History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity, 1848-1914 1843837544, 9781843837541

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Music Examples
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Pure Mirror: National Epic as National Opera
2 Germanic Heroes for Modern Germans: Gender and the Nation
3 Lost in Transfiguration: Redemption Operas in the Fin de siècle
4 The Sacred Nation and the Singing Nation: The Choral Movements
5 Symphonic Visions from the Periphery
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

HistoryMightySoundsv.2_PPC 08/08/2012 15:57 Page 1

Music played a central role in the self-conception of middle-class Germans between the March Revolution of 1848 and the First World War. Although German music was widely held to be 'universal' and thus apolitical, it participated – like the other arts – in the historicist project of shaping the nation's future by calling on the national heritage. Compositions based on – often heavily mythologised – historical events and heroes, such as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest or the medieval Emperor Barbarossa, invited individual as well as collective identification and brought alive a past that compared favourably with contemporary conditions.

BARBARA EICHNER is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Oxford Brookes University.

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk, IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Barbara Eichner

Cover design of the programme of the third imperial singing competition for German male choirs, Frankfurt am Main, 1909 (Festbuch zum 3. Gesang-Wettstreit Deutscher Männer-Gesangvereine, Frankfurt am Main, 1909).

History in Mighty Sounds maps out a varied picture of these ‘invented traditions’ and the manifold ideas of ‘Germanness’ to which they gave rise, exemplified through works by familiar composers like Max Bruch or Carl Reinecke as well as their nowadays little-known contemporaries. The whole gamut of musical genres, ranging from pre- and post-Wagnerian opera to popular choruses to symphonic poems, contributes to a novel view of the many ways in which national identities were constructed, shaped and celebrated in and through music. How did artists adapt historical or literary sources to their purpose, how did they negotiate the precarious balance of aesthetic autonomy and political relevance, and how did notions of gender, landscape and religion influence artistic choices? All musical works are placed within their broader historical and biographical contexts, with frequent nods to other arts and popular culture. History in Mighty Sounds will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century German music, history and nationalism.

HISTORY IN MIGHTY SOUNDS

MUSIC IN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

HISTORY IN MIGHTY SOUNDS

Barbara Eichner

Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914

History in Mighty Sounds Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914

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Music in Society and Culture issn 2047-2773

Series Editors vanessa agnew, katharine ellis, jonathan glixon, david gramit & jeffrey jackson Consulting Editor tim blanning This series brings history and musicology together in ways that will embed social and cultural questions into the very fabric of music-history writing. Music in Society and Culture approaches music not as a discipline, but as a subject that can be discussed in myriad ways. Those ways are cross-disciplinary, requiring a mastery of more than one mode of enquiry. This series therefore invites research on art and popular music in the Western tradition and in cross-cultural encounters involving Western music, from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Books in the series will demonstrate how music operates within a particular historical, social, political or institutional context; how and why society and its constituent groups choose their music; how historical, cultural and musical change interrelate; and how, for whom, and why music's value undergoes critical reassessment. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the series editors or Boydell & Brewer at the addresses shown below. Professor Vanessa Agnew, University of Michigan, German Department, 3136 MLB, 812 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, mi 48109-1275, USA email: [email protected] Professor Katharine Ellis, Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, tw20 0ex, UK email: [email protected] Professor Jonathan Glixon, School of Music, 105 Fine Arts Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington, ky 40506-0022, USA email: [email protected] Professor David Gramit, Department of Music, University of Alberta, 3-82 Fine Arts Building, Edmonton, Alberta, t6g 2c9, Canada email: [email protected] Professor Jeffrey Jackson, Department of History, Rhodes College, 2000 North Parkway, Memphis, tn 38112, USA email: [email protected] Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, ip12 3df, UK email: [email protected]

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History in Mighty Sounds Musical Constructions of German National Identity 184 8–1914

Barbara Eichner

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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© Barbara Eichner 2012 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Barbara Eichner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2012 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge isbn 978 1 84383 754 1 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk ip12 3df, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, ny 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Designed and typeset in Monotype Albertus and Adobe Warnock Pro by David Roberts, Pershore, Worcestershire Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy

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Contents List of Illustrations vi List of Music Examples vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xi Introduction  1 1 The Pure Mirror: National Epic as National Opera  41 2 Germanic Heroes for Modern Germans: Gender and the Nation  81 3 Lost in Transfiguration: Redemption Operas in the Fin de siècle 117 4 The Sacred Nation and the Singing Nation: The Choral Movements  163 5 Symphonic Visions from the Periphery  229 Bibliography 273 Index 291

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Illustrations 0.1 Otto Gussmann, Ragnarök. Ceiling of the memorial of the German student fraternities near Eisenach (destroyed). Archiv und Bücherei der Deutschen Burschenschaft, Koblenz 26 1.1 Heinrich Salomon as Siegfried in Heinrich Dorn’s Die Nibelungen. Eduard Bloch’s Album der Bühnen-Costüme: Mit erläuterndem Texte von F. Tietz, 53 vol. 1 (Berlin, [1859]), n.p. 1.2 Carl Amand Mangold, ‘Horand’s Lied’ from Gudrun. Illustrirte Zeitung 16 no. 415 (14 June 1851). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 2 Per. 26–16/17

74

2.1 Heinrich Hofmann, Armin: Heroische Oper in 4 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn, op. 40 (Berlin, [1877]). Title page. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 89 München, 4 Mus. pr. 2592 2.2 Heinrich Gudehus as Siegmund in Carl Grammann’s Thusnelda. Ferdinand 92 Pfohl, Carl Grammann: Ein Künstlerleben (Berlin, Leipzig, 1910), n.p. 2.3 Paul Bulss as Germanicus in Carl Grammann’s Thusnelda. Ferdinand Pfohl, 97 Carl Grammann: Ein Künstlerleben (Berlin, Leipzig, 1910), n.p. 2.4 The dancer Mathilde Zinck in Carl Grammann’s Thusnelda. Ferdinand Pfohl, Carl Grammann: Ein Künstlerleben (Berlin, Leipzig, 1910), n.p.

103

3.1 Peter Candid, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1620). Erzbischöfliches Ordinariat München, Kunstreferat (Photo: Wolf-Christian 136 von der Mülbe) 3.2 Heinrich Vogl as Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. Deutsches Theatermuseum 143 München, Inventory No. 21793 3.3 Heinrich Vogl, Der Fremdling: Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn: Scenische Anordnung vom Komponisten (Leipzig, [1899]), pp. 186–7. 144 Bodleian Library Oxford, Harding Mus. A 2851 3.4 Cyrill Kistler, Baldurs Tod: Musikdrama in 3 Akten: Dichtung von Frhrr. v. Sohlern, 2nd edn (Bad Kissingen, n.d.), pp. 179–80. Bodleian Library Oxford, Harding Mus. A 1411 156 4.1 Gedenkbuch des in der Stadt Nürnberg 1861 begangenen Großen Deutschen Sängerfestes (Nuremberg, 1861), n.p. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, 193 4 Bavar. 785

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4.2 Banner of the Deutscher Sängerbund. Die Gartenlaube: Illustrirtes Familienblatt (1865), no. 30, p. 473

200

4.3 Float ‘Frisch auf mein Volk, die Flammenzeichen rauchen’. 8. Deutsches Sängerbundesfest Nürnberg 1912: Der Festzug (Nuremberg, [1912]), n.p.

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Music Examples 1.1 Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen: Große Oper in 5 Acten von E. Gerber (Berlin, [1854]), Act 1, no. 10, Duettino, bars 1–12

56

1.2 Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen, Overture, bars 84–95

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1.3 Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen, Act 4, Finale, bars 32–41

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1.4 Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen, Act 4, no. 4, Quartet (and Chorus), bars 36–53 and 80–5

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1.5 Carl Amand Mangold, Gudrun: Grosse Oper in vier Acten (Darmstadt, [1851]), Act 2, no. 16 C: Romanze

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2.1 Carl Grammann, Thusnelda: Grosse Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von H. Dickmann, op. 29 (Leipzig, [1881]), Act 1, scene 2, Siegmund’s ‘aria’, bars 1–13 and 24–32

95

2.2 Carl Grammann, Thusnelda, Act 2, scene 3, Germanicus’ monologue, bars 19–29 and 51–4

99

2.3 Heinrich Hofmann, Armin: Heroische Oper in 4 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn, op. 40 (Berlin, [1877]), Act 3, scene 1: Fulvia’s monologue, 109 bars 30–7 and 68–75 2.4 Heinrich Hofmann, Armin, Act 2, scene 1: Thusnelda’s monologue, bars 93–100

115

3.1 Benedicamus Domino for Lauds, Feasts of the First Class. Liber Usualis (Tournai, New York, 1961), p. 124

151

3.2 Cyrill Kistler, Baldurs Tod: Musikdrama in 3 Akten: Dichtung von Frhrr. v. Sohlern, 3rd edn (Bad Kissingen, [1906]), Act 3, Baldur’s farewell, rehearsal numbers 66–7

153

4.1 Max Bruch, Arminius: Oratorium für Chor, Solostimmen und Orchester: Dichtung von J. Cüppers, op. 43 (Berlin, [1877]), no. 4, Recitative, and no. 5, Chorus and Duet, bars 1–16 177 4.2 Max Bruch, Arminius, no. 6, bars 166–83

180

4.3 Friedrich Silcher, ‘Barbarossa’, 150 Männerchöre: Gekürzte, verb. Ausgabe 207 d. Ersten Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart, 1940) 4.4 Franz Abt, Siegesgesang der Deutschen nach der Hermannsschlacht (Leipzig, n.d.), p. 267, bars 9–31

210

4.5 Max Bruch, Frithjof: Szenen aus der Frithjof-Sage von Esaias Tegnér, op. 23 (Leipzig, n.d.), scene 3, ‘Frithjof ’s revenge. Temple in flames. Curse’, bars 34–52216 4.6 Fritz Volbach, Am Siegfriedbrunnen: Ein Stimmungsbild für Männerchor 221 und Orchester, op. 31 (Leipzig, 1906), bars 131–40

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5.1 Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll) für grosses Orchester, op. 124 (Leipzig, [1875]), first movement Allegro, first theme, bars 17–47. Short score prepared by Barbara Eichner and Philippa Beckford.

244

5.2 Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll), second movement Andante, main theme, bars 14–21. Short score prepared by Barbara Eichner and Philippa Beckford.

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5.3 Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll), third movement Intermezzo: Allegro moderato, bars 9–32. Short score prepared by Barbara Eichner and Philippa Beckford. 247 5.4 Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa: Symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen für grosses Orchester (Berlin, [1901]), second movement Der Zauberberg, bars 209 ff., ‘Barbarossa’ theme. With permission from Ries 261 & Erler, Berlin. 5.5 Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa, second movement Der Zauberberg, bars 250–7, ‘Glory’ theme. Short score prepared by Barbara Eichner. With 262 permission from Ries & Erler, Berlin. 5.6 Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa, second movement Der Zauberberg, bars 284–7, theme ‘The German people’. Short score prepared by Barbara 263 Eichner. With permission from Ries & Erler, Berlin. 5.7 Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa, first movement Die Noth des Volkes, introduction, second theme, bars 17–24. Short score prepared by Barbara Eichner and Philippa Beckford. With permission from Ries & Erler, Berlin.265 The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Acknowledgements

T

his study into German national identity was born in Italy, in Settignano above Florence, when in November 2000 I discussed the beginnings of an idea with Margaret Bent, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Christian Thomas Leitmeir and Stephen Lovell. A month earlier, my interest in compositions with Nordic, Germanic or medieval subject matter had been kindled by a presentation which Jürgen Heidrich delivered at the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung in Würzburg. This gave me the impetus to unearth more such musical works, uncovering a hardly remembered repertoire from a culture that passionately  – and sometimes desperately  – cared about its national history. My first thanks are due to Roger Allen, who accompanied this project from its very beginnings with his profound knowledge of German music and culture and his enthusiasm for discovering little-known musical works. In addition to his constant support in all matters academic and practical he deepened my understanding of the music and thoughts of Richard Wagner, played Siegmund von Hausegger’s Barbarossa Symphony in a memorable piano performance and patiently improved my Teutonic syntax. Peter Franklin, Julian Johnson and Reinhard Strohm read preliminary versions of several chapters and gave me much food for further thought, and Robert Pascall provided meticulous and thoughtprovoking feedback. Several musicologists have added their expertise to particular topics: Claudia Breitfeld (Kistler), Friedhelm Brusniak (male choirs), Christian Detig (Schillings), Jürgen Heidrich and Linda Maria Koldau (oratorios), Katherine Leiska (Swedish music), Peter Pachl (Cornelius), Katrin Seidel (Reinecke), Roger Skarsten (Arminius operas) and Jutta Toelle (opera and politics in the nineteenth century). My research also brought me in contact with descendants of two composers, who liberally made available unpublished material about their ancestors: Klaus Kistler, the great-grandson of Cyrill Kistler, and Stefan Schönknecht, greatgreat-grandson of Carl Reinecke. Discussions with, among others, Sean Curran, Jeanette Gallant, Veronika Halser, Estelle Joubert and Barbara Titus helped me to focus my argument and to revive the sometimes flagging spirit. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Grotjahn not only for her advice on German symphonies and gender studies, but for the opportunities she offered me to present my research to scholarly and popular audiences, notably as part of the 2000-year anniversary of the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ in 2009. My most sincere thanks go to Sean Curran and Emanuele Senici, whose repeated reading of drafts and generous advice was invaluable for transforming this project into a book. They unerringly spotted flaws in the argument and method, and I can but hope that my response to their suggestions does justice to their painstaking labour. In recent years I could also draw on the support and encouragement of my colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Oxford Brookes University, especially Anthony Pryer, Jan Butler, Paul Whitty and Alexandra Wilson.

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At many points, scholars from other disciplines have contributed to this study. The friendly responses of historians Sven Oliver Müller and Philipp Ther was most encouraging, and they invited me to present my ideas at interdisciplinary conferences such as the Deutscher Historikertag in Constance. My understanding of the concept of historicism was broadened by Alice Arnold-Becker’s knowledge of historical paintings and by Rainald Becker’s subtle elucidations of the finer points of nineteenth-century historiography. Harald Lönnecker, archivist of the German student fraternities, provided me with detailed information about the German and Austrian student fraternities and their role in German nationalism. Klaus Böldl gave me a grounding in Old Norse language and poetry, while Julia Zernack awakened my interest for Nordic literature and its reception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The team of the Frankfurt-based DFG project Edda-Rezeption, notably Julia Zernack, Florian Heesch and Katja Schulz, most helpfully answered my queries about the research and reception of the Edda and invited me to share my ideas with colleagues from Scandinavian literature studies. The search for musical works and biographical information took me to several libraries and archives. I greatly benefited from the collections of the British Library and Senate House Library, London, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Music Faculty Library, Oxford, was a great place to work in peace and quiet, while the Taylor Institution Library supplied me with the most surprising specimens of nineteenth-century German literature. The University Library of Tübingen held rare materials about the choral movement in Swabia, and the Stiftung Dokumentations- und Forschungszentrum des Deutschen Chorwesens in Feuchtwangen opened its collection of choral music, Festschriften and specialised literature to me. I owe special thanks to archivist Günter Ziesemer, former managing director Helma Kurz and academic director Friedhelm Brusniak for providing me generously with copies of compositions, engravings and photographs. The realisation of this study was greatly aided by a Scatcherd European Scholarship from the University of Oxford. More recently the School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University and its International 19th-Century Research Cluster Development Fund helped me to procure reproduction rights. Last but not least I would like to thank Boydell & Brewer for including my study in their series Music in Society and Culture, whose cross-disciplinary and cultural focus very much echoes my own interests. Michael Middeke, Senior Commissioning Editor, and Catherine Larner and Megan Milan, Assistant Editors, accompanied the publication process with just the right mix of patience and perseverance. They also selected reviewers whose constructive criticisms greatly improved the manuscript. Special thanks are due to Philippa Beckford, who helped me to prepare the music examples. Christian Thomas Leitmeir, my husband, was my greatest support and an unerring critic. For many years I poured out my discoveries to him, tested argumentative strategies and benefited from his vast knowledge of music, history and philosophy as well as his curiosity for the many weird and wonderful compositions and composers that kept turning up. This study has gained in every respect from our intense discussions, from his perceptive suggestions and his

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Acknowledgements

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inexhaustible patience. Finally I want to thank my parents: my father Manfred Eichner, who taught me to love history and shared with me his awesome library of history books, and my mother Ingrid Eichner, who showed me how history should be brought alive. To them this book is dedicated.

List of Abbreviations AMZ Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung COJ Cambridge Opera Journal DSB Deutscher Sängerbund GSD Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen MGG Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart MGV Männergesangverein MWB Musikalisches Wochenblatt NZfM Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

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To my parents j j j j j j

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Introduction

I

n 1844, at a time of great expectations, the philosopher and critic Friedrich Theodor Vischer prophesied a new departure for German music: I must be very mistaken, or there is another, a new world of sounds left, which is yet to unfurl; music has had a Goethe in Mozart, a Klopstock in Haydn, a Jean Paul in Beethoven, a Tieck in Weber: it shall have its Schiller and Shakespeare, and the German shall yet hear his own, great history surge towards him in the waves of mighty sounds.  … The heroic operas of Gluck, his Alceste or Iphigenie, are by no means lacking in great heroic moments. However, these sounds of emotion were part of a foreign world, and we want a native world of our own, a national one in music as well as in poetry.1

Vischer’s plea for a national art is nothing less than a wake-up call to his composing contemporaries to make music as relevant for the German nation as literature had long been. While German music already excelled in the fields of all-embracing humanism, sublime learnedness, brilliant wit and romantic idyll, it had yet to take up the mantle of Shakespeare and Schiller: a heroic art inspired by the great events of a national past that would  – like the natural forces invoked in the sea metaphor  – sweep away his compatriots in a great surge of elation. Even as Vischer was writing these words  – just a few years before he was called to put his national-liberal ideals into practice by joining the National Assembly in Frankfurt  – composers were sharpening their pens to give the Germans the desired historical operas, oratorios, choruses and even instrumental works. The mighty sounds of history flooded German stages and concert halls and reverberated in the hearts of an audience that was still painfully unsure about its national identity. It is this sound world of a national history in and through music that this study seeks to capture. The insecurity about national identity was, like so many German insecurities, brilliantly summarised by Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘It is characteristic of the Germans that the question “what is German?” never dies out among them.’ 2 In 1874, when the Untimely Meditations touched a raw nerve of his compatriots, they could 1 Friedrich Theodor Vischer, ‘Vorschlag zu einer Oper’, in Kritische Gänge (Tübingen, 1844), vol. 2, p. 400: ‘Es muß mich Alles trügen, oder es ist noch eine andere, eine neue Tonwelt zurück, welche sich erst öffnen soll; die Musik hatte in Mozart ihren Goethe, in Haydn ihren Klopstock, in Beethoven ihren Jean Paul, in Weber ihren Tieck: sie soll noch ihren Schiller und Shakspeare [sic] bekommen, und der Deutsche soll noch seine eigene große Geschichte in mächtigen Tönen sich entgegenwogen hören.  … Es fehlt in den heroischen Opern Glucks, in seiner Alceste, Iphigenie nicht an wahrhaft großen heroischen Stellen. Allein diese Empfindungstöne waren in eine fremde Welt hineingelegt, wir wollen eine heimische, eine eigene, eine nationale in der Musik so gut als in der Poesie.’ 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intr. Michael Tanner (London, 2003), p. 174.

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already look back on almost a century of soul-searching and self-definition; Nietzsche only added a mocking counterpoint to the many-voiced chorus. In all likelihood he would have considered it symptomatic that the question ‘What is German’ enjoys undiminished popularity more than a hundred years later in a German state quite unlike the one he knew. In 2006 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg hosted the exhibition Was ist deutsch? Fragen zum Selbstverständnis einer grübelnden Nation (What is German? Questioning the self-conception of a ruminating nation), a title which both acknowledges and distances itself from the persistent need to define Germanness. Only a few months later the magazine Der Spiegel published a special issue entitled ‘Die Erfindung der Deutschen’ (The invention of the Germans) with the telling subtitle ‘How we became what we are’, advocating a renewed interest in national history in the light of present concerns about national identity.3 The list of contemporary attempts to address these concerns could be extended ad infinitum, including the debate whether it is acceptable to be ‘proud to be German’, whether there is a German Leitkultur to which immigrants must assimilate, or whether cars displaying black-red-gold flags during a football world cup indicate an unhealthy level of patriotic enthusiasm. Outside commentators such as Eric T. Hansen  – Germany’s equivalent to Britain’s Bill Bryson as American-in-residence  – frequently notice a mixture of assertiveness and anxiety when Germans are questioned about their relationship to their fatherland.4 In Hansen’s experience there is a pronounced wariness towards the political manifestation(s) of Germany, whereas German culture offers identification even to those who never attend a theatre or read one of the classical poets  – a preoccupation with culture that Hansen wittily calls the ‘GoetheundSchillerding’ (Goethe-and-Schiller-thing). With equal justification he could have dubbed the German condition the ‘BachundBeethovending’, since music  – or the esteem of the great musical tradition  – has long occupied pride of place in the self-conception of Germans, constituting a ‘genealogy of identity’ that Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter have done much to elucidate.5

The Land with Music The birth of this musical ‘genealogy’ is frequently dated to coincide with the beginning of the ‘long nineteenth century’ in the late 1780s when German music stepped out of the shadows of the dominating Italian and French traditions. While the actual breadth and width of nineteenth-century musical activities cannot be charted here, there is no doubt that the practice of music began to boom around 1800. Concert societies and amateur choirs sprang up everywhere, music 3 Spiegel Spezial Geschichte: Die Erfindung der Deutschen: Wie wir wurden, was wir sind (January 2007). 4 Eric T. Hansen, ‘Wofür halten Sie sich?’, in Was ist deutsch? Fragen zum Selbstverständnis einer grübelnden Nation (Nuremberg, 2006), pp. 42–56. 5 Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, ‘The Germans as the “People of Music”: Genealogy of an Identity’, in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago, 2002), pp. 1–35.

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Introduction

3

journals offered guidance on what to buy, what to listen to and how to relate to music,6 while a thorough musical education became the hallmark of a cultivated middle-class upbringing.7 The division of Germany into three dozen states (and later the federal structure of the German Empire), so worrying to political confidence, resulted in a cultural landscape whose richness and diversity was hardly rivalled elsewhere. Petty principalities and wealthy cities made a point of building concert halls and maintaining a professional orchestra, offering employment for musicians, entertainment for the culture-conscious bourgeoisie and performance opportunities for composers. Even more important than the growth in musical infrastructure was the increasing identification of Germany as the land of music. From the title of Oskar A. H. Schmitz’s notorious polemic about the shortcomings of English society  – the proverbial Land ohne Musik (1914)  – it can easily be deduced that Germany in turn was considered the ‘land with music’, superior to those less fortunate nations that lacked German depth and soul and hence a musical culture of equal rank.8 It did not require much imagination to turn the cliché of the Germans as the most musical people on its head and to declare music itself ‘the most German of the arts’, as Thomas Mann did, albeit with deep misgivings, in 1949.9 Whether or not these claims were justified hardly mattered when a sufficient number of other nations concurred  – grudgingly or enthusiastically. Today’s esteem of  – and generous public funding for  – (classical) music is but a faint afterglow of its veneration in the nineteenth century, although some vestiges still linger in the national memory. Lena Meyer-Landrut’s victory at the Eurovision Song Contest 2010 was greeted by the highbrow weekly Die Zeit with the Beethoven-inspired headline ‘Freu dich, kleiner Götterfunken!’10 Even with tongue in cheek, it is still gratifying to be able to fall back on such a venerable ancestry. Given the central position of music in nineteenth-century Germany on the one hand and the recent proliferation of investigations of German national identity, the dynamics of nation-building and the use of history for this purpose on the other, it is all the more surprising to find music frequently sidelined. Historians as well as specialists of art and literature are often reticent to draw on examples from 6 For the first part of the nineteenth century see Sanna Pederson, ‘Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1995). 7 A good overview of German musical life, complementing the numerous studies of German musical ideologies, is offered in David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley, 2002). 8 It is the perceived English shortcomings in the department of soul and Gemüt, rather than their lack of music, that is the focus of Oskar A. H. Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik: Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme (Munich, 1914). 9 Albrecht Riethmüller, ‘“ Is That Not Something for Simplicissimus?!” The Belief in Musical Superiority’, in Music and German National Identity, ed. Applegate and Potter, p. 292. 10 Christoph Amend, ‘Freu dich, kleiner Götterfunken! Lena siegt  – und ein Land dreht durch’, Die Zeit: Wochenzeitung für Politik, Wirtschaft, Wissen und Kultur no. 23 (2 June 2010), p. 1.

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the sphere of music, perhaps because engagement with musical notation is seen as too specialised a skill, which resists cursory readings and is not readily ‘quotable’. This, however, does not explain why the social side of nineteenth-century musical life, e.g. concert-going, singing associations or domestic music making, rarely feature as prominently as they deserve, considering how musical activities shaped the lives of the educated middle classes. A positive exception is the concise elevenpage survey offered in Thomas Nipperdey’s magisterial Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, though in view of his acknowledgment that music is central to German culture it might have featured also in other sections of the book.11 If music as such is considered at all, it is often restricted to a short digression on Richard Wagner who, thanks to his operatic texts and theoretical writings, is more accessible to the non-specialist. Interdisciplinary efforts that invite musicologists to offer their special expertise to a general audience are not as frequent as one could wish, with Nicholas Vaszonyi’s Searching for Common Ground a welcome multi-lingual and transnational exception.12 In the same spirit a three-volume survey of German memorial culture, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, devotes several chapters to an eclectic choice of musical topics, including, besides the inevitable ‘greats’ Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, the national anthem, Hausmusik and the home-grown pop music genre Schlager.13 Conventional musicological studies of nineteenth-century culture, in contrast, prefer to address issues of national identity in ‘peripheral’ musical traditions, rather than in the Austro-German, French or Italian mainstream. The misnomer ‘national schools’, which marginalises everything that does not belong to a narrowly conceived canon, keeps cropping up in academic and popular music histories of Scandinavia, Russia or Spain. This does not mean that German nationalism in music is not discussed at all. On the contrary, a lively and impassioned debate on the origins and nature of German musical nationalism has sprung up during the last decades, with key contributions from American scholars who strove to expose the mechanisms behind the traditional Austro-German hegemony in music and musicology. However, if Richard Taruskin’s seminal New Grove article on ‘Nationalism’ can be taken to indicate the main tendencies of this branch of scholarship, then German musical nationalism is quite different from that of any other European nation, since it sailed under the flag of an apolitical universalism that served to assert German superiority all the more effectively.14 This argument will be rehearsed in depth below; at this point it is worth noting that the focus on the universalising tendencies on the one hand hides the more obvious and mundane examples of musical nationalism, such as patriotic choruses 11 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918, vol. 1: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich, 1998), pp. 741–52. 12 Nicholas Vaszonyi (ed.), Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität, 1750–1871 (Cologne, 2000). 13 Etienne François and Hagen Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 3, 2nd edn (Munich, 2001). 14 Richard Taruskin, ‘Nationalism’, Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 17 March 2010 .

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and marches, and on the other it runs the danger of reinforcing once more the notion that German music is special and different. Other studies remain indebted to conventional biography and concentrate on a few selected ‘great names’. In this tradition German or Italian composers feature as prominently as their Czech or English colleagues, but their expression of nationalism is frequently considered as a matter of personal (artistic or political) choice and thus assertion of their creative individuality, rather than as expression of a wider cultural climate. Favourite research questions investigate whether Verdi’s ‘Va pensiero’ really was the musical icon of the Risorgimento movement (no),15 or whether Brahms’s ‘German Requiem’ actually is emphatically German (yes),16 or whether or not a modern audience is permitted to ignore the political thrust of Hans Sachs’s final speech in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (well …).17 Although such questions are justified and relevant  – particularly given the lingering tendency to ‘exonerate’ great composers from unwelcome political leanings  – the present study proposes to look at the nexus of music and national identity from quite a different angle: it brings history into the equation. More precisely, it focuses on musical works where Germans, in Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s words, would have heard ‘their own, great history surge towards them in the waves of mighty sounds’. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards innumerable compositions were inspired by and based on events and heroes from a past constructed as national. Together they form a musical branch of nineteenth-century historicism, a concept that so far largely has escaped musicological attention but that opens up a novel view on the unique contribution of music to the national identity project. It will be argued that composers relied on historical topics to make a (more or less obvious) statement about what being German meant, that they openly advertised these histories in titles, texts or programmes, and that they invited their audiences to identify with the national images and narratives their music brought to life. A range of case studies creates a diverse and nuanced picture of nationalism in music by drawing on a selection of well-known and forgotten composers, musical genres and historical narratives, offering a richness of national identities that the single-composer study would be hard pressed to achieve. Each case study is interpreted in its cultural and political context, and in addition ‘thick’ descriptions of pivotal scenes or prominent musical features highlight the compositional strategies that convey the messages. These descriptions do not claim to be fully fledged analyses; in fact they largely try to avoid technical terminology in order to further the communication between 15 This myth is debunked in Roger Parker, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Drama (Princeton, 1997). 16 For example Daniel Beller-McKenna, ‘How deutsch a Requiem? Absolute Music, Universality, and the Reception of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, op. 45’, 19th-Century Music 22 (1998), pp. 3–19; David B. Dennis, ‘Johannes Brahms’s Requiem eines Unpolitischen’, in Searching for Common Ground, ed. Vaszonyi, pp. 283–98. 17 A collection with the promising title ‘Deutsche Meister  – Böse Geister’  contains seven essays on Wagner alone, four of them concentrating on Meistersinger. See Hermann Danuser and Herfried Münkler (eds), Deutsche Meister  – Böse Geister? Nationale Selbstfindung in der Musik (Schliengen, 2001).

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musicologists and readers with a more general interest in nineteenth-century identity formation. In short, this study proposes to demonstrate how history, myths and music came together in specific works of art to give sound, image and voice to German national identity. Since none of the terms ‘Germany’, ‘nation’, ‘identity’, ‘history’ or even ‘music’ is unmarked or unproblematic, they need to be contextualised in their respective discourses. After a brief survey of German history in the ‘long nineteenth century’, the first part of the introduction examines the process of nation formation before discussing how a common past contributes to a shared identity, and which elements of that past were actually selected for the more emphatically national histories. The second part of the introduction then turns to music specifically, arguing that the concepts of both ‘nationalism’ and ‘historicism’ are currently used in an altogether too restricted and restricting sense. Finally, there is a brief overview of the subsequent chapters, giving a rationale for the particular selection of works and composers. This exposition offers a foundation for the case studies that follow, reducing the repetition of recurring methodological arguments in the individual chapters.

The Birth of a Nation from the Spirit of the Past The short-hand terms ‘Germany’ and ‘German’ are far from unproblematic in the context of the nineteenth century. For the present purpose ‘Germany’ most comfortably denotes the German-speaking regions and their culture in a broad sense, in order to distinguish them from the political entities  – states  – on the one hand (such as the Kingdom of Prussia or the German Empire) and from the more loosely defined regions (such as the Rhineland or Swabia) on the other. A ‘German’, therefore, becomes everybody who made a point about considering himself of herself as part of the larger German linguistic, historical, cultural or ethnic community, whichever state or region they actually belonged to. The terminological vagueness, which is itself indicative of the pervasive insecurity about German identity, can partially be explained by the delayed development of ‘Germany’ in the long nineteenth century: many Germans felt part of a German nation long before acquiring a German nation state. The discrepancy between aspiration and attainment, as well as a deep-seated distrust of the political aspects of becoming a nation, are encapsulated in Friedrich Schiller’s epigram ‘The German Empire’, published in 1797: Deutschland? aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß das Land nicht zu finden. Wo das gelehrte beginnt, hört das politische auf.18 (Germany? But where is it located? I cannot find the country. Where educated [Germany] begins the political ends.) In Schiller’s lifetime and until 1871, the German-speaking regions did not comprise a clearly defined national territory  – as did for example France or Spain  – but were divided into dozens of larger and smaller independent states. The entire ‘long 18 Friedrich von Schiller, Sämmtliche Werke (Grätz, 1836), vol. 20, p. 270.

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nineteenth century’, from the dawn of the French Revolution to the dusk of the German Empire in 1918, can therefore be characterised as a period of coming to terms with this legacy of division and the tension between national consciousness and national institutions. Throughout this period constructive development and national optimism alternated with blighted hopes and attempts to undo the unifying achievements, giving the historical narrative its characteristic wave-like shape. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which had provided at least an umbrella organisation for a loose confederation of states, ceased to exist in 1806 when several states formed the Rheinbund under the protectorate of France. Consequently the last emperor, Franz II, abdicated and became head of the new Habsburg Empire. One year later the Treaty of Tilsit sealed the defeat of Prussia, the last German state to resist Napoleon. While traditional historiography maintained that the Empire had outlived its usefulness anyway and offered little scope for emotional attachment and identification, attitudes have recently become more positive towards the Empire’s proto-national organisation of diverse peoples, now that the national state has ceased to be the yardstick of historiography. Nonetheless it is likely that around 1810 the dynastic model had ceased to satisfy those newly nationalised Germans who looked to revolutionary France as paradigm of the modern type of nation, bound together by a shared ‘Frenchness’ rather than the Bourbon dynasty. The medieval Empire nevertheless remained a focal point for nationalist desires, but had to be translated into the institutions and ideologies of the modern nation state.19 Besides offering new political models, the French occupation also provided the Germans with an enemy against whom they could unite in resistance and thus define themselves as members of a nation in the modern sense.20 From the start, therefore, the German nation was only thinkable vis-à-vis a hostile ‘other’, and for the most part of the nineteenth century France fulfilled that role. After Napoleon’s defeat hopes were high that a German nation state would come into existence as a reward for the sacrifices made in the ‘Wars of Liberation’. However, at the Congress of Vienna the ruling European dynasties sought to re-establish the status quo of the pre-revolutionary era and consented only to a loosely knit German Confederation. The passing of the Karlsbad Decrees in 1819 forced the national movement to go underground. The openly politicised organisations of students and gymnasts were prohibited, and associations like the emerging male choir movement were careful to remain inconspicuous by blending cultural and political aims. The years between the late 1820s and 1840s are characterised by a resurgence of liberal and national ideas, which, as Jonathan Sperber has shown, should be seen in the wider context of the European emancipatory movements and the revolutions 19 Otto Dann, ‘Nationale Fragen in Deutschland: Kulturnation, Volksnation, Reichsnation’, in Nation und Emotion: Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich. 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Etienne François, Hannes Siegrist and Jakob Vogel (Göttingen, 1995), p. 78. 20 See Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 82–3.

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of 1830 and 1848/9.21 In Germany a group of young writers and journalists, the so-called ‘Young Germans’, were most vociferous in demanding change and criticising the present state of affairs. Through activities such as helping Polish fugitives or giving money to the rebuilding of Cologne cathedral, the Vormärz movement reached wider parts of society, paving the way for widespread support of the March Revolution in 1848. Most governments of the German Confederation quickly responded to the demands for liberal freedom rights; in Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt the old rulers abdicated in favour of their (supposedly) more forward-looking sons, and constitutions were drawn up, although not ratified everywhere. The council of the German Confederation established a national assembly which opened on 18 May 1848 in the church of St Paul in Frankfurt am Main. As the historian Golo Mann wistfully remarks, there has never been a more educated parliament in Germany, consisting mainly of academic professors, lawyers, writers, clergymen and senior civil servants  – i.e. representatives of the educated middle classes  – and perhaps there has never been a more idealistic and optimistic one.22 A German constitution was prepared in March 1849 which would have guaranteed civil liberties and established a federal-constitutional monarchy with a two-chamber system. In the end neither Austria, Prussia nor the South German monarchies accepted the new constitution, and the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV declined the imperial crown offered by the parliament. Desperate insurrections in May 1849 notwithstanding, the German Confederation was restored two years later and conservative and reactionary forces asserted themselves once again. The end of the 1848/9 Revolution has often been seen as a crucial turning-point in modern German history, an argument which is revisited below. Despite restrictive governmental measures, the German states headed towards greater economic unity as transport improved and trade intensified. In most parts of Germany industrialisation  – often viewed as hallmark of a modern society  – set in with full force only in the 1850s and 1860s when thousands of workers moved from rural areas to the industrial centres of Silesia, Saxony and the Ruhr region, and swelled the population of cities such as Berlin and Hamburg. When the ban on political organisations was lifted in the 1860s, the political parties which shaped the second half of the century came into being: the liberal nationalists founded the Prussian Fortschrittspartei (Progressive Party, 1861), the incipient workers’ movement gathered in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (1863), and the Catholic Zentrum offered a counterweight to the hegemony of Protestantism (1870). Similar umbrella organisations sprang up in the realms of economy and culture, with Franz Liszt’s and Franz Brendel’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (1861) and the male-choir association Deutscher Sängerbund (1862) among the most prominent. The development towards national unification must have seemed unstoppable to contemporary observers, but when a German nation state finally came into being it was brought about ‘from above’, masterminded by 21 Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, 1780–1850 (Harlow, 2000). 22 Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1958), p. 205.

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the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, rather than by collective effort ‘from below’. Bismarck, later praised by his admirers as the ‘architect’ of the German Empire,23 instrumentalised conflicts with neighbouring states to overcome the disparity of the German Confederation, rather than supporting unification from within. When King Christian IX of Denmark tried to annex the Duchy of Schleswig in 1864, both Prussia and Austria protested, declared war and quickly defeated the Danish army. Denmark had to cede Schleswig and its twinduchy Holstein; the former came under Prussian, the latter under Austrian administration. Predictable conflicts arose over this arrangement, which gave Bismarck the welcome opportunity to enter into military confrontation with the former ally in 1866, asserting once and for all Prussian hegemony in Germany and excluding Austria effectively from German politics. The tension between the ‘greater German’ or the ‘smaller German’ solutions that had agitated the 1848/9 National Assembly was thus ‘solved’ through military means. The resentment of the southern German states, which had sided with Austria, was quickly overcome when, after diplomatic provocations on both sides, France declared war on 19 July 1870. The English term for the Franco-Prussian War reflects the actual diplomatic situation, while the German appellation ‘Deutsch-Französischer Krieg’ captures the spirit of 1870/1. All German states rushed to Prussia’s ‘defence’; the instant military success of the autumn was carried by a wave of national enthusiasm flaring up everywhere. Choruses, marches, ‘Sedan cantatas’ glorifying the decisive battle and even operas were an outlet for this enthusiasm and would warrant a study in their own right. In this atmosphere of national exultation Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871. The choice of location was a well-considered insult against the French, which came to haunt Germany in the shape of the Versailles Treaty after it had lost both the First World War and the Empire in 1918. It is important to recall that Nietzsche made his mocking statement that ‘the question “what is German?” never dies out among them’ in 1874, only three years after the foundation of the German Empire. The acquisition of a nation state had by no means solved the issue of a national identity, just as the reunification of 1990 has not laid this question to rest. The new state might even have exacerbated the insecurities since it could not live up to the expectations invested in the utopian ‘Germany’ before a state of that name came into being. There is no denying that the new Empire suffered from several structural issues that were only insufficiently addressed, such as the weak role of the parliament, the unclear division of authority and the predominance of the old elites.24 More important in the present context are the inner fault lines that persisted to divide the population, which meant that the work of identity construction had to continue. Germany in this respect was in 23 On Bismarck’s delayed reception as a national icon see Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford, 2005). 24 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Deveson (London, 1995), pp. 1–19 and 20–40.

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no different situation from the recently united Italy, famously summarised by the artist and politician Massimo d’Azeglio with the words: ‘We have made Italy: now we must make Italians.’25 In the present context three issues, which will return in several chapters, are particularly relevant. The largely federal structure of the German Empire meant that local or regional identities kept competing with national models. Ernst Moritz Arndt’s poem Des Deutschen Vaterland (The German’s fatherland) asked in 1813 ‘What is the German’s fatherland? Is it Prussia or Swabia?  … Bavaria or Styria?  … Pomerania or Westfalia?’ Its triumphant conclusion ‘O no, no, no! His fatherland must be bigger than that.’ lost nothing of its topicality after the Napoleonic Wars.26 To judge from the patriotic poetry penned in the late nineteenth century, Germans needed  – or wanted  – constant exhortations that their ultimate loyalty was owed to the ‘larger fatherland’, not their home regions or formerly independent states. The regional division was exacerbated by the religious rift, with the Catholic South and Rhineland resenting the hegemony of Protestant Prussia. Bismarck in turn treated the Catholics as inner enemies against whose schools, priests, press and associations he waged a Kulturkampf (war of culture) during the 1870s, a major ideological effort which included the arrest of hundreds of priests and bishops but significantly failed to ‘solve’ the confessional division by subduing the minority.27 Finally the growing working class was suspected of harbouring revolutionary ideas and (like Catholics and Jews) of placing transnational loyalties before their national identity; as a consequence the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (Socialist Workers’ Party) was prohibited between 1878 and 1890. Instead of seeking political solutions, an ebullient and increasingly state-led patriotism was invoked to smooth over these differences. Culture, science and the arts  – among them of course music  – were called upon to provide a sense of cohesion, but failed  – had to fail  – to reach out to and embrace all groups of society. In addition, a fierce antagonism against other European countries, particularly France and Russia, served as a convenient ‘glue’ against the centrifugal powers threatening the internal political balance. In the decades just before and after the turn of the century, the nationalist tone became ever shriller, as dedicated lobbying associations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Association, 1887), the Deutscher Flottenverein (German Fleet Association, 1898) or the anti-Polish Deutscher Ostmarkenverein (German Eastern-Areas Association, 1894) occupied the political platforms and pushed the older liberal or conservative groups into the background. The legal emancipation of the Jewish citizens and their successful assimilation was greeted in some parts of the population with 25 The authenticity of this remark is not entirely secure, but it is quoted everywhere, for example in Charles L. Killinger, The History of Italy (Westport, CT, 2002), p. 1. Se non è vero, è ben trovato. 26 Ernst Moritz Arndt, ‘Des Deutschen Vaterland’, in Gedichte (Berlin, 1860), pp. 233–4: ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? Ist’s Preußenland, ist’s Schwabenland?  … Ist’s Bayerland, ist’s Steierland?  … Ist’s Pommerland, Westfalenland?  … O nein! nein! nein! Sein Vaterland muß größer sein.’ 27 Exact figures are quoted in Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006), pp. 568 ff.

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increasing hostility that shifted from religious to racist prejudices.28 Finally the thorough militarisation of society, led by Emperor Wilhelm II himself, added to the increasing nervousness diagnosed by Volker Ullrich as the fundamental condition of the German Empire.29 Taken together, these fault lines meant that Germans tended to think of their national development as a series of narrowly averted failures rather than comfortable achievements, which allowed them to conceptualise their history from the perspective of the ‘underdog’, a nation constantly embattled and besieged by outside and inner enemies. The resulting German nationalism  – here used in Anthony D. Smith’s flexible definition as formation, consciousness and symbolism of national belonging30  – is often regarded as a particularly unhealthy variety of this nineteenth-century core ideology, since it was one of the contributing factors to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The notion that Germany somewhere along its historical development deviated from the path of the Western nations has been summarised as ‘the German Sonderweg’. In the second half of the nineteenth century this concept was used mainly by Germans to express the superiority of their spiritual culture compared with materialist Western ‘civilisations’. In the 1950s and 1960s the Sonderweg resurfaced again, this time with negative connotations as modern historians now sought ‘the roots of Nazi success  … in the peculiar pattern of German ideological, institutional, and political development, stretching back into the previous century.’ 31 The Sonderweg model of explaining at what point German history ‘went wrong’ is still much used among both German-speaking and English-speaking historians. Wolfgang Hardtwig, for example, sees the core problem of the German Empire in the non-synchronism (Ungleichzeitigkeit) of several modernising projects, such as the unequal progress of economic and state development. Even more damaging was the separation of the liberal demands of freedom and national unity, resulting in a gap between the realisation of unity, achieved in 1871, and the realisation of the liberal demands of the Vormärz, achieved only with the Weimar Republic in 1918/19.32 Such a chronological disjunction was diagnosed as early as 1934 by the sociologist Helmuth Plessner, who characterised the Germans as a ‘delayed nation’ because they had embarked on the national project later than their European neighbours, missing out on Enlightenment ideas and carrying the trauma of the dissolved medieval Empire into the modern nation 28 For a beautifully illustrated history see Nachum T. Gidal, Jews in Germany from the Roman Times to the Weimar Republic (Cologne, 1998). 29 Volker Ullrich, Die nervöse Großmacht, 1871–1918: Aufstieg und Untergang des deutschen Kaiserreichs (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), pp. 376–404. 30 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Malden, MA, 2001), pp. 5–6. 31 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, ‘Introduction’, in The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984), pp. 3–4. 32 Wolfgang Hardtwig, ‘Der deutsche Weg in die Moderne: Die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen als Grundproblem der deutschen Geschichte, 1789–1871’, in Nationalismus und Bürgerkultur in Deutschland, 1500–1914: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen, 1994), p. 184.

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state.33 The dangers of ‘coming too late’ are highlighted in direct comparison with other nation states. In her otherwise highly enlightening study on English, French, Russian, German and American nationalisms, Liah Greenfeld covers the German development under the heading ‘The Final Solution of Infinite Longing’, an intriguing mix of National-Socialist and Wagnerian allusions. She identifies the educated middle classes  – characterised as a ‘dangerous class’34  – as the main agents of the German national movement, a group which found in nationalism the importance and sphere of action they sought in vain on the political playing field.35 Their romantic notion of a pure community meant that individuality had to be totally submerged within the collectivity, with the consequence that ‘German national consciousness was unmistakeably and distinctly racist from the moment it existed’.36 This is not what middle classes are supposed to do: they are supposed to rise constantly, and in doing so achieve a ‘proper’ bourgeois revolution that will propel their nation towards a modern and democratic state. Germany’s subsequent failures as a nation state were thus laid at the door of the middle classes and their ‘unsuccessful’ revolution of 1848/9.37 Satisfying as the Sonderweg concept may appear as an explanation of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it suffers from several flaws which have been pointed out most succinctly by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley. First of all any aberration needs to be judged against a normative model, here provided by an idealised picture of the historical development of the ‘early birds’ England, France and America.38 The historian Heinrich August Winkler, for example, sees German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on a ‘long road to the West’, 39 where the reunited Federal Republic has now finally and thankfully arrived. The opposition of a Western ideal type and a more problematic Eastern variety is also reflected in a common typology of nationalisms. Like the Sonderweg model it can be traced back to a positive self-description of German values and ideals. In 1908 Friedrich Meinecke distinguished between the Staatsnation (state-nation), an ‘active, self-determining political nation’ based on voluntary citizenship, and the Kulturnation, a ‘largely passive cultural community’ based on shared ethnicity, culture and values.40 Again the pro-cultural value judgement of early-twentieth-century German thinkers was reversed after 1945: ‘Western’ 33 Helmuth Plessner’s collection of lectures appeared first in 1935 as Das Schicksal des deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche but gained wider currency as Die verspätete Nation: Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes (Stuttgart, 1959). 34 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 293. 35 Ibid., p. 360. 36 Ibid., p. 369. 37 Geoff Eley, ‘The British Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course of German History before 1914’, in The Peculiarities of German History, ed. Blackbourn and Eley, pp. 39–42. 38 Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 10. 39 Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols. (Munich, 2000). 40 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, 1991), p. 8.

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nationalism was now assumed to have developed in France and England during the Enlightenment, steeped in positive values such as rationality, liberalism and civic responsibility. ‘Eastern’ nationalism, on the other hand, was constructed as an envious counter-reaction of the not-yet enlightened peoples of Eastern Europe, who, since most did not have nation states, defined their nationhood in terms of ethnicity, heritage and destiny without much regard for the institutions of modern states. Within this polarity Germany is usually placed closer to the ‘Eastern’ end, since it had no state territory or government until quite late in the development of nation states, and because some German groups defined themselves in terms of ‘blood and soil’. Like all binary oppositions, this typology suffers from a moralising but tacit bias in favour of the ‘Western’ model where, as with the Sonderweg theory, the question is rarely asked whether the positive exemplars actually conform to the ideal type. The second problematic aspect of the Sonderweg is its verdict on the middle classes. Blackbourn and Eley challenge the assumption that ‘bourgeois material achievement should be expected to bring self-consciously bourgeois institutions and isms in their wake: parliamentarism, liberalism, democracy.’ 41 Comparing all European nations, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule and is confirmed by placing the revolutions of 1830 and 1848/9 in a wider European context: hardly anywhere the ideas of the revolutionaries (of whatever class) were put into practice immediately, and in none of the countries where national unity was one of the revolutionary demands  – like in Italy or Hungary  – this goal was achieved through the revolution alone.42 Finally the Sonderweg’s ‘teleological blandness’, that is ‘presenting German history since the middle of the last [i.e. nineteenth] century as if the known outcome in 1933 was inscribed in every event’, 43 is hardly helpful for explaining the master narratives of European history, let alone for contextualising small-scale phenomena such as individual musical works. Nationalism as a political ideology would be hardly relevant for most people or peoples if it were not grounded in individual or communal identities. In recent years it has become something of a cliché to assume that all national identities are constructions which draw on ‘invented traditions’ in order to forge, in Benedict Anderson’s memorable expression, ‘imagined communities’.44 National identities are, as John R. Gillis emphasises, ‘like everything historical, constructed and reconstructed’;45 they derive their meaning from and within a particular historical 41 Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 15. 42 For example Sperber, Revolutionary Europe, p. 422 in a chapter tellingly entitled ‘How Revolutionary was the Age of Revolution?’ 43 Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, p. 33. 44 The former expression is of course indebted to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992, first published 1983); the second is the title of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 45 John R. Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, 1994), p. 4.

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context and need to be recreated continuously. Contrary to the nineteenth-century conviction that national identities are inborn and immutable, Gillis insists that ‘identities and memories are not things we think about, but things we think with. As such they have no existence beyond our politics, our social relations, and our histories.’46 Timothy Blanning has rightly criticised the more extreme applications of constructivism, stressing that nations are not only and not principally ‘“fictive fabrications” born in the imagination of the deluding or the deluded.’47 The obvious functionality of the national idea does not detract from what its inventors considered as solid facts. Nevertheless the constructivist approach is particularly eye-opening when applied to those nations that insisted on an essentialist core such as ethnicity. There is some disagreement how far  – or how early  – German national identity was conceived along ethnic lines. Openly essentialist tones are first heard during the Napoleonic Wars, for example in the statutes of the Berlinbased debating club Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft and its anti-Semitic after-dinner speeches. In modern historiography the rise of ethnic definitions of German national identity is frequently measured against the attitude towards German citizens of Jewish descent, since they were most readily conceptualised as ethnically different. Until the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, the ethnic argument was eclipsed by cultural and historical modes of thinking about the nation. Considering the central role languages played in many national conflicts, for example for the Czech-speaking minority in the Habsburg Empire, it is surprising that language is not included in Anthony D. Smith’s list of fundamental elements constituting a national identity: a historic territory or homeland, common myths and historical memories, a public mass culture, common legal rights and duties and finally a common economy.48 Particularly the latter two are more relevant for nations that already have a nation state, and ‘public mass culture’ only inadequately captures the identity-stabilising role of ‘high’ as well as popular culture that can be observed in Germany. More helpful are the functions of national identities which Smith enumerates, in the present context most importantly the forging of social bonds between individuals and classes by providing ‘repertoires of shared values, symbols and traditions’ and ‘a means of defining and locating individual selves in the world, through the prism of the collective personality and its distinctive culture’. 49 Such national rituals or symbols, however, would have little impact if they did not offer scope for emotional attachment: national identity makes only sense to individuals if they can invest it with a corresponding Nationalgefühl (national feeling/emotion).50 Without placing undue emphasis on the emotional appeal of music, it is clear that the medium of music is ideally 46 Ibid., p. 5. 47 T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (New York, 2002), p. 20. 48 Smith, National Identity, p. 14. 49 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 50 Etienne François, Hannes Siegrist and Jakob Vogel, ‘Die Nation: Vorstellungen, Inszenierungen, Emotionen’, in Nation und Emotion, ed. François, Siegrist and Vogel, pp. 15 and 19.

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suited to emotionally anchor the floating national concepts. The emotive power of national rituals and symbols is strengthened by borrowing elements from religious practices: regular and formalised celebrations and the absorption of the individual into a community that is ennobled by its transcendental values.51 Those values make it possible  – or even desirable  – to sacrifice (itself a religious term) one’s life for nation and fatherland. This does not mean, as Peter Walkenhorst has pointed out, that nationalism simply usurped the position of established religions in a secularised modern society.52 Nineteenth-century nationalism and religion correlated and intersected with each other: the nation aspired to religious dignity and relevance, while religion was increasingly conceptualised within a national framework. However, in confessionally divided Germany the religious component did not necessarily stabilise the national narrative: Protestants venerated Martin Luther as a national father figure (and delighted in the church works of J. S. Bach), Catholics emphasised the civilising influence of the early missionaries such as St Boniface, and Jews were proud of Moses Mendelssohn’s contribution to German and European culture.53 What unites these cultural heroes is that they were figures from the past, whether more immediate (Mendelssohn) or very remote (Boniface). The importance of shared memories for the constitution of a group identity cannot be overemphasised for the nineteenth century. ‘To forge identity and to buttress self-esteem, each people wants or invents a distinctive legacy’ that will convince them of their uniqueness and superiority and provide them with convenient stereotypes of the outsider or antagonist.54 David Lowenthal’s choice of the word ‘forge’ already signals that the shared past is no less a construction than the national identity it serves to define. History comes into its own as identity-maker precisely when a major upheaval (such as the French Revolution) makes people aware of a break with living traditions and a sense of loss and nostalgia sets in. Therefore it is not the ‘real’ past, the chronology of what ‘actually happened’, that is pressed into service for the identity project, but a mythically enhanced version of historical narratives. A historical myth is (to use Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann’s definition) a memory of a historical event that through commemoration is opened up to narrative, symbolic or ritual re-presentation.55 The main characteristic of 51 Ibid., p. 25. 52 Peter Walkenhorst, ‘Nationalismus als “politische Religion”? Zur religiösen Dimension nationalistischer Ideologie im Kaiserreich’, in Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus  – Mentalitäten  – Krisen, ed. Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (Gütersloh, 1996), pp. 504–8. 53 Stefan Laube, ‘Konfessionelle Brüche in der nationalen Heldengalerie  – Protestantische, katholische und jüdische Erinnerungsgemeinschaften im deutschen Kaiserreich (1871–1918)’, in Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. Heinz Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), pp. 293–332. 54 David Lowenthal, ‘Identity, Heritage, and History’, in Commemorations, ed. Gillis, p. 46. 55 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Mythos und Geschichte. Leipziger Gedenkfeiern der Völkerschlacht im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, in Nation und Emotion, ed. François, Siegrist and Vogel, p. 111.

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historical myths (Geschichtsmythen) is that they are emphatically not a thing of the past, but that they connect the origins and early history of a nation with its hopes for the future, thus justifying political actions and attitudes in the present. In order to become relevant for the nation, they have to counter two major challenges pointed out by Herfried Münkler. Historical myths have to reduce the complexity of the historical events while adapting them to contemporary ethic and aesthetic ideals, and they have to do away with ‘the spectre of contingency’, the fear that one’s national history might be a meaningless episode in a random world history.56 Whether or not a nation had already found its shape and form as a modern state, historical myths were employed by all European peoples to assert and celebrate their respective uniqueness.57 Interestingly, it made little difference whether the chosen historical event was a success or a failure for the forefathers of the modern myth-makers; both a military victory (such as the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ for the Germans) or a defeat (such as the first Battle of Kosovo Polje for the Serbs) could boost the national identity. A defeat could be interpreted either as a warning against contemporary decadence, or the martyrdom for the nation guaranteed the future triumph over adversity. Neither are historical myths dependent on the current success of the national project; long-established nations such as England need their national myths (e.g. the birth of the liberal English tradition with Magna Carta) just as much as political newcomers. Of course, the narratives of young nations will make a point that their state is not new at all but can trace its roots far back into history and has always occupied its present territory. If Germany is often seen as particularly (and dangerously) prone to mythical self-definitions, this is perhaps more a result of its special historiographical status than a shortage of national myths among other European nations. The typological distinction between ‘civic nations’ (Staatsnationen) and ‘cultural nations’ (Kulturnationen) introduced above does not extend to the mythical narratives that are attractive to either type. As Charlotte Tacke has shown in a transnational comparison, the nineteenth-century appropriations of the Celtic chieftain Vercingetorix in France and the Germanic leader Arminius in Germany do not support a neat dichotomy.58 Both historical figures were credited with uniting their people against an outside enemy, the Romans; both were in the end defeated and killed; for both national monuments were erected that became the focal point of similar commemorations. France and Germany were obviously in equal need of a powerful founding myth to overcome contemporary issues, although the political situations east and west of the Rhine were markedly different. That neither the historical Vercingetorix nor Arminius are well documented was an invitation rather than an obstacle to their elevation to national icons. As Eric Hobsbawm has stressed, accuracy is not a precondition for national relevance: It is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and 56 Herfried Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (Berlin, 2009), p. 33. 57 For a comparative introduction to national myths, richly illustrated and drawing on ‘high’ as well as popular culture see Monika Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen: ein europäisches Panorama, 2nd edn (Munich, 2001). 58 Charlotte Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum: Nationale Symbole in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1995), p. 16.

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groups  – not least in nationalism  – were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semi-fiction (Boadicea, Vercingetorix, Arminius the Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech medieval manuscripts).59 To these examples any number of historical but highly fictionalised events or characters could be added. It is rather ironic that this generous approach to ‘facts’ in the service of the nation was endorsed during the same nineteenth century that saw the rise of philology and the historical-critical assessment of sources and documents. History was the leading academic discipline in the nineteenth century, occupying a privileged position for interpreting the world. Wolfgang Hardtwig has even diagnosed a Geschichtsreligion in the works of Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Friedrich Meinecke and many of their colleagues, since they made explicit or implicit claims to the metaphysical dignity and importance of their subject.60 Like the religious elements of nationalism mentioned previously, history was not simply an ersatz religion for the secularised intellectual but fully participated in the search for a higher truth. Such a revelatory approach to history could also be used to political ends. John Edward Toews has shown how the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who ascended to the throne in 1840, utilised national (here Prussian) history to transform his people into a new, historically aware and religiously reformed community.61 He was not the only monarch to instil historical awareness from above; the Bavarian kings Ludwig I and Maximilian II were engaged in a similar exercise in (Bavarian) nation-building, public education and religious revival. This interest found its expression in the memorial temple ‘Walhalla’ near Regensburg, the murals with events from Bavarian and world history adorning royal palaces, and even in the restitution of the monasteries dissolved in 1802. The growing awareness of historical developments had consequences, some of which sat uneasily with the transcendent claims of national historiography. On the one hand some historians feared that their research and publishing activities would build up an ever higher mountain of factual knowledge that threatened to overwhelm the great narratives. On the other hand the realisation that all historical phenomena had to be appraised in their context according to the standards of their own period made ‘absolute’ value judgements problematic.62 By the end of the nineteenth century this relativism plunged several disciplines, including economy, law and theology, into a severe crisis. Academic agonising, however, had little impact on the widespread and continuing popularity of historical narratives for 59 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger, p. 7. 60 Wolfgang Hardtwig, Hochkultur des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (Göttingen, 2005), p. 51. 61 John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge, 2004). 62 Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begriffs und des Problems (Göttingen, 1992), pp. 12–14.

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making sense of one’s national biography. Matthew Jefferies, for example, sees a broadly defined ‘historicism’ at the centre of German Imperial culture, a ‘tendency to see and explain everything historically; to believe that history alone could lead to a true understanding of human affairs’. 63 Friedrich Nietzsche impatiently castigated the historical infatuation of his contemporaries in the second Untimely Meditation of 1874: This meditation too is untimely, because I am here attempting to look afresh at something of which our time is rightly proud  – its cultivation of history  – as being injurious to it, a defect and deficiency in it; because I believe, indeed, that we are all suffering from a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognize that we are suffering from it.64 The ‘consuming fever’ quickly spread to all areas of culture and the arts, infecting architecture, painting, drama and literature as well as manifestations of popular culture. The book market was dominated by historical best-sellers such as Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard (1855) and Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom (1876), which were also called ‘professorial novels’ since their authors sought to combine historical accuracy with edifying entertainment. A parallel phenomenon on the theatrical stage were the so-called Oberlehrertragödien (schoolteacher’s tragedies) which applied Shakespearian and Schillerian blank verses to every conceivable historical-patriotic theme.65 Ernst Raupach’s sixteen-part cycle of dramas on the medieval Staufer emperors (1830–7) is only the most extensive attempt to bring the nation’s history onto the nation’s stages. Raupach also wrote the libretto to the historical opera Agnes von Hohenstaufen, set to music by Gaspare Spontini in 1827. For the visual arts the painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach famously summed up the spirit of the age: ‘It is history we must paint. History is the religion of our age; only history is in keeping with the times.’66 Not only did history offer an almost inexhaustible store of picturesque and patriotic scenes, painters of historical subjects embraced the whole gamut of stylistic possibilities, ranging from the idealising allegories of the early-Romantic Nazarene Brotherhood to the hyper-realistic and virtuosic tableaux by Hans Makart, Karl Theodor von Piloty or Anton von Werner.67 The preoccupation with history was particularly pronounced where paintings served an official purpose, as in the murals adorning town halls or courts of justice. National monuments were erected across Germany to commemorate great men of the past, both ‘cultural heroes’ such as Luther or Schiller and statesmen such as Arminius, Wilhelm I or 63 Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 101–2. 64 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1997), p. 60. 65 Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, pp. 105–8. 66 Quoted ibid., p. 99. 67 Piloty, who was long rejected as the worst representative of nineteenthcentury eclecticism, has been partially rehabilitated as a pivotal figure of his era, documented in Großer Auftritt: Piloty und die Historienmalerei, ed. Frank Baumstark and Fred Büttner (Cologne, 2003).

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Bismarck.68 A livelier and more entertaining outlet for the craze for anniversaries and jubilees was offered by historical pageants, which were organised in practically every town to lend dignity to civic celebrations.69 Although the wished-for participation of the entire population remained utopian  – pageants were, like all such endeavours, an expressive medium for the history-conscious middle classes  – they nevertheless gave hundreds of citizens an opportunity to enact their local, regional or national history in the public sphere. While historical pageants enjoy undiminished popularity, the artworks from the era of historicism have been dismissed until recently by modern (art) historians as a regressive sideline. The huge canvasses crammed with characters in all-too-accurate costume or the plodding historical novels were seen as embarrassing products of an eclectic nationalistic art which seemed to ignore ‘progressive’ movements like literary impressionism or art nouveau.70 This does not mean that nineteenth-century artists did not realise the challenges of bringing (national) history alive in their respective media or were unaware of the potential discrepancy between edifying content and pedestrian execution. As early as 1867 the art historian Anton Springer warned: The communion with the spirit of the people, the emphasis on national interests, the unprejudiced approach to real life are in no way detrimental. Rather they form an essential precondition of a healthy flourishing of the arts  … However, it is a different case when the interest in the subject matter is emphasised exclusively and when the patriotic relevance of the depicted event is considered the main merit of the artistic presentation.  … One has to protest decidedly that historical painting and monumental sculptures should not have to obey the inner laws of the art work, that formal failings should be disregarded because of the relevant content.71 68 Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur neueren Geschichte (Göttingen, 1976), pp. 133–73. 69 Wolfgang Hartmann, Der historische Festzug: seine Entstehung und Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976). 70 On the interdependence of eclecticism and historicism see Wolfgang Götz, ‘Historismus: Ein Versuch zur Definition des Begriffs’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 34 (1970), pp. 196–212. 71 Anton Springer, ‘Die Ziele der gegenwärtigen Kunst’, reprinted in Historienmalerei, ed. Thomas W. Gaethgens and Uwe Fleckner (Darmstadt, 2003), p. 333: ‘Die Einkehr in das Volksthum, die Betonung nationaler Interessen, die unbefangene Annäherung an das wirkliche Leben sind also durchaus nicht von Uebel, sie bilden vielmehr eine wesentliche Bedingung gesunder Kunstblüthe  … Anders verhält sich die Sache, wenn der Nachdruck ausschließlich auf das stoffliche Interesse gelegt, in der patriotischen Bedeutung des Gegenstandes der Hauptwerth der künstlerischen Darstellung gesucht wird.  … Dagegen aber muß man entschiedene Einsprache erheben, daß die historische Malerei und die Monumentalskulptur sich den gesetzlichen Bedingungen des Kunstwerkes nicht zu fügen haben, daß man bei denselben wegen des bedeutsamen Inhaltes Formenmängel nicht zu beachten brauche, die Form überhaupt in den Hintergrund trete.’

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The question, however, which historical contents could be considered as appropriate for an artwork with national relevance was fraught no less with difficulties than the search for the adequate artistic form. Given the instability of German identities, it will come as no surprise that the question of what actually comprised the German past was also a bone of contention. Scholars and artists reverted not to one but to a variety of rivalling pasts, depending on the future shape of the nation they envisaged. Klaus von See has even argued that there was no single historical period which the Germans unanimously accepted as a fair representation of their identity, neither the medieval emperors nor Bismarck nor the dark ages of prehistory.72 See’s negative assessment could of course be dismissed as a symptom of the long-lived German insistence that national identity is no simple matter. However, he is certainly right in suggesting that numerous historical events and figures were tried, tested and rejected, their plurality mirroring a heterogeneous society and its subdivisions. Some favourite strategies can be indicated. Most of the stories revolve around a strong historical leader; artists of course gladly immortalised cultural role models such as Gutenberg, Dürer or Beethoven. More important than the main character was the narrative potential of a story; historical relevance alone was not sufficient for a successful work of art. The historian Joseph Freiherr von Hormayr, who advised the Bavarian prince Maximilian on suitable subjects for the decoration of Hohenschwangau castle, recommended that historical events should be depicted which offered scope for poetic and picturesque scenes.73 Once a visually appealing constellation for a historical painting or the tableau in a historical opera was found it had to be suitable as a national myth. According to Herfried Münkler, the literary or historical models needed to have a ‘mythologisierbarer Kern’, a core that could be elevated to mythic or symbolic status, thus imbuing it with relevance for the present and the future.74 Only around such a mythic core the full potential of a historical story could be unfolded: through narrative variation, i.e. by adaptation to different media, through iconic condensation into a few memorable scenes, images or symbols, and by ritual performance which, in the present context, can include contemplating a historical mural as well as attending a musical performance.75 The most successful historical narratives were found in early history, well before the modern concept ‘Germany’ actually existed. The enthusiasm for all things medieval in Romantic culture has long been noted and need not be recapitulated here in detail. Goethe’s rapturous response to the Gothic cathedral of Strasbourg, written in 1772, was one of the earliest celebrations of a medieval building as both beautiful and German. The Romantic poets rediscovered the Middle Ages (formerly disregarded as a primitive and barbarous epoch) as a period of national 72 Klaus von See, ‘“ Hermann der Cherusker” in der deutschen Germanenideologie’, in Texte und Thesen: Streitfragen der deutschen und skandinavischen Geschichte (Heidelberg, 2003), p. 63. 73 Alice Laura Arnold, Poetische Momente der Weltgeschichte: Die Wandbilder in Schloss Hohenschwangau (Stuttgart, 2006), pp. 39–40. 74 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, p. 33. 75 Ibid., p. 15.

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greatness. Medieval chivalric culture with its crusaders, minstrels and noble ladies fired the popular imagination, while the Holy Roman Empire offered an image of spiritual and religious unity, nostalgically imagined in Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799). The old Empire was also imagined as a Golden Era of political greatness and power. The Ottonian and Staufer dynasties with Otto ‘the Great’ and Friedrich ‘Barbarossa’, but also some later rulers such as the ‘last knight’ Maximilian I seemed to embody a personal, cordial relationship between ruler and people that contrasted positively with the political complexities of the nineteenth century. Barbarossa especially was popular throughout the century; after the foundation of the Empire a veritable Barbarossa-craze broke out, culminating in the inauguration of the Kyffhäuser memorial in 1896.76 The monumental tower is crowned with an equestrian statue of Emperor Wilhelm I to emphasise the Hohenzollern dynasty’s continuity from the medieval rulers. Cities such as Nuremberg or Augsburg wistfully looked back to a medieval era of patrician self-governance and civic pride.77 Popular manifestations of this medievalism indicate the general acceptance of medieval narratives and imagery: during the Napoleonic Wars students and other young progressives sported an ‘old-German’ fashion with puffed sleeves and ruffed collars, while the ideal gentleman’s study of the 1870s was oak-panelled and furnished in a sedate ‘German Renaissance’ style. The early sixteenth century was about the last era the Germans could agree on; Protestants often considered the Reformation as the true starting point of German history, but all later events were overshadowed by the confessional divide. Important figures from the Thirty Years War, such as the Swedish king Gustav Adolf or Bernhard von Weimar, could offer scope for identification, but the resulting national vision  – embodied for example in Max Bruch’s oratorio Gustav Adolf (1898)  – appealed purely to Protestants (see also Chapter 4). In addition, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often regarded as an era of foreign  – French  – infiltration and therefore not as attractive points of reference. Therefore the sixteenth century, i.e. the Reformation and the beginning of the early modern era, offers a convenient cut-off point. Recent studies into German historicism have highlighted how German pre-history, or rather the history of the Germanic people, became increasingly the focus for nineteenth-century identification. It is important to note that outside a small circle of philologists and historians the images of the ‘ancient Germans’ were blurred with many other traditions. The erroneous equation of Teutons and Celts, common since the seventeenth century, transplanted Celtic bards and druids into the Germanic world and furnished the German ancestors with the artists and priests necessary for a cultured people.78 The Celtic fashion was furthered by James Macpherson’s fictitious bard Ossian who first appeared in 76 Monika Flacke, ‘Deutschland: Die Begründung der Nation aus der Krise’, in Flacke (ed.), Mythen der Nationen, p. 111. 77 Nuremberg has received more attention than Augsburg, e.g. Stephen Brockmann, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (Rochester, NY, 2000). 78 Klaus Düwel and Harro Zimmermann, ‘Germanenbild und Patriotismus in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Germanenprobleme in heutiger Sicht, ed. Heinrich Beck (Berlin, 1986), p. 363.

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public in 1760. ‘Bardic’ poetry became a short-lived craze during the Sturm und Drang period, combining the mystical atmosphere of ancient Scotland with events from the Germanic past. Around the same time the first translations of Old Norse literature reached German readers, again mixed with Celtic ideas in the seminal edition of Paul Henri Mallet, Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves (1756, first German translation 1763). Herder, who included several poems from the mythological collection Edda in his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1778/9) systematised these ideas by postulating a close affinity between Nordic, Germanic and German poetry and hence identity.79 His aims were literary rather than political, as he hoped for a rejuvenation of German literature that was still in the thrall of classical and classicist models, and later arrived at a more differentiated view of the vernacular poetic traditions. The political potential of the Germanic past was first fully realised during the ‘Wars of Liberation’ when ‘Hermann the German’, the vanquisher of the Roman legions, offered inspiring parallels for the anti-Napoleonic resistance. From then on the Germanic people retained an important presence within the repertoire of historical myths, although Klaus von See has argued that there was never a widespread popular and patriotic enthusiasm for the ancient Germans.80 See, however, overestimates the importance of historical knowledge and factual accuracy  – which admittedly must have been slim among the majority  – for the proper functioning of a historical myth. In contrast Rainer Kipper, the author of what is currently the most comprehensive study of the Teutonic myth, lists seventy-six historical novels about the ‘ancient Germans’ which appeared between 1871 and 1918, spanning the centuries from 113 bc to the era of Charlemagne.81 The novelists chose their topics to match contemporary political situations, taking sides with characters and events standing in for the confession, dynasty or political model they advocated in the present. Gustav Freytag’s multi-volume family saga Die Ahnen (The Ancestors, 1872–80), for example, depicts an optimistic development towards a national-liberal and constitutional state. Felix Dahn’s bestseller Ein Kampf um Rom, in contrast, which is set during the Migration Period after the fall of Rome, advocates a fatalistic conception of history where the death of the heroic individual is compensated by aesthetic transfiguration.82 Although these characterisations of the Germanic seem widely divergent, all authors agreed that there was a stable canon of national characteristics that could be traced back to the supposed ancestors, thus creating a continuity that effortlessly spanned two millennia. In Freytag’s widely read Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (1859), a book which intersperses original documents with narrative passages, the author justified his decision to have the German past start in the Roman era: 79 Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, ‘Deutsche Mythologie’: Die Erfindung einer nationalen Kunstreligion (Berlin, 2000), pp. 21–3. 80 Klaus von See, ‘Germanenbilder’, in Barbar, Germane, Arier: Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen (Heidelberg, 1994), pp. 9–10. 81 Rainer Kipper, Der Germanenmythos im Deutschen Kaiserreich: Formen und Funktionen historischer Selbstthematisierung (Göttingen, 2002), p. 18. 82 Ibid., pp. 150–1.

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However, our emotional life, the way we absorb the world into our souls and mirror it therein, our characteristic predilections and weaknesses, our idealism, the foundations of our customs are  – as much as the golden treasure-trove of our language  – a family heirloom from the Germanic people as described by Tacitus, a heritage that shapes with irresistible force our mentality, thoughts, creativity according to the necessity of German life. This [heritage] is an indestructible possession that  – despite many changes through time and incessant foreign influences  – has remained for us in its unique and original state, as German nature had been in pre-history.  … Therefore we are truly the descendants of the ancients, and whoever talks of them talks of our forefathers.83 Tracing the German-Germanic continuity all the way back to the ‘ancients’ had the added advantage of coming with an in-built enemy, the Romans. Whether during the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War or the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf: ‘Rome’ was a convenient shorthand for all things that were perceived as a threat to everything ‘German’. 84 Just as the image of the ancient Teutons remained relatively vague, its ‘Roman’ counter-image was equally pliable and could be adapted according to circumstances, with targets ranging from Parisian fashion to ‘un-Germanic’ forms of government such as the French republic. The latter example already indicates that the (supposedly) Germanic concept of ‘freedom’ could easily be used to support authoritarian and aggressive regimes, and that in some circles the Germanic society was imagined as a collective of elite warriors subscribing to a gloomy heroism.85 Towards the end of the century the ethnic unity of the Germanic people and their consanguinity with modern Germans was stressed, which fed into the emerging völkisch movement. The concept of a pan-Germanic race began to partially replace cultural unity with anthropologicalbiological homogeneity.86 83 Gustav Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, 5th edn (Leipzig, 1867), vol. 1: Aus dem Mittelalter, p. 35: ‘Aber unser Gemüthsleben, die Weise, wie wir die Welt in unsern Seelen aufnehmen und abspiegeln, unsere charakteristischen Neigungen und Schwächen, unser Idealismus, auch die Grundlagen unserer Sitte sind so gut wie der Goldschatz unserer Sprache ein Familienerbe der Germanen des Tacitus, ein Erbe, welches mit unwiderstehlicher Gewalt uns allen Gemüth, Gedanken, Erfindung im Zwange deutschen Lebens ausbildet. Dies ist ein unzerstörbarer Besitz, der trotz vielen Wandlungen in der Zeit und trotz unablässiger Einwirkung des Fremden uns eigenthümlich und eben so original geblieben ist, wie deutsches Wesen in der Urzeit war  … [D]eshalb sind wir in Wahrheit die Nachkommen jener Alten, und wer von ihnen berichtet, spricht von unseren Ahnen.’ 84 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, p. 162. 85 Michael Titzmann, ‘Die Konzeption der “Germanen” in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Nationale Mythen und Symbole in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Strukturen und Funktionen von Konzeption nationaler Identität, ed. Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 131–2. 86 Günter Hartung, ‘Völkische Ideologie’, in Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’, 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz and Justus H. Ulbricht (Munich, 1996), pp. 22–41.

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If the Celts provided the ancient Germans with poets and priests, and the people of the Migration Period supplied heroic sagas of the rise and fall of Germanic kingdoms, the transcendent superstructure of the ancient Germans was borrowed from medieval Iceland, particularly the Eddic poetry first introduced to German readers by Johann Gottfried Herder.87 The intensifying scholarly engagement with Old Norse texts and the gradual parting of German and Scandinavian studies as academic disciplines did little to dissuade nineteenthcentury Germans from claiming the Nordic gods as part of their pan-Germanic patrimony. Jacob Grimm, for example, used Nordic sources as a framework for the scarce indigenous material on the beliefs and religious customs of the ‘ancient Germans’ in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835).88 He justified his procedure with the close affinity of speech and the identical forms of poetry, using Herder’s notion of a language-based Volksgeist (spirit of the people) when he declared: ‘It is impossible that nations speaking languages which had sprung from the same stock … should have differed materially in their religious beliefs.’89 Grimm’s supplementation was turned into fully fledged identity in Karl Simrock’s highly successful edition of the two main sources of Nordic mythology, the Eddic poems and Snorri Sturluson’s prose Edda, a medieval handbook of pagan mythology for poets: We have for long abandoned all doubts that the Nordic gods were ours as well, that the German and Nordic brother nations had (like language, laws and mores) the same religious beliefs in common, that Odin is Wuotan and Thor Donar, that [the Nordic gods] Æsir and [the Germanic] Ansen, alves and elves, Sigurd and Siegfried are different forms of the same mythological names.90 With the same argument Nordic sagas could be integrated into the German tradition, which went even more smoothly since a substantial corpus of these heroic stories, the so-called fornaldarsögur (sagas from the old ages) shared their roots with German medieval poetry. Simrock’s example of Sigurd from Völsunga saga (The Saga of the Völsungs) and Siegfried from the medieval German Nibelungenlied is only the most famous instance. Prose retellings of 87 For a detailed study of the literary and scholarly reception of Nordic mythology in Germany and Scandinavia see Klaus Böldl, Der Mythos der Edda: Nordische Mythologie zwischen europäischer Aufklärung und nationaler Romantik (Tübingen, 1999). 88 For a discussion of Grimm’s methodology see Beate Kellner, Grimms Mythen: Studien zum Mythosbegriff und seiner Anwendung in Jacob Grimms Deutscher Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). 89 Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass (London, 1882), vol. 1, p. 10. 90 Karl Simrock (ed.), Die Edda, die ältere und jüngere nebst den mythischen Erzählungen der Skalda, 3rd edn (Stuttgart, 1864), p. 369: ‘Daß die Götter des Nordens auch die unsern waren, daß beide Bruderstämme, der deutsche und der nordische, wie Sprache, Recht und Sitte, so auch den Glauben im Wesentlichen gemein hatten, daß Odhin Wuotan ist und Thôr Donar, daß Asen und Ansen, Alfen und Elben, Sigurd und Siegfried nur andere Formen derselben mythischen Namen sind, darüber bleibt uns längst kein Zweifel.’

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mythology and saga  – often aimed at a younger audience  – became increasingly popular towards the end of the century and stressed the sagas’ educational value for German youths. The ultimate integration  – or confusion  – of German and Nordic elements was finally achieved by Wagner who forged a seamless unity of mythology and heroic epic poetry in Der Ring des Nibelungen. From then on the general public was absolutely convinced that Norns, Valkyries and Valhalla were part of a genuinely German and archaic tradition.91 The costumes of the first Ring performances in Bayreuth consolidated popular clichés of the ancient Germans as being blond and bearded, clad in bear-skin and wearing horned helmets; in fact Wagner’s costume designer Carl Emil Doepler invented the latter headgear which only in the twentieth century was ascribed to the Vikings.92 Wagner also popularised the notion of a Götterdämmerung, a necessary and heroic end of the gods and the world, which could effortlessly be integrated into the heroic pessimism so attractive to Germans disenchanted with their bland political present. The idea became so popular that a Götterdämmerung fresco decorated the memorial of the German student fraternities near Eisenach, inaugurated in 1902 to commemorate the students who had died in the wars of the nineteenth century.93 The design of the round temple by Wilhelm Kreis also paid homage to an eclectic selection of German heroes: statues of Emperor Wilhelm I, his chancellor Bismarck, the military men Albrecht von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke, as well as reliefs of Arminius, Charlemagne, Luther, Dürer, Goethe and Beethoven. It was not until around 1900 that contemporary Scandinavian culture in its own right  – and not as part of the pan-Germanic sphere  – came to the attention of the Germans. Dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg exerted a decisive influence on modernist literature, while the cruises of Emperor Wilhelm II made Norway a fashionable destination for wealthy tourists.94 The emperor even wrote a song to the Nordic sea-god, titled Sang an Aegir, which was published in arrangements for every conceivable ensemble.95 Viking art influenced floral art nouveau ornaments, Swedish music festivals took place in Dortmund (1912) and

91 Klaus von See, ‘“ Blond und blauäugig”: Der Germane als literarische und ideologische Fiktion’, in Texte und Thesen, p. 37. 92 Roberta Frank, ‘The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet’, in International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ed. Michael Dallapiazza, Olaf Hansen, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen and Yvonne S. Bonnetain (Trieste, 2000), pp. 199–208. 93 Harald Lönnecker, ‘“ Wie im Traum ich ihn trug …”: Die Wiederherstellung des Burschenschaftsdenkmals’, Studentenkurier: Zeitschrift für Studentengeschichte, Hochschule und Korporationen 17 (2002), pp. 14–15. 94 Julia Zernack, ‘Svärmeriet för Norden och det germanska i det tyska Kejsarriket’, in Skandinavien och Tyskland, 1800–1914: Möten och Vänskapsband, ed. Bernd Henningsen et al. (Berlin, 1997), pp. 71–8. 95 Florian Heesch, ‘Volkstümlichkeit und Pathos: Bemerkungen zur Musik des “Sang an Aegir” von Wilhelm II.’, in ‘Sang an Aegir’: nordische Mythen um 1900, ed. Katja Schulz and Florian Heesch (Heidelberg, 2009), pp. 31–43.

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0.1  Otto Gussmann, Ragnarök. Ceiling of the memorial of the German student fraternities near Eisenach (1902). The memorial commemorated the students who had died in the Napoleonic Wars and in the unification wars of the 1860s and 1870/71; hence the image of the final battle between the Nordic gods and heroes and their adversaries.

Stuttgart (1913),96 and even a few stave churches were erected in Germany. This more independent image of a culture in its own right was once more overwritten by the National-Socialist fusion of the Nordic and Germanic peoples into an Aryan master-race. 96 Katherine Leiska, ‘Svenska musikfester och Nordensvärmeriet i Tyskland: Dortmund 1912 och Stuttgart 1913’, Svensk Tidskrift för Musikforskning 87 (2005), pp. 69–80.

