How music shaped German cultural identity across eras
The German Quarterly’s special issue brings together nine essays exploring the crossroads of music and German culture. Contributors responded to a call that sought original approaches, unfamiliar figures and works, and topics able to engage a wide readership. The editors received thirty-two abstracts and selected those that broke with established scholarly patterns. They consciously set aside towering figures such as Beethoven and Wagner, whose work has been treated at length elsewhere. For strategic reasons, the chronological focus was also limited to German cultural history up to 1945; the postwar era is complex enough to merit its own project.
While film and visual studies have become established fixtures in many German studies programs — often with dedicated specialists — the same cannot yet be said for music, music history, or the broader intersections of sound and German culture. This is surprising, given that what we call “German” music fills concert halls and opera houses today, even in English-speaking countries. These performances offer educators a chance to draw on live German culture nearby, or to tap into the wealth of recordings and DVDs that document such productions. Yet there is also a clear need: exploring these resources requires us to educate both our students and ourselves on how this musical material can be made relevant to the issues we address in classrooms and scholarship. That need lies at the heart of this special issue.
The romantic legacy and its discontents
The bond between music and culture has long drawn attention across the humanities. Even before methodological questions were raised explicitly, studies of individual compositions, composers, genres, and traditions that rely on poetry or drama — such as the lied and opera — frequently engaged with the relationship between text and music, as well as with extra-musical contexts.
Since the 1980s, musicologists have grown increasingly aware that work on sources, scores, and performances must be situated within a broader cultural framework. The so-called new musicology — a term that describes a cluster of ideas rather than a unified movement — began adopting insights from sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, gender studies, feminism, psychology, and non-canonical genres such as popular music and jazz. Especially influential for German music and cultural studies was the English translation of Carl Dahlhaus’s Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, which sparked a revisionist trend that examined the German-centered ideologies behind canon formation, musical institutions, analytical methods, and the discipline of musicology itself. In the United States, Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter’s edited volume Music and German National Identity (2002) made a key intervention by bringing historians, musicologists, and scholars of German literature and culture into dialogue. The volume’s central question — “When and how did Germans come to be regarded as the ‘people of music,’ and music regarded as the ‘most German art’?” — investigated music through a cultural-historical lens. Applegate and Potter argued that the answer comes primarily from “writers, thinkers, statesmen, educators, impresarios, demagogues, and audiences,” and only “occasionally” from composers.
From the early 2000s onward, German music studies developed rapidly into a vibrant interdisciplinary field. Cultural scholarship made vital contributions by reading music through frames borrowed from media studies, ethnic studies, Jewish studies, gender and queer theory, and critical race studies. These trends are slowly finding their way into classrooms as well. Events such as the 2017 German Studies Association seminar “Not Enough Notes: Exploring the Intersections of Music, History, and Cultural Studies,” along with panel discussions at regional Modern Language Association conferences, suggest that music is far more than a passing scholarly fancy.
Methodological tensions often arise, of course. A literary scholar’s text-based approach may clash with a performance historian’s or a musicologist’s score-based analysis. These differences provoke questions. To what extent can a text alter the meaning of a musical work, or vice versa? Must one master complex musicological analysis to offer a thoughtful reading of a composition? How important is fluency in the German language to interpreting a musical piece? While such debates continue, a broad, multifaceted understanding of any work of art clearly demands contributions from multiple disciplines.
Applegate and Potter’s intervention mattered because it called for a critical examination of what can be termed the romantic paradigm in musical and cultural history. Studies of music and German culture frequently begin with the Romantics, who were among the first to challenge the primacy of text over music. They sought to establish music as a distinct art form capable of conveying subjective experience with an immediacy that, in Arthur Schopenhauer’s words, makes it a direct expression of the human will. Schopenhauer was not alone: philosophers from Schelling to Herder, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno all wrote at length about music’s unique expressive mode. Their ideas saturated the literary domain. Poets wrote texts for music, and the literary works regularly taught in German classrooms are filled with musical forms, musical works, and acts of “musicking” — participating in performance through playing, listening, rehearsing, composing, or dancing.
Romantic metaphysics opened the door for Richard Wagner, whose writings laid out a new vision of the relationship between text and music. Wagner’s early essays placed music at the center of debates over nationalism and the essence of the German spirit. His later turn to spiritualism and metaphysics further shaped nineteenth-century phenomenology of music. During the 1990s, scholars whose primary field was not musicology began taking up Wagner’s anti-Semitism. The adaptation of Wagner’s ideas to fascist agendas continues to influence readings of his work, and his importance for popular culture has also been explored by cultural studies. Laurence Dreyfus has pointed out that, in its nineteenth-century context, Wagner’s work was seen as provocative less because of its politics and more because of the pan-erotic sphere it evoked — a sphere with a distinct homoerotic component.
