as well as the "Letters on French Music". Through Rousseau's influence, music became a crucial "mirror" of France's historical development. However, unlike the Buffonists with their peaceful critical humour, Rousseau turned to rural musical imagery, which he believed was free from social tension and contradiction. This aligned with his concept of "returning to nature". His pastoral work "The Village Wizard" played an important role in establishing a new type of musical performance. From this point, the French opéra comique began to flourish.

The ideas of the French Enlightenment significantly prepared the ground for Gluck's opera reform. In his operas, Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) championed heroism and civic virtue, ideas shaped by the advanced pre-revolutionary circles of France. Music followed the development of new forms of social life. Concerts gradually moved beyond palace halls and aristocratic salons. Regular "spiritual concerts" were organized in Paris, and music began to leave its idealised royal space, moving toward the people.

The Great French Revolution brought sweeping changes to musical art. Under the influence of the revolutionary masses, music acquired a civil-democratic orientation. It became an integral part of every major revolutionary event: military victories, celebrations, festivals, and mourning ceremonies. People composed songs about overthrowing the monarchy and adopting a constitution. Brass bands accompanied the funerals of heroes. This new social function gave rise to mass genres: song, anthem, and march. Music gave strength to the revolutionary people.

The first revolutionary songs in France used melodies already popular among the people. Tunes that generalized characteristic folk music intonations became widespread, most famously the French "Carmagnole". The highest and most striking example of a revolutionary song is the "Marseillaise", created by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1792–1795), which later became the national anthem of France. It is significant that the nation's highest state song was born in this era.

The embodiment of heroic images in music and the appeal to a mass audience brought forth the art of revolutionary classicism. Ideas of the struggle against tyranny and for human freedom nourished musical art and spurred the search for new expressive means. For vocal and instrumental music, typical features included oratorical intonations, large melodic contours with a guiding line, fanfare calls, rigid rhythms, march-like movement, and harsh harmony. Works with historical themes appeared: "Song of July 14", "Awake, People!", "Sorrowful March", "Song of the Triumphs of the French Republic", "Hymn to Brotherhood", "Hymn of 9 Thermidor", and "Song of August 10". One of the creators of the revolutionary musical style was François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829), whose work laid the foundation for new genres: the revolutionary-patriotic mass song, the heroic funeral march, and the agitation opera. Gossec updated and expanded the symphony orchestra by introducing clarinets and French horns into the score. During the revolutionary years, the "rescue opera", which had taken shape before the revolution, continued to develop. The revolution also greatly expanded secular music. In Gluck's operas, a heroic-everyday genre evolved. Composers from the era of the Great French French Revolution made valuable contributions to opera. In the 1780s, military wind music gained special importance. The Paris Conservatory was founded in 1795, marking the beginning of organised music education.

Music was "let in" to the masses — the wall behind which music had existed only for the royal court was destroyed.

During Napoleon's dictatorship (1799–1814), musical art entered a period of decline. The style that recreated heroic "splendour" was called "Empire".

The July Revolution of 1830 revived culture. By the 1810s–1830s, French romantic opera had taken shape, acquiring semantic richness, lyrical immediacy, democratisation, and a brilliant musical language. The opera "The White Lady" by Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1830) contained idyllic everyday scenes and romantic fantasy. Later, lyrical principles expanded in music, and folk melodies were used more widely. French romanticism gradually turned toward artistic surface. Life became filled with a whirl of fun and public balls. All levels of society, from Versailles to the outskirts of Paris, were swept up in a dance craze.

Germany

In Germany during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, musical-theoretical and aesthetic thought became more active. The work of Johann Mattheson (1681–1764), the "Theory of Affects", gained fame.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) communicated the deep range of human feelings and the true vastness of philosophical thought through music. The historical experience of the German people, shaped by the harsh power of popular movements during the Reformation and the Peasant Wars, fostered a humanistic faith in human fortitude and moral strength. In Bach's music, the historical movement is reflected in the contrast between improvisational freedom and strict logic. This highlights a key difference in the historical process between Germany and France.

In the eighteenth century, new forms of musical life emerged, helping to establish secular culture. Almost all German composers of the era paid significant attention to the song, which was fueled by the flourishing of German poetry. Johann Gottfried Herder developed ideas of nationality in art. In 1778–1779, he wrote an "Anthology of the Songs of Different Nations", later published in 1807 under the title "Voices of the Nations in Songs".

Special significance in the preparation of German Romanticism belonged to the ballad genre, which originated in Scotland and was particularly favoured by Goethe and Schiller.

The pinnacle of all European music was achieved in the work of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). He created the heroic-dramatic symphony, absorbing the ideas of the French Revolution, the German Enlightenment, the artistic movement "Sturm und Drang" in German culture, Lessing's aesthetics, the literary and philosophical concepts of Goethe and Schiller, the dialectic of German philosophy, and features of the national-patriotic movement during the Napoleonic wars. Beethoven anticipated Romanticism by creating new synthetic vocal-instrumental genres, transforming classical forms such as sonata, variation, and rondo, and symphonizing chamber genres. German musical Romanticism was closely tied to German literature, which was distinguished by psychological orientation, the use of folklore, epic, and fairy-tale elements. Key composers include Schubert, Schumann, Weber, and Mendelssohn.

How did the approach to postmodernism develop in Germany? During the nineteenth century, German musical thought developed intensively. However, the influence of music on history and people differed between France and Germany. While French music strengthened the revolutionary spirit and increased the dynamism of the historical process, German music called for a logical participation in history. From 1824 to 1830, the "Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung" newspaper was published. The study of music from the past began in the mid-nineteenth century.

What happened in France? After the Revolution of 1848, French musical culture entered a complex and difficult phase. Paris, formerly Europe's greatest musical centre, lost its leading role.

And what happened in Germany? In 1846–1848, Richard Wagner wrote the opera "Lohengrin", in which he combined various legends concerning the Grail knights, champions of justice, moral perfection, and invincibility in the fight against evil. Pyotr Tchaikovsky called this work "the kingdom of light, truth and beauty".

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) occupies an intermediate position between scientific research and artistic creation. His philosophy was intertwined with music. Nietzsche argued that music liberates the human spirit. He was on friendly terms with Wagner and Schopenhauer, the latter embodying for him a courageous acceptance of suffering. For Nietzsche, Wagner represented the art of the future, in which spontaneous "Dionysian" and harmonious "Apollo" principles merged. Later, he accused Wagner of pandering to the masses and the crowd. He contrasted Wagner with Bizet's "Carmen", which for him represented the highest form of Romanticism. Nietzsche was also an improvisational composer.