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Music and the Construction of a German National Identity All these narratives and icons from the past  – whether indigenous or imported, histories or myths  – were at the disposal of artists who wanted to make a point about their national identity and heritage. Musicians were no exception and mined the past just as avidly as their colleagues in other media. This tendency is readily diagnosed in the non-German traditions because of the way musicology has conceptualised the issue of nationalism in music. As late as 1970 Willi Apel argued that ‘the nationalist movement is practically nonexistent in Germany’, since nationalism in music developed in peripheral countries ‘as a reaction against the supremacy of German music’. 97 Nationalism in this reading is the concern  – or problem  – of the north and east European countries alone which developed an indigenous art music not of their own volition but to overcome an inferiority complex towards their German teachers and ‘masters’. The musical mainstream of Germany and Italy  – and to some extent France  – in contrast remains untouched by such base political concerns as nationalism. Therefore works such as Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1874) and Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk Bán (1861) are considered as straightforward documents of Russian or Hungarian nationalism, since their historical plots seem to allow a direct application to the state of affairs in Russia and Hungary respectively. This makes them core works in national (music) histories but at the same time excludes them from the European mainstream. In a German opera like Lohengrin, in contrast, the political framework with King Heinrich and the Holy Roman Empire is commonly regarded as subservient to a mythical core about human and super-human love, even though Wagner’s considerable interest in the historically credible presentation of his material, for example the trial by combat, is well documented.98 Such a division into a non-nationalist mainstream and peripheral ‘national schools’ seems particularly incongruent considering that the issue of a national state was of primary concern in the ‘delayed nations’ Germany and Italy and held all manifestations of public culture enthralled. With the erosion of the concept of a musical ‘mainstream’ or canon and the American-led backlash against ‘Germanic’ modes of thought built into musicology, Apel’s position has become untenable. The most strident criticism has been formulated by Richard Taruskin who, as a specialist of Russian music, is acutely aware of the limitations of the traditional view of nationalism in music, since it dismisses his object of study as a kind of ‘minority music’, only interesting for its ethnic or folkloristic connotations: One rarely finds Verdi praised for his Italianness anymore, and one never finds Wagner praised for his Germanness, heaven forbid, although Verdi and Wagner were as conscious of their nationality, and as affected by it creatively, as any Balakirev. In the conventional historiography of

97 Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA, 1970), p. 565. 98 Politics in Lohengrin will be the topic of an independent study.

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History in Mighty Sounds ‘Western music’ Verdi and Wagner are heroic individuals. Russians are a group.99

It was not just the presentation of the leading German composers as ‘heroic individuals’, however, that exonerated their music from the taint of serving nationalist ends. In what Taruskin depicts as an insidious sleight of hand, German (art) music as such was elevated by its practitioners and admirers into a universally valid musical language that rose above any mundane concerns  – or at least pretended to do so. Traditional musicology and music theory, themselves creations of German-speaking universities, inherited this reverential attitude towards the great works of art that should not be dragged into the realm of politics lest they loose their aesthetic integrity. In Taruskin’s reading it is the Germans, rather than the non-Germans, who suffered from an inferiority complex and therefore pressed music into service for their national ends. Thus the ‘programme of German nationalism quickly metamorphosed, for music, into one of German universalism. In the history of no other art has nationalism been so pervasive  – yet so covert  – an issue.’ 100 With the dissemination and increasing canonisation of German music from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, German supremacy  – particularly in instrumental music  – was considered an established fact inside and outside the German-speaking cultural sphere. Franz Brendel’s influential Geschichte der Musik (1852) codified the division of music history into the Italian, French, German mainstream and peripheral ‘national’ traditions and gave it a neo-Hegelian slant. The responsibility for advancing music had now fallen to the Germans who showed themselves as German ‘not ethnically but spiritually, by putting [themselves] in humanity’s vanguard’.101 Germany’s gain was humanity’s gain, and vice versa. By the end of the nineteenth century many Germans felt comfortably settled in the notion of a superior Kulturnation, an idea that gained renewed momentum after the First World War. While Taruskin’s dissection of the universalist-nationalist discourse is as convincing as it is polemical, he bypasses the question why so many European artists fell so easily for what he depicts as quite unsubstantiated claims to providing the benchmark of musical value. Furthermore his narrative hides a variant of the Sonderweg debate with all its attendant problems. Like many historians he sees a ‘watershed in the history of German nationalism’ around 1848 when political liberalism gave way to ‘the more aggressive, exclusionary German nationalism’. 102 Before that watershed ‘Felix Mendelssohn, an emancipated and baptised Jew, [could] become in effect the president of German musical culture in the last dozen years of his life’, yet ‘less than three years after Mendelssohn’s death’ the publication of ‘“ K. Freigedank’s” notorious screed’ Das Judenthum in der Musik was the first portent of the impending catastrophe.103 While the general tendency is correctly 99 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, 1997), p. xvi. 100 Taruskin, ‘Nationalism’. 101 Ibid. 102 Richard Taruskin, ‘Introduction’, Repercussions 5 (1996), p. 15. 103 Ibid.

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diagnosed, the neat contrast of Mendelssohn’s death and Wagner’s ascendancy hides more complex realities of German nationalist culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Without doubt these aggressive and exclusionary tendencies became more prominent over time but, like the historiographical Sonderweg debate, they should not be collapsed into a streamlined trajectory  – not even for the sake of shaking musicology out of its aesthetic comfort-zone. A more egalitarian model of musical nationalism is proposed by the ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman in a comparative study of European nationalisms past and present that embraces folk, popular and art traditions in equal measure. In contrast to many others he does not regard nationalism as exceptional. It is not a question of nationalism that exists or does not exist, that one nation turns on and another off. Nationalism is not the marker of some musics while remaining entirely absent from others; it does not simply become extreme at some historical moments but recede at others.104 The main question is not whether nationalism is present or absent in a given repertoire (in this case the Eurovision Song Contest), but how musicians ‘weave their own national identities in the musics they create and produce’. 105 Bohlman also importantly reminds his readers that music not only symbolises and articulates nationalism but actively participates in its formation. While these ideas resonate with many aims of the present study, Bohlman’s distinction between ‘national’ and ‘nationalist’ music seems less fruitful. ‘National’ music draws on a nation’s pre-existing quintessence (whatever that may be) and is created and disseminated from the ‘bottom up’, i.e. from the ‘folk’ to the elites. ‘Nationalist’ music in contrast reverses the trajectory to ‘top down’ and competes with other nations in the cultural or political sphere.106 By this token, art music (which is inevitably written for and consumed by some form of social elite) ends up as ‘nationalist’ rather than national, and Bohlman therefore is not surprised that ‘the first nation to embrace the shift from a national to a nationalist aesthetics of music was Germany.’107 The traditional distinction between more or less commendable forms of nationalism is thus re-established, this time not with Taruskin’s chronological watershed, but through contrasting spaces (friendly peripheries vs. menacing centres) and social classes (folk vs. elites). In order to understand what German nationalism in music might be at least for the purposes of the present study, one has to revert to the question of why it is so easily overlooked in the first place. The main reason is the traditional definition of national styles by the presence or absence of musical markers that stand out from the ‘universal’ (German?) classical-Romantic language and that are supposed to derive from indigenous folk music, such as pentatonic tunes, harmonic drones or syncopated rhythms. Not only does this simplified definition render all ‘national 104 Philip V. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History (Santa Barbara, 2004), p. xxvi. 105 Ibid., p. 12. 106 Ibid., pp. 82, 85 and 119. 107 Ibid., p. 118.

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schools’ indistinguishable  – are open fifths a Finnish or a Czech characteristic?  – it makes German nationalism practically inaudible since even the most scrupulous music theorist is hard pressed to detect any obvious ‘Austrian’ or ‘German’ folkloristic elements in symphonic or operatic music written by German-speaking composers. This is not because there was no such ‘folk’ music available that could have been used (or invented) for the purpose  – German folk-song collectors and publishers were just as active as their colleagues elsewhere in Europe  – but because the ‘absolute’ music which became the hallmark of the German tradition was pressed into the service of the national enterprise by excluding from it everything that pointed beyond its own frame of reference, that smacked of ‘the world’ and blemished the most romantic of the arts. As Celia Applegate has convincingly argued, this novel aesthetic of autonomy might not have been invented to suit a nationalist agenda; first of all it offered a solution to the precarious status of music as an art in its own right and it gave musicians an admission ticket to the educated middle classes.108 Nevertheless being ‘serious’ about art music and being ‘German’ could be used interchangeably, which made obvious folksiness not just superfluous but undesirable. Given the recent developments in musicology it is not surprising that the notion of ‘national schools’ has come under attack and is being replaced by wider conceptions of national music, though remnants of the older view tend to linger despite the best intentions. While Dorothea Redepenning skilfully conceptualises a national music without folkloristic elements, her examples  – Grieg, Chopin and Dvořák  – are once more drawn from the musical ‘periphery’ when her argument could have been based on Schumann or Brahms just as well.109 The issue of stylistic ingredients is furthermore complicated by the general nineteenth-century predilection for invoking remote places and times in music as local or exotic colour, as Ralph P. Locke as shown in his study of musical exoticism. By turning the question about the exotic ‘other’ on its head and asking ‘who is “us”?’, Locke argues that it becomes difficult ‘to distinguish between the evocation of a different place and the evocation of a part of one’s homeland,’ as might be seen in the output of Chopin.110 Brahms is another case in point: is the final movement of his violin concerto, op. 77, with its invocations of Hungarian-gypsy music an example of musical exoticism written by a North German ‘tourist’ with an eye for folkloristic and ethnic appeal? Or does the music evoke his adopted home country, which for the long-standing resident of Vienna would have meant the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy? The main difference between Chopin, here standing in for the ‘national schools’, and Brahms, representing the Austro-German mainstream, 108 Celia Applegate, ‘How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century’, 19th-Century Music 21 (1998), p. 282. Applegate’s argument has been fleshed out in Gramit’s Cultivating Music. 109 Dorothea Redepenning, ‘“… unter Blumen eingesenkte Kanonen …”: Substanz und Funktion nationaler Musik im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Das Andere: Eine Spurensuche in der Musikgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Annette Kreutziger-Herr (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), pp. 225–45. 110 Ralph P. Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge, 2009), p. 75.

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might be that nobody would have been disappointed if Brahms had never written in a Hungarian-gypsy idiom. A non-German composer, however, laboured under the ‘double bind’ so aptly described by Taruskin with regard to Antonín Dvořák: Dvořák’s Bohemianisms were at once the vehicle of his international appeal and the eventual guarantee of his secondary status vis-à-vis natural-born universals like Brahms. Without the native costume, a ‘peripheral’ composer would never achieve even secondary canonical rank, but with it he could never achieve more.111 The double bind was of course not an issue for the ‘natural-born universals’, who instead preferred to labour in Beethoven’s shadow. Nevertheless the question remains: What options were open to German composers who wanted to make a specific statement about (their) Germanness, apart from being serious and universal? Although Carl Dahlhaus, like most scholars of his generation, embraced the traditional divide between Austro-German mainstream and ‘national schools’ in his history of nineteenth-century music, he elsewhere offered a broader concept of nationalism in music that seems particularly apt for the German musical tradition, although it was probably not intended as such: [If ] a composer intended a piece of music to be national in character and the hearer believes it to be so, this is something which the historian must accept as an aesthetic fact, even if stylistic analysis  – the attempt to ‘verify’ the aesthetic premise by reference to musical features  – fails to produce any evidence.112 Thus nationalism becomes both a functional and, by way of mutual interdependence, a structural trait of a musical work if the composer and the listener will it to be so. Dahlhaus’s suggestion can be extended to accommodate the possibility that artist and audience work at cross-purposes: a work might be embraced as ‘truly German’ even though this concern was not uppermost in the composer’s mind, while on the other hand many intentionally nationalist pieces were ignored by the wider German public, sometimes to the great consternation of their creators. Intention and reception, however, even when acknowledged as ‘aesthetic facts’, pose their own problems. Few composers were as candid about their intentions as Wagner, while the reactions of listeners outside the small circle of professional music critics are notoriously hard to gauge and popularity often has to be deduced from print runs or performance numbers. Furthermore admiring audiences dignified so many musical works with the label ‘German’ or ‘national’ that their appreciation is not the most reliable indicator of Dahlhaus’s functional-structural nationalism. Here the recourse to national history, defined in the broad terms outlined above, offers a solution that, as has been suggested at the beginning of the introduction, forms the core argument of the present study and its main claim to novelty. 111 Taruskin, ‘Nationalism’. 112 Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Nationalism and Music’, in Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 86–7.

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Contemporary responses from critics or other listeners show that the national relevance of Arminius, Barbarossa or Valkyries was recognised without the presence of additional musical markers. Therefore a composer’s decision to select a subject drawn from national myth or history (or the strange grey area in between) can be regarded as an expression of intent to place a piece of music within the discourse about national identity. In this context it is important to remember that all national myths and histories underwent a complex and often tortuous process of adaptation until they could be made to ‘work’ on the stage or the concert platform. A politically powerful icon such as the sleeping Emperor Barbarossa could not simply be ‘set to music’, nor did a national heroine automatically cut a graceful figure as an operatic soprano. All the subsequent case studies show a high degree of intervention with or manipulation of the literary and historical sources, sometimes to a point where the ‘original’ has become all but unrecognisable. Such decisions made by the composers and their collaborators give an indication of what exactly they considered the essential core of a national narrative that was  – in theory  – malleable to practically any artistic or political end. To disentangle the process of adaptation is of course not new in itself; for decades Wagner and Verdi scholars have been busy to chart the far-reaching changes the ‘greats’ inflicted on medieval legends or Shakespearian dramas to uncover new layers of meaning. Their less well-known contemporaries, however, equally exercised their artistic freedom to shape and mould the material. Even if they rarely stated their artistic or political persuasions explicitly in letters or memoirs, it makes sense to assume that they saw themselves as part of the project to create music where ‘their own great history’ would ‘surge back  … in the waves of mighty sounds.’ Given the pervasiveness of historical subject matter in all art forms, it seems strange that musical examples are hardly ever considered in the context of artistic historicism. The arts had an important role in reproducing the collective national memories through ‘the symbolic enactment of the past in narrative and non-narrative forms’, which could include, as has been illustrated above, the narrative historical novels, dramas, frescoes as well as the non-narrative memorials or celebrations of anniversaries. Music would easily fit both categories but is conspicuously absent from Stefan Berger’s list.113 For the majority of observers the most prominent relics of nineteenth-century historicism are the buildings that still dominate the cityscapes of European cities. It is worth noting that in architecture the reception of history works on a level quite different from painting or literature, one that on the surface appears more relevant to music. The main concern of historicist architecture is the historical style  – or the multitude of stylistic alternatives provided by the past  – rather than the historical narrative. For public buildings the style was chosen according to function (if the function had a historical precedent) and the particular ‘dignity’ of an epoch: neo-Gothic churches, Renaissance town halls, Rococo salons. Pillars, caryatids and ornaments veiled modern construction techniques such as steel girders and concrete. Historicising decorations could even be applied to entirely new types of buildings with more mundane functions, for example railway stations or public conveniences. The nineteenth century also saw the widespread restoration of historical buildings 113 Stefan Berger, Germany (London, 2004), p. 7.

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and the foundation of the first societies for the protection of ancient monuments. In 1826, for example, the historically conscious Bavarian king Ludwig I issued a decree that forbade the destruction of town walls and towers, which made sleepy provincial towns such as Rothenburg and Dinkelsbühl prime destinations for artists and tourists on the lookout for the nostalgic and picturesque. The past became a place that could be visited. Soon afterwards the appropriate soundtrack began to fill the historical spaces. Katherine Bergeron has highlighted the common ground of musical and architectural historicism in nineteenth-century France, and draws perceptive parallels between the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who restored Notre-Dame in Paris and the town of Carcasonne, and the reconstruction of the ‘pure’ chant tradition by the monks of Solesmes.114 Like architectural history, musicology traditionally has used the term ‘historicism’ almost exclusively in a stylistic and restorative sense. The term was first introduced to a wider musicological readership in a German collection of essays that appeared in 1969, where historicism encompassed the emulation of forms and techniques from the past (e.g. the self-consciously archaising choral music of Brahms and Rheinberger), the discovery and performance of pre-Classical music, and the establishment of music history in academia.115 Recent studies have, however, demonstrated that musical historicism can be more than a purely stylistic or repertorial phenomenon when it is interpreted within the wider context of nineteenth-century identity formation. Without using the actual term ‘historicism’ Bohlman points out how all European nations strove to build ‘musical museums’ through collections of folksongs and editions of great art music.116 James Garratt has brought the Romantic ideal of a ‘true church music’ in the style of Palestrina and the German Caecilianist movement to the attention of an English-speaking readership;117 Celia Applegate places the rediscovery of J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the context of a specifically German and more specifically Protestant national culture;118 and John Edward Toews aligns Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s use of historical forms and techniques with the reformist politics of Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV.119 Interestingly they focus primarily on the first half of the nineteenth century, on the origins of the historicist movement rather than its later  – more decadent?  – stages. Although these studies have considerably enriched the possibilities of considering music and history together, they still conceive historicism in the ‘architectural’ sense, rather than drawing the  – perhaps all too obvious  – parallel 114 Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 7 ff. 115 Erich Doflein, ‘Historismus in der Musik’ and Walter Wiora, ‘Grenzen und Stadien des Historismus in der Musik’, in Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik, ed. Walter Wiora (Regensburg, 1969), pp. 9–39 and 299–327. 116 Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism, pp. 25 ff. 117 James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002). 118 Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca, 2005). 119 Toews, Becoming Historical, p. 258

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with historical paintings, novels or dramas. The German musicologist Friedhelm Krummacher, when updating Carl Dahlhaus’s MGG entry on ‘Historismus’, even cautioned against using the term ‘historicism’ for operas on historical subject matter.120 For Krummacher this application could only be justified if the composers selected compositional techniques that accorded with the subject material, as Wagner did in Parsifal or Hans Pfitzner in Palestrina. Instances of ‘historical colour’, as opposed to the widely used ‘local colour’ are, however, few and far between in opera, and in genres such as oratorio or cantata they indicate the religious sphere in general rather than a specific historical period. The reluctance of musicology to engage systematically with the narratives underpinning so many large-scale works is all the more surprising given that the study of Stoffgeschichte, the ways a story is retold and refashioned through the ages and in different media, is a perfectly respectable pursuit in other academic disciplines, notably in literary history. The Nibelungenlied and the Faust story are among the few exceptions from the rule where musicologists and literary scholars are happy to discuss musical and literary versions side by side. Other musicological attempts at Stoffgeschichte have focused on opera and there more generally on a certain type of story and setting rather than a specific narrative. In the early twentieth century Theodor Kroyer constructed the ‘circumpolar school’ of German composers with explicit reference to the stories they selected; he remarked with a certain surprise on the multitude of subjects with a ‘German-national character’. 121 The medievalism in German opera with its heroic knights and idyllic German towns is summarised quite light-heartedly by Jens Malte Fischer  – the unintentional humour of swordwielding and singing heroes seems to invite such treatment  – and discussed more soberly in a study by Hans-Ulrich Schäfer-Lembeck.122 Such collections of related plots become more significant when the question is asked why certain myths came to prominence in a given period. Cecelia Hopkins Porter and Tobias Robert Klein, for example, link German national identity with an iconic landscape and an iconic building respectively.123 The river Rhine, which represented both the border to France and the heart of German Romanticism, and the Wartburg castle derive their 120 Carl Dahlhaus and Friedhelm Krummacher, ‘Historismus’, MGG 2, Sachteil, vol. 4 (Kassel, 1996), cols. 335 ff. This entry is somewhat of an oddity, since the first seven paragraphs reproduce Dahlhaus’s original, written for MGG 1, to which Krummacher added three chapters that include the perspective of art history, reflect recent developments in music historiography and seek to balance Dahlhaus’s anxiety that a historicist mode of thinking makes music analysis impossible. 121 Theodor Kroyer, ‘Die circumpolare Oper: Zur Wagnergeschichte’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 26 (Leipzig, 1920), p. 20. 122 Jens Malte Fischer, ‘Singende Recken und blitzende Schwerter: Die Mittelalteroper neben und nach Wagner: Ein Überblick’, in Oper  – das mögliche Kunstwerk: Beiträge zur Operngeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Anif, 1991), pp. 113–38; Hans-Ulrich Schäfer-Lembeck, Die Darstellung des Altdeutschen in den Opern des 19. Jahrhunderts (Egelsbach, 1995). 123 Cecelia Hopkins Porter, The Rhine as Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music (Boston, 1996); Tobias Robert Klein, ‘Wartburg-Mythos und biblisches Mysterium: Nationale und religiöse Identitätsbildung im Werk von

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significance not just from their scenic or architectural beauty but also from the histories attached to them: both are places of historical commemoration as well as aesthetic contemplation. Yet another fruitful approach to the relationship between history and music  – or history in music  – is chosen by Sarah Hibberd whose study of nineteenth-century French grand opéra ingeniously interweaves historicism as a mode of thinking and history as an operatic plot device. She utilises the idea of ‘historic metaphor’ to explain the various and ambiguous meanings audiences invested in grand opéras.124 Even a story seemingly remote from the French July Republic, such as the assassination of the Swedish king Gustav III, could easily be read as a metaphorical comment on the present political climate. Of the five operas that Hibberd studies in depth only one, Halévy’s Charles VI (1843), concerns itself with French history, turning a hardly successful episode of the Hundred Years War into an uplifting stage spectacle. For the present study Hibberd’s useful concept of the ‘historical metaphor’ begs the question whether the use of one’s own national histories actually has any added value compared to events or characters drawn from any other tradition. Would it not have been equally possible to reconstruct (German) identity formation in Edmund Kretschmer’s highly successful opera Die Folkunger (1874), based on a dynastic conflict in medieval Sweden, just as the Swedish king Gustav III was relevant for the French July Republic? The answer leads back to Dahlhaus’s definition of nationalism in music, which he locates in the intention of the composer and the reception of the public. Choosing a narrative from national history or national mythology arguably results in a musical work that wants to be understood as a statement about the nation. While this is neither the only nor necessarily the most prominent reading of any given work  – the ‘new musicology’ has rightly warned against the plausibility or even desirability of unequivocal readings  – it is the one allocated prominence in the present context. The overarching question is not whether a piece is national (or nationalist); instead musical works that offer themselves for such a reading because of their choice of subject matter  – their Stoff  – are questioned about how they both mirror and shape ideas about German national identity. In this context the ‘how’ is seen as a strategic and technical question, rather than one of aesthetic worth or lack thereof. The success of a piece of music in embodying or promoting a sense of national belonging does not depend on whether or not it is viewed by today’s connoisseurs as a successful and ‘autonomous’ work of art. Traditionally this argument has been made from the opposite end: a piece of music obviously endorsing a contemporary concern is comfortably dropped from the canon of ‘great masterworks’ that continue to be performed and studied, since ‘great masterworks’ are defined by (amongst other things) transcending the time of their creation. As has been pointed out above, the very notions of ‘absolute’ music and canonicity are themselves steeped in nationalist values. Brahms’s Triumphlied, op. 55, for example, a cantata written in celebration of the Prussian victory over August Bungert’, in Deutsche Meister  – böse Geister, ed. Danuser and Münkler pp. 343–66. 124 Sarah Hibberd, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 8–9.

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France and the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, is in Taruskin’s opinion ‘despite its present squeamish neglect a major work by any standard’,125 but few would like to contemplate it along with the more ‘purely musical’ Alto Rhapsody or Rinaldo. While such squeamishness may be justified for modern German concert audiences who prefer not to be reminded of their nation’s aggressive nationalism, this should not be true for studying such works within their historical context where they were welcomed and appreciated for both their aesthetic interest and their uplifting message. Some nineteenth-century observers were admittedly concerned about the contradictory values of functionality and artistic value, but since most of them were in principle well disposed towards musical manifestations of patriotism, their tolerance threshold seems to have been somewhat higher than ours. Musical value had to be very obviously subordinated to the occasion to make (professional) listeners uncomfortable. This happened at the first performance of the cantata Barbarossa by Bernhard Hopffer, which glorifies the Hohenzollern dynasty as representatives of the German imperial idea. It shares the political context with Brahms’s Triumphlied, but the quality of Hopffer’s music spurred a critic to muse generally on the relationship of art and patriotism: If it is not auspicious for the purely artistic character of a work when a specific agenda (besides purely artistic considerations) comes to the fore, this is decidedly detrimental if the agenda is a political one.  … Wherever this patriotism  … is the motivating force of artistic creativity, it can hardly be avoided that the (political) tendency dominates the artistic principle.  … Music, as the innermost art, the art most obviously remote and detracting from the world of external appearances, is harrassed most by the emotional overflow of political patriotism  … This is the case with the music to the poem outlined above: the music is the humble and obedient servant of the patriotic agenda.126 It must not be forgotten that the critic addressed his reservations to the musically educated readership of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, who would have shared the view that music lost its unworldly integrity when made to serve a political agenda. Audience members who attended the gala performance at the Berlin court opera were apparently less concerned about the cantata’s precarious aesthetic status; the 125 Taruskin, ‘Nationalism’. 126 A. Maczewski, ‘Kritik. B. Hopffer: Barbarossa’, MWB 2 no. 23 (2 June 1871), pp. 359–60: ‘Ist schon jedes Hervortreten einer besonderen Tendenz neben der blos ästhetischen dem rein künstlerischen Charakter eines Werkes mindestens nicht förderlich, so ist dasselbe bei der politischen Tendenz entschieden ungünstig.  … Wo dieser  … nach aussen drängende Patriotismus die Triebfeder zu künstlerischem Schaffen abgibt, da wird das Vorwalten der (politischen) Tendenz vor dem künstlerischen Princip sich kaum vermeiden lassen  … Musik, als die innerlichste, von der Aussenwelt am augenscheinlichsten abgezogene und abziehende Kunst [wird] von solchem Ueberfluthen nach aussen strebender Empfindungen des politischen Patriotismus am meisten bedrängt  … So ist es auch mit der Musik zu der hier skizzirten Dichtung: sie ist die bescheidene und ergebene Dienerin der patriotischen Tendenz.’

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wife of the ambassador of Württemberg for one found the ‘festival play’ featuring star tenor Albert Niemann as Barbarossa quite splendid.127 It could of course be argued that at such a gala performance the tableaux vivants and the festive occasion should have eclipsed the music anyway; nevertheless it seems likely that for many nineteenth-century music lovers aesthetic and patriotic appreciation reinforced rather than excluded each other. As long as a composer did not explicitly treat his creation as the ‘humble and obedient servant of the patriotic agenda’, music in fact had a decisive advantage over other artistic realisations of national history. Moving through time and unfolding its sonorities in space, it presented history not in the didactic manner of a professorial novel or a monument, but captured the listeners with its immediacy. Through their emotional involvement they were transformed from passive recipients of a political message to active participants reliving historical events. Music, with its emotional appeal and rich religious heritage, played a key role in the rituals of national commemoration; no celebration of a historical anniversary, no inauguration of a monument was complete without choirs and military bands. In many instances music itself became a ritual of national significance, with the dedicated music festivals on the Lower Rhine or the ‘pilgrimage’ to Bayreuth just the best-known examples. To dismiss music in such a ritual context as a purely ‘functional’ vehicle for patriotic content misses an important practical point. Many of the texts discussed in the following chapters would not have been written at all had it not been with a view to setting them to music. This applies not only to the operatic libretti but also to the majority of poems set as choral music; neither was intended for consumption in private seclusion but for active performance by and for the many. The words told the listeners what the music was supposed to ‘mean’, but that the words did mean anything to them was the merit of the music. In order to demonstrate the multiple strategies that musicians used to construct and communicate diverse German national identities, it is necessary to consider those composers who rarely feature in music histories and to trace their efforts across genre boundaries. Throughout this study we shall encounter many so-called Kleinmeister, such as Heinrich Hofmann, who were successful and esteemed in their own time but have since disappeared from sight. Other composers are today remembered as ‘one-hit wonders’, such as Max Bruch of the violin concerto fame, or their contributions as conductors or teachers overshadow their compositional output, such as Carl Reinecke. Yet others were never very famous in the first instance and for them it was sometimes even difficult to ascertain biographical facts, let alone their political proclivities. Composers who populate today’s canon will feature with works they are not normally remembered for, such as Anton Bruckner’s choruses Germanenzug and Helgoland. Apart from the desire to let a diversity of musical voices be heard, the availability of musical material influenced to some extent the selection of the case studies. Considering that nineteenth-century music is supposed to be part of modern ‘mass culture’, it is surprising how much material has been lost even in popular genres such as choral music. Operas are accessible mainly in piano reductions rather than full 127 Camilla G. Kaul, Friedrich Barbarossa im Kyffhäuser: Bilder eines nationalen Mythos im 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2007), pp. 324 ff.

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scores, and only a handful of pieces have so far been recorded. Nor is it likely that the others ever will be. At no point will it be argued that any of the works discussed is a forgotten ‘masterwork’ that clamours for revival. On the other hand none should be dismissed as a piece of functional political music, but treated as the valid artistic utterance it was meant to be. Therefore a compensatory history that surrounds prominent figures with some new supporting characters is not intended. Richard Wagner will, of course, continue to play the role of the ‘elephant in the room’, especially in Chapter 3, but his unavoidable presence provides a context for his less well-known colleagues, not vice versa. Not all writers of historical-mythological operas were Wagnerians, nor were all writers of symphonies anti-Wagnerians, and many composers occupied a middle ground that did not define itself with reference to Wagner at all, which highlights the wide range of artistic options available in the second half of the nineteenth century. By that time institutions that could disseminate largescale works to a widening public were firmly established. Concert halls and opera houses flourished in the larger cities, towns and villages boasted choral societies, the repertoire of the ‘great classical composers’ gradually solidified, helped by the musical press and the music publishing houses. While the beginnings of both German nationalism as a concept and of modern musical life can be traced back well into the eighteenth century, by 1850 they were firmly in place and readily available to a relatively broad audience. Although it is occasionally unavoidable to go back to the first half of the nineteenth century to explain later developments, this study does not ask for the origins of musical nationalism or historicism but for their form and impact once they had been established. In view of the larger historiographical perspective, this concentration on the second half of the ‘long nineteenth century’ has an additional advantage. It avoids the convenient but all too simplistic teleological trajectory that traces the music of German nationalism from its ‘innocent’ beginnings at the dawn of Weimar Classicism to its ugly conclusion at the dusk of the Weimar Republic. For friends of the Sonderweg theory, the ‘fall from grace’ has already happened, while others might appreciate considering the (musical) culture of the 1850s to 1910s on its own terms, rather than as a transitional state between Herder and the Holocaust. When studying how national narratives made their way into music the obvious strategy would be the treatment by story, i.e. bringing together all those pieces that feature the Nordic gods or the conflict between the Romans and the Germanic tribes. Since, however, each musical genre poses its own set of problems in terms of composition, performance and reception, it seemed more expedient to adopt a genre-based approach. Three chapters are devoted to operas. Chapter 1 investigates works that offer scope for identification through their insistence on the German ‘national virtues’ of fidelity and liberty. Chapter 2 analyses gendered role models on stage. Heinrich Dorn’s Die Nibelungen and Carl Amand Mangold’s Gudrun were written at the beginning of the era under investigation and draw their material from medieval German epic poetry that was commonly regarded as a national treasure. In contrast Heinrich Hofmann’s Armin and Carl Grammann’s Thusnelda are set during the Roman–Germanic conflict and reflect in very different ways the upsurge and decline of patriotic enthusiasm after the German unification. While Hofmann and Grammann largely followed the formal models of

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historical grand opera, Wagner’s influence is palpable in the Nordic-mythological ‘redemption operas’ presented in Chapter 3: Peter Cornelius’s operatic fragment Gunlöd and the Baldur operas by Cyrill Kistler and Heinrich Vogl, which revisit an aspect of Nordic mythology untouched by Wagner. Chapter 4 moves from the operatic stage to the more egalitarian surroundings of the music festival and the choral associations. Oratorios were particularly apt for conveying the religious dignity of the German nation through the reverential treatment of national history, although here the confessional divide encouraged quite different views on who could be considered a national hero: the missionary Boniface bringing religion and civilisation from Rome to the Germanic barbarians, or the noble Arminius leading the Germans against Roman occupation. The political impact of music is most easily apparent in the male choir movement, since it was one of the main outlets of patriotic fervour when outright political activities were discouraged or suppressed. The importance of this movement will be considered from three angles: the expectations that a nation of singers would precipitate a harmonious and egalitarian society; the formal organisation of the choral associations and their festivals as part of a national communication network; and finally the issue of the appropriate musical language of an art form that should be accessible to the ‘masses’ (or at least their musically literate part) but should also advance along with other genres of art music. Chapter 5, the final chapter, is devoted to the symphonic works of two composers, Carl Reinecke and Siegmund von Hausegger, who came to the German musical sphere from its geographical margins and whose instrumental works arguably reflect their precarious position as Germans. While each chapter follows a roughly chronological order, the juxtaposition of genres overrides a larger chronological trajectory, so that no simple narrative emerges, such as relentless progression from a benign, liberal nationalism to an aggressive, reactionary one. As is apparent from this overview, all musical works under discussion are for relatively large performing forces and were intended for the public sphere of the opera house, the concert hall or the music festival. This is not because the smaller, domestic genres did not contribute to German identity formation; the exact opposite could be argued for the Lied. Nor was nationalism restricted to high art music; dance music and marches as well as popular songs could all project messages about what ‘being German’ actually meant. Nevertheless this study will not consider Philipp zu Eulenburg’s Skalden-Gesänge (Skaldic songs) and Nordlandslieder (Songs from the North) nor Hermann Eichborn’s Germanischer Sturmmarsch; this is both for reasons of space and because the impact of large-scale musical works is more easily established than for a song or a piano composition whose popularity is often only attested in a reprint in the publisher’s catalogue. The chosen focus on opera, choral music and symphony, it has to be remembered, excludes not only several important genres but also large swathes of society. Women are once more barely audible except in their traditional roles as vocal performers and members of the audience. Female composers rarely ventured into the realm of grand historical opera or programmatic symphony, and when they did, as in the case of Ingeborg von Bronsart’s opera Hiarne (1891), the critics expressed in equal measure admiration for and bewilderment about her grasp of drama and the ‘masculine, martial’ style of the battle

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scenes.128 Their absence as composers is compounded by a tendency of nineteenth-century chroniclers to exaggerate their ornamental presence, for example at a singing festival, rather than their behind-the-scenes activities as organisers, patrons and arbiters of taste. The other major group that makes only a passing appearance  – mainly as admiring crowds at open-air events or as targets of pedagogical efforts  – are the lower classes of society. Throughout the nineteenth century the appreciation, dissemination and consumption of ‘art music’ remained by and large a hallmark of the middle classes, and from their vantage point the piano-playing seamstress as well as the Wagner-loving aristocrat aspired to their bourgeois ideals. Even populist forms such as part-songs for male voices took several decades and some middle-class engineering to trickle ‘down’ to the working classes. However, the flexibility of what comprised the middle classes should not be underestimated, since wealth and status were less important than a willingness to embrace culture as a defining element of one’s identity. Even with these temporal, geographic, social and generic restrictions the following case studies of musical works will hopefully surprise with the multitude and diversity of their approaches to the nation, its history and mythology. The question ‘What is German?’ led to musical solutions that were widely different in their scope, style and political agenda. If some of them strike the modern reader as aesthetically unsuccessful, parochially small-minded or unintentionally funny, this would not be the least contribution this study could make to a musical tradition that has so long enjoyed the privilege  – and stigma  – of being regarded as universally appealing and dangerously serious.

128 Paul Simon, ‘Die erste Aufführung der Oper Hiarne von Frau Ingeborg von Bronsart im Königl. Opernhause zu Berlin’, NZfM 58 no. 8 (25 February 1891), p. 87.

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1 The Pure Mirror: National Epic as National Opera

I

f German national identity was in a permanent state of crisis and redefinition throughout the nineteenth century, the same can be said of German national opera. Until Wagner’s music dramas finally  –  and not without controversy  –  came to be adopted as the ‘soundtrack’ of the German Empire in the 1870s, the search for an appropriate and recognisable operatic idiom remained an ongoing concern. The two operas discussed in this chapter, Heinrich Dorn’s Die Nibelungen (1854) and Carl Amand Mangold’s Gudrun (1851), made significant and at the time most welcome contributions to the problematic genre by transforming epic poetry from the treasure-trove of medieval German literature into glorifications of the national character. ‘Treue’ (loyalty or constancy) and ‘Freiheitsliebe’ (love of freedom) are central to the two operas, which have been chosen not just for their topicality  –  no discussion of German national myth would be complete without consideration of the Nibelung tradition  –  but also for the impassioned responses they engendered in contemporary observers who eagerly tested each new artwork for its suitability as the desired national opera. The creation of a national theatre and by extension a national opera can in itself be considered an act of cultural politics, a project that was intended to elevate the German language to the serious stage and to remove the perceived hegemony of foreign drama and opera. From the late eighteenth century onwards opera had been an essential item on the agenda of progressive thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder. Many intellectuals were convinced that music theatre had to play an essential role in the national enterprise, though they seldom clearly defined the precise function that opera would assume in the creation of a German nation.1 Several decades after Herder, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink still asked anxiously ‘Why does German opera in general not flourish, and what can be done for it?’, although by the 1830s the operas of Carl Maria von Weber, Louis Spohr and Heinrich Marschner, today considered the apogee of German romantic opera, were already in existence.2 The debate became more urgent and more explicitly political during the Vormärz period. Leading figures of the cultural scene argued that all political, economical and cultural forces had to be united before a free, liberal German state could become reality. In 1846 Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, postulated a connection between the 1 Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington, 2003), p. 15. 2 G[ottfried]. W[ilhelm]. Fink, ‘Warum will die teutsche Oper in der Mehrzahl nicht empor und was ist für sie zu thun?’, AMZ 40 no. 4 (24 January 1838), cols. 59–64. For a thoughtful introduction to the debates of the 1820s to 1840s see Anno Mungen, Musiktheater als Historienbild: Gaspare Spontinis ‘Agnes von Hohenstaufen’ als Beitrag zur deutschen Oper (Tutzing, 1997), part I: ‘Bedingungen’.

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growing interest in public affairs, democratisation of the arts and a rejuvenation of opera: Therefore it is now our mission to enter the innermost centre of national life  … Only popular ways of thinking, in an emphatic sense democratic ways of thinking will enable us to reach this goal.  … The entire development of the nation moves towards this point, and therefore it is no idle dream if I call it the next goal of our art. Opera, the artistic genre equally accessible to all circles of the people, is first called upon to realise this progress.3 It is worth noting that Brendel considers the supposedly ‘elitist’ opera the most widely accessible genre, even more so than the already thriving choral movement. Sadly, however, composers had so far been reluctant to embrace the national challenge, as Louise Otto, journalist and campaigner for the women’s rights movement, complained: A people has to be a nation before it can be politically important; political consciousness must come from a developed nationality. Therefore we first of all need a national opera  … One art after the other stretches out friendly hands to the sister arts, and, glancing happily into the world, they look ahead to where the nation’s banner waves, leading the arts victoriously into a holy war to reach and conquer the promised land of a new, free future  … Yet the Muse of music stands still and dreams and does not want to join them. Not for one moment does she want to serve the times like the others do …, she does not care about life and its events, about her own people, about a new era  –  she does not care about anything apart from her own artistic rules that nobody except composers and music experts are supposed to judge.4 3 Franz Brendel, ‘Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Oper. Dritter Artikel. Zukunft’, NZfM 24 no. 16 (22 February 1846), p. 62: ‘So ist es jetzt die Aufgabe, in den innersten Mittelpunct des nationalen Lebens einzudringen  … Popularität der Gesinnung ist es, demokratische Gesinnung im höheren Sinne, welche allein zu befähigen vermag, dieses Ziel zu erreichen.  … Die gesammte Entwicklung der Nation drängt jetzt auf diesen Punct, und es ist darum keine Träumerei, wenn ich ihn als das nächste Ziel unserer Kunst bezeichne. Die Oper aber, die allen Kreisen des Volkes gleich sehr zugängliche Kunstgattung, ist berufen, zunächst diesen Fortschritt zu verwirklichen. ’ (Brendel’s emphasis). 4 Louise Otto, ‘Die Nibelungen als Oper’, NZfM 23 no. 13 (12 August 1845), pp. 50–1: ‘Ein Volk muß national sein, eh’ es politisch groß sein kann, aus seiner entwickelten Nationalität muß die politische Gesinnung kommen. So brauchen wir auch vorerst eine nationale Oper  … Eine Kunst nach der andern reicht den Schwestern freundlich die Hände, und fröhlich dareinschauend in die Welt blicken sie vorwärts, wo ihnen voraus das vaterländische Banner weht, mit dem sie siegesbewußt in den heiligen Kampf ziehen, um das gelobte Land der neuen, freien Zukunft zu erreichen und zu erobern,  … aber die Muse der Musik steht still und träumt und will nicht mitgehen. Sie will nicht einen Augenblick der Zeit dienen wie die Andern …, sie will nichts wissen vom bewegten Leben, nichts wissen von einem eignen Volk, nichts wissen von einer neuen Zeit  –  sie will von gar nichts wissen, als von den eigenen Kunstvorschriften, über welche Niemanden [sic] ein Urtheil zustehen soll als Componisten und Musikkennern.’

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Otto here applies the same standards of political relevance to opera that she attached to her own literary activities. Her early poems revolve around the themes of national unity, freedom from oppression and social responsibility; for example her controversial poem Die Klöpplerinnen on the plight of lace-makers ‘took on an almost iconic status in the years preceding the 1848 revolution.’5 Her novels Schloß und Fabrik (Palace and Factory, 1846), Römisch und Deutsch (Roman and German, 1847) and Ein Bauernsohn (A Peasant’s Son, 1848) attest to her increasing political radicalisation before the March Revolution. The violent crushing of the Dresden uprisings, which she witnessed at first hand, and the hostility of the population against her as a representative of the failed liberal movement hurt her deeply.6 While her novels gave her ample space to develop her political agenda, she expected her poetry, when set to music and sung by the many, to communicate the ideals of the Vormärz movement to a wider audience.7 Arguing for a national opera must have appeared to her as the natural extension of her songs. In her criticism of the self-absorption of music, Otto  –  who was friends with Brendel and composers such as Carl Zöllner, Friedrich Schneider and Carl Gottlieb Reißiger  –  shows little sympathy for the specific problems of operatic composers. The derided ‘artistic rules’ were much more ambiguous and contested in music than in the other arts, starting with the thorny question of what a German opera actually was. A simple definition based on the language of the libretto potentially ruled out the masterworks of Mozart or Gluck, although most German opera houses presented them in translations from the Italian or French. Nevertheless the German language was a first prerequisite. More complicated was the question of a German style independent of the relatively well-defined Italian and French operatic traditions that dominated the theatrical repertoire. The Singspiel, a musical comedy with spoken dialogues and simple musical numbers that could be performed by singer-actors, left no doubt about its German credentials, but it lacked the social and aesthetic distinction of Italian or French serious opera patronised by the upper classes. Moreover, most theorists, composers and librettists advocated an artwork that would combine text, music, stagecraft and scenery into a greater unity, which necessitated the use of recitatives instead of dialogues, an altogether more fluid musical declamation and an elevated, serious subject.8 In view of the hegemony of Italian and French models it is hardly surprising that many attempts at a stylistic definition went little beyond anti-foreign polemics: German composers should neither imitate the florid and ‘superficial’ virtuosity of Italian singing nor the cool elegance or ‘frivolous’ effects of French opera. As Sebastian Werr has noted, the perceived shortcomings of Italian opera were used as a backdrop to demonstrate 5 Carol Diethe, The Life and Work of Germany’s Founding Feminist Louise OttoPeters (1819–1895) (Lewiston, NY, 2002) p. 31. 6 See her letters to Ernst Keil of 26 May and 7 June 1849, published in Louise OttoPeters: Ihr literarisches und publizistisches Werk: Katalog zur Ausstellung, ed. Johann Ludwig and Rita Jorek (Leipzig, 1995), pp. 16–17. 7 Thomas Schinköth, ‘Einmischung ins Musikleben’, in Louise Otto-Peters, ed. Ludwig and Jorek, p. 87. 8 John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 17–33.

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the strengths of German music.9 This attitude is apparent in an  –  otherwise quite detailed and technical  –  essay by Carl Amand Mangold, the composer of the opera Gudrun discussed below. While he admits that French libretti tend to be better crafted than the boring and lumbering average German text, he warns of their inconsistencies and superficially entertaining plots.10 With regard to the ideal musical style of German opera he writes: The German composer should not disavow his German nature, the Gemüthliche, the simplicity and naturalness that speaks to the heart. He should not seek popularity in italianised, outwardly charming but inwardly empty melodies, but in characteristic, expressive tunes which speak to the innermost heart.11 Rather than providing stylistic guidance, Mangold’s recommendations simply fall back on the elusive and clichéd ‘German nature’ and warn of Italian superficiality. Only in a passing comment does he suggest a more practical solution: the perfect German libretto, which would express the singular German character and noble moral culture, should be ‘rooted in real German soil’, either in the realm of history or in German myth and legend.12 While a patriotically informed choice of subject matter appears a selfevident solution, it needs to be emphasised that Mangold is among the first to recommend it explicitly for opera, at a time when historical spoken drama on German subjects such as the Staufer emperors had been well established for several decades. National topics had first entered the German operatic tradition in the later eighteenth century. Günther von Schwarzburg (1777) by the Mannheim Kapellmeister Ignaz Holzbauer is often cited as the first example, offering ‘frequent reminders in text and stage directions of the Teutonic nature of the proceedings’, although Italian operatic traits were equally apparent in the music.13 Later attempts at emphatically German operas eschewed history or historical myths and preferred fairy-tale and folklore. The impenetrable German forests, the secluded villages, the lakes and rivers with their water sprites provided the backdrop for Weber’s Freischütz (1821) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Undine (1816), to name but the most prominent examples. The tension between a simple human existence and the intrusion of the supernatural is played out prominently in Marschner’s romantic 9 Sebastian Werr, ‘Sinnliches Vergnügen und reine Kunst: Das Italienische als Folie des Deutschen’, in Das Bild der italienischen Oper in Deutschland, ed. Sebastian Werr and Dieter Brandenburg (Münster, 2004), p. 10. 10 C[arl]. A[mand]. Mangold, ‘Die neuere deutsche Oper’, NZfM 28 no. 27 (1 April 1848), pp. 157–60. 11 Ibid., NZfM 28 no. 29 (8 April 1848), p. 169: ‘Der deutsche Componist soll nicht seine deutsche Natur, das Gemüthliche, die zum Herzen sprechende Einfachheit und Natürlichkeit des Gefühls verleugnen. In italienisirten, äußerlich reizenden, innerlich leeren Melodieen [sic] soll er nicht die Popularität suchen, wohl aber in kernhaften, ausdrucksvollen Weisen, die zum Innersten des Herzens sprechen.’ 12 Ibid., p. 158: ‘[ein Drama das] auf ächt deutschem Boden im Reich der Geschichte oder der deutschen Sage wurzelt.’ 13 Warrack, German Opera, pp. 111–12.

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operas Der Vampyr (1828) and Hans Heiling (1833) and, as late as 1848, in Wagner’s Lohengrin. The latter, however, bridges the divide between myth and history by locating the tale of the swan knight firmly within the political framework of the tenth-century Holy Roman Empire. Ultimately the genre of historical opera seems to have arisen not from German spoken drama but from French opera. French revolutionary opera and grand opéra kindled an interest for stories with a wider scope, embedding the compulsory romantic interest in a historical scenario. Standard operatic situations such as a love triangle or star-crossed lovers could  –  but did not necessarily have to  –  be made relevant to the current political situation by relating them to real historical events from the (national) past. For German composers this genre was mainly exemplified in the grand opéras by Auber, Spontini and Meyerbeer. Thus it is not coincidental that Louise Otto was suddenly reminded of the latter’s Les Huguenots while she discussed the future of German art with two fellow writers in 1845: ‘“ That’s a great and political opera”, I said, “but we need a national opera, an opera with a German historical subject and popular music!”’ 14 However, the storyline that Otto came up with qualifies only indirectly as ‘historical’ along the lines of Meyerbeer’s Huguenots or the life of a medieval emperor. In an attempt to merge the literary, the mythical and the historical, Otto advocated a medieval epic poem that left ample space to the romantic imagination: the Nibelungenlied. While the well-known storyline of the Nibelungenlied does not need to be retold here, a short overview of its reception will help to understand the role of medieval poetry in the national discourses of the nineteenth century.15 The early-thirteenth-century epic poem was rediscovered in 1755 and first published in its entirety in 1782. Despite being hailed the ‘German Iliad’, to make the high-middle-German text more appealing to a classically educated readership,16 the Nibelungenlied’s reception only gathered momentum when the Napoleonic Wars brought patriotic themes to the fore. In a series of popular lectures August Wilhelm Schlegel advocated its educational use in schools, so that the young generation would be conscious of being part of a glorious and indivisible people.17 Modern scholars of the Nibelungenlied’s reception history 14 Otto, ‘Die Nibelungen als Oper’, NZfM 23 no. 33 (21 October 1845), p. 129: ‘“ Das ist eine große und politische Oper,” sagte ich, “aber wir brauchen eine nationale, eine Oper mit deutschem historischen [sic] Stoff und volksthümlicher Musik!”’ 15 There is a plethora of recent studies on the rediscovery and reception history of the Nibelungenlied which cannot possibly be enumerated here. The musical reception is covered most fully in Christa Jost, ‘Die Nibelungen auf dem Weg zur Oper’, in Nibelungenlied und Klage: Ursprung  –  Funktion  –  Bedeutung, ed. DietzRüdiger Moser and Marianne Sammer (Munich, 1998), pp. 483–505, and in Bernd Zegowitz, ‘Die Nibelungen vor dem Ring: Zur (Vor)Geschichte eines Opernstoffes’, in Getauft auf Musik: Festschrift für Dieter Borchmeyer, ed. Udo Bermbach, Hans Rudolf Vaget and Yvonne Nilges (Würzburg, 2006), pp. 257–74. 16 Annegret Pfalzgraf, Eine Deutsche Ilias? Homer und das ‘Nibelungenlied’ bei Johann Jakob Bodmer: Zu den Anfängen der nationalen Nibelungenrezeption im 18. Jahrhundert (Marburg, 2003), pp. 91 ff. 17 Quoted in Werner Wunderlich, ‘“ Ein Hauptbuch bei der Erziehung der Jugend …”: Zur pädagogischen Indienstnahme des Nibelungenliedes für Schule und Unterricht

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often rely on a relatively small group of poets and scholars, arguing for a widespread and deep-seated enthusiasm for medieval German poetry that simply did not exist. The post-war decline in patriotism relegated the Nibelungenlied once more to academic circles, although Karl Simrock’s popular translation of 1827, which adapted the medieval world for a Biedermeier readership, soon found its way onto many bookshelves of the educated middle classes.18 Although few would have read the original in its entirety, the Nibelungenlied was  –  at least in theory  –  widely accepted as the national epic poem of the Germans; or rather, as Klaus von See perceptively remarks, the question whether it actually constituted a document of national greatness was never asked but implicitly taken for granted.19 In many respects it had little to offer for national identification: the story showed no obvious parallels to present or recent political events, and it ended with the utter destruction of all the main characters.20 The apolitical nature of the Nibelungenlied was pointed out by Friedrich Theodor Vischer as early as 1844: Out heroic poetry has not taken as its model the turbulences of the barbarian migrations, nor the great victory over the Romans; with German obstinacy it has made its home in a family saga and tries in vain  … to widen this narrow interest to world-historical relevance …21 Vischer’s criticism of the Nibelungenlied expresses the dissatisfaction of the forward-looking minority with the political sleepiness of the German majority; the lack of interest in ‘world-historical relevance’ is aimed less at the medieval poet and his audience than at nineteenth-century Germans. In order to make the medieval epic at all relevant for contemporary audiences, the concept of a continuous national character was pressed into service, a strategy that both Dorn and Mangold pursued in their respective operas. Those who wanted to find the Nibelungenlied relevant considered it a glorification of all the virtues that the educated middle classes were so proud of. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, editor of the first complete translation into modern German, catalogued the following character traits common to the Nibelungs and the Germans of the present: im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Die Nibelungen: Ein deutscher Wahn, ein deutscher Alptraum: Studien und Dokumente zur Rezeption des Nibelungenstoffs im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim Heinzle and Anneliese Waldschmidt (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 142. 18 Joachim Heinzle, ‘ “… diese reinen, kräftigen Töne”: Zu Karl Simrocks Übersetzung des Nibelungenliedes’, in Die Nibelungen, ed. Heinzle and Waldschmidt, pp. 111–17. 19 Klaus von See, ‘Das Nibelungenlied  –  ein Nationalepos?’, in Die Nibelungen, ed. Heinzle and Waldschmidt, p. 94. 20 Ibid., p. 58. 21 Vischer, ‘Vorschlag zu einer Oper’, p. 408: ‘Unsere Heldensage hat nicht die Stürme der Völkerwanderung, nicht den großen Sieg über die Römer zum Stoffe genommen; mit deutschem Eigensinne hat sie sich in eine Familiengeschichte eingehaust und sucht vergebens  … das enge Interesse zu einem welthistorischen zu erweitern.’

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Hospitality, honesty, uprightness, fidelity and friendship unto death, humanity, clemency and magnanimity under the duress of battle, a heroic mindset, unshakeable steadfastness, superhuman bravery, audacity and willingness to sacrifice oneself for honour, duty and justice; [these] virtues  … fill us with courage to word and deed, with pride and trust in fatherland and people, with hope of a future return of German glory and worldwide greatness.22 It was for the sake of these eternally valid virtues, rather than a straightforward application of the narrative to the current political situation, that Vischer promoted the Nibelungs as the ideal operatic heroes: ‘The Nibelung heroes are truly German character types, such as a people creates them in prehistoric times (based on vaguely historical traits) as a mirror image of their best moral powers.’ 23 He hoped that to see those exemplary characters on stage would have a beneficial influence on the self-indulgent contemporary public. However, the archaic strangeness of the medieval heroes would prohibit their appearance in spoken drama. Vischer here ignored the numerous Nibelung tragedies that had already made it to the German stages. For him opera was the only appropriate medium: Thus opera presents itself as a form that tempers the brutal and gruff elements, enriches and expands the simple feelings of these taciturn and harsh heroes and heroines, without dragging them into the sphere of enlightened consciousness, which would destroy the uniquely grandiose darkness of their nature.24 Vischer then sets out a five-act scenario in order to strengthen his claim that an epic poem of the scope of the Nibelungenlied was well suited to the requirements of the operatic stage. For practical reasons he proposed dividing the opera into two parts, ending with Siegfried’s death and the extinction of the Nibelungs at Etzel’s court respectively. Inspired by Vischer’s draft, Louise Otto took up the cause of the operatic Nibelungs, versifying this scenario and publishing three scenes of Act 1 22 Quoted in Wunderlich, ‘“ Ein Hauptbuch bei der Erziehung der Jugend …”’, p. 142: ‘Gastlichkeit, Biederkeit, Redlichkeit, Treue und Freundschaft bis in den Tod, Menschlichkeit, Milde und Großmuth in des Kampfes Noth, Heldensinn, unerschütterlicher Standmuth, übermenschliche Tapferkeit, Kühnheit, und willige Opferung für Ehre, Pflicht und Recht; Tugenden, die  … zugleich mit Muth zu Wort und That, mit Stolz und Vertrauen auf Vaterland und Volk, mit Hoffnung auf dereinstige Wiederkehr Deutscher Glorie und Weltherrlichkeit erfüllen.’ 23 Vischer, ‘Vorschlag zu einer Oper’, p. 403: ‘Die Nibelungen-Helden sind ächt deutsche Charaktertypen, wie sich solche ein Volk in der vorgeschichtlichen Zeit auf der Grundlage nicht weiter erkennbarer historischer Züge als Spiegelbild seiner besten sittlichen Kräfte dichtet.’ 24 Ibid., p. 409: ‘[So] bietet sich  … die Oper, als eine Form dar, worin das Rohe und allzu Schroffe sich mildert, die einfache Gefühlswelt dieser wortlos rauhen Helden und Heldinnen sich bereichern und erweitern läßt, ohne doch in jene Sphäre heller Bewußtheit hinübergezogen zu werden, worin das eigenthümlich großartige Dunkel dieser Naturen zerstört würde.’

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in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.25 In a letter to Vischer she vividly describes the impact her draft made on the composers amongst Brendel’s acquaintance, notably Schumann, Mendelssohn and Niels W. Gade.26 At this stage she considered the Danish composer the best choice for the monumental task, and hoped to ‘hear the Nibelungs sing’ in 1847, a wish that was ultimately disappointed when Gade left Leipzig for Denmark in 1848. Vischer’s division of the Nibelung epic into two parts  –  which had been prefigured in several spoken tragedies  –  solves a crucial continuity problem of the medieval epic poem that welded together two originally unrelated epic traditions: the story of Brunhild’s betrayal and Siegfried’s death, and the story of the downfall of the Burgundians at the court of Etzel.27 For nineteenth-century dramatists and librettists, who tried to create consistent characters, Kriemhild and Hagen in particular were problematic. In the first part of the poem Kriemhild (though without doubt a central figure) mainly appears as the meek sister of the Burgundian kings and Siegfried’s loving bride, cruelly betrayed by her relatives. In the second part she mutates to a reckless avenger who does not rest until countless heroes have been slain for her personal revenge; finally she kills Hagen by her own hands. Hagen in turn undergoes the reverse transformation. In the first part he is a rather sinister figure who from the start jealously eyes Siegfried’s treasures and who kills him in an act of betrayal. In the second part he is aware of the impending doom but remains the most faithful servant of the royal brothers and thus becomes an epitome of the proverbial Nibelungentreue (Nibelung fidelity). This quality made him the perfect role model during the First World War when the mythical Nibelungentreue was invoked to characterise the special relationship between the German and Habsburg Empires.28 The tradition continued during the interwar period and the Third Reich, culminating in Joseph Goebbels’s Stalingrad speech on 30 January 1943. In nineteenth-century dramas Hagen is generally portrayed positively, which has repercussions for the character of Kriemhild whose revenge is the focal point for many playwrights, as the titles of their tragedies indicate. Wagner in contrast evaded the continuity problem by constructing his storyline backwards from Siegfried’s death, which allowed him to cast Hagen as a purely negative character and to dismiss Kriemhild/Gutrune as a non-entity in a powerplay beyond her control. It is unclear whether Wagner relied on Vischer’s and Otto’s ideas. He drafted his Nibelung project in October 1848 and expanded it into dramatic form in November and December 1852; the full text was printed privately one year later.29 25 Otto, ‘Die Nibelungen als Oper’, NZfM 23 no. 44 (28 November 1845), pp. 175–6; no. 46 (5 December 1845), pp. 181–3. The full text was published as Die Nibelungen: Text zu einer grossen heroischen Oper in 5 Acten: Manuscript (Gera, 1852). 26 Quoted in Schinköth, ‘Einmischung ins Musikleben’, p. 89. 27 Gottfried Weber and Werner Hoffmann (eds), Nibelungenlied, 4th edn (Stuttgart, 1974), pp. 30 ff. 28 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, pp. 88 ff. 29 John Deathridge, Martin Geck and Egon Voss (eds), Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis: Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen (Mainz, 1986), pp. 393, 352–3.

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In retrospect Wagner claimed that his text had sparked a general interest for the Nibelung story among composers, librettists and playwrights, relegating his literary predecessors to the role of mere epigones.30 Ironically Louise Otto made an identical claim in 1853, stating in a letter to her fiancé, the political activist and fellow writer August Peters: ‘I’m aware that nowadays, when old-German myths are brought into opera everywhere and Wagner too works on the Nibelungs, nobody remembers that it was me who made the first proposal in the Zeitschrift für Musik in 1845.’31 In fact, besides the numerous spoken tragedies (of which Wagner acknowledges only Ernst Raupach’s drama), several composers had contemplated the Nibelung story before Wagner’s plans or even Otto’s scenario became public knowledge, attesting to the more widespread appeal of the Nibelungs to artists in search of appropriate material. In 1840 Fanny Hensel suggested a Nibelung opera to her brother Felix, but despite a lively correspondence on the subject the plan was ultimately abandoned. Around the same time Schumann included the Nibelungs in a list of possible operatic projects, and in 1847 the poet Ludwig Rellstab sent a script for a Nibelung opera to Meyerbeer, which even would have featured norns and valkyries, normally considered a Wagnerian innovation.32 It is tempting to speculate how Wagner would have reacted to a Nibelung opera by his arch-rival Meyerbeer; as it was, he poured his most biting scorn on the composer Heinrich Dorn (1804–92), whose opera Die Nibelungen was premiered in Weimar under Liszt’s baton on 20 January 1854: However, some time before this discrete publication [of the Ring text], some excerpts from my poem as well as my Nibelungen project had drawn the attention and the mostly ridiculing reviews in journals.  … A first symptom of the attention paid to my happy idea emerged in the appearance of a grand opera ‘Die Nibelungen’ by the Berlin Kapellmeister H. Dorn, [an opera] where a popular singer is said to have made great effect by jumping onto the stage on horseback.33 Wagner was bitter for several reasons. The first was his grudge against Dorn 30 Richard Wagner, ‘Epilogischer Bericht über die Umstände und Schicksale, welche die Ausführung des Bühnenfestspieles “Der Ring des Nibelungen” bis zur Veröffentlichung der Dichtung desselben begleiteten’, GSD, vol. 6 (Leipzig, 1872), pp. 260–3. 31 Letter dated 29 March 1853, published in Louise Otto-Peters, ed. Ludwig and Jorek, p. 37: ‘Ich weiß daß nun wo man lauter altdeutsche Sagen in die Oper bringt u. auch Wagner Nibelungen schreibt kein Mensch daran denkt daß ich 1845 in der Zeitschrift [für] Musik die erste Anregung dazu gab.’ 32 Jost, ‘Die Nibelungen auf dem Weg zur Oper’, pp. 486 f. and 493 f. 33 Wagner, ‘Epilogischer Bericht’, pp. 261–2: ‘Bereits länger vor jener seiner diskreten Veröffentlichung waren aber Theile meines Gedichtes, sowie das Vorhaben meiner Beschäftigung mit dem Nibelungenstoffe  … zur Beachtung und meistens spaßhaften Besprechung in Journalen gelangt.  … Ein erstes Symptom von der Beachtung meines glücklichen Griffes tauchte mir mit dem Erscheinen einer großen Oper “die Nibelungen” vom Berliner Kapellmeister H. Dorn auf, in welcher eine beliebte Sängerin, zu Pferde auf die Bühne sprengend, großen Effekt gemacht haben soll.’

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dating back to their days in Riga, when Dorn replaced Wagner as music director after the latter was dismissed from the theatre. Second, Liszt was supposed to be the champion of Wagner, not that of any other composer. Liszt saw things slightly differently: When asked by Lina Ramann for the most significant performances he had achieved in Weimar, he mentioned Dorn’s Nibelungen side by side with Tannhäuser and Lohengrin (the other operas were Flotow’s Martha, Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, Schumann’s Genoveva and Manfred, Sobolewski’s Komala, Rubinstein’s Die sibirischen Jäger, Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella and Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad).34 Third, the famous singer in question was Wagner’s niece Johanna Wagner, who first created the role of Elisabeth in Tannhäuser but who did not campaign as actively for her uncle’s music dramas as he might have wished. Wagner’s account is of questionable reliability not only because Johanna calmly rode rather than leaped onto the stage (as Therese Vogl later did in Götterdämmerung), but also for reasons of chronology. Unfortunately Wagner’s negative assessment has been accepted and perpetuated by practically all scholars engaging with Dorn’s opera, including Bernd Zegowitz in his otherwise illuminating chapter on the operatic reception of the Nibelungenlied before Wagner, as well as Adelyn Peck Leverett, who has written the hitherto only study of Dorn’s opera in the English language.35 While it is quite likely that Dorn and Liszt hastened Die Nibelungen into production to pre-empt Wagner’s Rheingold, or that Liszt wanted, as Alan Walker suggests, to kindle the Weimar court’s interest for Wagner’s trilogy by offering Dorn’s Nibelungen as a taster,36 the initial inspiration for Dorn’s opera predates Wagner’s Ring by several years and belongs into the context of the projects by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Vischer, Otto and Rellstab. According to his memoirs Dorn’s interest in the Nibelungs goes back to 1844, when he set aside the revision of a previous opera in favour of the new project.37 At his request a civil servant named Krieger developed a five-act scenario based on Raupach’s tragedy of 1834; however, the draft proposal turned out not to be viable, and the opera was shelved for several years. After taking up the post of Kapellmeister at the Berlin court theatre in 1849 Dorn completed a Nibelung overture in the spring of 1852. It is conceivable that his renewed interest in the Nibelungenlied was inspired less by rumours of Wagner’s plans than by the historicist climate prevailing in Berlin under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who according to Dorn showed an active interest in the libretto. After the completion of the overture Dorn sketched what became the pivotal scene of Act 4, the confrontation of the Burgundians and Chriemhild at Etzel’s court. For this scene he also composed the entrance chorus ‘Vom Rhein, vom deutschen Rhein’ (From the Rhine, from the German Rhine); only then he drafted all five acts, relying again 34 Quoted in Allan Keiler, ‘Liszt and the Weimar Hoftheater’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 28 (1986), p. 446. 35 Zegowitz, ‘Die Nibelungen vor dem Ring’, p. 270; Adelyn Peck Leverett, ‘Liszt, Wagner and Heinrich Dorn’s Die Nibelungen’, COJ 2 (1990), pp. 121–44. 36 Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. 2: The Weimar Years, 1848–1861 (London, 1989), p. 234, n. 26. 37 Heinrich Dorn, Aus meinem Leben: Erinnerungen (Berlin, [1870]), pp. 40 ff.

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mainly on Raupach’s tragedy. The choice of the five-act format may be significant, since it situates the opera in the context of both historical tragedy and French grand opéra. At Dorn’s request the actor Ernst Gerber versified the sketch, and together they pillaged other Nibelung dramas such as Franz Rudolph Hermann’s trilogy of 1819, the tragedy Chriemhilds Rache (1822) by Wilhelm Müller (of Die schöne Müllerin fame), Siegfried’s Tod by Christian Wurm (1839) and Kriemhildens Rache by Reinald Reimar (1853), completing the libretto in October 1852.38 The composition must have proceeded very swiftly, because it was finished towards the end of 1852 with the finale of Act 3. By this time the libretto had already been printed and copies were sent to Berlin’s theatrical director Botho von Hülsen as well as Franz Liszt in Weimar. The first Berlin performance took place on 27 March 1854, hard on the heels of the Weimar premiere; the opera was repeated in Berlin twenty-five times during the next decade and performed in Königsberg, Breslau, Vienna and several other German cities. The libretto is obviously indebted to Raupach’s Der Nibelungen-Hort in several ways. One instance is the almost literal transfer of Siegfried’s final dialogue with Hagen into Act 3 of the opera, noted by Robert Didion,39 another is that the Burgundians think that the Nibelung treasure is cursed. The latter detail makes little sense without Raupach’s play, which opens with Siegfried’s fight with the dragon to liberate Chriemhild and to win the treasure.40 In several other points Dorn and Gerber deviated from their models, and it is in these changes that their otherwise undocumented dramatic intentions can be discovered. For example, they changed the transition from Act 3 to Act 4. In the play Etzel’s messengers enter in Act 4 after Siegfried’s funeral, whereas in Act 3 of the opera Chriemhild grasps at this opportunity for revenge immediately after Siegfried’s death while literally standing over the body of her husband, making Etzel the willing tool of her plans. For greater dramatic impact they shortened Act 5 to the most basic showdown, and relocated the fateful quarrel of the queens from the steps of Worms cathedral to the rose-garden outside Worms. The latter decision may betray an influence of Hermann’s play Siegfried (in both versions Chriemhild enters the scene with delay, giving Brunhild time to brood), but Dorn and Gerber may also have been careful to avoid a direct comparison with the confrontation of Elsa and Ortrud in Act 2 of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Interestingly, the title page of the vocal score of 38 Adolf Glaser, who started his literary career with Kriemhildens Rache under the pseudonym Reinald Reimar, studied philosophy and history in Berlin; thus it is possible that Dorn and Gerber could draw on his play before the publication. 39 Robert Didion, ‘Heinrich Dorn’, Piper’s Enzyklopädie des Musiktheaters, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Sieghart Döhring (Munich, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 55–7. Didion’s article on this opera, which he announces in the bibliography, was apparently never published. For a blow-by-blow comparison of the Nibelungenlied, Raupach’s drama and Gerber’s libretto see Danielle Buschinger, ‘Ernst Raupach: Der NibelungenHort und Heinrich Dorn: Die Nibelungen: Zwei Beispiele für die produktive Nibelungenlied-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Wort unde vîse, singen unde sagen: Festschrift für Ulrich Müller zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz (Göppingen, 2007), pp. 223–36. 40 Ernst Raupach, Der Nibelungen-Hort: Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen, mit einem Vorspiel (Hamburg, 1834).

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Die Nibelungen is illustrated with both Siegfried’s fight with the dragon and the quarrel of the queens outside the church, though neither features in the opera.41 Apparently the publisher did not want to forego the appeal of these scenes which had imprinted themselves on the popular imagination. The extensive cast of the epic poem and the dramatic adaptations had to be whittled down to a smaller operatic ensemble focusing on a few chief characters: Günther’s brothers Gernot and Giselher disappear as well as  –  more importantly  –  the heroes Dietrich von Bern and Rüdiger von Bechelaren, who in the final battles of the Nibelungenlied are torn between their allegiance to Etzel and their friendship with the Burgundians. Thus in the opera the showdown is reduced to a direct opposition of Chriemhild, Etzel and the Huns on one side and the Burgundians on the other. Dorn’s most significant departure from all other Nibelung adaptations, however, was made apparently without recourse to a previous model: Brunhild loves Günther.42 After she is vanquished in combat by Günther and an invisibly supporting Siegfried, she vents her anger and hurt pride in a magnificent entrance aria. However, when Günther woos her with the rather insipid cavatina ‘Komm an den Rhein’ (Come to the Rhine), she genuinely falls in love with him and acknowledges that his love restored her to her ‘better self ’, i.e. turned her from proud warrior maiden into loving wife. Even after she learns of her husband’s duplicity, she concedes: ‘I can forgive the deeds of love; but treachery be accursed!’43 In this context it is interesting to note that Günther is sung by a tenor, while the quintessential German hero Siegfried is relegated to the baritone range. This decision was sharply criticised by Adam Rauh, the author of the first (and only) full-length study of Dorn’s operas.44 According to Rauh, operatic convention would demand a weak yet royal character to be cast as a lyrical baritone, not as a romantic tenor. Dorn may have made this unusual decision due to musical considerations, because otherwise the opera would lack a tenor lead after Siegfried’s death in Act 3. It also indicates an unusual inversion of hierarchy and makes Siegfried an older and more respectable figure than the youthful and irresponsible character from the Ring. This impression was enhanced by the mature appearance of Heinrich Salomon, who created the role of Siegfried in Berlin and who was praised for his calm, noble and chivalric elegance.45 Dorn’s sympathetic treatment of Günther’s and Brunhild’s relationship has two major consequences for motivating the catastrophe of the Nibelungs. First of all, it removes the indelicacy of Siegfried’s assistance to his brother-in-law during 41 Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen: Große Oper in 5 Acten von E. Gerber (Berlin, [1854]). 42 This was also noted by Zegowitz, ‘Die Nibelungen vor dem Ring’, p. 271. 43 Dorn, Die Nibelungen, p. 85: ‘Ich kann verzeihn was Liebe that; Fluch aber treffe den Verrath!’ 44 Adam Rauh, Heinrich Dorn als Opernkomponist, 1804–1892 (Neustadt a.d. Aisch, 1939), pp. 67–8. Despite being written in the 1930s, Rauh’s dissertation is a sensitive and careful exploration of Dorn’s style; nowhere the discussion of the nationalist aspects of the works descends into National-Socialist jargon. 45 Eduard Bloch’s Album der Bühnen-Costüme: Mit erläuterndem Texte von F. Tietz, vol. 1 (Berlin, [1859]), n.p.

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1.1 Heinrich Salomon as Siegfried in Dorn’s Die Nibelungen. The costume for the performances at the Berlin court opera emphasises Siegfried’s chivalric character.

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the latter’s wedding night in the Nibelungenlied: if Brunhild submits voluntarily and gladly to Günther, there is no need for Siegfried to interfere in the marital bed. Consequently Dorn transformed the belt that Siegfried originally wrestles from Brunhild into a ring which the hero picks up randomly in Isenland. Dorn was rather proud of his invention, as he states in his memoirs: ‘Thus I evaded a most embarrassing, if not obscene explanation, and at the same time saved, I think, the honour of the hero  … Perhaps my method could be called prudish, but it has nowhere been criticised.’46 The Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV and even Nibelungenlied specialist von der Hagen approved of the change, which does of course not exonerate the composer from the charge of prudishness. In fact, from his incensed reaction to Wagner’s Ring it becomes quite obvious that it was Dorn’s own sense of decorum that had motivated him to interfere with the original: The horrible crudeness that characterises the majority of this drama’s characters revolts against the nation-wide popularisation of such a story [the Ring] with our national character  … The bottomless wickedness of the deities and the hideous beastliness of the earthborn characters, the abundance of shameless situations that scorn all morality (all recent French sensational pieces shrink in comparison)  …  –  such stuff can never strike root with a wider public, least of all with the people.47 Dorn’s verdict that Wagner’s Ring distorted and blemished the national character is indicative of the central role that the Nibelungs played for the German self-image. Though it is easy to dismiss the criticisms as the spite of the unsuccessful rival, they should not simply be rejected as the rants of a disappointed reactionary. As the discussion of Cyrill Kistler’s opera Baldurs Tod in Chapter 3 will demonstrate, even Wagnerians of a younger generation found the Ring’s disregard of conventional morality rather trying. However, Dorn’s decision to make Brunhild and Günther a genuinely loving couple had an even more important consequence than preserving a sense of bourgeois decorum. His move elevates the concept of Treue  –  variously translatable as loyalty, truth or constancy  –  to the conceptual centre of the opera. The work thus celebrates a character trait particularly important to the identity of nineteenth-century Germans, as has been suggested above with regard to the political applications of the idea of Nibelungentreue from 46 Dorn, Aus meinem Leben, p. 42: ‘So umging ich eine höchst peinliche, wenn nicht anstößige Erklärung, und rettete zugleich, wie mir schien, die Ehre des Helden  … Vielleicht nennt man mein Verfahren Prüderie, aber es ist noch nirgends bemängelt worden.’ 47 Heinrich Dorn, Ergebnisse aus Erlebnissen: Fünfte Folge der Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1877), pp. 90–1: ‘Wider das Eingebürgert- und Beliebtwerden eines solchen Stoffes streitet grade bei unserm Nationalcharakter eine entsetzliche Rohheit, welche die meisten Personen dieses Dramas kennzeichnet  … Die bodenlose Schlechtigkeit der Ueberirdischen und die scheussliche Gemeinheit der Erdgebornen, die Fülle jeder Sitte hohnsprechender schamloser Situationen, denen gegenüber alle neueren französischen Sensationsstücke einschrumpfen  …  –  dergleichen kann niemals bei einem grösseren Publicum, am allerwenigsten im Volke Wurzel schlagen.’

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the German Empire to the Third Reich. In fact, Treue can even be traced back to the first utterances of a proto-national consciousness in the age of Humanism, when German constancy was invoked as the antidote to ‘welsche Tücke’, the perfidy of the ‘others’. 48 In the nineteenth century Treue featured in numerous songs, such as Arndt’s Des Deutschen Vaterland where the seventh stanza locates Germany ‘where a handclasp is an oath, where Treue brightly sparkles in the eye and love rests warmly in the heart.’49 In Dorn’s reading of the Nibelung story Treue pervades and binds together the private and the political levels. In the sense of marital fidelity, Treue first of all characterises the romantic relationships. By making Günther and Brunhild as devoted a couple as Siegfried and Chriemhild, Dorn undermines the latters’ exclusive claim to sharing a deep emotional bond and thus creates a symmetry of lovers. Just as Chriemhild is prepared to kill for the sake of her husband Siegfried, Dorn’s Brunhild is ready to die for her husband Günther  –  not for her former lover Siegfried, as in the Ring, since their previous relationship belongs only to the Nordic tradition on which Wagner drew, not the German Nibelungenlied. When she enters in Act 4 she is clad in armour like the Burgundian warriors and clearly prepared to participate in the fight. The symmetry of the two couples finds more or less sophisticated expression in the music associated with them. In Act 1, after Brunhild has yielded to Günther’s persuasive cavatina, the couple breaks into a short duet. Its straightforward poetic imagery, regular four-bar phrases and consistent parallel thirds and sixths sound rather innocuous for the union of a warrior-maiden with a mighty king, though Dorn has taken care to break the rhythmic pattern with the lengthening of the syllable ‘Harmonien’, and lets the voices of hero and heroine cross in the Italianate melisma on ‘Treue’ (Ex. 1.1). Naïve as this music may be, it returns almost literally in Act 5 when Günther and Brunhild are overpowered by the Huns and condemned to death by Chriemhild. She intersperses the ecstatic duet with helplessly raging outcries but cannot prevent its triumphant conclusion. The sprightly dotted accompaniment is replaced by ‘celestial’ triplets in a high range (as far as can be judged from the piano reduction), and the text of the first line is slightly changed to fit the new situation: Das Leben fällt, die Seelen sich umschlingen, Schon rauscht entzückt um uns der Gottheit Licht. Wir stehn vereint und Harmonien klingen: Es wanken Lieb’ und Treue selbst im Tode nicht. Life falls, our souls entwine, Divine light rushes around us delightfully. We stand united and harmonies resound: Love and constancy falter not even in death. The use of Chriemhild’s and Siegfried’s ‘love theme’ is rather more sophisticated, because it also appears divorced from a concrete text as part of the orchestral texture, thus moving from conventional reminiscence motif towards the 48 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, pp. 151–5. 49 Arndt, ‘Des Deutschen Vaterland’, p. 233: ‘Wo Eide schwört der Druck der Hand, / Wo Treue hell vom Auge blitzt, / Und Liebe warm im Herzen sitzt.’

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History in Mighty Sounds Example 1.1  Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen: Große Oper in 5 Acten von E. Gerber (Berlin, [1854]), Act 1, no. 10, Duettino, bars 1–12

 brunhild

 

     
 

   

 


[Maestoso animato]



   
   




 
  


Das Le - ben jauchzt, günther

die See - len sich

 

     

            Das Le - ben jauchzt,

   



    

 

   rauscht um uns in ros’- gem  

   

  

  

    

   

rauscht




   

um uns

6

  




klin

-

 



klin

-













gen, wir sind ver - eint und Har

Treu

-

-

-

Treu

-

-

-

  




  

 









gen,

Ent - zü - cken







  

  

   

  

-

Wir sind ver - eint und Har



 

 

 



9

-

mo - ni - en

     

 



  

 

 

      

      

    

       



 ver - eint und Har   mo - ni - en klin - gen: es wan - ken Lieb’ und

           

  Licht.





-



       

      

   

um - schlin

        


Wir sind ver - eint und Har      
 



in ros’- gem Licht.



 
 gen, wir sind

  
 

-

 





   

   

die See - len sich

    



3

um - schlin



 
  gen, Ent - zü - cken

   





 














f  



 




mo - ni - en

-

mo - ni - en

klin - gen: es wan - ken Lieb’














 


-

-

e

selbst

im To - de

nicht,

-

-

e

selbst

im To - de

nicht,







 



f

   









und
































[Life jubilates, our souls entwine, / Delight rushes around us in rosy light. / We are united and harmonies resound: / Love and constancy falter not even in death.]

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leitmotif.50 It first appears in the overture as the second subject of the sonata form and in augmentation in the overture’s coda (Ex. 1.2). The theme receives its textual explanation in Act 1, when Siegfried demands Chriemhild’s hand in exchange for his services to Günther. His words are fitted rather tortuously to the flowing cantilena, supporting Dorn’s claim that the composition of the overture had actually preceded the conception of the rest of the opera: ‘You know that we love each other with a pure fire; for Chriemhild no sacrifice is too dearly purchased.’51 The theme features next in the orchestral introduction to Act 3 and in fragments during the dialogue between Chriemhild and Siegfried before he departs for the fateful hunting expedition. This relatively short scene is the only instance when the audience can actually witness the close relationship of the lovers on stage; without it the depth of Chriemhild’s unforgiving hatred would seem rather unmotivated. The ‘love theme’ appears one last time after Chriemhild has finally achieved her goal and her enemies are dead. When Etzel wants to embrace her, she rejects him with the angry exclamation that she is and will remain Siegfried’s faithful wife. To the horror of Etzel and his court she stabs herself with a dagger, dying to the accompaniment of her and Siegfried’s ‘love theme’: ‘My Siegfried, dear Siegfried, take me to you in love.’ 52 Dorn thus makes it abundantly clear that Chriemhild’s revenge crusade was motivated solely by her overriding love and fidelity to Siegfried. While nineteenth-century audiences might have  –  in real life  –  disapproved of the bloodshed caused by such deep emotion, the concept of wifely faithfulness unto death will have met with approval. Sacrificial loyalty unto death also underpins the political aspect of the operatic plot. This type of Treue is centred on the figure of Hagen, who  –  contrary to Wagner and other Nibelung dramas  –  is cast throughout as the most faithful servant to his king and an unequivocally positive figure. He foresees the dire consequences of Günther’s and Siegfried’s deception of Brunhild from the start and warns Günther never to trust anybody whose love is not exclusively devoted to his master and king. This warning is of course directed at Siegfried who betrays his role in Brunhild’s conquest in order to placate his wife’s jealousy. Interestingly Hagen reminded several contemporary critics of Meyerbeer’s operatic style.53 The anonymous reviewer of the Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung, who is generally more critically disposed towards Dorn, explicitly conjures up the spectre of Meyerbeer’s eclecticism, which makes little sense in stylistic terms, since Hagen’s utterances are dignified and gloomy throughout. Perhaps the low bass part, if not the positive characterisation, reminded him of Bertram in Robert le diable. Hagen is willing 50 Adelyn Peck Leverett points out several other examples of even more sophisticated and almost ‘Lisztian’ instances of motivic transformation, credited to Liszt’s influence on Dorn during the composition of Die Nibelungen. See Leverett, ‘Liszt, Wagner and Heinrich Dorn’s Die Nibelungen’, p. 130. 51 Dorn, Die Nibelungen, p. 20: ‘Du weisst wir lieben uns mit reinem Feuer / für Chriemhild ist kein Opfer mir zu theuer.’ 52 Ibid., p. 169: ‘Mein Siegfried, theurer Siegfried, nimm in Lieb’ mich hin.’ 53 This was noted in both G.E., ‘Berliner Briefe’, Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung für Kunstfreunde und Künstler 2 no. 16 (22 April 1854), p. 124, and ‘Dorn’s Nibelungen’, Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung 2 no. 17 (29 April 1854), p. 133.

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History in Mighty Sounds Example 1.2  Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen, Overture, bars 84–95

84

       
         

             





dolce.

       

                        


 

            

                          

          





87




             


                 

                         



   93         

      

        

                 

                      



        

 

90




to bear the consequences of Günther’s deception (when he won Brunhild) and Siegfried’s betrayal (when he divulged it to Chriemhild) and to kill Siegfried. Dorn and Gerber are very careful to exonerate Hagen as far as possible by involving him in a dialogue with Siegfried where the two basically agree on the centrality of Treue: Hagen asks: ‘If a dear friend besmirches the honour of the man to whom you are bound by loyalty, would you not kill that friend?’ Siegfried readily agrees, thus unknowingly pronouncing his death sentence. They then join their voices in manly unison at the words: ‘We hold on to honour and loyalty, may God’s grace assist this oath.’54 This death-defying commitment to Treue is not restricted to the main characters, i.e. the ruling upper classes, but extends to the chorus of the Burgundian warriors, i.e. the people. The role of the chorus in portraying the nation in its entirety, not just in its outstanding individuals, has persuasively been highlighted by James Parakilas.55 Without the explicit involvement of the chorus, 54 Dorn, Die Nibelungen, p. 102: ‘Schmäht ein dir lieber Freund des Mannes Ehre, dem Du Treu geschworen, wirst du nicht tödten diesen Freund?’ ‘Fest halten wir an Ehr’ und Treu’, Gott steh dem Schwur in Gnaden bei!’ 55 James Parakilas, ‘Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera’, 19th-Century Music 16 (1992), pp. 181–202.