After Wagner, Theodor W. Adorno looms large in discussions of German music and culture. A founder of the Frankfurt School best known for his critique of post-Enlightenment society and its authoritarian leanings, Adorno wrote extensively on culture and aesthetics. He was himself trained in composition and twelve-tone technique under Alban Berg, studied piano, and produced a wide body of writing on music. His scathing critique of Wagner, along with his application of negative dialectics to musical works, offered new ways of reading music as cultural critique. His studies of Mahler and Schoenberg shaped discourse on Jewish cultural identity within German music. Yet Adorno’s strict separation of high and low art, and the central role he assigns to art in explaining the world — an idea rooted in German Romanticism, albeit in modified form — appear less constructive for today’s scholarship. Interestingly, while Adorno wrote about music and literature separately, he rarely explored them together; his studies of Mahler and Wagner show little interest in the texts those composers used.
In recent years, scholars have worked to move beyond the romantic paradigm and the focus on Beethoven and Wagner alone, exploring music and meaning from fresh perspectives. The legacies of music in German culture are too diverse to remain confined to these cornerstones, even though innovative research on them continues.
Rethinking music, literature, and culture
This special issue offers a chance to think through the many ways music and culture interact, more systematically than has happened before. Rather than viewing music as expressing some essential cultural identity that must be decoded by literary means — the romantic paradigm — it seems more promising to examine the multifaceted interactions among music, text, other media, and culture, without presupposing a hierarchy among them. How can the relationship between music, text, and culture be conceptualised in principle? What can literature and literary analysis contribute to understanding music? And how can music illuminate culture?
Current scholarship reveals several approaches to these questions. Musical hermeneutics seeks meaning in music. Music as a cultural product examines the social surroundings that shape a work. Performance history attends to the material conditions of making music. Another strand reads music as both creator and reflector of cultural memory. All share one feature: the notion of “text” plays a formative role, even as it is often problematised and a broader understanding of “language” — encompassing acoustic signs and body language — is sought.
Musicologist Julian Johnson, in his 2015 study Out of Time, observes that music and language are “like two magnetic fields, exhibiting a simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion.” This explains why literary scholars are drawn to musical works as texts that invite repeated reading. Johnson’s reflections echo discussions dating from the late eighteenth century, when thinkers began to consider music in relation to language while also insisting on their distinctness. These discourses point to a desire to assign a cognitive function to music, with language serving as the dominant model for understanding cognition. While the search for meaning in music — a musical hermeneutics — is not new, the paradigms deserve fresh scrutiny. How can we articulate music’s cognitive dimension while respecting the contradictions, heterogeneity, and pluralism inherent to music and its traditions? The development of musical hermeneutics would benefit from engaging more critically with both its own history and contemporary hermeneutic thought.
Beyond questions of interpretation, studies must also consider the musical work as a cultural object — an expression of the surrounding society that can offer useful commentary on that society. An essential starting point is the literary and broader cultural interests of composers and their librettists. In the last two decades, a wealth of research has reframed composers as readers, artists, and philosophers whose works speak not only to musical tradition but also to the political and cultural dialogues of their historical moment. The texts a composer adapts or transforms, and the discourses their music enters, help explain the ideological function their music can play — whether intentional or not. Similar observations can be made about literary authors who incorporate musical interests into their writing. Literary scholars led the way in this comparative territory; Steven Paul Scher’s foundation work, along with studies by McGlathery, Chapple, Walter, and Bernhart, offers comprehensive overviews of the many ways literature and music interact.
Literary works with enormous impact on musical repertoire, such as Goethe’s Faust, continue to inspire scholars to reflect on text and music alike. Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus attracted the attention of several composers while prompting explorations into the link between German nationalism, music, and politics. A recent example that successfully blends literary analysis, film studies, cultural history, and music study is Philip Kitcher’s examination of Mann’s Death in Venice.