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Dorn’s Nibelungen would indeed  –  as Vischer feared  –  have remained on the level of an apolitical family saga, a private fight between brother(-in-law) and sister(in-law). The moral code of a nation of warriors finds its most chilling expression in the finale of Act 4. After Chriemhild and her followers have threatened the Burgundians (or, as they are known since Siegfried’s death, the Nibelungs) with death and destruction, they gather around their king and queen, draw their swords and solemnly lower the tips of their weapons.56 Günther and Brunhild hold their hands above the swords and consecrate them, chanting in heroic falling and rising lines  –  the unison contrasting starkly with their playful parallel thirds and sixths in Act 1  –  over a memorable ten-bar series of chords to be performed Largo maestoso (Ex. 1.3). At this point the warriors kneel, and the chorus, lead by Volker (tenor), Dankwart (baritone) and Hagen (bass) responds, articulating the chordal sequence in four-part writing interspersed with semiquaver runs of the orchestra: Hört den Schwur auf ’s Neu: Was uns auch bedroht ewig fest und treu theilen wir die Noth treu bis in den Tod!57 Hear the oath anew: whatever threatens us we share the adversity, eternally steadfast and loyal, loyal unto death. For its religious overtones this scene was appropriately called Todesweihe   –  –  by the critic Carl Friedrich Weitzmann.58 It consecration of or to death   is evident that these bars  –  and by extension the scene  –  are central to the interpretation of the entire opera because they form the opening of the overture, where the semiquaver runs are then developed into a transitional theme depicting the fight against the Huns. Again it is worth remembering that the overture and the conception of Act 4 preceded the rest of the opera, making it likely that the concept of Nibelungentreue was the guiding principle of Dorn’s reading of the drama. In the overture the non-directional juxtaposition of chords in root position largely sounds sombre and archaic (except for the rather forced cadential move back to D major in the last segment), conjuring the vision of a distant (pre-tonal) era, a sense of ‘once upon a time’ that accords with the concept of couleur du temps sometimes used in grand opéra. The solemn tone is emphasised by the scoring with low brass; in a letter to Liszt Dorn was explicitly looking forward to the moment when the Weimar trombonists would play the first chord in 56 While the vocal score contains no stage directions, they are included in a printed libretto bound with the copy in the Bodleian Library. As Dorn states in his memoirs, the libretto had been available since 1853. 57 Dorn, Die Nibelungen, pp. 153–4. 58 C. F. W[eitzmann]., ‘Aus Berlin: Die Nibelungen: Oper in fünf Acten von E. Gerber: Musik von H. Dorn’, NZfM 40 no. 16 (14 April 1854), p. 170.

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History in Mighty Sounds Example 1.3  Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen, Act 4, Finale, bars 32–41

 brunhild



32

Largo maestoso



günther  








  f    

To

-

des Wei - he nehmt ent - ge

-

gen,

Des

To

-

des Wei - he nehmt ent - ge

-

gen,

  

35

     

 
 








al

-

te

Band,

fe - stet sei

das

al

-

te

Band,





     De

-

gen,

De

-

gen,

  





    












 



38

 






  



das

 

  




   



    

       

fe - stet sei



   







    

       

Des




      

 










   





  

 

 

 



im




letz

-

ten Kampf ihr tap - fern

im

letz

-

ten Kampf ihr tap - fern

  

 

 







   


  

ste - hen

All’



in Got

-

tes Hand.

wir

ste - hen

All’

in Got

-

tes Hand.

 









 

ge -

wir



ge -



pp

   
 

      

[Accept the consecration of death, / the old bond shall be confirmed; / in the final battle, ye brave warriors, / we are all in God’s hand.]

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D major.59 However, when the chordal sequence is reinterpreted as the Todesweihe in Act 4, it becomes apparent that this is not an instance of quaint antiquarianism. Rather the opera’s set of values is summarised in the quasi-religious statement ‘loyal unto death’, which not only reminds the listener of Günther’s and Brunhild’s marriage vows from Act 1, but invokes the idea of religious martyrdom familiar from, for example, Revelations 2:10: ‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.’ The theme of martyrdom is then extended to encompass the idea of a glorious death for the sake of Treue, here with the religious overtones of ‘faith’ as well as secular ‘loyalty’ to one’s nation and its leaders, who in turn act in unity with their people. After a rallying cry from Brunhild the act closes with a bellicose unison chorus in rapid 12/8 metre, explicitly linking the death-defying stance of the Burgundians to the German national character: Wohlan, frisch auf in Feindes Reih’n wir wollen fest zusammensteh’n, wir wollen ruhmvoll untergeh’n, ein Denkmal deutscher Treue sein.60 Go to, go forth in[to] the ranks of the enemies, we want to stand fast together, we want to perish with honour, a monument of German loyalty. The invocation of their Treue as German lifts their willingness to die from the participation in a family feud  –  Vischer’s ‘family saga’ without ‘world-historical relevance’  –  to an act of individual and collective self-affirmation as Germans rather than as Burgundians or Nibelungs. Furthermore, through their sacrificial oath, the warriors invest their German fatherland with a quasi-religious importance and dignity. In their aspiration to become a ‘monument of German Treue’ the ‘medieval’ heroes on the stage even anticipate their own reception history in modern Germany, consciously becoming part of nineteenth-century memorial culture that had just started erecting monuments to the ‘great men’ of the past. For the mid-nineteenth century Dorn’s and Gerber’s stark invocation of Nibelungentreue is rather unusual, since its militancy and death-defiance came to the fore, as Klaus von See has pointed out, rather towards the end of the nineteenth and more explicitly in the twentieth century.61 Unfortunately Dorn’s memoirs offer no clue as to why this scene was so central to his artistic imagination that it was the first to be composed, and he is altogether silent on his artistic or political views in the 1840s and 1850s. There is some indication that Dorn shared the cruel disappointment after the March Revolution. In a note scribbled onto a copy of his work Deutsche Nationalhymne of 1848 he lamented the ‘smell of corpses’ 59 Letter to Franz Liszt, 4 December 1853, printed in La Mara, Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, vol. 1: 1824–1854 (Leipzig, 1895), pp. 301–2. 60 Dorn, Die Nibelungen, pp. 155–7. 61 Von See, ‘Das Nibelungenlied  –  ein Nationalepos?’, p. 60.

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History in Mighty Sounds

pervading Germany.62 His opera could thus be read as a desperate call to action at a point when all hopes for national unity had been put on hold, reminding his fellow countrymen that they should aspire to a heroic attitude in order to stay true to their inherited national character. On the other hand, the finale of Act 4 can be quite comfortably explained in terms of operatic convention. Scenes with solemn oaths and vows were a staple ingredient of historical tragedies and grand opéra, with famous examples like Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell or the consecration of the swords from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots predating Die Nibelungen by several decades. If Dorn had aimed mainly for a theatrical coup (which of course a German composer rather should not have done) his efforts were richly rewarded: during the opera’s first run in Berlin the composer was called forth by the enraptured audience every time after Act 4.63 Even more popular than the Todesweihe scene, however, was an altogether less belligerent and more jovial expression of ‘deutsche Treue’, whose music evoked the familiar style of middle-class male choirs rather than a past age of gloomy heroism. The entrance chorus of the Burgundian warriors at Etzel’s court, ‘Vom Rhein, vom deutschen Rhein’ was so popular with Berlin audiences that it had to be repeated at every performance,64 notwithstanding the sneering of some music critics who considered such fare below the standards of serious opera. The reviewer G.E. quite rightly remarked that such Liedertafel (i.e. choral society) style would transport the audience from the heroic Middle Ages straight into the domestic sphere of musical entertainments.65 Five years later the editor of an album of costume figurines called the Rheinlied a Volksgesang (Song of the people) resounding the length and breadth of Germany.66 The simple four-part setting is first sung a cappella by Volker, Günther, Dankwart and Hagen, its lack of orchestral accompaniment underscoring its kinship with contemporary musical culture. From a comparison with the other major choral scenes it is apparent that Dorn aimed here for a recognisably vernacular idiom, contrasting with those choruses that represent two distinct exotic othernesses: the choruses of the Icelandic maidens in Brunhild’s retinue are cast in stern A minor, evoking the bleakness of a Nordic landscape, while the Huns reveal their lack of culture with clashing augmented chords and a ‘barbaric’ texture, with the sopranos doubling the tenor and the altos doubling the bass lines respectively. Inconspicuous as the remaining mixed (Act 2) and male choruses (Act 4) may look, their deliberately un-exotic harmonies and correct four-part writing (never mind the parallel fifths) thus denote the Germans, a message expressed with blatant clarity in the text of the Rheinlied. Its opening lines evoke the landscape of German patriotic longing par excellence, the German Rhine, and would not have been out of place with any nineteenth-century Cologne male choir (Ex. 1.4).67 The Rhine valley 62 Quoted in Rauh, Heinrich Dorn als Opernkomponist, p. 93. 63 C. F. W[eitzmann]., ‘Aus Berlin: Die Nibelungen’, p. 171. 64 Ibid. 65 G.E., ‘Berliner Briefe’, p. 124. 66 Eduard Bloch’s Album der Bühnen-Costüme, n.p. 67 This chorus and Günther’s cavatina ‘Komm an den Rhein’ support Dorn’s testimony that he started thinking about a Nibelung opera while still in Cologne.

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with its vineyards (which are explicitly mentioned in the text) and castles had come to be considered an icon of Germany as such, guarding the border against France. Musically this symbolic function had been enshrined in countless Rhine songs written after the Rhine crisis of 1840, including Die Wacht am Rhein, which almost acquired the status of a national anthem.68 In the Burgundians’ entrance chorus in Act 4, however, such a militant attitude is carefully avoided, since the soloists assert their peaceful intentions and that they only came to the shores of the Danube at the request of Chriemhild. At this point the chorus joins in, and together they bring the short piece to the conclusion: ‘Yea, German loyalty, German word [of honour], that’s the treasure of the Nibelungs.’69 In stark contrast to Chriemhild and Etzel, who crave the (cursed) riches of the Nibelung treasure, the Burgundians in their role as model Germans consider their national virtues  –  German Treue  –  as their most valuable possession. Such an image of the Germans as simple, honest, well-meaning and perhaps even too trusting seems more consistent with the German self-conception in the mid-nineteenth century, rather than the grim defiance of the Todesweihe. This supports Klaus von See’s observation that the focus of the Nibelungenlied reception shifted during the nineteenth century from guileless and boisterous Siegfried to the dark heroism of Hagen.70 Dorn later exploited the popularity of the chorus by publishing it separately as a Festgesang for mixed choir under the title Deutsche Treue, deutsches Wort in July 1871, i.e. in the aftermath of the foundation of the German Empire when  –  momentarily  –  all patriotic hopes seemed fulfilled. This was not the only instance of a piece of music crossing the boundaries between the operatic and the contemporary world: the music of Volker’s diegetic song from Act 2, ‘Wenn hoch ich auf der Halde stehe’, praising valiant German men and chaste German women, had started its life as the Deutsche Nationalhymne mentioned above, first performed in the Cologne theatre on 20 March 1848.71 The date of the performance  –  and possibly the composition  –  suggests that Dorn intended this song as a contribution to the festivities surrounding the revolutionary events in Cologne, again hinting at his national-liberal sympathies in the late 1840s. Thus very similar, essentially song-like musical material in the Deutsche Nationalhymne/Volker’s song and in the Rheinlied could celebrate either the liberal March Revolution of 1848 or the less-than-liberal German Empire of 1870/1 while blending in  –  more or less seamlessly  –  with the demands of a national opera extolling the German virtue of Treue on a grand scale. 68 Porter, The Rhine as Musical Metaphor, pp. 38 ff. Good examples of the many trivial Rhine (wine) songs are offered in Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann and Antje Johannig, Mythos Rhein: Zur Kulturgeschichte eines Stromes (Darmstadt, 2003). 69 Dorn, Die Nibelungen, pp. 135–6: ‘Denn deutsche Treue, deutsches Wort, das ist der Nibelungen Hort.’ 70 Von See, ‘Das Nibelungenlied  –  ein Nationalepos?’, p. 125. 71 Rauh, Heinrich Dorn als Opernkomponist, p. 92. I would like to thank Verena Schmidt from the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Cologne who made every effort to establish the theatrical context for the performance, unfortunately without success.

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History in Mighty Sounds Example 1.4  Heinrich Dorn, Die Nibelungen, Act 4, no. 4, Quartet (and Chorus), bars 36–53 and 80–5


    36  




   


volker

günther Vom Rhein, dankwart

         


  


   
   


vom deut - schen Rhein,

hagen

40 
       

  





               

 wir

im Treu - ver - ein

45

- stran - de

im

   

 


 

 p

 

sei

auch

      p


  

 
Denn     
 

Euch all - hier

    






Euch

be







      
deut - sche Treu - e, deut - sches        


    


p

     



de, wir

ka -

men her

  

-

in

 

Frie - den, der

   

[bars 54–79]

den.







    



Wort,

das

ist der





sind

    


schö - nen Do - nau -

 



nen,

     


p

  



-

                





schie



  

 -

grü

er - schie - nen, am

       



Re - ben

      

fer - nen Un - gar - lan -

f 80 quasi ritenuto.

f

uns - re



         
 


 



50

wo

    

vor

   


     





Ni

   

-

be - lun - gen

 

Hort.



Despite Dorn’s and Wagner’s polemics over the precedence of their respective Nibelung realisations, neither composer was the first to have turned medieval epic poetry into German serious opera. The credit for this is due to Gudrun by Carl Amand Mangold (1813–89), the author of the essay on modern German opera discussed above. He was a member of a musical dynasty based in Hesse and, from 1848 onwards, Kapellmeister at the Darmstadt court theatre. During the past decades he has attracted some scholarly attention for his opera Tanhäuser [sic], which he started writing the same month as

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Wagner.72 Neither composer knew of the other’s attempt, which once more shows that Wagner’s choice of subject material moved very much within the mainstream of nineteenth-century operatic convention. Mangold combined the various elements of the Tannhäuser legend in a different way, without Wagner’s addition of the song contest, and infused the opera with a strong sense of patriotism: after returning from his unsuccessful pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mangold’s protagonist enthusiastically praises the beauties of his native Germany (not unlike Wagner upon returning from Paris in 1842 when he first saw the Wartburg). The choice of the Tannhäuser story is in accordance with the composer’s espousal of German history, legend or myth as basis for emphatically German compositions, as expressed in his article on the future of German opera. He put is own recommendation into practice with the cantatas Die Hermannsschlacht (1845–7), Frithjof (1851–7), Hermanns Tod (1868–70), Barbarossas Erwachen (1874) and the oratorio Wittekind (1845), not to mention a considerable number of patriotic choruses for male voices.73 Thus Mangold’s interest in the medieval Kudrun poem is part of his general preoccupation with the German past and its national myths. As the scant biographic literature on Mangold, mostly written from the vantage point of local history, is silent on any political views the composer may have held, his choice of genre and subject matter need to be taken as the most explicit indication of his  –  in the widest sense  –  patriotic attitude. If the panegyric printed in the family journal Illustrirte Zeitung is correct, Mangold came across the story in an adaptation by Albert Schulz alias San-Marte (1839) and in the more literal translation by Karl Simrock (1843), who had already provided German readers with his influential Nibelungenlied edition: Touched and moved by what he had read, Mangold was compelled to testify to the great impression the heroic poem had made on him. The wonderful epic poem had awakened a mighty lyrical torrent in his soul. Consequently the libretto and the music of the opera Gudrun were created of a piece almost simultaneously.74 The medieval Kudrun poem, which is thought to have originated shortly after 72 Helen Mendl-Schrama, ‘The other “Tanhäuser”’, Wagner 7 (1986), pp. 83–94; Norbert Tschulik, ‘Ein zweiter Tannhäuser: Zur Oper von Carl Ludwig Amand Mangold’, Musicologica Austriaca 13 (1995), pp. 127–37. For a scene-by-scene comparison of Wagner’s and Mangold’s operas see Wolfram Klante, ‘Tannhäuser und Venusberg auf der Bühne des Musiktheaters’, in Tannhäuser in der Kunst, ed. Heinrich Weigel, Wolfram Klante and Ingrid Schulze (Bucha, 1993), pp. 103–49, music examples pp. 251–68. 73 For a list of works and detailed biography see Wilhelm Mangold, ‘Mangold, Carl Amand’, in Hessische Biographien, ed. Hermann Haupt (Darmstadt, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 10–18. 74 ‘Gudrun: Große romantische Oper in 4 Acten’, Illustrirte Zeitung 16 no. 415 (14 June 1851), p. 423: ‘Erfüllt und ergriffen von dem Gelesenen drängte es ihn, Zeugniß abzulegen von den Wirkungen, welche dieses Heldengedicht auf ihn gemacht. Das herrliche Epos hatte einen gewaltigen lyrischen Strom in seiner Seele hervorgerufen. So entstand aus einem Gusse fast zugleich Textbuch und Musik der Oper Gudrun.’

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the Nibelungenlied but is preserved only in one early-modern manuscript, had to wait a few decades longer for its rediscovery and was, in excerpts, first edited by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen in 1820. He was also the first to draw a direct comparison with the Nibelungenlied and called Kudrun its ‘Nebensonne’, or mock sun.75 The strategy of increasing the appeal of medieval works by comparing them with the more familiar classical literature was employed here as well: if the Nibelungenlied’s bloodthirsty tale of treason and bloodshed, culminating in the extinction of an entire family, was perceived to resemble the Iliad, Kudrun with its conciliatory ending was likened to the Odyssey.76 Wilhelm Grimm placed Kudrun even higher than its companion piece; nevertheless at first its reception lingered because, as the comprehensive study of Hagenberg-Miliu shows, it missed the patriotic boost of the Napoleonic Wars that had propelled the popularisation of the Nibelungenlied. By the second half of the century, however, Kudrun had caught up in popularity, and the last decades of the nineteenth century saw practically equal numbers of adaptations and editions of both works.77 Particularly attractive to nineteenth-century readers was the contrast of the female principals: Kriemhild, the merciless avenger of her beloved husband Siegfried on the one hand, and patiently waiting, forgiving Kudrun on the other. If the former represented an archaic, almost heathen era, the latter stood for the dawn of Christian values. As with the Nibelungenlied, the nineteenth century celebrated Kudrun as an exemplification of the finest traits of the German national character, summarised effusively in San-Marte’s otherwise quite sober and scholarly study of the Kudrun sources: I think the true glory and greatness of our poem lies in the fact that almost every line reveals the basic character of true German nationality: loyalty and reliability, chastity and purity, serenity, the fullness and depth of a pure mind, the open acknowledgement of the valuable even amongst the enemy, and a reconciling magnanimity.78 As Wilhelm Grimm argues, this continuity of character was no coincidence: since the poem had emanated from the Wesen, i.e. the essential character, of the entire German people, it showed their vivid picture as in a pure mirror.79 Kudrun also 75 Quoted in Ebba-Christina Hagenberg-Miliu, ‘“… Denn nur der Ruhm des Vaterlandes ist mein Ziel”: Zu Erneuerungen des Nibelungen- und des Kudrunepos’ (PhD dissertation, Bonn 1988), p. 63. 76 For example in Albert Schott’s introduction to Gûdrûn, ed. Alois Joseph Vollmer (Leipzig, 1845), pp. vi–vii. 77 Hagenberg-Miliu, ‘… Denn nur der Ruhm des Vaterlandes ist mein Ziel’, pp. 64, 73, 83. 78 San-Marte (ed.), Gudrun: Nordseesage: Nebst Abhandlung über das mittelhoch­ deutsche Gedicht Gudrun und den Nordseesagenkreis (Berlin, 1839), pp. 274–5: ‘Und darin, mein’ ich, liegt die wahre Herrlichkeit und Größe, und das Ehrwürdige unsers [sic] Gedichts, daß es fast in jeder Zeile den Grundcharakter echtdeutscher Nationalität offenbart, Treue und Verlaessigkeit [sic], Zucht und Keuschheit, den frohen Sinn, die Fuelle und Tiefe des reinen Gemueths, die offene Anerkennung des Werthen auch im Feinde, und die versoehnende Großmuth.’ 79 Hagenberg-Miliu, ‘… Denn nur der Ruhm des Vaterlandes ist mein Ziel’, p. 68.

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attracted more localised (mis)appropriations as a national document: with much of its action revolving around the North Sea, the epic poem potentially appealed to North Germans in particular (in contrast to the Nibelungenlied, set in South Germany). The poet and schoolmaster Karl Heinrich Keck from Schleswig even went so far to liken Kudrun’s captivity and perseverance with the Danish occupation of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein between 1848 and 1866.80 Besides its appeal as testimony of the German national character, it was probably the straightforward structure of Kudrun that attracted a great number of dramatic and several operatic adaptations. Since Kudrun is not nearly as well known as the Nibelungenlied, a short plot summary will help to appreciate the far-reaching changes Mangold introduced to his literary model. The storyline as well as the spelling of proper names follows Karl Simrock’s widely disseminated edition, which was also used by Mangold.81 The epic poem tells the story of the Hegelingen clan and is divided into three major sections, the first two of which were usually disregarded by composers, as they deal with the stories of Gudrun’s grandparents Hagen and Hilde and her parents Hettel and the younger Hilde respectively. The third part starts when several suitors arrive at Matalan castle to court Gudrun. Prince Hartmut of Normandy is rejected because of his inferior social position, although Gudrun seems to like him. The more practically minded Herwig von Seeland besieges Hettel’s castle until the old king is forced to submit his daughter. Hartmut, however, has not yet given up. While Hettel and Herwig are at war with yet another rejected candidate, he abducts Gudrun and her female companions. Hettel is killed by Hartmut’s father King Ludwig in the battle on the island Wulpensand. The old warrior Wate advises the Hegelingen to give up the pursuit because of their great losses, and thus Gudrun arrives in Normandy. She rejects Hartmut’s repeated offers of marriage and swears to remain faithful to her fiancé Herwig. Her obstinacy enrages Hartmut’s mother, Queen Gerlind, who is set to have Gudrun as daughter-in-law to improve her family’s social standing. She tries to break Gudrun’s resistance by forcing her to do menial work, a humiliation that Gudrun’s faithful friend Hildburg volunteers to share. During the thirteenyear exile only Hartmut’s sister Ortrun treats the captive as a friend. One day in late winter, when Gudrun and Hildburg are sent to the beach to launder dirty linen in the icy water, a bird announces that rescue is near. Herwig and Gudrun’s brother Ortwein arrive by boat, and a touching scene of mutual recognition follows. The two warriors promise to return the next day with an army in order to free all the women and to avenge King Hettel’s death. Gudrun exultantly throws the washing into the sea and, when Gerlind wants to whip her for this act of defiance, slyly hints that a future queen should not be punished. Gerlind misunderstands her and tells the rejoicing Hartmut that Gudrun finally consents to marriage; the captive is immediately restored to her status as a noblewoman. The next day, however, witnesses Gudrun’s liberation. The Hegelingen conquer the Norman castle, Ludwig and Gerlind are killed, Hartmut and Ortrun are led into captivity. In contrast to her own fate, Gudrun repays the siblings’ friendliness with 80 K[arl]. H[einrich]. Keck, Die Gudrunsage: Drei Vorträge über ihre erste Gestalt und ihre Wiederbelebung, gehalten in Schleswig im Januar 1867 (Leipzig, 1867), pp. 4–5. 81 Karl Simrock (ed.), Gudrun: Deutsches Heldenlied (Stuttgart, 1843).

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forgiveness and magnanimity. On returning home, Gudrun marries her fiancé Herwig, Hartmut the faithful Hildburg, Ortwein Hartmut’s sister Ortrun, and even one of Gudrun’s rejected suitors finds a bride. The contrast to the ending of the Nibelungenlied, where an entire dynasty is wiped out, could hardly be greater. It is easy to see how this story appealed to nineteenth-century dramatists, in addition to displaying positive ‘national’ characters (Gudrun, Hildburg) offering scope for identification and contrasting them with decidedly disagreeable figures such as Gerlind. The action can easily be reduced to three basic elements  –  abduction, captivity and liberation  –  and abounds in picturesque situations, notably the two noble maidens shivering on the wintry beach. Thus it is not surprising that a literary study from 1902 enumerates seventeen stage works based on Kudrun,82 most of them in the tradition of Schiller’s historical tragedies, including the drama Gudrun by Mathilde Wesendonck (1868). Wesendonck gives the saga a surprising contemporary twist by reinterpreting it as a conflict between the Germans and the French: Gudrun and Hildburg are sent to clean Queen Gerlind’s dirty washing not in the North Sea but in the river Seine.83 Five out of the seventeen stage works are operas, beginning with Mangold’s Gudrun in 1851, and encompassing composers as diverse in their musical approach and political outlook as August Reissmann (1870), August Klughardt (1882), Felix Draeseke (1884) and Oskar Pasch (1888). To these Alan H. Krueck has added a lost Gudrun opera by Oskar Bolck (1865) and one by the Swiss composer Hans Huber (1896).84 Each realisation emphasises different elements of the basic plot, leaving out some figures, compressing the action and interpreting the medieval story from different angles. While Klughardt, for example, stresses the antagonism between Christian Gudrun and heathen Gerlind, with Hartmut torn helplessly between the two strong female figures, Felix Draeseke sets his version entirely in prehistoric pagan times and changes the happy ending into the sacrificial death of Hartmut, obviously inspired by the Wagnerian model.85 These different reinterpretations notwithstanding, Mangold departed from the original to the greatest degree, not just in terms of reading medieval concepts such as triuwe and êre as modern Treue and Ehre, but in wholesale alterations. First he relocates the conflict from the continental North Sea coast to England: the Hegelingen become Anglo-Saxons, and the opera is thus historicised within the context of the Norman invasion of England. This move was perhaps motivated 82 Siegmund Benedict, Die Gudrunsage in der neueren deutschen Literatur (Rostock, 1902). 83 M[athilde]. Wesendonck, Gudrun: Schauspiel in 5 Akten (Zurich, 1868), p. 117. Wesendonck asked Johannes Brahms to read her text, but he politely doubted its suitability as an operatic libretto. 84 Alan H. Krueck, ‘Die Gudrun-Opern des 19. Jahrhunderts: Textgestaltung und Textvergleiche’, in Deutsche Oper zwischen Wagner und Strauss, ed. Sieghart Döhring, Hans John and Helmut Loos (Chemnitz, 1998), pp. 95–114. 85 For a more extensive comparison of the operas by Mangold, Klughardt and Draeseke see Barbara Eichner, ‘Vier Hochzeiten oder ein Todesfall: Die Inszenierung des Kudrun-Epos als Nationaloper’ , in Bühnen der Politik: Die Oper in europäischen Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Sven Oliver Müller and Jutta Toelle (Vienna, 2008), pp. 54–75.

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by a desire to make the opera conform to the standards of grand opéra, where real political conflicts are the driving force of the action. Mangold had studied in Paris from 1836 to 1839 and thus experienced French opera in its heyday, which may have left its imprint on his operatic output.86 Other alterations are less easy to explain, since they offer little dramatic gain or even limit the story’s effectiveness on the stage. The Anglo-Saxons are led by their King Baldur (baritone, originally Hettel); Mangold apparently was either unaware that this name belonged to a Scandinavian god, or he saw no danger of misunderstanding. Herwig is given the characteristic Anglo-Saxon name Alfred but is meant to be Duke of the Frisians (tenor); Hartmut is given the more Franco-Norman name Raimund (bass). Gudrun’s brother Ortwin is sung by a soprano, probably to indicate his relative youth (there is no opportunity for cross-dressing à la Cherubino or Octavian) and to enliven musically the otherwise all-male Anglo-Saxon ensembles in Act 3. In the medieval Kudrun poem, the vassal Horand plays a major role in the second part when his wonderful singing helps Hettel to win Hilde’s heart. Mangold transfers Horand into the Gudrun story and makes him a minstrel whose songs reappear in dramatic key situations, as will be discussed below. Raimund’s parents are eliminated completely from the cast and their negative character traits are collectively transferred to their son who becomes a thoroughly evil figure. No trace of the chivalrous medieval knight remains in this exemplary operatic villain, and his evil character is not balanced by a gentle sister. Mangold’s alterations thus deprive the libretto of two dramatic constellations. First, the potentially effective stage-conflict between two major female characters, Gudrun and her would-be mother-in-law Gerlind, is discarded. Second, Raimund’s lustfulness and reckless cruelty make it easy for Gudrun to resist his repeated offers of heart and hand, while in the Kudrun poem only her inner strength and aristocratic pride prevent her from yielding to Hartmut’s advances. Moreover Mangold even sacrifices both the picturesque scene on the beach, the symbol of Gudrun’s deepest humiliation (the sea is replaced by a well in the courtyard, and Gudrun does not do any manual labour), and the touching recognition scene of the loving couple. Thus her fiancé Alfred is hardly ever seen interacting with his beloved apart from a short farewell duet in Act 1. Finally, there is a complete reinterpretation of the marriage issue: Mangold’s Gudrun consents to marry Raimund in order to free the captive minstrel Horand when she is certain that rescue is near. Unfortunately it is not near enough. Gudrun already stands at the steps of the altar when her father’s ghost appears, preventing Raimund from marrying her. By 1851 this was a rather tired operatic device to get a character out of a tight corner and it sits oddly with the otherwise strictly historical genre. Musically the apparition is not even handled very convincingly, despite superficial similarities to the finale of Don Giovanni. One can only speculate what motivated these far-reaching changes; perhaps Mangold wanted to cater for a number of operatic standard situations such as the preghiera for the damsel in distress, the ombra scene for the ghostly apparition, the spring celebration for the women’s choir, the interrupted wedding. This strategy starkly contradicts Mangold’s own 86 Philipp Schweitzer, Darmstädter Musikleben im 19. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, 1975), pp. 126–7.

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recommendation to develop arias and ensembles organically from a logical storyline, not to interpolate them as the music demands, and to be true to the national subject matter derived from history or legend.87 Contemporary critics appreciated the composer’s claim (proudly displayed on the title page of the printed vocal score) that the opera was adapted from an ‘ancient German heroic poem’88 and did not reproach him for the substantial changes he introduced. On the contrary, the press responded for the greater part with enthusiasm and hailed Gudrun as a solution to the pressing problem of the national stage. Was this finally the desired, truly German opera that everybody, including Franz Brendel and Louise Otto, had longed for? Had Mangold achieved the union of the best elements of contemporary drama, music and stage-craft, thus paving the way to national unity as well? One should not forget that in 1851 Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin had made little impact beyond Dresden and Weimar. Nevertheless it is surprising that an opera that saw only three performances  –  one concert performance in November 185089 and two stage performances at the Darmstadt court theatre on and after 23 March 185190   –  elicited so many responses. The Illustrirte Zeitung in particular testifies to the popularity that the advocates of a new opera for the German people hoped to generate; the family serial published a biographical sketch of Mangold and an illustrated introduction to Gudrun. Most critics tacitly assumed that Gudrun was indeed an emphatically national opera but were at a loss to explain what actually constituted the Germanness of the new work and symptomatically resorted to negative definitions against the foreign foil. Theodor Hahn from the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung sharply distinguished Mangold’s style from French superficial theatrical grandeur, echoing Wagner’s polemical ‘effect without causes’: [Gudrun] is not one of those works characterised by speculative technical virtuosity at the expense of inner value and content, [works] that employ the most unmusical means to produce great theatrical effects and which try to hide the lack of melody by numerous effects. Nor it is one of those works which, by staging grand historical subject matter, have transferred dramatic opera into a realm where art must cease to be music, without, however, attaining the value of a proper [spoken] drama.91 87 Mangold, ‘Die neuere deutsche Oper’, pp. 158–9. 88 Carl Amand Mangold, Gudrun: Grosse Oper in vier Acten, bearbeitet nach dem altdeutschen Heldenlied ‘Gudrun’ (Darmstadt, [1851]), title page. 89 B., ‘Gudrun, Große Oper in vier Aufzügen’, NZfM 33 no. 47 (10 December 1850), p. 253. 90 Ernst Pasqué, Musikalische Statistik des Grossherzoglichen Hoftheaters zu Darmstadt von 1810–1868 und der Krebs’schen Epoche von 1807–1810 (Darmstadt, 1868), pp. 13–18. 91 Theodor Hahn, ‘Gudrun: Grosse Oper in 4 Aufzügen’, Neue Berliner Musikzeitung 5 no. 42 (15 October 1851), p. 327: ‘[Gudrun] gehört nicht unter die Zahl der Werke speculativer Virtuosität in der Technik ohne inneren Werth und Fond, welche zu grossartigen theatralischen Effecten die unmusikalischsten Mittel gebraucht und durch massenhafte Wirkung den Mangel an Melodie zu verdecken sucht, oder durch grossartige historische Sujets die dramatische Oper auf ein Feld

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Critic B. from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik praised Mangold for refusing to court popular taste at the expense of the music,92 although some diegetic music such as Horand’s songs or Hilda’s romance in Act 2 definitely display a  –  fictitious  –  musical vernacular, an artificial Volkston style characterised by strophic form, symmetric phrases and a narrow vocal range. In their studied simplicity they are not dissimilar to the Rheinlied from Dorn’s Nibelungen. However, the enthusiastic review of the Illustrirte Zeitung makes it quite clear that being rooted in the German vernacular was an atmospheric quality rather than the result of a specific compositional style: What the little bird proclaims from the bushes and the air, what meadows and fields and dark forests whisper to us, we only vaguely feel it  –  for this is a language we have forgotten in the foreign countries  –  but hark! The tuneful sound we suddenly hear! These simple melodies sing from the heart; deeply, purely, nobly; such a climax, such modulations, such harmonic progressions and tangles of voices and instruments; such richness, wealth and power! These are the beloved songs of home [Heimat], these are the adornments of the fatherland, these are the possession and pride of the Germans.93 The reviewer hints at some musical markers of Germanness, such as melodic simplicity, contrapuntal complexity and harmonic richness. More importantly Mangold’s music is identified with the sounds of German nature, with little birds inhabiting a mysterious and pastoral landscape, in stark contrast to the foreign countries devoid of bushes, fields and dark forests. In the actual opera, however, nature does not play any role at all, neither the sea (which would have been the obvious choice) nor the forest. Nature is talked about  –  for example in Hilda’s romance about her longing for home  –  but it never enters and disrupts the civilised, courtly world. Mangold has left behind the Romantic dichotomy of man and nature, but has not arrived in the mystic landscape of Wagner’s Ring either. Nature serves solely as pretty scenery or as trigger for sentimental associations, such as the ones allegedly expressed by an educated lady on hearing the opera: I would like to compare the experience to that of a weary pilgrim who, after he wandered around in foreign countries, sees again the sweet homeland with all its dear, sacred memories.  … Here is something German, something hinübergezogen hat, auf welchem die Kunst aufhören muss Musik zu sein, ohne deshalb je den Werth eines wirklichen Dramas erhalten zu können.’ 92 B., ‘Gudrun, Große Oper in vier Aufzügen’, p. 255. 93 ‘Gudrun: Große romantische Oper in 4 Acten’, p. 423: ‘Was das Vöglein aus Busch und Lüften uns verkündet, was Wies’ und Flur und Waldesdunkel uns leise zurufen, wir ahnens erst  –  diese Sprache haben wir ja verlernt in fremden Landen –, aber horch jener Liedeston, der an unser Ohr schlägt! Dieses einfach Melodische, das singt tief aus dem Herzen, innig, rein und edel, diese Steigerung, diese Modulation, diese harmonischen Gänge und Verschlingungen der Stimmen und Instrumente, diese Fülle, dieser Reichthum, diese Kraft! Das sind der geliebten Heimat Klänge, das ist des Vaterlandes Zierde, das ist des Deutschen Eigenthum und Stolz.’

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Apart from such gushing enthusiasm about the ineffable ‘something German’ present somewhere in the work, the opera’s relevance to the German national consciousness rested entirely on the plot and its sources being read in the light of current events which, as will be shown below, is not unproblematic in itself. The enthusiasm for Mangold’s opera was, however, not unanimous. While Theodor Hahn conscientiously extolled the beauties of every single number, the critic ‘T.U.’, who wrote another review for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, bitterly complained that the great number of scenes and the rapid succession of events suffocated the most essential feature of opera: the portrayal of human emotions.95 Mangold is accused  –  not entirely without justification  –  of formalism, i.e. forcing the story into conventional operatic forms, of introducing dramatic makeshifts such as the ghost and of a certain melodic monotony. These are said to demonstrate the musician’s inadequacy to the task, while the clichéd rhymes of the libretto attest to the second-rate quality of the poet-composer. Mangold, the critic concludes, attempted a virtually impossible reconciliation of the popular and the artistic, of the taste of the masses and the few connoisseurs. The true artist, however, should aim for a complete break with the operatic past and present: The only thing a true artist can do today  … is a complete break with the past, i.e. the most reckless opposition against the present. Richard Wagner, for instance, has dared to do this with Tannhäuser, and has achieved more than all the half-baked compromisers taken together.96 This radical suggestion is out of step with the majority of the positive responses to Gudrun, but hardly surprising coming from Wagner’s friend and chief advocate Theodor Uhlig. Wagner himself understood quite well that the main intention of Uhlig’s review was not so much to criticise Mangold’s opera in particular but rather to promote Wagner’s reform project in general. In a letter to Uhlig written on 19 April 1851 he approved of the article,97 although by this time he had already changed direction from the romantic operas Tannhäuser and Lohengrin 94 Quoted ibid., p. 424: ‘[Ich] möchte es dem Gefühle vergleichen, das den lange in der Fremde umhergeirrten Pilger ergreift, wenn er die traute Heimat mit all den lieben heiligen Erinnerungen nun wiedersieht.  … Du hast hier etwas Deutsches vor dir, etwas aus dem reinen Gemüth Geschöpftes, ein aus der innersten Natur hervorgegangenes Kunstwerk.’ 95 T[heodor]. U[hlig]., ‘Gedanken über die Oper: I. Bei C. A. Mangold’s Gudrun’, NZfM 34 no. 8 (21 February 1851), p. 73. 96 T[heodor]. U[hlig]., ‘Gedanken über die Oper’, NZfM 34 no. 9 (28 February 1851), p. 88: ‘Ein vollständiger Bruch mit der Vergangenheit, d.h. die rücksichtsloseste Opposition gegen das Gegenwärtige,  … ist sicher das Einzige, was der wahre Künstler heut zu Tage thun kann. Diesen Bruch hat z.B. Richard Wagner im “Tannhäuser” gewagt, und damit mehr erreicht, als alle Halben zusammengenommen.’ 97 Richard Wagner, Briefe der Jahre 1849–51, ed. Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf (Leipzig, 1975), p. 552.

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to the Ring. For the general public of 1851, however, for whom Lohengrin still felt startlingly new, Uhlig’s prediction of the imminent arrival of the artwork of the future was wishful thinking rather than a correct observation of contemporary tendencies. Nevertheless recent scholarship, dazzled by Wagner’s subsequent impact, has regarded Uhlig’s harsh assessment of everything not-yet Wagnerian as evidence of the inferior quality of contemporary operas, expressed for example in John Warrack’s dismissal of Mangold’s Gudrun as a ‘sluggish piece of work’.98 The main problem of Mangold’s opera is not that it does not live up to a Wagnerian gold standard (hardly existent at the time), but that it falls short of Mangold’s own musical and dramatic ideals of (German) grand opera, while projecting an at best ambivalent message about the German national character. Mangold’s Gudrun does not offer a scene that in its operatic effectiveness or in its explicit projection of a politically loaded catchword (Treue) could rival the solemn vows of the doomed Burgundians in Die Nibelungen. However, as Dorn had done with the Rheinlied, Mangold heavily relies on diegetic songs in order to express his message, i.e. songs that form part of the action and are heard by the characters on stage as music. By introducing the minstrel Horand into the Gudrun plot he has created the ideal mouthpiece for the poet-composer. This is, of course, a device not unknown to romantic opera; Wagner for example uses Tannhäuser to voice his own controversial ideas about love. In contrast to Volker’s song in Die Nibelungen, which is mainly decorative, Horand’s performances also fulfil important roles within the development of the story line, notably at the end of Act 2. Gudrun has been left alone by Raimund and her companions and reflects sadly on her fate. After a typical preghiera she wants to commit suicide, but her attempt to jump from a cliff is prevented by the arrival of a messenger from home. An arpeggiated D major chord introduces the minstrel Horand, who announces his presence by singing from behind the scene the refrain of his song ‘Ueber die Berge’ (Across the mountains), a song which Gudrun last heard at her engagement. The message that love surmounts every obstacle fills her with consolation and new hope. The clear-cut phrases of the simple melody, the rocking 9/8 metre and a short dip into the minor mode conform to the norms of the Romanze, one of the standard genres of nineteenth-century opera.99 Mangold uses this romance as the central theme of the opera which recurs at pivotal points, again a tried and tested solution. As early as 1784 the French composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry had the minstrel Blondel sing a romance eight times while searching for Richard Cœur-de-Lion in the eponymous opera. It is telling that the Illustrirte Zeitung chose this particular piece to illustrate the article on Gudrun, as it was attractive for the amateur musicians among their readers, although hardly representative of the more complex overall style of the opera that seeks to integrate individual numbers into larger tableaux. Gudrun greets the singer as he brings the glad tidings that the rescue army is approaching. This short interaction is set in an accompagnato style typical of 98 Warrack, German Opera, p. 371. 99 Siegfried Goslich, Die deutsche romantische Oper (Tutzing, 1975), pp. 249–51. Ironically Mangold himself had criticised the vogue for romances in the opéra comique in an article written from Paris.

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1.2  Horand’s song in the first-act version, published in the Illustrirte Zeitung. It is telling that the editors of this family journal selected Horand’s song in praise of constant love for their readership, although the song is not very typical of the overall style of the opera.

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mid-century German opera, used also for example in some of Dorn’s recitatives. The orchestra shows independent musical activity, the voices ‘speak’ in an idiom melodically more flexible than standard declamation while the words are easily audible. This phenomenon puzzled some contemporary critics, such as ‘B.’ and Weitzmann from the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, who would have expected less elaborate orchestral activity and agreed that Mangold and Dorn overtaxed the listeners by making the recitatives too melodic.100 The Wagnerian Theodor Uhlig predictably complained that Mangold had not aimed at a more unified declamation in Wagner’s manner.101 In their diverging judgements, the reviewers represent the more conservative and progressive aesthetic camps, struggling for a definition of the (German) opera of the future. The swift interaction of Gudrun and Horand becomes even more animated when Raimund suddenly returns, introducing a darker tone into the music. He demands to know Horand’s identity, to which the minstrel innocently responds: ‘I’m a singer who is known to old and young across the country.’102 The king asks him to sing but the musical offering, though again a simple strophic song in idyllic Ab major, turns out to be not at all the love song Raimund expected. Horand embarks on a mocking praise of freedom, first comparing a musician’s freedom to a bird, then claiming that no gaol could restrain his free spirit, and finally even likening his freedom to the angels in heaven (Ex. 1.5). Mangold had adapted this song (like the romance ‘Ueber die Berge’) from Herder’s translation of an English song in Stimmen der Völker in Liedern,103 perhaps in an attempt to create some couleur locale since Horand is supposed to be Anglo-Saxon. However, the reference to English sources is purely textual, not musical, and was lost on all but the most well-read listeners. What would have made the audience prick up their ears was the hardly disguised message of (artistic) freedom. Horand, standing up to a tyrant and defending the freedom to express whatever seems right to him, could even be admired as a champion of free speech. Civil liberties such as freedom of speech and a free press had been central demands of the liberals and democrats during the March Revolution of 1848/9. It is even possible to hear in the second stanza an allusion to the motto of the gymnastic societies ‘Frisch, fromm, fröhlich, frei’ (Fresh, good, merry, free). Such an unabashed celebration of freedom, even in playful musical disguise, was not unproblematic in 1851 when the liberal achievements of the March governments had been taken back one after the other. Since many revolutionaries were still languishing behind the ‘stones, ridges and walls’ of the song, Horand’s blithe assurance that captivity would not last forever could even have been interpreted as a prophecy that the democratic 100 B., ‘Gudrun: Große Oper in vier Aufzügen’, NZfM 33 no. 49 (17 December 1850), p. 266; C. F. W[eitzmann]., ‘Aus Berlin. Die Nibelungen’ , p. 171. 101 T[heodor]. U[hlig]., ‘Gedanken über die Oper’, NZfM 34 no. 9 (28 February 1851), p. 86. 102 Mangold, Gudrun, p. 78: ‘Ein Sänger, der im weiten Land / bei Alt und Jung ist wohlbekannt!’ 103 Johann Gottfried Herder, Stimmen der Völker in Liedern, ed. Johann von Müller (Tübingen, 1807), no. 32: ‘Wege der Liebe’ (The Ways of Love), pp. 359–61; no. 35: ‘Lied vom Gefängniß’ (Song of the Gaol), pp. 367–8.

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History in Mighty Sounds Example 1.5  Carl Amand Mangold, Gudrun: Grosse Oper in vier Acten (Darmstadt, [1851]), Act 2, no. 16 C: Romanze Andante con moto q = 72

 

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and liberal movement would rise again. These potential readings of Horand’s message received added poignancy from the specific performance context of the Darmstadt court theatre discussed below. In the opera Raimund’s response once more reveals his tyrannical and unjust nature: he summons his guards and orders them to imprison Horand whom he (quite correctly) assumes to be a spy. This in turn leads to Gudrun’s acceptance of marriage in order to save Horand from certain death, and necessitates the appearance of her father’s ghost. The topic of freedom or liberty is carried over into Act 3 when the AngloSaxons are planning the rescue of Gudrun and her companions. While they are waiting for Horand’s return, they pass their time with a drinking song. Framed by a refrain of the full ensemble, the soloists Alfred and Ortwin in turn toast to luck in battle, constant love, freedom and the fatherland. Freedom in this context means, as the text makes clear, predominantly Gudrun’s liberation from captivity. There is, however, scope for a wider application, since in the following recitative Gudrun’s fiancé Alfred addresses the old warrior Wate: Der König der Normannen, er herrschet als Tyrann, und ist im ganzen Lande verhasst bei Jedermann! Das Volk hier zu gewinnen wird uns so schwer nicht sein! Wollt ihr es, Graf versuchen?104 The King of Normandy rules as a tyrant, and everybody hates him throughout the country! It won’t be difficult to win the people over to our cause! Count, could you try it? From what was visible (and audible) of Raimund so far, this information is consistent with his character  –  why should not a king who wants to force a woman into marriage oppress his subjects as well? What is new is the political dimension the rescue operation suddenly takes. Not only Gudrun’s and Alfred’s private 104 Mangold, Gudrun, pp. 99–100.

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happiness is at stake but the Norman people languishing under an oppressive regime. The prominent contrast of tyranny versus liberty connects Mangold’s libretto with the dramas of Schiller, particularly Wilhelm Tell, and Beethoven’s Fidelio, where individual as well as collective freedom are key concepts, though there they run through the dramas consistently rather than being suddenly sprung at the listeners. Fidelio may even have been at the back of Mangold’s mind during composition, since one critic commented on the musical similarity of Raimund’s vengeance aria (Act 2, no. 13) to Pizarro’s ‘Ha! Welch ein Augenblick!’105 After a duet expressing Alfred’s and Ortwin’s hope to rescue Gudrun (ironically, this soprano-tenor duet makes the relationship between Alfred and Gudrun’s brother much more memorable than his relationship with her), Wate returns with the message that the people of Normandy are ready for an uprising. From then on Mangold stops pursuing the freedom theme and it sinks without a trace in the final scene of the opera. After Alfred has slain Raimund and thus liberated Gudrun from her captivity, Anglo-Saxon warriors and Gudrun’s women join the chief characters in a song of celebration. They choose, however, to express their joy with the refrain of ‘Ueber die Berge’ rather than Horand’s song to freedom. The final message of the opera is not that freedom must not be suppressed, but that love overcomes everything. The people of Normandy never appear on stage, as the chorus is made up of Anglo-Saxon warriors and ladies-in-waiting; their fate is completely forgotten now that Alfred and Gudrun are reunited and the tyrant is dead. After all, he was killed not for his dubious governance but for lusting after another man’s fiancée. Instead of a new political awareness of the people it is the steadfastness of the loving aristocratic couple and the loyalty of their men that secures the happy ending. Such a conclusion is entirely congruent with the prevailing mood of the early 1850s which makes Dorn’s celebration of Germanness and political Treue all the more remarkable. When the hopes for political liberation and national unity had foundered, happiness within the restricted circle of family and friends had to make up for political disappointment. The courtly surroundings and the medieval-chivalric setting notwithstanding, Mangold’s Gudrun retreats into a celebration of the Biedermeier family. At this point the special local situation needs to be taken into account, not least because Darmstadt was the only place where Gudrun was ever seen on stage. It could be argued that Mangold was simply careful not to damage his position as Kapellmeister at the court of Hesse-Darmstadt by choosing a love song as the structural backbone of his opera. However, he could also be confident that a few well-chosen words in favour of artistic liberty and against tyranny would not have been taken amiss. According to Philipp Schweitzer’s chronicle of musical life at Darmstadt, Mangold had been appointed to his post in 1848 on the strength of his dramatic cantata Hermannsschlacht.106 The story of Hermann’s freedom fight against the Roman invaders possessed unassailable national credentials that will be explored at greater depth in the following chapter. Furthermore Mangold’s ‘employer’ and the dedicatee of Gudrun, Grand Duke Ludwig III, would hardly 105 Hahn, ‘Gudrun. Grosse Oper in 4 Aufzügen’, Neue Berliner Musikzeitung 5 no. 43 (22 October 1851), p. 336. 106 Schweitzer, Darmstädter Musikleben im 19. Jahrhundert, p. 128.

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have perceived himself as a tyrant à la Raimund when the noble Alfred offered a much more flattering a model of a good ruler. During the March Revolution the liberals had actually hailed Ludwig as their hope for the future.107 After the abdication of his father on 5 March 1848 Ludwig III appointed the previous opposition leader Heinrich von Gagern as his new prime minister  –  Gagern later became president of the National Assembly in Frankfurt  –  and granted many core demands of the liberal movement, such as religious tolerance, freedom of assembly and a free press. Mangold’s employment as court Kapellmeister was therefore supported by a liberal March government, and the composer paid due homage to the new regime by dedicating his Hermannsschlacht to prime minister Heinrich von Gagern. Whether this dedication is seen as motivated by genuine sympathy with the liberal movement or shrewd career opportunism depends very much on whether one wants to see the composer in the national-liberal camp. Mangold clearly was not among those artists who, like Louise Otto or Richard Wagner, campaigned vociferously for a new Germany, although the well-being of German opera as a nationally important enterprise certainly influenced his artistic decisions. A similar half-heartedness prevailed in his native Darmstadt: under the influence of a new, reactionary prime minister the Grand Duke soon returned to more conservative politics. However, in the late 1840s and early 1850s, when Mangold’s Gudrun was composed and first performed, Hesse-Darmstadt may have been pervaded by the hope that a more liberal age was indeed in the ascendancy, albeit one that did not threaten the aristocratic claim to leadership. It is no coincidence that Dorn dedicated his Nibelungen to another sovereign of one of Germany’s small principalities with liberal leanings: Carl Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. While both dedications will have been motivated by a traditional idea of courtly artistic patronage, they also imply that around 1850 the hopes for German opera  –  and perhaps by extension for the German nation  –  were most likely to be realised in the constitutional and relatively liberal microstates wedged between the competing great powers Austria and Prussia. The widespread interest for national subject matter responded not only to a general rise in patriotic feeling but also to a very concrete and continuing crisis in what constituted a German opera. Librettists and composers turned at first to medieval literature rather than actual events of medieval history, in contrast to the numerous spoken dramas extolling, for example, the emperors of the Staufer dynasty. This may reflect a peculiarly German conviction that, as Vischer had argued, mythical heroes were best represented in opera, leaving ‘real’ history to spoken theatre. The ‘national epos’ Nibelungenlied and its companion piece Kudrun in particular offered an ideal basis for portraying the contemporary German character in a historical-romantic mirror-image, showcasing virtues such as loyalty, constancy and  –  to some extent  –  love of freedom. Despite the mainly aristocratic heroes and heroines of the operas, characters such as Siegfried, 107 For a contemporary assessment of the March Revolution in Hesse-Darmstadt see ‘Die deutschen Märzministerien: II. Hessen-Darmstadt und seine Märzminister’ , in Germania: Die Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der deutschen Nation (Leipzig, 1852), vol. 2, pp. 289–316.

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Günther, Brunhild, Hagen, Gudrun or Alfred invited everybody for identification, or at least everybody who was willing to model their attitudes on an opera  –  which mainly meant the wealthy and culture-conscious middle classes who attended performances and bought vocal scores. Not only the leaders but all the Burgundians adopt a death-defying attitude in Die Nibelungen, and the enduring love, devotion and patience displayed by all three (noble) couples made them the ideal embodiments of the (truly bourgeois) concept of romantic love. The question remains why the success of both Dorn’s Nibelungen and Mangold’s Gudrun was so short-lived, despite incipient enthusiasm from critics and audiences. In the long run neither their endorsement of German values and virtues nor their hybrid musical language was accepted as a perfect solution to the generic problem of German opera. Its nationwide performances in the 1850s notwithstanding Dorn’s Nibelungen were thoroughly superseded by Wagner’s Ring, whose monumental effort scared all other German composers away from the Nibelungenlied. The story simply was no longer available to aspiring composers who wanted to bring their perspective on the national myth onto the stage. In the case of Kudrun no single successful piece edged Mangold’s opera out of the repertoire; rather the numerous Gudrun operas after Mangold attest to the enduring popularity of the story, which could be adapted in a variety of ways. Their very multitude, however, also demonstrates that in the end nobody had managed to derive a winning formula from the epic poem. Since national epic poetry had not offered the desired solution, in the 1870s some composers returned to ‘real’ historical (but heavily mythologised) events and heroes in order to bring their visions of German greatness to life on the operatic stage. Siegfried and Gudrun were replaced by Arminius and Thusnelda.

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2 Germanic Heroes for Modern Germans: Gender and the Nation

W

hile Richard Wagner had declared as early as 1851 that historical topics were utterly obsolete for artistic purposes,1 such operas were still very much alive at the time of the completion and first performance of the Ring cycle. Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, both recognisably set in the medieval period, were just reaching the height of their popularity on German stages in the years of the Reichsgründung, and some of the most successful operas of the 1870s centred on historical subject matter while following the traditional format of grand opéra. Cosima Wagner herself had to admit that the genre continued to have contemporary appeal when she noted in 1879: In the evening whist and perusal of modern operas, Armin, Folkunger, Königin von Saba; it turns out that the Israelite’s work is after all the best, musically more refined; but one cannot take any of these things seriously. The libretto of Armin, with its repulsive and superficial patriotism, aimed merely at effect, is truly horrifying.2

Of these three operas, which in the 1870s were amongst the most widely performed and which in the short run were certainly more successful than Wagner’s contemporary music dramas, Armin was the only one based on a story from German national history, which explains its obvious patriotism. The story of the Germanic leader Arminius/Hermann was not just one of the many heroic narratives from early German history, but the key to the national imagination. At any pivotal turning point in the development of the German nation it was an obvious strategy to assure oneself of one’s national identity by returning to the putative beginnings of German history: the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ in ad 9, when several Germanic tribes, brought together under the superior leadership of the Rome-trained Arminius from the Cheruscan tribe, annihilated three Roman legions led by Varus in a three-day battle. The reception history of this event mirrors the changing national discourses, which justifies a short general introduction to the afterlife of ‘the first German’, before turning to the issue of the interrelationship of gender and national identity. This will be exemplified with two operas written in the first decade of the German Empire which offered Germanic men and women as role models in very different ways: Heinrich Hofmann’s Armin (op. 40, 1877) and Carl Grammann’s Thusnelda (op. 29, 1881). Arminius’ career as a national hero began in the early modern era when the Annales of the Roman historiographer Tacitus were rediscovered and published 1 Richard Wagner, Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in GSD, 2nd edn, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1888), pp. 314–15. 2 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, vol. 2: 1878–1883, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (London, 1980), p. 344.

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in a German translation in 1515. Not only did Tacitus create a flattering image of the Germanic people and their unadulterated morality and lifestyle in his ethnographic study Germania; he also endowed Arminius with a recognisable profile as a historical character. In praising him as ‘without doubt the liberator of Germania’ (Annales 2, 88: ‘liberator haud dubie Germaniae’), Tacitus furnished the Germans with their first national hero, and when he commented that ‘his praises were still sung among the Barbarians’ (Annales 2, 88: ‘caniturque adhuc barbaras apud gentes’), he implicitly recommended the ‘first German’ for artistic treatment. The humanistic writer Ulrich von Hutten extolled Arminius as the greatest military leader of classical antiquity and Martin Luther said of him that he would exalt ‘Hermann’ if he were a poet.3 The real popularisation of Arminius as a literary hero began, however, with the French dramatists Georges de Scudéry and Jean Galbert de Campistron in the late seventeenth century, who focused on the romantic attachment of the protagonists. Arminius’ career as an exclusively German, patriotic hero started slightly later, and from the start the story was adapted to diverse political ends. In Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s trilogy  –  Hermanns Schlacht (1769), Hermann und die Fürsten (1784) and Hermanns Tod (1798)  –  the principal themes of the tradition are fully established: the liberation of the Germanic people from Roman occupation, the saving of German culture and customs from foreign infiltration, the constant dangers of discord and enmity amongst the German princes (notably Hermann’s romanised brother Flavus and his Rome-friendly father-in law Segestes), the romantic elopement with Thusnelda and finally Hermann’s tragic death at the hands of treacherous relatives. The upsurge of patriotic enthusiasm during the Napoleonic Wars renewed the topicality of the Germanic–Roman conflict and the idea of a ‘War of Liberation’. France took on the role of the Roman adversaries, as the dichotomy Rome vs. Germania could be easily updated to suit any current political constellation.4 Celebratory poems and images abounded,5 and spoken dramas with incidental music as well as Singspiele were performed throughout the German-speaking countries to celebrate the liberation from French occupation: Franz Volkert’s Hermann, Germania’s Retter on a text by M. Stegmayer was premiered in Vienna in 1813; August von Kotzebue’s libretto Hermann und Thusnelde reached the stages in Königsberg and Würzburg in two different settings by Julius Miller and Georg Valentin Röder; Stuttgart followed in 1817 with Johannes Brandl’s Hermann der Deutsche; and finally another incarnation of Kotzebue’s text was premiered in Berlin in 1819 with music by Bernhard Anselm Weber. Despite a lavish staging designed by Prussian court architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and added local patriotism  –  according to Jost Hermand Thusnelda is modelled on Queen Luise 3 Klaus Kösters, Mythos Arminius: Die Varusschlacht und ihre Folgen (Münster, 2009), pp. 59–63. 4 Herfried Münkler traces the history of this dichotomy in Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, chapter 2: ‘Ein Kampf um Rom’. 5 For a plethora of illustrations see the exhibition catalogue 2000 Jahre Varusschlacht: Mythos, ed. Landesverband Lippe (Stuttgart, 2009).

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of Prussia, that icon of German femininity,6  –  the audience remained indifferent: ‘The content entirely replicates the emotions and phrases of the years 1813–15  … now it left us indifferent here, and nobody clapped at the theatrical coups, no acclamation sounded at the phrases which then had been on everybody’s lips.’7 During the Vormärz period only one Arminius opera seems to have reached the stage, ironically composed by a Frenchman working in Bavaria: Hippolyte André-Baptiste Chelard’s Hermannsschlacht enjoyed a considerable success after its premiere in Munich in 1835. Perhaps the choice of topic can be explained in the context of the antiquarian enthusiasm of Bavarian King Ludwig I. In his German pantheon ‘Walhalla’ a commemorative plaque for Hermann took pride of place, and the pediment of the classicist temple above the Danube depicts the battle itself. The Vormärz period also saw the beginnings of another monumental memorial project: from 1836 onwards the sculptor Ernst von Bandel planned a monument to Hermann, to be erected in the vicinity of Detmold near the putative location of the battle. The foundation stone was laid in 1841 and the pedestal built, but despite the creation of numerous monument societies throughout Germany the project proceeded only hesitantly and ground to a halt in 1848. Contemporary satire linked the failure of the project with the flagging national spirit. In his poetic cycle Deutschland: ein Wintermärchen Heinrich Heine wittily speculates what would have happened if Hermann had not won his battle (amongst other things the Germans would have been spared some modern conveniences and a number of mediocre poets) and depicts Hermann’s achievement in decidedly anti-heroic terms. The law student and poet Joseph Victor von Scheffel, later famous as author of the best-selling novel Ekkehard, penned a satirical poem in 1848 starting with the lines ‘Als die Römer frech geworden’ (When the Romans felt cheeky).8 Like Heine’s Wintermärchen poem, the final stanza alludes to the failed monument project. In 1861 the casting of the statue resumed and in 1875 the monument was inaugurated in the presence of Emperor Wilhelm I.9 The changed political context altered the meaning of the monument: Bandel had envisaged the inscription on Hermann’s raised sword, ‘Deutsche Einigkeit, meine Stärke / Meine Stärke, Deutschlands Macht’ (German unity, my strength / my strength, Germany’s power) as an exhortation against inner-German discord; now it was raised threateningly against 6 Jost Hermand, Von Mainz nach Weimar (1793–1919): Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 104. I would like to thank Roger Skarsten, who has just completed his thesis on ‘Singing Arminius, Imagining a German Nation: Narratives of the “liberator Germaniae” in Early Modern Europe’, for drawing my attention to this connection. 7 ‘Berlin: Uebersicht des März’, AMZ 21 no. 15 (April 1819), col. 252: ‘Der Inhalt ist ganz den Gefühlen und Redensarten der Jahre 1813–15 nachgebildet  … hier liess er jetzt kalt, und keine Hand regte sich bey den Theatercoups, kein Beifallslaut ertönte bey den Phrasen, die damals in aller Munde waren.’ 8 For an edition of the most well-known version and a summary of its genesis see Scheffels Werke, ed. Friedrich Panzer, vol. 11 (Leipzig, 1917), pp. 34–6 and 413–14. 9 The monument is richly contextualised in Charlotte Tacke’s study Denkmal im sozialen Raum. For descriptions of the inaugural celebrations see Dirk Mellies, ‘“ Symbol deutscher Einheit”: Die Einweihung des Hermannsdenkmals 1875’, in 2000 Jahre Varusschlacht: Mythos, pp. 222–8.

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the French enemy towards the West. Similarly Scheffel’s song, which had gained currency amongst students with the interpolation of nonsense syllables, received a new final stanza and now celebrated the monument with the swaggering line ‘Mögen sie nur kommen’ (let the French come). In a sense the inauguration of the monument marked a turning point in the popularity of Hermann as a national political icon. The subsequent celebrations were more modest, regional affairs, and Herfried Münkler has argued that the rebellious and anti-imperialist attitude of Arminius/Hermann was not quite appropriate anymore for the newly founded German Empire.10 On the other hand Klaus Kösters, who has written the most extensive reception study of Arminius so far, declares that the Hermann myth became the central founding myth of the new Empire, with added topicality during the anti-Roman Kulturkampf.11 The impressive list of Arminius poems, novels and plays compiled by Kösters and Susanne Hellfaier certainly supports the idea that Hermann, his wife Thusnelda and the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ retained their popularity, with a noticeable clustering of dramas in the 1870s, i.e. just after the foundation of the German Empire, and around the 1900th anniversary of 1909. Interestingly  –  but not surprisingly  –  the two-millennial anniversary of 2009 carefully avoided patriotic exuberance. Instead the numerous exhibitions in north-west Germany and associated publications focused on historical and archaeological issues, especially the debate about the Roman–Germanic interactions in the first century ad and the potential site of the battle at Kalkriese near Osnabrück.12 At the same time Arminius/Hermann’s role in the German national discourse of the past was thoroughly investigated. The twenty-first-century balance of history and historiography is perhaps best captured in the titles of the threevolume exhibition catalogues 2000 Jahre Varusschlacht: Imperium (the Roman Empire north of the Alps), Konflikt (the Germanic–Roman conflicts) and Mythos. The changing instantiations of the core ‘national myth’ inevitably reflect changing concepts of gender among the modern Germans. Tamar Mayer has argued that modern nationalism cannot be adequately understood without an examination of its interaction with the concepts of gender and sexuality,13 as gendered stereotypes abound in all cultural products such as poems, songs, education manuals, children’s books, caricatures and monumental oil paintings. The rise of modern-type nationalism on the one hand and the development of polarised gender models on the other, which can be observed from the late eighteenth century onwards, strengthened and reinforced each other. Men and women found their place within the community by fulfilling the functions that 10 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, p. 165. 11 Kösters, Mythos Arminius, pp. 244–5. 12 For a sensitive discussion of the historical events and their sources, as well as the Kalkriese debate, see Reinhard Wolters, Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald: Arminius, Varus und das römische Germanien (Munich, 2008). 13 Tamar Mayer, ‘Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage’, in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London, 2000), p. 3.

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were adequate and ‘natural’ to their gendered character.14 The modern nation was built around a model of gender relations that conceived men and women as radically different but complementary, constructed along binary oppositions that could be ideally embodied in the heroic couple Hermann and Thusnelda or  –  as Bettina Brandt has shown  –  in the relationship between ‘Germania’, the allegory of the German nation, and the masculine heroes who were variously imagined as her fatherly protectors, loving suitors or belligerent sons.15 The national myths of nineteenth-century Europe thus rested on two pillars: the Männerbund (male comradeship) on the one hand, which protected the ‘national body’ imagined as feminine, and the loving couple at the core of the bourgeois nuclear family on the other. The ideal man, the ideal woman and their ideal relationship were thus defined with reference to each other and to the national community, while excluding all groups which did not (or did not want to) comply with these norms.16 The operatic stage was ideally suited to present such abstract ideals in tangible, larger-than-life characters: the national hero and his female counterpart in the leading roles, and ‘the people’ as chorus. Ever since Arminius had entered German literature, he was endowed with all ‘truly manly virtues  –  of unselfish heroism, indefatigable and finally victorious’.17 Whenever the perceptions of ideal German masculinity and femininity changed the figures of Arminius and Thusnelda were updated accordingly, a process that documents the increasing radicalisation of both nationalist and gender stereotypes. In the opere serie of the Baroque era, which grew out of the classical French Arminius tragedies, the male and female protagonists share the values and ideals of a cosmopolitan nobility. Love conflicts with duty but ultimately triumphs, and all problems are resolved by the ‘clemenza’ of a benign ruler.18 In true seria style, the librettists Antonio Salvi and Giovanni Claudio Pasquini, whose texts were set to music by Handel and Hasse amongst others, introduce fictional sisters of ‘Arminio’ or ‘Varo’ in order to complement the symmetric cast and to provide everybody with a partner for the mandatory lieto fine. Like the Baroque operas, Elias Schlegel’s play Hermann (1737) extolled basically identical virtues for his male and female protagonists in the spirit of early Enlightenment. Three decades later Klopstock firmly divided the public, male world of warfare from the private  –  and less important  –  domain of the women and children.19 Finally Heinrich 14 Bettina Brandt, Germania und ihre Söhne: Repräsentationen von Nation, Geschlecht und Politik in der Moderne (Göttingen, 2010), pp. 103–4. 15 Ibid., pp. 197–202. 16 See Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum, pp. 44–50. 17 Richard Kuehnemund, Arminius or the Rise of a National Symbol in Literature (From Hutten to Grabbe) (Chapel Hill, 1953), p. 16. 18 For an overview of the Baroque operatic tradition see Paola Barbon and Bodo Plachta, ‘“Chi la dura la vince”  –  “Wer ausharrt, siegt”: Arminius auf der Opernbühne des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Arminius und die Varusschlacht: Geschichte  –  Mythos  –  Literatur, ed. Rainer Wiegels and Winfried Woesler (Paderborn, 2003), pp. 265–90. 19 Hans Peter Herrmann, ‘Arminius und die Erfindung der Männlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Machtphantasie Deutschland: Nationalismus, Männlichkeit und

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von Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht (1808), which in its glorification of total guerrilla warfare was so radical that the drama was not printed until 1821 and first staged in 1860, depicts Hermann as an unscrupulous political leader who exerts complete control over his emotions, manipulates the women around him and recklessly uses all men of lesser social standing. Although Kleist undoubtedly presents the most extreme reading of German masculinity  –  his Hermann’s heroism overrides all ethical considerations  –  his contemporaries and successors agreed insofar that masculinity was constructed around the ability to fight (Wehrhaftigkeit) and the willingness to die for the fatherland. During the Napoleonic Wars the volunteer corps contributed little to actual military success, but they highly stimulated the popular imagination. Their eagerness to sacrifice their young lives on the altar of the fatherland bestowed an almost religious dignity on the evolving nation and proved the fallen heroes to be proper men.20 As the patriotic poet Ernst Moritz Arndt declared in the song text Wer ist ein Mann (Who is a man?) a (real) man was prepared to die for freedom, duty, justice, God and fatherland. During these years a universal and compulsory military conscription was first discussed, as it was believed that only a man forced to defend his home, wife and children would develop appropriate patriotic zeal. Military service thus became a crucial qualification for the acceptance of an individual into the nation and for full citizenship. This had two major consequences. First, women could conveniently be excluded from political participation since they obviously could not aspire to the ideal of Wehrhaftigkeit. Second, military ideals and hierarchies permeated German society, culminating in the militarisation of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. The bourgeois reserve officer became the typical (and much caricatured) exponent of Wilhelminian Germany, cultivating special comrades’ organisations that transferred the military code of honour into civilian society, which resulted in the increasing acceptance of duels as a social convention.21 The army was not the only ‘school of masculinity’. 22 The gymnastics movement, founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn during the Napoleonic Wars to complement the traditional humanist education, attracted young men from all social classes, creating an exciting sense of brotherhood and equality. Besides political awareness and physical fitness, the gymnastics movement also propagated a novel ideal of the male body: lean, athletic, well proportioned and obedient to the will of its Fremdenhaß im Vaterlandsdiskurs deutscher Schriftsteller des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hans Peter Herrmann, Hans-Martin Blitz and Susanna Moßmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), pp. 161–91. 20 Karen Hagemann, ‘“ Heran, heran, zu Sieg oder Tod!” Entwürfe patriotischwehrhafter Männlichkeit in der Zeit der Befreiungskriege’, in Männergeschichte  –  Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, ed. Thomas Kühne (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), pp. 51–68. 21 Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, trans. Anthony Williams (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 68–84. 22 Thus the title of Ute Frevert, ‘Das Militär als “Schule der Männlichkeit”: Erwartungen, Angebote, Erfahrungen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Frevert (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 145–73.

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owner.23 For obvious reasons, such an ideal could be expressed more easily in writing, painting or sculpture, while on the operatic stage the scarcity of athletic tenors must have exasperated any director who wanted realistic embodiments of Arminius (or indeed Siegfried, which is why the athletic but vocally precarious Georg Unger was cast in Bayreuth in 1876). For opera, male beauty had to be located in the sound of specific voice types: the heroic tenor and his opponent, the heroic baritone. These embodiments of musical masculinity found their counterpart in the dramatic or lyrical soprano and her adversary, the alluring but dangerous mezzosoprano. In order to illuminate the interrelated binary oppositions of gender and nationalism, the following discussion will compare two male and two female characters from each opera: the vulnerable masculinity of the German Siegmund and the Roman Germanicus in Carl Grammann’s Thusnelda, and the contrast of the ideal German woman Thusnelda with the decadent Roman Fulvia in Heinrich Hofmann’s Armin. The lives of the two composers, both born in 1842, could hardly have been more different. Hofmann (d. 1902) climbed the social ladder from being a poor artisan’s son to becoming a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts who could live comfortably from the proceedings of his successful compositions,24 while Grammann (d. 1897) came from a patrician family in Lübeck and spent his life as a freelance composer and journalist in Vienna and Dresden.25 They also attained different levels of fame and renown: Grammann was never widely popular although he was well respected amongst the not too radical Wagnerians; Hofmann, on the other hand, must be counted amongst the most successful German composers of the 1870s and 1880s. J. A. Fuller-Maitland included a biographical sketch in his Masters of German Music, tersely remarking that An amazing facility in manufacturing music, complete mastery in expressing what he desires, an absence of such originality as might offend the public, and an entire lack of distinction, are the chief characteristics of Hofmann’s music, and perhaps among the chief cause of its success with the German people.26 These differences notwithstanding, their major works are indebted to the general spirit of the age with their remarkably similar subject matter: Hofmann’s mildly programmatic Frithjof Symphony has its counterpart in Grammann’s Aventiure Symphony, op. 31, while the latter’s opera Andreasfest is inspired by a 23 See Daniel A. McMillan, ‘“… die höchste und heiligste Pflicht …” Das Männlichkeitsideal der deutschen Turnbewegung, 1811–1871’, in Männergeschichte  –  Geschlechtergeschichte, ed. Kühne, pp. 88–100. 24 There is as yet no biographical study of Hofmann. For the key facts see Rebecca Grotjahn, ‘Hofmann, Heinrich Karl Johann’, MGG 2, Personenteil, vol. 9 (Kassel, 2003), cols. 148–50. 25 Ferdinand Pfohl, Carl Grammann: Ein Künstlerleben (Berlin, 1910). The biography, written in collaboration with the composer’s sister, provides a wealth of primary information with excerpts from letters and reviews. It was clearly intended to propagate an unrecognised genius. 26 J. A. Fuller-Maitland, Masters of German Music (London, 1894), p. 248.

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similar interest in folklore, medievalism and legend as the former’s Ännchen von Tharau. The choice of Arminius, the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ and the tragic fate of Arminius’ wife Thusnelda attest to their awareness of contemporary popular patriotism, if not necessarily to their personal convictions. In the case of Hofmann’s Armin, the patriotic intention is documented at least for the librettist. Felix Dahn, professor of law at Königsberg and eminent specialist for Germanic law and history, wrote his operatic texts as a conscious contribution to German national art: I wholeheartedly wanted to bring German, national art on the stage; and because this had not worked out for spoken drama, at least not in the long run and not on many stages …, I planned to capture the Germans with opera. They had put up with Wagner’s tribune [Rienzi], his gods, Nibelungs, minnesingers, knights of the Holy Grail  –  albeit primarily for the sake of the music. Perhaps they would forgive my prehistoric protagonists and my Germanness if somebody  –  as extenuating circumstances!  –  wrote really nice music to go with them.27 In order to reinforce the national message of the opera, the librettist even requested the final scene of the opera to resemble the recently inaugurated Hermann monument at Detmold. During the final celebratory chorus the stage directions demand that Armin should be elevated on his shield, raise his sword and strike the pose of the Hermann monument, under general sword-waving of the men.28 The monument was also reproduced on the title page of the vocal score, with the title surrounded by oak foliage, Germanic weapons and bardic harps to underscore its patriotic message. Conversely, the final scene of Thusnelda by Grammann and his librettist Hermann Dickmann may have been inspired by a famous painting rather than a monument. At the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna, Karl Theodor von Piloty’s large canvas Thusnelda im Triumphzug des Germanicus caused a sensation, both for its superior technique and the moving depiction of the captive Thusnelda, her little son by her side, dramatically singled out by a beam of light and her proud, majestic bearing.29 The painter himself was strongly inspired by contemporary theatrical performances, especially by the actress Clara Ziegler, and dramatised the contrast between the depravity and decadence of 27 Felix Dahn, Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1890–5), 4. Buch: Würzburg, Sedan, Königsberg (1863–1888): 2. Abtheilung (1871–1888), pp. 669–70: ‘Mir lag es warm am Herzen, deutsche, nationale Kunst auf die Bühne zu bringen: und da es mit dem Schauspiel  … doch nicht auf die Dauer und auf vielen Bühnen gehen wollte, dachte ich den Deutschen mit der Oper beizukommen. Sie hatten doch Richard Wagner’s Tribun [Rienzi], seine Götter, Nibelungen, Minnesänger, Gralsritter sich gefallen lassen:  –  vor Allem freilich um der Musik willen. Vielleicht verziehen sie mir auch meine vorzeitlichen Gestalten und mein Deutschthum, wenn jemand  –  als mildernden Umstand!  –  recht schöne Musik dazu machte.’ 28 Heinrich Hofmann, Armin: Heroische Oper in 4 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn, op. 40 (Berlin, [1877]), pp. 258–9: ‘Armin wird auf den Schild gehoben; er erhebt das Schwert: Bild des Hermanndenkmals. – Allgemeine Erhebung der Waffen.’ 29 See Großer Auftritt, ed. Baumstark and Büttner, pp. 318–49.

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2.1  Title page of the vocal score of Armin, with a drawing of the Hermann monument. In the final scene of the opera the hero is requested to strike the same pose.

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the decaying Roman world on the one hand, and the healthy, morally superior Germanic ‘barbarians’ on the other, a theme that will return in the discussion of the operatic Thusnelda and her Roman adversaries. Interestingly the musical press reacted very differently to each composer’s choice of subject matter, depending on their stylistic preferences. For Theodor Krause, who wrote a biographical feature on Hofmann for the journal Illustrirte Zeitung, the decision for Arminius and against a Wagnerian idiom were signs of the composer’s sure artistic and patriotic instincts: The music, like the text, addresses the nation with the conciseness and comprehensibility of its motifs, and by adhering to the traditional, classical form. A purely declamatory style could not have reached out to the many. In this vital point Hofmann even opposes Wagner, a contrast that is emphasised by numerous, almost too many perfect cadences.30 In contrast to Hofmann, who was content with the stylistic moderation advocated by the Berlin Academy of Arts, Grammann was an outspoken disciple of Wagner. He visited his hero in 1871, persuaded friends and family to become patrons of the Bayreuth Festival and attended the early performances of the Ring and Parsifal.31 His first opera Melusine was immediately and not unfavourably compared with the Wagnerian music dramas. Because of this advanced idiom another critic complained after the premiere of Thusnelda that Grammann had apparently not understood Wagner’s reform when he chose a historical plot: Roman topics, history in general is not among [Wagner’s recommendations for music drama], and Thusnelda und der Triumphzug des Germanicus is too short of those mythical elements that demand musical treatment, that provide the right words and phrases for Wagnerian musical ideas. For Meyerbeer, for H. Hofmann, for the traditional closed operatic form this text would have been ‘musical’, but not for the music drama dating from Wagner.32 From a slightly later perspective the stylistic differences between Hofmann and Grammann became insignificant. Both were summarily dismissed as composers of the neo-romantic school who had shied away from the fundamental implications of Wagnerian reform. 30 Theodor Krause, ‘Heinrich Hofmann’, Illustrirte Zeitung 76 no. 1959 (15 January 1881), pp. 49–50: ‘Wie der Text, wendet sich aber auch die Musik, und zwar durch diese Prägnanz und Faßlichkeit der Motive sowie durch Festhaltung der überlieferten classischen Form, an die Nation. Der rein declamatorische Stil hätte jene Adresse gewiß nicht erreicht. In diesem wesentlichen Punkt stellt sich also Hofmann sogar in Gegensatz zu Wagner, zahlreiche, fast zu viele Vollschlüsse verschärfen denselben.’ 31 Pfohl, Carl Grammann, pp. 83–4, 88, 232–3. 32 Ludwig Hartmann, ‘Dresden’, MWB 12 no. 16 (14 April 1881), p. 193: ‘Römerstoffe, überhaupt Geschichte ist nicht darunter, und Mythisches, Musikforderndes in “Thusnelda und der Triumphzug des Germanicus” nicht genügend vorhanden, um Wagner’schen Musikgedanken die Wortformen bieten zu können. Für Meyerbeer, für H. Hofmann, überhaupt für die geschlossene Opernform, aber nicht für das Musikdrama Wagner’schen Datums war der Text “musikalisch”.’

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The objections from the Wagnerian camp notwithstanding, Arminius should have made such an attractive operatic hero that it is surprising that he is entirely absent from Grammann’s opera Thusnelda und der Triumphzug des Germanicus. As the title indicates the plot focuses not on the Germanic victory in the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ but on later events in ad 15–17. In the opera Thusnelda and her young friend Hilda are captives of the Romans; the Roman commander Germanicus even suggests to her an alliance between himself and Hermann against Emperor Tiberius in exchange for Thusnelda’s freedom. She rejects the degrading offer, faithful to her motto ‘Life is paid too dearly with ignominy.’33 In the end she commits suicide during Germanicus’ triumphal procession in Rome and dies while experiencing a prophetic vision of Germany’s future greatness. Hermann’s absence from the proceedings  –  historically correct but unexplained in the opera  –  was felt keenly by a contemporary reviewer: We always feel that somebody is to appear on stage who stands higher than everybody else, for whom all our hearts beat, and who was just forgotten on the play bill: Armin, who even in his absence makes an impression. If he was in captivity, I think the poet should have set him free, because without him the true protagonist is missing, the head and arm of the entire [drama].34 Thus instead of presenting a single radiant hero as a national role model, Dickmann and Grammann divide the attention between two male protagonists –  and by extension their masculinity as defined whose national allegiances   through their roles as defenders of the fatherland  –  are ambivalent: the Romefriendly Germanic prince Siegmund, Thusnelda’s brother and Hilda’s lover (tenor), and the German-friendly Roman commander Germanicus (baritone).35 The major bass role, tribune Publius, is a typical operatic villain and of little interest for the dramatic constellation, except for triggering the events that lead to the death of the main character. Both Siegmund and Germanicus reveal their characters most clearly in short solo scenes in which they express their dreams and aspirations  –  with very different consequences. At the beginning of scene 2 of Act 1 Siegmund joins the distressed Hilda. She wants to send him away, upset that he is following in the footsteps of his treacherous father. In agitated recitative she accuses him: ‘You are a Roman! Would you be here otherwise? The men are fighting against the arch-enemy; 33 Carl Grammann, Thusnelda: Grosse Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von H. Dickmann, op. 29 (Leipzig, [1881]), p. 112: ‘Zu theuer ist das Leben mit der Schande stets bezahlt.’ This motto is also inscribed on the first page of the vocal score. 34 Review by Louis Köhler of a performance in Königsberg in 1882, quoted in Pfohl, Carl Grammann, p. 145: ‘Immer hat man das Gefühl, es werde ein Jemand auftreten, der höher als alle steht, für den unser aller Herzen hochschlagen, und der auf dem Zettel nur vergessen sei: Armin, der uns in seiner Abwesenheit imponiert. War er gefangen, ich denke, der Dichter hätte ihn freilassen dürfen, denn mit ihm fehlt doch der wahre Akteur, der Kopf und Arm des Ganzen.’ 35 The historical Segimundus, son of Segestes and brother of Thusnelda, was not a soldier but a priest in Roman service. The operatic Siegmund blends the historical characters Segimundus and Arminius’ brother Flavus.

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2.2 Heinrich Gudehus as Siegmund in Grammann’s Thusnelda. The costume for the Dresden premiere, which shows both wings and horns on the helmet, was possibly adapted from a Wagner performance.

the coward remained to guard betrayed women.’36 Her allusion to the ‘Erbfeind’ places the Roman–Germanic conflict in the context of the Franco-Prussian War; her attitude that she cannot possibly love a traitor of the fatherland identifies her as a thoroughly modern woman of the nineteenth century. Her sentiments echo political songs and popular writings from the Napoleonic Wars, for example the refrain from the poem Männer und Buben (Men and boys) by volunteer-poet Theodor Körner, popularised in its setting by Carl Maria von Weber: Bist doch ein ehrlos erbärmlicher Wicht; Ein deutsches Mädchen küßt dich nicht, Ein deutsches Lied erfreut dich nicht, Ein deutscher Wein erquickt dich nicht.37 You are a miserable wretch without honour; No German maiden will kiss you, No German song can please you, No German wine can refresh you. 36 Grammann, Thusnelda, p. 15: ‘Du bist ein Römer! Wärest du sonst hier? Im Kampfe mit dem Erbfeind steh’n die Männer, der Feigling blieb als Hüter hier zurück verrathner Frauen.’ 37 Theodor Körner, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Streckfuß (Berlin, 1855), vol. 1, pp. 97–9. Note the German ‘trinity’ of wine, woman and song.

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Siegmund asks her not to be so prejudiced against Rome, the true ruler of the world and the sun that warms the cold North. At this point he embarks on a short lyrical scene of sixty bars, which is differentiated from the surrounding recitative by the new key signatures A minor and later A major, by the indication Andante moderato quasi Adagio and the regular metrical structure with end-rhymes: Vor mir liegt freudlos ausgebreitet als öde Wildnis die Natur; um ihre kargen Gaben streitet des Helden Arm mit Wolf und Ur. Den Göttern nahen wir mit Grausen, selbst Wodan mit verzagtem Muth; Ihn kündet nur des Sturmes Brausen und Hertha heischt zum Opfer Blut. Aus des Südens sanften Auen steigt empor der Sonne Pracht, strahlet hell in unsre Gauen, ihrem Glanze weicht die Nacht. Und die finstern Götter fliehen, und Apollo ziehet ein; von des Jubels Melodien tönet der geweihte Hain. Fern hör ich den Lorbeer rauschen, unter Myrthen tönt Gesang; göttergleiche Frauen lauschen auf der Liebe süssen Klang. Doch der stolzen Römerinnen hehres Bild zerfliesst in Schaum, darf ich deine Huld gewinnen, gern entsag’ ich meinem Traum.38 Before me nature lies joylessly as a bleak desert; for her meagre gifts the hero’s arm battles with wolf and aurochs. We approach the gods with dread, even Wodan with disheartened courage; only the roaring of the storm proclaims him and [goddess] Hertha craves bloody sacrifices. From the gentle meadows of the South the sun rises in glory, brightly shines on our countries, night cedes to sun’s splendour. And the gloomy gods flee, and Apollo enters; of jubilant melodies 38 Grammann, Thusnelda, pp. 16–20.

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Musically and lyrically the short ‘aria’ is divided into two sections. The first eight verses paint a bleak picture of barbarian Germany; the following sixteen offer a contrasting image of the South as the country of culture and civilisation. Despite the different content the verse structure maintains the regular tetrameters with sometimes predictable (Muth  –  Blut, Pracht  –  Macht), sometimes contrived rhymes (die Natur  –  Wolf und Ur). This structure prompts stereotypical four-bar phrases, their regularity enhancing the aria-like qualities of the scene. The musical setting underscores the opposition between gloomy Germany and sunny Rome: A minor and 4/4 time depict the dark and cold North in twenty-four bars, while the Roman world basks in the warm light of A major and gently sways in 6/4 time. As a ‘prelude’ four bars of stiff chords, low rumbling triplets and the indication ‘düster’ (gloomy) set the scene. Word-painting abounds throughout: the chordal, chorale-like accompaniment with archaic harmonic relations depicts the bleakness and backwardness of Germany; repeated quavers illustrate Wodan’s appearance in the storm or men’s trembling fear of the goddess Hertha. The top notes f ' and g' on ‘Grausen’ (dread) and ‘Sturmes’ (storm’s) respectively are supported by strongly dissonant chords tapering off into meek resolutions (Ex. 2.1). After an interlude of two bars Siegmund launches into the song of praise for the beauties of the South, to be sung ‘Zart, mit steigender Empfindung’ (tenderly with growing emotion). Harp-like arpeggios marked dolce and legato now swirl around the lyrical vocal line. The suspensions speak no longer of desperation or fear, but of tender longing. At the mentioning of the Germanic gods the darkness of the preceding section briefly returns, but with the arrival of Apollo the minor keys give way to bright E major, culminating on the vocal top note b' on ‘Jubels’ (jubilation’s). The following lines see further intensification; tremolos and a sudden enharmonic shift depict very literally the rustling of the laurel and Siegmund’s awe of the beautiful Roman ladies. However, he returns to A major and a simpler, more songlike idiom when he remembers Hilda and assures her of his love. The penultimate line of the text is repeated with another ascent to top b', and a two-bar break in the accompaniment would even allow for a cadenza, before leading into a broadly spun-out  –  but finally evaded  –  cadence. Siegmund’s rhetorical means are fairly traditional but in their stark contrasts quite effective, and the regular four-bar phrases and the lyrical vocal lines of the second part are more than a little reminiscent not only of his namesake from the Ring but even more of Lohengrin’s tender addresses to Elsa. However, Siegmund utterly fails to persuade Hilda of the blessings of Roman civilisation, and her swift declamation quickly brings him back from lyrical

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Example 2.1  Carl Grammann, Thusnelda: Grosse Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von H. Dickmann, op. 29 (Leipzig, [1881]), Act 1, scene 2, Siegmund’s ‘aria’, bars 1–13 and 24–32




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History in Mighty Sounds Example 2.1 continued

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outpourings to reality. As the prize of her love she demands him to break his alliance with Rome, to liberate Thusnelda and to fight side by side with Hermann. Siegmund agrees to fight for the good of the people, but not in the ranks of the ‘barbarians’. Her anguished outcry only spurs him to shout: ‘Salvation comes from Rome alone!’  –  a highly charged phrase at the time of the anti-Roman Kulturkampf.39 Hilda turns away from him in disappointment. At this moment Thusnelda and a crowd of Germanic men and women arrive to consult a wise seeress and to pray to the gods. Thusnelda first calls on Wodan and Freia to save her brother. According to the vocal score he turns away in inner turmoil, indicated by a short flickering of the ‘love motif ’ in the accompaniment, but he remains silent. With some asperity Thusnelda exclaims: ‘Love is silent; speak thou to your 39 Ibid., pp. 22–3: ‘Von Rom nur kommt das Heil!’

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2.3  Paul Bulss as Germanicus in the Dresden performance of Thusnelda

son, o fatherland!’40 The male chorus begins by praising warfare, the women’s chorus responds with a promise of love as a reward for the homecoming soldiers; then both choruses unite to extol the joys of Valhalla that await the dead heroes. Finally Siegmund cannot resist this image of immortal glory and fame and pledges his undying allegiance to the fatherland. The chorus breaks into shouts of ‘Hail’ and elevates him on a shield  –  the standard response of Germanic choruses to the assertion of natural leadership. Siegmund has returned to his own people and is now free to reassert his masculinity in the service of love and fatherland by liberating Hilda from Roman captivity in the final act. Like Siegmund, the Roman commander Germanicus suffers from a conflict over his ‘true’ nationality, though in inverted direction. His military campaign in Germany has been successful, and with the capture of Thusnelda and the support of her Rome-friendly father Segestes he can negotiate with the Germanic chieftains. Nevertheless Germanicus is torn between his official duties to Rome and his secret love for Germany. The musical means to express this conflict are  –  intentionally or not  –  very similar to the ones deployed in Siegmund’s ‘aria’, as his monologue also juxtaposes contrasting images of opposite nations. At the beginning of scene 3 of Act 2, Germanicus contemplates his future while waiting for Thusnelda. In a fourteen-bar recitative he reveals that his growing fame has kindled the envy of Emperor Tiberius, who wants to lure his rival to Rome with 40 Ibid., p. 35: ‘Die Liebe schweigt, sprich du zu deinem Sohn, o Vaterland!’

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the promise of a triumphal procession. The sparsely accompanied recitative culminates in the anguished outcry ‘Zurück nach Rom?’ (Back to Rome?); then an enharmonic juxtaposition of chords leads directly into a con moto section, still with prose text but now with a more sustained orchestral accompaniment, with an ominous circling figure in the middle register alternating with heavily ascending broken chords (Ex. 2.2). Germanicus confesses: Ich liebe dieses Land, das Helden zeugt, dem Sieger ew’gen Ruhm und Macht verleiht, der Welt einst zu gebieten. In Rom bin ich dem Untergang geweiht.41 I love this country which engenders heroes, which grants the victor eternal glory and power, to rule the world some day. In Rome I’m doomed. During these thirty-two bars of accompanied speech-song the phrases are of irregular length and the harmony roams around uncomfortably, except for a passing brightening at the vision of Germany’s future glory. Then a more decisive modulation and a pedal point on B prepare the arioso section in E major, which is additionally set apart by the time signature of 3/2, a stately and dignified metre that contrasts implicitly with Siegmund’s pastoral idyll in 6/4. Poetic diction replaces prose with regular trochaic tetrameters that prevent upbeat vocal phrases and lend Germanicus’ confessions a special gravity. Herrlich durch die Nacht voll Grauen winkt verlockend mir das Bild. Krieger aus den deutschen Gauen heben hoch mich auf den Schild. Rom belohnt mit Schmach und Schande seine Helden, wirf das Loos: Walte in dem deutschen Lande als ein Herrscher stark und groß. Weh, das hehre Bild verschwunden, eine Leiche hebt die Hand! Fluch ihm, der dem Feind verbunden, ihm, der schnöd verrieht sein Vaterland! Nicht zu stolzen Ruhmeshallen führt dich deine Siegesbahn: Ruhmlos, Stolzer, wirst du fallen, und dein Streben ist ein Wahn!42 Splendidly through the dreadful night an enticing image beckons. Warriors from the German countries elevate me on the shield. Rome rewards with shame and disgrace her heroes, cast your lot: You shall reign in Germany 41 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 42 Ibid., pp. 76–8.

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Example 2.2  Carl Grammann, Thusnelda, Act 2, scene 3, Germanicus’ monologue, bars 19–29 and 51–4 Con moto.






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History in Mighty Sounds as a ruler, powerful and mighty. Woe, the noble image has disappeared, a corpse lifts his hand! Curse him who joined the enemy, who callously betrayed his fatherland! Not to proud halls of honour your victorious course will lead you: Proud man, you will fall without glory, and your striving is in vain.

This utterance is, as the text suggests, divided into three sections, with the outer parts (lines 1–8 and 13–16) in stable E major and the inserted vision of the corpse in contrasting E minor, where tremolos underscore the threatening atmosphere. The first section is more lyrical, with great tenderness as Germanicus imagines himself ruling in Germany. The final section takes up the melodic material from the first, but the anguished outcry ‘Ruhmlos, Stolzer, wirst du fallen’ is repeated with increasing intensity over a knocking ‘fate’ motif, until Germanicus settles on dignified resignation, complete with quasi-religious plagal cadence. In both solo scenes Dickmann and Grammann play on time-honoured stereotypes of Rome and Germany. While Siegmund compares the blessings of a superior civilisation and more ‘enlightened’ religion with untamed nature, Germanicus focuses on the political attitudes of both nations. The Germans’ genuine admiration for ‘natural’ leadership and military prowess is contrasted with Roman jealousy and scheming to political ends, embodied in the operatic characters of the villain Publius, the Romanised German Segestes and Emperor Tiberius. This dichotomy was summarised by a contemporary: ‘It is part and parcel of the first expressions of the awakening national consciousness that the German contrasts the German word [of honour], German steadfastness with Southern lies and perfidy.’ 43 Between these binary oppositions, however, Siegmund and Germanicus occupy an ambivalent position, as they both  –  at least initially  –  have unstable relationships with their respective fatherlands. This lack of national roots affects their identity as men; without a fatherland to die for, masculine Wehrhaftigkeit cannot prove itself. This is not an invention of librettist or composer; the Wilhelminian establishment, for example, criticised Socialists as ‘vaterlandslose Gesellen’ because they had protested against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 and because their international outlook allegedly undermined their loyalty to Germany.44 The desire of both operatic characters to change sides remains unfulfilled, albeit for different reasons. In retrospect Siegmund’s praise of everything Roman appears as the childish infatuation of a young man who has not yet realised that his duty is not with the invader (however glamorous), but in unwavering loyalty to the people to whom he his bound by ties of shared blood and faith. Conversely, Germanicus can never become a true German despite his upright character and his sincere desire to leave Rome. When 43 Quoted in Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, pp. 154–5: ‘Es gehörte zu den ersten Lebensäußerungen erwachenden Nationalgefühls, daß der Deutsche deutsches Wort, deutsche Treue der welschen Lüge und Tücke gegenüberstellte.’ 44 Ullrich, Die nervöse Großmacht, p. 64.

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he explains his plan of a Roman-Germanic alliance to Thusnelda, she suspects him of a cunning scheme to take over the rule of Germany. Her message is plain: a German(ic) identity cannot be acquired at will. One has to be born into the Germanic people or otherwise be their arch-enemy; nationality equals destiny. This rigid conception of nationality distinguishes sharply the nineteenth-century operatic characters from their Baroque predecessors who shared virtues across national or political boundaries. Unfortunately Dickmann and Grammann did not focus on the genuinely tragic character of Germanicus at length, perhaps prevented by patriotic bias. To them he is relevant mainly as Thusnelda’s opponent, whereas some added human interest  –  apart from his desire to find an (adopted) fatherland  –  would have highlighted his similarity to tragic baritones like Philip of Spain in Verdi’s Don Carlos. The imaginative critic Louis Köhler even detected faint traces of romantic attraction between Thusnelda and Germanicus,45 a development that would have added considerable interest to both the blandly upright German woman and the Roman soldier.46 Siegmund, on the other hand, undergoes a process of transformation when he hears the call of the fatherland. However, the listener is hardly aware of this conversion as it happens silently and implicitly at some point during a choral tableau, and his understated inner struggles are over before the end of Act 1. Thus what might have been a psychologically interesting development of a manyfaceted character remains a demonstration of the self-evident: that the trappings of Roman civilisation pale before the joys of German love and the eternal bliss of Valhalla. Again Louis Köhler, who spent a considerable portion of his review speculating about the underdeveloped dramatic potential of the characters, was clearly disappointed when he summarised Siegmund’s swift conversion to Germanic patriotism: On the whole Siegmund is little more than a nobody in the opera, because nothing of consequence happens to him. While Siegmund’s inner struggles for Hilda as the prize of his conversion are of somewhat doubtful interest, such an interest lacks entirely for Hilda: she is only Siegmund’s beloved and not attractive in herself. Finally [in Act 3] the couple flees and is, truly, missed by no one.47 Several other critics seconded Köhler in suggesting that greater attention to the romantic side would have made the opera more attractive and more congenial to the Wagnerian style. If lyrical romanticism gets short shrift, then sexual politics play an important 45 Quoted in Pfohl, Carl Grammann, p. 145. 46 Roger Skarsten has suggested that Thusnelda may not be quite as virtuous, as she remembers, at the beginning of Act 3, with apparent passion the night of her elopement. 47 Quoted in Pfohl, Carl Grammann, p. 144: ‘Im übrigen ist Siegmund in der Oper nicht viel mehr als ein Niemand, denn nichts von Belang geschieht um ihn. War der innere Kampf Siegmunds um Hildas Besitz als Preis seiner Bekehrung von etwas zweifelhaftem Interesse, so fehlt ein solches gänzlich für Hilda: sie ist nur von Siegmund geliebt und zieht nicht selbständig an. Das Liebespaar ergreift schließlich die Flucht und wird durchaus nicht vermißt.’

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role in the denouement of the opera. In the final act the political opposition of German heroism and Roman perfidy acquires yet another moral dimension when German virtue is starkly contrasted with Roman lasciviousness. The theme of Roman decadence has briefly been touched upon when the corrupt Publius lusts after Hilda, but his attempts on her virtue are quickly checked by Germanicus. In the final act, however, the Germanic women, who as prisoners of war are paraded before the Roman public, are isolated in a hostile crowd of spectators. The triumphal procession begins with a (historically spurious) dance of bacchantes and maenads that takes the traditional place of the grand opéra ballet. Uninhibited dancing is a convenient way to depict the decadence of the ‘other’ as a group, a famous example being the Bacchanale in Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila.48 In Grammann’s ballet the lasciviousness is in the intention, as expressed in the stage directions, rather than the score, where the composer shies away from colourful orientalisms; placid waltz rhythms stand strangely unconnected with the mandatory chromatic runs and excited trills. Costumes and choreography will have supplied the titillation that the music lacked. After a pas-de-deux the dance of bacchantes and maenads ‘gradually grows into glowing excitement’ and dissolves in ‘highest paroxysm  –  passionate embrace of the couples’ in the final bars of the ballet.49 After this display of bodily excess the crowd of onlookers starts taunting the Germanic prisoners, just as in the painting by Karl von Piloty. The Roman woman Prisca especially mocks Thusnelda as she decorates her with flowers like a priestess of Venus and promises her a future as a whore for the Roman soldiers, a suggestion that is eagerly taken up by the chorus. Prisca exemplifies the morally fallen woman who rejoices in dragging another woman to join her in the gutter. Superficially she even resembles Kundry who laughed at Christ on the way to the cross. In the context of the entire opera, however, Prisca is of little dramatic consequence since the function of her ribaldry is restricted to triggering the rebellion of the Germanic warriors, the escape of Siegmund and Hilda, and Thusnelda’s suicide who stabs herself out of shame, thus claiming the moral high ground for the Germans even in the deepest humiliation. It fell to Heinrich Hofmann and his librettist Felix Dahn to exploit fully the antithesis of the virtuous Germanic woman and her lascivious Roman opponent.50 The plot of their ‘heroic opera’ Armin sets in immediately before the battle against the Roman legions in ad 9. The eponymous hero is unquestionably the central figure, and he and his bride Thusnelda are prime examples of complementary gender roles of the nineteenth century. The feminine stereotype was especially 48 Ralph P. Locke, ‘Constructing the Oriental “Other”: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila’, COJ 3 (1991), p. 265. 49 Grammann, Thusnelda, pp. 164–5: ‘Der Tanz steigert sich allmählig [sic] zu glühender Aufregung  –  höchster Paroxismus. Liebestrunkene Umarmung der Paare.’ 50 I have compared Fulvia and Thusnelda in the context of other ‘Germanic’ heroines in ‘Schwert und Schild und Dolch und Gift: Germanische Heldin und welsche Primadonna’, in Diva  –  Die Inszenierung der übermenschlichen Frau: Interdisziplinäre Untersuchungen zu einem kulturellen Phänomen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Rebecca Grotjahn, Dörte Schmidt and Thomas Seedorf (Schliengen, 2011), pp. 230–46.

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2.4 Mathilde Zink, solo dancer at the Dresden opera house, dressed a Roman ‘bacchante’ for the final-act ballet

important to nationalist ideologies  –  not only to German nationalism  –  as the ideal woman was supposed to defend the native virtue and culture and to act as an antidote to evil outside influences.51 Violating a woman’s body was understood as synonymous with the violation of the body politic, and conversely a morally deviant woman undermined the (military) prowess of her male compatriots and thus threatened to emasculate the entire nation. In order to make this threat viable on the stage, Felix Dahn invented the fictitious character of Fulvia, the daughter of Roman commander Varus: ‘I tried to make the historically established plot more poignant by adding to the likewise historical couple Armin and Thusnelda the daughter of Varus, Fulvia, who is consumed by a demonic passion for the strong Cheruscan and by jealousy of his beloved.’52 In contrast to the largely passive Thusnelda, Fulvia’s ‘demonic passion’ drives several strands of the plot, ending with the undoing of Varus’ army and ultimately with her suicide in the face of Roman defeat. In Act 1 she arranges a secret rendezvous with Armin by promising to reveal her father’s military strategy to him. Act 3 opens with this assignation in her chamber in the Roman camp Aliso, lovingly described in the stage directions: 51 Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum, pp. 46–8. 52 Dahn, Erinnerungen, pp. 655–6: ‘[D]en von der Geschichte gegebenen heroischen Stoff suchte ich dadurch herzrührender zu gestalten, daß ich neben das ebenfalls gegebene Liebespaar Armin und Thusnelda die Tochter des Varus, Fulvia, stellte, die dämonische Leidenschaft für den starken Cherusker und Eifersucht auf seine Geliebte verzehren.’

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To the right a divan lavishly decorated with purple carpets and cushions; in front a low marble table with gold and silver goblets and mixing bowls. Four candelabras with colourful flames. Tripods, sacrificial bowls. Marble, gold, ivory everywhere. Mosaics on the floor. Frescoes  –  Pompeian style. The full luxury of Roman civilisation in contrast to the simplicity of Thusnelda’s chamber.53 With the sure eye of the novelist Dahn uses a character’s surroundings to hint at her passionate nature (the divan), at luxury and indulgence (marble, gold and ivory) and even at the dangers of witchcraft and sorcery (the tripod, coloured flames and mysterious vessels). These come into play as Fulvia plans to enhance her seductive efforts with a love potion, which makes her a sinister, witch-like figure and also places her in line with exotic characters such as the Indian slave girl Sélika in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’ Africaine (1865), who  –  though not voluntarily  –  drugs Vasco da Gama. Armin, however, is entirely unimpressed by the splendid surroundings and remains unaffected both by her amorous efforts and the libation which he downs with a toast to his lover Thusnelda. The scene offers an alternative outcome to the parallel plot constellation in Act 1 of Götterdämmerung when Siegfried drinks the drugged potion to Brünnhilde’s memory, only to forget her completely and to fall in love with Gutrune. It is quite likely that Dahn intended Armin’s resistance to Fulvia’s snares as a commentary on Wagner, since he criticised in his impressions of the first Bayreuth Festival: [Wagner] committed many violations of taste and did not avoid ambiguities, longwinded passages entirely contrary to stage practice and tiring repetitions.  … Apart from the downright pitiful and undignified figure which he turned Wotan into …, the love potion, which we don’t believe in, is a reprehensible dramatic makeshift since it works only for a short while, just like certain drugs.54 Being drugged into oblivion was a fate that the more forthrightly patriotic Dahn obviously wanted to spare his ideal German hero. As a seductress, however, Fulvia is hardly more successful than as a potionmaker. Her scene shows none of the seductive dance rhythms or exotic flourishes that make, for example, Carmen such an exciting heroine. On the contrary, her monologue is a prayer to Amor, the Roman god of love, in which she voices her 53 Hofmann, Armin, p. 110: ‘Rechts vorn ein mit Purpurteppichen und Polstern reich geschmücktes Lager; davor ein niedrer Marmortisch mit Gold- und SilberPocalen und Mischkrügen. Vier Candelaber mit bunten Flammen. Dreifüsse, Opferschaalen. Rings Marmor, Gold und Elfenbein. Mosaiken auf dem Fussboden. Fresken  –  pompejanische Wandmalereien. Der ganze Luxus der römischen Cultur im Gegensatz zu der Schlichtheit im Gemach Thusnelden’s.’ 54 Dahn, Erinnerungen, pp. 378–9: ‘[Wagner] beging gar viele Geschmacklosigkeiten und vermied nicht Unklarheiten, höchst bühnenwidrige Längen und ermüdende Wiederholungen.  … Abgesehen von der geradezu kläglich würdelosen Gestalt, zu der Wotan herabgezerrt ist  … ist der Liebestrank, an den wir nun einmal nicht glauben, ein im Drama durchaus verwerflicher Nothbehelf, zumal da er nur auf Zeit wirkt, ganz wie gewisse Medicinen.’

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desire for sensual pleasure and for political domination  –  a standard preghiera turned evil. A short orchestral prelude, with ‘uncanny’ tremolos and hurried triplets alternating with stiff dotted rhythms, accompanies the rising of the curtain. Through the first few bars of Fulvia’s recitative the orchestra is silent, but adds an ethereal chord sequence when she comments that the Germanic people are now gathered to pray to their god of light. This ‘religious’ plagal cadence reflects Hofmann’s rather than Fulvia’s attitude to the Germanic deity since she confesses that she worships only the god of love. At this point she launches into her prayer, cast in ternary form with an abbreviated and modified repetition of the first section. The short middle section does not create the contrast of style and emotion that the modified da capo form suggests, but rather an overall intensification. Höre mich, Amor, bogengewalt’ger, lächelnd die Männer bezwingender Gott. Beuge dem stolzen Cherusker den Nacken, welcher bisher dein Scepter verschmäht. Lass ihn an Fulvia’s Busen erglühen, lass ihn von diesen schimmernden Armen eng, den Bezwungnen, umschlungen werden. Lass ihn in sel’gem Rausche vergessen, Mund an Mund in brennendem Kuss, lass ihn vergessen Freiheit und Freunde und sein barbarisches Vaterland.      Segnet mir, Himeros, Eros und Anteros,     segnet den magischen Liebestrank,      dass ihm die Sinne wonneversunken     unter Fulvia’s Küssen vergeh’n. Höre mich, Amor, bogengewalt’ger, lächelnd die Männer bezwingender Gott! Beuge dem stolzen Cherusker den Nacken! Lass ihn in sel’gem Rausche vergessen, Mund an Mund in brennendem Kuss, lass ihn vergessen Freiheit und Freunde und sein barbarisches Vaterland.55 Hear me, Amor, mighty with the bow, god who smilingly overmasters the men. Bend the neck of the proud Cheruscan, who thus far spurned your rule. Make him glow at Fulvia’s breast, let these shining arms tightly embrace him, the defeated one. Make him forget in blissful ecstasy, mouth to mouth in burning kiss, make him forget freedom and friends and his barbarian fatherland. 55 Hofmann, Armin, pp. 111–16.

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History in Mighty Sounds     Himeros, Eros and Anteros,      bless the magic love potion,      so that he, lost in delight,      loses his senses under Fulvia’s kisses. Hear me, Amor, mighty with the bow, god who smilingly overmasters the men. Bend the neck of the proud Cheruscan! Make him forget in blissful ecstasy, mouth to mouth in burning kiss, make him forget freedom and friends and his barbarian fatherland.

The librettist has created interesting and potentially very flexible verses with freely alternating trochees and dactyls which attest to Dahn’s skill as a poet, compared with the standard iambic tetrameters that characterise much of Dickmann’s libretto for Thusnelda. Compound adjectives like ‘bogengewalt’ger’ or her list of minor deities invoke classical poetry. Using such trappings of classical learning  –  Dahn had attended a humanist grammar school and even wrote some Latin poems  –  for a character of questionable morals was an interesting inversion of the traditional hierarchy of education that highly valued classical culture. It is the content of her prayer, however, rather than its outward form which marks her as a representative of the ‘other’, the outsider to the (German) nation. The strongest indication of her ‘otherness’ is her desire for and free expression of sensual pleasure. She wishes to make Armin glow at her bosom, to share with him blissful ecstasy, to embrace him tightly in her ‘shining arms’. While the costumes for both Roman and Germanic women would have exposed the singers’ bare arms  –  the illustrations from Grammann’s Thusnelda are a good example  –  no ‘decent’ woman would have drawn attention to the allure of her body. Unlike Thusnelda or Hilda, who dream of the eternal bond of marriage and are probably happy to defer sexual fulfilment until then, Fulvia’s inability or unwillingness to control her passions mark her as a member of the inferior nation. This lack of restraint had been an ingredient of anti-Roman stereotype since the chronicles of the sixteenth-century historiographer Aventinus, who painted Varus as both morally depraved and politically unscrupulous, which in turn inspired countless novelists and dramatists to justify the Germanic–Roman conflict on moral grounds.56 Fulvia shares her lack of continence with the Roman tribune Publius in Thusnelda or Varus’ legate Numonius Vala in Armin who lusts after Thusnelda. Thus the dangers of transgressive passion were not limited to women, but their violation of morality was judged more seriously by the standards of nineteenth-century gender roles. As women were supposed to be less strong-willed and more likely to yield to temptation, even greater self-control was expected of them. At the same time their violation of the moral code was considered a smirch not only of their personal honour but by extension of their father, brother or husband.57 Therefore the forbidden pleasures of unregulated sexuality had to be projected onto a female 56 Kösters, Mythos Arminius, p. 62. 57 Ute Frevert, ‘Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann’: Geschlechter-Differenzen in der Moderne (Munich, 1995), chapter ‘Weibliche Ehre, Männliche Ehre’, pp. 166 ff.

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representative of the ‘other’, which kept the class, race and gender boundaries of one’s own group  –  here the nation  –  intact.58 Unlike many other instantiations of the alluring but dangerous outsider mentioned by George L. Mosse in his study on Nationalism and Sexuality, Fulvia is neither black, nor poor, nor Jewish, though as a Roman she might have been costumed with a dark wig in contrast to the blond or red-haired Germanic women.59 However, she can be interpreted as a member of the nation that the Germans feared, envied and despised more than any other in the nineteenth century: the French. The stereotype of the superficial, luxuryloving and immoral Frenchwoman was common currency and gained further popularity after the Franco-Prussian War.60 In popular fiction Parisian fashion or French novels are used as a shorthand for the dangers of foreign, urban culture, and a woman who indulges in both is already on the road to decadence. Since the days of Louis XIV and Napoleon the French were perceived to endanger the liberty and unity of the German nation, but even more the moral basis of German society and its natural character. They posed not just the concrete threat of an outside arch-enemy (Erbfeind) who could  –  and was  –  defeated with military power; more dangerous was the inner enemy who, sneaking and flattering, wanted to ‘poison’ the Germans.61 Thus Fulvia’s use of a love potion can be seen as an embodiment of all that was both dangerous and alluring about the French enemy. When Fulvia fails to ‘poison’ Armin, she wishes at least to corrupt pure and innocent Thusnelda. During the confusion of the battle in the final act she refuses to shield the virtue of the Germanic woman who has momentarily ended up as her captive. In this respect she is a sister of Grammann’s Prisca who wants to humiliate Thusnelda as a ‘servant of Venus’  –  a prostitute. Fulvia’s subversion of ideal femininity does not stop, however, at a reckless wish for sexual fulfilment. She wishes to dominate Armin not only as a physical but also as a political being when she urges Amor to ‘bend the proud Cheruscan’s neck’ and to make him forget ‘freedom and friends and his barbarian fatherland’. The contrast of blissful but transgressive ecstasy in the arms of an ‘exotic’ woman and the duty to the fatherland  –  defined as masculine by its very name  –  is obvious. As she plans to guide Armin politically and to decide the fate of the Roman army and Germanic tribes by divulging her father’s military strategy, Fulvia rejects the nineteenth-century ideal of separate spheres of activity for men an women. As stated above, women were excluded from most political activities in the German Empire, both from active and passive suffrage and from participation in political parties and associations.62 Although the boundaries between an ‘outer’ sphere of state, business and politics reserved for men and the ‘inner sphere’ of home and family for women were more permeable than the clear-cut divide suggests, bourgeois society upheld this ideal throughout the nineteenth century. 58 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985), pp. 133–52. 59 Fulvia is depicted with dark hair in a series of contemporary ‘cartoons’ illustrating the opera (a copy can be seen in the little museum near the Hermannsdenkmal). 60 Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde, p. 248. 61 Ibid., p. 252. 62 Frevert, Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann, pp. 95–125.

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The  private space was imagined as ‘apolitical and anti-competitive, centred on homes that were increasingly segregated from workplaces, scrutiny, and traffic of all sorts.’63 Ambitions beyond this segregated sphere marked a woman as dangerous and subversive. It is the combination of ‘demonic passion’, witchcraft and political meddling which marks Fulvia as a villainess. In this respect she is a sister of Wagner’s Ortrud, whom the composer famously characterised in a letter to Franz Liszt dated 30 January 1852: ‘Her nature is politics. A male politician disgusts us, a female politician appals us: it was this appallingness which I had to portray.’ 64 In fact her single-mindedness makes Ortrud even more demonic than Fulvia, who intrudes into the male sphere of politics for the feminine goal to win the man of her desire, while Ortrud, in Wagner’s retrospective appraisal, does neither know nor care what love is. Fulvia’s transgression of the boundaries of decency and the feminine sphere finds its equivalent in the music to which her perverted prayer is set. In feverish anticipation of Armin’s arrival, her expressions of desire are frantic and obsessive rather than seductive. It would be wrong to expect from her exotic allure on a par with Carmen or Kundry, since Hofmann’s relatively conservative and restrained musical language is not given to overflowing sensuality. Within these constraints, however, Hofmann pushes the boundaries of his style to make her monologue a memorable moment in the opera. After the opening recitative described above, the aria proper opens with a four-bar instrumental prelude that arrives on the tonic key of A major with the entrance of the voice. For the first verse chords of A major alternate with the flattened submediant F major, the contrast of the chords underlined by the voice’s downward leaps of a fifth (Ex. 2.3). The effect is striking, especially since such juxtapositions are not employed elsewhere in Armin and are therefore unique to Fulvia’s musical language. The repetition of this model to the text ‘bend the proud Cheruscan’s neck’ is disrupted when the harmony proceeds to F# major while the voice leaps to a highly dissonant g'' (instead of c'' ) and back again to a #', overstepping the boundaries of natural diatonic melody. However, at the repetition of the line ‘who thus far spurned your rule’ the music is back on track to a firm cadence in the tonic with a triumphant top a'', one of the ‘almost too many perfect cadences’ Hofmann’s admirer Theodor Krause commented upon. For the description of Fulvia’s trembling bosom and her tight embrace Hofmann resorts to standard   –  though nonetheless effective   –  word-painting with oscillating tremolo chords and snake-like melodic lines that culminate in a brief coloratura flourish. The latter marks Fulvia  –  like the use of a love potion  –  as an essentially ‘operatic’ character, an Italianate villainess whose vocal display indicates her sinister designs. The anti-French political message is overlaid with implicit musical criticism of Italian opera. The passage is, however, too short to constitute a major stylistic deviation from Hofmann’s ordinary idiom. Finally Fulvia predicts that in their union Armin will forget his duties to freedom, friends and fatherland, 63 Mary Jo Maynes, ‘Class Cultures and Images of Proper Family Life’, in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1913, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven, 2002), p. 201. 64 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), p. 248.

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Example 2.3 Heinrich Hofmann, Armin: Heroische Oper in 4 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn, op. 40 (Berlin, [1877]), Act 3, scene 1: Fulvia’s monologue, bars 30–7 and 68–75

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the worst-case scenario for a national hero. For the first time downward-sliding chromatic lines are associated with the femme fatale, appearing in a four-bar model spanning the fourth d''–a', which derives its harmonic vagueness from the parallel motion of soprano voice and bass part, while the top melody of the accompaniment  –  probably a woodwind instrument  –  again spells out the idea of ‘excess’ with its wide leaps. This passage is answered with a second chromatic model, this time with an ascending bass line, before the by now expected and unfittingly down-to-earth final cadence brings the first section to a close. The juxtaposition of distantly related chords and the augmented and diminished intervals in the singing voice are intensified in the short middle F–c#–e–d ) underpinning Fulvia’s invocation section. The two-bar bass line (      of the assorted gods of love would make an apt leitmotif for the dark, witchlike quality of her character, especially its opening leap of an augmented fifth. Such a leitmotivic device would connect her scene to Ortrud’s schemes and sorcery in Act 2 of Lohengrin. Hofmann, however, consciously eschewed the opportunities of leitmotif technique; no musical trait that can be classified even as a ‘reminiscence motif ’ appears throughout the entire opera, which is unusual even in a conservative take on the genre. At the return of the text of the first section the music deviates from its first statement after only eight bars, as Fulvia grows ever more frantic in her desire to humiliate and dominate Armin. The vocal leaps of a fifth are now replaced with hysterical sevenths. The repetition of ‘make him forget’ returns to the sliding chromatic line but is now transposed up a step for intensification. Again the final cadence with its clear-cut dominant–tonic trajectory and the operatic leap to the top-note a'' is slightly disappointing because the compositional commonplace destroys the chilling atmosphere of the scene. The orchestral prelude brings back at least some uncanny flair by returning to the alternation of A and F major. Both in her characterisation as an evil force within the plot and as a woman out of bounds Fulvia is fairly consistent, employing some of the traits associated with the exotic (here urbane-French rather than oriental or ‘native’) and dangerous version of femininity. However, the comparatively strict formal frame and Hofmann’s careful containment of her excesses by blunt tonal cadences undermine his intentions. Her through-and-through evil designs and her undecided musical language project none of the alluring ambiguity which makes Carmen, Dalila or Kundry such exciting sirens; Fulvia is almost reduced to a caricature of the dark side of the ‘eternally feminine’. This begs the question whether Dahn and Hofmann did not dare to jeopardise Armin’s patriotic mission  –  and thus the patriotic message of the opera  –  by making Fulvia too attractive, or whether exciting sensuality was simply beyond the creative powers of the composer. Unlike her more successful sisters, she does not quite fit the concept of the alluring exotic woman, whom nineteenth-century audiences found delectable because her obvious ‘otherness’ and her spatial and chronological remoteness made her a relatively unthreatening outlet for erotic projections. Fulvia, in contrast, was clearly recognisable as a Frenchwoman in Roman disguise whose machinations threatened the very beginnings of German history. Her appearance on stage had eminent political implications for the Germans who had won the Franco-Prussian War only six years before the premiere of the opera. To downplay

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or caricature Fulvia’s feminine wiles was a politically safe, if not artistically fully convincing, solution. The unequivocally positive character of Thusnelda, Armin’s youthful fiancée, was obviously more congenial to Hofmann’s lyricism. As the ideal counterpart to the national male hero, Thusnelda is loving, faithful, chaste, graceful and willing to suffer, for which the plot gives her ample opportunity. At her first appearance in the opera, the beginning of Act 2, Thusnelda is held captive by her father Segestes, who wants her to marry his Roman ally Numonius Vala. In dreamy rapture she awaits the arrival of Armin, who has promised to elope with her. The scene thus offers a suitable parallel to Fulvia’s monologue, since both female protagonists eagerly await the appearance of the main hero. As in the case of Fulvia’s chamber the stage directions are deployed to outline Thusnelda’s character: Simple, heavy wooden building. Painted wooden pillars. The cross beams of the ceiling are roughly carved; animal figures, dragons, flowers. Heavy chests. Low, cambered wooden stools covered by carpets. Spindle and flax; other tools and female ornaments in open cupboards along the wall.  … Full moonlight shines above the oak forest visible outside.  … Dreamily moonlit night full of longing.65 These stage directions underline the unspoiled simplicity of Thusnelda’s character: there are no luxury goods for her; her domesticity is evident in the female attributes of distaff and spindle, and her closeness to (German) nature through the oak forest and moonlit night beckoning outside. Her chastity is emphasised in Dahn’s original version of the printed libretto. At the ending of the rhymed verses  –  clearly intended for a lyrical scene  –  she turns back to prose as she reproaches herself for even hoping to run away with her lover against the wish of her father.66 In the process of composition, Dahn or Hofmann inserted two nostalgic reveries into what became the slow first section of her scene, thus contrasting her anguished worries with more positive thoughts. Their most important addition is the substitution of the concluding prose, where she reproaches herself for wanting to run away with Armin, with verses for a completely new Allegro, giving the entire monologue the familiar form of an Italianate cantabile–cabaletta structure and providing the singer with a veritable entrance aria. Her solo scene becomes thus much more extended than any of the others discussed so far, with eighty-eight bars of Adagio non troppo and eighty bars of Allegro. It also gives the composer the opportunity to show two entirely different aspects of Thusnelda’s character: the gentle girl who is lost in dreams of springtime happiness and anxiously longs for the return of her beloved, and the femme forte who is certain that Armin will soon liberate her and the fatherland. 65 Hofmann, Armin, p. 72: ‘Einfacher, sehr schwerer Holzbau. Bemalte Holzpfeiler. Querbalken des Daches roh geschnitzt; Thiergestalten, Drachen, Blumen. Schwere Truhen. Niedrige geschweifte Holzschemel, darüber Teppiche. Spindel und Flachs; anderes [sic] Arbeits- und Schmuckgeräthe der Frauen an der Wand in offenen Verschlägen.  … Volles Mondlicht steht über dem draussen sichtbaren Eichenwald.  … Träumerisch sehnsuchtsvolle Mondnacht.’ 66 Felix Dahn, Armin: Operndichtung in vier Aufzügen (Leipzig, 1880), p. 22.

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History in Mighty Sounds Adagio non troppo Ueber des Eichwalds wogende Wipfel hin und wieder fluthet das Mondlicht, fluthet die Sehnsucht!      Selig denk ich immer der Tage     da dies Lieben aufgeblüht,      durch der Weser grüne Hage      war der Frühling hold erglüht.     Irrgeflogen war mein Sperber,      ach, Armin bracht ihn zurück,      brachte mir der kühne Werber     neuer Schmerzen neues Glück. Werd’ ich ihn jemals wieder erschauen? Trägt ihn der Liebe muthige Schwungkraft über den Hass der beiden Geschlechter sieghaft zu mir? O komm, mein Geliebter!      O wie oft im Schatten der Eichen      barg sich scheu das sel’ge Paar,     Götterathem fühlt’ ich wehen     durch die Wipfel wunderbar. Der du dein Volk zu retten gelobt hast, willst die Geliebte du lassen verzagen? O komm, mein Geliebter! Allegro Bald doch bringen die Götter die Stunde, da er befreit sein Weib, sein Land, da er Thusnelden zum ew’gen Bunde reicht die rettende Siegerhand.      Fort aus diesen hemmenden Schranken,      fort aus schnöder Umwerbung Zwang,      zu dem Geliebten ziehn die Gedanken,      zieht der Sehnsucht starker Drang. Ja, bald bringen die Götter die Stunde etc.67 Adagio non troppo Above the swaying treetops of the oak forest the moonlight floods back and forth, and so floods my longing!      Happily I always remember the days     when this love flowered;      in the green grove beside the river Weser     springtime glowed sweetly.      My sparrow hawk had flown astray,      ah, Armin returned it to me,      and the bold suitor brought

67 Hofmann, Armin, pp. 72–80.

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     the new pains of a novel happiness. Will I ever see him again? Will the valiant power of love carry him back to me across the hatred of our families? O come, my beloved!      O, how frequently in the shadow of the oaks      the happy couple shyly hid,      I felt the breath of the gods      waft wonderfully through the tree tops. You who have vowed to save your people, do you want to leave your lover in despair? O come, my beloved! Allegro Soon, soon the gods will bring the hour when he liberates his wife and his country, when he will extend, for an eternal bond, his saving vanquisher’s hand to Thusnelda.      Away from these restricting boundaries,      away from the pressure of hateful courtship,      my thoughts fly to my lover,      my strong longing flies to him. Yes, soon the gods will bring the hour etc. Below the level of the cantabile–cabaletta model the formal structure of her monologue is much more complex than Fulvia’s modified ternary form, especially in the Adagio section. Like many other romantic heroines of nineteenth-century opera Thusnelda is associated with woodwind and string instruments. The gentle triplets of the orchestral prelude are scored for flutes and French horns, the violoncello plays a longing melody that anticipates Thusnelda’s sigh ‘O come, my beloved’, and clarinet and flute exchange phrases with a turning figure. The tonic Ab major is finally reached when Thusnelda starts describing the moonlit night. At first glance her musical means seem to be not dissimilar to Fulvia’s but they are deployed to entirely different ends: the juxtaposition of unrelated chords  –  probably played by the harp  –  depicts the enchantment of the moonlight, the wide vocal leap from c'' to d' is clearly intended as an expression of tender longing rather than frantic passion, and the chromatic inflections in the accompaniment remain either on the level of passing notes or belong to applied dominants. They do not disturb the harmonic progression, as in Fulvia’s entreaty to the love gods, but rather emphasise the stability of the tonal centre and the cadence-oriented trajectory of the harmonic language. After this introduction an expansive binary structure unfolds. Each component begins with happy recollections of first love in spring-time, which are interrupted with anxious questions in recitative style culminating in the cry ‘O come, my beloved’. Hofmann opted for a developing variation and emotional intensification in the second ‘stanza’ of the Adagio section, rather than a straightforward repetition.

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Not content to leave Thusnelda in this dreamy, longing frame of mind he added the more assertive Allegro. Energetic dotted semiquavers and a downward scale through two octaves usher in an optimistic, even triumphant atmosphere. Thusnelda’s sweeping melodic lines fall into clear-cut four-bar phrases, and repetitions of individual verses emphasise her confidence in Armin’s ‘victorious hand’ (Ex. 2.4). Her spirits are slightly dampened in the middle section when she remembers that she is trapped in her father’s house, and accordingly the harmony is trapped in a two-bar model circling helplessly in a sequence of eight chords repeated four times. As in the anxious rhetorical questions of the first part the recollection of the beloved man offers an escape, an idea that she dwells on extensively, until she returns to a modified repetition of the first part of the Allegro. The syncopations of the vocal part on the minim–crotchet level even suggest that this repetition might be taken faster like a stretta, culminating in a triumphant top bb'' before the final cadence. Thusnelda stands before the audience as an embodiment of Germania herself, the female allegory of Germany. In the context of the unification wars of the 1860s and 1870s, Germania ceased to be depicted, as in the early nineteenth century, as the victim of foreign aggression, helplessly clinging to the national hero Arminius. In Lorenz Clasen’s famous picture of 1860 she is fully armed as a maiden warrior and ‘Siegesbraut’, standing on guard above the river Rhine or shielding herself and the German nation against enemies.68 This heroic Allegro is very appropriate for an operatic heroine, but at first glance seems to fit uncomfortably with Dahn’s original conception of Thusnelda as a gentle, sweet girl who reproaches herself for just wishing to elope with her lover. Even the character’s assessment of her situation differs between the two sections. While the lyrical flow of the first section is interrupted by anxious questions, the woman of the Allegro is more enraged than scared about being trapped in a hopeless situation. Perhaps Clementine Schuch-Proska, who sang the role of Thusnelda at the Dresden premiere of the opera, had wished for a longer, more elaborate and more varied entrance aria. Although a critic complained that her coloratura voice was not quite up to the demands of a Teutonic heroine, SchuchProska selected the scene for a concert performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1882,69 which suggests that she considered the scene a good showcase for her artistic abilities. In addition to this practical reason the stronger, more heroic Thusnelda makes good sense in the dramatic constellation as well, since her first visitor in the following scene is not Armin but her Roman suitor Numonius Vala whom she resists vigorously. A third explanation is offered by nineteenthcentury ideals of femininity: while Thusnelda has to conform to contemporary standards of bourgeois domesticity and sweet womanliness, in a national crisis the ideal German woman was also supposed to model her behaviour on her proud, belligerent Germanic ancestors. This emphasis on strength and self-reliance does not necessarily mean that the German version of the femme forte should have been an amazon in armour  –  though they did exist on the German stages as well  –  or the valkyrie Brünnhilde, but rather the confident, courageous soldier’s bride who keeps good faith and the home fire burning until her hero returns after 68 Brandt, Germania und ihre Söhne, pp. 321 ff. and table 22. 69 Eichner, ‘Schwert und Schild und Dolch und Gift’, p. 244.

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Germanic Heroes for Modern Germans Example 2.4  Heinrich Hofmann, Armin, Act 2, scene 1: Thusnelda’s monologue, bars 93–100

Allegro

      

93




115

thusnelda mf

       



Bald

doch

brin

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gen

die

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ter

 die

                                         mf           


      










96



 






p





da

er

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-

de,







   

cresc.

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freit

sein

                                        p cresc.                   









f

Weib,

sein

             

 





Land,

          

Ob.



 



  







   

 



99

 

accomplished victory.70 These two aspects of ideal femininity complement the ideal male hero as represented by Armin: the dear childhood friend who brings back his girlfriend’s pet bird, and the death-defying fighter for the national cause. From the solo scenes of these four characters   –  Siegmund, Germanicus, Fulvia and Thusnelda  –  it is apparent that the two Arminius operas rely heavily on gendered stereotypes to convey their unequivocally patriotic messages. The resulting gender roles are conceived as complementary. Men prove their worth and their identity as men and Germans through Wehrhaftigkeit, the ability and willingness to fight and die for the fatherland. If they fail to live up to this ideal or if 70 See Karen Hagemann, ‘Heldenmütter, Kriegerbräute und Amazonen. Entwürfe “patriotischer” Weiblichkeit zur Zeit der Freiheitskriege’, in Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Frevert (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 174–200.

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they pledge allegiance to the enemy they lose the respect of high-minded German women who reserve the right bestow their love on victorious warriors only. The ideal woman is conversely characterised by her virtue and chastity; she spurns the company of the enemy or of traitors and defers her erotic longings until marriage. Unlike the unscrupulous Roman woman she does not resort to seductive tricks, nor does her sentimental longing descend into ‘demonic’, sensuous passion. In a crisis she either withdraws into her personal dignity, as the heroine of Grammann’s opera, or she develops a belligerent attitude that is calculated to inspire the men to even greater courage and daring. Such high-minded stereotypes were, of course, an easy target for parody, as was the entire enthusiasm for Arminius and Germanic prehistory. In the early 1890s a carnival Singspiel, Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Walde for male choral societies was published by the librettist van Brouver (possibly a pseudonym since beer plays an important role in the text) and the amateur composer Valentin Eduard Becker who adapted popular student and folk songs to the droll lyrics.71 Germanic people and Roman soldiers are spoofed in equal measure, though of course the Singspiel ends with Germanic victory, which is celebrated with a hearty drinking song that threatens future invaders with a proper spanking, and Hermann is elevated on the shoulders of his men. Nevertheless there is a pervasive element of parody, and much of it is gender-related. The Germanic warriors enter the battle to the strains of Weber’s bridal chorus ‘Wir winden dir den Jungfernkranz’, and the sentimental farewell scene between Hermann and Thusnelda (lovingly dubbed ‘Tusschen’) derives its humour not only from the broad Bavarian dialect in which both speak and sing, but because Thusnelda  –  like the other female roles  –  is actually a tenor in drag. ‘Her’ costume combines the ‘Germanic’ Bayreuth style with modern, mock-cosmopolitan elements: ‘a white dress, covered by a modern lady’s fur collar, at the front two tin lids of a pan; long Danish evening gloves, fire-red wig, blue stocking(s)’. 72 Conversely, the Germanic warriors are portrayed as hapless country bumpkins under the spell of the ‘Germanic agitator’ Hermann, and the Roman commander Varus is the opposite of heroic military masculinity. He needs a (blackface) slave to hold the scabbard of his overlong sword if he wants to draw it; otherwise this servant carries his personal baggage through the German forests and swamps: an embroidered vanity case, a red umbrella and a bootjack. This type of slapstick humour made sense to audiences nourished on the over-determined, idealised gendered stereotypes that were common currency in the Wilhelminian Empire. While from a twenty-first-century perspective this humour seems rather heavy-handed and infantile  –  and just as prejudiced as the more sober instantiations of the prehistoric model Germans  –  it is on the other hand refreshing that even national heroism was not exempt from gentle mockery and satire. 71 Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Walde: Große lyrisch-romantisch-heroische Oper in 3 Akten: Text von van Brouver: Musik nach berühmten Mustern und Meistern von V. E. Becker (Nachgelassenes Werk) (Coburg, [1893]). 72 Ibid., n.p.: ‘ganz weißes Gewand, darüber modernen Damenpelzkragen, vorn mit 2 Topfdeckeln aus Weißblech; lange dänische Handschuhe, feuerrothe Perücke, blauen Strickstrumpf.’

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3 Lost in Transfiguration: Redemption Operas in the Fin de siècle

A

lthough operas like Heinrich Hofmann’s Armin or Edmund Kretschmer’s   Die Folkunger close with jubilation for the reunited couples and celebratory choruses of their liberated people, such happy endings became increasingly rare as the century proceeded. While tragic conclusions had long been the rule across the European operatic traditions, towards the fin de siècle the mandatory death(s) of the protagonist(s) acquired a striking transcendental dimension that had not been as conspicuous earlier in the nineteenth century. The finale of Grammann’s opera Thusnelda is a case in point. The eponymous heroine is ridiculed by the Romans, refuses to join the Germanic rescue mission and stabs herself. Her death is the signal for the Germanic legionaries to kill themselves and to rejoin the fatherland in death. As Thusnelda dies, an electric ray of light falls on her head, surrounding it like a halo.1 She envisages the hall of the gods and Hermann welcoming her, and prophesies that German warriors will invade Rome victoriously. Her dying scene, therefore, points beyond the actual plot towards a brighter future and a higher purpose, which ennobles her suicide into a sacrifice for the (future) German nation. Her Roman adversary Germanicus acknowledges this deeper meaning by placing his laurel wreath on her body. From such a finale it is only a small step to the ‘redemption operas’ (Erlösungsopern) of the post-Wagnerian generation. Contemporary critics and modern musicologists alike have observed a preference for plots that hinge on redemptive acts in various forms and shapes. In current opera historiography this phenomenon is considered almost self-explanatory; for example, Jens Malte Fischer simply states that redemption modelled on Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser or Lohengrin is a central feature of operas written ‘in Wagner’s shadow’.2 There is a general consensus that Wagner’s influence made redemption a core concern of fin-de-siècle music drama. Frank Halbach’s study of Ahasverus operas demonstrates how the concept of redemption gradually transformed the century-old story. In the course of the nineteenth century the focus of the adaptations shifted from the eternal odyssey of the ‘wandering Jew’ until the Last Judgement, to a reinterpretation of Ahasverus’ death as an act of ‘redemption’, 3 exemplified in Wagner’s own take on the legends of the Flying Dutchman or Kundry. This development was not restricted to Germany: operas such as Alberto Franchetti’s Cristoforo Colombo (1892) or Ernest Chausson’s 1 Grammann, Thusnelda, pp. 196–7. 2 Jens Malte Fischer, ‘Oper im Schatten Wagners. Aporien und Auswege der nachwagnerschen Opernentwicklung’, in Oper im 20. Jahrhundert: Entwicklungs­ tendenzen und Komponisten, ed. Udo Bermbach (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 36. 3 Frank Halbach, Ahasvers Erlösung: Der Mythos vom Ewigen Juden im Opernlibretto des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009), p. 16.

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Le Roi Arthus (1886–95/1903) show their Wagnerian inspiration not only in their symphonic orchestral language but also in finales that glorify the heroes’ deaths as transfiguration. Some of these operas  –  or even cycles of music dramas  –  were planned for special festival theatres, which furthermore testifies to the influence of the Bayreuth project. The content and messages of these alternative festivals were equally high-flying and serious: Felix Weingartner explicitly rejected Wagner’s world views in favour of a theory of reincarnation, but demanded that a performance of his music drama Die Erlösung was only conceivable in a purposebuilt theatre with select performers, appropriate scenery and an appreciative audience.4 The tetralogy was never composed, so that the issue of a Weingartner festival did not arise. This tendency towards redemptive dramas that claimed to be different from ordinary theatrical fare was heartily ridiculed even while these operas were in vogue. Julius Korngold, the most influential Viennese music journalist after the death of Eduard Hanslick, decried that the ending of Hans Pfitzner’s Der arme Heinrich made too little of the girl’s redemptive self-sacrifice which restores the hero to health and happiness: ‘How could the music dramatist miss the opportunity for miracles and a solemn, mystical conclusion! Especially since after Wagner he sought nothing else in his plots except the music drama of redemption.’ 5 Even more acerbic was Richard Specht’s summary of the development of German opera before the appearance of Richard Strauss: Inflated mythological guide books, floating in a pulp of commenting leitmotifs. Redemptive business of obscure mythological families  –  Indian, Greek, Germanic, Celtic  –  with an endless sequence of motifs strung together in fat tomes of scores …; following a recipe that only the most hopeless confusion, the most absurd misinterpretation of Richard Wagner’s lofty thoughts and dramatic procedure could have caused: take Jacob Grimm or the Edda or Homer, turn them into a scenario stuttering with alliterations, furnish each character and each object with a leitmotif, douse the entire thing with the monotonous sounds of divided strings and solemn tuba chords, and  –  lo and behold  –  the post-Wagnerian music drama was ready.6 4 Felix Weingartner, Die Lehre von der Wiedergeburt und das musikalische Drama nebst einem Entwurf eines Mysteriums ‘Die Erlösung’ (Kiel, 1895), pp. 98–9. 5 Julius Korngold, ‘Der arme Heinrich’, in Deutsches Opernschaffen der Gegenwart: Kritische Aufsätze (Leipzig, 1921), p. 28: ‘Wie dürfte sich der Musikdramatiker Wunder und feierlich mystischen Ausklang entgehen lassen! Suchte der doch nach Wagner nichts anderes in dem Stoffe als das Musikdrama der Erlösung.’ 6 Quoted in Fischer, ‘Oper im Schatten Wagners’, pp. 41–2: ‘Aufgedunsene mythologische Leitfäden, von einem Brei glossierender Tonsymbole umflossen. Erlösungsangelegenheiten obskurer Sagenfamilien, indischer, griechischer, germanischer, keltischer, in endlosem Gänsemarsch der Motive in dickleibigen Partiturwälzern aufgereiht …; nach einem Rezept, das nur die heilloseste Verwirrung, die absurdeste Verkennung des hohen Gedankens und des dramatischen Verfahrens Richard Wagners verschulden konnte: “man nehme” Jakob [sic] Grimm oder die Edda oder Homer, verfertige ein stabreimend

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Despite Korngold’s and Specht’s agreement that redemption operas à la Wagner were the bane of the German stages around 1900, there seems to be little reflection  –  either then or now  –  on what the common denominators of these operas actually were and, more importantly, why they were written in the first place. While the desire to emulate Wagner surely played an important role, the rejection of historical or comic plots in favour of transcendentalism must have been motivated by more deep-seated cultural and ideological needs. This chapter, therefore, sets out to uncover the motives behind the pervasive trend for ‘redemption finales’ in German fin-de-siècle opera. In order to do so, the following discussion will first attempt to show that the Wagnerian model of ‘Erlösung’ is rather a tangle of different and sometimes conflicting redemption models that influenced individual composers to very different degrees and that allowed for widely varying conceptions of what ‘redemption’ could mean for the individual, the community or the nation as a whole. Second it will investigate the ideological messages that three mythological operas sought to convey under the seemingly ‘apolitical’ transcendent cloak: Peter Cornelius’s Gunlöd, Heinrich Vogl’s Der Fremdling and Cyrill Kistler’s Baldurs Tod. Each of the three composers had a very different relationship to Wagner and the Wagnerian circles, and while their operas share a preoccupation with Christian symbolism in mythological disguise, their ideological trajectories were radically different.

‘Someone Always Wants to be Saved’: Wagner’s Redemptions It is a truth universally acknowledged that Wagner’s music dramas revolve around the concept of redemption. This idea works on two levels. On the one hand, Wagner argued in his aesthetic writings that the arts of music, dance and poetry would be reunited and ‘redeemed’ in the artwork of the future, thus liberating modern man, the Nützlichkeitsmensch, from the constraints of civilisation and enabling him to become the artistic man of the future.7 On the other hand, redemption was an important plot device. According to the literary scholar Peter Wapnewski, all major characters from Wagner’s music dramas need to and want to be redeemed, mirroring the discontent and suffering of their creator.8 Friedrich Nietzsche mocked this preoccupation in his famous polemic Der Fall Wagner of 1888: ‘Wagner pondered over nothing so deeply as over salvation: his opera is the opera of salvation. Someone always wants to be saved in his operas,  –  now it is a youth; anon it is a maiden,  –  this is his problem.’ 9 However, in many of Wagner’s music dramas it is not entirely clear who is redeemed by whom from what predicament stotterndes Szenarium, behänge jede Gestalt und jeden Gegenstand mit seinem Leitmotiv, übergieße das Ganze mit dem Einerlei geteilter Streicherklänge und feierlicher Tubenakkorde und das nachwagnersche Tondrama war fertig.’ 7 Richard Wagner, ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’, in GSD, vol. 3, pp. 67–71 and 129. 8 Peter Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Munich, 1978), p. 18. 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Anthony M. Ludovico (Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 5–6 (Nietzsche’s emphasis).

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and by which means. The case is comparatively straightforward for Der fliegende Holländer, where Senta redeems the Dutchman from his eternal odyssey by her sacrificial love. This plot constellation has often been generalised to the extent that all Wagnerian music dramas are supposed to follow the redemption-throughlove pattern. In an exhibition catalogue titled Erlösung durch Liebe Sven Friedrich, supported by Wagner’s own writings, argues that ‘redemption through love’ is the main theme that transforms the mythological or archaic content into stories that are relevant for all humanity.10 In most cases it is a woman that has the power  –  but also the duty  –  to redeem a suffering man through her unquestioning love, which can express itself either in total (erotic) surrender to the beloved or in purified renunciation. This simple scheme, however, does not apply to all of Wagner’s music dramas equally, let alone to the music dramas of his successors and followers where, as will be seen, male redemption through female love is by no means the most frequent scenario. For example, in Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde Wagner claims that will-driven Lohengrin hopes to find redemption in Elsa as the embodiment of the subconscious, in analogy to the relationship between the artist and the soul of the people.11 In the end, however, the swan-knight subordinates his need of liberation to the rules of the Grail community, which leaves Elsa’s brother Gottfried as the only character in the opera who is actually saved from anything, namely from being an enchanted swan. The various drafts of the final scene of Götterdämmerung bear witness to significant changes in the meaning of Brünnhilde’s immolation, owing to the conceptual shift from Siegfried’s tragic death to the fate of the gods: from redemption by the gods (Brünnhilde and Siegfried ascend to Valhalla) to redemption of the gods (the vicious circle of reincarnation is broken) to redemption of the world from the gods (the destruction of Valhalla heralds a new world governed by pure love rather than lust and greed).12 In Wagner’s final music drama even man’s redemption through female love is inverted, where chaste Parsifal redeems Kundry through his rejection of physical love.13 The oscillating nature of Wagnerian redemption inspired Nietzsche to an acerbic set of variations: If it were not for Wagner, who would teach us that innocence has a preference for saving interesting sinners? (the case in ‘Tannhäuser’). Or that even the eternal Jew gets saved and settled down when he marries? (the case in the ‘Flying Dutchman’). Or that corrupted old females prefer to be saved by chaste young men? (the case of Kundry).  … Or that beautiful girls most love to be saved by a knight who also happens to be a Wagnerite? (the case in the ‘Mastersingers’). Or that even married women also like to be saved by a knight? (the case of Isolde). Or that the venerable Almighty, after having 10 Sven Friedrich, ‘Einführung’, in Erlösung durch Liebe: Richard Wagner und die Erotik (Munich, 1995), p. 9. 11 Richard Wagner, ‘Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde’, p. 295–6. 12 Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Über den Schluß der Götterdämmerung’, in Richard Wagner: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1971), pp. 97–115. 13 Jeffrey Peter Bauer, Women and the Changing Concept of Salvation in the Operas of Richard Wagner (Anif, 1994), p. 183.

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compromised himself morally in all manner of ways, is at last delivered by a free spirit and an immoralist? (the case in the ‘Ring’).14 Leaving Nietzsche’s polemics aside, it nevertheless can be argued that Wagner’s concept of redemption  –  or rather its different and ambiguous incarnations  –  attracted contemporaries and posterity alike precisely because it did not require understanding of or adherence to an underlying normative model. Despite the efforts of the Bayreuth Circle and other Wagnerians in search for an aesthetic and ideological gospel, Wagner’s music dramas as well as his prose writings are only with difficulty reduced to a set of logically interconnected ideas. Wagner borrowed the idea of redemption and much of its imagery and terminology from Christian theology, but filled it with varying and sometimes conflicting meanings. This lack of religious or philosophical content deeply offended Theodor W. Adorno, who couched his uneasiness in powerful images: The category of redemption is stripped from its theological meaning, but endowed with the function of giving solace, without however acquiring any precise content. It is a homecoming without a home, eternal rest without Eternity, the mirage of peace without the underlying reality of a human being to enjoy it.  … In the innermost core of Wagner’s idea of redemption dwells nothingness. It too is empty.15 This very emptiness where Adorno expected an ideological heart made the concept attractive for other composers and librettists: they could fill the void with any worldview they cared to support, whether traditional Christianity, Buddhist reincarnation, anarchist world-weariness, prehistoric archaism or erotic libertinism. Adorno’s polemics indicate that there is yet another aspect to the Wagnerian redemption model: for Adorno Wagner’s inconclusive conclusions are the ‘ultimate phantasmagoria’, the substitution of true transcendence with the ‘cheap fiction of a circus finale’.16 As contemporary responses to Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian music dramas attest, the ‘fiction’ of transcendence proved just as powerful as the ‘real thing’ because it gave an opportunity to bring out all the strengths of the lateRomantic musical language: the dazzling sound effects of tremolando strings and powerful brass blasts, the soprano’s ever higher-soaring voice, static harmonic tableaux that make time stand still, plagal cadences and the fading away of the final chord in a high register and pianissimo  –  all these musical elements were indispensable for a death-and-transfiguration finale.17 Or as Felix Weingartner laconically describes the finale of his tetralogy Die Erlösung: ‘The music gives a 14 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, p. 6. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1991), p. 149. 16 Ibid. 17 Camilla Bork, ‘“ Tod und Verklärung”. Isoldes Liebestod als Mittel künstlerischer Schlußgestaltung’, in Zukunftsbilder: Richard Wagners Revolution und ihre Folgen in Kunst und Politik, ed. Hermann Danuser and Herfried Münkler (Schliengen, 2002), p. 164.

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premonition of the Nirvana.’18 It could therefore be argued that redemption on the operatic stage is to some extent less a philosophical or religious than a musical and aesthetic necessity. Music is not simply the  –  however attractive  –  ‘cloak’ of an extra-musical message; it is not a means to the ends of a specific Weltanschauung, however lofty. In contrast, one could even say that a transcendental message is a pretext to achieve a musically stunning finale: only a very ‘big’ theme, such as the triumph of love over death or the redemption of mankind offers the composer (in the words of Korngold) the ‘opportunity for miracles and a solemn, mystical conclusion’ or, to put it more bluntly, to pull out all the stops. Expressive musical rhetoric is then enhanced by the finale’s dazzling scenery and special effects which appealed to the spectators’ visual sense, creating visions of overwhelming beauty and awe. Weingartner, for example, has the Buddha and his long-lost brother Ahasverus ascend to heaven, ‘followed by the holy men and women. A sea of light is poured out over them. The sight of the earth disappears by and by into white, glowing clouds, while an innumerable crowd of dignified, noble figures floats upwards.’19 Thus Wagnerian redemption scenarios seem plausible or necessary not so much on the discursive level but in their appeal to the listeners’ senses and emotions, by inviting them to feast on the powerful sounds and images presented before their eyes and ears. Death and transfiguration in Wagner’s operas is first and foremost an excuse to stage an aurally and visually powerful finale and to bring the audience home in one sweeping gesture of emotional persuasion or even compulsion. Such ‘transcendent’ conclusions brushed aside any worldly concerns and dislocated both dramatic and musical discourse onto a seemingly ‘higher’ plane. With grand musico-dramatic gestures these finales dismissed the mundane worries that audiences might have brought to the opera house, promised a higher purpose in life and death without having to spell out exactly what this might be, and thus offered liberation  –  or at least temporal respite  –  from the pettiness of post-unification Germany. Escapism from political and social realities was definitely a key attraction of the transcendental messages from the stage. By the time of Wagner’s death the enthusiasm for the newly founded German Empire had turned into disenchantment when the new state disappointed the utopian expectations of the national movement. General weariness towards the political pragmatism of the Bismarck generation made stage celebrations of national unity, such as the finale of Hofmann’s Armin, feel pale and wan. Once again many Germans retreated into an inner realm (Innerlichkeit) that was perceived as free from politics and economics, although of course this very retreat into arts, transcendence or the simple life was an implicitly political decision. Transcendent salvation appeared superior to practical solutions. The challenge to build onto Wagner’s successful ‘redemption formula’ was most important for composers who chose topics that were either closely related 18 Weingartner, Die Lehre von der Wiedergeburt, p. 140: ‘Die Musik läßt die Seligkeit des Nirvana ahnen.’ 19 Ibid.: ‘Ihnen folgen die heiligen Männer und Frauen. Ein Lichtmeer ergießt sich über sie. In weißen, leuchtenden Wolken verschwindet allmählig [sic] das Bild der Erde, während eine unabsehbare Schaar erhabener, hehrer Gestalten der Höhe zuschwebt.’

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to Wagner’s own music dramas, such as Germanic mythology and saga, or topics he had once contemplated himself, such as the Buddhism-inspired sketch Die Sieger. Wagner himself warily watched this trend amongst his younger colleagues. In 1879 he claimed: ‘What this [direction] consists of I cannot begin to comprehend. Perhaps that for some time people have preferred medieval subjects for operatic texts; the Edda and the bleak North in general, have been considered as quarries for good libretti.’ 20 In the 1870s, however, the preference for Eddic and Nordic subject matter was not yet as pervasive as Wagner claimed; in fact the great popularity of operatic subjects based on Nordic mythology and saga began only after his death. The Nordic pantheon was particularly suitable for redemption finales, since academic as well as popular writers agreed that a tragic death for a higher purpose was something specifically Germanic and by extension German. This included the tragic fate of the Nordic-Germanic gods who have to face Ragnarök, actually a final battle between the gods and their adversaries but misunderstood in the nineteenth century as the ‘twilight of the gods’. Felix Dahn, for example, extolled this idea as an especially inspired trait of Nordic lore: The Germanic gods have  … placed themselves unbearably and inexpiably in opposition to morality, and the Germanic conscience therefore doomed them all and sundry to their downfall, to their death. That is the meaning of the ‘twilight of the gods’  –  it is a moral deed of the Germanic people which is unsurpassed in its greatness, and it bestows on Germanic mythology its tragic character.21 Drawing on Nordic mythology thus enabled artists to combine the tragic but necessary death of the hero(es) with the eschatological dimension of the ‘twilight of the gods’ and the end of the world. For the less ambitious poet or composer who was content with human heroes, the appearance of Valhalla still offered a transcendental consolation that allowed for a specifically national take on afterlife. The literary critic Wolfgang Menzel, for example, included a chapter on ‘The doctrine of immortality of the ancient Germans’ in his study of pre-Christian beliefs and extolled the uniqueness of Valhalla: Nothing is more characteristic of the old Germanic people than their pugnacious spirits and the idea that they would continue fighting even after 20 Richard Wagner, ‘Über das Opern-Dichten und Komponiren im Besonderen’, in GSD, vol. 10, p. 171: ‘Worin diese [Richtung] besteht, ist mir selbst am allerunklarsten geblieben. Vielleicht, daß man eine Zeit lang mit Vorliebe mittelalterliche Stoffe zu Texten aufsuchte; auch die Edda und der rauhe Norden im Allgemeinen wurden als Fundgruben für gute Texte in das Auge gefaßt.’ 21 Felix and Therese Dahn, Walhall: Germanische Götter- und Heldensagen: Für alt und jung am deutschen Herd erzählt (Leipzig, n.d.), p. 40: ‘Auch die germanischen Götter haben sich  … untragbar und unsühnbar in Gegensatz zu der Sittlichkeit gestellt, und das germanische Gewissen hat sie deshalb samt und sonders — zum Untergang, zum Tode verurteilt. Das ist die Bedeutung der “Götterdämmerung” –: sie ist eine unerreicht großartige sittliche Tat des Germanentums und sie verleiht der germanischen Mythologie ihre tragische Eigenart.’

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death.  … The main difference between the Germanic and the Greek attitude was that according to the former the joys of Valhalla would not continue forever; rather all of Odin’s warriors would perish with him in the final battle of the worlds.22 As usual, Menzel blurs the boundaries between Nordic and Germanic traditions and present-day Germany. The relevance of the beliefs of the ‘old Germans’ thus established, it is not surprising that the appearance of Valhalla or the valkyries became almost compulsory for the finales of ‘Germanic’ heroic operas, whether suitable or not. The lost opera Gudrun by O. and G. Vogel (libretto) and Oskar Pasch (music) of 1888 featured the following final scene, here summarised by a contemporary literary scholar: The involvement of elves is entirely new; at the beginning they are substituted for the prophetic swan of the original epic poem, at the end they re-appear as messengers of peace. Here Baldur joins them, and in the background even Valhalla becomes visible. More one cannot possibly demand from an effective finale, and the listeners in the gallery won’t mind this ‘heavenly’ effect; however we would not subscribe to the librettists’ claim in their preface that the ancient spirit still dwells in their new song.23 Such finales were, however, not the sole preserve of German composers; valkyrie and Valhalla finales were appended to many plots regardless of mythological plausibility.24 Emanuel Chabrier’s opera Gwendoline (1886), for example, ends with a vision of the valkyries and Valhalla shared by the dying heroine and her lover Harald; Chabrier and his librettist Camille Mendès alter the Saxon–Danish conflicts of eighth-century England to infuse them with Nordic mythology. Although the Wagnerian leanings of such operas seem more than obvious, it should not be forgotten that most of these works depart from Wagner’s models in several important ways. While Wagner rejected Christian readings of his 22 Wolfgang Menzel, Die vorchristliche Unsterblichkeitslehre (Leipzig, 1870), p. 189: ‘Nichts kennzeichnet die alten Germanen besser, als diese Kampfeslust und die Vorstellung, sie würden auch nach dem Tode noch fortkämpfen.  … Der grösste Unterschied zwischen der germanischen und griechischen Anschauung bestand aber darin, dass nach der erstern die Freuden in Walhalla keineswegs ewig dauern, dass vielmehr alle seine Genossen mit Odin selbst im letzten grossen Weltkampfe untergehen sollten.’ 23 Benedict, Die Gudrunsage in der neueren deutschen Literatur, p. 96: ‘Ganz neu ist die mitwirkung von elfen, die zu anfang den profetischen schwan des alten epos vertreten, am schlusse aber als friedensboten wiedererscheinen. Hier gesellt sich auch Baldur zu ihnen, und im hintergrund wird sogar “die Walhalla” sichtbar. Mehr kann man ja für einen wirkungsvollen aktschluss nicht verlangen, und die “galerie” wird auch wol gegen diesen “himmlischen” schlusseffect nichts einzuwenden haben, nur möchten wir dann nicht unterschreiben, was die beiden verfasser in ihrem vorwort behaupten, nämlich, dass der alte geist in ihrem neuen lied noch walte.’ 24 Joachim Grage, ‘Ballett, Oper, Melodrama? Walküren im Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Eddische Götter und Helden: Milieus und Medien ihrer Rezeption, ed. Katja Schulz (Heidelberg, 2011), pp. 293–312.

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transcendental solutions, most of his successors, as will be seen in greater detail below, imbued their finales not just with Christian imagery but also with Christian beliefs. In addition, hardly any of the post-Wagnerian mythological operas ends with a monologue of the heroine (or hero), although the dramatic effectiveness of such a scene must have been obvious to anybody who ever heard Isolde’s Verklärung or saw Brünnhilde’s immolation. Instead, the chorus is reinstated in a central function and has the final say. It could be argued that composers of the younger generation took their inspiration from Tannhäuser or Parsifal for their finales, where both the role of the chorus announcing the successful redemption and the Christian content are conspicuous. However, it is equally possible that the artists referred back to older operatic or oratorio traditions, and that their take on the redemption finale was motivated by biographical, social and philosophical concerns beyond straightforward Wagner emulation. Besides these similarities and differences, there is another problem of ‘opera after Wagner’ that has to be addressed in this context and that will return throughout the following discussion. In the 1880s and 1890s there was once again a widespread discomfort with the current state of German opera. Despite the national and international success of Wagner’s music during these decades, critics, composers and impresarios were concerned about the future of the genre. Artist after artist was hailed as the true successor of the Bayreuth master and the hope of German culture, only to be dropped when his second or third opera failed to make a lasting impression. In 1892 the music critic Arthur Seidl asked ‘Has Richard Wagner founded a school?’, to which his despondent answer was: Effects as such do not make a ‘Wagner-school’ and  –  one swallow does not make a summer. Gods and heroes are not enough; on the contrary, they are not sufficient because the librettists are lacking psychological depth and a stringent dramaturgy. The more or less independent development of the musical aspect of the work cannot make up for this.25 The situation is not dissimilar to Italy, where after Verdi’s retirement and death none of the younger generation was fully accepted as his legitimate successor, not even the overwhelmingly popular Giacomo Puccini.26 North of the Alps Puccini and even more his colleagues Ruggero Leoncavallo and Pietro Mascagni were considered a threat to the indigenous operatic culture, and the tone of the written polemics against foreign dominance was shriller and more alarmist than earlier in the century. Alexander Ritter, violinist in Meiningen under Hans von Bülow and himself a fairly successful composer of Wagnerian fairy-tale operas, pleaded: 25 Arthur Seidl, Hat Richard Wagner eine Schule hinterlassen? (Kiel, 1892), p. 17: ‘Aber Wirkungen an sich begründen noch keine “Wagner-Schule” und  –  eine Schwalbe macht noch keinen Sommer.  … Götter und Helden thun’s noch nicht; im Gegentheil, sie thun’s um so weniger, als die Dichter es meist an der psychologischen Vertiefung wie an einer strafferen Dramatik dabei fehlen lassen. Die mehr oder minder selbständige Weiterbildung der musikalischen Seite des Werkes vermag dafür nicht zu entschädigen.’ (Seidl’s emphasis). 26 Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007).

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May the young generation of composers soon find equally independent paths, helping us to create a stylistically unified, above all German repertoire!  … Once we possess the German art desired by R. Wagner in general (and not just Bayreuth), the exotic vapours of the operatic swamp, which today stagnates on all German stages, will disappear into their homeland [Italy] of their own volition, and German dramatic art, equal to that of other nations, will spread its blessings and grow for the benefit of the German people and their culture!27 And his younger contemporary Cyrill Kistler, who wrote some of the most xenophobic polemics in these decades, complained in 1885: It is typical for our national standpoint that foreigners are always preferred to Germans. For example, in the town of S. it was thought a good idea to open the new season with Trovatore. Only on the second evening this street-organ opera was followed by the through-and-through German Freischütz.28 The concern for the careers of German operatic composers was not entirely unfounded, since the performance statistics for the 1899/1900 season demonstrate that Mascagni and Leoncavallo, with 274 and 192 performances respectively, were hardly challenged by the most successful living German artists Engelbert Humperdinck (Hänsel und Gretel, 168) and Siegfried Wagner (Der Bärenhäuter, 96).29 The hysterical tone of Seidl, Ritter and Kistler shows that the permanent crisis of German art and German identity entered a new phase of desperate urgency in the final decades of the nineteenth century. This renewed anxiety perhaps motivated several composers to write operas that were loosely based on Nordic sagas and focused on a skald  –  a singerwarrior  –  as their protagonist. In most cases, as in Viktor Gluth’s opera Horand und Hilde (1901) or Richard Strauss’s first opera Guntram (1894), the hero uses the gift of music to woo the lady of his heart and to proclaim his ideal of a peaceful society while fighting and ultimately losing against a hostile environment. 27 Quoted in Seidl, Hat Richard Wagner eine Schule hinterlassen?, p. 24: ‘Möge der junge Komponisten-Nachwuchs bald ähnlich selbständige Bahnen einschlagen, uns ein styleinheitliches, deutsches Repertoire vor Allem schaffen helfen!  … Dann, wenn wir erst diese von R. Wagner ganz im Allgemeinen ersehnte, deutsche Kunst (und nicht blos Bayreuth) haben, werden die exotischen Dünste des heute auf allen deutschen Bühnen stagnierenden Opernsumpfes sich von selbst in ihre Heimat verziehen und die deutsche dramatische Kunst, derjenigen anderer Nationen ebenbürtig, segensvoll wirken und wachsen zum Heile des deutschen Volkes wie seiner Kultur!’ (Ritter’s emphasis). 28 Cyrill Kistler, ‘Deutsches’, Aufsätze über musikalische Tagesfragen 2 no. 1 (1885), p. 8: ‘Es ist für unseren nationalen Standpunkt sehr bezeichnend, dass der Ausländer stets dem Deutschen gegenüber ein Vorrecht geniesst. So hatte man in S. die äusserst verständnissvolle Einsicht, dass es gut sei mit dem “Troubadour” die Saison zu eröffnen. Dieser Drehorgeloper folgte erst zur zweiten Vorstellung der durch und durch deutsche Freischütz.’ 29 Wilhelm Altmann, ‘Das moderne Opernrepertoir [sic] der 10 Spielzeiten 1899/1900–1908/09’, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 37 no. 25 (1910), p. 601.

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Such a plot constellation allowed artists to express their aesthetic concerns in diegetic songs on the one hand, but also voice their vision of the role of art and artist in Wilhelminian society. Considering the nervous spirit of the time, it is hardly surprising that many ‘skaldic’ operas end tragically with the death of the protagonist, an apt symbol for the perceived alienation of the modern artist from his surroundings. A ‘redemption finale’, however, restores the dignity of the singer by giving his death and that of his beloved a transcendental dimension. At the end of the heroic opera Hiarne (1891) by Ingeborg von Bronsart a group of valkyries swoops down to lead the hero to Valhalla where he joins his wife Hilda who in turn has become a valkyrie.30 While Hiarne had been happy to govern the people of Denmark, the protagonist of Max Schillings’s debut opera Ingwelde (1894) is an equally competent singer but a more reluctant hero. Bran transforms from a gentle, unworldly bard to a merciless fighter in order to avenge the death of his brother Klaufe, who in turn had been lured to his death by his wife Ingwelde. Fighting and bloodshed are, however, against an artist’s calling to beauty and love; similarly Ingwelde has betrayed her feminine nature when she resorted to treachery in order to escape an enforced marriage. In the final scene of the opera Bran and Ingwelde recognise that they cannot continue living against their true natures as artist and woman respectively. In an ecstatic duet they implore the Norns to show them a solution, ‘so that love may extinguish destiny’s guilt and death the sufferings of love!’31 While these sentiments are fairly conventional for fin-de-siècle redemption operas, the staging of their double suicide is rather unusual. Bran and Ingwelde jump aboard a burning ship that carries the body of Ingwelde’s foster-brother out into the sea. There their boat collides with a ghost ship steered by the spectre of Klaufe; both ships sink while the bystanders cry out anxiously. From the sea, however, an ethereal chorus announces that Bran and Ingwelde have been accepted into the hall of the sea-gods, and human and divine voices unite in a chorus of praise.32 The short orchestral postlude in Ab  major  –  the key symbolising Bran’s true identity as an artist – prominently recalls a leitmotif associated throughout the opera with ‘Atonement, Peace, Redemption’ and culminates in the plagal cadence Db  minor  –  Ab major. This harmonic progression would have reminded listeners forcefully of, for example, Isolde’s transfiguration; since Wagner had used it as an all-purpose Erlösungsmotiv from his Faust Overture onwards it had become a standard formulation in nineteenth-century 30 For an overview of Ingeborg von Bronsart’s stage works and a sensitive comparison of Hiarne with Wagner’s operas see Melinda J. Boyd, ‘Opera, or the Doing of Women: The Dramatic Works of Ingeborg von Bronsart (1840–1913)’ (PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2002). 31 Max Schillings, Ingwelde: Dichtung in 3 Aufzügen von Ferdinand Graf Sporck (Leipzig, [1894]), pp. 172–3: ‘Helfet uns nun, weist uns den Weg, dass Liebe lösche des Schicksals Schuld, und Tod der Liebe Leid!’ 32 The idea of a realm of the departed under the sea might seem strange when Nordic heroes are expected to enter Valhalla. However Wolfgang Golther, who advised Schillings and Sporck about Nordic mythology, devotes a chapter of his Handbuch der Germanischen Mythologie (1895) to the sea goddess Ran and the happiness awaiting those who bravely die on sea.