The history of opera offers compelling case studies for understanding how music intertwines with other performing arts and the culture around it. As recent scholarship reminds us, opera depends on the medial forms available not only to the composer of its time but also to today’s performers and stage directors. Mozart is an interesting example — a composer whose cultural contexts have long been neglected. Studying Mozart’s operas as part of a reconsideration of German cultural history can yield revealing comparisons. How, for instance, do the social dynamics in these works differ from those in plays by Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe from the same period? A post-colonial perspective can help scrutinise the stereotypical depictions of the orient in these works. Scholars might also rethink Mozart’s position in eighteenth-century intellectual debates. Mozart’s operas with Italian-language libretti are often left out of discussions of German Enlightenment culture, yet throughout the nineteenth century, operas by Gluck and Mozart with foreign-language libretti were typically performed in German in German-speaking territories. Perhaps it is time to move beyond a language-centred approach to German culture, using Mozart’s operas as a case study. Studies of German opera before Wagner are increasingly paying attention to social and cultural considerations alongside aesthetic ones. Scholars have also questioned the traditional linear narrative from Carl Maria von Weber to Wagner, acknowledging the many experiments, influences, and directions shaped by transcultural dialogues, the national theatre debate, political implications, musical and critical considerations, and contemporary performance practices.
It is productive to view performance history as a supplement to approaches that look for a work’s meaning independent of its performance circumstances. Performance history points to the material conditions of turning a score into a real act of music-making — into a “material, present event.” As such, it contains important information about time and place. Because a performance is a material event, it carries what Carolyn Abbate calls the “hieroglyphic traces” of its original conception, of the times and places where it has been performed before, and of its potential usefulness in the present and future.
Performance history also engages with the conditions by which such events can be preserved for posterity. Depending on the circumstances and contexts where music is performed, it accrues multiple meanings, opening many new directions for scholarly investigation.
Nevertheless, the concept of “performance” does not completely steer us away from viewing music as text. David Levin, for example, sees his work as part of an ongoing effort since the mid‑1980s to make musicology receptive to “textual theory and cultural analysis,” including reflections on an opera’s “textual indeterminacy or inscribed power relations” (Unsettling Opera 1–2; see also 33). This is not to claim that an opera’s meaning is fixed by its text, but rather to foster a richer understanding of opera performance as the convergence of varied semiotic strategies and their accompanying media. A particular performance can itself be treated as a “performance text” (11); it is the performance that adds fresh layers of significance—it performs a “reading” (49) of a given score or functions as its “translation” (75), employing yet another text-related metaphor. What emerges from Levin’s reasoning is a perspective that opens musical performances to a broad array of contextualizations, contingent on their time and place. It also requires us to acknowledge “the very threat of uncontrolled signification” (27)—the fact that music can signify many different things, a potential for disorder that, in Levin’s view, we ought to embrace.
Music as part of an encompassing “culture” can also operate as a form of literary and cultural memory. Hans Werner Henze’s orchestral piece “Sebastian im Traum” might spark interest in Georg Trakl’s poem cycle of the same name (on which the music is based), and may further prompt questions about what those poems reveal about Trakl and his contemporaries in the period just before World War I. Mahler devotees may number among the few still drawn to reading (and studying) the poems from the romantic collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn or the otherwise forgotten verse of Friedrich Rückert. Scholars of music history and culture have also been crucial in recovering the often overlooked, yet foundational role of female writers, composers, and musicians in shaping German musical traditions—from Mariane von Ziegler’s cantata texts for Bach (Peters), to Marie Pappenheim’s libretto for Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Keathley), not to mention recent work on Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Clara Schumann (see Todd and Reich).
Reconstructing musical “canons” within specific historical moments can also help us comprehend how particular works and composers have featured in the imagining of German national identities, as well as in the marginalization of other traditions and cultures. Lily E. Hirsch has examined the presence of Jewish music and its stewardship by the Jewish Culture League in Nazi-era Berlin. Jonathan Wipplinger and Kira Thurman have explored the history of jazz and of African-American musicians, composers, and performers in the German-speaking world.
Elaine Kelly, Kyle Frackman, and Larson Powell have analyzed the production and reception of classical music in the GDR. Joy Calico documents and examines the reception of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in postwar Europe. These examples show how the study of music can continue to broaden our understanding of history and critically engage with music as both a product of and contributor to cultural memory. Moreover, because music belongs to cultural history, it can help us grasp the forces guiding the processes of canonization and exclusion that inevitably shape cultural traditions—and can provide new perspectives for reading those traditions differently.