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music.33 By dying together rather than living a lie, Bran and Ingwelde redeem each other and are rewarded by being welcomed into a more understanding beyond. In order to achieve this ending, Schillings and his librettist Ferdinand Graf von Sporck had to reinvent Bran’s character entirely and to turn him from the retarded fool of the Icelandic saga into a dreamy singer who is despised by everybody  –  except Ingwelde  –  for his sensitivity. Christian Detig has convincingly argued that Bran, like the protagonists of his later operas Ein Pfeifertag (1899) and Moloch (1906), held a deep biographical significance for the composer. Throughout his life Schillings cast himself in the role of the misunderstood artistic outsider  –  the sweeping successes of Ingwelde and Mona Lisa (1913) notwithstanding  –  and conceived his operas as a commentary on the hostile environment of the competitive, materialistic and military Wilhelminian Empire.34 Schillings’s Ingwelde exemplifies how redemption operas convey meanings that were both highly personal and at the same time carried messages that their creators considered relevant for society as a whole. These messages become even weightier and more serious when turning from heroic operas, where divine intervention is minimal and normally confined to the final scene, to operas where the Nordic gods are the main characters. The remainder of this chapter will therefore focus on three operas that drew on Nordic mythology for their plots as well as their protagonists: Gunlöd by Peter Cornelius and two works that feature the Nordic god Baldur: Der Fremdling by Heinrich Vogl and Baldurs Tod by the already mentioned Cyrill Kistler.

Redemption as Assumption At first sight Gunlöd seems to have originated under the direct influence of Wagner, although the poet-composer Peter Cornelius (1824–74) fought all his life against being monopolised by his friend. After several years spent in the Weimar circle of Liszt, who also conducted the premiere of his musical comedy Der Barbier von Bagdad in 1858, Cornelius moved to Vienna in order to write his second opera Der Cid. The tranquillity he needed for creative work was soon disrupted by Wagner who arrived in 1862 to oversee the production of Tristan und Isolde. Cornelius found Wagner’s demands on his time and his intoxicating music very dangerous for his own work, as he confessed years later to his fiancée Bertha Jung: ‘Wagner’s hot, sensuous spirit was just a will-o’-wisp for me. My art should be serene, simple, delightful, rooted in the spirit of the people and morality, rather than replacing God with vain, sickly passionate love and selfishness.’ 35 As a strategy to overcome 33 Gerhard J. Winkler, ‘Wagner’s “Erlösungsmotiv”: Versuch über eine musikalische Schlußformel: Eine Stilübung’, Musiktheorie 5 (1990), pp. 3–25. 34 Christian Detig, Deutsche Kunst, deutsche Nation: Der Komponist Max von Schillings (Kassel, 1998), pp. 63–8 and 73–81. 35 Letter to Bertha Jung, 24 June 1865, in Peter Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe nebst Tagebuchblättern und Gelegenheitsgedichten, ed. Carl Maria Cornelius (Leipzig, 1904–5), vol. 2, p. 166: ‘Wagners heißer, schwüler Geist war mir nur ein Irrlicht. Meine Kunst soll eine heitre, einfache, beglückende sein, im Boden des Volkes, der

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this dangerous influence he totally immersed himself into the score of Tristan und Isolde until he felt secure of his own style again. His bid for independence caused a crisis when Wagner more or less ordered him to join him in Munich. To the surprise of their mutual friends (and of Wagner scholars since) Cornelius first resisted the offer, maintaining that he did not wish to become ‘a kind of intelligent piece of furniture’. 36 In the end he had to surrender because of the desperate financial situation of his family. Several years later Cornelius was appointed as a teacher at the Munich conservatoire, a position that enabled him to marry and to find long-sought domestic happiness, though it severely restricted his time for writing and composing. Cornelius struggled with Wagner’s overwhelming influence yet again when he decided to base his third opera on Nordic mythology, thus straying into the territory of Wagner’s Ring. In March 1866 the works of the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger  –  who will play an important role in Chapter 5  –  inspired him to study the poetry of the Edda.37 He already owned Alkuna, an introduction to the Nordic cosmology and deities, which included, besides brief prose surveys, mythological poems by Ludwig Bechstein.38 The concluding poem is devoted to the divine mead symbolising poetic inspiration, a story that would have been particularly attractive to the poet-musician Cornelius, for whom writer’s block was a well-known problem. In June 1866 Cornelius turned to Karl Simrock’s edition of the poetic Edda; the concrete idea of a Gunlöd opera first appears in his correspondence on 10 August 1866.39 His enthusiastic response to the story demonstrates his concern about the future of (German) opera and his acceptance of Nordic mythology as an indigenous, German tradition: The Edda is my consolation, this wonderful, holy book, so rich with the nectar of poetry. It makes me a Wagnerian again; I think it was his great achievement as a poet to have been the first to lift a grandiose poem out of this inexhaustible font.  … My third topic was to be German, and what could be more German than this. The mythical realm, the beautiful symbolism of nature is the true destiny and proper application of music: to give speech to gods, i.e. legendary, wonderful humans onto whom the properties and processes of nature have been projected  –  this will remain the highest duty of art!40 Sitte wurzelnd, nicht die eitle, sinnenkranke Liebe und mit ihr das eitle Selbst, an Gottes Statt setzen.’ 36 Letter to his sister Susanne, 24 June 1864, ibid., vol. 1, p. 775: ‘eine Art geistiges Möbel für ihn’. 37 Letter to Bertha Jung, March 1866, ibid., vol. 2, p. 358. 38 D. G. Th. Legis, Alkuna: Nordische und Nord-Slawische Mythologie: Mit 13 Kupfern, einer kosmologischen Karte und Stammtafel (Leipzig, 1831). 39 Letter to Reinhold Köhler, 10 August 1866, Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, vol. 2, p. 427. 40 Letter to Bertha Jung, 29 June 1866, ibid., p. 404: ‘Mein Trost ist die Edda, das schöne heilige Buch, strotzend von allem Nektar der Poesie. Das macht mich wieder völlig zum Wagnerianer, ich find’ es eine große dichterische Tat von ihm, zuerst wieder eine große Dichtung aus diesem unerschöpflichen Urquell

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Cornelius was fascinated by Eddic poetry and learned several passages by heart; at the first reading of the Gunlöd text he impressed Hans von Bülow with a recital of the opening poem Völuspá.41 Wagner, however, was very sceptical about the suitability of the Gunlöd story for a music drama and he was annoyed that three of his younger friends  –  Cornelius, Felix Draeseke and the Hungarian composer Ödön Mihalovich  –  chose Nordic themes for their operas. Although Cornelius dedicated the manuscript copy of the libretto to him, Wagner continued to discourage Cornelius and even advised him to conflate Bluebeard and Jeanne d’Arc into an operatic scenario, a suggestion which understandably vexed Cornelius. Wagner might have had genuine misgivings about the dramatic potential of Gunlöd  –  and not without justification  –  but it is equally possible that he was concerned about competition for his not yet completed Ring cycle and, as will be seen, the similarities with the projected Parsifal. In the poetic Edda Gunlöd is mentioned only once in a collection of proverbs attributed to the highest god Odin and therefore called Havamál (Sayings of the High One). Probably it was stanza 105 that inspired Cornelius to the central idea of his opera: that the mead of poetry equals divine inspiration, which can only be poured out from the hands of a loving woman. Gunnlod gave me [Odin] from her golden throne a drink of the precious mead; a poor reward I let her have in return, for her open-heartedness, for her heavy spirit.42 The background story is explained in the Prose Edda in Skaldskaparmál, a dialogue about the origin of poetry.43 When the divine dynasties of the Æsir and Vanir settle peace, they spit into a vessel and create from the spit a wise man called Kvasir. He is killed by two dwarfs, who brew from his blood a mead that transforms everybody who drinks from it into a poet or a wise man. Some time later the dwarfs have to surrender the mead to the giant Suttung as compensation in a blood-feud; Suttung hides the mead in a mountain and sets his daughter Gunnlod to guard it. The god Odin disguises himself as the human Bolverk and seeks employment with Suttung’s brother Baugi in exchange for a drink of the mead. Suttung, however, denies Bolverk the payment for his labours, whereupon Bolverk transforms into a snake, slithers through a hole into the mountain and sleeps with Gunnlod for three nights (probably back in his true form, although Snorri does not say so). In turn she permits him to drink from the mead. Bolverk empties the vessels, transforms herausgehoben zu haben.  … Deutsch soll mein dritter Stoff sein, und was ist deutscher als dies. Und in diesem Reich der Mythe, einer schönen Natursymbolik, liegt ja doch die eigentliche Bestimmung und rechte Anwendung der Musik: Götter, d.h. sagenhafte, herrliche Menschen, in welche die Eigenschaften und Vorgänge der Natur hineingedichtet wurden  –  reden zu lassen, das bleibt die höchste Aufgabe der Kunst.’ 41 Letter to Bertha Jung, 5 May 1867, ibid., p. 513. 42 The Poetic Edda, trans. and ed. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1999), p. 28. 43 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. and ed. Anthony Faulkes (London, 2002), pp. 61–4.

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into an eagle and reaches Asgard before the furious Suttung can catch him. There he regurgitates the mead and distributes it to the Æsir and those humans who are destined to be poets. However, during the flight he spilled a small quantity, and this has produced the bad poets. It is unlikely that such a humorous and rather bawdy story would have inspired a high-minded poet like Cornelius. Compared with the Old Norse original, Karl Simrock’s translation is more voluble in its praise of Gunlöd’s holy heart and glowing favour. Cornelius might also have been inspired by the Alkuna collection, where the poet Bechstein injects nineteenth-century sentiment into the medieval poetry: Sie saß im Schlummer, Sich träumend sehnend Nach Licht und Liebe Und Lebenslust. Da kam der Wandrer Des Tranks begehrend, Die Süße seufzte, Ach, unbewußt.44 She sat sleeping, dreaming, yearning for light and love and joy of life. Then the wanderer came asking for the mead, the sweet girl sighed, ah, unconsciously. This was a story Cornelius could relate to. According to his biographer Max Hasse, he interpreted the myth as art’s unceasing struggle for the ideal of poetmusicianship, hidden in a mountain and administered only by a truly loving woman.45 However, for Cornelius the Eddic version must have suffered from a major fault: Gunlöd does not receive anything in return from Odin and vanishes from the focus of the story as soon as the theft is accomplished. This was something Cornelius had to set right if he wanted to remain truthful to his high standards of love and artistic integrity, as well as his ideals of divine decorum. Since Cornelius did not complete the music for Act 3, the following discussion will focus on the text and the stage directions rather than the style of composition, although the edition of the sketches by Max Hasse and the partial reconstruction by Waldemar Baußnern give some idea of what the finished opera would have been like.46 Cornelius condensed the complicated pre-history of the mead into Gunlöd’s 44 Legis, Alkuna, pp. 185–6. 45 Max Hasse, Der Dichtermusiker Peter Cornelius (Leipzig, 1922–3), vol. 2, p. 124. 46 After Cornelius’s death his friend Karl Hoffbauer completed the score which Eduard Lassen prepared for the first performance in 1891. Due to litigation over the intellectual property rights of the additions Bertha Cornelius withdrew this version from the stage. See ibid., p. 171.

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monologue at the beginning of Act 1. She tells how Kwasir, a wise god, was killed by Suttung, but just before his death he passed on the secret of his blood to Gunlöd, a human girl kidnapped by the giant. Thus she became the guardian of the vessel and promised to keep the mead for Odin. After this narration she joyfully enumerates the qualities of the holy mead, using the terms ‘blood’ and ‘mead’ interchangeably: Blut des Sanges ist Gottesbegeist’rung, Kuss der Liebe, Sieg in der Schlacht, Wonne in Weh, erlösende Schönheit, Lenzesblüthe und Heimathlust, Traumesweben, Reigen der Freude, Heldenehre, Frauenpreis!47 Blood of song is divine inspiration, kiss of love, victory in battle, bliss in sorrow, redeeming beauty, flower of springtime and joy in the homeland, flowing dreams, dance of joy, honour of the hero, praise of the woman! This is a fairly representative sample of Cornelius’s elevated speech and rhythmic verses. In expressions such as ‘Wonne in Weh’ he could not avoid alliterations, but altogether he rejected both rhyme and Wagnerian Stabreim for his last libretto. In a letter to his fiancée he defended his position: My text avoids both: the German (romantic) rhyme and the Wagnerian Stabreim; the latter is only a new constraint which forces one to invent again certain poetic tricks which are completely lost in the music. On the contrary, they rather impede the music because they produce a formal music in themselves, which causes contradictions to the actual, sung music, as it sometimes happens in Tristan and the Ring.48 However, Cornelius’s elevated language is not unproblematic either when set to music. In the surviving fragments the persistent use of iambic or dactylic tetrameters creates, as Anna Amalie Abert has demonstrated, a lyrical and ceremonious tone which is further emphasised by frequent melodic and harmonic sequences.49 The prevailing lyrical atmosphere suppresses the little development 47 Peter Cornelius, Gunlöd: Oper in drei Aufzügen, ed. Max Hasse (Leipzig, 1894), pp. 13–14. 48 Letter to Bertha Jung, November 1866, Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, vol. 2, p. 451: ‘In meinem Text ist beides vermieden: Der deutsche (romantische) Reim und der Wagnersche Stabreim  –  der ja doch nur einen neuen Zwang bildet und schuld daran ist, daß man wieder rein dichterisch gewisse Kunststückchen sucht, die dann in der Musik völlig verloren gehen; im Gegenteil die Musik hindern, da sie für sich eine formelle Musik bilden, die mit der eigentlichen, gesungnen einen Widerspruch bildet, wie so manchmal im Tristan und in den Nibelungen.’ 49 Anna Amalie Abert, ‘Zu Cornelius’ Oper “Gunlöd”’, in Peter Cornelius als Komponist, Dichter, Kritiker und Essayist, ed. Hellmut Federhofer and Kurt Oehl

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the plot has to offer. By making Gunlöd a human woman rather than Suttung’s daughter, Cornelius creates a love-triangle where Bölwerk/Odin (tenor) and Suttung (bass) compete for Gunlöd’s (soprano) love and the mead. The sacred liquid carries a different meaning for each of them, as they explain in an elaborate trio in Act 1 which is the only face-to-face confrontation of all three protagonists: to Gunlöd, the mead is the source of happy love, to Suttung the source of universal power, to Odin the source of poetry.50 Odin and Gunlöd want to enrich divine and human existence with love and art, whereas Suttung plans to destroy the rule of the gods with the help of the mead. The contrast love vs. power recalls the various functions of the ring in Der Ring des Nibelungen, although Wagner did not explore the potential of the Rhinegold to symbolise artistic creativity. The triple dimension of the mead results from Cornelius’s symbolic understanding of the three principal characters, which he explained to his fiancée while working on the text of Act 3: ‘Now I know that the third act will be something very poetic, maybe the best part of the opera, so that the three archetypes devil  –  woman  –  god will stand out in dazzling beauty.’51 In Cornelius’s adaptation of the myth Gunlöd, Suttung and Odin are allegories rather than the ‘legendary, wonderful humans’ he intended, acting out an archaic confrontation between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness which leaves little space for psychological development or surprising plot twists. The only real conflict  –  Gunlöd’s love for Bölwerk and the vow that binds her to Odin  –  is quickly resolved when Bölwerk reveals himself as the god in disguise. Odin, in turn, is not the ambiguous character from the Edda who seduces Gunlöd and leaves her to her fate; neither does he resemble Wagner’s world-weary Wotan. Throughout the opera he shows the wisdom, integrity and consideration befitting the highest of the gods. Although he has to leave Gunlöd at the beginning of Act 2, after they declared their love, he promises a reunion in the near future and tells her a magic word to summon the light-elves when she is in mortal peril: the word ‘Alfadur’, i.e. Odin’s title as all-father, will carry her to Valhalla. This promise of eternal joy in Valhalla makes the outcome of the opera entirely predictable, especially since Odin enchants Gunlöd so that the suffering awaiting her at Suttung’s hands will seem to her as a mere dream. To balance the goodness of the lovers, the giant is a one-dimensionally demonic character. When he realises that Bölwerk and the mead have disappeared, Suttung cancels the wedding with Gunlöd and drags her off to Hela, the personification of Nordic hell, a cold, gloomy place of eternal despair. Cornelius endows Suttung with a quality he considered particularly devilish, namely deadly irony and sarcasm; in this respect the giant is similar to the figure of Mephistopheles from Goethe’s drama Faust or Liszt’s Faust Symphony: Suttung treats Gunlöd with irony, says everything with treacly mockery, (Regensburg, 1977), pp. 152–3. 50 Cornelius, Gunlöd, pp. 33–40. 51 Letter to Bertha Jung, 3 March 1867, Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 488–9: ‘[Ich] weiß, daß ich aus dem dritten Akt etwas Poetisches mache, was vielleicht das beste der Oper wird  –  so daß ich die drei Typen: Teufel  –  Weib  –  Gott blendend schön herausbringe.’

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treats their journey to Hela’s cave as their honeymoon,  … sings her  … an eerily tender lullaby, then leaves her to collect a bunch of poisonous flowers, belladonna, and says: Darling, you will be rather thirsty  –  here, eat this  … Then he pronounces the deadly curse, and whereas she has responded so far only dryly with Yes and No, now she exults in the jubilation of death and summons the light-elves. Meanwhile Suttung incites Hela and her servants, which results in the final battle of the good and evil spirits …52 The finale of Gunlöd clearly resembles an apocalyptic oratorio, such as Friedrich Schneider’s Das Weltgericht (1819). The light-elves triumph without much ado over the evil spirits and carry the lifeless Gunlöd on a chariot of clouds upwards to Valhalla where Odin calls her back to life. She awakens and shields her eyes from the dazzling splendour as gods and heroes welcome her. (What Odin’s wife Frigga would have to say about the arrival of a former lover of her husband is not mentioned.) The plethora of heavenly spirits and their graceful welcome recall the final scene of Goethe’s Faust II.53 Cornelius was an ardent admirer of Goethe’s poetry from his earliest youth, and it is possible that Schumann’s Scenen aus Goethes Faust came to his attention at some point. It is even more likely that this is another reflection of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, especially of its choral finale. However, the roles of redeemer and redeemed are inverted: in the opera it is the man (or god as man) who lifts the woman up to him, not Gretchen transfigured as the eternally feminine who redeems Faust. Gunlöd finally realises where she is and joyfully claims the gods as her friends and relations. Odin appoints her the eternal cup-bearer of the gods, making her a Nordic version of Ganymede, the cup-bearer of Greek Zeus. Gunlöd takes the golden vessel with the mead, kneels down and offers it  –  as she had done in Act 1  –  to Odin, who solemnly elevates the chalice. It is tempting to speculate that this image inspired Wagner for the final scene of Parsifal. Both operas share a preoccupation with Christian ideas, imagery and beliefs. While the Grail scenes from Parsifal resemble the Eucharist, the final scene of Gunlöd was possibly modelled on a religious dogma that was familiar to the devoutly Catholic Cornelius: the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Cornelius himself invited a Christian reading of his opera when he compared Suttung to the devil and endowed him with devilish traits such as rebelling against the gods, contempt of love and ironic mockery. Taking this parallel further, it makes sense to compare Gunlöd to the Virgin Mary, who, according to the Legenda Aurea, was admitted bodily into heaven. Although Mary’s corporeal assumption was declared a Catholic dogma only in 1950, the tradition of the feast celebrated 52 Ibid., pp. 488–9: ‘Suttung behandelt die Gunlöd ironisch, sagt alles mit süßlichem Hohn, behandelt die Fahrt zur Höhle der Hela als ihre Hochzeitsreise  … er singt ihr  … ein schauerlich zärtliches Ruhelied, er geht dann, um ihr einen schönen Strauß von Giftblumen, Tollkirschen zu pflücken, und sagt dann: Liebchen Du wirst recht durstig sein  … nun spricht er den Todesfluch über sie aus, und während sie bis dahin nur lakonisch mit Ja und Nein geantwortet  –  bricht sie in den Jubel des Todes aus und beschwört die Lichtalfen, während Suttung die Hela und ihr Gesind’ veranlaßt, was dann den Schlußkampf der bösen und guten Geister hervorruft, wie Du’s kennst.’ 53 This similarity has also been noted by Abert, ‘Zu Cornelius’ Oper “Gunlöd”’, p. 148.

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on 15 August can be traced back to the seventh century. The Assumption was a popular topic in Baroque art, with the image of the ascent to heaven superseding the older iconographic tradition of Mary’s coronation.54 Cornelius will have known many examples from his native Mainz, Vienna or Munich, such as the altar-piece by Peter Candid painted for the Church of Our Lady in Munich in 1620. According to the art historian Brigitte Volk-Knüttel, Mary’s rapturous glance towards God/ Jesus indicates that Candid interpreted the Assumption in the light of the Song of Songs, with Christ as bridegroom and Mary as his bride.55 Following her reading, the finale of Cornelius’s opera shows a similar reception of a beloved woman by her celestial lover. The gods and heroes inhabiting Valhalla are paralleled in the saints and figures from the Old Testament populating the background of the painting. Little cherubs carry Mary upwards on clouds, just like the light-elves transport Gunlöd from Hela to Valhalla. This comparison is further supported if the poet-composer’s religiosity and specifically his Marian devotion are taken into account. Cornelius was by no means a blind follower of Catholic doctrine and his sincere religiosity was not naïve. As a young man he openly despised hypocritical priests and turned down a job as church musician because he would have had to comply with orthodox Catholicism. At the instigation of Liszt he nevertheless began composing church music and found religious soul-mates in Liszt and the equally devout Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein.56 To judge from his letters and poems, he also tended to blur his devotion to the Virgin Mary and the love and veneration he felt for the women in his life, which might have been intensified by the coincidence that two of these women were called Marie: Marie Rückert, the daughter of the poet Friedrich Rückert, and Marie Gärtner, a pupil of Liszt. The blend of sacred and secular love is most conspicuous in his letters and poems to Rosa von Milde, the soprano who first performed the leading female roles in Der Barbier von Bagdad and Der Cid.57 This tendency is less apparent in his letters to his fiancée Bertha Jung who, however, was a free-thinking Protestant and might not have relished comparisons with the Virgin Mary. It is quite possible, then, that during his engagement with Bertha Cornelius sought and found an artistic outlet for his Marian devotion in his last opera Gunlöd. If the Eddic myth is reinterpreted in the light of Catholic beliefs, the finale with Gunlöd’s salvation and ‘assumption’ to Valhalla gains additional meaning, though one that further lessens the dramatic urgency of the plot resolution. On the archetypal level of ‘all-father’ and loving woman, redemption is inevitable. (A) God cannot abandon his child who loves and trusts him even beyond the grave; the reward for her faithful and patient suffering by elevating her into the company 54 Ulrike Liebl, ‘Himmelfahrt’, Marienlexikon, ed. Remigius Bäumler and Leo Scheffzyk (St. Ottilien, 1991), vol. 3, pp. 199–208. 55 Brigitte Volk-Knüttel, ‘Der Hochaltar der Münchner Frauenkirche von 1620 und seine Gemälde von Peter Candid’, in Monachium Sacrum: Festschrift zur 500-JahrFeier der Metropolitankirche Zu Unserer Lieben Frau in München, ed. Hans Ramisch (Munich, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 213, 222. 56 Edgar Istel, Peter Cornelius (Leipzig, [1906]), pp. 26–7. 57 See, for example, the letter to Rosa von Milde, 16 May 1859, Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, vol. 1, p. 356.

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3.1  Peter Candid, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1620). Until the neo-Gothic restoration of the Frauenkirche in Munich, Candid’s painting was part of the high altar, where Cornelius easily could have seen it.

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of the heavenly hosts is built into the very fabric of the world. This might explain why Cornelius ‘gives away’ the happy ending half-way through the opera when Odin teaches Gunlöd how she can join him in Valhalla, and why her suffering at the hands of Suttung  –  the devil  –  appears to her as a mere dream: ‘real’ life starts only after death and resurrection. Any doubts about the redemption of the human being, even for the sake of dramatic tension, would have made Cornelius’s religious devotion pointless, especially since it was bound up with his self-awareness as a poet and composer. In the Ring universe, the other Eddic opera of the 1870s, the love of the gods is corrupted by power and has to be redeemed by Brünnhilde’s human love. For Cornelius, divine and human love are mutually dependent, as the latter cannot exist without the former. Since the story of the divine mead and Gunlöd’s love was so close to Cornelius’s heart, he hoped to communicate it to his listeners with utmost clarity. Obviously he spoke in jest when he declared to his friend Alexander Ritter that he intended to compose the opera like a children’s symphony, with melodies à la Flotow and simple harmonies: ‘the first diminished seventh chord is to appear not before the third act, and on the play bill you will read: ill  –  Mr Pedal-point. On leave or unwell because of excessive augmentation: Mr Triad!’58 In a more serious mood he explained to the conductor Carl Riedel: ‘As soon as one is writing chromatically, the matter becomes unprincipled, and only diatonicism shows the true heart.’59 All this was part of his efforts to reach his audiences, since he was afraid that Wagner’s more advanced style since Tristan und Isolde would fail to touch anybody’s heart. After the completion of Der Cid he admitted: ‘I will hold on to Lohengrin, I seek the understanding of the public, I consider the possibilities of performance. I think it is the highest goal of my life  … to give to the German stage a series of operas that can be performed between 7 and 10 in the evening and which respect the limitations set by Mozart, Weber and [early] Wagner.’60 Cornelius was obviously worried what would happen to the German stages if more composers followed the dangerously attractive model of Tristan und Isolde. Admittedly the completed passages of the Gunlöd fragment are harmonically rather advanced, frequently shifting to unexpected mediants or modulating to remote keys. However, the sliding chromatic counterpoint, which Cornelius found so intoxicating and repulsive when studying Tristan, is carefully avoided. It is quite possible that Cornelius’s and Wagner’s respective last operas might have shared 58 Letter to Alexander Ritter, 4 June 1867, ibid., vol. 2, p. 517: ‘der erste verminderte Dreiklang darf mir erst im dritten Akt kommen, und auf dem Zettel der Gunlöd wird stehen: Krank: Herr Orgelpunkt. Beurlaubt, oder unpäßlich wegen Übermäßigkeit: Herr Dreiklang!’ 59 Letter to Carl Riedel, 18 August 1870, ibid., p. 635: ‘Sobald man chromatisch wird, wird die Sache charakterlos und nur im Diatonischen zeigt sich wahre Herzensmeinung.’ 60 Letter to Carl Hestermann, 17 January 1865, ibid., p. 21: ‘Ich halte am Lohengrin fest, ich suche das Verständnis des Publikums, berechne die Möglichkeit der Aufführung; ich betrachte es als das höchste Ziel meines Lebens  …, der deutschen Bühne eine Reihe von Opern zu geben, die zwischen 7 und 10 Uhr abends spielen, die sich in den von Mozart, Weber und Wagner gesteckten Grenzen halten.’

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not only a reinterpretation of Christian imagery and beliefs but even the deliberate and reflected use of a regained diatonic language that leaves behind the chromatic excess and the erotically charged atmosphere of Tristan to celebrate chaste love and true religion. With this blend of Nordic mythology and Marian symbolism, Cornelius’s Gunlöd created a highly individual solution to the tension between fascination for Wagner and the striving for an independent creative voice which plagued so many of his contemporaries.

The Twilight of the Light God The second mythological opera under consideration, Heinrich Vogl’s (1845–1900) Der Fremdling (The Stranger, 1899), shares the general scenario with Cornelius’s Gunlöd: a human woman suffers for her love for an immortal and is rewarded by being elevated to the realm of the gods as a reward. In a sense, the romantic love story developed around the Nordic god Baldur and the human princess Nanna is the most conventional of the three Eddic operas discussed here, and the one that strays furthest from the mythological tradition, but is also the only one where gods and human society  –  rather than human individuals  –  are intended to interact quite closely. Felix Dahn, who wrote the libretto of Der Fremdling in 1880 after he was disappointed that his Armin had not enjoyed a more lasting success, admitted in his memoirs that he had modelled his opera on ‘Richard Wagner’s intermingling of the Germanic gods into human pains and joys’. 61 Wagner even accepted the dedication of the printed libretto but, to Dahn’s disappointment, did not compose it himself. The plot of the opera is based on Dahn’s own ballad Der Fremdling, published in 1878 and set to music by Vogl shortly afterwards for baritone and piano. In the fourteen-stanza poem the Nordic princess Haralda falls in love with a stranger and promises to remain faithful to him until his return in springtime. Her father and the people want to punish her by burying her alive, but at the last moment the stranger returns, spring breaks out, the people recognise him as the god Baldur, and the couple ascends to the stars.62 As the stereotypical names ‘Haralda’ and ‘King Olaf ’ indicate, the story was Dahn’s own invention and was not directly based on the Nordic myths which Dahn of course knew intimately. The operatic libretto extends the basic plot of the ballad in two directions; first by introducing a political sub-plot, where the widowed queen Hardrun of Gautaland wants to force her despised stepdaughter  –  now renamed ‘Nanna’ like Baldur’s wife in the Edda  –  to marry her son Hâko in order to ensure the royal heritage. Second, the human love story is embedded into a mythological background. At the beginning of Act 1 the gods are assembled in Asgard to deliberate the marriage of Baldur. However, he refuses the suggested goddesses and elves, including the sister of fire-god Loki, because he has already chosen a wife amongst the humans. 61 Dahn, Erinnerungen, p. 673: ‘Richard Wagner’s Hereinziehung der germanischen Götter in menschliche Leiden und Freuden’ . 62 Felix Dahn, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5: Gedichte und Balladen (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 282–4.

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Dahn summarises the plot as follows, not without some self-deprecating humour at his fanciful invention: In the first act in Asgard Baldur wagers his head with Loki if the human girl Nanna, the orphaned stepdaughter of a Nordic king whom he has selected for his wife, will not pass the most severe trials of her faithful love. I truly did not spare the poor child  … Brought into the temple of Baldur as a prisoner she is visited by the stranger [in Act 3]; in the moment of tender embrace the couple are surprised by the jealous suitor [Hâko] and his followers, the stranger escapes. Nanna is condemned to death because she has defiled the temple; she is to be buried alive. Steadfast to the end she rejects her suitor’s proposal of marriage who is willing to save her in return; her belief in the stranger and the help he had promised does not waver even when the clods of earth start covering her; then, at the last moment, the stranger appears on a shining sun-chariot: it is Baldur, who carries his wife before the eyes of the surprised humans to the gods, who welcome the new goddess on the rainbow bridge, while Loki shamefacedly has to believe in true love until death amongst the humans.63 This ‘love-test plot’, a commonplace of comic operas, is far removed from the mythological tradition, which does not offer a romantic pre-history of the couple Baldur and Nanna.64 The only indication of a deep attachment between the two is Snorri Sturluson’s narration of Baldur’s death, when Nanna’s heart breaks at her husband’s funeral and their corpses are burnt together  –  not unlike Brynhild and Sigurd in the Nordic version of the Nibelungenlied.65 Otherwise the love story of Nanna and Baldur as told by Dahn is reminiscent of operatic clichés on the one hand  –  e.g. the forbidden love between a soprano and a 63 Dahn, Erinnerungen, pp. 673–4: ‘In einem in Asgardh spielenden ersten Aufzug verwettet Baldur gegenüber Loki sein Haupt, falls das von ihm zum Weib erkorene Menschenmädchen Nanna, die verwaiste Stieftochter eines nordischen Königs, nicht alle schwersten Proben der vertrauensvollsten Liebe bestehen sollte. Die hab’ ich dem armen Kinde wahrlich nicht erspart:  … Als Gefangene in den Baldurtempel gebracht, wird sie hier von dem Unbekannten aufgesucht, im Augenblicke zärtlichster Umarmung wird das Par [sic] von dem eifersüchtigen Freier und dessen Gefolgschaft überrascht, der Unbekannte entflieht. Nanna wird wegen Tempelschändung zum Tode verurtheilt: sie soll lebend eingegraben werden: standhaft bis an’s Ende weist sie die Hand des Freiers zurück, der sie um diesen Preis zu retten bereit ist: ihr Glaube an den Fremdling und seine ihr zugesagte Hilfe wankt nicht, als sie schon die fallenden Erdschollen bedecken: da, im letzten Augenblick, erscheint auf leuchtendem Sonnenwagen der Fremdling: es ist Baldur, der vor den staunenden Augen der Menschen seine Gemahlin emporträgt zu den Göttern, die oben auf der Regenbogenbrücke die neue Göttin jubelnd begrüßen, während Loki beschämt an Treue und Liebe bis zum Tode bei den Menschen glauben muß.’ 64 The mythological models of Der Fremdling and Baldurs Tod are discussed in Barbara Eichner, ‘Romantischer Held und deutscher Lichtgott: Baldur auf der Opernbühne des Fin de siècle’, in Eddische Götter und Helden, ed. Schulz, pp. 313–34. 65 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, p. 49.

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tenor persecuted by a jealous baritone and a politically ambitious mezzosoprano  –  and Wagnerian commonplaces on the other. The council of the gods in Asgard in Act 1, for example, superficially resembles the second scene from Das Rheingold. However, the gradual and ceremonial introduction of the gods is more like a traditional pageant, beginning with a song of praise by minor gods, goddesses and light-elves before the successive appearance of the main characters Baldur, Loki, Freia and finally Odhin [sic]. Vogl took great care to characterise each god with quite simple but fitting musical means: Baldur’s arrival is heralded by bright A major, mirrored in the stage directions that request a sunrise; Thor as god of thunder is characterised with good-natured rumbling triplets in the bass; Loki’s melodic lines are angular and ‘jumpy’ and are accompanied by staccato semiquavers; Freia’s music is supposed to be played ‘light and gracefully’ (‘Leicht und duftig’), and Odhin’s entrance is marked by a majestic tune in triple metre and regal C major, more brass-band like and less subtle than Wagner’s ‘Walhall’ motif but with an obvious family resemblance.66 Only of the latter theme a variant returns at the end of the opera when Nanna and Baldur are elevated to Asgard; the other gods  –  and their motifs  –  are not further integrated into the plot after Act 1, thus undermining Dahn’s claim that there is direct interaction between the two worlds, except for Baldur’s appearances as ‘the stranger’. The wager between Baldur and Loki, where the former bets his head and thus the future of the gods, is reminiscent of the dialogue between Mime and the Wanderer in Act 2 of Siegfried, although it is equally possible that Dahn, an acknowledged specialist for Nordic and Germanic history, was inspired directly by the Eddic poetry. Nanna in contrast does not resemble any character from the Ring universe; rather she appears as a more positive version of Elsa. Whereas Elsa finally succumbs to her need to know Lohengrin’s name, Nanna never questions her lover’s lack of a proper identity, even though in both cases the future of a kingdom is at stake. In fact the people of Gautaland show more political common sense than Wagner’s Brabantians when they refuse to be led by an unknown stranger. Although Dahn claimed that he wanted to bring together human and divine world, his choice of language divides rather than unites the two spheres. While the gods converse in short, alliterating verses without end-rhyme, the humans  –  including Baldur in his disguise as ‘the stranger’  –  use simpler, more traditional rhymed lines. The love duet between Baldur and Nanna in Act 1 is a good example for the language of the humans: nanna: Du kannst mich lieben? Ich bin nicht schön! fremdling: Du bist schöner als Freia in Asgard’s Höhn! nanna: Ich kann nicht sprechen, nicht loben, nicht werben! fremdling: Doch kannst du für deine Liebe sterben? nanna: Das kann ich, Ja! Gott Baldur soll es hören! fremdling: Gott Baldur weiss! Du brauchst es nicht zu schwören.67 nanna: You could love me? I’m not beautiful! 66 Heinrich Vogl, Der Fremdling: Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn: Scenische Anordnung vom Komponisten (Leipzig, [1899]), pp. 7–13. 67 Vogl, Der Fremdling, pp. 80–1.

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the stranger: You are more beautiful than Freia in Asgard’s heights! nanna: I cannot speak, not praise, not attract! the stranger: But could you die for your love? nanna: Yes, that I can! God Baldur shall hear me! the stranger: God Baldur knows! You don’t have to swear it. The language of the gods with its pseudo-Nordic Stabreim is exemplified in Odhin’s speech when he calms the gods who are anxious about the outcome of Baldur’s and Loki’s wager. Odhin promises them that the downfall of the gods, which they all know is linked to Baldur’s welfare, cannot happen as long as true love exists. Like Wagner, Dahn and Vogl link the fate of the gods to undying, unquestioning love, though with strikingly different conclusions. Allwissend ist Allvater nicht, aber ahnungsvoll! Traurige Täuschung trügt zuweilen auch Weise: Aber ich ahne im hoffenden Herzen: Nicht wird die Nacht um Nanna uns nehmen den blühenden Baldur! Sieghaft und selig trägt sie in Treue die Lasten der Liebe!  … So lange Liebe lebt, wie in Baldur’s Brust,  … So lang’ lebt auch der Götter Geschlecht und der muthigen Menschen! Liegt einst die Liebe verlodert und Treue in Trümmern dann dämmert das dunkle Verderben dumpf und drohend uns auf über Asgard und Erde. Doch: noch nachtet es nicht: Denn noch lebt lautere Liebe: Denn Weibes Werth, er wird sich erwahren.68 All-father is not all-knowing, but full of premonitions! Sad delusion sometimes deceives even the wise man: But I feel in my hoping heart: the night surrounding Nanna 68 Ibid., pp. 42–6.

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Struck by the foresight of their ruler, the other gods repeat the last four lines of his prediction a cappella, while Odhin raises his hands in blessing. This chorus also plays a crucial role in the final scene when Baldur has revealed his identity. He first triumphantly proclaims that Nanna’s death-defying love has made her worthy to join the immortals, and cites the lines ‘Noch nachtet es nicht’ etc., which are then repeated by four voices ‘from the height of the stage (as if coming from Valhalla).’69 At the return of the orchestral transition the people, who thus far have kneeled in adoration before Baldur, jump up. The chorus ‘from above’ continues, the voices split into eight parts, building up to a triumphant cadence in C major. Under the strains of the Asgard theme  –  which starts at the indication ‘Langsamer’  –  Baldur and Nanna are carried upwards in a chariot decorated with flowers, while the abode of the gods appears in the background. The piano reduction used by the stage manager of the Munich performances also indicates that green fire should blaze during the short instrumental postlude,70 and flowers rain from the sky as the curtain closes to the sounds of the full orchestra in triple fortissimo. In contrast to Dahn’s plot summary, Baldur and Nanna are not welcomed by the gods nor is the rainbow bridge shown; Vogl possibly made this decision in order to avoid too close a visual resemblance to the final scene of Das Rheingold. The mythological framework narrative  –  Baldur’s wager with Loki  –  thus remains unresolved, though the triumphant finale leaves no doubt that the mutual love of Baldur and Nanna has postponed the ‘twilight of the gods’ for the time being. The reception of the opera in Munich on 7 May 1899 was just as triumphant as the finale of Der Fremdling. According to contemporary critics such as the Munich correspondent of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik the general rejoicing and applause 69 Ibid., p. 186: ‘4 Stimmen a.d. Höhe des Bühnenraumes (wie von Walhall kommend).’ 70 Vocal score of the ‘Inspektion’, D-Mbs, St.th.1247.

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3.2  Heinrich Vogl in the role of Siegfried from Götterdämmerung

were unprecedented; the composer  –  who had himself sung the role of Baldur  –  was called out six times after Act 1 alone, and a numerous crowd accompanied the artist from the stage door to his house.71 However, the acclamation was aimed at the singer rather than the composer: Vogl had been a member of the royal opera company for several decades, he had participated in the Munich premieres of Das Rheingold (Loge) and Die Walküre (Siegmund), was the first Bayreuth Loge and was internationally renowned in the roles of Tristan (with his wife Therese singing Isolde), Siegmund and Siegfried, where he could display his legendary vocal stamina. The newspaper Münchner Signale thus sadly observed that the applause had noticeably diminished at the second performance of Der Fremdling, and that the music  –  while most commendable for a newcomer and amateur  –  could not stand up to professional critical standards.72 Since Vogl died the year after the premiere, he could not personally further its success by singing the title role. Hermann von der Pfordten even speculated in the obituary that disappointment with the failure of the opera had contributed to Vogl’s unexpected death at age fifty-five.73 71 Paula (Margarete) Reber, ‘Der Fremdling. Oper in drei Akten nach einer Dichtung Felix Dahn’s von Heinrich Vogl’, NZfM 66 no. 20 (17 May 1899), pp. 228–9. 72 Quoted in Rolf Wünnenberg, Das Sängerehepaar Heinrich und Therese Vogl: Ein Beitrag zur Operngeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tutzing, 1982), pp. 140–2. 73 Hermann Frhr. von der Pfordten, Heinrich Vogl: Zur Erinnerung und zum Vermächtniss (Munich, 1900), pp. 24–5.

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3.3  Heinrich Vogl, Der Fremdling. Baldur and Nanna ascend to Valhalla amidst a shower of flowers.

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The similarities of Der Fremdling with Cornelius’s Gunlöd are apparent especially in the final apotheosis; in both cases a male god  –  for part of the opera disguised as a human  –  saves a woman from mortal peril and elevates her in recognition of her true love and suffering to the higher realms. It is perhaps telling that at least two composers responded to the religious and cultural insecurities of the second half of the nineteenth century by falling back on deus ex machina solutions whose scenic representations with their chariots and swirling clouds remind of festive Baroque operas. The authority of the divine ruler is not questioned or ultimately destroyed, as in Wagner’s Ring, but happily reaffirmed. This should not, however, be read as compliance or even complicity with the political status quo of the German Empire or the Bavarian kingdom. For Cornelius the dignity of divine rule is ultimately bound up with the wellspring of artistic inspiration, and to him poetic and musical inspiration were unthinkable outside a world redeemed by divine love. Vogl, in contrast, did not reveal his reasons for selecting Der Fremdling for his only operatic project; perhaps it would not be too unfair to suggest that the ageing singer mainly wanted to write the perfect dramatic vehicle for himself, displaying his dignified appearance as well as his heroic tenor voice in lyrical and heroic situations, and culminating in his triumphant ascension to the gods. The second Baldur opera of the 1890s, Cyrill Kistler’s Baldurs Tod, was no more successful than Vogl’s Fremdling on the stage, but it created a much more vociferous and at times violent public debate, thanks mainly to the polemical writings of its composer. Baldurs Tod goes considerably beyond a romantic love story in Nordic-mythological guise, because Kistler and his librettist Carl Edgar Freiherrr von Sohlern restored Baldur to his pivotal role in the downfall of the Nordic gods, as described in the Eddic poem Völuspá and in Snorri Sturluson’s mythological handbook. Baldur’s death at the hand of his blind brother Hödr heralds the end of the rule of the gods and the final battle Ragnarök between the gods, supported by the Valhalla heroes, and their adversaries. Wagner had transplanted this important function of Baldur’s murder onto the death of Siegfried, who also dies innocently at the hand of treacherous relatives. While the first drafts of Der junge Siegfried still contained an allusion to the Nordic god, Wagner eliminated it from the final text since, in the words of Deryck Cooke, he ‘realized that the figure of Siegfried had absorbed [Baldur], as it were, and made him redundant.’74 The similarities between the fates of the two heroes were, of course, noticed by Wagner’s contemporaries. In his essay Die Wibelungen Wagner himself had interpreted Siegfried as a god of light or sun-god fighting against the powers of evil, in accordance with the general nineteenth-century understanding of Baldur’s role.75 Therefore Kistler and von Sohlern faced the challenge of restoring a story familiar from Götterdämmerung to its mythological integrity while making it palatable to contemporary audiences used to the Ring. The composer was thus understandably vexed whenever the obvious similarities between his music drama and the Ring were pointed out, a reaction that is indicative of his problematic relationship with Wagner, the Wagner Societies and especially 74 Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s Ring (London, 1979), p. 241. 75 Richard Wagner, Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage (Leipzig, 1850), p. 11.

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Bayreuth. Kistler (1848–1907) grew up in humble circumstances, received a chance to develop his musical talents at a local teacher training college and taught at thirteen different schools in the Augsburg area between 1867 and 1875.76 The marriage to Rosina Stainheimer, a wealthy Jewish woman from the village of Ichenhausen where Kistler conducted a Jewish choral society, enabled him to study at the Munich conservatoire with Joseph Rheinberger and Franz Wüllner. Kistler conveniently omits to name his first wife in his autobiography, where he refers to her only as his benefactress, and does not mention that they attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 before being divorced two years later.77 It would be too simplistic to blame the failure of the relationship for the spiteful anti-Semitism of many of his later writings, where Jews are equated with everything materialistic and anti-idealistic and are ridiculed for their lack of genuine artistic talent.78 In Munich Kistler joined the Munich Wagner Society and first met the admired master in 1877. From then on he was a frequent guest in Bayreuth  –  for the Parsifal premiere he corrected the solo vocal parts  –  and aimed to become a writer of music dramas.79 He also composed his first opera Kunihild oder Der Brautritt auf Kynast (Kunihild or the bridal ride on Kynast mountain), which when performed in 1893 brought him to the attention of George Bernard Shaw, and married his second wife Mary Crompton, the daughter of a retired English officer. In 1883 Kistler became a teacher of music theory at the conservatoire in Sondershausen, but soon afterwards retired to Bad Kissingen where he lived quietly with his family, financially supported by the lawyer Bruno Wieland from Ravensburg. While his stage works, including several comic operas and the ambitious Faust (1905) based directly on Goethe’s play, were quickly forgotten, Kistler gained some notoriety with his self-published journal Aufsätze über musikalische Tagesfragen. This was later titled Tagesfragen: Organ für Musiker, Musikfreunde und Freunde der Wahrheit (Questions of the day: Mouthpiece for musicians, friends of music and friends of the truth) and characterised by Fuller-Maitland as ‘a brochure of somewhat spasmodic character, both in its matter and in the irregularity of its appearance.’ 80 In recklessly partisan articles, which considerably hindered the appreciation of his works outside a narrow circle of supporters, he criticised the un-German bent of contemporary musical life, advocated nationalist political views, attacked ‘unfair’ reviewers, insulted ‘reminiscence hunters’, promoted the 76 For a brief biography see Adolf Layer, ‘Cyrill Kistler 1848–1907 Komponist’, in Lebensbilder aus dem Bayerischen Schwaben series 3, vol. 13, ed. Adolf Layer and Josef Bellot (Weißenhorn, 1986), pp. 281–307. Claudia Breitfeld is preparing a monograph, Ein Leben für Musik und Menschheit: Cyrill Kistler: Der Musiker, Pädagoge und Publizist: Ein Stück Kulturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. I would like to thank Claudia Breitfeld for sharing an earlier manuscript version. 77 The autobiography, covering his early life, was published in instalments in his journal Tagesfragen in 1906. 78 For example [Cyrill Kistler,] ‘Rechtfertigung’, Aufsätze über musikalische Tagesfragen 1 no. 4 (June 1884), p. 17. 79 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Cyrill Kistler and “Kunihild”’, The Meister: The Quarterly Journal of the London Branch of the Wagner Society 6 no. 22 (22 May 1893), p. 69. 80 Fuller-Maitland, Masters of German Music, p. 286.

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performances of his music by calling for financial support and constantly fought against the claims of the Bayreuth Circle to represent the only legitimate form of Wagner worship. Kistler defended the creative artists of the younger generation against writers like Wolzogen, Stein and Glasenapp, and advocated a school of composers inspired by Wagnerian principles but not bound to the Bayreuth orthodoxy.81 Because of the foreseeable criticism from Wagnerian circles, Kistler was at great pains to explain the origins of his music dramas. According to his recollections he became aware of the Baldur story in Munich ‘around 1876’ through the ballad Der Fremdling  –  probably Felix Dahn’s poem  –  composed by Oskar Merz.82 In 1880 he partially set Dahn’s libretto Der Fremdling to music, and in the same year completed his own Baldur scenario before turning to the composition of Kunihild. At Bad Kissingen he met the medic Carl Edgar Freiherr von Sohlern, who transformed the prose draft into alliterating verses. He had to revise his first musical sketch, which had incorporated material from a Festmarsch, op. 41 (1877), dedicated to Wagner, when he realised the similarity of a central theme with a motif from Parsifal. The music drama was completed in 1891; the same year he published the prelude and a solo scene from Act 1, Wotans Klage und Pflanzensegen (Wotan’s lament and blessing of the plants); the complete vocal score followed in 1892 and was revised several times, renaming the highest god ‘Odin’ instead of ‘Wotan’. The first performance of the opera took place in Düsseldorf in 1905 and had to be financed privately with money from Kistler’s supporters, amongst them the English Wagner biographer William Ashton Ellis, who advocated a ‘KunihildBaldur Fund’ ‘for the promotion of stage representations of Cyrill Kistler’s musicdramas’ and regularly advertised Kistler’s music in his journal The Meister.83 As in Der Fremdling, the romantic love story between Baldur and a human woman, here called Nana, plays an important role and enables Kistler and von Sohlern to include an ardent love duet in Act 1. Again the gods react with horror and indignation to the idea that one of them has promised undying love to a mere mortal; however, when Baldur returns to Asgard in Act 3, he quickly manages to appease his father Odin. Although Nana’s dead body is carried on stage after Baldur’s death  –  implying that she died from a broken heart  –  their love story is not directly relevant to the downfall of the gods, nor is the redemptive finale brought about by a ‘love death’ in the Wagnerian sense. In fact the question why the gods have to perish at all is not answered conclusively. Since Kistler and von Sohlern stay much closer to the Eddic sources than Dahn and Vogl, they place the blame for Baldur’s death squarely on the machinations of Loki. In the vocal score he is simply  –  and incorrectly  –  identified as ‘the God of Evil’;84 he plans the 81 Cyrill Kistler, ‘Wagnersekten’, Aufsätze über musikalische Tagesfragen 3 no. 8 (October 1886), pp. 116–18. 82 Cyrill Kistler, ‘Richard Wagners Götter’, Tagesfragen 10 nos. 9 & 10 (December 1893), p. 136. 83 William Ashton Ellis, ‘In honour of Julius Cyriax’, The Meister 5 no. 20 (14 November 1892), p. 104. 84 Cyrill Kistler, Baldurs Tod: Musikdrama in 3 Akten: Dichtung v. Frhrr. v. Sohlern, 3rd edn (Bad Kissingen, [1906]), p. 6.

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demise of the gods from the start and it is at his instigation that the blind Höder unwittingly kills his brother Baldur. Sohlern defended ‘his’ Loki against critics who had expected a figure along the lines of Wagner’s slightly crooked but not outright evil Loge, or even Goethe’s Mephistopheles: For myself, I cannot find anything at all in the Edda that would have made me consider Loki a humoristic figure. I see him as the uncanny, elementary power of untamed fire, the dark force of destruction that hates everything good because it is good, the natural enemy of the best and most noble things  …85 Loki’s musical language  –  unlike Loge he is not a light tenor but a bass  –  is quite predictably characterised with rapid-fire declamation or satirical sweetness, with restless accompaniments and frequent diminished seventh chords. He stands out from the other roles for his use of melodramatic speech when at his most evil. In three brief instances  –  triumphing over Odin in Act 1, ridiculing the assembled gods as ‘blind’ in Act 2, and after the death of Baldur in Act 3  –  his threats and laughter are notated with square note-heads indicating relative spoken pitch. Baldurs Tod thus predates the well-known example of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Die Königskinder of 1897, which is usually considered the first instance of Sprechgesang. In contrast, all the other gods are blamelessly good and noble, with perhaps the exception of Odin’s wife Frigga who is most upset about her son’s liaison with a human and wants Nana to die as atonement for the illicit love affair. Here perhaps the model of Wagner’s Fricka, who in Die Walküre exhibits a similar sense of decorum, shines through despite Kistler’s protestations. All-father Odin, however, had to be the embodiment of every positive ‘German’ character trait. Kistler’s comparison of his Odin with Wagner’s Wotan shows most clearly where he saw the difference between their respective father gods, as well as the moral and ideological superiority of his own music drama: This Wagnerian Wotan is the representative of a world that never existed. He has no ideals, he is no ideal model, he is no hero, only a henpecked husband, he is a common perjurer, whose actions have nothing to do with the arch-German character, he does not feel in a Germanic way, he acts like the hero of a Parisian adultery drama.  … Wagner’s Wotan resembles a bankrupt businessman from Berlin rather than a German god, let alone the first German god! Wagner’s Wotan is a Jew who haggles and cheats from Rheingold onwards, who can arouse only our hatred.86 85 [Carl Edgar] Freiherr von Sohlern, ‘Ein offenes Wort an Herrn Moriz [sic] Wirth’, Tagesfragen 8 no. 6 (July 1891), p. 85: ‘Ich selbst kann in der Edda gar Nichts finden, was mir Loke [sic] so humoristisch hätte erscheinen lassen. Ich sehe in ihm die unheimliche, elementare Kraft des ungebändigten Feuers, die finstere Macht des Zerstörenden, die das Gute hasst, weil es gut ist, und die allem Besten und Edlen aus Princip Feind ist …’ 86 Cyrill Kistler, ‘Baldurs Tod und Wagners Wotan’, Tagesfragen 9 nos. 3 & 4 (April– May 1892), p. 54: ‘Dieser Wagner’sche Wotan ist der, [sic] Repräsentant einer Welt, die gar nie existirte. Er hat kein Ideal, er ist kein Ideal[,] er ist kein Held, ausser ein

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While criticism of the Ring pantheon on moral grounds was not at all uncommon, Kistler is unusually venomous, and in retrospect it is ironic how he turns Wagner’s anti-Semitic and anti-French prejudices against his own creations. Odin’s divine dignity is underscored with a theme that Kistler  –  after he had to dismiss his first thematic idea as too similar to a Parsifal leitmotif  –  derived from a Benedicamus Domino chant which is used in Catholic services on feast days; Kistler may have come across it during his time as a village organist (Ex. 3.1). The motif opens the prelude of the opera in stately unison and is usually invoked whenever Odin acts in his capacity as the ruler and father of the gods, e.g. when blessing the plants or endorsing Baldur’s love for Nana. The other gods are hardly characterised as individuals except for obvious musical ‘attributes’ like rolling thunder for Donar, the god of thunder, or the use of the solo harp when Brage, the god of song, makes his first appearance in Act 2. At no point does it become apparent why the gods are doomed, since Odin’s dark pronouncements ‘We gods all have failed enough!’ or ‘We will fall, we gods, because [we were] deceiving and untrue’ are nowhere substantiated in the plot.87 None of the gods  –  except for the outcast Loki  –  does anything on stage that would justify their impending destruction. From the beginning of the opera Odin has misgivings about the future of the gods. In Act 1 he consults the wise Wala, the ‘seeress from the realm of the death’, about his troubling dreams of Baldur’s death. Unlike Wotan, who does not heed Erda’s advice, Odin proceeds to bless the plants to safeguard his son. His concerns return in Act 2 after Loki first ridicules and then curses the gods. While he tries to calm the other gods and goddesses, who look to him for reassurance, he admits to himself that an inner voice has long told him that the end is nigh.88 However, at the invocation of the gods and goddesses the three Norns appear briefly and predict, underscored by the Benedicamus Domino motif: ‘Divorced from the gods, Baldur will nevermore live with the gods. The Æsir will fall, Valhalla will collapse. You make room for a higher one, a pure one.’ 89 The last sentence echoes with the enigmatic sixty-fifth stanza of the Eddic poem Völuspá, where the seeress of the title predicts what will happen after the final defeat of the gods in the last battle Ragnarök: Then the powerful, mighty one, he who rules over everything, will come from above, to the judgement-place of the gods.90 Pantoffelheld, er ist ein gewöhnlicher Meineidschwörer, der durch sein Handeln durchaus mit dem urdeutschen Charakterzug nichts zu thun hat, er fühlt nicht germanisch, er handelt wie der Held eines Pariser Ehebruchdramas.  … Wagner’s Wotan sieht eher einem Berliner Bankrotteur gleich, als einem deutschen Gott und dazu dem ersten deutschen Gott!  –  Wagner’s Wotan ist ein Jude, der schon im Rheingold schachert und betrügt, der nur unseren Hass erwecken kann.’ 87 Kistler, Baldurs Tod, p. 124: ‘Genug ist gefehlt von allen uns Göttern!’; p. 176: ‘wir fallen, wir Götter, weil trugvoll und unwahr’. 88 Ibid., pp. 109–10. 89 Ibid., p. 118: ‘Von Göttern geschieden, bei Göttern wohnt Baldur nie mehr. Es fallen die Asen, Walhall zerfällt. Einem Höheren, einem Reinen macht ihr Raum.’ 90 Poetic Edda, p. 12.

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Example 3.1  Benedicamus Domino for Lauds, Feasts of the First Class


   

   

Be - ne - di - ca - mus

Do

-

   

-

-

-



[mino]

A first idea who this ‘higher one’ might be in the context of the opera is offered in Act 3, when Odin has summoned the gods to a council meeting. After a general imploration of the chorus in F# minor the key signature suddenly changes to Gb major, and ‘from above, quite distinctly but softly’ an instrumental chorale can be heard, to which the gods react with astonishment while Odin is lost in thoughts.91 Music coming ‘from above’ is indeed rather surprising, because Act 3 is set in ‘Asenheim’ or Asgard, the home of the gods, with a panoramic view of the rainbow bridge, so there should not be an ‘above’ in the world the operatic characters inhabit. Operatic audiences will have been equally astonished because the chorale tune is clearly recognisable as the Protestant hymn Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr, one of the staples of Lutheran liturgy as a German substitute for the Latin Gloria in excelsis deo. The meaning of this instrumental interlude is not explained immediately, because the gods instead discuss the issue of Baldur’s betrothal; only at the very end of the opera does the reason for interpolating the Protestant hymn become apparent, giving a clue to the wider ideological implications of the music drama. When the blind Höder unwittingly kills his brother Baldur, Loki triumphs and disappears with thunder, lightning and diminished seventh chords. The distressed parents Odin and Frigga rush to Baldur’s side as he regains consciousness one last time and exhorts the gods:92 Haltet und hört! Vergebung den Frevlern! Schuldlos fahr’ ich die Todesfahrt. Was Menschen ehret entheiligt die Götter nicht. Die Liebe lebt ewig! Heliand, Hehrer, Herrscher der Welt, hell sieht Dich mein brechendes Aug. Zu Odins Trost scheid ich in glücklichem Traum. Nana folgt mein Lieb, denn erlischt mein Leben, auch ihres erlischt! Wir sind eins, selig im Schauen, eine Seele, ein Leib! Stop and listen! Forgiveness to the evil-doers! Innocently I tread the path of death. 91 Kistler, Baldurs Tod, p. 130: ‘Von Oben. (Recht deutlich, doch schwach.) (Die Götter staunend, Odin in Gedanken versunken.)’ 92 Ibid., pp. 166–8.

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History in Mighty Sounds What is honourable for humans does not desecrate the gods. Love lives forever! Heliand, high one, lord of the world, my breaking eye sees you brightly. To Odin’s consolation I depart in a happy dream. Nana my lover follows me, because if my life is extinguished, hers expires as well! We are one, blissfully in visions, one soul, one body!

Three musical motifs characterise his speech. Whenever Baldur mentions his love for Nana, his lyrical vocal lines are underpinned by a melodic turn and languishing leap of a sixth that are more than a little similar to Brünnhilde’s love motif from the Ring (Ex. 3.2). When he sees the ‘Heliand’  –  an old-German word for ‘Heiland’ or ‘Saviour’  –  he is accompanied by a very tender rendering of the Benedicamus motif, a shorthand for divine dignity and might. Though the ‘Heliand’ passage is in B major and the memory of Nana with the love motif in Bb major, as the changing key signatures clearly indicate, there is no attempt whatever at any modulation from one tonal area to the next, which shows that Kistler had not quite mastered or even understood the Wagnerian ‘art of transition’ that is so central to his mature music dramas. At the beginning of Baldur’s address the hymn tune Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr appears, in similar musical isolation, as he asks for forgiveness for the evil-doers. Thus the musical material as well as his noble, forgiving attitude sufficiently establish his similarity to the dying Jesus Christ. This reading of Baldur was not without foundation in Nordic mythology, as the Eddic poem Völuspá envisages a new, better world after the defeat of the gods in Ragnarök, with echoes to the vision of a new heaven and earth described in the biblical Book of Revelation.93 However, Kistler and von Sohlern go beyond presenting Baldur’s death as a Christian allegory that would have been comparable to Cornelius’s Marian interpretation of Gunlöd’s ‘assumption’. Although the identity of the ‘Heliand’ prophesied by Baldur would have been sufficiently obvious to contemporary audiences, thanks to the intervention of the hymn tune, Odin is apparently oblivious of its sounds or unconscious of its meaning and, still distressed, asks the other gods to prepare a funeral pyre for Baldur. Under the strains of a slow march in C minor, obviously modelled on Siegfried’s funeral march in Götterdämmerung but with additional voice parts, the chorus enters with the dead body of Nana. Odin is touched by her faithful love and her beauty and blesses the pyre with his spear: ‘So go together, you pure souls, into the infinity I cannot comprehend but desire painfully.’94 At his request the other gods respectfully leave their ruler who launches into a monologue  –  the humans give no indication that they are listening  –  about the future of the gods. He remembers the prophecy of the Norns from Act 2: ‘We make way for a higher, a more pure 93 Poetic Edda, p. 12. 94 Kistler, Baldurs Tod, p. 175: ‘So zieht zusammen, ihr lauteren Seelen in die Unendlichkeit, die ich nicht fasse, doch schmerzvoll ersehne.’

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Example 3.2  Cyrill Kistler, Baldurs Tod: Musikdrama in 3 Akten: Dichtung von Frhrr. v. Sohlern, 3rd edn (Bad Kissingen, [1906]), Act 3, Baldur’s farewell, rehearsal numbers 66–7 66

Langsam



      



      





(sterbend)

baldur




Ver - ge

pp

          pp

  




To

-

     



des - fahrt.





















O - dins







  



























Frev

-

lern!

Schuld - los fahr’ ich die










(Prophetisch)









   



 









ritard.

Hehr - er,







   






 67



hell sieht Dich mein brech - en - des Aug’.







 



Trost



He - li- and,

Herr - scher der Welt,

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den


























bung



pp zart und sehr gebunden

  

 






-



  



pp zart und sehr gebunden

p



scheid

ich in















Zu













  



 





glück - li - chem Traum.

 

ritard.

 



 



Continued overleaf

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Na

-



  

-

na



        ppp







folgt

Example 3.2 continued



mir

        

mein Lieb, denn er - lischt

   

mein Le - ben,

                      
      
 





 

 

one! Thus sang the Norns! But who will succeed us? Whom did the son see while trembling and dying?’95 The answer is given at first purely instrumentally: the hymn tune Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr resounds again, this time in a pompous rendering that leaves no doubt that the climax of the opera is nigh. First three trumpets play the cantus firmus on the left side of the stage, accompanied by runs in the strings that sound very much like an organist’s elaborations on a chorale prelude. The repetition adds trombones on the right side of the stage and bells. During the chorale the scene changes: Transformation music. The stage becomes darker. Gradually the hall of the gods transforms into a Romanesque temple. Then half-light.  … Near the area where normally the high altar would be placed a statue of the Saviour appears, most ideally conceived, surrounded by clouds in magic illumination, one hand raised in a gesture of blessing. Odin, to the left, stands in highest surprise. To the right the humans kneel, their hands raised to the Saviour.96

At this point Odin ecstatically greets the apparition as the Saviour and the ‘consolation’ promised by the dying Baldur. In response an a cappella chorus sounds ‘from above’, again with a four-part rendering of the hymn (albeit modified in the second line), now restored to its liturgical text ‘Glory to God on high and peace to men on earth!’97 Its reduced scoring contrasts strikingly with the surrounding orchestral interludes and postludes; furthermore its Gb major tonality is simply interpolated into Eb major, the final key of the opera. Again there is no modulatory transition from Odin’s exclamation to the chorus, the sustained b b in the bass range functioning as a simple link. As the curtain falls the Benedicamus 95 Ibid., p. 177: ‘Einem Höheren machen wir, einem Reineren Raum! So sangen die Nornen! Doch wer folget uns nach? Wen schaute in Schauer des Sterbens der Sohn?’ 96 Ibid., pp. 178–9: ‘Verwandlungsmusik. Die Bühne wird düstrer. Aus dem Göttersaal entwickelt sich allmählig [sic] ein romanischer Tempel. Dann Halblicht.  … Es erscheint in der Gegend, in der der Hochaltar zu stehen pflegt, von Wolken umgeben in magischem Lichte in idealster Auffassung eine Heilandsstatue, die Hand zum Segen erhebend. Odin steht links in höchstem Erstaunen. Rechts knieen [sic], die Hände zum Heiland erhebend, die Menschen.’ 97 Ibid., p. 180: ‘Ehre sei Gott in der Höh’ und Frieden den Menschen auf Erden!’

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melody resounds twice more in the full orchestra, thus juxtaposing the Protestant hymn tune and the Catholic liturgical chant; the final chords oscillate between Eb major and Ab minor, an obvious reference to Wagner’s ‘redemption motif ’. The twilight of the gods, so anxiously anticipated by Odin, is suspended for the vision of a Christian future. The apparition of the statue of Jesus Christ sparked off objections immediately after the publication of the libretto, even before the vocal score with its Christian musical material had appeared. While the Wagnerian Arthur Seidl complained in a general way that some of Wagner’s younger followers, like Cornelius and Kistler, had not avoided dragging Christian elements into Nordic mythology,98 Moritz Wirth accused the librettist of blasphemy: Did Freiherr von Sohlern not realise that there is a difference between the form of existence we attribute to any character appearing on stage, and the form of existence the Christian believer attributes to his Saviour? Did he not realise that the former is only an imagined existence, dissolving when the curtain falls, while the latter is real  … and extends into time and eternity?  … [Did he not realise] that Christ must never appear on stage with a figure that, from a Christian standpoint, exists only in our imagination, and that, if such a confrontation is enacted (like the one between Wotan and Christ), Christ loses his second, real existence and is degraded to a mere theatrical figure?99 From Wirth’s perspective, it is unforgivable to have a mythological figure like Wotan/Odin appear together on stage with Christ, even if only as a statue. Kistler and von Sohlern in turn repeatedly defended their decision by claiming that several theologians had approved of the ending of the music drama. Cornelius had circumnavigated this issue by treating Gunlöd, Suttung and Odin as religious allegories. They allow for a Christian reading precisely because neither Mary nor God nor the devil appears on stage. In Baldurs Tod, in contrast, Kistler and von Sohlern explicitly stage a transition from the Nordic gods to the Christian Saviour. From a nineteenth-century perspective, the ‘high one’ promised in the Edda had to be the Christian god, as one of the defenders of the music drama pointed out: If the drama is supposed to find an ending that is reconcilable with [modern] ideas, then it can and must end with the victory of Christianity, since the 98 Seidl, Hat Richard Wagner eine Schule hinterlassen?, p. 19. 99 Moritz Wirth, ‘Freiherr von Sohlern: “Baldurs Tod”’, MWB 22 no. 22 (28 May 1891), p. 285: ‘Frhr. v. S. hat sich also den Unterschied zwischen jenem Dasein, das wir jeder beliebigen auf einer Bühne erscheinenden Gestalt zuschreiben, und jenem Dasein, das der gläubige Christ seinem Heiland zuschreibt, nicht klar gemacht? Er hat sich nicht klar gemacht, dass jenes erste Dasein nur ein gedachtes, blosses Bühnendasein ist, das mit dem Schluss des Vorhanges wieder schwindet, jenes zweite aber ein ganz wirkliches Dasein,  … das in Zeit und Ewigkeit hineinragt?  … Dass also Christus auf der Bühne niemals mit einer Gestalt zusammengebracht werden darf, der, vom christlichen Standpuncte aus, nur ein gedachtes Dasein zukommt, und dass, wenn man eine solche Gegenüberstellung, wie hier zwischen Wotan und Christus, dennoch vornimmt, Christus dadurch um sein zweites, wirkliches Dasein gebracht und zu einer blossen Theaterfigur herabgewürdigt wird?’

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3.4  Cyrill Kistler, Baldurs Tod. After the stage has transformed into a Romanesque church, the hymn tune Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr is sung by ‘voices from above’.

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ancient pagan beliefs were superseded victoriously by Christian beliefs in the grand drama of the world. Our German art has to be national and can only stand on the morally improving basis of Christianity.100 The national argument is invoked to explain why Christianity is still relevant for the nation at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the question why von Sohlern and Kistler opted for this particular transformation scene at the end of Baldurs Tod can also be approached from the opposite direction: Why was it so important for the Christian Saviour to acquire a Nordic-Germanic ancestry? The answer might be found in the ideas of a small but quite vocal movement that was part of the wider völkisch circles and subscribed to the notion of a ‘Germanic Christianity’. The extremist wing of the völkisch movement wanted to abandon Christianity altogether and promoted, in numerous sects and societies, the cult of heroic Germanic man and a pantheism vaguely inspired by the Edda.101 More moderate groups wanted to retain the New Testament, but were  –  like Kistler  –  weary of organised religion and insisted on the primacy of individual religious experience. Both groups rejected the Jewish roots of the Christian religion, which were not considered appropriate for a German nation that was increasingly conceived as an ethnic rather than political or cultural community. The Bayreuth Circle, inspired by Wagner’s so-called regeneration writings, was instrumental in calling for the suppression of Jewish elements, such as the Jewish origins of the historical Jesus.102 In practically all areas of human life, the Jewish race was construed as the exact opposite of the German(ic) race; inferior but at the same time endangering the latter’s idealist strivings for the good, the beautiful, the true. This attitude found its most influential expression in Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts, where the chief ideologist of the Bayreuth Circle (and posthumous son-in-law of Wagner) narrates Western history as a continuous struggle of the Germanic race for domination over the inferior, Semitic or mixed-race, peoples. According to Chamberlain the irreconcilable racial characteristics are especially apparent in the realm of religion: here transcendental speculation, introspection, idealism; there a materialist and arbitrary set of beliefs combined with the dangerous idea of being the chosen people. Under these premises, Christianity could not have originated from the 100 R., ‘Baldurs Tod’, Tagesfragen 8 no. 8 (1891), p. 117: ‘Soll das Drama einen unser Denken versöhnenden Abschluss finden, so kann und muss es mit dem Sieg des Christenthums enden, wie ja auch in dem grossen Welt-Drama der alte Götterglaube vom Christenglauben siegreich verdrängt wurde. Unsere deutsche Kunst muss national sein und kann nur auf der sittlich veredelnden Basis des Christenthums stehen.’ 101 Stefanie von Schnurbein, ‘Die Suche nach einer “arteigenen” Religion in “germanisch-” und “deutschgläubigen” Gruppen’, in Handbuch zur ‘Völkischen Bewegung’ , ed. Puschner, Schmitz and Ulbricht, pp. 172–85. 102 Winfried Schüler, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära: Wagnerkult und Kulturreform im Geiste völkischer Weltanschauung (Münster, 1971), pp. 275–7. For a more recent summary see Hildegard Châtellier, ‘Wagnerismus in der Kaiserzeit’, in Handbuch der ‘Völkischen Bewegung’, ed. Puschner, Schmitz and Ulbricht, pp. 575–612.

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Jewish religion or amidst the Jewish people, a sentiment echoed in Arthur Seidl’s article ‘On the de-Judaization of Christianity’, published in the essay collection Richard Wagner-Credo (Richard Wagner Creed) and thus easily accessible in musical circles.103 In accordance with these ideas the biblical Jesus, whom many völkisch believers considered as too weak a model for the life-affirming modern era, was to be replaced with an Aryan solar-hero along the lines of Siegfried, and the Jewish roots of Christianity were to be exchanged for a Germanic prehistory. In 1890, one year before Kistler completed Baldurs Tod, a fellow-Wagnerian offered advice in the Bayreuther Blätter on how religious education in German elementary schools should be modified in order to incorporate the Germanic heritage. The pedagogue Johann Heinrich Löffler argued for concrete goals which might have resonated with Kistler, himself trained as a teacher: Is it not a natural necessity to open up German paganism to our children as the ethical-religious portico, the sacred entrance hall of Christianity? What business do German children have in the Jewish Tabernacle?  … Religious education in the German elementary school has to be German-Christian and to  … form German-Christian characters turned towards idealism. The elementary school cannot fulfil this task as long as the Jewish Testament is regarded as  … equally valuable, equally important, equally appropriate for the syllabus as the Christian Testament.  … Instead, German mythology has to come into its own.104 Although Kistler had by then begun distancing himself from the orthodoxy of the Bayreuth Circle, it is apparent that such an interpretation of Germanic religiosity was not at variance with his own thinking and the ideas of his supporters. In his journal Tagesfragen he defended himself against accusations of plagiarising Wagner by pointing out that his Odin is infinitely superior to Wagner’s Wotan because Odin feels like a true Christian. Kistler saw this element as self-evident from the way Odin acts in the Eddic version of Baldur’s death, without indicating, however, how he had come to this rather far-fetched conclusion.105 In a later issue he returned to this line of reasoning and stated that ‘Odin  … suffers endlessly but he repents, too; he feels like a Christian, something that Wotan is unable to do 103 Arthur Seidl, ‘Zur Entjudung des Christentums (1895)’, in Richard Wagner-Credo: Eine Ergänzung zur ‘Richard Wagner-Schule’ (Berlin, 1901), pp. 496–505. 104 J. H. Löffler, ‘Volksglaube und Volksschule’, Bayreuther Blätter 13 nos. 9/10 (September–October 1890), pp. 315–17: ‘Ist es denn nun nicht naturgemäss nothwendig, das deutsche Heidenthum als ethisch-religiösen Vorbau, als heilige Vorhalle des Christenthums unsern Kindern aufzuschliessen? Was haben die deutschen Kinder in der jüdischen Stiftshütte zu suchen?  … Denn der Religionsunterricht in der deutschen Volksschule hat ein deutsch-christlicher zu sein und durch seine erziehende Macht  … deutsch-christliche, dem Idealismus zugewandte Charaktere anzulegen. Dieser Aufgabe entspricht die Volksschule aber nicht, solange sie das jüdische Testament  … dem christlichen Testament als gleichbedeutend, gleichwichtig, als Unterrichtsstoff gleichberechtigt erachtet.  … Dagegen ist der deutsche Mythus in sein Recht einzusetzen.’ 105 Kistler, ‘Baldurs Tod und Wagners Wotan’, p. 54.

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because he is and remains a heathen; thus we can empathise and sympathise with Odin, something nobody manages to feel towards Wagner’s Wotan.’ 106 To sceptics he recommended Ernst Krause’s study Tuisko-Land, subtitled ‘home of the Aryan tribes and gods’, where the Germanic mythology is accorded the highest rank among the Indo-European religious systems: I [Krause] do not think that the myth of Baldur, as developed in the North, has a counterpart in the literature of all times and peoples, other than the Gospel of Christ. This bright, immaculate deity, who has only one enemy, the god of evil …, whose death is mourned by all gods and men and even insentient creatures, he is without doubt the highest creation of Germanic profundity.107 Apparently Kistler managed to convince at least his circle of supporters, because when the debate surrounding the apparition of the Jesus statue flared up again after the premiere of Baldurs Tod in 1905, one of his followers argued: [The critic] Mr Hagemann will permit us to find the Christian roots in our Nordic mythology, that we delight in their existence and present the wonderful mixture of paganism and Christianity to the German people in public speeches and on stage.  … The Baldur myth  … finds its explanation in the Gospel of Christ where Baldur is imagined as a precursor of Christ, as a kind of John the Baptist.108 While a superficial reading of the finale of Kistler’s music drama would indicate that the Germanic gods have to abdicate because of their faults and weaknesses (never explained in the opera), it is at the same time Odin’s and Baldur’s tragic greatness and idealistic frame of mind that makes them the perfect precursors of the Christian religion. This idea is enhanced by the image of the men and women who share the vision of Christ with Odin and kneel in adoration, transferring 106 Kistler, ‘Richard Wagners Götter’, pp. 134–5: ‘Odin  … bereut aber auch, er fühlt christlich, was Wotan versagt ist, der ein Heide ist und bleibt, desshalb [sic] können wir auch mit Odin fühlen, mit ihm leiden und das bringt bei Wagners Wotan niemand fertig.’ 107 Ernst Krause, Tuisko-Land[,] der arischen Stämme und Götter Urheimat: Erläuterung zum Sagenschatze der Veden, Edda, Ilias und Odyssee (Glogau, 1891), p. 429: ‘Ich glaube nicht, daß der Baldur-Mythos, wie er sich im Norden entwickelte, in der Litteratur [sic] aller Zeiten und Völker ein anderes Seitenstück findet als das Christus-Evangelium; denn diese lichte, fleckenfreie Gottheit, die nur einen Feind, den Gott des Bösen besitzt,  … um [dessen] Tod dann alle Götter und Menschen, ja selbst die gefühllosen Kreaturen trauern, ist unbedingt die höchste Schöpfung germanischen Tiefsinns.’ 108 H.H., ‘Baldurs Tod in Düsseldorf und die Kritik’, Tagesfragen 14 no. 12 (1905), pp. 179–80: ‘Herr Hagemann werden doch noch erlauben, dass wir die christlichen Wurzeln aus unserer nordischen Mythologie heraussuchen, dass wir ihrer Existenz uns freuen und dem deutschen Volke in Vorträgen und Bühnenaufführungen diese herrliche Mischung des Heiden- und Christentums vorführen.  … Der Baldurmythos  … findet seine Erklärung im Christusevangelium, in dem Baldur als der Vorläufer Christi gedacht ist, als eine Art heiliger Johannes.’

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without further ado their religious allegiance from one to the other. Without doubt this solution satisfied the moderate advocates of a Germanic Christianity who, like Kistler and von Sohlern, did not want to return to a neo-pagan cult but hoped to purge Christianity of its Jewish roots to establish a national-German religion across the confessional divide.109 When viewed in this light Baldurs Tod must have been one of the earliest artistic contributions to this special brand of völkisch ideology at the time of its composition in the 1890s. After the turn of the century, around the date of the first performance of the music drama, other composers continued the line started by Kistler, although Max Schillings’s Moloch (1906) and Felix Weingartner’s Kain und Abel (1914) display noticeable racist and anti-Semitic overtones that are absent from Baldurs Tod. Despite its topicality, however, the music drama did not enjoy a lasting success because, as even Kistler’s supporter and biographer Arthur Eccarius-Sieber had to admit, the opera had entered the public sphere twenty-five years too late, when Wagner’s gods, despite their moral shortcomings, had been firmly established as the normative take on Eddic mythology on stage.110 Despite their different approaches to the mythological material, the operas by Cornelius, Vogl and Kistler share several textual and musical characteristics that set them apart from the putative Wagnerian model of ‘redemption operas’ but are typical for German stage works in the last decades of the nineteenth century. While the finales of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung dispense with the musical participation of a chorus that explains the (higher) reasons for the deaths of the protagonists, his successors did not want to leave their audiences in any uncertainty that the redemptive work has been accomplished. While in Gunlöd  –  and in some sense in Parsifal  –  the community of the redeemed immortals or Grail knights celebrates its unity, in many other operas mystic ‘voices from above’ proclaim the transcendent dimension of the stage proceedings. Apparently the composers did not want to trust the music to ‘say it all’, as Wagner had done when he cut Brünnhilde’s final speech in favour of an orchestral postlude whose uplifting but ambiguous message has puzzled and delighted listeners ever since. In addition, all three mythological operas display strong Christian leanings, though they transform the myths in different ways: whereas Cornelius’s Gunlöd develops an elaborate religious allegory centred on the Virgin Mary, Vogl is content with a Baroque deus ex machina solution, while Kistler interweaves mythology and Christian symbolism under the auspices of the contemporary ideology of a ‘Germanic Christianity’. The strong and, at least in its visual appearance, rather conventional religious component may come as a surprise in an era that is often described as one of increasing secularism and of rivalry between competing, quasi-religious ideologies. However, it may have been exactly the endangered position of traditional religion and the arbitrariness of more modern promises 109 See Justus H. Ulbricht, ‘“ Buddha”, “Sigfrid” oder “Christus”. Religiöse Suchbewegungen als Ausdruck kultureller Identitätskrisen im deutschen Bildungsbürgertum um 1900’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 4 (1998), pp. 209–26. 110 Arthur Eccarius-Sieber, ‘Korrespondenzen: Düsseldorf: Uraufführung von Cyrill Kistler’s “Baldurs Tod”’, NZfM 72 no. 45, pp. 903–4.

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of transcendence that made these composers and librettists turn back to the safe haven of Christian tradition. Since, according to Adorno, in ‘the innermost core of Wagner’s idea of redemption dwells nothingness’, there was no reason for his followers why the perceived void should not be re-filled with Christian content or at least imagery. In this context it should be mentioned that all three composers came from a Catholic background, with the spectrum ranging from the devout Cornelius to the rebellious Kistler, contradicting the assumption that Nordic ersatz religions were more attractive to secularised Protestant milieus. While this may be a coincidence, it is worth noting that all three operas originated not in the immediate shadow of the Bayreuth Festival, but in Munich. The Bavarian capital was one of the first strongholds of Wagnerians, Wagner Societies and Wagner performances, but it also developed its very own strand of (post-) Wagnerian traditions in competition with the Bayreuth orthodoxy. Thus it might have offered a congenial milieu to the marriage between Wagnerian musical language and ideas, and the splendours of Baroque spectacle.

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4 The Sacred Nation and the Singing Nation: The Choral Movements

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espite the high density of theatres across the German-speaking countries, where the music-loving public could experience new operas even in many provincial towns, most people encountered large-scale works in the form of choral music, either as active singers in one of the many mixed or male choirs or as part of the sizeable audiences attracted by concerts and music festivals. For the Vormärz years James Garratt rightly considers the choral movement and its manifestations the ‘principal forum for mass amateur musical participation’, a forum that emphasised not the outstanding creative effort of the individual  –  though the choral movement had its fair share of genius worship  –  but rather the experience of a collective united in and through art.1 In the context of nineteenth-century Germany, such unity was first and foremost imagined to reside in a national community, and time and again the ‘harmony’ of the assembled singing multitude was interpreted as anticipating the harmonious nation that unification would engender. Mixed and male-voice choirs often recruited from the same social strata and shared many ideals, such as the free association of like-minded people or the leading role of the educated middle classes in the sphere of culture. Although both types of choral association congregated at increasingly massive festivals in order to ‘display in monumental form the cohesion and collective strength of the middle classes’, 2 they set their priorities slightly differently. Mixed choirs found their most prestigious outlet in the genre of the oratorio, mainly performed at concerts and music festivals that emphasised the collective aesthetic experience in moral and religious terms that made them adequate  –  if not obvious  –  vehicles for the national cause. In contrast the male choir movement was strongly politicised from the start, i.e. the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In fact it can be argued that the ‘invention’ of all-male part-song in these years met a need for the expression of patriotic feelings that could not be fulfilled otherwise. Most male-voice choirs pursued, with shifting emphasis throughout the nineteenth century, a triple agenda of social improvement, aesthetic education and national unification. Therefore the ways in which the choral movements recreated and celebrated the national past will be discussed separately: first the oratorio for mixed voices with its nationalreligious connotations, then the male choir movement with special emphasis on its nation-wide modes of communication and sociability on the one hand, and the aesthetic tensions embedded in its repertoire on the other.

1 Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, p. 84. 2 Ibid., p. 85.

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Apostles of the Germans: Religious Issues in the Oratorio In contrast to the newly invented genre of the part-song for male voices, the nineteenth-century oratorio looked back to the works of J. S. Bach and G. F. Handel, which were increasingly considered as ‘a great national patrimony’.3 The link to Bach, however, was rather tenuous, since the amateur choral societies followed the English Handel and Haydn performances by integrating oratorios into secular concert life, stripping the Passions of Bach and Graun of their liturgical context and transferring them summarily into the realm of art religion and Gefühlsreligion. Even when they were performed in churches, often the biggest venues available, oratorios were treated as concert works, albeit ones that were regarded as especially noble and edifying. Since they also required large forces, oratorios were usually performed on special occasions or as centrepieces of the music festivals that sprang up all over Germany in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, the earliest festivals benefited from the patriotic fervour of the ‘Wars of Liberation’. At the festival in Frankenhausen in Thuringia in 1808 a trip to the Kyffhäuser mountain, where the medieval Emperor Barbarossa was rumoured to await the restitution of the German Empire, was part of the programme. The festivals of 1811 and 1812 were instigated by the French occupiers, but after their defeat the public announcement of the 1815 festival invited ‘friends of music and of the fatherland’ to celebrate the ‘undying glory’ of Germany’s victory over French tyranny.4 Later music festivals, such as the Lower Rhine Music Festival launched in 1818 or the Elbe Festival started in 1829, rarely invoked the national spirit in such an explicit way. Though some contemporaries considered music festivals as ‘forums for fostering democratic, humanitarian and national values’ because they cultivated collective subjectivity, they were hardly ever, as James Garratt has persuasively argued, outright or veiled political demonstrations.5 They lacked the speeches and rituals that marked Nationalfeste; and because they relied on the ‘goodwill and co-operation of ecclesiastical and civic authorities’, for example in offering churches as concert venues, their oppositional potential remained at best limited. This does not mean, however, that oratorios were not able to make a contribution to German national identity, beyond assuring the musical public that Germany was able to host such highly cultivated spectacles. Oratorios shaped the national consciousness in at least two ways: by presenting great events and heroes of the past in music for the concert hall, and by negotiating the national and religious identities, especially with regard to the confessional divide. Though oratorios were neither liturgical nor sacred music, biblical stories or religious legends dominated the genre throughout the nineteenth century. Increasingly, however, secular, i.e. non-biblical, subjects from world literature and history became popular with composers and audiences. As early as 1837 Ferdinand Hand argued: 3 Howard E. Smither, A History of the Oratorio, vol. 4: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chapel Hill, 2000), p. 10. 4 Ibid., pp. 46–8. 5 Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, p. 86.

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Why should not tales in Tasso’s Jerusalem be treated as an oratorio, why not Luther’s struggle for the faith or Guttenberg’s [sic] significant life? Also a hero of the fatherland, like Hermann, [or] a world-historical event  … is useful: the ideal direction of the action might directly lead to religious ideas or stimulate feelings that belong no less to the sphere of the eternal or the sublime.6 Although the overall production  –  if not performance  –  of oratorios declined in the second half of the nineteenth century, the proportion of secular oratorios rapidly grew in the 1870s. Arnold Schering, who still knew the nowadays forgotten repertoire as a living tradition, suggests that this was caused by weariness of the biblical topics (hinting at an anti-Jewish prejudice against the Old Testament), by the exuberant spirit of the young German Empire and by the general historicist tendencies of the age: Wherever world history offered events whose poetic-musical treatment promised strong, stimulating effects on the masses, [composers and librettists] snatched at the offer. One realised that the great characters of world history offered at least the same opportunity for extolling important ethical ideas as the apostles and prophets who had been quoted ad nauseam. In addition one felt that the newly awakened German national pride could find no better outlet than the depiction of historical moments when peoples that had immersed themselves in vice, arrogance or luxury, were overcome by the fresh, youthful power of neighbouring peoples deeply rooted in their faith.7 In this scenario the Germans of course represented the vigorous young nations whereas their adversaries could be painted in the most enticing (musical) colours of moral depravity. Schering explicitly mentions the opportunity to introduce exotic rituals and sensual love scenes in caves and catacombs. Due to their ethical mission oratorio libretti  –  whether biblical or historical  –  were constructed along stark binary oppositions, contrasting ‘freedom and oppression, decadence and morality, tyranny and love of peace’.8 These binary oppositions could easily be injected into stories from the German past, for example into Carl Adolf Lorenz’s 6 Quoted in Smither, The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 79. 7 Arnold Schering, Geschichte des Oratoriums (Leipzig, 1911), p. 494: ‘Wo immer die Weltgeschichte Ereignisse bot, deren poetisch-musikalische Behandlung Aussicht auf starke, nervenanreizende Massenwirkungen eröffnete, griff man zu. Man bemerkte, daß die großen Charaktere der Weltgeschichte zum mindesten dieselbe treffliche Gelegenheit zum Hervorkehren bedeutender ethischer Ideen böten wie die bis zum Überdruß herbeizitierten Apostel- und Prophetengestalten, und fühlte, daß sich der neuerwachte deutsche Nationalstolz nicht besser ausleben könne als in der Schilderung der geschichtlichen Augenblicke, wo Völker, die in Laster, Übermut, Anmaßung oder Prunksucht aufgingen, überwunden wurden von der jugendlich anstürmenden Kraft glaubenstiefer Nachbarvölker.’ 8 Ibid., p. 495: ‘Die Mehrzahl dieser großen weltlichen Oratorien gründet sich auf den Gegensatz von Freiheit und Bedrückung, Dekadenz und Sittlichkeit, Tyrannei und Friedensliebe’.

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Otto der Große (1870), praising the rule of the great medieval emperor with a bow to contemporary political achievements, or Georg Vierling’s Alarich (1881), one of the more popular artistic treatments of the ‘clash of civilisations’ between the Romans and the Goths during the barbarian migrations. Because of the genre’s origins in sacred music and its ethical aspirations, Christian thoughts were never far from the surface of even the non-biblical oratorios. In several cases the Christian outlook was grafted onto a historical or mythological story with gentle force. The cantata Velleda (1864) by Carl Joseph Brambach on a text by Gustav Pfarrius, for example, depicts the conflict between the Romans and the Germanic people in the first decades ad, ending predictably with the German victory over the invaders. The finale is, however, more conciliatory than that of many other such works. The Germanic seeress Velleda prophesies an era of peace between the Romans and Germans for the time when ‘the light will pervade everything and, on a path ne’er trodden, will guide the nations heavenwards’.9 She even envisions the star of Bethlehem and the adoration of the magi, quoting almost literally from the Gospel of Matthew, whereupon everybody joins in the final chorus praising the ‘eternal power’. A similar Christian reading was also injected into one of the few oratorios based directly on Nordic mythology: Der Tod Balders (1886) by Otto Beständig stresses the Christian elements implicit in the story of Baldur’s death and the return of a new, rejuvenated world.10 While the oratorio for the most part faithfully follows the mythological narrative, the final chorus leaves behind the pagan world and is couched in terms that are amenable to Christian religious sensibilities and recall traditional liturgical language. Thus hardly any ‘secular’ oratorio was entirely free from Christian beliefs and values, whether on a decorative surface level or in its general agreement with the religious persuasions of the majority. The religious angle became problematic in oratorios that focused on the Christianisation of the Germanic people through the early missionaries. Texts of such oratorios reflect the divided attitudes of the German public towards church history, which differed depending on their denomination. The transition from pagan pre-history, where the Germanic tribes featured as objects of Roman historiography, to the Christian-European mainstream raised important questions that touched upon issues of national identity: the origins of modern Germany as a nation; the inclusion or exclusion of certain peoples or territories; the ideal relationship of nation and religion, given that there were two main denominations.11 Oratorios, with their blend of religious gestures and bourgeois 9 Carl Joseph Brambach, Velleda: Gedicht von G. Pfarrius für Männerchor, Soli und Orchester, op. 7, 2nd edn (Mainz, [1881]), p. 102: ‘bis jenes Licht herüberdringt und über nie betret’ne Bahn die Völker leitet himmelan.’ 10 Jürgen Heidrich, ‘Götterdämmerung im Oratorium’, in Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Hamburgs vom Mittelalter bis in die Neuzeit, ed. Hans Joachim Marx (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), pp. 463–74. 11 These questions have been adapted from Siegfried Weichlein, ‘Bonifatius als politischer Heiliger im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Bonifatius: Vom angelsächsischen Missionar zum Apostel der Deutschen, ed. Michael Imhof and Gregor K. Stasch (Petersberg, 2004), p. 220.

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morality, offered answers to these questions in appealing musical language, either specifically addressing Protestant or Catholic audiences or aiming for a more conciliatory approach. The most popular figure amongst these heroes of early religious history was the English priest Winfried or Boniface, whose life story attracted fifteen composers throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with a libretto by the Protestant pastor Julius Schubring (1837) and ending with Heinrich Zöllner’s oratorio Bonifacius of 1903 for male choir.12 Boniface was born in Wessex, evangelised in the early eighth century the people of what today is north Germany and, with the support of Pope Gregory II, formally organised the church hierarchy in the eastern part of the Frankish kingdom by establishing episcopal sees. One of his most spectacular acts  –  and one that frequently featured in nineteenth-century artworks  –  was the cutting down of an oak tree sacred to the thunder-god Donar, a deed that convinced the bystanding pagans to convert to Christianity. He died on his last mission to the people of Frisia and was buried in his own foundation in Fulda. His veneration as ‘apostle of the Germans’ increased in the nineteenth century, but it also reflected the contemporary religious divide between Catholics and Protestants. The central question was how Boniface’s missionary work should be judged. Did he  –  and his fellow missionaries  –  bring a higher state of religion and culture to the half-barbarian Germanic peoples, thus integrating them into Christian Europe? Or did he suppress the natural religious traditions of the Germans and force a foreign church hierarchy and organisation upon them, thus ‘Romanising’ the Germans despite Arminius’ liberating deed? The answer to these question changed over time and depended on one’s religious position. While in the early nineteenth century Boniface was venerated locally in Fulda and Mainz, he gained wider popularity from 1828 onwards when an appeal was issued to fund a Boniface monument.13 This idea was in line with the general drive to erect monuments to ‘great men’ from the German past, and it accorded with the goals of the early national movement that stressed Boniface’s role as a mediator of culture and pre-national religious unity. When the confessional conflicts deepened in the 1850s he was claimed by leading Catholics as the originator and representative of an ultramontane Church, i.e. one that professed allegiance to Rome and the Papal See over and above national bonds. The celebrations of the 1100th anniversary in 1855 had a distinct ultramontane flavour, and Boniface became a model for identification during the Kulturkampf of the German Empire. German Catholics continued to extol Boniface as founding father of the German Empire in the spirit of Christianity, thus proposing an alternative to the predominantly Protestant and Prussian Empire of 1871. This perspective is succinctly expressed by a Benedictine priest who described the frescoes adorning 12 Linda Maria Koldau, ‘Apostel der Deutschen: Bonifatius-Oratorien als Spiegel einer patriotischen Bonifatius-Verehrung im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Patriotische Heilige: Beiträge zur Konstruktion religiöser und politischer Identitäten in der Vormoderne, ed. Dieter R. Bauer, Klaus Herbers and Gabriela Signori (Stuttgart, 2007), pp. 337–395. 13 See Weichlein, ‘Bonifatius als politischer Heiliger im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, pp. 219–34.

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the monastery church St Boniface in Munich, which Ludwig I had founded in 1850: The activities and great successes of the great apostle had a wonderful influence on the political unification of Germany  … Without his influence and without the unifying bond of the Church the German tribes, with their penchant for warfare, would have annihilated each other or have been destroyed by their enemies.  … Through his efforts a friendly relationship developed between the Pope and the Frankish princes,  … whose beneficial effects were disturbed only by Luther and the Reformation and destroyed by the Revolution (1806) that had developed from the Reformation.14 For the Catholic priest it was self-evident that Christianisation was the main reason for the greatness of the medieval Empire, which had thrived only as long as the relationship between Germany and the Roman Church was intact. In his reading the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 was a direct result of the religious division of the German nation through the Reformation. This ultramontane appropriation of German Christianity predictably provoked protests from the Protestants who did of course not agree that the Reformation had been detrimental to German unity and strength. Rather, they argued, Luther had purged religious life in Germany from the deficiencies and grievances introduced by the Rome-friendly Boniface,15 thus establishing a truly German church that was blissfully free from foreign influences. During the heyday of the Kulturkampf in the late 1870s and 1880s, there were thus two ‘apostles of the Germans’ vying for supremacy and popularity: the missionary Boniface imagined as the founder of Roman-Catholic faith in Germany, and the reformer Luther as the founder of an anti-Roman and national-Protestant church. The latter idea is visually encapsulated in a drawing published in the satirical journal Kladderadatsch in 1875, where Arminius and Luther are depicted side by side, the former with the caption ‘Vici’ (I have triumphed) on his shield, the latter with the caption ‘Vincam’ (I will triumph) on his Bible.16 All three  –  Arminius, Boniface and Luther  –  were immortalised musically in oratorios, some of which took on a distinctly Catholic or Protestant hue which will be explored in the following pages. Few librettists and composers, however, tailored their work to one denomination 14 P. Melchior Eberle (OSB), Der hl. Bonifacius, Apostel von Deutschland: Sein Leben und Wirken nach den Wandgemälden der Basilika in München dargestellt, 2nd edn (Augsburg, 1902), p. 190: ‘Auch auf die politische Einigung Deutschlands,  … hatte die Wirksamkeit und die großartigen Erfolge des großen Apostels einen großartigen Einfluß errungen. Ohne diesen Einfluß und das einigende Band der Kirche würden die deutschen Stämme  … bei ihrem Hange zum Kriege sich gegenseitig aufgerieben haben oder von ihren Feinden vernichtet worden sein.  … [So] entstand durch seine Bemühung zwischen dem Papste und den fränkischen Fürsten ein freundschaftliches Verhältnis,  … welche segensreiche Wirksamkeit erst durch Luther und die Reformation gestört und durch die aus der Reformation entwickelte Revolution (1806) vernichtet wurde.’ 15 Koldau, ‘Apostel der Deutschen’, pp. 352–3. 16 For a reproduction see the exhibition catalogue 2000 Jahre Varusschlacht: Mythos, p. 226.

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to the exclusion of the other; even in a buoyant musical market like the German it was not advisable to alienate two thirds of the potential performers, listeners or buyers. From the fifteen Boniface oratorios written in Germany in the nineteenth century, Linda Maria Koldau has selected four for a comparative study of their religious and denominational allegiance, and a brief summary of her findings provides an introduction to the potential religious conflicts that could be waged in the concert hall. The two earliest examples, Julius Schubring’s libretto Bonifacius (1837) and the secular oratorio Winfried und die heilige Eiche bei Geismar (Winfried and the holy oak tree of Geismar, 1854) are still untouched by the religious conflicts of the later nineteenth century. Schubring intended his text for Friedrich Schneider, the nestor of the romantic oratorio tradition, and highly unusually compiled his libretto from biblical quotations alone.17 This was a strategy he had already successfully employed for Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s oratorio Paulus, drawing on the model of Handel’s Messiah; nevertheless it was an exceptional decision for a non-biblical figure like Boniface. Schubring’s main intention was to promulgate the Christian message in contemporary guise, thus drawing a parallel between pagan Germany in the eighth and secularised Germany in the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Osterwald and Daniel Engel, in contrast, explored in their oratorio Winfried the picturesque effects of opposing the rhythmically lively choruses of the heathens with static chorales of the missionaries, bringing both groups together in a traditional fugal finale.18 The first Boniface oratorio in the newly united Empire was written by a Dutch composer, Willem Frederik Gerard Nicolai, on a text by the German Lina Schneider. Initially Bonifacius (1875) might have been intended for a choral society in Thuringia, because the libretto pays much attention to Boniface’s activities in that part of Germany. The conflict between pagans and Christians is embodied in the figures of a heathen priest and his daughter, who converts to Christianity and is baptised by Boniface.19 Her father kills the missionary, but regrets his deed and commits suicide; his people then convert to Christianity, moved by the forgiveness of the dying Boniface. The most conspicuous feature of the music is the use of a Marian song as a reminiscence motif throughout the oratorio. At first glance this might appear as if targeted specifically at Catholic audiences, which, however, seems unlikely given the Protestant background of composer and librettist. Koldau thus convincingly argues that the Marian elements symbolise Christianity in general,20 and one could go one step further and suggest that the Marian songs are deployed mainly as a picturesque device to create a religious couleur locale that, with its sentimental and idyllic tunes, contrasts strongly with the rugged and ‘barbarian’ music of the heathen rituals. Both Christian and pagan music are thus characterised by a certain ‘exoticism’  –  ‘medievalist’ the one, ‘prehistoric’ the other  –  that would have pleased the nineteenth-century desire for musical variety. 17 Koldau, ‘Apostel der Deutschen’, p. 364. 18 Ibid., p. 369. 19 Willem Frederik Gerard Nicolai, Bonifacius: Oratorium in drei Theilen: Dichtung von Lina Schneider, op. 17 (Leipzig, [1874]). 20 Koldau, ‘Apostel der Deutschen’, p. 384.

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Interestingly, a reviewer who witnessed the first performances of Bonifacius in Essen in 1875 did not comment at all on the appropriateness or otherwise of Marian imagery, but he approved very much of the depiction of the ancient Germans: I only want to highlight one trait that is particularly commendable: that the poetess has shown the pagan religion of our ancestors in such a noble light throughout. In Bonifacius the heathens and the Christians feel and think almost in the same way; only the symbolism of the rituals is different. Everything appears to us so native and familiar, the heroic figures of our ancestors are not in the least demeaned by any coarse sentiments, we can proudly look up to them  –  even from the standpoint of modern Christian sensitivities.21 Thus composer and librettist tried to offer a twofold identification to their German audiences: the pre-Christian Germans had to be depicted in an agreeable light, because they were the ‘ancestors’ of the modern Germans, while the Christian missionaries also had to offer positive role models, because they embodied the superior religion. Unlike the Babylonians in Handel’s Belshazzar the pagan Germans could be depicted as stubborn or misguided, but not as outright evil or unreligious. This leaves only Friedrich Koenen’s oratorio Der heilige Bonifacius (c. 1883) for male voices and piano accompaniment as an example that unequivocally subscribes to an ultramontane position. It does so by emphasising Boniface’s status as a saint of the Catholic Church in the title and by curtailing the role of the pagan Germans in favour of the celebration of the missionary’s allegiance to Rome.22 Perhaps the music director of Cologne cathedral, one of the strongholds of the ultramontane party, chose to gloss over the pagan religion, rather than depict the German ancestors in an unflattering light that might have offended the history-conscious bourgeoisie. With its simple harmonies and brief solos the oratorio was intended to be performed in small parish churches, thus fulfilling its own mission in an attempt to re-Catholicise the German Empire. The impact of Koenen’s oratorio was predictably local, and later composers fell back on adaptations of Wilhelm Osterwald’s picturesque and sentimental text. The number of oratorios celebrating Martin Luther did not approach the popularity of Boniface oratorios (according to another study by Linda Maria Koldau there were nine between 1850 and 1917, compared to fifteen about 21 August Guckeisen, ‘Berichte: Nachrichten und Bemerkungen: Essen’, AMZ 10 no. 22 (2 June 1875), col. 348: ‘[Ich] möchte nur noch als einen besonders anerkennenswerthen Zug hervorheben, dass die Dichterin das Heidenthum unserer Vorfahren in ein durchaus edles Colorit getaucht hat. Die Heiden und Christen in dem “Bonifacius” fühlen und denken fast auf die gleiche Weise; nur die Symbolik des Cultus ist verschieden. Das weht einen so heimisch und vertraut an, die hehre Gestalt unserer Ahnen wird nicht durch den mindesten Zug eines wirklich rohen Empfindens herabgewürdigt, wir können stolz zu ihnen hinaufschauen  –  selbst vom Standpunkt des modern-christlichen Gefühles aus.’ 22 Koldau, ‘Apostel der Deutschen’, pp. 390–4.

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Boniface),23 possibly because their subject matter would have appealed exclusively to a staunchly Protestant audience rather than the religiously diverse   –  or indifferent  –  listeners who normally flocked to a music festival. Of these oratorios the work Luther in Worms (1876) by Ludwig Meinardus was the only one to receive more than a handful of performances, mainly because it was written just in time for the Luther anniversary of 1883.24 The plot leaves no doubt of the work’s Protestant credentials. In 1521 Luther and his followers are on their way to the Diet of Worms, where Luther has to defend his religious views before Emperor Charles V and the German princes. The climax of the oratorio is of course his famous  –  and spurious  –  rejoinder to the emperor’s demand to renounce his views: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me, Amen.’25 On the way they liberate a group of nuns from their joyless existence by preaching the true word of God, a scene which allows for the effective contrasting of a Latin Miserere for female voices and vernacular hymns for mixed chorus.26 Protestant chorales, whether traditional or newly invented, are deployed to good effect elsewhere in the oratorio, including complex contrapuntal arrangements of Luther’s own hymns Vom Himmel hoch and Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott in the finale where the cantus firmus is sung by a boys’ choir. While the use of Ein feste Burg was wellnigh compulsory for a Luther oratorio or cantata and often intended to invite the audience to join in,27 the use of a boys’ choir clearly is a reference to J. S. Bach’s contrapuntal technique in the St Matthew Passion. From a political point of view the treatment of the character of the emperor is highly revealing: on the one hand Meinardus and his librettist W. Rossmann could not ignore that the historical Charles V had been an indefatigable enemy of the Reformation; on the other hand they could hardly present the emperor as an adversary to the cause of German religion, especially in a work calculated to please the majority which was loyal to the Hohenzollern dynasty. Thus Charles V is furnished with an evil advisor, Glapio, who tries to dissuade Luther from his mission by bribing him with riches and ecclesiastical honours. Glapio’s melodies are richly ornamented, almost bordering on coloratura, and should be sung ‘somewhat pompously’, thus creating a stark contrast to Luther’s unaffected declamation. Here the contrast between ‘Southern’ perfidy and German sincerity is utilised in the context of Reformation propaganda, and the theological differences of opinion are reinterpreted in the light of national conflict.28 The emperor, however, does not give in to the ferocious demands of the followers of Rome to have Luther killed; he simply states that he is bound by his imperial word of honour to protect the Holy See and leaves the judgement to a 23 Linda Maria Koldau, ‘Träger nationaler Gesinnung: Luther-Oratorien im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Musik zwischen ästhetischer Interpretation und soziologischem Verständnis, ed. Tatjana Böhme-Mehner and Motje Wolf (Essen, 2006), p. 64. 24 Smither, The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 107. 25 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, pp. 183–6. 26 Ludwig Meinardus, Luther in Worms: Oratorium in zwei Theilen: Dichtung von W. Rossmann, op. 36 (Hamburg, [1876]). 27 Koldau, ‘Träger nationaler Gesinnung’, pp. 66 and 72–4. 28 Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, p. 189.

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higher power, thus coming as close to an endorsement of the Protestant cause as the historical facts would allow. Although Luther in Worms was obviously calculated to affirm Protestant audiences in their conviction of the Reformation as the real ‘birth’ of modern Germany, composer and librettist had to carefully circumnavigate the issue of who was to blame for the division of the German nation along religious lines. Shorter compositions such as the numerous Luther cantatas written to celebrate anniversaries or the erection of monuments had to be less circumspect and could afford more forthrightly triumphalist gestures.29 In other instances the regional significance of the historical figure outweighed their national role. Just as Nicolai’s Bonifacius focused on the missionary’s activities in Thuringia, the Luther oratorios of Bernhard Schick (Luther in Erfurt, 1883) and Wilhelm Venus (Luther in Eisenach, 1883) celebrated their cultural hero from a local or regional perspective. The German identity was perhaps most comfortably at home in the small-scale instantiation of local patriotism. If the two ‘apostles of the Germans’ had the potential to divide audiences along denominational lines, then the pre-Christian history of Germany offered a neutral ground where patriotic exaltation and religious edification could safely be combined. On the concert platform as on the stage, the first national hero Arminius was never far from the imagination, featuring in three oratorios written in the second half of the nineteenth century,30 as well as several choral cantatas (for example Hermannsschlacht and Hermanns Tod by Carl Amand Mangold) and innumerable battle and victory songs for male voices some of which will be discussed below. The most successful and widely known amongst these works was the oratorio Arminius by Max Bruch (1838–1920), which was also the only one to be revived during the 2000th anniversary of the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’ in 2009. Its success was at least partly due to Bruch’s prominent position on the music festival circuit and amongst amateur choral associations, since he consciously positioned himself as the main purveyor of large-scale choral compositions after his ambitions for a national opera foundered. Between 1871 and 1898 he composed five full-length oratorios which drew their texts variously from Greek mythology, German history and biblical narrative, thus encompassing the whole gamut of topics available at the time: Odysseus, op. 41; Arminius, op. 43; Achilleus, op. 50; Moses, op. 67, and Gustav Adolf, op. 73. Of these, Odysseus had the greatest success with audiences and music critics alike, while the later works were more popular with amateur musicians than professional critics, who dismissed them for recycling an increasingly outmoded musical idiom. According to Matthias Schwarzer’s study of Bruch’s oratorios, the five works share the same ideals ingrained in the German middle classes: love of the fatherland, marital fidelity, friendship unto death, and the celebration of a heroic 29 For a preliminary list of such cantatas see Koldau, ‘Träger nationaler Gesinnung’, pp. 83–4. 30 Smither, The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 104: Heinrich Küster, Hermann der Deutsche (1850), Max Bruch, Arminius (1875), and Hermannsschlacht (1886) by the German-American composer Guenther Kiesewetter for the united singers of Newark, New Jersey.

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leader.31 Thus these oratorios embraced the values of all their intended performers and audiences, with the exception of Gustav Adolf, which extols the heroism of the Swedish king during the Thirty Years War and was written as an explicit service to the cause of Protestantism.32 In Arminius any too-obvious siding with Protestantism would have been difficult anyway, since Bruch  –  normally a rather indifferent Lutheran  –  drew on a text by the Catholic teacher and writer of educational religious stories Adam Joseph Cüppers (1850–1936). Although the libretto underwent many revisions during the course of the composition, there is no indication that Cüppers and Bruch did not see eye to eye in the depiction of ancient German religiosity. The first indication of their collaboration is a letter by Bruch to his publisher Simrock from February 1875, where he extols the potential of the new text.33 It is normally assumed that Bruch simply adapted Cüppers’s pre-existing poem Die Hermannsschlacht, though the poet distinctly remembered the composer playing his musical ideas on the piano, to which he had to invent new verses.34 Perhaps these meetings happened during the drawn-out revisions, which soon irked Bruch, who was torn between the Arminius project and a cantata Das Feuerkreuz based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott. The latter project seemed more attractive, since its message  –  honourable death for the fatherland  –  was embedded in a touching love story, while Bruch had misgivings about the too abstract content of Arminius. In November 1876 he complained to Simrock: ‘These good features [of Arminius] are partly paralysed by the shortcomings of the story, which isn’t sufficiently interesting; freedom and fatherland are abstract concepts which have to be made palatable in a true artwork through an appropriate poetic arrangement.’ 35 Perhaps the manifold revisions between the premiere in Barmen on 4 December 1875, the follow-up performance in Zurich on 21 January 1877 and the publication later that year were due to an attempt to inject greater human interest into the heroic narrative. For the final version Bruch considerable shortened the first part into a mere ‘introduction’  –  which might explain why the oratorio is not, as was customary, divided into two parts  –  and replaced the final choruses with two more rousing numbers.36 Ironically it might have been the drawn-out revision process 31 Matthias Schwarzer, Die Oratorien von Max Bruch: Eine Quellenstudie (Berlin, 1988), pp. viii–ix. 32 Letter to Suschen Krause, quoted in Martin Geck, ‘Max Bruchs Oratorium “Gustav Adolf ”  –  ein Denkmal des Kultur-Protestantismus’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 27 (1970), p. 140. 33 Schwarzer, Die Oratorien von Max Bruch, p. 87. 34 Erika Münster-Schröer, ‘Der Aufbruch in die Moderne  –  Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik (1871–1918)’, in Ratingen: Geschichte von 1780 bis 1975, ed. Eckhard Bolenz et al. (Essen, 2000), p. 142. 35 Quoted in Schwarzer, Die Oratorien von Max Bruch, p. 137: ‘Diese guten Eigenschaften werden aber zum Theil paralysiert durch Mängel des Stoffes, der nicht genug Interesse macht; denn Freiheit und Vaterland sind abstracte Vorstellungen, die im rechten Kunstwerk erst durch eine wahrhaft poetische Einrichtung genießbar gemacht werden.’ 36 Karl Gustav Fellerer, Max Bruch, 1838–1920 (Cologne, 1974), p. 79.

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which hampered the long-term success of Arminius. After the first performance the critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung remarked approvingly: ‘This oratorio  … narrates an event which has been brought closer to our patriotic consciousness through the recent inauguration of the Hermann monument.’ 37 Despite this topical reference, Emil Kamphausen stresses, the oratorio endorsed timeless values such as freedom and fatherland which were expressive of a more general political revival in recent years. However, in the already mentioned letter to Simrock Bruch complained that Arminius had already lost its relevance to the national and international public by the time of its completion: With Armin[ius] there is the problem that the story is not cosmopolitan; and that the work would now be released at the very worst moment; everywhere in Germany the atmosphere has a hangover-like quality. [The World Exhibition in] Philadelphia has earned the nation all kinds of criticism from home and abroad; under these circumstances patriotic things are less appealing than ever.38 As with the two operas Armin by Hofmann and Thusnelda by Grammann, the Arminius craze of the early 1870s had passed its prime by the time the artistic responses were ready, and at the same time the former topicality of the story made it difficult to argue for its timeless qualities. Bruch was very sensitive to this problem; for example, when in 1874 he was urged to write a Bismarck cantata he rejected the idea because his art should ‘stand above the [political] parties’ and would never ‘abase itself as a slave to tendentious political trends, even if those should happen to coincide with my own political attitude’. 39 With reference to Arminius he explained to Simrock in August 1876: The Arminius enthusiasm of 1875 has dissipated in the meantime. My work, however, is not an occasional ephemeral composition, like Bismarck hymns and such like, but an edifice that is based on artistic considerations, which does not appeal to the patriotic mood of the moment, but which wants to have impact in the long run through artistic means.40 37 Emil Kamphausen, ‘Arminius, Oratorium von Max Bruch’, AMZ 10 no. 52 (29 December 1875), col. 818: ‘Das Oratorium behandelt  … ein Ereigniss, welches unserm patriotischen Bewusstsein durch die jüngst erfolgte Enthüllung des Hermannsdenkmals näher getreten ist.’ 38 Quoted in Schwarzer, Die Oratorien von Max Bruch, pp. 137–8: ‘Bei Armin. ist das Schlimme, daß der Stoff nicht cosmopolitisch ist; und daß das Werk jetzt in die allerschlechteste Zeit fallen würde; überall in Deutschland herrscht jetzt katzenjämmerliche Stimmung. Philadelphia hat der Nation Vorwürfe aller Art aus dem In- und Ausland eingebracht; unter diesen Umständen ziehen patriotische Dinge weniger denn je.’ 39 Quoted in Fellerer, Max Bruch, p. 73: ‘Die Kunst muß über den Parteien stehen. Meine Kunst wird sich niemals zur Sklavin tendenziöser politischer Bestrebungen herabwürdigen, auch nicht in dem Fall, wenn dieselben im übrigen mit meinen politischen Anschauungen übereinstimmen sollten.’ 40 Quoted ibid., p. 78: ‘Die Arminius Begeisterung von 1875 (Enthüllung des Denkmals) ist inzwischen verraucht. Mein Werk ist aber keine

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Bruch nonetheless considered the work on Arminius as a ‘patriotic and national task’; this demonstrates that, like many of his contemporaries who wanted to reach a wide audience, he was caught in the dilemma of artistic excellence and independence on the one hand, and contemporary relevance and appeal on the other. In the oratorio he tried to square this particular circle by focusing on the timeless conflict between ‘Rome’ and ‘Germany’, and by treating the three soloists as embodiments of German archetypes that had a chance to retain their significance beyond the 1870s: Arminius (baritone) as the Germanic military leader; Siegmund (tenor) as the young German hero, and the Germanic priestess (mezzosoprano) as embodiment of the religious profundity so natural to the German psyche.41 As is typical for an oratorio it is the chorus that, as the representative of ‘the people’, has to carry the main burden of national-religious significance. Since Bruch singled out ‘freedom and fatherland’ in his letter to Simrock, the following survey of the oratorio will focus on these core values and the depiction of a trans-confessional German(ic) religiosity. The conflict between the Romans and the Germanic people is painted in stark binary oppositions with a strong preponderance of the latter. Only the third number, the soldiers’ chorus ‘Wir sind des Mars gewalt’ge Söhne’ (We are the mighty sons of Mars) reflects the Roman perspective, presenting them as bragging oppressors who enumerate the European and Asian nations they have already conquered and humiliated. Although the hammering declamation and the brass-heavy accompaniment give the chorus a militaristic colouring, Bruch obviously was not after dramatic verisimilitude; in line with the epic nature of the oratorio even this soldiers’ chorus is given to the entire mixed choir rather than the male voices alone, as Hofmann did for the equivalent scene in his opera Armin. The Germanic people, in contrast, are depicted throughout as a peace-loving nation who would prefer to mind their own business. In the second part of the introduction, Arminius declares: Ich leb’ in Frieden mit den Nachbargau’n, die Hütte und den Herd der Väter schirmend! Ich kämpfe mit dem hornbewehrten Ur, der in den Wäldern schrecklich hauset, und mit des Bären wildem Grimme!42 No feud I have with clansman or with tribe, I guard the hearth and altars of my fathers! My spear I lift against the savage boar, Gelegenheits-Komposition, wie Bismarck-Hymnen und derartiges, sondern ein auf künstlerischer Grundlage aufgeführtes Gebäude, welches sich nicht an die patriotische Stimmung eines Augenblicks wendet, sondern mit künstlerischen Mitteln dauernd wirken will.’ 41 Schwarzer, Die Oratorien von Max Bruch, p. 135. 42 Max Bruch, Arminius: Oratorium für Chor, Solostimmen und Orchester: Dichtung von J. Cüppers, op. 43 (Berlin, [1877]), p. 14. English translation by Natalia Macfarren. Bruch’s oratorios and choral cantatas were almost as popular in Britain as they were in Germany and thus published from the start with English translations.

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The first two lines are then repeated by the chorus in simple, hymn-like harmonies, underscoring the simplicity and innocence of the Germanic people. The fight against the Romans  –  tellingly named ‘Insurrection’  –  breaks loose only after the invaders have provoked the peaceful inhabitants. The young men are enslaved, the bards have stopped singing, the men grumble and the women cry. An act of selfdefence is the final straw: Siegmund tells in a recitative and aria (no. 9) how he had to kill a Roman soldier who molested his fiancée, which triggers the insurrection. With hindsight, this peaceful self-image of the Germans is markedly at odds with their actions in the 1860s and 1870s, when the foundations of the German Empire were laid in three consecutive wars. However, Bruch’s contemporaries would have agreed that these wars were really foisted upon the Germans by inimical foreign powers  –  Denmark, Austria, France  –  thus forcing the German states to go to war to defend their freedom and right of self-determination. The theme of ‘freedom’, as highlighted in Bruch’s correspondence with Simrock, is explicitly invoked in recitative no. 4, where Arminius proudly declaims: ‘We freeborn sons of Wodan, we have not learnt to bend to the stranger’s yoke!’43 (Ex. 4.1) At this moment the relatively free recitative turns into a more stately declamation, which is given additional emphasis by the double-dotted rhythm on ‘freie’. (The melodic resemblance of the phrase ‘We freeborn sons of Wodan’ with the opening of the national anthem of the GDR ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ is of course entirely coincidental.) The sentence is repeated by the full chorus in fortissimo and given additional gravitas by the first entrance of the organ which contrasts with the string accompaniment of the baritone solo and evokes the religious sphere. After eight bars the choral homophony dissolves into a fugal treatment of the motif ‘wir beugten nie den Nacken’ which, with its suspensions and plagal cadences, is obviously modelled on the Handelian choral idiom as developed by Mendelssohn. A richly scored instrumental interlude then leads into a duet between Arminius and Siegmund. In soaring, intertwining lines baritone and tenor compare the liberty of the Germanic people to an eagle that rises into the air unfettered, to the free murmuring of the spring and to the animals that freely dwell in the forests. The message of the animal imagery is then summarised in the line: ‘For Freedom reigns in our dwellings, Germania’s sons are freemen!’44 In the German original, the contemporary relevance of this proclamation is more obvious, since Arminius and Siegmund give up the pretence of being ancient Germanic warriors and proclaim ‘und frei sind Deutschlands Söhne!’ Thus the identity of ‘Wodan’s sons’ and ‘the sons of Germany’ is fully established and not left to the imagination of the listeners who would have drawn that conclusion anyway. The concept of the fatherland is invoked most prominently in Arminius’ solo scene no. 11, when he prepares the Germanic insurrection by calling the various

43 Ibid., p. 30. 44 Ibid., pp. 35–6.

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Example 4.1 Max Bruch, Arminius: Oratorium für Chor, Solostimmen und Orchester: Dichtung von J. Cüppers, op. 43 (Berlin, [1877]), no. 4, Recitative, and no. 5, Chorus and Duet, bars 1–16






  

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Continued overleaf

tribes to arms. His appeal to the ‘brothers from north and south’45 would have resonated with the national movement; the fraternisation of Germans from all points of the compass was, as will be shown for the Nuremberg male choir festival of 1861, one of the political catchphrases of the 1860s. Arminius then lists the tribes he sees approaching from the Danube and the North Sea, appealing to them: ‘United, be strong!’46 This exhortation would have resonated most before the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. However, even afterwards the

45 Ibid., p. 88. 46 Ibid., p. 91.

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History in Mighty Sounds Example 4.1 continued

     

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179

concerns about discord and particularism were kept alive in nationalist speeches, demonstrating that many patriots felt nervous about the cohesion of the disparate ‘tribes’ huddling under the imperial umbrella. In addition, the phrase linked the oratorio to the Hermann monument inaugurated when Bruch began composing the oratorio, echoing the inscription of the huge sword of the Hermann statue, ‘Deutsche Einigkeit, meine Stärke / Meine Stärke, Deutschlands Macht’ (German unity, my strength / my strength, Germany’s power). In this demonstrative invocation of national freedom through national unity Bruch’s oratorio joins the chorus of like-minded compositions from the first decade of the Empire, notably Hofmann’s opera Armin, as well as several of the choruses for male voices discussed below. The second part of the oratorio is entirely given over to a ritual ‘In the sacred forest’. With only one through-composed number  –  the only one that is entitled ‘Scene’ rather than ‘Chorus’ or ‘Aria’  –  and one concluding chorus, it is the shortest section of the oratorio and one that Bruch kept revising throughout the protracted composition process. From Emil Kamphausen’s review of the premiere in Barmen it is apparent that in the first version priestess and people gathered ‘around the altar of the god Fro, the patron of love and joy, who protects the peace and blesses the plough of the peasant’. 47 In the final version Wodan is substituted for Fro, which could have happened for a variety of reasons: Wodan was more likely to be familiar to the average concert-goer and  –  as a warrior god  –  would have been a more appropriate patron of the military action later in the oratorio; Fro might have been confused with a minor character from Wagner’s Rheingold; or Bruch and Cüppers tried to limit the number of Germanic gods to bring the work in line with Christian monotheism. In its revised version the scene begins with a short prelude for orchestra, the only instance of purely instrumental tone-painting, opening up the sonic space of the sacred forest with horn calls and woodwind instruments, and triplets in the strings invoking the windswept trees. The chorus hears Wodan approaching in the rustling of the oak trees. The expressive wordpainting continues when the priestess envisages the approaching battle, but she then abruptly changes from agitated declamation to a dignified Andante as she assures her congregation: ‘But yet the people are not faint, because their Gods remain to them! With hope and trust then lift your hearts on high, look heav’nward, fear ye not, they watch and guard.’ 48 (Ex. 4.2) The metaphor of lifting the hearts heavenward is borrowed straight from the Eucharistic liturgy  –  both Catholic and Lutheran  –  so that Bruch’s contemporaries could immediately identify with the ritual displayed before them. In addition, the simple diction of the priestess, supported by chorale-like harmonies, might have reminded the listeners of equivalent passages in Mendelssohn’s oratorios Paulus and Elias (e.g. the alto aria ‘Sei still in dem Herrn’ from the second part of Elias), where the early Christians or the people of Israel respectively were admonished to trust in the Lord. Although no organ is used in this instance, the passage is separated from 47 Kamphausen, ‘Arminius’, col. 819: ‘wo ein einfach frommes Volk sich um die Priesterin sammelt und um den Altar des Gottes Fro, des Schirmherrn der Liebe und Freude, der den Frieden schützt und den Pflug des Landmannes segnet’. 48 Bruch, Arminius, pp. 51–2.

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History in Mighty Sounds Andante

166



 



Example 4.2  Max Bruch, Arminius, no. 6, bars 166–83 p

  

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the preceding string-accompanied recitative by the use of wind instruments, first a solo clarinet for the top line, then the full wind section at ‘Erhebet’, underscoring the sombre, ritualistic aura. The familiar oratorio-idiom with its repercussions of Handel as well as nineteenth-century church music is then fully developed in the subsequent chorus where the Germanic people implore the gods of Valhalla to ‘graciously hear us call’, another familiar liturgical formula. After a homophonic invocation of the gods the chorus embarks on a fugato which in its deployment of stately subject and more flowing countersubject clearly crosses over into the sphere of sacred music. Bruch does not choose an archaising a cappella style, e.g. in the vein of Palestrina, to express the chronological distance between his listeners and the ancient Germans worshipping their gods; nor does he aim to depict the pagan ritual as in any way ‘exotic’. The comparison with Bruch’s cantata Frithjof, discussed below, demonstrates that the composer had an entirely different palette of expressive means at his disposal when he wanted to present a pagan ritual as

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archaic and ‘other’. In contrast, for the sacred forest in Arminius he settled for the sacred style familiar from Handel’s and Mendelssohn’s oratorios in order to stress the identity between the forefathers praying to Wodan for peace and victory for the fatherland, and the modern Germans praying to the Christian God for the same reasons. This identification would have worked regardless whether Mendelssohn’s people of Israel pray to Jehova, or whether Bruch’s Germanic tribes pray to Wodan. In their shared musical language, both are clearly singled out as ‘God’s chosen people’. Allusions to Christian liturgy enhance the familiarity, while being sufficiently vague to appeal to listeners of all the Christian denominations present in the German Empire. One might even speculate whether the depiction of a devout but non-determined religiosity in Mendelssohnian style might not have appealed to Germans of Jewish background as well, many of whom strongly identified with the German nationalist cause that offered them full integration into the fatherland. In this sense, the Catholic poet Cüppers and the Protestant composer Bruch had chosen a musical idiom whose religious connotations and simple primary colours would appeal to as wide a constituency amongst the choral movement as possible. By focusing on the ancient hero Arminius they avoided the confessionally loaded figures of Boniface or Luther, while the likeable depiction of Germanic religiosity successfully transported the message that trust in God would be repaid with national unity and strength.

‘German Song Our Weapon’: The Male Choir Movement as a Forum for Political Communication49 While mixed oratorio choirs could trace their origins back to the late eighteenth century, the male choirs were very much a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Although the roots of this movement lie outside the focus of this chapter, it is necessary to review them briefly in order to understand the subsequent development in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the persistent debates about the function and purpose of male choirs. According to the first chronicler of the movement, the long-serving official Otto Elben, choral associations for men originated simultaneously in northern Germany and in Switzerland: on the one hand the first Berlin Liedertafel founded by Karl Friedrich Zelter in 1808, an exclusive club of twenty-four poets and composers; and on the other the pedagogical efforts of the Swiss music collector and publisher Hans Georg Nägeli who advocated choral singing as a means of education for the masses.50 According to Nägeli, an ensemble of male voices was capable of greater expressivity than a mixed choir and represented the entirety of the people both in reality and symbolically. While the Berlin Liedertafel gave rise to the socially more exclusive but artistically more demanding choirs in the north, the Swiss 49 The heading is adapted from the poem ‘Das deutsche Lied die Waffe’ by Heinrich Stein, Aus deutschem Sängerherzen! (Leipzig, 1865), pp. 46–7. 50 Otto Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang: Geschichte und Stellung im Leben der Nation: der deutsche Sängerbund und seine Glieder, 2nd edn (1887), reprint ed. Friedhelm Brusniak and Franz Krautwurst (Wolfenbüttel, 1991), pp. 19–24 and 39–41.

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model influenced the South-German choral societies that emphasised conviviality and accessibility, both branches merging gradually through the regional and national singing festivals (Sängerfeste) of the 1840s.51 Elben’s model has informed all subsequent accounts of the rise of the male choir movement, including recent studies such as Dietmar Klenke’s exploration of the ‘singing German men’ as carriers of a belligerent masculine identity52 as well as James Garratt’s sensitive discussions of Vormärz festival culture. This persistence indicates that Elben’s dual-roots model has remained attractive because it offers an explanatory narrative for the tensions between the social, patriotic and aesthetic goals of male choir societies. Contemporaries singled out these three aspects whenever they systematically reflected the aims and purposes of the movement, documented in festival reports, speeches and dedicated journals which make it relatively easy to reconstruct the self-perception and intentions of the singing German men. Throughout the nineteenth century the male choir movement was one of the main catalysts of the belief in the improving and educating powers of art, especially music. At a regional singing festival in North Bavaria a music director summarised his beliefs: And if it is true that the highest purpose of education is to improve our hearts, to ennoble our feelings, to make them more refined, cheerful, pure, more receptive for delights of a higher nature, what then would serve this purpose better than music, the irresistible mover of hearts?53 With even greater conviction and an exuberance of rhetorical questions these ideas were reiterated in an extensive report of the all-German singing festival held in Würzburg in 1845: All superior sentiments, all sublime feelings, fear of god, love of the fatherland, fidelity, friendship and harmony, are stimulated, awakened and strengthened [by singing], the seed of virtue is kindled to enthusiasm; courage and energy are heightened to real zeal.  … Yes, not just the singer, even the listener will become a better human.54 51 It is helpful to distinguish between Musikfeste (music festivals) featuring mixed choirs and Sängerfeste (singing festivals) for male choirs. 52 Dietmar Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’: Gesangvereine und deutsches Nationalbewußtsein von Napoleon bis Hitler (Münster, 1998). 53 J. C. Engelhardt, Erinnerungsblätter an das Windsheimer Gesangfest am 17. Juli 1842, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Liedertafeln (Neustadt a.d. Aisch, 1842), p. 69: ‘Und wenn es wahr ist, daß der höchste Zweck der Erziehung dahin geht, unser Herz zu bessern, unsre Gefühle zu veredeln, sie feiner, heitrer, reiner, für höhere Genüsse empfänglicher zu machen, was kann mächtiger auf diesen Endzweck hinlenken, als die Tonkunst, die unwiderstehliche Herzenslenkerin?’ 54 M[aximilian]. R[ömer]., Das erste deutsche Sängerfest gefeiert in Würzburg in den Tagen des 3. bis 7. August 1845: Ein Erinnerungs-Album für dessen Theilnehmer (Würzburg, 1845), p. 104: ‘Alle bessern Empfindungen, alle erhabenen Gefühle, Gottesfurcht, Vaterlandsliebe, Treue, Freundschaft und Eintracht, werden durch denselben [Gesang] angeregt, gewekt [sic] und gestärkt, der Keim der Tugend zum Enthusiasmus angefacht, Muth und Thatkraft zur Begeisterung gesteigert.  … Ja, nicht blos der Sänger, auch der Zuhörer wird ein besserer Mensch.’

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Through their educating and regulating powers the arts assumed the role that religion had taken in the lives of earlier generations: a world of high ideals and aspirations that was attainable even to humble amateurs who sang the works of the great composers in a village choir. Singing was considered the simplest and most natural form of music making, which offered everybody an appreciation of music and admittance to the higher realms of art. This interest in education and improvement stemmed from middle-class values. In contrast to the younger and often working-class members of the gymnastics associations, the male choir movement recruited predominantly from the middle classes, with its aesthetic goals as well as membership fees ensuring a certain social exclusivity.55 On a local level representatives of the professions, civic servants, wealthy tradesmen and teachers often took the lead, while members of the lower aristocracy were not averse to bestowing their patronage as presidents. Nevertheless the singers asserted that their activities represented and ‘embraced the people in its entirety’.56 At the first Swabian Sängerfest in 1827 the teacher Karl Pfaff famously claimed: ‘[The singer] is drawn closer to his fellow human beings, and the ridiculous classbarriers yield to the power of song; the choir forms one family, united in joy, harmony and enthusiasm.’ 57 This spirit of equality and harmonious communality is nicely encapsulated in a poem written for the singing festival at Frankfurt am Main in 1838, inviting all and everybody except pedants and philistines: Alle seien aufgenommen, Die mit rechtem Sinne kommen, Jeder, der der Liederlust Sich, der ächten, ist bewußt. Sei er jung und unerfahren; Sei er älter schon an Jahren; Aus was immer welchem Stand; Hochgeehrt und unbekannt. Hab’ ihn eigner Fuß getragen; Sei gekommen er zu Wagen; Sei er an Millionen reich; Sei er arm, ist alles gleich. Ob er Christ sei, Jude, Heide; Aus der Nähe, aus der Weite; Volksmann oder Royalist, Wenn er nur ein Sänger ist.58 55 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , p. 11. 56 Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, p. 84. 57 [Karl Pfaff ], Das Liederfest zu Plochingen den 4ten Junius 1827 (Esslingen, [1827]), pp. 7–8: ‘[Der Sänger] wird seinem Mitmenschen näher gerückt und niedersinken vor des Gesanges Macht der Stände lächerliche Schranken, Eine Familie, vereint in Eintracht, Freude und Begeisterung bildet der ganze Chor.’ 58 H. Hoffmann, ‘Gesang im Freien und Freies im Gesang’, in Erinnerung an das erste Saengerfest der Mozartstiftung gehalten zu Frankfurt am Main 29. u. 30. July 1838

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Thus shared love of singing was invoked to overcome several social divisions: differences between generations, political opinions, religions (the explicit invitation to Jewish singers perhaps due to the patronage of citizens like Anselm von Rothschild) and, last but not least, differences of wealth, education and social standing. In its playful exhilaration the poem is a tribute to the pervasive liberal spirit of the early years of the movement, which in songs and speeches conjured up the ‘ideal polis of the future’ where equal citizens united for a higher goal.59 However, the praise of a classless community of singers was often more utopian gesture than reflection of social realities. Other writings show that the educated middle-class spokesmen of the choral movement derived considerable self-esteem from their improving mission. Frequently, though often inadvertently, they emphasised the gulf between ‘us’ and the ‘lower classes’. Just one year after his rousing speech the teacher Karl Pfaff complacently concluded a festival report with the observation that the power of song had once again proved reliable, as the day had passed without disruptions and in cheerful propriety, though listeners ‘even from the lowest classes’ had been numerous.60 Their moral improvement through art  –  either as participants or as listeners  –  was considered especially important in the cities, where the membership of a choir would provide a stable social environment, while the exposure to works of art was hoped to replace revolutionary ideas with artistic ideals. However, in larger cities several choral societies co-existed, often divided along the lines of profession and wealth, and ([Frankfurt am Main], 1838), pp. 13–14. The author is probably Heinrich Hoffmann, liberal representative in the 1848 National Assembly and author of the children’s book classic Der Struwelpeter. 59 Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, p. 118. 60 [Karl Pfaff ], Programm auf das allgemeine Lieder-Fest zu Eßlingen am PfingstMontag den 26. Mai 1828 (n.p., 1828), p. 16.

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the emergence of a separate workers’ choral movement in the second half of the nineteenth century shows that the middle classes ultimately failed to integrate all social groups. Regardless of these high-flying social and educational aspirations few men would have joined a choral society had it not afforded an opportunity to socialise informally with like-minded people. The very name Liedertafel combines singing and feasting, while the Liederkranz invokes equality as well as festive decorations. From the start conviviality and celebration were integral to the choral movement. As long as an association did not own practice rooms, rehearsals were often held in the backrooms of inns. This set male choirs apart from mixed choirs, where the presence of women precluded this type of socialising, as one singer confessed with gentle self-mockery: We could hardly expect our wives and daughters to meet for a pint of beer in a public house in the evening; at least we men would make a rather curious face if the ladies expressed such a desire. On the other hand the male choir is an excellent excuse for having to drink a few pints of beer at least one evening per week; let’s face it, my fellow singers, is that not so?61 The address ‘Sangesbrüder’, literally ‘brothers in song’, is indicative of the jovial and egalitarian spirit of the male choir movement. Descriptions of singing festivals regularly stress the fraternisation amongst singers from different associations and regions as their main purpose. The rules of social etiquette were set aside in the spirit of celebration, and men who had met only a few hours ago switched quickly from the formal mode of address to the intimate, brotherly ‘Du’. Such fraternisation was helped by the social events that complemented concerts or singing festivals: banquets, picnics, jaunts and boat trips to picturesque spots, as well as balls and dances that gave the wives and daughters of the singers an opportunity to join the music-induced conviviality. Their participation, although restricted to a passive and decorative role as listeners, ‘maids of honour’ or dancing partners was very welcome to give the festivities a more refined touch.62 Reports delight in little gallantries such as ‘the beautiful eyes of the ladies of Coburg which amply compensated for the lack of sunshine.’63 Opinions were divided about 61 W. Lackowitz, ‘Gesangfeste’, Die Sängerhalle 9 no. 19 (1869), p. 146: ‘Wir können unseren Frauen und Töchtern nicht zumuthen, Abends zu einem Glase Bier in einem öffentlichen Locale zusammen zu kommen; wir Männer würden wenigstens ein etwas curioses Gesicht machen, wenn unsere Frauen mit einem derartigen Wunsche kämen. Andererseits giebt ja auch der Gesangverein einen prächtigen Vorwand ab, wenigstens an einem Abende in der Woche ein paar Gläser Bier trinken gehen zu müssen; Hand auf ’s Herz, ihr Herren Sangesbrüder, ist’s nicht so?’ 62 On the role of ‘maids of honour’ see Barbara Eichner, ‘“ Die Fahne ist des Sängers Braut”: Bilder von Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit in der bürgerlichen Männerchorbewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Geschlechterpolaritäten in der Musik des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Freia Hoffmann and Rebecca Grotjahn (Herbolzheim, 2002), pp. 31–49. 63 Album des zweiten Coburger Sängertages am 29. und 30. Juli 1855 (Coburg, 1855), p. 13: ‘Die schönen Augen der Coburgerinnen boten reichen Ersatz für den Mangel an Sonnenschein.’

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the importance of the non-musical elements: a chronicler of the Sängerfest in Bielefeld in 1845 stressed that music should be at the centre of the event, but that a concentration solely on the musical aspect would spell the end of the movement: ‘A singing festival would never arouse such general interest if non-singers were not allowed to participate; in fact through them the festival becomes, as it were, a musical Volksfest, because all special interests recede and the festival becomes the sole focal point for a nation.’64 As the century progressed and festivals attracted hundreds or even thousands of singers, commentators deplored that many participants ignored the serious artistic and national purpose of communal singing and behaved in an undignified manner. The ‘Festbummler’, a singer who sought just his amusement, who flirted, drank and neglected rehearsals and concerts, was an easy target for satirists within and without the choral movement. It was this mixture of harmless conviviality and serious artistic and moral aspirations that made the male choir movement an ideal carrier of national and liberal ideas in the nineteenth century. Although patriotic songs and speeches formed an integral part of the repertoire and festival rituals,65 their artistic context made them appear sufficiently apolitical to evade the more stringent policing and censorship targeted at the gymnastics or student associations. Naturally the approval of state and church authorities had to be ensured, and they carefully guarded their right to issue or withhold permits for public activities. Sometimes they exercised it quite at random, as a group of singers realised with astonishment when they were forbidden to serenade the organising committee of the Frankfurt Festival in 1838. Circumspect organisers eliminated potential conflicts in advance. At the Rudolstadt Festival in 1858 the committee of the Thuringian Choral Union urged all singers to abstain from political allusions in speeches and symbols, e.g. wearing the national colours of black, red and gold. As they put it: ‘No dissonance from the political sphere was to spoil the Thuringian joviality and hospitality.’ 66 However, the authorities overlooked  –  or ignored  –  the fact that the very form of association, the Verein, provided an introduction to democratic practices, even if an association’s professed goals were purely artistic or convivial. The members of the Verein decided the admission of new singers by secret ballot and elected the committee.67 The singers set up their association’s statutes which 64 ‘Das Gesangfest der vereinigten norddeutschen Liedertafeln zu Bielefeld’, NZfM 23 no. 6 (18 July 1845), p. 23: ‘Und nimmermehr würde das Gesangfest so allgemeines Interesse erregen, wenn nicht die Theilnahme an demselben auch den Nichtsängern gestattet würde; gerade dadurch wird das Fest gleichsam zu einem musikalischen Volksfeste, da alle Privatinteressen zurücktreten und es allein den Centralpunct für eine Völkerschaft bildet.’ 65 See Dieter Düding, Organisierter gesellschaftlicher Nationalismus in Deutschland (1808–1847): Bedeutung und Funktion der Turner- und Sängervereine für die deutsche Nationalbewegung (Munich, 1984), p. 145. 66 A.G., ‘Zur Erinnerung an das vor fünfundzwanzig Jahren am 4. und 5. Juli 1858 in Rudolstadt abgehaltene Sängerfest’, in Jubiläums-Fest-Zeitung zum Rudolstädter Sängertage am 8. Juli 1883 (Rudolstadt, 1883), p. 2: ‘Die thüringische Gemüthlichkeit sollte kein Mißklang aus der politischen Sphäre stören.’ 67 For an introduction to the practicalities of the Verein see Michael Sobania, ‘Vereinsleben. Regeln und Formen bürgerlicher Assoziationen im 19. Jahrhundert’,

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regulated its purpose and organisation, finances and the conduct of its members. Since the Satzung spelled out equal rights and duties for all active members, it anticipated the political constitutionalism of the liberal movement. At least in theory all activities were openly discussed in regular general meetings, while the day-to-day business was co-ordinated by the committee. Even if these procedures often threatened to slip into Vereinsmeierei (pedantic over-regulation), the associations provided a rare opportunity to take on responsibility in the public sphere. The political significance of the Vereine became more apparent once the local associations began to form regional unions. The first steps were undertaken by several North-German Liedertafeln in the 1830s, with the associations in South and Middle Germany following slightly later, but then often with the explicit aims of furthering a patriotic spirit and demonstrating the unity and coherence of the German singers across regional boundaries. The statutes of the Thuringian Choral Union, founded in 1842, explain the aims of the umbrella organisation as follows: The purpose of the Choral Union of Thuringia is to cultivate German song and to make it common property; furthermore to foster the patriotic spirit through its power  –  a patriotic spirit that finds its satisfaction in the intellectual and moral elevation of the German Volk, in a more affectionate union of the various German peoples, in unwavering loyalty to the traditional sovereigns and in inviolate obedience to the laws of the country.68 The attempt to mediate between liberal and patriotic ideas on the one hand and an appeasement of the political rulers is obvious. On the whole, the singers pursued a conciliatory strategy, trying to convince the governments of their good intentions through the invocation of the power of music, and by inviting their officials to patronise the movement. Some sovereigns, especially those of the smaller principalities who cultivated a volkstümlich image and had least to lose in an eventual German unification, even encouraged liberal and national aspirations. Most prominent among them was Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, elder brother of Prince Albert and like him dedicated to moderate progress, official patron of the German Riflemen’s Union (Schützenbund ) and himself a prolific composer. In 1862 he invited the representatives of the regional choral unions to Coburg, where a national umbrella organisation, the Deutscher Sängerbund (DSB) was founded on 21 September. At a time when trade and travel throughout Germany were still hampered by a multitude of borders, such a nationwide structure was no mean achievement in itself and a positive signal to all advocates of a political union. in Bürgerkultur im 19. Jahrhundert: Bildung, Kunst und Lebenswelt, ed. Dieter Hein and Andreas Schulz (Munich, 1996), pp. 170–90. 68 Ludwig Storch, Der Thüringer Sängerbund und sein erstes Liederfest zu Molsdorf den 16. August 1843: Blätter der Erinnerung (Gotha, 1843), p. 21: ‘Zweck des Thüringer Sängerbundes ist, das deutsche Lied zu pflegen und mehr und mehr zum Gemeingut zu machen, auch durch die Macht desselben vaterländischen Sinn zu fördern  –  denjenigen vaterländischen Sinn, der in geistiger und sittlicher Erhebung des deutschen Volks, in einer innigeren Einigung seiner verschiedenen Stämme, und unverbrüchlicher Treue gegen die angestammten Herrscher und in unverletzlichem Gehorsam gegen die Landesgesetze seine Befriedigung findet.’

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The statutes of the DSB explicitly proclaim its political significance: ‘Through the unifying power immanent to German song, the German Choral Union aims for its part to strengthen the sense of national cohesion among the German peoples and to collaborate towards the unity and power of the fatherland.’69 Although the DSB never managed to integrate all middle-class male choirs, let alone the workingclass associations, it united thousands of singers and positioned itself as a powerful mouthpiece of the national movement, not least through its official magazine Die Sängerhalle. A collection of choruses for members had sold 37,200 scores and 400,600 individual parts by 1886.70 Although the DSB never surpassed 200,000 active members before the First World War,71 the total number of singers from the national-liberal or national-conservative camp organised in male choirs must have been considerably higher. The movement achieved its greatest prominence and widest social impact through its nationwide singing festivals, whose history will be considered in some detail for two reasons. On the one hand, they are symptomatic of the development of the national movement in general; on the other hand they form the institutional backdrop of the choruses that glorified the German singer in historical (dis)guise. The choral movement found its favourite mode of communication in the regional and national Sängerfeste. These festivals continued the tradition of the victory celebrations after the Napoleonic Wars and developed ritual forms of expression that were intended to appeal to the emotions of the listeners and participants.72 Since the essential form of these gatherings changed little during the nineteenth century, its typical components can be demonstrated in the modest, early festivals that were held in Baden and Swabia. About 200 singers would gather in a centrally situated town on a Sunday or public holiday. A short rehearsal was followed by a morning concert in a church, usually the only building large enough to accommodate singers and audiences. The dignity of the location demanded a sacred or at least solemn repertoire, which accorded well with contemporary ideas about the quasi-religious nature of music. After a simple lunch an informal concert followed in a public space or a picturesque outdoor setting, where sentimental, convivial and patriotic songs alternated with uplifting speeches and toasts to the arts, to nature, to the organisers, to the ruling dynasty, to the fatherland and to the graceful ladies. The individual choirs performed in turn, or all singers united in mass choirs which were perceived as particularly moving and inspiring. Entertainments such as banquets or dances often concluded the day. With the spread of the male choir movement and the advent of better transportation the numbers of participants increased and the scope of 69 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, pp. 172–3: ‘Durch die dem deutschen Liede innewohnende einigende Kraft will der deutsche Sängerbund in seinem Theile die nationale Zusammengehörigkeit der deutschen Stämme stärken und an der Einheit und Macht des Vaterlandes mit arbeiten.’ Elben dwells on this event with particular fondness, as he was president of the constituting assembly and remained on the executive committee of the DSB until 1896. 70 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, p. 203. 71 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , p. 186. 72 Düding, Organisierter gesellschaftlicher Nationalismus, pp. 181 and 170.

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the festivals widened considerably. Events could last two or more days and new elements were introduced to the rituals. On entering the town, each choir was received by a welcoming committee; a voluntary helper (often school children or members of the gymnastics associations) shepherded the singers to their sleeping quarters and the concert venues. Groups arriving by special trains or boats were welcomed by military bands, cannon salutes or fireworks. As the number of participants outgrew churches and town halls, special festival halls were erected which seated several thousand listeners and attracted huge audiences. A podium with orchestra pit separated singers and listeners. Some events such as Kommerse (drinking punctuated by patriotic speeches and toasts) were reserved for the singers, undermining the original idea of a Volksfest. However, the male choirs publicly asserted their presence with a festival pageant which became a standard element of the celebrations. Accompanied by ‘heralds’ or guards on horseback and under the sounds of military bands, the choral societies marched through the towns, displayed their banners and, if contemporary reports are to be believed, were cheered enthusiastically by the general populace. No commentator forgot to congratulate the hosting town for its splendid decoration with garlands, flowers and allegorical inscriptions. The serious political purpose that underpinned the festive cheer became more obvious during the Vormärz, when the national movement was sparked into action by the Rhine crisis of 1840. As a consequence of the foreign threat the national movement became more outspoken in its demands for domestic reforms (including constitutions and civil rights) and national unification. The Sängerfest in Würzburg in 1845 claimed to be ‘The first German  –  and truly German  –  singing festival!’73 Although the majority of its 1,773 participants came from Bavaria (1,234), Prussian and Austrian choirs were represented by eighty-eight and eight singers respectively. The greatest political significance was accorded to a delegation from Schleswig-Holstein: they had smuggled their forbidden banner across the border to raise general sympathy for the plight of their country that was in danger of being divided into a German and a Danish part. Their unofficial ‘national anthem’ Schleswig-Holstein, meerumschlungen was repeated over and over by the singers until the entire audience, including the women, enthusiastically joined in the refrain.74 Such moments of patriotic elation confirmed the expectations that collective singing and celebrating would forge a strong bond between Germans from all states and regions. However, contemporary observers were at pains to point out that this was not a ‘political’ demonstration. The chronicler of the festival, Maximilian Römer, was relieved that no religiously motivated frictions had broken out, as had been feared from the great influx of Protestant singers to the Catholic city, and he defended the patriotic tendency of the event: Even if such a festival should exclude all political and religious demonstrations, this exclusion cannot pertain to manifestations that address 73 Römer, Das erste deutsche Sängerfest, p. 13: ‘Das erste deutsche Gesangfest  –  ein in Wahrheit deutsches!’ 74 C. G., ‘Das deutsche Sängerfest in Würzburg’, AMZ 47 no. 34 (20 August 1845), col. 578.

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the hope and necessity of the unity of the German peoples in joy and sorrow, united in defence against foreign attacks on our independence.75 The spokesmen of the male choir movement thus agreed with the majority of the national-liberals that the nation was a topic above and beyond the ‘political’ reality. Campaigning for national unity and freedom constituted a universal demand of all Germans, not just the factions or lobbying groups commonly associated with the term ‘politics’. In addition it should be noted that the confrontation with a hostile neighbouring country, be it France or Denmark, shaped the agenda of the male choir movement even during the Vormärz, when, according to the Sonderweg theory, German nationalism should still have been friendly and liberal rather than defensive and xenophobe. Such sentiments were less prominent at the following festival in Cologne in 1846 when twenty-seven choirs from Belgium followed the invitation of the German-Flemish Choral Union, although much was made of the ‘consanguinity’ of the Flemish and the German singers.76 The presence of one of the most prominent composers, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, added artistic glamour to the festival. He conducted the first performance of his Festgesang an die Künstler, op. 68, which, in the words of James Garratt, ‘provided the movement with a charter for musical reform’ that united high aspirations with an accessible musical language.77 The appeal of patriotic songs continued unbroken, and the campaigning for constitutional reforms and liberty was more outspoken than in Würzburg. The next year’s festival in Lübeck was on a smaller scale due to its peripheral location; the festival planned in Frankfurt for 1848 had to be cancelled because of the March Revolution. As political assemblies and associations were permitted for the first time in several decades, those singers who were genuinely interested in transforming the constitutional framework of the German Confederation devoted their energies to political newspapers or rallies.78 Maximilian Römer’s fears at the Würzburg Festival had become reality. Now that concrete plans and actions were possible, the different political options  –  liberal or conservative, constitutional or republican  –  divided the singers who had been united as long as their ideals were sufficiently vague and utopian. Few if any regional festivals were held; this illustrates the compensatory nature of the male choir movement once political commitment was possible. The direct influence of the singers on the events of 1848/9 is difficult to assess. Most associations were content to support traditional patriotic causes such as the German fleet or the restoration of Cologne cathedral. Modern historians explain this reluctance with the generally more conservative outlook of the choral 75 Römer, Das erste deutsche Sängerfest, pp. 17–18: ‘Denn wenn auch von einem solchen Feste alle politischen und religiösen Demonstrationen ausgeschlossen seyn sollen, so kann diese Ausschließung doch nicht auf solche Aeußerungen bezogen werden, welche den Wunsch und das Bedürfniß der Einigkeit der deutschen Völker in Glück und Gefahr, zur Abwehr jedes fremden Angriffs auf unsere Unabhängigkeit zum Gegenstande haben.’ 76 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, pp. 110–13. 77 Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, p. 127. 78 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , p. 77.

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movement: singers wholeheartedly supported the idea of a German unification but were less committed to liberal or democratic reforms.79 In the end, neither unification nor liberalisation became reality, and the patriotic movements faced another decade of hibernation. Unlike the gymnastics associations the male choirs were not prohibited, but they kept a low profile compared to their assertive posturing in the Vormärz. Dieter Düding even claims that they lost their ‘national character’ and restricted their repertoire to apolitical and folksy songs,80 while Dietmar Klenke objects that belligerent battle songs were especially popular as compensatory gestures for the failed national revolution.81 Contemporary festival programmes bear out both observations. The programme of the Fourth Lower Rhine Sängerfest in Krefeld in 1857 shows many musical works with innocuous themes such as springtime, love and nature, with excerpts from sacred and stage works more prominent than in other years.82 The Sängerfest in Bavarian Passau in 1851, on the other hand, featured the traditional mix of sacred and secular music, with works such as Joseph Hartmann Stuntz’s Deutscher Gruß (German greeting) and Julius Rietz’s Altdeutsches Schlachtlied (Ancient German battle song) balancing Johann Georg Mettenleiter’s Psalm 144 and the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Handel’s Messiah.83 The festival hall proudly displayed a patriotic motto, and the fraternisation of German and Austrian singers was no less cordial than in Würzburg six years earlier. While it is possible that Passau was just an exception to the general despondency it is even more likely that the patriotism of the singers, who in the majority had not been directly involved in the March Revolution, had been less dented than that of the liberal core constituency. When the national movement resurfaced towards the end of the 1850s, the festival culture became once more a favourite platform for patriotic ideas.84 Compared to the Vormärz the festivals had changed considerably: there were more singers from the working classes, though that did not change the dominance of the educated middle classes; the participation of Austrian singers gave them a ‘greater German’ complexion which not even the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 interrupted, and numbers expanded considerably.85 The Sängerfest at Nuremberg in 1861, which was the first festival on a national scale after the end of the reactionary era, attracted some 250 choirs with more than 5,000 members; accordingly the festival hall offered space for 4,000 singers, orchestra and 12,000 listeners.86 79 Ibid., p. 79. 80 Düding, Organisierter gesellschaftlicher Nationalismus, p. 312. 81 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , p. 90. 82 Heinz Blommen, Anfänge und Entwicklung des Männerchorwesens am Niederrhein (Cologne, 1960), pp. 290–2. 83 Blätter der Erinnerung an das Passauer Sängerfest 1851 (Passau, 1851), pp. 131–2. 84 Dieter Düding, ‘Nationale Oppositionsfeste der Turner, Sänger und Schützen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum 1. Weltkrieg, ed. Dieter Düding, Peter Friedemann and Paul Münch (Reinbek, 1988), pp. 183–6. 85 Dieter Düding, ‘Deutsche Nationalfeste im 19. Jahrhundert. Erscheinungsbild und politische Funktion’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 69 (1987), pp. 384–5. 86 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, pp. 163–4.

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(See Illus. 4.1.) The decision to hold the festival in Nuremberg was on the one hand inspired by the picturesque backdrop the medieval streets and buildings would provide for the pageant, and on the other hand by the glorious past of the free imperial city and meeting place of several imperial diets in the Middle Ages.87 It had also harboured some of the greatest German artists, such as Albrecht Dürer and Veit Stoß as well as Hans Sachs and the Meistersinger, obvious role models for the amateur musicians. If the choice of location had already been politically informed, the programme of the two main performances on 21 and 22 July left no doubt of the patriotic significance of the festival: All-Deutschland (All-Germany) by Franz Abt, An das Vaterland (To the Fatherland) by Ferdinand Hiller, An die Deutschen (To the Germans) by Rudolf Tschirch. Duke Ernst of Saxe-CoburgGotha contributed a much acclaimed chorus An die deutsche Tricolore (To the German Colours), a tribute to the black, red and gold flags so prominent in the March Revolution. Even inconspicuous topics such as springtime (Vincenz Lachner, Frühlingsgruß an das Vaterland) were infused with references to the fatherland. All these substantial works had been composed expressly for the festival and took the massive forces of several thousand singers into account; the result was suitably monumental, heroic and musically not too subtle.88 Thanks to the commitment of the musicians and the all-pervading patriotic enthusiasm the mass choirs went very well, and their success was interpreted as a sure sign that the political unification of the German peoples was imminent. The dominating theme of the festival was the fraternisation of Germans from the south and north. The festival motto ‘Deutsches Banner, Lied und Wort / Eint in Liebe Süd und Nord’ (German banner, song and poetry / unites South and North in love) inspired the public speeches and found its most adequate expression in an informal picnic on the meadows around the Dutzendteich lake which concluded the festival: ‘The fraternisation became an act of a political or rather national manifestation; a sense of unity flashed through everybody, a thousand bonds of love were tied between North and South.’ 89 Otto Elben admits that this was only Gefühlspolitik (emotional politics), which accords with modern assessments of the emotive power of the festival culture. Nevertheless he defends the patriotic exuberance with the benefit of hindsight because it prepared the Germans for the trials that lay ahead on the path to national unity. Since the Deutscher Sängerbund was founded one year later as a direct result of the Nuremberg Festival, most contemporaries probably would have agreed with Elben’s endorsement of Gefühlspolitik. For many the events of 1861 represented a culmination of the national festival culture that was never to be equalled. If the first official festival of the DSB in 1865 was perceived as an anti-climax compared to the spontaneous enthusiasm of Nuremberg, the hosts in Dresden 87 Brockmann, Nuremberg, p. 73. 88 For a discussion of the programme see Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’, pp. 110–15. 89 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, p. 168: ‘Die Verbrüderung wurde zur That einer politischen, oder besser nationalen Kundgebung, das Einheitsgefühl durchzuckte alle, tausend Fäden der Liebe zwischen Nord und Süd wurden angeknüpft.’

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4.1  The interior of the festival hall of the Nuremberg Sängerfest of 1861, view towards the podium. The hall could accommodate 4,000 singers and 12,000 listeners. Note the banners of the choral associations displayed below the rafters, and the numerous women in the audience.

could hardly be blamed for not trying to organise the perfect event, in the process running up a sizeable deficit of several thousand thalers.90 The festival hall alone with its rich neo-Gothic decoration cost 76,262 fl.,91 impressing singers, locals and the royal family of Saxony alike. Of the 54,500 singers comprising the DSB three years after its foundation, 16,000 flocked to Dresden. 1,100 boys from gymnastics associations led the guests to their sleeping quarters; 19,000 participants with more than 1,000 banners formed an impressive festival procession, at the end of which 400 maids of honour presented each association with colourful favours to commemorate the event. One of the highlights was the solemn consecration of the banner of the DSB, a ceremony that mixed quasi-religious and profane elements in a typical instance of Gefühlspolitik. Moved by the solemnity and significance of the event, Otto Elben (in his capacity as the representative of the DSB) appropriately defined the role of the singers within the national movement: We may not be able to liberate and unify Germany through our songs. But into every heart we plant the indestructible national credo of our common bond and unity; a credo that will in good time engender national action in every new generation raised in this belief.92 90 Das erste deutsche Sängerbundesfest in Dresden, 22. bis 25. Juli 1865: Ein Gedenkbuch (Dresden, [1865]), p. 2. 91 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, pp. 179–80. 92 Das erste deutsche Sängerbundesfest in Dresden, p. 20: ‘Wohl vermögen wir’s nicht, mit unsern Liedern Deutschland frei und einig zu singen. Aber wir pflanzen in alle

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This lofty, idealist level, however, could not be sustained throughout the entire festival. Pamphlets and caricatures insinuated that some singers had come to Dresden to drink incessantly and to flirt with the easy-going local girls.93 Lack of preparation and low attendance at the rehearsals spoiled the impact of the mass choirs. Despite the excellent acoustics of the festival hall the brass band drowned out the singers, and at the second concert only those choirs that had volunteered a solo performance participated in the general choruses.94 For the first time, a wide array of merchandise is documented at a choral festival: postcards and badges, photographs, gingerbread, chocolates, pipes and pocket-knifes, bronze bracelets and lace collars for the ladies at home were sold in the many booths surrounding the festival hall.95 The commercial spirit that the singers had hoped to transcend through their artistic activities had entered a happy alliance with the lofty goals of national unity and harmony. The historian Dietmar Klenke has interpreted the disappointment with the Dresden Sängerfest as a sign that the male choir movement had lost its earlier oppositional drive, that the singers had realised the political insignificance of their activities compared to the wars of the 1860s and now fell in step with a more conservative nationalism that was compliant with the official line of the ruling sovereigns.96 However, the question should be asked whether the ‘singing German men’ really had lost their idealism, or whether the politics around them had changed in such a way that national unification was now a top priority of the political elite, led by Prussia, rather than a utopian goal of the liberal minority. The real caesura in the history of the movement was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1 and the foundation of the German Empire. This was not because singers  –  along with the gymnasts and riflemen  –  suddenly shifted their political allegiance from liberal opposition to national conservatism, as Dieter Düding has suggested,97 but because the realisation of the old patriotic dream made the unifying zeal of the singers suddenly redundant. As a consequence the male choir movement lost much of its attraction as an unofficial platform for nationalist ideals, since there were now plenty of official outlets. Triumphant gestures could not balance a lack of political significance: this is mirrored in the low attendance at the DSB festivals in Munich in 1874 (5,000) and Hamburg in 1882 (7,000). When the figures recovered in Vienna in 1890 (13,000) and Stuttgart in 1896 (14,000), the former glory did not necessarily revert as well. Many of the older generation, especially those who remembered the Vormärz festivals, bemoaned the lack of spontaneity and authenticity in the mass-produced patriotic enthusiasm. The president of Herzen den unzerstörbaren nationalen Glaubenssatz der Zusammengehörigkeit und Einigkeit, den Glaubenssatz, welcher, gewaltiger in jedem nachwachsenden, in diesem Glauben empfangenen Geschlechte, wenn die Zeit gekommen sein wird, die nationale That erzeugen muß.’ 93 Schultze (pseud.), Schultze und Müller auf dem ersten deutschen Sängerbundesfest zu Dresden, 2nd edn (Leipzig, [1865]). 94 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, pp. 183–4. 95 Das erste deutsche Sängerbundesfest in Dresden, pp. 163–4. 96 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , pp. 127–30. 97 Düding, ‘Deutsche Nationalfeste im 19. Jahrhundert’, p. 385.

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the Franconian Sängerbund, Carl Gerster, wistfully reminded the singers of their contribution to the German unification three years after the fact: My friends, it was a hard time when it was frowned upon to think German out loud, to sing German.  … Even free speech was frowned upon, the German-national idea was outlawed. Then our patriotic feelings sought refuge in the German song, and through song we carried the German idea to all German regions; we helped to bring up a young, German generation.98 As one writer commented tersely in the movement’s journal Die Sängerhalle, the victories of Sedan and Weißenburg had not been won with songs but with cannons, guns and sabres.99 In order to counter the loss of a raison d’être two argumentative strategies were developed. Some singers insisted that patriotic and national songs had never been the sole focus of the male choirs; singing enabled men to express a whole gamut of human emotions through art, which was certainly still important.100 The artistic and social goals of the movement had lost none of their validity, and the male choirs tried with renewed vigour to justify their relevance to German musical life. Others  –  probably the majority  –  were convinced that the national spirit still required careful cultivation, lest it should slacken and evaporate.101 During the following decades the warnings against German discord and regionalism persisted, but towards the end of the century the choral movement claimed a new niche in the patriotic discourse. This renewed bid for national relevance was altogether more disturbing than the weariness experienced by some singers. After the unification wars many Germans had become accustomed to expecting the solution to any problem to come from a (victorious) confrontation with a foreign nation. Rather than focusing on the issues arising within the Empire, the national movement turned its attention to the fringes of the German political sphere. Although the Empire united the majority of German speakers within its borders, a significant proportion remained outside the fatherland, notably in the Habsburg Empire. Thus the vision of a united Germany was replaced with a pan-German nation state that would include every single German man and woman in a culturally (and in some circles ethnically) homogenous population. It was thus no coincidence that the DSB festivals of 1902 and 1907 were held in Graz (in Austrian Styria) and Breslau (Wrocław) respectively, where a Germanspeaking majority felt threatened by its Slavonic neighbours. The speeches held on 98 Festzeitung zum II. deutschen Sängerbundesfest in München 1874 no. 2 (9 August 1874), p. 4: ‘Meine Freunde, es war eine schwere Zeit, wo es verpönt war, laut deutsch zu denken, deutsch zu singen.  … Selbst das freie Wort war verpönt, der deutsch-nationale Gedanke geächtet. Da hat sich in das deutsche Lied unser patriotisches Gefühl geflüchtet, und in ihm haben wir die deutsche Idee hinausgetragen in alle deutschen Lande; wir haben eine deutsche Jugend mit erziehen helfen.’ 99 r., ‘“ Die finstern Geister zu beschwören”’, Die Sängerhalle 16 no. 4 (1876), p. 28. 100 Ibid. 101 ‘Der nationalen Feste Bedeutung’, Festzeitung zum II. deutschen Sängerbundesfest no. 1 (7 August 1874), p. 2.