3. A Note on Disciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, and Discipline-Based Interdisciplinarity
Pursuing interdisciplinary research challenges us to recognize and reconsider the boundaries of our disciplines, as well as the geographical, cultural, and temporal borders that influence how we interpret music within diverse cultural and historical contexts. Philip Bohlman writes about the significance of aporias for music, a term borrowed from Derrida that denotes borders not merely as endpoints, but also as “zones of overlapping, of fullness” and “areas of impossibility and unknowability, of silence and emptiness” (“Analysing Aporia” 136). To analyze musical aporia, he argues, is to engage in a “process of translation, poised at the borders between music and the meanings that lie beyond it” (137). Rather than viewing an “aporia” negatively—as an unfillable empty space—it can be seen as an opportunity to reconsider the terms under which we work and move across and among disciplines. This might at times prove difficult, and reaching consensus on what messages music conveys may not be straightforward, but crossing boundaries without the certainty of knowing where one will arrive can also be rewarding.
Ideally, a scholar writing about music and (German) culture would be equally competent in both fields and sufficiently aware of the implicit biases underlying cultural and musicological scholarship to carry on a meaningful internal dialogue, weighing both the strengths and limitations of these alternative scholarly approaches. Such a fair-minded and balanced expert may exist—realistically, however, most scholars working at the intersections of music and (German) culture tend to favor one side over the other. But is this necessarily undesirable? The figure of the “intellectual authority” with its ideal of omnicompetence is fading from academia. The idea of dialogue among areas of expertise mentioned above suggests that achieving genuine interdisciplinarity would benefit from more collaboration and intellectual exchange.
To some extent, the question of interdisciplinarity in the case of music and culture does not fundamentally differ from how it appears in other fields.
Most scholarship in literary and cultural studies, in one way or another, involves information from outside the domains of literature and culture; the same applies to music scholarship in relation to music. However, instead of clinging to the ideal of a single consciousness that can unify all knowledge, it seems important to recognize that a person’s analysis is shaped by the disciplinary boundaries of their training and by their ongoing interests, both academic and personal—in other words, that one’s interdisciplinary interests are grounded in one’s own discipline. Once we acknowledge those boundaries, dialogue across disciplines may become easier.
4. Future Perspectives
We hope that our collection contributes to creating a space for dialogue among musicians, musicologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and literary and cultural scholars—and beyond them as well. This conversation can certainly include art historians, philosophers, specialists in gender studies, Jewish studies, critical race studies, and others.
In recent years, “intermediality” has become a key concept in cultural studies. It has decisively moved beyond the older Romantic paradigm of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the integration of various art forms into a single canonical work—to explore instead the many different ways in which music and its associated media are transposed, adapted, combined, and referenced across art forms (Rajewsky 50–52). Rolf Goebel has proposed intermediality as an opportunity to broaden musical interpretation so as to recognize the “dialectical intersection of formalist analysis, hermeneutic signification and performative acts” (296). This is an intriguing idea, because by using intermediality as an overarching concept he suggests building a bridge between older and contemporary approaches to music as an object of interdisciplinary study. One can observe this phenomenon elsewhere as well. Examining music through the lens of intermediality offers the chance to revisit classical paradigms of inter‑arts study, such as ekphrasis (Goehr) or Herder’s and the early Romantics’ advocacy for the emancipation of sound and the ear. It also allows us to consider how modern technology, especially sound recording, has shaped our reception of music in the modern age (Katz). Historical studies of acoustics, soundscapes, and practices of listening (Feiereisen and Hill) offer important new paradigms for research on the creation and reception of music as sound, providing a logical counterpart to the study of “image.” Conceiving music as part of an intermedial network necessarily forces us to consider a variety of approaches and ways of understanding music, including those that have been overlooked today.
The intermedial turn also enables us to read the history of music and culture in novel ways. Since the late eighteenth century, music has often functioned as a myth of cultural self-understanding, and thus as a proxy sphere for other debates about community and belonging. As we explore music and its many, often contradictory meanings, it is wise to remain aware of this history and the risks involved in undertaking this task.
How can we preserve the cognitive dimension of music without reducing it to either a monolithic ideology or vague, intuitive associations? Clearly, achieving this requires us to keep posing challenging questions, pushing the boundaries of our understanding of German music, and reassessing our ways of thinking to be more inclusive of the individuals, musical practices and works, and theoretical concepts and perspectives historically marginalized in our scholarship.
As sound, music is highly mobile. One does not need to understand a specific language to be moved by music or to grasp at least some of its communicative potential. Music can and will travel in many directions. As a form of culture, cultural memory, and countermemory, it can serve as a means to understand one’s time and place, but it can also transport us beyond the here and now. It is our hope that the following essays contribute to a meaningful dialogue about music and its many meanings—among scholars and in the classroom.
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