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these occasions can be regarded as symptomatic for the new trend. On the third day of the Graz Festival, the local student fraternities invited fellow students from Austria and Germany. Their representative Heinrich Wastian first highlighted the traditional bond between singers, gymnasts and students who had upheld the national idea in opposition to the political establishment.102 The Germans in Austria, he maintained, were true and equal Germans, even though they had remained outside the German Empire. They guarded its ‘border ramparts’ and ensured that the vital connection of all Germans from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea remained indestructible. Wastian then asked his listeners to raise sympathy for the German resistance fight in the south-east. His use of the ominous term völkisch indicates that a more aggressive nationalist and racist spirit had entered the choral movement, its principal thrust directed not so much against Germans from a Jewish background but against the neighbouring, supposedly inferior cultures.103 Five years after Graz, the mayor of Breslau welcomed the singers in similar terms: We feel safe in the German Empire,  … but we shall never forget that we are placed at the borders of the Empire, where another people attacks us with different weapons. And we know, dear friends, that if we win this fight we owe our success to the higher German culture which keeps the upper hand. However, our German culture can conquer the attacking foreign peoples only if it is strong internally. Whence should such strength come if not from German song, from German singing!104 The theme of German culture under siege was also apparent from the musical programme and the symbolism surrounding the festival. The first main concert featured two new compositions which translated the opposition of the Germanic people towards foreign infiltration into music: Heinrich Zöllner’s oratorio 102 ‘Die Grazer Festtage (Bericht über den Verlauf des 6. deutschen Sängerbundes­ festes)’, Festblätter zum 6. deutschen Sängerbundesfest in Graz 1902 no. 12 (1 October 1902), pp. 564–5. 103 There is as yet no study about the role of Jewish singers and officials within the male choir movement. While the early gymnastics associations had inherited anti-Semitic attitudes from their founding father Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and many student fraternities did not admit Jewish students, among the singers anti-Semitic prejudices would have been incongruent with the consistent veneration of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. This does not mean that no singer had anti-Semitic prejudices, but they do generally not surface in official writings. 104 P. Daehne, ‘Deutsches Sängerbundesfest in Breslau’, Die Sängerhalle 47 nos. 32/33 (15 August 1907), pp. 606–7: ‘Wir fühlen uns sicher im Deutschen Reich,  … aber nimmer können wir vergessen, daß wir auf der Grenze des Reiches stehen, wo ein anderes Volk mit anderen Waffen gegen uns anstürmt. Und wir wissen es, liebe Freunde: wenn wir in diesem Kampfe siegen, daß wir es verdanken dem Deutschtum durch seine bessere Kultur, die die Oberhand behält. Es muß aber innerlich kräftig sein, dann erst kann es obsiegen dem anstürmenden fremden Volkstum. Woher soll es aber die Kraft erhalten, wenn nicht vom deutschen Liede, vom deutschen Sang?’

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Bonifacius and Richard Strauss’s choral work Bardengesang, op. 55, a piece that will be discussed below in greater detail. At the last pre-war festival in Nuremberg in 1912, the explicitly xenophobe tones were less prominent, but with the lack of political urgency the male choir movement faced once more the question whether it was still able to make a worthwhile contribution to the German cause. As 34,000 singers flocked to Nuremberg to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the DSB, the organisation came up against its limitations. Committee member Ferdinand von Jäger praised the achievements of the organisers as far as he dared to, but at the same time defended them against the reproaches of disgruntled singers, dissatisfied hosts and disappointed listeners.105 The masses of participants and visitors were hardly manageable anymore, and many singers might have felt like insignificant little cogs in an oversized festival machinery. The memory of the festival of fifty-one years earlier must have been tinted with nostalgia for a time when collective singing, spontaneous fraternisation and an open-air picnic had sufficed to sustain the utopian vision of a nation of free and equal men. The German singers had been overtaken by their own history.

Bards, Vikings, Meistersinger: Historicising the Singing German Men A keen sense of its historical roots had been integral to the male choir movement from its very beginnings. Although most contemporaries admitted that the movement as such was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, its official representatives were eager to highlight its historical antecedents, linking their activities with the most glorious eras of German history. The following instances are just a small sample of the many historical references that peppered speeches and visual representations, before finally turning to the representation of history in music. As early as 1828, at the second Swabian Liederfest in Esslingen, Karl Pfaff conjured up a vivid picture of the German singers throughout history, beginning with an image of the Teutons that combines all the usual stereotypes: When the Germanic man, whose defiant gaze made even Rome’s worldconquering cohorts quiver, still lived in a humble cottage in his native forest, the song of the bard resounded in the shade of the ancient oaks, accompanied by the harp, and when he sang of [his ancestors] Teut and Mannus, of Hermann the vanquisher of the Romans and of the feasts of the heroes in the golden hall of Valhalla, then the wild joy of fighting awoke in the hearts of his listeners.106 105 Ferdinand von Jäger, ‘Das 8. Deutsche Sängerbundesfest in Nürnberg (27.–31. Juli 1912): Statt eines Berichts ein Rückblick’, Deutsches Sängerbundes-Fest zu Nürnberg 27.–31. Juli 1912. Festzeitung no. 12 (30 November 1912), pp. 202–30. 106 [Pfaff ], Programm auf das allgemeine Lieder-Fest zu Eßlingen, p. 12: ‘Als der Germane, vor dessen trotz’gem Blicke selbst Roms weltbezwingende Kohorten bebten, noch in der niedern Hütt’ im heimathlichen Forste hauste, ertönte in der alten Eichen Schatten schon des Barden Lied zum Klange der Telyn, und wenn er sang von Teut und Mannus, von Hermann dem Römerbezwinger und von der

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He then drew particular attention to the age of the Meistersinger, when the civic freedom of the free imperial cities had encouraged the pursuit of artistic activities  –  a veiled exhortation to the authorities to respect the civic liberties. Although the connection between the male choirs and the Meistersinger was at best tenuous, they were frequently invoked as precursors, and Otto Elben proudly noted that the last four members of the Meistersinger guild of Ulm handed over their insignia, music books and banner in 1839 to the local Liederkranz whom they designated as their rightful successor.107 The banners and images that adorned the erstwhile houses of Hans Sachs and Albrecht Dürer during the first Nuremberg Festival in 1861 have already been mentioned; in 1912 the theme was taken up by an elaborate tableau vivant entitled ‘Hans Sachs and the Meistersinger welcome the festival pageant’: a venerable, bearded singer in historical costume greeted the procession from a purpose-built and richly decorated balcony, surrounded by other great artists from Nuremberg’s golden age such as Dürer, Stoß, Martin Behaim and Willibald Pirkheimer, together with male and female ‘patricians’. 108 If the free imperial cities were invoked as examples of a liberal civic society, the Middle Ages also offered visions of imperial and religious glory. The album commemorating the ‘first truly German’ festival of 1845 depicts the medieval emperor Friedrich Barbarossa seated in a cave. Apparently he has just awoken from the sound of a male choir gathered on a hill above his abode. In front of the emperor stands a minnesinger  –  possibly Walther von der Vogelweide who is allegedly buried in Würzburg  –  and draws his attention to the singers who display their banners and swear  –  or sing  –  a solemn oath, while the genius of art hovers above them.109 In the last line of the poem that explains the allegory, Barbarossa leaves his cave, a sure sign of the imminent restoration of the German Empire. Representations of medieval themes were not restricted to ephemeral media such as prints, pictures or banners. The festival halls in Regensburg (1847), Nuremberg (1861) and Dresden (1865) derived their grandeur from the use of neo-Gothic ornaments, turning the secular constructions into a pseudo-sacred space appropriate for the celebration of the highest national and artistic values.110 This use of a ‘national’ style was indebted to the contemporary completion and restoration of medieval cathedrals, projects of great symbolic value for a nation that tried to recapture its pre-Reformation unity. The historicist message of the Dresden festival hall was heightened by the banners that decorated the building within. Some depicted composers and poets Helden Festen in Walhallas goldnem Saale, da erwachte in der Hörer Herzen des Kampfes wilde Lust.’ 107 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, p. 7. 108 8. Deutsches Sängerbundesfest Nürnberg 1912: Der Festzug (Nuremberg, [1912]), n.p. 109 The image is reproduced in Friedhelm Brusniak, ‘Nationalbewegung und Sängerstolz: Das erste deutsche Sängerfest in Würzburg 1845’, in Musikpflege und Musikwissenschaft in Würzburg um 1800: Symposiumsbericht 1997, ed. Ulrich Konrad (Tutzing, 1998), p. 43. 110 Barbara Stambolis, ‘Religiöse Symbolik und Programmatik in der National­ bewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld konfessioneller Gegensätze’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 82 (2000), pp. 157–89.

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in semi-classical garb, including Mozart, Körner, Weber and Mendelssohn; some represented allegories of German regions and rivers; a third group was devoted to the various branches of art, such as folk song and church music. The heroic past was invoked with the figures of ‘Sage’ (legend), a blind woman with bowed head plucking the strings of a harp, and ‘Heldenlied’ (heroic song), a rare male allegory among the traditionally female figures. The picture of a warrior with sword, shield and spear, holding a lion-headed harp in his left hand, was explained as follows in the festival album: Heroic song is the most ancient and greatest product of folk poetry  … Only the heroic deeds from the earliest times of a people, when all its members were still closely connected through language, customs, thought and deed, as well as fully conscious of this common ground, could provide the material for the true heroic song.  … Only exceptional, virile people called to a grand fate have heroic songs.111 Not surprisingly, the commentator regarded only the Greeks and the Germans as sufficiently heroic to produce epic poetry, exemplified in Iliad, Odyssey, Nibelungenlied and Kudrun. The national past also offered the appropriate imagery for the newly created banner of the Deutscher Sängerbund that was consecrated during the festival. The festival booklet explains the significance of the central image: The image depicts an ancient German master of song, clad in white, adorned with a wreath of oak leaves, the left hand resting on his golden harp, the right hand raised as if in enthusiastic exclamation; under the image  … the motto ‘The entire fatherland it must be’ proudly appears. Behind the bard the sea is visible; at the shore a megalithic grave and an old, mighty oak can be discerned. The oak sapling growing next to the harp is to symbolise the hope that our pan-Germany should grow in strength. The megalithic grave, however, admonishes us to educate a brave German generation.112 The image thus combined generic national symbolism  –  the oak  –  and a role 111 Das erste deutsche Sängerbundesfest in Dresden, p. 86: ‘Das Heldenlied ist der älteste und großartigste Ausfluß der Volkspoesie  … Nur die Heldenthaten der ältesten Zeiten eines Volkes, da noch alle seine Stammesangehörigen in Sprache, Sitte, Denken und Thun eng verbunden, sowie von dem Bewußtsein dieser Gemeinsamkeit ganz erfüllt waren, können dem echten Heldenlied seine Stoffe liefern.  … Es können daher nicht anders als hervorragende, kraftvolle, zu großen Geschicken berufene Völker sein, die ein Heldenlied haben.’ 112 Ibid., p. 21: ‘Das Bild stellt einen in weiße Gewandung gehüllten und mit Eichenkranz geschmückten altdeutschen Sangesmeister dar, mit seiner Linken auf die goldene Harfe gelehnt, die Rechte wie im begeisterten Zuruf erhoben; unter dem Bilde  … tritt der Spruch ‘Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein!’ stolz hervor. Hinter dem Barden ist das Meer sichtbar, an dessen Gestade ein Hünengrab und eine alte mächtige Eiche bemerkbar werden. Die zur Seite der Harfe aufsprießende junge Eiche soll ein Bild der Hoffnung sein, daß unser Alldeutschland erstarken werde. Das Hünengrab aber soll eine Mahnung sein, ein wackeres deutsches Geschlecht heranzubilden.’

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4.2  The banner of the Deutscher Sängerbund, consecrated at the DSB Festival in Dresden in 1865. It combines standard national symbols (the German oak) with references to the past (bard, megalithic grave) and a quotation from the patriotic song Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland.

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model from the past  –  the ancient German ‘bard’  –  with a modern political slogan from Ernst Moritz Arndt’s ever popular Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland which was sung several times during the Dresden Festival. As the century progressed, the festival pageants, which had started as simple processions of the participants, changed into historical showpieces of increasing elaboration and highly charged symbolism. As in the Dresden festival hall, different types of song such as love song, spring song and drinking song were dramatised in the style of tableaux vivants on horse-drawn floats. Two themes are especially noteworthy from a nationalist perspective: the depiction of the ‘ancient Germans’ and the references to the ‘Wars of Liberation’, symbolising the ‘invented’ and the ‘real’ origins of the male choir movement. At the Breslau Festival in 1907 the ‘song of war’ tableau displayed the full mythological inventory: A couple of valkyries rode ahead of the float on unsaddled horses, very impressive brothers of Brünnhilde’s steed Grane. Of course, the dignified … The float amazons were in fact dashing young men from Breslau.   suggested a mighty rock where eagles and ravens nested. Wotan and Freya were enthroned upon it.  … Next to Wotan’s feet a sacrificial altar was erected, and before that a terrible two-tailed lindwurm crouched, afraid of no Siegfried.113 Untroubled by this instance of cross-dressing for patriotic purposes, the commentator P. Daehne is carried away with patriotic frenzy by this image of ancient German strength, waxing lyrical about the ‘true sons of Teut, lords of the forest, not yet broken by Charlemagne’s iron fist,  … the true blond champions, hunters of the aurochs, club-wielders, aroused by the songs of the sacred bards, worshippers of love’. 114 However, even a staunch patriot like Daehne discovered a humorous side in this Teutonic display, speculating about the drinking capacities of the wild forefathers and comparing the lindwurm unfavourably to the firebreathing monster of the Parisian Opéra. For the ‘patriotic song’ a theme from the more immediate past had been selected: Queen Luise of Prussia, Germany’s ‘national patron saint’, was surrounded by maids of honour and accompanied by men dressed up as heroes from the Wars of Liberation: the poets Körner and Arndt as well as the Prussian military leaders Gneisenau, York and Blücher. The Nuremberg festival pageant five years later featured a similar float: under a motto borrowed from the song Aufruf (Rallying cry) by Theodor Körner the float showed 113 Daehne, ‘7. Deutsches Sängerbundesfest in Breslau’, p. 634: ‘Vorweg eilten ein paar Walküren auf ungesattelten Pferden, sehr stattlichen Brüdern des Brünnhilderosses Grane. Die würdigen Amazonen waren natürlich in Wahrheit in paar schneidige Breslauer Jünglinge.  … Der Wagen stellte einen mächtigen Felsblock dar, auf dem Adler und Raben nisteten. Wotan und Freya thronten darauf.  … Zu Füßen Wotans erhob sich ein Opferaltar, und über diesem züngelte ein doppel-geschwänzter fürchterlicher Lindwurm, der sich vor keinem Siegfried zu fürchten schien.’ 114 Ibid.: ‘richtige Teutsöhne, Waldherrscher, noch ungebrochen durch Karls des Großen Eisenfaust  … die wackeren blonden Recken, die Urochsenjäger, die Keulenschwinger, die vom Gesang der geweihten Barden Inflammierten, die Minnehuldiger’.

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4.3  A float from the pageant at the DSB Festival in Nuremberg in 1912. Its mixture of ‘Germanic’ and Napoleonic elements symbolises the belligerent spirit of the male choir movement.

a monumental statue of Germania, the allegory of Germany, displaying ‘lyre and sword as symbol of patriotic song’, again a reference to Körner’s influential collection.115 She was surrounded by young girls costumed as Germanic priestesses tending to a sacrificial altar, and the entire float was decorated with ‘Nordic’ and Germanic motifs in blue and gold, allegedly the favourite colours of the ancient Germans. The float was accompanied by heroes from the Wars of Liberation on horseback; the group was rounded off with ‘war volunteers’ in Napoleonic costume. Even by the standards of the age, the Nuremberg pageant  –  designed by professional artists and equipped by a Munich-based purveyor of historical costumes  –  shows a dazzling syncretism of historical set-pieces, calculated to rouse patriotic pride amongst the spectators. The choice of the Wars of Liberation theme was especially adequate because the warrior-musician, who was equally able to handle the lyre and the sword, remained the principal ideal of the German singers throughout the nineteenth century.116 This ideal of masculine courage and belligerence goes some way to explain the historicist texts selected for large-scale choral works. Songs that were performed by a group of Vikings or Teutonic tribesmen allowed the singers to present themselves as the warrior-heroes they would have liked to be, albeit in historical role-play rather than in their everyday selves as accountants, civic servants or school teachers. Such historicist choral works never replaced the straightforward patriotic songs, such as Die Wacht am Rhein or Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland, where the singers stood for themselves and represented the community of contemporary Germans. However, they offered a welcome element of diversity on the concert and festival programmes, where they often featured as the centrepiece. 115 8. Deutsches Sängerbundesfest Nürnberg 1912, n.p. 116 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , pp. 4–6.

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The repertoire sung by the Academic Male Choir of Munich at a concert in 1864 gives a fairly representative sample of programming from one of the more ambitious choirs, its favouring of local composers notwithstanding:117 Title

Composer

Poet

Hymne an die Musik

Vincenz Lachner

Sternau

Nachtlied

Conradin Kreutzer

August Mahlmann

Das deutsche Lied

Friedrich Schneider

Stoltze

Außen und innen

Bernhard Mettenleiter

Franz von Kobell

Husarenlied

Georg Kremplsetzer

Nikolaus Lenau

Drei Volkslieder (from op. 41)

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Heinrich Heine

Frühlingslandschaft

Julius Otto

Carl Gärtner

Das Dichtergrab am Rhein

Ferdinand Möhring

Julius Mosen

Auf dem See

Franz Abt

G. Franke

Siegesgesang aus der Hermannsschlacht

Franz Lachner

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

The programme featured staple topics of choruses for male voices, such as folk songs (Mendelssohn), soldier songs (Kremplsetzer), praise of music (V. Lachner, Schneider), nature songs (Kreutzer, Otto, Abt), but the final work by court music director Franz Lachner represented without doubt the pièce de resistance of the 117 Georg Leidinger, Geschichte des Akademischen Gesangvereins München, 1861–1911 (Munich, 1911), pp. 278–9.

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evening: it depicted a historical situation, was longer than the other works and required a brass band for accompaniment. With their balladesque structure and wider scope of expressive topics, such narrative poems on historical events met a demand for longer works with higher artistic aspirations, a reaction to an aesthetic dilemma that haunted the male choirs from their very beginnings. The movement struggled to balance the demands of social inclusivity and artistic elitism to a greater extent than the other movements engaged in music as a social art.118 Therefore the following discussion of selected choral works with historical themes will first have to outline this balancing act between patriotic relevance and stylistic developments. The limitations of the genre, such as a narrow overall range and a uniform sound, were admitted even by the earliest advocates of the male choirs, especially in comparison with the musically superior mixed choirs.119 Frequently the singers had difficulties to defend the artistic merits of their humbler art; instead they fell back on the social and national justifications outlined above. Therefore the balance of musical and socio-political goals had to be constantly renegotiated. One participant in the early movement formulated a compromise, arguing that choral festivals became an agent of national unification only by virtue of their artistic quality.120 Others were unwilling to concede even that much. Philipp Spitta, today mainly remembered for his biography of J. S. Bach, saw the genre’s dilemma clearly: One should never judge male choir festivals and the compositions written for these festivals, or indeed the majority of all choruses for male voices, without taking into consideration that they were, so to speak, an emotional outcry of a nation that was again and again disappointed in its dearest wishes and fondest hopes.  … To many it may appear like a degradation of pure art if it should be permissible to tie the impact of a song to other, extra-musical conditions. However, this attitude can justly be countered with one whose ideal is the harmonious development of all the strengths of a nation.121 Spitta thus expressly demanded that choruses for male voices should be exempt 118 Garratt, Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner, p. 87. 119 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , pp. 137–8. 120 Die Feier des Norddeutschen Sängerfestes in Lübeck am 30sten Juni und 1sten Juli 1844 (Lübeck, 1844), p. 49. 121 Philipp Spitta, ‘Der deutsche Männergesang’, in Musikgeschichtliche Aufsätze (Berlin, 1894), pp. 319–20: ‘Nicht nur die Männergesangsfeste, auch die für diese geschaffenen Compositionen, ja man darf sagen, die Mehrzahl sämmtlicher Männerchöre überhaupt sollte man nie beurtheilen, ohne sich lebendig vorzustellen, daß sie gleichsam ein Ausruf waren, durch welchen ein Volk seinem Empfinden Luft machte, dem die theuersten Wünsche und goldensten Hoffnungen immer aufs neue versagt und unerfüllt blieben.  … Daß es vollends zulässig sein soll, die Wirkung eines Liedes zum Theil auch an andere, außerkünstlerische Bedingungen zu knüpfen, mag noch immer vielen als eine Erniedrigung der reinen Kunst erscheinen. Dieser Ansicht darf sich aber wohl mit gleicher Berechtigung eine andere entgegenstellen, deren Ideal eine harmonische Entwicklung aller Kräfte einer Nation ist.’

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from the demands of aesthetic autonomy, though he was in principle willing to concede some musical relevance to the genre. Most professional music journalists shared this attitude only to a certain degree and lost interest in the male choir movement as an artistic phenomenon as the century progressed. While the Würzburg Festival of 1845 was reported extensively and on its musical merits in the specialist journals, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik refused to print an account of the Nuremberg Festival only sixteen years later, since ‘the musical significance of those days is so secondary that we feel occasioned to set aside an original report submitted to us.’122 Henceforth the NZfM ignored the larger festivals and at best covered provincial concerts in its regional news. The attitude of the professional champions of pure art is summed up in a heartfelt groan published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung after the invitation to Munich 1874 had gone out: ‘If not the “united fatherland” had forever to be invoked for such festivals, and if they would understand that art has nothing to do with politics! The great festivals have never done anything fruitful for art, they have rather debased it!’123 At a time when the male choir movement tried to reassert its relevance as a valuable contribution to German musical life, this was a damning indictment. One of the reasons for this gradual alienation of male choruses and the mainstream musical development was the formers’ original intention as a popular, widely accessible a cappella genre that sat comfortably within the confines of Gebrauchsmusik. The basic model for two tenors and two basses, set in strophic form with emphasis on melodic linearity and straightforward harmonic progressions, enjoyed the greatest popularity and circulation. Since musical education in Germany did not encourage countertenors, the overall range normally did not exceed two octaves, and in order to cater for musical amateurs the tenor parts were normally notated in transposed treble clef, not the C4-clef still used for operatic scores. Amongst the composers who defined this simple musical language was Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860), music teacher, church musician and university music director in Tübingen. Silcher was strongly influenced by the pedagogical ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Nägeli and intended his arrangements of folk songs as well as his original choral settings for the education of musical amateurs.124 Otto Elben significantly discussed Silcher in a section entitled ‘Das Volkslied’ and extolled him as a collector of traditional songs as well as a composer of such Volkslieder ‘in the fullest sense of the word, tunes which one assumes to have sprung directly from the mouth of the people; simple, moving melodies full 122 ‘Vermischtes’, NZfM 55 no. 6 (2 August 1861), p. 50: ‘[Die] musikalischkünstlerische Bedeutung dieser Tage ist eine so untergeordnete, daß wir einen uns vorliegenden Originalbericht bei Seite zu legen veranlaßt sehen.’ 123 ‘Berichte. Nachrichten und Bemerkungen’, AMZ 9 no. 2 (14 January 1874), col. 28: ‘Wenn doch nicht immer das “geeinte Vaterland” bei allen dergleichen Festen herhalten müsste, und man doch einsehen lernte, dass die Kunst mit der Politik nichts zu thun hat! Die grossen Sängerfeste haben für die Kunst übrigens noch nie etwas Erspriessliches geleistet, eher sie entwürdigt.’ 124 Friedhelm Brusniak, ‘Silcher, Philipp Friederich’, MGG 2, Personenteil, vol. 15 (Kassel, 2006), cols. 794–8.

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of that tender poetic spirit that cannot be described’.125 Many of his songs became so popular that they were  –  and are  –  circulated without a composer attribution. The chorus Barbarossa, based on a poem by Friedrich Rückert, is a good example for Silcher’s restrained style that effectively supports and gently interprets the text. Rückert’s poem was written in 1816 and published in 1817; it describes Emperor Barbarossa seated in his subterranean palace, his fiery beard grown through the marble table. From time to time he sends out a boy to check whether the ravens are still circling the mountain; as long as they do, he  –  and the Empire whose glory he took down with him  –  will continue their enchanted sleep. According to Camilla Kaul, the author of the most thorough study of the Barbarossa myth, the poem reflects the early-nineteenth-century hopes of reviving the old Empire, but also the sense of disappointment and resignation after the Congress of Vienna.126 Silcher sets the ballad in muted C minor and with dignified, long note values giving the music an archaic look, its dotted rhythms reminiscent of a funeral march. Two of the short stanzas of the poem are merged into one to make the song less shortwinded; in the first half rests separate the individual lines, while the second half gains greater momentum by joining two phrases together. The final line of the text is repeated, a common strategy to add emphasis, though here it is marked piano and ritardando like a forlorn echo (Ex. 4.3). The four-part harmony unfolds slowly and almost reluctantly from the opening unison and does not stray far from the original key, reaching Eb major at the middle of each stanza and adding some harmonic interest with a Neapolitan sixth chord in the penultimate line. At this point the narrow range of the four parts suddenly opens up, with the second basses dropping down to F. The chorus may look inconspicuous but it is carefully crafted, e.g. in the changing distribution of the dotted rhythms that avoid the rigid patterning so common in German poems. The sense of nostalgia and resignation resembles other im Volkston settings like Karl Zelter’s Der König in Thule, and both poet and composer have created an attractive reinvention of a native ballad or Volkslied, adapted for the modern four-part male choir. This accessible musical idiom tempted amateur and professional composers to saturate a growing market with mass-produced settings. Their formulaic folksy, sentimental or brazenly cheerful style was soon dubbed Liedertafelstil and held in contempt by many composers and music lovers. The texts recycled the popular topics of wine, woman and song, nature, spring and fatherland ad nauseam, the blandness of the poetic imagination seeping into the musical settings. Such debasement of the musical language contributed, together with the organisational Vereinsmeierei and the nationalist posturing, to the gradual decline in the perception of male choirs as serious musical institutions. Composers were exhorted repeatedly to return to the simplicity of the folk song arrangements and Biedermeier choruses of the 1830s and 1840s, with Silcher, Conradin Kreutzer 125 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, p. 426: ‘Namentlich hat Silcher selbst viele Volkslieder, und zwar Volkslieder im vollsten Sinne des Wortes, komponirt, Weisen geschaffen, wie man sie dem Munde der Volkskreise unmittelbar entsprungen vermuthen sollte, einfache, rührende Melodien, voll jenes zarten, poetischen Hauches, der sich nicht beschreiben lässt’. 126 Kaul, Friedrich Barbarossa im Kyffhäuser, pp. 103–4.

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Example 4.3  Friedrich Silcher, ‘Barbarossa’, 150 Männerchöre: Gekürzte, verb. Ausgabe d. Ersten Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart, 1940)


   

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stützt, winkt, Jahr,

    

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sich. Zeit. ruht, Berg.



 

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and Mendelssohn setting the standard against which any new composition in the Volkslied style was measured. Emperor Wilhelm II, notorious for his conservative taste, even sponsored a collection of folk song arrangements for male and mixed voices. These so-called Kaiserliederbücher were intended to promote the ‘authentic’ expression of the German spirit of the people, but were not greeted with universal acclaim among the singers who resented the meddling of an imperial dilettante.127 Alternatively, composers consciously embraced contemporary stylistic developments, often pushing the chorus to its technical limits. Some male choir associations, notably the Männergesangvereine of Cologne and Vienna, had grown to more than 200 singers, were led by professional conductors and had attained such a level of proficiency that they could showcase their abilities with virtuosic compositions. A setting of Felix Dahn’s poem Siegesgesang nach der Varusschlacht (Victory song after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest) by Georg Meßner stretched the range from C for the second basses to c'' for the first tenors. Meßner’s composition was a compulsory exercise at the second so-called Kaiserpreissingen in 1903, a competition also founded  –  ironically  –  by Wilhelm II in 1895.128 The competitive spirit fostered by such events was widely deplored in the male choir movement, since artistic rivalries contradicted the ideal of a universal brotherhood in song.129 The division between ambitious associations collecting medals, trophies and  –  worst of all  –  prize money, and less proficient choirs threatened the unity of the singing nation, reproducing the very features of the competitive, class-divided society which the singers had hoped to transcend. The controversy over folk song versus artistic song reached its climax around the turn of the century, the rallying-cry ‘Silcher or Hegar’ effectively dividing the singing community into two camps.130 Few critics were as broad-minded as Karl Thiessen, who prefaced a review of choruses with the following deliberations: In our opinion those works come out on top where a original, creative inspiration can be discerned, whether in the simple parameters of the Volkslied or the larger and more demanding genre of the characteristic art song with its tone-painting.  … [The latter], as a necessary product of its time, has the same right to exist like its elder brother, the simple song. Of course, art should not degenerate into artistry, and technical prowess should not be an end in itself.131 127 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , p. 167. 128 For the aims of the competition see Festbuch zum 2. Gesang-Wettstreit deutscher Männergesangvereine um den von Sr. Majestät dem deutschen Kaiser und König v. Preussen gestifteten Wanderpreis vom 3. bis 6. Juni 1903, Frankfurt a/M. (Frankfurt am Main, [1903]). 129 Elben, Der volksthümliche deutsche Männergesang, pp. 473–5. 130 Adolf Prümers, Silcher oder Hegar? Ein Wort über den deutschen Männergesang und seine Literatur (Leipzig, 1903) actually defends the merits of both traditions. 131 Karl Thiessen, ‘Neue Männerchöre’, NZfM 70 no. 47 (18 November 1903), p. 603: ‘Für uns obenan stehen natürlich Werke in denen eine womöglich eigenartige, schöpferische Inspiration zu erkennen ist, sei es nun im einfachen Rahmen des Volksliedes oder in dem grösseren und anspruchsvolleren des tonmalerischcharakteristischen Kunstliedes.  … [Es] hat genau so gut als ein aus seiner Zeit

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The choruses discussed on the following pages therefore have to be understood as more or less conscious responses to these challenges, with composers trying to make their choruses politically relevant, widely accessible and aesthetically original. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the addition of instruments seemed the natural solution to overcome the limitations of an unaccompanied choir of equal voices. That way the choruses could be expanded in volume, length and complexity, and the orchestral colours relieved the monotony of a cappella singing. For less ambitious choral societies the obvious (and cheapest) solution was piano accompaniment, and doubtless many smaller choirs performed works for chorus and orchestra in such a reduced scoring. A horn quartet produced more varied effects, particularly appropriate for hunting songs or invocations of the German forest. If greater musical forces were required, military bands could readily be drafted in. Regiments were based in many towns and cities, and they often participated in the festival processions anyway or were invited to add greater variety to the concert programmes with marches and overtures. Brassy fanfares and blaring trumpets also adequately underscored the heroic and belligerent attitude of the patriotic repertoire. Franz Abt’s (1819–85) Siegesgesang der Deutschen nach der Hermannsschlacht, op. 267 (1864), on a text by Felix Dahn is a paradigmatic example. Abt’s chorus, which features the Germanic warriors celebrating the victory over the Romans in ad 9, enjoyed considerable popularity, especially after the foundation of the Empire. At the 1882 festival of the DSB in Hamburg, the musicians were able to complete the chorus even when the electrical illumination failed halfway through the piece.132 A glance at the composition shows that this achievement posed no insurmountable obstacles (Ex. 4.4). After an eight-bar instrumental introduction, which sets the tone with energetic dotted rhythms and rising fanfares, the chorus enters in powerful unison outlining the underlying harmony. The first two lines of the text are set as a predictable antecedent–consequent pair, but the treatment of the fourth verse surprises with a sudden drop in dynamics to pianissimo and the anti-metric setting of the iambic ‘auflauschend’. The instrumental accompaniment either simply supports the chorus or continues the rhythmic momentum when the singers rest on long-held notes (e.g. bars 10 and 15). The second stanza repeats the music of the first, while the third introduces a new rhythmical element as the flight of the valkyries and the wrath of the gods are underscored with triplets. In the penultimate stanza Abt departs from the belligerent idiom hitherto employed: in the first half a solo quartet urges the warriors to pay homage to the gods with gently alternating chords. Throughout the 165-bar piece the harmony is solidly rooted in the neighbouring keys of the tonic F# major; only in the final stanza, which returns to the opening musical material, an adventurous harmonic move is introduced when the choir claims that the world will belong to the Teutons, giving the phrase a quasi-religious dignity with a sudden jolt to the submediant. The vocal mit Notwendigkeit hevorgewachsenes Produkt seine Berechtigung wie der ältere Bruder, das einfache Lied. Nur darf selbstverständlich in ihm die Kunst nicht in Künstelei ausarten, die technische Kunstfertigkeit nicht Selbstzweck werden.’ 132 Klenke, Der singende ‘deutsche Mann’ , p. 152.

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Example 4.4  Franz Abt, Siegesgesang der Deutschen nach der Hermannsschlacht (Leipzig, n.d.), p. 267, bars 9–31

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Maestoso, ma con moto.




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14     

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sang;

  

 

   

  

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     26

     




     

   

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211

  

parts are throughout treated in ‘functional unison’, i.e. the choral unison is fanned out into homophonic chords at cadential points for extra emphasis, which makes the piece manageable for a mass choir of several hundred or thousands. Franz Abt, an experienced choral conductor and one of the most successful composers of the male choir movement, had precisely followed the recipe of his colleague Heinrich Adam Neeb: ‘When writing for massed voices one should avoid all artificial designs, write tunefully and thus aim to produce an effect through the power of melody combined with a comprehensible harmony.’133 In order to elicit the desired emotional response from the listeners, technical sophistication and originality were secondary to mass appeal, invoking standard musical formulae of triumph and heroism. The celebration of a Germanic military victory mirrored the heady atmosphere during the unification wars of the 1860s, while the promise of future world domination remained relevant after 1871. The format of the battle song allowed non-combatants to enjoy vicariously the glory of war, with the historical costume glossing over contemporary differences of political opinion about Prussian domination or the greater-German solution. In contrast to the previous example, an orchestra was usually added to increase musical subtlety. Ferdinand Hiller’s (1811–85) pair of choruses Aus der Edda on poems by Etlar Ling were published one year before Abt’s Siegesgesang and incidentally also sung at the 1882 DSB festival, but display greater musical depth as well as a less straightforward political message. The first chorus, Osterfeuer (Easter bonfire), calls the men to assemble around the bonfire. The fire is invoked against deceit and dishonour, then freedom and joy are summoned, culminating in the exclamation: ‘Resurrection must go through forests and people!’134 This call for a resurrection of the peoples and the image of the fires springing up from hilltop to hilltop invoke the celebratory bonfires after the Wars of Liberation. The chorus derives its main musical interest from the interpolation of the hushed repetition 133 Quoted ibid., p. 114: ‘So soll man bey großen Sängermassen alle verkünstelten Gestaltungen meiden, sangbar schreiben, und so durch die Macht der Melodie im Verein mit einer faßlichen Harmonie zu wirken, sich bestreben.’ 134 Ferdinand Hiller, Aus der Edda. Zwei Gedichte von Ellar [sic] Ling (Breslau, [1863]), p. 8: ‘Auferstehen, ja Auferstehen muss durch Wälder und Völker geh’n!’

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of ‘in der Nacht, in der Nacht’ (in the night) at the end of almost every line, giving a vivid impression of the clandestine nocturnal meeting and injecting formal cohesion into the mounting excitement towards the resurrection hymn. The second chorus, Ostara, ostensibly celebrates the (spurious) Germanic goddess of spring with an idyllic four-part chorus in E major and a lyrical tenor solo that describes the beauty of May. The orchestral support enables the composer to interpolate such a change of texture, scoring and atmosphere. Dotted quavers, however, announce the ‘victory’ of Ostara, and the resurrection of the peoples is ushered in with fanfare-like sounds from chorus and orchestra: Ostara komm! Ostara komm! Sieh’, deine Feuer flammen ringsum von allen deutschen Bergen schon! Uns lass auch all zusammen in deines Geistes Gluthen loh’n. ‘Ostara’ jauchzet Alles dann. So bricht der Völker Frühling an! Ostara come! Ostara come! See, your fires burn all around from every German mountain! Let us all together burn in the blaze of your spirit. ‘Ostara’ everybody rejoices. Thus the peoples’ springtime begins! These lines are repeated over and over again, both in fugal writing and choralelike homophony, mixing again energetic dotted rhythms with more gentle strains, though the final invocation of the ‘peoples’ springtime’ is rendered in unremitting fortissimo. What makes the message of this chorus more complex than Abt’s battle song is the relative ideological openness of ‘German resurrection’ and ‘peoples’ springtime’. The nocturnal meeting of a clandestine Männerbund and the ensuing triumphant invocation of a Germanic goddess can be  –  and probably were  –  understood as a celebration of recent German victories and the ‘springtime’ as a foreshadowing of Germany’s future power and glory. However, the emphasis on ‘truth’ and ‘freedom’ in the first chorus Osterfeuer also allows a reading that stresses liberal rather than military values. The expression Völkerfrühling had been coined by the liberal Ludwig Börne with an explicit anti-Metternich slant; it became a slogan of the 1848/9 March Revolution and was given a new lease of life in 1868 through a rousing speech by Joseph Bölk in the Prussian Customs Parliament.135 Furthermore ‘springtime of the people(s)’ invoked all the national and liberal movements in the Vormärz period, including Greece and Poland. The poet’s identity supports such a reading: ‘Etlar Ling’ was the pseudonym for Eduard Wilhelm Baltzer (1814–87), a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, founder of the free Protestant church as well as the vegetarian movement in Germany, who in 1858 published the collection of poems 135 Otto Ladendorf, Historisches Schlagwörterbuch (Straßburg, 1906), pp. 325–37.

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Aus der Edda.136 Hiller himself did not, as far as can be ascertained, suggest a preferred reading for his Eddic chorus. During his early years in Paris, however, he took a lively interest in the ideas of the Saint-Simonians137 and, like Baltzer, he moved in liberal and radical circles during the Vormärz period, meeting Wagner, Devrient and Bakunin. Although his musical style gravitated towards the conservative end of the spectrum after he became music director in Düsseldorf and Cologne, this does not necessarily mean that he relinquished the liberal ideas of his earlier years. Perhaps it is no coincidence that several of his pieces from the 1860s feature a spring theme: his symphony, op. 67, with the motto Es muß doch Frühling werden (1865), Palmsonntagsmorgen, op. 102, for female voices and orchestra (Emanuel Geibel, 1863) and Ostermorgen, op. 134 (Geibel, 1868), for male choir, soprano solo and orchestra. Hiller’s choruses, which are meant to be performed together with an attaca leading from the first to the second, are a step towards the choral cantata and oratorio for male choirs. According to Hermann Kretzschmar, who wrote his Führer durch den Concertsaal when these works were still part of the standard repertoire, it was Max Bruch’s cantata Frithjof, op. 23 (1864), that opened new roads for the genre at a time when it threatened to petrify in idyllic and patriotic still-lives.138 Given that Frithjof became Bruch’s greatest success for male choir it is ironic that he had intended this work initially as a full-length oratorio for mixed choir, several soloists and orchestra. It is based on the epic poem Frithiofs saga (1825) by the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér who had transformed a late-medieval story into an idealised picture of Viking heroism, tempered by modern humanism and romantic interest, which was widely popular.139 Tegnér’s metric variety, faithfully reproduced in the numerous German translations, was attractive for composers; the episodic structure, however, posed serious problems for a continuous narrative. In the course of far-reaching revisions, Bruch reduced the choral forces to male voices and cut all solo roles except for Frithjof and his fiancée Ingeborg, assigned to baritone and soprano respectively, as was common practice for the genre.140 These changes were possibly undertaken when the ambitious choral society Concordia from Aachen expressed an interest in the new work. Bruch and his poetic collaborator Ludwig Bischoff, music critic and editor of the Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung, left little of Tegnér’s original; they shifted lines, interpolated new text and condensed the action into six scenes. The complicated 136 Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, ‘Baltzer, Eduard Wilhelm’, Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 1 (Hamm, 1990), cols. 360–1. I would like to thank Anna Schmitz for identifying ‘Etlar Ling’. 137 Ralph P. Locke, Music, Musicians and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago, 1986), pp. 106–7. 138 Hermann Kretzschmar, Führer durch den Concertsaal, vol. 2: Oratorien und weltliche Chorwerke (Leipzig, 1890), p. 339. 139 Regina Freyberger, ‘Esaias Tegnérs “Frithjof ”. Nordischer Held in germanischem Reich’, in Eddische Götter und Helden, ed. Schulz, pp. 31–58. 140 Paul Mies, ‘Zur Entstehung des “Frithjof, Szenen aus der Frithjofsage von Esaias Tegnér” op. 23 von Max Bruch’, in Max-Bruch-Studien: Zum 50. Todestag des Komponisten, ed. Dietrich Kämper (Cologne, 1970), pp. 46–88.

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prehistory was relegated to a preface in the score, and the cantata closed with the hero’s farewell from home and bride instead of their happy reunion. Thus six loosely connected tableaux remained: Frithjof ’s return; Ingeborg’s bridal procession to meet King Ring; Frithjof ’s revenge and the conflagration of Baldur’s temple; Frithjof goes into exile; Ingeborg’s lament and finally Frithjof on the sea. Bruch consciously avoided the inclusion of a love duet, thus emphasising the isolation of the principal characters and especially Ingeborg. In the second scene, the bridal procession, the contrast between the lone soprano voice and the subdued male choir commenting on her grief is exploited effectively. The chorus has to assume a variety of roles which the audience is expected to recognise from the music alone: the male voices function as the hero’s followers, as ‘the people’ and as priests of the temple of Baldur which Frithjof destroys in the central tableau. As the priests are Frithjof ’s adversaries, Bruch could make their chants as alien and ominous as he wished to, since he was not obliged, as in his oratorio Arminius, to depict pre-Christian religion in a friendly or familiar light. In the third tableau the priests go about their rites under the eerie light of the midnight sun: Mittnachtsonn’ auf den Bergen liegt, blutroth anzuschauen, es ist nicht Nacht, es ist nicht Tag, es ist ein seltsam Grauen. Durch die Schauer der Mitternacht naht schon in der Krone Pracht Helge unser König. Mittnachtsonn’ auf den Bergen liegt etc.141 Midnight sun on the mountain burns, red like blood appearing, and thro’ the strange mysterious light Helge’s train is nearing. Lo, he comes, while the glare is spread, splendid crown adorns his head, Helge mighty monarch. Midnight sun on the mountain burns etc. This short scene, which foreshadows the destruction of the temple and the curse laid on Frithjof, is a good example of how the addition of instrumental forces elevates a very simple chorus  –  tenors and basses are each led in unison, creating a two-part vocal texture  –  onto a higher artistic plane of great dramatic intensity. The key of Eb minor is far removed from the bright C major associated with Frithjof and creates a stark contrast to the depiction of the idyllic Nordic landscape in the first scene (E major) or the subsequent sunrise over the sea (F# major). At first the basses chant alone in solemn declamation, supported by horns, trombones and low strings which create a sacral, ritual aura. At the repetition of the first strain, the bass line is intensified by two simple but highly effective devices: after two bars 141 Max Bruch, Frithjof: Szenen aus der Frithjof-Sage von Esaias Tegnér, op. 23 (Leipzig, n.d.), pp. 21–3. The anonymous English translation again bears witness to Bruch’s popularity in England.

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the tenors follow with an imitation up a fifth, giving the impression of contrapuntal complexity when, in fact, the basses simply lengthen the rests between the phrases to accommodate the tenors (Ex. 4.5). Thus the traditional association of counterpoint and sacred rituals is preserved with minimal elaboration, albeit with a sinister undertone that is reminiscent of the ‘uncanny’ going back to the Wolf ’s Glen scene in Weber’s Freischütz. In addition, the orchestral accompaniment at this point leaves the low register; violins and violas slowly ascend and descend in calm crotchets, opening up the mountain range invoked by the singers. After marked dynamic contrasts all parts unite for the final uttering of the beginning of the text, employing for the first time the full, four-part sound of the male choir. The slow unfolding of cadential suspensions and the Picardie third in the final chord affirm once more the ritualistic atmosphere of the scene. However, it was neither the dramatic conflagration of the temple nor Ingeborg’s touching solos that Ludwig Bischoff singled out as the crowning achievement of the cantata in a detailed review he wrote after the first performance at Aachen on 20 November 1864.142 Bischoff, who did not mention his role in the composition process, particularly enjoyed the final chorus, ‘Frithjof on the sea’, which is based on the so-called ‘Wikingerbalk’, a section from Tegnér’s epos explaining the laws of the Vikings. Three main musical ideas characterise the chorus with its broad rhythms in 3/2 time. First Frithjof gives the basic rule to be constantly alert and armed in sweeping, arpeggiated broken triads accompanied by the brass section, repeated by the four-part chorus. The static triads then give way to a flowing tune expressing the challenge to raise the war-lances and banners, as Frithjof encourages his warriors to look ahead to the battles and victories awaiting them further south. Here Bruch uses the harp and pizzicato strings for a touch of local colour, as the harp was associated with ‘the North’ in general ever since the Ossianic fashion of the eighteenth century. In a third section the forces of a sea storm are invoked, which the Vikings meet with daring and death-defiance. The banner theme restores musical order and brings the chorus to a triumphant conclusion when the theme is augmented and piled high from the low voices upwards, culminating in the triumphant cry ‘Auf, entfaltet die Fahnen!’ (Rise, unfold ye our banners!). Only one contemporary observer, Selmar Bagge from the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, complained that such a triumphant, emphatic finale was hardly an appropriate conclusion of the preceding tragedy.143 Frithjof ’s renewed exile and Ingeborg’s betrothal to an elderly rival should hardly have given cause for joyful exuberance. However, Bruch met the expectations of contemporary singers and audiences. To conclude with a rousing, forward-looking chorus in C major not only complemented the tonal symmetry of the opening chorus, the finale also displayed the male voices to their greatest advantage in their very own domain: the celebration of heroic deeds and military prowess. At this point the narrative distance between the performers and the events of the cantata, hitherto 142 Ludwig Bischoff, ‘Scenen aus der Frithjofs-Sage’, Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung für Kunstfreunde und Künstler 12 no. 50 (10 December 1864), pp. 393–4; no. 51 (17 December 1864), pp. 401–3. 143 S[elmar]. B[agge]., ‘Berichte: Leipzig’, AMZ 3 no. 8 (22 February 1865), cols. 139–41; no. 10 (8 March 1865), cols. 172–3.

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Example 4.5  Max Bruch, Frithjof: Szenen aus der Frithjof-Sage von Esaias Tegnér, op. 23 (Leipzig, n.d.), scene 3 ‘Frithjof ’s revenge. Temple in flames. Curse’, bars 34–52

   T 1, 2     
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es

               

                                           

      

 









               

 

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maintained in the more idyllic and narrative tableaux, collapsed into full-blown identification. The belligerent posturing of the ‘Vikings’ fused with contemporary patriotism and stirred the audience to enthusiastic applause. Compassion with Ingeborg’s grief was superseded by identification with the male group; private sorrow was submerged in the expectation of glory and victory. With this finale Bruch exactly met the Zeitgeist of his audiences who upheld values such as duty and denial of happiness for a greater cause. In combination with a clear and comprehensible musical language, such compliance with middle-class ideals ensured a broad reception throughout Germany well into the twentieth century. Selmar Bagge’s criticism of a lack of genuine inspiration was clearly of no concern to the majority of listeners or performers who found Bruch’s musical language reassuringly familiar, an antidote to the modernist strains and immoral plots of Wagner. Bruch’s compositions thus attest the widely held conviction that tunefulness and simplicity were indispensable for the Volkstümlichkeit required from the male choir movement. Bruch himself fully endorsed this attitude. In response to Hermann Levi’s criticism he replied: ‘A choral work which is intended to be effective with masses and through masses, by itself excludes too great freedom of [thematic] work. Since I have insisted for some years, ever since I have become sane, on tunefulness, I cannot devote the same attention to instrumental filigree.’ 144 This attitude both ensured the mid-term success of his choral works as well as their neglect after the turn of the century. For the younger generation of composers, who had grown up with Wagner’s works, the musical language of Die Meistersinger held a clear promise to integrate the male choir movement into the mainstream of musical progress. Heinrich Zöllner (1854–1941), who was practically born into the movement since his father Carl was another prolific composer of part-songs, clearly emulated the Bayreuth master: he wrote the libretti of his music dramas himself, used a heavily alliterating text for the oratorio Bonifacius mentioned above and paid particular tribute to Wagner in his chorus for male voices and orchestra Jung Siegfried, op. 14 no. 2 (1882).145 The choice of Siegfried is not surprising, since the blue-eyed, blond and boisterous hero was a particular favourite in new Empire, his popularity furthered by his prominent role in Wagner’s Ring. As the very embodiment of youthful strength and idealism he seemed the perfect hero of the young nation state with its optimistic aspirations to a positive national identity and ‘a place in the sun’. However, Zöllner’s choice of a poem by Heinrich Heine to pay homage to Wagner  –  who saw in Heine everything he did not like about ‘the Jews’  –  is certainly curious. Most composers preferred Ludwig Uhland’s poem Siegfrieds Schwert (Siegfried’s sword) if they wanted to invoke the most German of heroes: 144 Letter to Hermann Levi, 21 January 1867, published in Uwe Baur, Max Bruch und Koblenz (1865–1867): Eine Dokumentation (Mainz, 1996), p. 107: ‘ein Chorwerk, welches mit Massen und durch Massen wirken soll, schließt von selbst übermäßige Freiheit der Arbeit aus. Da ich seit einigen Jahren, seit ich zurechnungsfähig bin, den Hauptnachdruck auf die Melodik lege, so ist es mir schon deshalb unmöglich, dieselbe Aufmerksamkeit der instrumentalen Filigran-Arbeit zuzuwenden.’ 145 Heinrich Zöllner, Jung Siegfried: Gedicht von Heinrich Heine für Männerchor und Orchester mit Benutzung von Motiven aus Richard Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’, op. 14 no. 2 (Leipzig, [1882]).

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Uhland’s idyllic depiction of Siegfried’s forest childhood is less ambiguous than Heine’s irritating blend of seriousness and irony. In six stanzas Heine compares Germany to Siegfried who is still an infant nursed by the sun, brawling with the neighbourhood children, beating them with an oak tree and breaking his sword for sheer strength. However, at some point the grown-up Germany will be like Siegfried, kill the ugly dragon and take possession of the golden crown of the Empire.146 Within Heine’s output this poem is quite problematic. The year of its creation, 1840, points to the Rhine crisis as a likely source of inspiration. Despite his generally sceptical attitude towards German nationalism, Heine expressed his hopes for Germany’s future greatness in other writings of the early forties, which make the contextualisation of Deutschland! within that particular surge of patriotic feeling quite likely.147 However, Heine treats the heroic Siegfried with typical ironic detachment, e.g. in the opposition of milk and fire nourishing the infant or the description of the young hero as a ‘täppisches Rieselein’ (a clumsy little giant) who beats his enemies ‘windelweiche’ (literally ‘as soft as nappies’). To describe Siegfried as ‘junger Fant’ (approximately ‘young jackanapes’) is not very flattering either, particularly if the following line ‘von dem wir singen und sagen’ (of whom we sing and say) resonates with the Christmas carol Vom Himmel hoch. Even the emphatic reference to the crown jewels in the final lines sounds ambiguous  –  what use could the imperial crown have on such a head? In his setting of the poem, Zöllner completely and almost wilfully ignores Heine’s irony; for him the image of the not-so-noble savage must have accorded quite well with the boisterous Siegfried from the first act of Wagner’s music drama. While he composed Jung Siegfried Zöllner was director of music at the University of Dorpat (Tartu, Estonia), where different languages and nationalities vied for dominance. Thus he might have preferred positive identification with the German national hero to Heine’s ironic distancing. As a special tribute to Wagner he obtained permission from Wagner’s publisher Schott in Mainz to quote several motifs from Der Ring des Nibelungen. The first three stanzas, however, are set to music without any direct reference to the Ring. It is only when the name Siegfried is actually mentioned that Zöllner employs the first leitmotif: the tempo becomes ‘breit und herrlich’ (broad and glorious) in order to accommodate Siegfried’s horn call. After this Zöllner breaks up the motif and uses its first bar as an accompanying figure that is easily repeated and transposed. The next quotation is triggered by the mentioning of ‘sword’, underlined with the melody associated with ‘Nothung, Nothung, neidliches Schwert’. The horn call resumes its activity in the triumphant last stanza, where Zöllner has reserved the transition to the final climax for the last and most significant reference: the ‘Sword motif ’ played very emphatically by the combined horns and trombones. As the remainder of the poem deals with ideas alien to Wagner’s Ring the composer does not introduce any new motifs; not even Zöllner dared to conflate the crown of the Holy Roman Empire with the Rhinegold, 146 For a translation see Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems, trans. Hal Draper (Oxford, 1982), pp. 538–9. 147 See Walter Hinck, Die Wunde Deutschland: Heinrich Heines Dichtung im Widerstreit von Nationalidee, Judentum und Antisemitismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 176–81.

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though this might have been a logical connection for many listeners. Wagner’s reaction to Jung Siegfried is not recorded; as the piece is dedicated to him, he will not have been able to ignore it entirely, but it is unlikely that he enjoyed such a recycling of his musical material even for the sake of greater popular impact. That the genre lent itself to more subtle transformations of Wagner’s musical language is exemplified by Fritz Volbach’s (1861–1940) work Am Siegfriedbrunnen, op. 31, for male choir and orchestra after a poem by Philipp See. Volbach composed the work for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Liedertafel in Mainz in 1905, at a time when the idea of heroic death seems to have exerted a particular fascination on him.148 The subtitle ‘Ein Stimmungsbild’ (An atmospheric painting) summarises exactly the composer’s approach to the story of Siegfried’s betrayal and death at the hand of Hagen. Volbach is more interested in recreating the atmospheric quality of selected Ring scenes rather than literal quotations of musical material. The first three stanzas of the poem describe the quiet forest at sunset with murmuring springs and softly rustling trees. In the orchestral introduction, Volbach sets the scene with sustained pedal notes on B, firmly anchoring the main key B major  –  the dominant key of the Waldweben from Act 2 of Siegfried. Muted strings create a softly oscillating rhythmic continuum, while the main melodic interest is assigned to the ‘Waldhorn’, the instrument of the romantic forest. Suspended ninth chords and some harmonic progressions remind strongly of Wagner, but the similarity to the Waldweben is apparent without any literal allusions. The second section of the composition is devoted to the sounds of the approaching hunt, a genre much exploited by choruses for male voices, but Volbach adds some eerie touches to the well-worn formulae of hunting horns and galloping horses. Just as the hunt arrives, Volbach translates the wild cheer of the horsemen into disjointed musical configurations, before ‘Siegfried der Held’ is greeted with bright fanfares. Rather than as a hunter and warrior, See and Volbach present him as the very image of ‘fairest grace of happy youth, transfigured by love’ with throbbing triplet chords hovering around the key of F# major.149 Interestingly the closest match for this tone-painting is not the operatic Siegfried in his encounters with Brünnhilde, but the love scene between his parents Siegmund and Sieglinde, invoked perhaps by the similarity of the line ‘des Lebens wonnigster Mai’ (life’s most blissful May) with ‘Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond’ from Die Walküre. The following passage destroys the idyllic image, and tremolos, tritones and rolling timpani spell out the imminent danger posed by the ‘grim man with the pale face’ (der finstere Mann mit bleichem Gesicht). The poem does not name the villain, but Volbach identifies him through musical means by alluding to Wagner’s Erda motif, signalling that fate is about to strike, and linking the scene with ‘Hagen’s Watch’ from Götterdämmerung through the use of the Tristan chord. After a sforzando outcry musical silence falls. Volbach depicts Siegfried’s 148 Axel Beer, ‘Fritz Volbach  –  ein wilhelminischer Komponist’, in Fritz Volbach (1861– 1940): Komponist, Dirigent und Musikwissenschaftler, ed. Klaus Hortschansky (Hagen, 1987), p. 118. 149 Fritz Volbach, Am Siegfriedbrunnen: Ein Stimmungsbild für Männerchor und Orchester, op. 31 (Leipzig, 1906), p. 20: ‘holdeste Anmut seligster Jugend, von Liebe verklärt’.

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death ‘wie im Volkston’ (like a folk song), using an unaffected four-part a cappella idiom, the third phrase repeating the music of the first (Ex. 4.6). Although the image of the little flowers, reddened with the hero’s blood, is hardly original, the composer avoids the cliché by suffusing the folk song with discordant elements like suspensions, such as the clash of b and a on ‘Blut’, and harsh passing notes. The laconic statement ‘den bittern Tod’ with its hammering rests replaces the trite verse repetition one would normally expect after the evaded cadence in bar 138. Significantly a contemporary critic singled out this section for special praise: ‘[The piece] demonstrates everywhere the hand of a virtuosic musician, but at the central climax of the entire work  … it shows something which means much more: a true, heart-rending folk sound.’ 150 For once, a composer seems to have squared the circle of synthesising the popular idiom with modern artistic developments for added expressiveness. For the final stanza that describes the sleeping forest, Volbach returns to the Waldweben of the beginning, thus creating a static frame of natural imagery for the inner dramatic section. There is more to this decision than the desire to create a rounded form. The return of the forest idyll reminds the listeners that the events they ‘witnessed’ happened only in the imagination of the narrating choir. The third stanza states this distance explicitly: Und traumverloren lausche ich dem stillen Waldesweben, und vor dem Geiste reget sich ein wunderseltsam Leben.151 And lost in dreams I listen to the silent sounds of the forest, and in my imagination stirs a strange, wonderful life. Thus the arrival of the hunt, Hagen’s deadly blow and Siegfried’s death do not ‘really’ happen within the poem. The choir has narrated and the audience has listened to events that took place in a long distant past. Only the forest preserves the memories of the ancient heroes, and modern man has to listen closely and carefully to decode the old stories hidden in the sounds of nature. The little pun on the word ‘Quelle’, meaning both ‘well’ or ‘spring’ and (literary or historical) ‘source’ was probably not lost on Volbach. After all he was not only a composer and conductor but also a scholar who organised, in collaboration with Friedrich Chrysander, the Handel Festivals in Mainz and who was one of the pioneers of Handel performance.152 To him the futility of any attempt to bring the past back to life, whether the original sounds of Handel’s operas or the German heroes of yore, must have been a painful reality. In contrast to compositions such as Abt’s 150 Quoted in Beer, ‘Fritz Volbach  –  ein wilhelminischer Komponist’, p. 118: ‘Es verrät überall die Hand des virtuosen Musikers, am inneren Höhepunkt aber des Ganzen  … etwas, das mehr bedeutet: einen wahren, ans Herzen greifenden Volkston.’ 151 Volbach, Am Siegfriedbrunnen, pp. 9–10. 152 Fritz Volbach, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes (Mainz, 1956), pp. 51–5, 71.

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Example 4.6 Fritz Volbach, Am Siegfriedbrunnen: Ein Stimmungsbild für Männerchor und Orchester (Leipzig, 1906), bars 130–40


 T 1, 2   130

B 1, 2

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  137
     



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Siegesgesang nach der Hermannsschlacht or Zöllner’s Jung Siegfried, Volbach’s work does not offer an easy identification with the victories of battles past. Needless to say the continuity of nature and the German spirit is still there, Volbach does not deny this fundamental assumption of nineteenth-century nationalism. However, he does not force his reading onto the listeners or the singers, but invites them to reflect on the distance between past and present. In this sense Am Siegfriedbrunnen comes full circle to Friedrich Silcher’s Barbarossa chorus of almost three generations earlier: history is not being relived but rather recreated by invoking the sounds of nature and of the Volk. Historicist distancing prevents facile identification with the past, highlighting the fragility and constructedness of the national identity thus created. Though Abt, Zöllner and Volbach were widely esteemed within the choral movement and amongst musical amateurs, the organisers of festivals or anniversaries frequently sought contributions from composers who had made their name outside the movement. Like Mendelssohn’s invitation to the Cologne Festival of 1846, such commissions were motivated by a desire to bestow artistic dignity on the participating singers and to demonstrate to its detractors that the male choir movement did in fact engage with  –  or even actively contribute to  –  the most recent developments in the wider field of music. From this perspective it is significant that both Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss wrote large-scale choruses for male voices and orchestra that were performed at prestigious events, and both selected historical topics that fed into the construction of a national

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identity for the singing German  –  or Austro-German  –  men. Their obvious compliance with contemporary tastes and political agendas has made both Bruckner’s Helgoland (1893) and Strauss’s Bardengesang (1905) outsiders in the composers’ œuvres which cause their modern admirers considerable discomfort, if not outright embarrassment, because they would prefer it if the composers had not curried favour with the ephemeral Zeitgeist  –  though of course in the 1890s and 1900s it was by no means foreseeable that ebullient nationalism was a passing fashion. At the time of their conception the works were likewise controversial, though less for their content than for their relentless pushing of the limitations of the choral and orchestral forces. Bruckner’s fame as a composer actually began to spread beyond the town of Linz with the 1865 premiere of Germanenzug for male voices and military band, based on a poem by the Austrian poet August Silberstein. The chorus was his first work to be printed and remained popular with male choir associations well into the early twentieth century.153 After this success Bruckner quickly composed two more patriotic texts by Silberstein for his Liedertafel Frohsinn, but upon moving to Vienna in 1868 he stopped conducting male choirs. However, as late as 1880 he inquired with Eduard Kremser, the musical director of the prestigious Wiener Männergesangverein, for the position of second conductor, explicitly referring to the warm reception he and the Austrian singers had received at the Nuremberg Sängerfest of 1861.154 Thus it is likely that he felt flattered when in 1893 he was asked to contribute a chorus for the fiftieth anniversary of the Vienna MGV. Again he drew on a poem by Silberstein, perhaps in remembrance of their fruitful collaboration thirty years earlier. The content of Helgoland has all the ingredients for a varied and attractive composition: first the wild island in the North Sea is threatened by a Roman invasion; then the scared inhabitants fervently entreat ‘all-father’ to protect their island by sending a storm, which as requested breaks loose, unleashing all the forces of the orchestra; and after the destruction of the Roman fleet the tonality breaks through from G minor to G major, culminating in a hymn of thanksgiving.155 Interestingly at this point Silberstein substitutes the Christian-Austrian appellation ‘Herrgott’ (Lord God) for the previously used pagan ‘Allvater’ (all-father), bringing the poem to a Christian-sounding conclusion. Given Bruckner’s sincere devotion to the Catholic faith, it is not surprising that the religious passages resonate with his sacred works and his hymn-like symphonic finales. The relevance of the isle of Helgoland to the Viennese is less obvious. Silberstein’s poem had been published in the collection Mein Herz in Liedern as early as 1868, but at the end of the century Helgoland was actually very topical, since it became part of the German Empire in 1890 after having been a British 153 Alexander L. Ringer, ‘Germanenzug bis Helgoland: Zu Anton Bruckners Deutschtum’, in Bruckner-Probleme: Internationales Kolloquium 7.–9. Oktober 1996 in Berlin, ed. Albrecht Riethmüller (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 26. 154 Anton Bruckner, Gesammelte Briefe: Neue Folge, ed. Max Auer (Regensburg, 1924), p. 151. Bruckner actually writes 1862, but this must have been an oversight. 155 Anton Bruckner, Helgoland, in Kantaten und Chorwerke, ed. Franz Burkhart, Rudolf H. Führer and Leopold Nowak (Vienna, 1987), pp. 213–76.

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colony for almost ninety years. The integration of such an outpost into the Empire might have been seen as an encouraging sign in German-nationalist circles within the Habsburg Empire who felt increasingly under pressure from the non-German nations. Silberstein had without doubt intended his poem as a commentary on the rift between the German Confederation and the Habsburg Empire after the war of 1866, since German nationalism was an important part of his self-image. He came from a poor Jewish family in the Hungarian town of Ofen, where German language and culture were seen as the key to education and social mobility.156 In Vienna he joined the democratic student movement that in the 1840s emphatically supported the German unification. After the March Revolution he fled Vienna and went to Leipzig, joined the radical gymnasts and socialists, was imprisoned and in 1851 extradited to Austria, where he had to spend another four years in prison. All this did not dent his enthusiasm for the German cause, as demonstrated by his collection Trutznachtigall published in 1859 under the impression of the German Schiller festivals. It could be argued that liberal nationalism and pan-Germanism offered Silberstein an alternative identity that transcended his working-class Jewish origins and allowed him to integrate with the intellectual Viennese circles where pan-German thoughts were very much in vogue. Interestingly, he converted to Protestantism at the very point when Jews were granted full citizen status in 1867; Alexander Ringer suggests that Silberstein might have wished to avoid being considered an opportunist by joining the mainstream Catholic denomination.157 It is therefore all the more ironic that Silberstein’s Jewish background  –  of which he did not wish to be reminded in later years  –  prohibited the National-Socialists from embracing Bruckner’s most ‘Germanic’ choral works Germanenzug and Helgoland as part of their adulation of Austria’s model ‘Aryan’ composer. Despite the rising anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna Silberstein’s background does not seem to have troubled anybody at the work’s premiere in 1893. Despite the long and taxing programme, which featured besides Helgoland two other commissions for the anniversary concert (Friedrich Gernsheim’s Phöbus Apollon and Max Bruch’s Leonidas), Bruckner’s chorus was received with enthusiastic acclaim. The observer from the newspaper Wiener Fremdenblatt was especially taken by the strident, belligerent tones and exclaimed: ‘The singers transform into giant warriors; thunder and lightning, storm and tempests, the sounds of swords and shields riot in this music, Wagner’s ‘Nibelungs’ are harmless dwarfs next to these champions.’ 158 This comment reveals more about the expectations for a large-scale choral work  –  the Viennese singers transforming into ferocious warriors through music  –  than the journalist’s powers of observation, since 156 Wolfgang Häusler, ‘August Silberstein (1827–1900)  –  demokratischer Publizist in der Wiener Revolution von 1848 und Mentor Peter K. Roseggers’, in Jüdische Integration und Identität in Deutschland und Österreich 1848–1918, ed. Walter Grab (Tel Aviv, 1984), pp. 65–121. 157 Ringer, ‘Germanenzug bis Helgoland’, p. 28. 158 Quoted in August Göllerich, Anton Bruckner: Ein Lebens- und Schaffensbild, ed. Max Auer, vol. 4, part 3 (1936) (reprint Regensburg, 1974), pp. 356–7: ‘Da werden die Sänger zu hünenhaften Kriegern; Donner und Blitz, Sturm und Wetter, Schwerter- und Schilderklang tobt in der Musik, Wagners “Nibelungen” sind harmlose Zwerge neben diesen Recken.’

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the islanders actually do not defeat the Romans with their military prowess but with their fervent prayer to the ‘Herrgott’. The fierceness resides mainly in the invocation of the elements, though of course one could argue that the nationalist message is all the more forceful if even the divine powers of nature contribute to the victory of the German cause. Generally the sheer difficulty of the chorus was much admired  –  the first phrase of the first tenors alone spans a wider range than the entire Barbarossa chorus by Silcher  –  but this development was also seen as a cause for concern. Eduard Hanslick used the review of the anniversary celebrations to reminiscence wistfully about the early days of the Vienna Männergesangverein in the 1840s, when the singers sang simple patriotic songs at clandestine trips to the villages of Haimbach and Weidling. Compared with the erstwhile importance of the male choirs, who successfully ducked the censorship of the Metternich era, the artistic achievements of the present paled: I found the forceful expansion of the limitations of male-voice singing problematic and think that, after all these attempts to elevate this branch of music to the highest aims and independent aesthetic relevance, the genre will by its own volition revert to the more humble region which is more agreeable to its nature. Even in the aforementioned recent works of three esteemed masters I cannot see a real gain; they only enforce the wish that the four-part male choir should gradually revert to its home, lyricism, and to the narrower circle of poetic sociability.159 And Hanslick’s colleague Robert Hirschfeld from the Neue Freie Presse warned: ‘This is more a trial of strength than an artwork. The singing founders on the rocks of this awesome piece of music. If this is the future of the male choir, then there is no future.’ 160 However, Bruckner’s ‘symphonic chorus’ was not the end of musical athleticism in the male choir movement. Richard Strauss’s Bardengesang showed what a collision of the modernist symphonic poem with the ethos of the singing German men would sound like. In contrast to Bruckner, who sang with the Liedertafel Frohsinn for more than a decade, Strauss stayed at the fringes of the movement and engaged with it quite reluctantly. It was due to his position as conductor of the Berlin court opera that he became one of the judges of the first Kaiserpreissingen in 1899, and 159 Eduard Hanslick, ‘Das fünfzigjährige Jubiläum des Wiener MännergesangVereins’, in Fünf Jahre Musik (1891–1895): Kritiken, 3rd edn (Berlin, 1896), pp. 252–3: ‘Ich fand die bis zum Zerspringen gewaltsame Ausdehnung der Grenzen des Männergesangs bedenklich und meinte, nach all den Anstrengungen, diesen Musikzweig zu höchsten Zielen und selbstständiger Kunstbedeutung emporzuziehen, werde derselbe doch immer wieder mit eigener Schwerkraft in jene bescheidene Region zurückfallen, die ihm von Haus aus behaglicher und natürlicher ist. Auch in den genannten neusten Produkten dreier geachteter Meister erkenne ich keinen reellen Gewinn; sie bestärken nur den Wunsch, es möge der vierstimmige Männerchor allmählich wieder mehr in seine Heimat, die Lyrik, und in den engeren Kreis einer poetischen Geselligkeit zurückkehren.’ 160 Quoted in Göllerich, Anton Bruckner, p. 357: ‘Das ist mehr Kraftprobe als Kunstwerk. An den Klippen dieses fürchterlichen Tonsatzes zerschellt der Gesang. Ist das die Zukunft des Männergesanges, dann hat er keine.’

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the four-part arrangements for the Kaiserliederbuch likewise belong into the context of duties that he would have found hard to evade.161 Immediately after the competition Strauss composed several a cappella choruses, among them two battle songs which fit neatly into the atmosphere of the Prussian court.162 Since as a juror Strauss would have been familiar with the capabilities of the very best choral associations, and since he mentioned Bardengesang first in a letter to the imperial theatre director in August 1905, when Strauss suggested a dedication to the emperor, it would be obvious to assume such an imperial background. However, the dedication never happened, and the case might be altogether more complicated. With its score for three choirs, full Straussian orchestra with triple woodwind, large percussion section and extra horns and trombones behind the stage, the chorus runs to more than eleven minutes in performance and seems altogether too substantial for a mere reciprocation of imperial favour. The music for Bardengesang appears first in a sketch book of 1903–5 amongst drafts for Salome;163 its instrumental introduction is sandwiched between Salome’s dance and Herod’s reaction to her performance, at first glance a strange combination but, as will be seen, not incongruent with some features of the chorus. Strauss started writing the full score on 6 April 1906 and finished it twenty days later.164 In Die Sängerhalle Ernst Flügel claimed that Strauss had actually been approached to compose the chorus for the DSB Festival in Breslau in 1907,165 which may have been wishful thinking of the male choir movement when the chorus was indeed performed at this event. In the end Bardengesang was dedicated to Gustav Wohlgemuth, a colleague of Strauss in the Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer and an ‘energetic champion of the artistic endeavours of the male choir associations’. 166 According to Flügel the work was first performed by the teachers’ male choir association in Dortmund on 21 November 1906,167 a date supported by a brief note in the Musical Times.168 In the Strauss literature the premiere is  –  wrongly  –  assigned to the Strauss stronghold Dresden on 6 February 1907, perhaps because the composer was present when Friedrich Brandes conducted the Dresden choral association of teachers.169 161 Heiner Wajemann, Die Chorkompositionen von Richard Strauss (Tutzing, 1986), p. 49. 162 Ibid., p. 98. 163 Franz Trenner, Die Skizzenbücher von Richard Strauss aus dem Richard-StraussArchiv in Garmisch (Tutzing, 1977), p. 23. 164 Franz Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik zu Leben und Werk, ed. Florian Trenner (Vienna, 2003), pp. 275–6. 165 Ernst Flügel, ‘Der Bardengesang von Richard Strauß, Op. 55’, Die Sängerhalle 47 no. 1 (3 January 1907), pp. 7–8. 166 Richard Strauss, Bardengesang, op. 55, in Werke für Chor und Orchester (Vienna, 1999), p. 141: ‘Dem tatkräftig für die Ziele der Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer wirkenden Vorkämpfer aller künstlerischen Bestrebungen der Männergesangvereine Herrn Gustav Wohlgemuth zugeeignet.’ 167 Flügel, ‘Der Bardengesang von Richard Strauß’, p. 8. 168 The Musical Times 48 no. 767 (1 January 1907), p. 51. 169 E.g. Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik, p. 287.

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At the Breslau Festival the chorus was the much debated main attraction of the first concert, fitting in neatly with the other large-scale historicist choruses on the programme. The work is based on a text from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s ‘bardic drama’ Hermanns Schlacht (1769) and revisits familiar historical ground: the exultation of the Germanic bards who witness the Roman defeat in the ‘Battle of the Teutoburg Forest’. Its scenario is therefore identical to Franz Abt’s much less demanding Siegesgesang der Deutschen nach der Hermannsschlacht, with the difference that it is not the warriors themselves but the bards who chant the song of praise. The festival chronicler Daehne deplored the fact that only 1,000 singers participated, since Strauss’s publisher had not permitted the choral parts to be printed in the general music book for the festival, but praised the singers for their ‘glorious victory’ in the ‘gross realism’ of the introductory battle which reminded him of Don Quixote’s fight against the windmills in the eponymous tone poem: ‘It is hard to depict the campaign of the wild, half-barbarian peoples under the creaking oak trees of their forests in more naturalistic colours.’ 170 He then drew attention to the admirable development of the ‘Heerruf-Motiv’, a rising fourth which resounds altogether ninety times171 before the piece culminates in the apparition of Valhalla in luminous clouds. The most conspicuous feature of the text is the invocation of twenty-three Germanic tribes which are called into battle by the bards. This passage is regularly ridiculed in the Strauss literature, which altogether finds very little positive to say about the composition. Ernest Newman pronounced that there was no ‘attempt at subtlety in the choral writing; the effects achieved are mostly those of sheer depth and massiveness. The Bardengesang is magnificently barbaric, though it slightly tries one’s gravity as the chorus thunders out the names of the tribes: Ha, ye Cheruscans! Ye Chattees! Ye Marsians! Ye Semnonians!’ etc.172 However, the critic of the premiere suggested that Strauss may actually have been attracted to this very feature of the text, because he was inspired by the ‘dithyrambic momentum of Klopstock’s language’.173 This is quite possible, since Newman omits in his enumeration of tribal names that they are regularly interspersed with the line ‘Ihr festlichen Namen des Kriegsgesangs!’ (Ye names of our heroes whose praise we sing!) Strauss was apparently drawn to this line especially, since he takes the opportunity each time to break into an ecstatic dance whose clashing cymbals reminded Norman Del Mar quite rightly of Elektra’s dance,174 though the dancelike elements may actually be due to the simultaneous conception of Bardengesang with Salome’s dance. There is truly a barbaric exuberance to this song of praise, 170 Daehne, ‘7. Deutsches Sängerbundesfest in Breslau’, p. 666: ‘Veristischer läßt sich schließlich die Heerfahrt der wilden halbbarbarischen Völker unter den knarrenden Eichbäumen ihrer Urwälder kaum ausmalen.’ 171 Wajemann, Die Chorkompositionen, p. 152. 172 Ernest Newman, Richard Strauss (London, 1908), pp. 101–2. 173 Fr., ‘Dortmund, 31. November. Uraufführung des “Bardengesang” von R. Strauss’, NZfM 73 no. 50 (13 December 1906), p. 1000: ‘Strauss dagegen hat sich für den dithyrambischen Schwung der Klopstock’schen Sprache begeistert.’ 174 Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works, vol. 2 (London, 1969), p. 368.

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which is matched by the vivid colours of the orchestral introduction and the individual war cries of the choirs. The hymn-like ending, which like Bruckner’s Helgoland breaks through from minor to the major key, is more problematic in that it raises the perennial question of how Strauss’s excursions into diatonic bliss should be understood. In this respect the choral work recalls the ambiguity of Jochanaan’s utterances in Salome or even more the relentless communal happiness in Friedenstag, which shares with Bardengesang the key of C major. With a composer like Strauss, who excelled in the depiction of the dissonant and deviant, it is hard to believe that this homophonic wallowing in C major is as straightforward as it seems, especially as the finale functions very much as a ‘song without words’. Once the choir has come to the end of the poetic text and proclaimed the praise of Valhalla, there was apparently little left in the sound of the male voice to exercise Strauss’s imagination. The fifty-bar orchestral postlude, where sweeping melodic lines are tossed to and fro between the first and second violins, brings the piece to a close that is musically more satisfactory than the preceding choral passages; and the final utterance of the choir in the last eighteen bars of the piece seem rather perfunctory (despite the strenuous top-note c'' demanded from the tenors), the male voices merely adding one tone-colour among many. If Strauss’s treatment of the chorus, which in places appears as a mere interpolation into a self-sufficient symphonic poem, is rather unorthodox, his choice of text seems self-evident. As ancient ‘bards’, who cheer the warriors to victory, the singers could step into their favourite role as facilitators of national glory. However, Klopstock’s text was a far from obvious choice. Unlike the lost Bardengesang which Strauss wrote in 1886 on the text by Heinrich von Kleist,175 Klopstock’s ‘bardic drama’ predates the nationalist enthusiasm of the Napoleonic Wars. While the poet wished to present an alternative to the prevalent classical mythology by drawing on Germanic and Celtic traditions, he was nevertheless a major influence on the literature of Weimar Classicism. As such he might have been a more attractive choice to Strauss who deeply and sincerely venerated the masters of literary German classicism, especially Goethe, with whom he shared a fondness for all things Greek. In his final contemplations of 19 June 1949 he famously called himself a ‘Greek Teuton’, 176 comparing himself to Goethe and claiming the cosmopolitan composers Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt as his mentors. Thus while he tapped into the general Germanic enthusiasm of his contemporaries  –  and especially the male choir movement  –  for heroic deeds from the ancient past, he rejected the heavy-handed Teutonic approach by presenting them in the classicist garb of eighteenth-century dithyrambic poetry. Thus in Bardengesang the national movement is once more compelled to look back to its beginnings, this time not to its musical origins as simple a cappella choral harmony as in Volbach’s Am Siegfriedbrunnen, but to its roots in eighteenthcentury literature. However ‘magnificently barbaric’ Strauss’s Germanic bards appear on the surface, they cannot deny their descent from the cultural aspirations of the German Bildungsbürgertum. 175 Wajemann, Die Chorkompositionen, p. 23. 176 Richard Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, ed. Willi Schuh, 2nd edn (Zurich, 1957), p. 182.

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Whatever motivated Richard Strauss to set Klopstock’s Bardengesang to music, the short choral work reached a great number of amateur musicians who might not have encountered his music in the context of an opera house or a regular concert hall. The choral movements for mixed and male choirs thus had a pivotal function in German musical life. On the one hand, they mediated between the increasingly detached sphere of the professionally performed ‘great masterworks’ and a wider musical public for whom the social, educational and convivial functions of music remained central to their self-image as educated citizens. On the other hand, oratorios and choral works mediated between academic historiography and the popular celebration of historical heroes and events, and opened them to general identification. Both choral movements were highly conscious of their role in history, including music history, and stylised their own traditions. The mixed oratorio choirs aligned themselves with the tradition of Bach, Handel, Graun and Haydn, and thus fed into the incipient early-music movement; the male choir associations traced their roots back to the even more distant past, the Germanic bards and the medieval Meistersinger guilds. Mixed choirs were less obviously ‘politicised’ due to the participation of female singers and the greater importance of the ‘pure art’ ideology which would have been undermined by an open commitment to the fatherland or national unity. However, their religious or religiously inspired narratives can be read as commentaries on the religious tensions in nineteenth-century German society, especially in the 1870s and 1880s when the rivalry of Protestantism and Catholicism threatened the fragile equilibrium of the young Empire. The singers of the all-male associations, in contrast, considered their musical activities as a direct contribution to the national movement, both through their nation-wide modes of communication and their patriotic repertoire. They chose historical roles to imagine themselves as singerwarriors who fought for the nation with ‘lyre and sword’, and their belligerent posturing can easily be understood as an outlet for pent-up patriotic enthusiasm that could not be spent otherwise. The male choirs’ contribution to the national project, however, was frequently called into question both from inside and outside the movement, and even its advocates admitted that their musical re-enactment of national history fed into the Gefühlspolitik where the educated middle classes felt more at home than in the actual parliamentary or governmental arena. Despite these different aims and strategies, the mixed and male choirs were united by their shared belief in the ennobling and unifying power of music as practiced by amateurs, giving a foretaste of the utopian national community by donning the historical costumes of the German past.

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5 Symphonic Visions from the Periphery

I

f a survey had been conducted among nineteenth-century concert-goers, asking them which musical genre they considered the most typically German, the majority would probably have replied, ‘The symphony’. German-language opera struggled to assert its independence of Italian and French models; choral works were not held in high esteem as aesthetic objects in their own right since they were too closely intertwined with the national festival culture. Symphonic music, in contrast, could boast both a venerable tradition and aesthetic superiority. The latter had been established in the literary writings of the early Romantic school, who regarded large-scale instrumental music without any obvious extraneous function as the ‘purest’ and hence the ‘highest’ of all art forms.1 Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven represented the symphonic heritage; particularly Beethoven’s works became paradigms of both the symphonic and the German, prompting Robert Schumann to open a review of new symphonies with the following observation: When the German talks of symphonies, he means Beethoven; the two names are for him one and indivisible; his joy, his pride. As Italy has its Naples, France its revolution, England its navigation, so Germany has its Beethoven symphonies; the German forgets, in his Beethoven, that he has no school of painting; with Beethoven he imagines that he has again won the battles that he lost under Napoleon; he even dares to place him on a level with Shakespeare.2

Schumann, one hopes, was speaking here with tongue firmly in cheek, which does not preclude the possibility that many of his readers were pleased with the alignment of Beethoven and Napoleon. As the discussion of nationalism versus universalism in the introduction has already indicated, national symphonies or symphonic nationalisms during the second half of the nineteenth century were  –  and sometimes still are  –  habitually seen from the perspective of those non-Austro-German composers who had to find their place in the widely accepted Beethovenian mainstream, while the German tradition could hide its national(ist) leanings under the cloak of universality. In such a ‘universal’ symphony the allusion to historical events or figures could potentially have jeopardised the aesthetic tenets of the highest genre of instrumental music, a difficulty not encountered in the vocal genres discussed in the preceding chapters. In addition the neat pigeon-holing of composers into national traditions is by itself a fraught issue, not least because not all 1 An excellent introduction to the symphonic genre and its aesthetic, formal and institutional issues is provided by Wolfram Steinbeck and Christoph von Blumröder, Die Symphonie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 1: Wolfram Steinbeck, Romantische und nationale Symphonik (Laaber, 2002), pp. 11–18. 2 Robert Schumann, Music and Musicians: Essays and Criticisms, trans. Fanny Raymond Ritter (London, [1880]), p. 38.

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German-born composers can be said to have entered the symphonic ‘mainstream’, while numerous composers of other nationalities contributed to the tradition. The current chapter thus focuses on two composers who entered German culture from its geographical margins and who cannot comfortably be regarded either as ‘insiders’ or as ‘outsiders’. Both Carl Reinecke and Siegmund von Hausegger had to define and negotiate ‘tradition’, whether musical or historical, from an individual and unstable vantage point. In the course of the nineteenth century the public symphony concert emerged as the cultural focus of the urban bourgeoisie throughout the German-speaking countries, and the more formalised type of concert developed by Mendelssohn for the Leipzig Gewandhaus became increasingly the norm, as Rebecca Grotjahn has shown in a detailed study that combines institutional and genre history.3 The former diversity of vocal and orchestral pieces was gradually reduced to the presentation of a few large-scale works of the highest aesthetic pretensions. Concerts of professional orchestras now had to include a complete symphony, though it has to be remembered that the Germano-centric Gewandhaus narrative is to some extent an oversimplification of the continuing variety of concert life in major cities.4 The stabilising institutional framework of concert halls and subscription series encouraged the consolidation of an approved classical repertoire as well as an ever-increasing output of new symphonies, most of which, however, did not leave a mark on the gradually ossifying canon of masterworks that deserved repeat performances. The lack of repertorial survivals has led Carl Dahlhaus to regard the decades between 1850 and the mid-1870s, when Brahms’s First Symphony successfully reinterpreted the Beethovenian model, as a ‘dead era’, a view that in itself is widely accepted as canonic.5 At first glance the ‘dead era’ is confirmed by a certain mid-century anxiety about the future of the genre which resulted in several competitions for new symphonies, all of which failed to make a lasting impression. Dahlhaus’s periodisation has, however, been challenged for its aesthetic exclusivity and because it affords limited insights into the formation of the modern symphonic ‘canon’.6 As Rebecca Grotjahn has demonstrated persuasively, the performance of orchestral novelties was one of the major attractions for the concert-going public. Therefore composers devoted much time and energy to the composition of new symphonies without much hope of joining the established repertoire of the Viennese classics and the Mendelssohn-Schumann 3 Rebecca Grotjahn, Die Sinfonie im deutschen Kulturgebiet 1850 bis 1875: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungs- und Institutionengeschichte (Sinzig, 1998), p. 46 and pp. 102–7, 145–9. 4 For an in-depth study of the changes that concert programming underwent see William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge, 2008). 5 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 265 ff. 6 Siegfried Kross, ‘Das “zweite Zeitalter der Symphonie”  –  Ideologie und Realität’, in Probleme der Symphonischen Tradition im 19. Jahrhundert: Internationales Musikwissenschaftliches Colloquium Bonn 1989, ed. Siegfried Kross (Tutzing, 1990), pp. 11–36.

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generation.7 This was due less to their deteriorating musical standards or lack of originality than to the consumerist expectations of the audience. Nurtured on a balanced diet of approved masterworks and brand-new compositions, works by contemporaries had first and foremost to satisfy the demand for novelty rather than durability. Although the combined pressures of the Beethovenian model, the aesthetic standards of the genre and the expectations of the audiences vexed many aspiring composers, the overall validity of the symphonic enterprise was never questioned, except perhaps by Wagner’s call for the displacement of instrumental music by the music drama. The challenges rather stimulated a general enthusiasm for writing symphonies which was boosted by the conviction that a new work would contribute not only to the venerable national tradition but to human culture in general. This universalist claim was widely disseminated through popular publications like the Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon of Hermann Mendel and August Reissmann: Sonata, symphony, overture etc. are German in the truest sense of the word.  … The main characteristic of German music is that it presents its ideals (meaning not the subjective figments of an exuberant imagination but the summary of essential ideas that simultaneously govern life) in eternally exemplary forms.  … German music has been practiced by our masters as an art exclusively in this sense, and therefore music did not fall under the spell of national restrictions but has become universal  … in the best sense.8 As already discussed in the introduction, this universalism has come under attack  –  notably voiced by Richard Taruskin  –  as a special and rather insidious form of nationalism.9 It is necessary to approach the issue here once more with the specific focus on the symphony and symphonic poem, as the universalist ideology was most pertinent to large-scale (and textless) instrumental music. A tendency to equate serious music with German music was apparent from the start of the nineteenth century,10 and the equation became a birth-mark of music historiography dominated by German-speaking scholars. Hugo Riemann, for example, remarked patronisingly that the overwhelming apparition of Beethoven 7 Grotjahn, Die Sinfonie im deutschen Kulturgebiet, p. 200. 8 August Reissmann, ‘Deutschland’, Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon: Eine Encyklopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften für Gebildete aller Stände, ed. Hermann Mendel and August Reissmann, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1880), vol. 3, pp. 138–9: ‘Sonate, Symphonie, Ouvertüre u.s.w. sind deutsch im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes.  … Dies hauptsächlich ist das charakteristische Merkmal der deutschen Musik, dass sie in ewig mustergiltigen Formen ihre Ideale  –  worunter nicht das subjektive Gebilde einer überschwänglichen Phantasie, sondern die Gesammtsumme der Ideen zu verstehen ist, die zugleich die leitenden und wesentlichen des Lebens sind  –  darstellt.  … Die deutsche Musik ist von unseren Meistern immer nur in diesem Sinne als Kunst geübt worden, und deshalb ist sie nicht nationaler Beschränkung verfallen …, sondern sie ist universell geworden im besten Sinne.’ 9 Taruskin, ‘Nationalism’. 10 Applegate, ‘How German Is It?’, pp. 274–96.

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brought forth the national directions in music, because all those non-German composers who were not able to scale the ‘Beethoven mountain’ were forced into ‘lovely and graceful side valleys’  –  implying that they could not scale the Beethoven mountain because they were not German.11 The ‘universal’ AustroGerman mainstream thus contrasts with secondary ‘national schools’, obstructing the view of a specifically German tradition. It is mainly in the non-German repertoires where instrumental works are expected to exhibit traits of indigenous musical styles, whereas it is considered nonsensical to hunt for traces of folk music in Austro-German symphonies. Conversely, programmatic references to national culture and history or to the native landscape are expected and welcome in non-German instrumental works, for example Bedřich Smetana’s cycle of tone poems Ma Vlast (1874–9) or Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia (1899/1900). Even James Hepokoski’s clear-sighted survey of the symphonic tradition after 1850 states that Mendelssohn’s orchestral works ‘helped to nurture the idea that orchestral music should take a more decisive literary-poetic turn, and it was a simple matter for non-Austro-Germanic composers to adapt such precedents into völkisch evocations of their own homelands.’12 It is not only the term völkisch, normally associated with twentieth-century ideologies of blood and soil, that rings an anachronistic note, but the implication that the poetic-literary evocation of their native country or region should have been unduly difficult for Austro-German composers. The difficulty did not present itself so starkly to nineteenth-century composers, but it is largely inferred by modern musicology which assumes that German composers most ‘naturally’ asserted their national identity in purely musical music. Since they are seen as simply taking possession of their rightful heritage when they compose a symphony as such, asserting German superiority in abstract sound, what added value could they have gained from a patriotic title or national programme? Would they not have violated the autonomy of instrumental music and thus detracted from its claim to universal validity? In practice, the equation of ‘symphonic’ and ‘absolute’ was by no means self-evident, and the majority of Austro-German composers did indeed embrace poetic evocations of history, literature and nature in their instrumental works. While Brahms and Bruckner dominate today’s perception of the symphonic repertoire, from a nineteenthcentury perspective their ‘absolute’ symphonies should not be considered as default models but as conscious commitments to a quite special ideal.13 11 Hugo Riemann, Geschichte der Musik seit Beethoven (1800–1900) (Berlin, 1901), p. 499: ‘[Die] Erscheinung Beethovens mit ihrer imponierenden Größe hat nicht nur die Blüte der musikalischen Romantik, sondern auch die nationalen Richtungen in der Komposition hervorgebracht. Sie drängte alle die Kleinen, welche über diesen Berg hinüber zu kommen nicht hoffen konnten, in liebliche und anmutige Seitenthäler.’ 12 James Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception: the Symphonic Tradition’, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, 2002), p. 430. 13 As Sanna Pederson has pointed out, the loaded term ‘absolute music’ comes to the fore in twentieth-century musicology, though nineteenth-century critics heatedly debated the merits of Brahmsian and Lisztian conceptions of instrumental music.

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It is relatively easy to find explicitly patriotic references in instrumental music of lower aesthetic pretensions and clear-cut function. Military marches revel in patriotic titles, ranging from Wagner’s Kaisermarsch (1871) celebrating Wilhelm I, to more picturesque (but equally politicised) historical topics such as the marches Barbarossa’s Erwachen (Barbarossa’s Awakening) and Kriegsruf der Cherusker (War-cry of the Cheruscans, both 1896) by August Reckling who specialised in such fare. Titles of dances also reflected current affairs, exemplified in Carl Faust’s Germania-Quadrille (1855), Hermann Hirschbach’s waltz Nordischer Heldenreigen (Dance of the Nordic Heroes, 1853) or R. Buskies’s Walhalla-Polka (1857). For a symphony, however, an explicitly patriotic title or programme  –  as opposed to one alluding to history or nature  –  was the exception rather than the norm. In this respect German composers were no different from their Bohemian or Scandinavian colleagues. There are few compositions that state their national agenda as openly as Joachim Raff ’s first symphony An das Vaterland (To the Fatherland, 1859–61). According to Raff ’s preface to the published score, composition was begun after the Treaty of Villafranca between Austria, France and Sardinia-Piemont in 1859, which paved the way for the unification of Italy.14 The reference to Villafranca shows that Raff considered this event a happy omen for those Germans who continued to hope for a unified German state. The main themes of the first movement portray the German national character, defined by Raff as ‘free aspirations’, ‘thoughtful depth’, ‘morality and mild manners’ and ‘victorious perseverance’. 15 The second movement depicts young German men and women in their native landscape, during a hunt in the German forest and in a merry procession around the fields. The third movement extols the joys of domestic bliss in a fairly conventional Larghetto. The fourth and fifth movements reflect more directly current political concerns. In the turbulent fourth movement repeated attempts at a German unification are thwarted by (unspecified) enemies, but in the finale melancholy despondency is gradually replaced by hopes for a triumphant return to national glory. In order to ensure that this narrative does not escape the listener, Raff introduces a popular patriotic tune into the fourth movement, Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland.16 When the symphony was submitted for a composition contest in Vienna, one of the jurors (either Ferdinand Hiller, Carl Reinecke, Wilhelm Ambros, Robert Volkmann or Vincenz Lachner) found the unprepared quotation of a popular and politically charged song somewhat See Sanna Pederson, ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’, Music & Letters 90 (2009), pp. 240–62. 14 Joachim Raff, ‘An das Vaterland’: Eine Preis-Symphonie in fünf Abtheilungen für das grosse Orchester, op. 96 (Leipzig, [1863]). 15 Ibid.: ‘In dem ersten derselben versuchte der Tondichter, freien Aufschwung  –  gedankenhafte Vertiefung  –  Sittigung und Milde  –  sieghafte Ausdauer  –  als bedeutende Momente in der Anlage des Deutschen, welche sich vielfach ergänzen, durchdringen und bedingen, tonbildlich zu schildern.’ 16 For an analytical close-reading of this symphony see A. Peter Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire, vol. 3 part A: The European Symphony from ca. 1800 to ca. 1930: Germany and the Nordic Countries (Bloomington, 2007), pp. 831–42.

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disturbing, which motivated Raff to write his explanatory notes.17 Nevertheless the symphony was awarded the first prize, premiered by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde of Vienna to much acclaim and performed widely in the following years. The critic Louis Köhler praised Raff for portraying the invigorated spirit of the German people and he even detected a musical resemblance between Raff ’s treatment of the song tune and the manifestations of national ideas: ‘The song and its modulatory and combinatorial fate in the symphonic movement resemble our people’s ideal of freedom, which sometimes floats free, sometimes is suppressed, sometimes is anxiously murmured in secret.’ 18 In the long run the musical display of such straightforward patriotic zeal proved detrimental to the canonisation of the symphony. Raff had tried to harness the dignity of the symphonic genre to the highest patriotic values, but he also tied the symphony to a specific political situation, thus undermining its claim to universal validity.19 In contrast to such a concrete programme, more discreet references to the national past, culture and landscape were widely accepted during the second half of the nineteenth century when the symphonic concept itself underwent a change, or rather, when competing concepts emerged. German symphonies, often played by German musicians, had formerly been exported to foreign concert halls along with the more formalised and less miscellaneous type of concert programming that is frequently, though not entirely correctly, associated with the Leipzig Gewandhaus.20 As these cultural centres began to emancipate themselves from German influences, their composers used the symphonic model to create independent traditions, while German composers found themselves increasingly at the receiving end of new developments.21 In addition the German tradition itself divided into two opposing camps that both claimed to be the true heirs of Beethoven: on the one hand the traditionalists who upheld the idea of instrumental music without extra-musical admixtures (or more precisely, music where extra-musical admixtures were not supposed to disturb the musical structure), and on the other hand the new-German School postulating the primacy of poetic expression. The latter term was coined by Franz Brendel to replace the much contested ‘music of the future’ and to embrace all forward-looking contemporary music rooted in the Beethovenian tradition, subsuming Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz under a generously defined notion of German universality.22 Both Hanslick’s and Liszt’s followers were convinced of their rightful ownership of the Beethoven heritage, and thus their relevance for the national mission, while disagreeing whether renewal or transgression of the traditional forms would 17 Helene Raff, Joachim Raff: Ein Lebensbild (Regensburg, 1925), pp. 160–1. 18 Quoted in Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire, p. 842. 19 Steinbeck, Romantische und nationale Symphonik, p. 170. 20 Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste considers London, Boston and other cities besides Leipzig and Vienna. 21 Steinbeck, Romantische und nationale Symphonik, pp. 234–5. 22 For a recent discussion of the origins of the concept see Rainer Kleinertz, ‘Zum Begriff “Neudeutsche Schule”’, in Liszt und die Neudeutsche Schule, ed. Detlef Altenburg (Laaber, 2006), pp. 23–31.

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guarantee continued German superiority.23 The clear-cut division implied here is of course, as Hepokoski argues, ‘a false dichotomy, one forged in the heat of nineteenth-century polemics’ that does not do justice to the complex layering of referentiality in instrumental music.24 Neither does it reflect the pressures actually operating on composers. Despite the controversies that forced them to take sides at least in theory, the majority steered a middle course, retaining the traditional four-movement model but interpreting it in the light of suitable programmatic or poetic ideas. As Wolfram Steinbeck has noted, the majority of popular symphonies from the second half of the nineteenth century had a title or concrete programmatic tendencies, often without jeopardising the standard form or the tradition of the genre, but frequently necessitating a compromise.25 Either the poetic content had to be adapted to fit the symphonic mould, or the extra-musical programme engendered individual formal solutions. Both strategies also had consequences on how clearly the ‘extra-musical’ content or narrative could be projected, and how accurately it was understood by those audience members who made the effort to map their listening experience onto the poetic or programmatic idea. The Hakon Jarl Symphony by Carl Reinecke (1824–1910) and the symphonic poem Barbarossa by Siegmund von Hausegger (1872–1948) clearly represent these different stylistic approaches, which accord with their authors’ professed allegiance to the respective warring factions: Reinecke was one of the signatories of Brahms’s and Joachim’s notorious manifesto of 1860 attacking the ‘progressives’, while Hausegger signals his adherence to a Lisztian ideal of instrumental music by calling his large-scale work a ‘symphonic poem’. In the present context it is thus safe to assume that they approached the compositional task with different priorities, though this does not mean a simplistic adherence to the ideologies of opposing ‘schools’. Despite this difference in attitude and their disparity in age, their careers resemble each other considerably though they took place almost two generations apart. Today mainly remembered as conductors rather than composers, both still belonged to the guild of Kapellmeister-composers before the two professions largely separated in the twentieth century. Both composers entered German culture from its geographical and political margins, from Schleswig-Holstein and Habsburg Austria respectively. Both were thus able to bring a particular perspective to issues of German identity. Nonetheless their musical visions of Germany are strikingly dissimilar, both stylistically and politically. Carl Reinecke was born and grew up in Altona, today a part of Hamburg but during his youth the southernmost  –  and second largest  –  city of Denmark. Altona had belonged to the Duchy of Holstein since 1640 and was therefore ruled in personal union by the Danish kings as part of the greater Danish state, enjoying relative autonomy in terms of administration and education. In contrast to its northern twin duchy Schleswig, which was also home to a sizeable Danishspeaking minority, Holstein belonged to the Holy Roman Empire until 1806 and 23 Steinbeck, Romantische und nationale Symphonik, p. 240. 24 Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception’, p. 435. 25 Ibid., p. 163.

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to the German Confederation from 1815 onwards. As with other national conflicts in the nineteenth century, linguistic differences gave the first impetus to develop a nationalised consciousness. Interestingly, however, it was the educated Danish middle class in Copenhagen that increasingly resented the autonomy of Schleswig and Holstein and the continuing leading role of German-speaking aristocrats and administrators in Danish politics.26 Conversely, German-speaking professors and journalists from Schleswig and Holstein began campaigning for a common constitutional basis for the twin duchies in order to prevent Schleswig’s full integration into Denmark or its division along the language boundary. Such ideas were reflected in popular musical culture. The incipient male choral movement sang the same patriotic repertoire as their counterparts south of the Elbe, and their ‘anthem’, Schleswig-Holstein, meerumschlungen, became a symbol of the unification movement across Germany, as the previous chapter demonstrated. Altona, with its rich cultural life and tradition of religious and liberal tolerance, boasted several male choral societies, but at least in Reinecke’s youth their political allegiance can at best be described as flexible: at the Lübeck choral festival of 1844, which was explicitly intended to boast German nationalism rather than Danish patriotism, the singers from Altona displayed the Danish banner, the Danebrog.27 One year later at Pinneberg they appeared with Danish, English and American flags while singing Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland  –  a combination symptomatic of the Vormärz mixture of regional (Danish) patriotism, cosmopolitan outlook and German nationalism. While growing up in Altona did not necessarily make Reinecke a Danish patriot, he certainly enjoyed the patronage of the Danish king Christian VIII, who awarded him a small stipend in 1843 and appointed him court pianist in 1846. Reinecke evidently acquired a working knowledge of Danish, because as late as the 1870s Niels W. Gade  –  who did not consider Reinecke as a fellow Dane  –  wrote to him in this language.28 As will be elaborated below, the years spent in Denmark might have been vital for selecting the Hakon Jarl topic for his second symphony. When the German–Danish conflict escalated in 1848 Reinecke had to flee from Copenhagen along with most other Germans; when he returned to the Danish capital forty years later some former friends reproached him for siding with the Germans when he had been a de facto Danish citizen in Danish employ.29 This charge was not entirely unfair, because Reinecke hoped to enlist with the volunteers from Schleswig-Holstein who fought on the German side, and in May 26 Ole Feldbaek, ‘Dänisch und Deutsch im dänischen Zentralstaat im Zeitalter der Aufklärung’, in Der dänische Gesamtstaat: Kopenhagen, Kiel, Altona, ed. Klaus Bohnen and Sven-Aage Jørgensen (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 7–22. 27 Henning Unverhau, Gesang, Feste und Politik: Deutsche Liedertafeln, Sängerfeste, Volksfeste und Festmähler und ihre Bedeutung für das Entstehen eines nationalen und politischen Bewußtseins in Schleswig-Holstein, 1840–1848 (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), p. 115. 28 Inger Sørensen, ‘Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Niels W. Gade und Carl Reinecke’, Die Tonkunst: Magazin für Klassische Musik und Musikwissenschaft 4 no. 4 (October 2010), p. 483. 29 Carl Reinecke, Erlebnisse und Bekenntnisse: Autobiographie eines Gewandhaus­ kapellmeisters, ed. Doris Mundus (Leipzig, 2005), p. 68.

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1848 he gave a concert for the benefit of the wounded German soldiers, which drew a considerable crowd to the Altona theatre.30 After appointments in Cologne, Barmen and Breslau, Reinecke held a central position of musical life in Germany as Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus orchestra from 1860 to 1895.31 He continued in the vein of his predecessors Mendelssohn, Gade and Julius Rietz, concentrating on serious instrumental and vocal music, fighting for adequate pay and working conditions for his musicians and championing the music of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Novelties by composers such as Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz he left to the music societies Liszt and Euterpe. This reluctance to embrace the Wagnerian and new-German schools has earned Reinecke the reputation of being an archtraditionalist, when in fact, as Katrin Seidel has been able to demonstrate, a board of directors was largely responsible for the risk-averse and conservative programming. However, Reinecke himself readily admitted that he preferred music without extra-musical associations, even if this made him highly unpopular with the avantgarde press. During a visit to Paris in 1851 he heard the Symphonie fantastique and Roméo et Juliette conducted by Berlioz himself, but despite his great interest in the works he regretted that he could not enjoy them as much as those of Beethoven or Schumann. In a letter to his father he explains his aesthetic convictions, incidentally toying with a Kantian metaphor: I think that music will never be able to express anything concrete, neither events nor concepts; music is only capable of depicting feelings and emotions, perhaps to a higher degree than any other art. A musician can very well express the feeling that overcomes him when watching the starry sky, but he cannot depict the starry sky itself; he can express Judas Iscariot’s despair and tormented conscience in music, but he cannot draw Judas himself.32 In his autobiography, written about fifty years later, Reinecke again stressed this point with reference to a controversy that by then had long been obsolete: I cannot esteem a composer who needs to be inspired by drama or poetry generally in order to create a musical work, as highly as the composer who is able to create great things relying solely on himself, exclusively through the means and according to the laws of his art. Thus I gladly acknowledge  … Gluck and Wagner as colossal reformers of dramatic music, but men like 30 Ibid. 31 All biographical information, unless otherwise stated, draws on Katrin Seidel, Carl Reinecke und das Leipziger Gewandhaus (Hamburg, 1998). 32 Reinecke, Erlebnisse und Bekenntnisse, p. 77: ‘Ich meine, die Musik wird niemals imstande sein, etwas Konkretes auszudrücken, nicht Vorgänge, nicht Begriffe, sie kann nur Gefühle sowie Stimmungen wiedergeben, dies vielleicht in höherem Grade als irgendeine andere Kunst. Der Musiker kann wohl die Empfindung ausdrücken, die ihn etwa beim Anblick des gestirnten Himmels überkommt, nicht aber den gestirnten Himmel selbst illustrieren, er kann wohl die Verzweiflung und Gewissensqualen eines Judas Ischarioth durch Töne ausdrücken, jedoch nicht den Judas zeichnen.’

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Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, who besides their operatic and choral works wrote wonderful instrumental music  … are closer to my heart.33 As Reinecke’s aesthetic position was well known, it is hardly surprising that his Second Symphony was introduced simply as ‘Sinfonie Nr. 2 in Cmoll’ when it received its first performance in the eleventh subscription concert of the Gewandhaus orchestra on 7 January 1875.34 The response of the audience was decidedly cool. The first movement was not applauded at all, the three others only hesitantly. In this context it is interesting to note that as late as the mid-1870s clapping between the movements was standard practice in Leipzig. Even the critic from the Musikalisches Wochenblatt  –  a journal generally hostile to Reinecke’s compositions  –  rebuked the Leipzigers for such a display of ingratitude towards a conductor of outstanding merit.35 He also argued that in this case Reinecke’s conservative programming had backfired, because he exposed the audience too infrequently to new music. Less sympathetic were his remarks on the ‘eclecticism’ of the symphony and the condescending conclusion that the work was quite enjoyable if one did not expect it to live up to the approved masterworks. This commonplace comparison with Beethoven, a standard trope of musical reviews, need not have troubled Reinecke too much. Nevertheless he was apparently distressed that ‘his’ audience had rejected not an outrageously avant-garde tone poem, but a work that conformed to the standard procedures of symphonic form, little individual twists notwithstanding. The same month the publisher Robert Forberg announced the forthcoming piano four-hands arrangement of the still nameless symphony. Nine months later the full score was advertised with the subtitle Hakon Jarl in brackets; the fact that Forberg took the financial risk of printing a full score indicates that he expected the work to be commercially viable.36 In the preface Reinecke revealed his source of inspiration for the first time, the tragedy Hakon Jarl by the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), and

33 Ibid., p. 126: ‘Mir steht der, welcher sich an dramatische Dichtung oder Poesie überhaupt anlehnen muß, um Tonwerke zu schaffen, nicht so hoch wie der, welcher lediglich aus sich heraus, ausschließlich durch die Mittel und nach den Gesetzen seiner Kunst Großes zu schaffen vermag. So erkenne ich mit Freude  … Gluck und Wagner als gewaltige Reformatoren der dramatischen Musik an; aber Männer wie Bach, Händel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, die neben ihren Opern oder Chorwerken auch herrliche Instrumentalwerke  … geschrieben haben, stehen meinem Herzen näher.’ 34 ‘Dur und Moll: Leipzig’, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 33 no. 4 (January 1875), pp. 52–3. The programme comprised Beethoven’s third Leonore Overture and Reinecke’s symphony in the first half, and Julius Otto Grimm’s Suite in Canonform and Schumann’s Ouverture, Scherzo und Finale, op. 52, in the second. Between these orchestral works the singer Anna Marie Gutzschbach from the Leipzig theatre performed songs and arias. 35 W., ‘Berichte’, MWB 6 no. 3 (15 January 1875), p. 33. 36 MWB 8 no. 4 (22 January 1875), p. 51; no. 43 (22 October 1875), p. 564.

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at the same time cautioned the reader against mistaking him for a composer of ‘programme music’: [The composer] has by no means sought to reproduce the course of events of the tragedy, but he unconsciously tried to mirror the impressions of this Nordic-pagan hero and the poetic characters surrounding him; thus he does not actually feel justified to call his work ‘Hakon Jarl’. Nonetheless, if a conductor should think it desirable to make the symphony more accessible to the understanding of the public with a reference to the work’s genesis, the following titles would be the most appropriate for the individual movements: I. Hakon Jarl. II. Thora. III. In Odin’s Grove. IV. Oluf ’s Victory.37 Oehlenschläger’s play, which had first appeared in Danish in 1807 and two years later in German, was not such a far-fetched choice of inspiration as it might seem today, and Reinecke will have relied on the ability of the more literary-minded readers of his preface to recall the main events of the drama. It had also inspired Bedřich Smetana to write a symphonic poem Hakon Jarl in 1860–1. At this stage of his career and under the spell of Liszt he was influenced more by a broadly conceived notion of ‘world literature’ rather than the (Czech) national stories later so important to his œuvre (the other two symphonic poems of those years feature Richard III and Wallenstein respectively),38 although it could be argued that it was Smetana’s stay in Sweden that brought this episode from Norwegian history to his attention. The plot of the drama can be summarised as follows.39 Around the turn of the first millennium Jarl Hakon rules Norway in all but the official title of king.40 Already an elderly man, he has not yet lost his interest in women nor his ambition to become the crowned king of Norway. He fails spectacularly on both counts. 37 Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll) für grosses Orchester, op. 134 (Leipzig, [1875]), p. 2: ‘[Der Komponist] hat jedoch keineswegs getrachtet den dramatischen Gang der Tragödie wiederzugeben, sondern versuchte nur unwillkürlich die Eindrücke jenes nordisch-heidnischen Helden und der ihn umgebenden poetischen Gestalten musikalisch wiederzuspiegeln, demgemäss er sich nicht eigentlich berechtigt hält, dem Werke den Namen “Hakon Jarl” beizulegen; sollte es aber nichtsdestoweniger dem Dirigenten wünschenswerth erscheinen, die Symphonie durch einen Hinweis auf ihre Entstehung dem Verständnisse des Publikums näher zu rücken, so dürften die folgenden Ueberschriften für die einzelnen Sätze die geeignetsten sein: I. Hakon Jarl. II. Thora. III. In Odin’s Hain. IV. Oluf ’s Sieg.’ In the second edition the half-sentence starting with ‘demgemäss’ was cut, probably because the name of the symphony was by then well-established. I would like to thank Stefan Schönknecht for providing me with a copy of the score containing hand-written annotations by the composer. 38 Detlef Altenburg, ‘Symphonische Dichtung’, MGG 2, Sachteil, vol. 9, col. 162. 39 The synopsis is based on the first German edition produced by Adam Oehlenschläger himself: Hakon Jarl: Ein Trauerspiel (Tübingen, 1809). 40 A jarl (the word is related to English ‘earl’) was a local ruler in early medieval Norway. Oehlenschläger drew for his drama on the historical conflict between Hákon jarl Sigurđarson (c. 940–95) and Ólafr Tryggvason (968–1000), who became the first king of Norway in 995.

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His pursuit of the peasant girl Gudrun enrages her father and fiancé, causes a rebellion of the Norwegian peasantry and earns him the hatred of his former lover Thora. At the same time Olaf Tryggvason, the rightful heir to the throne, lands in Norway. Hakon plots to murder him secretly but fails; Olaf seizes the opportunity to free the country from Hakon’s rule and to introduce Christianity. In his desperation Hakon sacrifices his only surviving son to Odin; repelled by this atrocity even his last followers desert him. After being defeated in battle he hides with the forgiving Thora. In a final act of betrayal Hakon is slain by a serf while Olaf is proclaimed king. Despite the underlying opposition of paganism and Christianity, the traditional interpretation of Hakon Jarl as a Schillerian conflictof-ideas drama is problematic. As the literary scholar Alvhild Dvergsdal has pointed out, there is no genuine tragic conflict at the core of the play, because Hakon mainly fails through his own weaknesses when he loses both self-control and sense of reality.41 Nevertheless the opposing forces of the drama, the old pagan rule and the new Christian faith, are directly confronted in two scenes: the encounter between Hakon and a disguised Olaf in Act 3, modelled on Schiller’s meeting of Maria Stuart and Queen Elisabeth, and the conversation between Olaf and the disguised god Odin who tries to convince the young king that the pagan religion is more genuine to the cold, harsh North. In Oehlenschläger’s reading neither world-view emerges entirely victorious from the drama. The cult of Odin is tarnished by the blood sacrifice of Hakon’s innocent son, while Christianity largely serves as a means to Olaf ’s political ends, his beautiful speeches on its humanitarian aspects notwithstanding. Two entirely positive characters, the blacksmith Bergthor and the freed serf Grib, acknowledge the new political rule but do not convert to the new faith, thus offering an alternative to native but cruel heathendom or humane but foreign Christianity.42 Thora’s final epilogue shifts the balance again towards Hakon’s side, as she laments not only the death of a ruler and warrior but also the passing of the great, heroic age that soon will be only an old saga. She articulates Oehlenschläger’s own conviction that the Scandinavian people should remember their national roots and national past in order to claim their place among the modern European nations. Reinecke’s composition draws on Oehlenschläger’s complex and richly populated drama only for two character sketches, a piece of musical landscape painting and the simplified ending. A comparison with other programmatic symphonies shows that it was a fairly standard procedure to associate the first movement with a fictional hero and the finale with victory. The slow movement (or the secondary subject of the first) symbolised the hero’s romantic interest, while the scherzo had to provide appropriate couleur locale. This model can be exemplified with Heinrich Hofmann’s Frithjof Symphony (1875), one of the more successful symphonies of the 1870s and 1880s. He introduces ‘Frithjof and Ingeborg’ in the first movement (as first and second subject respectively) and thus follows what Hepokoski has defined as the ‘Dutchman model’ of contrasting gendered 41 Alvhild Dvergsdal, Adam Oehlenschlägers Tragediekunst (Copenhagen, 1997), pp. 187–8. 42 Ibid., p. 197.

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themes.43 The second movement is titled ‘Ingeborg’s Lament’ and was possibly inspired by the eponymous section of Max Bruch’s cantata. In the third movement ‘Light-elves and frost-giants’ set the scene in Scandinavia, and in the finale ‘Frithjof returns’ in full splendour.44 The music is based rather loosely on the literary model, which inspired the reviewer Wilhelm Tappert to the acerbic remark that ‘Eduard and Kunigunde’, ‘Hans and Grete’ or ‘Paul and Virginie’ would have been just as fitting.45 When listening to Reinecke’s Second Symphony it is apparent that nobody could have suspected the composer of any serious Lisztian leanings. Both first and last movements are model sonata forms with repeated expositions, which in the context of the 1870s can be interpreted as a ‘purposeful gesture harking back not only to older traditions but also to the more abstract or absolute ideal of the symphony’. 46 In both instances, however, the first themes briefly recur at the end of the respective expositions and consequently recapitulations, thus hinting at an arch-form. The main keys of the outer movements, C minor and C major, conform to the darkness-to-light model popular since Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a strategy that is enhanced by the subdued melancholy of the first and the triumphant exuberance of the final movement. The second movement, a lyrical Andante in rhapsodic rounded-binary form is cast in the strongly contrasting key of B major, creating a pair with the Intermezzo in E minor.47 At first this key sequence surprises in a composer of traditional rather than avantgarde persuasion, and Nikolai Topusov’s interpretation of the foreign keys as Cb major and Fb minor hardly helps to explain the curious choice.48 However, since the outer (C minor  –  C major) and inner movements (B major  –  E minor) are conceived as pairs, only the leaps from C minor to B major and from E minor to C major require explanation. Reinecke forges an organic transition from the first to the second movement by opening the latter with a unison d#' in flutes and violas, which is perceived as the third of the C minor chord (eb) closing the preceding movement. After two bars the single note is expanded into a chord of D# minor, leading to a first full cadence in B major a few bars later. Similarly the final movement opens with the pedal-point E (cellos and basses), first heard as tonic of the preceding Intermezzo and subsequently reinterpreted as the third degree of C major by a fanfare of the lower horns. The reinterpretation of a unison note had been a familiar tool for modulations at least since Haydn’s days; however, most composers used the device to deflect the tonality in mid-movement rather than 43 For a compact critique of gendered readings of sonata form see James Hepokoski, ‘Masculine  –  Feminine’, Musical Times 135 no. 1818 (August 1994), pp. 494–9. 44 Heinrich Hofmann, Frithjof: Sinfonie für grosses Orchester, op. 22 (Berlin, [1875]). 45 Wilhelm Tappert, ‘Berlin’, MWB 6 no. 1 (1 January 1875), p. 6. 46 Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception’, p. 448. 47 Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Quartet (1823) or Brahms’s G minor Quartet, op. 25, could have inspired Reinecke to call the third movement Intermezzo rather than Scherzo. 48 Nikolai Topusov, ‘Carl Reinecke: Beiträge zu seinem Leben und seiner Symphonik’ (PhD dissertation, Berlin, 1943), pp. 286 and 294.

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to connect movements in unrelated keys, relying on the horizontal logic of voiceleading rather than the vertical logic of harmonic relations. Even before Reinecke revealed the literary source of his inspiration at least one critic recognised something distinctly ‘Northern’ about the C minor symphony. The correspondent of the Monthly Musical Record concludes a very positive assessment of the individual movements as follows: The symphony has a particular advantage in the unity of mood of the different movements. One feels that the whole is but one and the same effusion. We might say that the whole bears a Northern colouring, such as we have noticed in some works of Gade, in Mendelssohn’s A minor symphony, &c. We do not imply that Reinecke has in any way imitated any of the above works; on the contrary, the spirited contents of Reinecke’s symphony have something particularly charming and original about them.49 Admittedly this remark could be dismissed as an over-interpretation of the faint resemblance between the new work and two symphonies which were known to be ‘Northern’: Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony (although it was famously mistaken by Schumann to be Italian),50 and Gade’s First Symphony in C minor, which derives the thematic material of the first movement from a Danish folk song. Wolfram Steinbeck has indeed observed thematic resemblances between Gade’s and Reinecke’s C minor symphonies,51 and it is not far-fetched to assume that the Danish composer influenced his ‘countryman’ Reinecke. The symphonies of his predecessor were popular with the Gewandhaus audience throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and thus he must have conducted them repeatedly. However, as Siegfried Oechsle has pointed out in his detailed study of Gade’s First Symphony, neither a composer’s nationality nor the use of folk songs (authentic or invented) are solely responsible for a national ‘tone’. 52 This is a welcome departure from the more naïve view that a national tone  –  or even a nationalist agenda  –  rests on the musical material, although many Scandinavian composers admittedly singled out certain elements from the corpus of rediscovered folk music that would ensure the im Volkston appearance of songs and instrumental music. Apart from a predilection for symmetrical periods and rhythms borrowed from regional dance types, Oechsle characterises the ‘Nordic tone’ as a minor mode with modal inflections, e.g. avoiding leading notes or with a flattened second degree. Consequently the harmonic language gains considerable flexibility, particularly in minor keys. Reinecke’s Second Symphony exhibits many elements that could be heard as ‘Nordic’ without, however, referring to any concrete melodic models such as the folksong used by Gade. The following brief description of the individual movements aims to demonstrate how Reinecke gives expression to a poetic ‘Northernness’ while at the same time maintaining the formal integrity of 49 ‘Foreign Correspondence: Music in North Germany’, Monthly Musical Record 5 (1 February 1875), p. 21. 50 Steinbeck, Romantische und nationale Symphonik, pp. 108–9. 51 Ibid., p. 176. 52 Siegfried Oechsle, Symphonik nach Beethoven: Studien zu Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn und Gade (Kassel, 1992).

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the genre, before the discussion returns to the question of how the choice of the Hakon Jarl drama can be interpreted in the context of the composer’s ambiguous national background. The opening of the first movement defines the mood for the appearance of the first theme in bar 17: a pedal-point C, compact woodwind chords and the prominent use of trombones create a sombre atmosphere. The theme itself is introduced by the strings (without double basses) in unison, the violins frequently using the open-string sonority of their lowest note g. Only the repetition of the second eight-bar phrase is assigned to the high woodwinds in a higher register, brightening the colour of the theme significantly (Ex. 5.1). The melody itself clearly avoids the leading-note b § (note the unusual interval of a minor seventh at the transition from the first to the second phrase) and usually approaches the final c' from the third above, while the accompaniment seeks to ‘rectify’ these modal tendencies by underlaying conventional V–I cadences. A general drift towards plagal sonorities such as F minor and Ab major is noticeable throughout the movement. Reinecke even has the timpani tuned in C and Ab at the beginning; only for the return of the first subject in the coda the second instrument is tuned to the standard G. This initial hegemony of the plagal area may explain the subsequent exploration of the keys of A minor, E minor, F# minor and their respective relative major keys in the development. The composer apparently wanted to contrast stable, plagal sonorities in the thematic sections with the dynamic authentic range in the transitional passages. Despite its self-contained, song-like structure the first theme lends itself well to motivic development, particularly its first and third bars whose dotted rhythm is easily recognisable even when the motifs are isolated and their intervallic content changed, and Reinecke makes ample use of this in the development. The main theme of the second movement, which is inspired by Hakon Jarl’s lover Thora, is characterised by the use of the solo oboe in the first section and its lilting, ‘pastoral’ 9/8 metre. The deliberate avoidance of the tonic B in the melody is striking; it appears only in the second and sixth bar in a metrically strong position. After four bars interlude with wavelike quavers the main theme is repeated (Ex. 5.2). Here Reinecke uses another strategy to start a symphonic process from a self-contained, song-like theme, a problem that Wolfram Steinbeck has highlighted as a core issue of symphonic writing after Beethoven.53 While the tension between lyricism and motivic-thematic work (‘Arbeit’) was already prominent in much of Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s symphonic output, its reconciliation became ever more urgent for their followers who wanted to position their works within the Austro-German tradition. The final section of the ternary theme repeats the first, but does not substitute the cadence in D# minor of bar 20 with the expected full cadence in B major. Instead it steers towards D# major with sequences of the characteristic downward leap. At this point the accompanying lower strings introduce semiquavers and thus a new rhythmic element that rises 53 According to Steinbeck the first work to achieve the ideal equilibrium was Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony, which became a model for non-German composers if they wanted to include traditional(ly sounding) material. Steinbeck, Romantische und nationale Symphonik, pp. 107–10.

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Example 5.1 Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll) für grosses Orchester, op. 124 (Leipzig, [1875]), first movement Allegro, first theme, bars 17–47 17      

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Symphonic Visions from the Periphery 41


 


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Example 5.2  Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll), second movement Andante, main theme, bars 14–21


    

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to prominence in the middle section in B minor. This stormy interlude is brought to a close by the return of the shortened main theme that now finally is allowed to cadence firmly in B major. Reinecke thus employs two alternative strategies of how to derive a symphonic process from a self-sufficient lyrical theme: the separation and symphonic development of sub-thematic motifs, exemplified in the first movement, and rhapsodic Fortspinnung, particularly appropriate for a lyrical slow movement where any form of dynamism is stilled by the 9/8 metre. If harmonic ambiguities are already important in the first pair of movements, the modal leanings of the ‘Nordic tone’ are even more prominent in the Intermezzo that depicts ‘Odin’s grove’ (Ex. 5.3). In this movement it is the second degree of the scale, rather than the leading note, that is sometimes flattened. This is apparent when the prominent parallel thirds of the flutes shift the harmony from the opening E minor to D minor in bar 13, which in retrospect functions as second degree of C major, as the cadence at the end of the phrase shows. The Phrygian semitone returns as the second section of the Intermezzo begins with the characteristic step e' to f ' in the violins, the latter again harmonised as D minor. While D minor is merely a digression in the first section, in the second the Phrygian semitone step brings about a real shift of tonal focus. Here another element borrowed from folk music enters, the dotted rhythms of a traditional dance, which are given a scherzo hue by pizzicato articulation. To make the impression of a country dance complete, Reinecke uses a straightforward rondo structure (a–b–a–c–a–b–a' ) for the first part of the movement, which as a whole is cast in a modified ternary form. The mock-simplicity of the structure is underlined by the use of elementary forms of accompaniment, such as parallel thirds, horn fifths and arpeggiated chords, easily identifiable as signifiers of rural simplicity, bygone ages and life ‘in tune’ with nature, though hardly outlining a specific geographic locale.54 The conspicuous absence of any ‘Nordic’ or folk-like elements in the finale conforms with the theme of the movement, the victory of Oluf (the Norwegian pretender Ólafr Tryggvason) over his adversary Hakon Jarl and thus the triumph of the new, Christian rule over the old pagan era. A little self-consciously, 54 See the perceptive discussion of the concept of Volkston that unites the Volk, nature and history, in Oechsle, Symphonik nach Beethoven, pp. 87–8.

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Example 5.3  Carl Reinecke, Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll), third movement Intermezzo: Allegro moderato, bars 9–32

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  25
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Reinecke draws the listener’s attention to the learnedness of his music by using the simple second theme for a brief fugato to enliven the development section. In this context fugato can be read either as shorthand for ‘old times’ or for ‘highest artistic challenge’; both would be in accordance with the Austro-German symphonic tradition. The first theme, introduced by rousing fanfares, combines the decisive rhythm of a swift march with the stately grandeur of a chorale to depict an impressive conqueror, albeit a fairly conventional one. A contemporary commentator duly criticised the similarities to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mendelssohn’s Sommernachtstraum Overture and Wagner’s Lohengrin, the latter reminiscences probably triggered by the compact treatment of the woodwinds and the exuberant melodic suspensions of the first theme. It is unlikely that Reinecke consciously emulated Wagner’s music, although the critic from the new-German Neue Zeitschrift für Musik seems to imply just that when he suggests that Reinecke should replace this movement with a more original composition in order to make the symphony ‘more rich in content’ (gehaltvoller).55 By the 1870s Lohengrin was so widely accepted as the paradigm of the age of chivalry that it had virtually lost its specific reference to Wagnerism. Despite the outward congruence of programmatic title and musical material, their association is by no means unproblematic. Most interpretations of instrumental music as a ‘story’ agree that only one character should stand at the centre of the musical narrative. Composers usually confine themselves to a single point of view even when more than one character appears. Richard Strauss, for 55 ‘Sch…’ , ‘Correspondenz: Leipzig’, NZfM 71 no. 4 (22 January 1875), p. 35. Reinecke revised the finale considerably for the second edition, but only on the level of musical detail such as the more independent use of the trumpets.

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example, remembered Hans von Bülow’s criticism of his first symphonic poem Macbeth: … remarked very properly that the first triumphal march in Bülow   D major of Macduff was nonsense. It was all very well for an Egmont overture to conclude with a triumphal march of Egmont, but a symphonic poem Macbeth could never finish with the triumph of Macduff. A poetic programme may well suggest new forms, but whenever music is not developed logically from within, it becomes ‘literary music’.56 Reinecke, however, does just that: he concludes the symphony Hakon Jarl with the triumph of his adversary Oluf. In doing so, he deprives the darkness-to-light model of its poetic justification (e.g. a transfiguration of the tragically dying hero Hakon) and reduces it to a purely musical breakthrough from minor to major mode, mediated by the harmonically distant keys of the middle movements. The ambiguity of the victory, which is one of the most attractive features of Oehlenschläger’s tragedy, is resolved in favour of Oluf and the Christian principle. Reinecke’s cantata Hakon Jarl, op. 142, written for the Leipzig university male choir on Reinecke’s own text, celebrates the new rule even more explicitly by bringing all characters on the imaginary ‘stage’.57 The choruses of the monks and Christian warriors drown out the singing of Hakon’s supporters; Hakon dies in Thora’s arms; the king forgives everybody in true Christian style; Thora spontaneously converts to the new faith; and the sun rises to a fervent prayer of thanksgiving. In contrast to this obvious reading of the tragedy, which was much more successful with general audiences, the conclusion of the symphony is more subtle. The final triumphant V–I cadence occurs already forty-one bars before the end of the last movement, and the subsequent final statement of the abbreviated main theme is taken at a swifter pace and harmonised with secondary dominants pulling away from the main key. Seventeen bars before the end a reminiscence of Hakon Jarl’s theme from the first movement, complete with triple rhythm and C minor tonality, is smuggled in. It does not exactly disrupt the festive C major, but allows for the interpretation that some elements of the old, pagan North survive into the modern Christian era, which should remain conscious of its roots. As Marion Recknagel has suggested, Reinecke might have interpolated this thematic reminiscence because he identified Hakon Jarl’s fate with his own position in music history  –  a defender of the ‘old faith’ that was doomed to be vanquished by the ‘new school’. 58 More discrepancies between Oehlenschläger’s tragedy and Reinecke’s reading are evident in the second and third movements. Oehlenschläger’s Thora is a 56 Richard Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. L. J. Lawrence (London, 1953), p. 139. 57 Carl Reinecke, Hakon Jarl: Dichtung von Heinrich Carsten componirt für Alt, Tenor und Bass-Solo, Männerchor und Orchester, op. 142 (Leipzig, [1876]). Reinecke uses this pseudonym for all his texts. 58 Marion Recknagel, ‘Das Alte stürzt: Carl Reineckes zweite Sinfonie, Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlägers “Hakon Jarl” und der Untergang alter Prinzipien’, Die Tonkunst 4 no. 4, pp. 503, 506.

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strong-willed (she curses Hakon when he jilts her), mature (she is a widow) and independent woman (she owns her own farm), whose mental and moral strength is demonstrated in her final act of forgiveness. In contrast, Reinecke’s Thora does not exhibit any such formidable traits. Her character, as depicted in the second movement, is gentle rather than grandiose and, the more agitated middle section in the minor mode notwithstanding, essentially undramatic. Reinecke apparently took the one trait of the character that every listener could empathise with, namely her unfailing love and devotion to Hakon, and used it as inspiration for the lyrical, idyllic slow movement that conforms to the stereotype of the idealised nineteenth-century woman. Had Reinecke transferred her character faithfully into the symphony her movement might have ended up sounding all-too similar to the main hero and his music, in short, like first-movement material. Interestingly the second movement of Liszt’s Faust Symphony depicts Gretchen with quite different musical means (though their thematic material shares a certain circular tendency), but the new-German Liszt and the musically conservative Reinecke subscribe to very similar ideals of sweet, passive femininity.59 ‘Odin’s grove’ from Reinecke’s Intermezzo is even more different from the one Oehlenschläger imagines. In the tragedy it is a place of political conspiracies and the site where Hakon sacrifices his son. The contrast of the boy’s naïve joy over the sunrise with Hakon’s struggles of conscience creates one of the most harrowing scenes of the entire drama. Moreover it is the only scene where Hakon is torn by a genuine tragic conflict between the love of his child and  –  what he thinks to be  –  the will of the gods. Reinecke was well aware of the dramatic impact of the scene because he included it in his cantata where ragged harmonies and tremolos create a sombre and tense atmosphere. In contrast the opening rondo of the symphony’s Intermezzo is clearly indebted to the ‘Nordic tone’, but to its folk and country dances rather than to its pagan rituals. Judging from the music alone, the first part of the movement could equally appropriately have been labelled ‘Norwegian peasant dance’. The middle section is appropriately contrasted, replacing the tunefulness of the outer sections with rash repeated semiquavers, to be played con fuoco and with carefully outlined crescendos and decrescendos. The quick motion, the echo-effects and the playful accents are strongly reminiscent of the elfish music of Mendelssohn’s Sommernachtstraum. The uncanny but not threatening nature of the fleeting semiquavers is even more apparent in the final return of this section, when the low strings provide a pedal point to the hushed repeated figures. The spirits haunting this particular grove may be up to some Puckish mischief, but they bear no resemblance to either the cruel gods to whom Hakon sacrifices his son, nor to the Nordic god Odin in his Wanderer-like disguise as the old warrior Auden. This is not to say that Reinecke misread or misunderstood Oehlenschläger’s tragedy; his choral cantata, to which he wrote the text himself, shows that he clearly grasped the conflicting characters and ideas. However, in accordance with his compositional principles, he concentrated on those elements of the poetic model that sat comfortably with his symphonic ideal: nostalgia for lost heroism, 59 On gender tropes in Liszt’s symphony see Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 102 ff.

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sweet femininity, the spirit of the Nordic landscape, the triumph of the good cause. This explanation is supported by Reinecke’s account of the compositional process provided in his autobiography: Soon after In memoriam [in memory of Ferdinand David] my Second Symphony was written, inspired by reading Oehlenschläger’s tragedy Hakon Jarl. Yet it is no programme music in today’s sense of the word, because I did not abandon the form in order to follow the dramatic action of the poetry faithfully. Rather I allowed the individual character of the poetry to impress me, albeit without transgressing the limitations that music has just like any other art. To this day I have been convinced that music which requires a commentary to be understood may be tolerated only as an exception.60 It seems that whatever impressions Reinecke took away from reading the drama, they immediately fell into the right place within his premeditated symphonic mould. If he had not chosen to reveal the source of his inspiration for fear of not being appreciated, hardly anybody could have suspected an extramusical background, let alone this particular literary narrative, as it can sometimes be done with symphonies that exhibit strikingly irregular features disrupting the genre’s conventions. As the Hakon Jarl Symphony hides its poetic inspiration very well and probably deliberately, it is surprising that Reinecke, as a well-known antagonist of ‘programme music in today’s sense of the word’ did not steer a clearer course by giving the symphony just a generic, poetic title such as ‘Nordic Symphony’, instead of identifying characters, landscapes and even hinting at a narrative (‘victory’). Apparently he considered the specific reference to Oehlenschläger as important and helpful to the listener, beyond pointing generally to a ‘Nordic’ background for the symphony and elucidating some of its picturesque details. This leads to the question what the Danish poet laureate could possibly have meant to the Leipzig Kapellmeister, beyond an apparently cordial personal relationship which the famous writer and the young pianist had struck in Copenhagen in the 1840s. The poets Oehlenschläger and Hans Christian Andersen repeatedly attended the chamber music matinees which Reinecke organised during his years in Copenhagen. Oehlenschläger’s son also arranged for Reinecke to give a concert in Sorø just before the escalation of the Danish–German conflict forced him to leave Denmark in 1848.61 Oehlenschläger’s name has virtually vanished from histories of German literature, while in Denmark his poems and plays are still highly regarded as fine examples of a specifically national Romanticism, a ‘Golden Age’ of Danish 60 Reinecke, Erlebnisse und Bekenntnisse, pp. 171–2: ‘Bald nach dem “In memoriam” entstand, angeregt durch die Lektüre von Oehlenschlägers Tragödie “Hakon Jarl”, meine zweite Sinfonie. Dennoch ist sie keine Programmusik im heutigen Sinne, denn ich habe nicht, um der dramatischen Handlung der Dichtung treu zu folgen, die Form verlassen, sondern habe jene in ihrer Eigenart auf mich wirken lassen, im übrigen aber die Grenzen, welche der Musik wie jeder andern Kunst gesetzt sind, nicht überschritten. Bis auf den heutigen Tag bin ich der Überzeigung treu geblieben, daß diejenige Musik, die eines Kommentars bedarf, um verstanden zu werden, nur ausnahmsweise toleriert werden darf.’ 61 Ibid., pp. 62 and 67.

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literature. He frequently turned to Nordic history and mythology for inspiration, for example in the visionary poem Guldhornene (1802) that evokes the lost unity of nature, history and art of the ancient times. Nineteenth-century German readers, in contrast, numbered Oehlenschläger among the German poets, as some of his works were written and first published in Germany where they exerted a considerable influence on native writers. Instead of claiming him exclusively for one or the other literary tradition, current scholarship emphasises his national ambiguity and prefers to see him, in the words of Heinrich Anz, as a ‘Grenzgänger’ or borderline figure.62 Like many Scandinavian intellectuals Oehlenschläger sought recognition in Germany and hoped for a wider dissemination of his works on the German book market.63 The bilingual writer received a warm welcome when he travelled through Germany from 1805 to 1806. He met eminent figures of German literary life such as Ludwig Tieck, Schiller’s widow and Goethe. The latter took an interest in the young poet and even intended to produce the recently written Hakon Jarl in 1806. However, when Napoleon’s troops occupied Weimar Goethe regarded it as tactless and politically inopportune to stage a tragedy about the deposition of a ruler.64 Nevertheless Hakon Jarl was soon printed in Tübingen, and Oehlenschläger’s plays, particularly the artist drama Coreggio, were hailed as a continuation of the German dramatic tradition, a field deserted since the death of Schiller in 1805. Thus a Danish citizen and representative of a specific kind of national Romanticism became  –  at least temporarily  –  heir to one of the heroes of Weimar Classicism. The particular appeal of Oehlenschläger’s personal success story for Reinecke is easy to see. Since he had been born in Altona, then under Danish rule as part of the Duchy of Holstein, and worked for some years under Danish patronage, his situation was not entirely different from that of the non-German foreign students who flocked to Leipzig. When he was appointed Kapellmeister at the Gewandhaus, he entered the heritage of Mendelssohn as a semi-outsider and became  –  at least for the traditionally minded  –  the figurehead and guardian of the German musical tradition. It is easy to imagine that any symphony written in this capacity, including for example the Third Symphony (1847) of the impeccably Danish Gade, had to conform to the high standards of the classical and early-Romantic masters, including its treatment of poetic imagery. In his Hakon Jarl Symphony Reinecke emulated Mendelssohn’s concept of national colour as exemplified in the ‘Scottish’ Symphony. He did not even have to decide whether he wanted to regard the age of the Nordic hero as his ‘own’ or as an ‘other’ national past, whether he wanted to visit ‘the North’ like Mendelssohn the tourist in Scotland, or to search for his 62 Heinrich Anz, ‘Der Januskopf des Grenzgängers: Adam Oehlenschlägers Stellung zwischen dänischer und deutscher Literatur’, in Dänisch-deutsche Doppelgänger: Transnationale und bikulturelle Literatur zwischen Barock und Moderne, ed. Heinrich Detering, Anne-Britt Gerecke and Johan de Mylius (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 147–56. 63 Dieter Lohmeier, ‘Adam Oehlenschlägers Ruhm in Deutschland’, in Dänische ‘Guldalder’-Literatur und Goethezeit, ed. Klaus Bohnen, Sven-Aage Jørgensen and Friedrich Schmoe (Copenhagen, 1982), pp. 90–108. 64 Albert Sergel, Oehlenschläger in seinen persönlichen Beziehungen zu Goethe, Tieck und Hebbel: Nebst einer Oehlenschläger-Bibliographie (Rostock, 1907), p. 20.

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own roots like Gade in his native Denmark. Both readings may have seemed equally viable from his particular biographic vantage point, from the fringes of the German sphere of influence. Two generations before him, a Danish poet had rewritten a story from Norwegian history in Schillerian blank verse for a German readership enamoured with all things Nordic; now Reinecke used this drama as a source of inspiration to situate himself within in the venerable tradition of Mendelssohn and Schumann. In a sense, the composer was a ‘Grenzgänger’, a wanderer between the worlds, as much as the poet. However, it must be admitted that Reinecke sided staunchly with Germany whenever a political conflict over the Schleswig-Holstein issue erupted between the German Confederation and Denmark. As mentioned above, he not only left Denmark in 1848 but actively supported the German side. In the late 1850s and 1860s he shared the wide-spread enthusiasm for Duke Ernst II of Saxe-CoburgGotha, who vigorously campaigned for replacing the Danish rule over SchleswigHolstein with a German prince.65 Unfortunately Reinecke does not record how he perceived the outcome of the German-Danish War in 1864, perhaps because he did not want to articulate any disappointment over the loss of Schleswig-Holstein’s autonomy under the new Prussian rule. He only mentions that his enthusiasm for Ernst II somewhat evaporated with the passing of time, which may indicate a disenchantment with populist patriotism. The events of 1870 inspired him, like the majority of his contemporaries, to write several patriotic male choruses, a triumphal march for orchestra and an overture Friedensfeier. Interestingly, he first planned to have the latter work culminate in the belligerent tune of Die Wacht am Rhein but then settled for the less obviously militant but religiously charged ‘See, the conquering hero comes’ from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus.66 Reinecke doubtlessly paid his dues to the spirit of 1870/1 in these compositions; nevertheless it was his native Holstein that, even long after he had settled in Leipzig, remained his ‘closer homeland’ (‘engere Heimat’), as he remarked on the occasion of a concert he conducted in Kiel in 1878.67 When he turned to Oehlenschläger’s Hakon Jarl for inspiration at about the same time, the composer may have felt himself transported back to the earlier nineteenth century when the Romantic school embraced all national and folk traditions with equal affection, and when an ‘Italian’ or ‘Scottish’ symphony was part of the German tradition just as much as the ‘Rhenish’ and the ‘Reformation’. Might not the nostalgic longing that pervades the greater part of the Hakon Jarl Symphony be understood as a resigned commentary on the 1870s, when the national utopia of the Romantic school surrendered to the political realities of the Bismarck Empire, and the traditional symphony had lost its poetry in the competition with programme music? While Reinecke looked to the past for inspiration  –  both the era of the Nordic heroes and the Golden Age of the Romantic symphony  –  Siegmund von Hausegger, two generations younger than Reinecke, started composing his symphonic poem Barbarossa under the impression of contemporary events. In an essay on his 65 Reinecke, Erlebnisse und Bekenntnisse, p. 120. 66 Ibid., p. 148. 67 Ibid., p. 152.

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childhood and youth in Graz, the capital of the Austrian province of Styria, he remembers the following incident: A completely different emotional field was opened up to me in autumn 1897, when the Austrian Germans flared up in hot indignation because of the new language regulations forced onto them by the Slavonic majority. The demonstrations against the enforced rule of the Badeni ministry took on a revolutionary character. From the windows of our flat I could watch how a crowd of a thousand screaming people were scattered by the attacking cavalry, then gathered again the very next moment and stormed against the police head quarters in highest agitation. The most thrilling reports about bloody fights and the entering of armed forces into the parliament were read out in the streets and greeted with deafening whistling and shouting. It seemed as if life or death were at stake for the Germans. The rage of the people around me had to ignite my heart as well.68 Infected by the fury of his compatriots, Hausegger decided that his original plan to compose Emanuel Geibel’s poem Friedrich Rotbart would not do justice to his emotional state. Instead a three-movement symphonic poem Barbarossa, scored for the full forces of the modern Straussian orchestra, became the outlet for Hausegger’s patriotic indignation. He finished the composition two years after the events in Graz when he already lived in Munich and moved in the circle of young artists around Richard Strauss.69 Strauss also gave Hausegger the opportunity to conduct Barbarossa in a concert of the Berlin Wagner Society in December 1900.70 The first performance of Barbarossa took place in Munich on 21 March 1900 with the Kaim Orchestra (the predecessor of the Munich Philharmonic) whose ‘People’s Concerts’ Hausegger conducted between 1899 and 68 Siegmund von Hausegger, ‘Kinder- und Jugendjahre in Graz (1905)’, in Betrachtungen zur Kunst: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig, [1920]), p. 21: ‘Ein gänzlich anders geartetes Empfindungsgebiet erschloß sich mir, als im Herbste des Jahres 1897 die Deutschen Österreichs in heller Empörung gegen die ihnen von der slavischen [sic] Majorität aufgezwungenen Sprachverordnungen aufloderten. Die Kundgebungen gegen die Gewaltmaßregeln des Ministeriums Badeni nahmen revolutionären Charakter an. Von den Fenstern unserer Wohnung konnte ich beobachten, wie eine tausendköpfige Volksmenge schreiend vor der ansprengenden Reiterei zerstob, um im nächsten Augenblicke sich wieder zu sammeln und in höchster Erbitterung gegen das Polizeigebäude zu stürmen. Die aufregendsten Berichte über blutige Kämpfe und das Eindringen der bewaffneten Macht in’s Parlament[s]-Gebäude wurden auf der Straße verlesen und mit Ohren betäubendem Pfeifen und Schreien beantwortet. Es schien, als handle es sich um Leben und Tod für die Deutschen. Die rings so wild aufflammende Volkswut mußte auch in meinem Herzen zünden.’ 69 Strauss also premiered Hausegger’s opera Zinnober. See Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik, pp. 160, 167 f. 70 ‘Berliner Nachrichten’, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 58 no. 68 (12 December 1900), p. 1081. Hausegger had been an active supporter of the Wagner Society of Graz; thus it might also have been the Wagner network that brought about the performance, rather than Strauss’s direct support.

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1900.71 Twenty years later Hausegger became the principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and remained in this position until 1938. Today he is mainly remembered for performing Bruckner’s symphonies in their original versions and for participating in the Bruckner cult of the Third Reich;72 his compositional activities practically ceased after the First World War. At the first performances his symphonic poem Barbarossa, whose political inspiration was made public through Hausegger’s programme notes, was well received. But what was the cause of the uproar that had inspired the piece? In order to gauge the ideological message of Barbarossa to its full extent, it is necessary to understand the political background of its composition. As a consequence of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Habsburg Empire consisted of two largely separate political entities, one dominated by the German-speaking part of the population, the other by the Magyar elite.73 While the Hungarian half of the Empire was conceived as a unified Magyar nation that wanted minorities to stay invisible, the Austrian  –  or more correctly ‘Cis-Leithanian’  –  half tried to accommodate the needs of the non-German populaces by granting them legal and linguistic equality: all languages spoken should be acknowledged in educational and official usage.74 With the awakening of national feelings throughout Europe, these provisions were increasingly seen as a half-hearted and inadequate compromise that did little to diminish German predominance; hence many of these linguistic communities began to perceive themselves as nations and sought greater autonomy, if not necessarily political independence. As Pieter M. Judson has pointed out, the spread of modern-style nationalism transformed the dynastically conceived Habsburg Empire into a multi-national state that increasingly threatened to disintegrate along linguistic and ethnic fault lines.75 Statistical surveys, which were originally meant to ensure equality by asking all citizens of the Empire for their preferred language, contributed to a changing self-perception of the linguistic minorities that began to define themselves as ethnic or national groups in the late nineteenth century. In Styria, which until 1919 also encompassed the northern regions of present-day Slovenia, the traditional hegemony of a German-speaking and largely urban majority clashed with the increasing demands of the Slavonic minority. A pamphlet of the Pan-German League, written at the same time as Hausegger’s 71 Gabriele E. Meyer (ed.), 100 Jahre Münchner Philharmoniker (Munich, 1994), pp. 45 and 462. 72 Christa Brüstle, ‘Siegmund von Hausegger: a Bruckner Authority from the 1930s’, in Perspectives on Anton Bruckner, ed. Crawford Howie, Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy Jackson (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 341–52. 73 John W. Mason, The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1867–1918, 2nd edn (London, 1997). 74 Arnold Suppan, ‘Die Untersteiermark, Krain und das Küstenland zwischen Maria Theresia und Franz Joseph’, in Zwischen Adria und Karawanken, ed. Arnold Suppan (Berlin, 1998), p. 317. 75 Pieter M. Judson, ‘Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe’, in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York, Oxford, 2005), p. 3.

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symphonic poem, outlines the confrontation in contemporary terms. With their strong sense of cultural superiority, the Germans regarded the Slovenians as hardly civilised people, disobedient children who suddenly revolted against their natural masters.76 The author Paul Hofmann von Wellenhof, a member of the Reichsrat and one of the leaders of the ‘People’s Party’ in Styria, repeatedly stresses that the simple rural population was in principle German-friendly, but increasingly incited to notions above their station by educated agitators and Catholic priests. Thus a variant of the Kulturkampf narrative was utilised here to explain a confrontation of two national or ethnic groups, adequately illustrated by examples of the ill-treatment that German-speaking parishes suffered from pro-Slovenian pastors. Such religious tensions were exacerbated by the presence of Protestants among the settlers from the German Empire who were induced to move to Southern Styria to tip the German–Slavonic balance in favour of the former.77 However, the statistics collated by Arnold Suppan paint a more nuanced picture and demonstrate that the concerns of the German-speaking upper and middle classes were the product of a collective hysteria rather than a real threat of foreign infiltration. In Styria the proportion of Slovenian speakers decreased from 36 per cent in 1851 to just under a third in 1910, whereas German-speakers in neighbouring Carniola were indeed a dwindling minority restricted to a few urban settlement ‘islands’.78 Despite the largely peaceful cohabitation the pro-German activists portrayed the Slovenians as reckless agitators for the pan-Slavonic cause with a final goal of undermining and destroying the Habsburg Empire. Conversely, they criticised the Germans in Austria for lacking in national-German  –  as opposed to Austrian or Habsburg  –  consciousness and for yielding all to easily to Slavonic demands because of a misplaced liberal notion of equality that would be their undoing. Lastly the Germans in the German Empire were taken to task for failing to support the struggle of their brothers. However, it should not be overlooked that many Germans, particularly employees of the imperial administration or members of the army, continued their traditional support of the Habsburg Empire, with the pan-German agitators forming a small if vociferous minority. Neither were the German-speaking Styrians the helpless and victimised minority that agitators like Wellenhof were fond of depicting. Some responded to the perceived threat to their national existence with the foundation of pro-German protective associations such as the Deutscher Schulverein (Association for German Schools) or Südmark (The Southern Border Region); Wellenhof himself became president of the latter.79 For those Germans the culture and political symbols of the German Empire provided convenient rallying points to express their own anti-Slavonic and increasingly anti-Habsburg stance. Many students were members of Reichs-German-nationalist fraternities, and the Wagner Society 76 P[aul]. Hofmann v. Wellenhof, Steiermark, Kärnten, Krain und Küstenland (Munich, 1899). 77 Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 114. 78 Suppan, ‘Die Untersteiermark, Krain und das Küstenland’, p. 296. 79 William H. Hubbard, Auf dem Weg zur Großstadt: Eine Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Graz, 1850–1914 (Munich, 1984), pp. 169–71.

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of Graz, founded by Siegmund’s father Friedrich von Hausegger in 1883, was just one of many platforms where cultural and political aims intersected. Hausegger also gave the keynote address at the Bismarck celebrations held in Graz in 1885,80 a clear indication that he saw the future of the Germans in Austria with the German Reich rather than the Habsburg state. These activities also suggest that the Hausegger family might have been members of the Protestant minority, which traditionally aligned itself more closely with Prussia, but it has not been possible to ascertain their denominational background. When the Habsburg Prime Minister Kasimir Count Badeni proposed two language decrees in 1897, which made the knowledge of both German and Czech compulsory for employees in the administrative and judicial systems in Bohemia, the Viennese parliament was in uproar. The riots spread not only into the Bohemian towns but also to Styria, where the frequently monolingual Germans –  and competition   –  from the Slavonic apparently feared similar demands   minority.81 In the end Badeni had to resign, the language decrees were withdrawn and the parliament in Vienna was effectively put out of action. The Graz riots were led by German-speaking students who feared for their career prospects, and it is not unlikely that Siegmund von Hausegger, who was a member of the Deutscher Akademischer Gesangverein (German Academic Singing Association),82 was more actively involved in the riots than his recollections make it appear. The Styrian government called on the Third Bosnian Regiment of the Infantry to quench the revolt; two men died on 20 and 27 November 1897.83 The population was infuriated by the government’s reliance on non-German troops; the popular writer Peter Rosegger (a close friend of Friedrich von Hausegger) was even reminded of the wars against the Turks.84 The funeral of the two victims of the riot on 30 November 1897 was turned into a pro-German demonstration against the government. The Germans in Austria and the German Empire loudly sympathised with Graz, and the pan-German groups in Styria and elsewhere felt very much confirmed in their convictions, a mood that was still palpable in 1902 when Graz hosted the festival for the German male choirs (Deutsches Sängerbundesfest), discussed in the preceding chapter. It is highly suggestive of this feeling of national oppression that Siegmund von Hausegger selected a specific musical motif from Barbarossa for reproduction in the festival journal: ‘Die Not des Volkes’  –  the plight of the people.85 80 Julius Schuch, ‘Friedrich und Siegmund von Hausegger’, Festblätter zum 6. deutschen Sängerbundesfest in Graz 1902 no. 7 ([Graz], 1902), p. 254. 81 Mason, The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, pp. 40–1. The standard study of the Badeni Decrees is Berthold Sutter, Die Badenischen Sprachverordnungen von 1897: ihre Genesis und ihre Auswirkungen vornehmlich auf die innerösterreichischen Alpenländer, 2 vols (Graz, 1960). 82 I would like to thank Harald Lönnecker for informing me about Siegmund von Hausegger’s membership in the DAGV. 83 Hubbard, Auf dem Weg zur Großstadt, pp. 171–4. 84 Peter Rosegger, ‘Die Novemberereignisse in Graz’, Der Heimgarten 22 (1898), pp. 311–13. 85 Festblätter zum 6. deutschen Sängerbundesfest in Graz 1902 no. 10 ([Graz], 1902), p. 424.

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Hausegger’s decision to base his composition on the figure of Emperor Barbarossa has to be seen in the context of these German–Slav tensions. The symphonic poem reflects the narrative of his abandoned project, Emanuel Geibel’s poem Friedrich Rotbart, which, like Rückert’s Barbarossa, had inspired many choruses for male voices. The poet first describes the sleeping emperor deep below in the Kyffhäuser mountain and ends with his triumphant return to Aachen to re-erect the Empire. Geibel had written the poem during his student days in 1837 when the restoration of German unity and power was only a faint hope entertained by a minority, a hope that had to some degree been fulfilled with the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Nevertheless Barbarossa had not yet lost his power to capture the national imagination. The new Empire, poor in genuine traditions but rich in imperial pretensions, relied more than ever on medieval props for its national symbols and emblems.86 Felix Dahn famously dubbed Emperor Wilhelm I ‘Barbablanca’ (white-beard) in a celebratory poem, turning the old Prussian king and very reluctant emperor into the fulfilment of the messianic promise symbolised by his ‘ancestor’ Friedrich Barbarossa, the ‘red-beard’.87 The sacralisation of the new Empire was promulgated vigorously by Wilhelm’s grandson Wilhelm II, who revelled in ideas of Germany’s predestined mission to rule the world. As Camilla Kaul remarks perceptively, the myth of the sleeping and returning emperor stood for German national desires as such, and every generation had to define anew what exactly the desired goals were.88 Thus for the Germans within the new German Empire Barbarossa expressed either the fulfilment of their national hopes or the desire for becoming a world power; for the Germans beyond the borders the Barbarossa myth expressed a desire for an all-German Empire yet to be erected. The German-speaking Austrians in particular were still painfully aware that Bismarck’s kleindeutsch nation-state dominated by Prussia had excluded them from the desired all-encompassing, greater-German Empire. Therefore Hausegger’s choice of the Barbarossa myth harks in fact back to the discussions over the greater-German and lesser-German solutions of the 1840s to 1860s, which gained new topicality in the 1890s under the perceived threat of Slavonic infiltration. The multi-national Habsburg Empire was not deemed suitable to fulfil any pan-German aspirations. Conversely, it is telling that the sleeping Barbarossa could not be pressed into service to symbolise Austrian or Habsburg visions, which is apparent from the choice of the medieval Habsburg emperor Rudolf I for the festival play The Emperor’s Dream planned for Emperor Franz Joseph’s jubilee of 1898.89 Hausegger was therefore in the aesthetically promising position to imbue his symphony with a visionary quality and to create a national utopia, rather than to descend into post-1871 Prussian smugness. 86 Kaul, Friedrich Barbarossa im Kyffhäuser, pp. 451 ff. 87 Ibid., p. 454. 88 Ibid., p. 440. 89 Daniel Unowski, ‘Staging Habsburg Patriotism. Dynastic Loyalty and the 1898 Imperial Jubilee’, in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Judson and Rozenblit, pp. 141–56. The celebrations were downsized because of the assassination of Empress Elisabeth.

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Hausegger’s musical education is a vital factor to explain the form Barbarossa finally took. From early on he had been brought up on the theories of his father, a lawyer, music critic, philosopher and above all ardent Wagnerian and prominent contributor to the Bayreuther Blätter. Friedrich von Hausegger’s monograph Die Musik als Ausdruck (Music as Expression, 1885) was intended to challenge Hanslick’s formalist aesthetic theory.90 He argued that neither form nor content nor technical prowess decide the value of an artwork, but solely the power it exerts over the listeners. Although both men and animals can express emotions, only human beings are capable of responding with compassion and empathy to the mediated and refined emotions expressed in art. Taking his cue from Wagner, Friedrich von Hausegger postulated a prelapsarian unity of language, music and dance that had to be restored into a total work of art. Consequently young Siegmund grew up in the conviction that the ultimate aim of his musical education was to make music the necessary expression of his innermost being: ‘There had to be the most intimate contact between experience and musical activity.’ 91 After two attempts as a Wagnerian music dramatist (Helfried, 1890; Zinnober, 1895), Hausegger nevertheless abandoned the Gesamtkunstwerk and turned towards large-scale instrumental music as his favourite mode of expression; the Barbarossa tone poem is framed by the Dionysische Phantasie (1896) and Wieland der Schmied (1904). The latter theme also resonated with German national history (and Wagnerism) while the programmatic Natursinfonie (1911) embraces an ecstatic pantheism. In this genre the issue of an original, poetic form had to be solved one way or the other, particularly if the composer consciously departed from the ‘academic’ four-movement symphonic form. Nevertheless, even the most deviant ‘sonata deformations’ continued, as Hepokoski has argued, to be locked in a dialogue with the sonata concept, which holds true for Hausegger’s instrumental works.92 The generic title he chose, Symphonische Dichtung, points towards Liszt as a model, but the young composer would also have found inspiration in the tone poems of Richard Strauss whom he admired for the realism and concise expressivity of his compositions.93 Strauss’s standpoint, summarised in a letter to Hans von Bülow, may well have been familiar to Hausegger: If you want to create a work of art that is unified in its mood and consistent in its structure, and if it is to give the listener a clear and definite impression, then what the author wants to say must have been just as clear and definite in his own mind. This is only possible through the inspiration by a poetic idea, whether or not it be introduced as a programme. I consider it a

90 For excerpts in translation see Bojan Bujic, Music in European Thought, 1851–1912 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 103–13. 91 Hausegger, ‘Kinder- und Jugendjahre in Graz (1905)’, p. 14: ‘Zwischen Erlebtem und musikalischer Betätigung mußte der innigste Kontakt herrschen.’ 92 Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception’, p. 447. 93 Siegmund von Hausegger, ‘Strauss-Glosse (1912/14)’, in Betrachtungen zur Kunst, pp. 119–24.

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legitimate artistic method to create a correspondingly new form for every new subject.94 At first glance the three-movement symphonic poem Barbarossa qualifies as a ‘correspondingly new form’ created under the impression of Hausegger’s unique political experience and his emotional response. The composer reduced the Barbarossa myth to three basic stages to each of which one movement is dedicated: Die Not des Volkes (The plight of the people), Der Zauberberg (The magic mountain), Das Erwachen (The awakening), implying an organic progression from suffering and despair to victory and triumph. The time-hallowed darkness-to-light model is, however, not the only familiar element in the design of the symphonic poem. The first movement is cast in a loose sonata form with some formal licences discussed below. The finale traditionally allows for greater formal freedom, provided it fulfils the expectations raised in the preceding movements  –  which Hausegger’s finale does to a fault. Even the middle movement (which will be investigated first in order to demonstrate more clearly the close relationship of the outer movements) reveals itself as an amalgamation of traditional forms: a scherzo-type frame around a slow middle section. Hausegger himself published an explanatory narrative for this structure some years after the composition: Introduction in the character of a scherzo: ghostly mists around the slopes of the Untersberg  –  fantastic apparitions lead into the mountain.  –  Slow movement: Main section: A magical apparition of ancient German greatness arises before the wanderer: Barbarossa and his faithful knights, fast asleep. Secondary subject: Transported back to the fairy-tale world of his childhood, [the wanderer] begins to understand who alone can help the people. But the yearning cry for liberation through the sleeping Emperor falls on deaf ears  –  the ravens still fly around the mountain.  –  Repetition of the scherzo; the reappearing mists gradually veil the image.95 Hausegger’s choice to localise his sleeping Barbarossa in the Untersberg near Salzburg rather than in the more usual Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia, where the Barbarossa monument had been inaugurated in 1896, is important for the political interpretation of the tone poem. By selecting a mountain on the very border of the German and the Habsburg empires he highlights the significance of 94 Hans von Bülow and Richard Strauss, Correspondence, ed. Willi Schuh and Franz Trenner, trans. Anthony Gishford (London, 1955), p. 82. 95 Hausegger, ‘“ Barbarossa”, symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen’, in Betrachtungen zur Kunst, p. 136: ‘Einleitung im Scherzo-Charakter: Gespenstisches Nebeltreiben um die Abhänge des Untersberges  –  phantastischer Spuk geleitet in das Innere des Berges.  –  Langsamer Satz: Hauptteil: Es zeigt sich dem Wanderer ein wundersames Bild von alter deutscher Herrlichkeit; Barbarossa und seine Getreuen, in tiefem Schlafe versunken.  –  Seitensatz: Zurückversetzt in die Märchenwelt seiner Kindertage, beginnt ihm vor diesem Anblicke die Erkenntnis Dessen zu dämmern, der allein dem Volke zu helfen vermag. Aber der Sehnsucht[s]ruf nach Befreiung durch den schlafenden Kaiser verhallt ungehört  –  noch fliegen die Raben um den Berg.  –  Wiederholung des Scherzo’s; wieder auftauchende Nebel verhüllen allmählich das Bild.’

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Example 5.4 Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa: Symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen für grosses Orchester (Berlin, [1901]), second movement Der Zauberberg, bars 209  ff.: ‘Barbarossa’ theme

  

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the Barbarossa myth for the entire German-speaking Volk, rather than the narrow Prussian-led version glorified in the Kyffhäuser monument.96 A rapid 6/8 metre and the ‘dark’ tonality of Bb minor create an uncanny –  fairly atmosphere from the outset. Although the scherzo’s function is   conventionally  –  to establish the couleur locale of the mist-shrouded mountain with its flying ravens, the first part of the movement is not fashioned along traditional lines such as ternary form but consists basically of several build-ups. Each time the music starts from near-silence, gathering more instruments and new motivic material, and then suddenly breaks off to start the process again. At first only the divided strings enter one group after the other with semi-chromatic quaver runs, circumscribing the diminished harmonies on which the entire scherzo rests, accompanied by pizzicato chords. The entries of the woodwind instruments, horns and harp introduce two new chromatic motifs which support the flitting string triplets with counter-motions and are spun out in sequences until the first climax breaks off on a diminished chord. The second build-up starts with the woodwinds, replacing the legato lines of the strings with mocking staccato motifs; the entrance of a trill-motif heralds the climax which again breaks off, this time on a Db minor chord in second inversion. The bass note Ab serves as starting point of a new descending motif in cellos and bassoons that underpins the staccato articulation of the strings. For the first time the four trumpets make themselves heard with a soft chordal pedal that sustains the modulation to E major reached about half-way through the scherzo. From this far-out point the tonality has to wind its way back to Bb minor, which it reaches quickly after all orchestral forces have joined in with greatest possible violence. On this high dynamic level (triple fortissimo) the harmony stabilises around the axis of the brass chords with their distinctive alternation of fanfares in 6/8 and hemiolas in 3/4 metre. This section is repeated literally in F minor, ever increasing in urgency and density until the harmony brightens to C major. The time signature changes to 4/4 and the variety of rhythmic figures is reduced to a flickering (but fortissimo) accompaniment reminiscent of Wagner’s Feuerzauber: Barbarossa appears in regal C major with a theme of majestic simplicity (Ex. 5.4). The repetition of the theme’s final two bars in the trumpets allows for a switch to C minor, paving the way for a second harmonic tableau in Db major without, however, another statement of the Barbarossa theme. Instead, open fifths in the horns prepare the transition 96 In the Middle Ages several mountains were considered as possible hiding places of the sleeping Barbarossa, among them the Untersberg, and as late as 1852 the painter Wilhelm Kaulbach drew the ‘Dwarf in the Untersberg’ as Barbarossa’s companion. In some legends the Untersberg was inhabited by Charlemagne. See Kaul, Barbarossa im Kyffhäuser, pp. 41 and 221.

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Example 5.5  Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa, second movement Der Zauberberg, bars 250–7, ‘Glory’ theme


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Example 5.6  Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa, second movement Der Zauberberg, bars 284–7, theme ‘The German people’

 

 

 


              

 

   

    

 


  
   

  
  



     

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to the Adagio, indicated in bar 250 with ‘Sehr ruhig’ (very calmly). This intricate process has taken all but three minutes until the appearance of the Barbarossa theme, and in its breathless brevity the bizarre fugato excited the admiration of the contemporaries. In contrast to an independent slow movement, the Adagio section is not unified by a single key but proceeds in stately slowness from one tonal centre to the next. It is characterised by two themes labelled by Hausegger (in ill-fitting sonata-form terminology) Hauptsatz and Seitensatz (Ex. 5.5). The former depicts the ‘glory’ of the emperor and his court, starting in the subdued brightness of the divided strings in D major and supported by a chorale-like accompaniment, a well-chosen musical simile for the sleeping ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. A regular four-bar pattern adds to the hymn-like impression, although the antecedent is not followed by a similarly regular consequent. Instead the phrase is spun out and leads to a second statement of the ‘Glory’ theme in Db major, the melody this time delivered by the unusual combination of first trumpet and harp. Almost predictably the tonality drops a further half-step to C major, but this time an intruder from the first movement pushes aside the ‘Glory’ theme: the first theme of the slow introduction of the first movement and thus associated, according to Hausegger’s explanation, with ‘The German people’ as such (Ex. 5.6).97 To interrupt a development or sequence with an external agent is a device particularly prominent in the first movement and will be discussed there in greater detail. Like the Barbarossa theme, this fanfare is usually harmonised with a plagal twist, facilitating the modulation to Db major and the introduction of the so-called Seitensatz in Gb major. The simple tune, divided into two-bar periods and accompanied by parallel thirds and horn fifths, effectively evokes the fairy-tale world of childhood that Hausegger describes in his programme notes. However, the idyllic memories are not to stay either. The shimmering chords that formerly accompanied the Barbarossa theme return in the major mode, this time framing an expressive cello melody. From then on a syncopated version of the childhood-memory theme builds up again to an agitated outburst complete with distorted repetitions of the Barbarossa theme. The uplifting vision of the secret underground world is effectively destroyed. Only from afar the ‘Glory’ theme sounds once more, retreating into the shadows of triple pianissimo. Even before the time signature changes back to 6/8, the restless triplets of the scherzo return. Its recapitulation is shortened, 97 Hausegger, ‘“ Barbarossa”, symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen’, p. 136: ‘Einleitung: Das deutsche Volk.’

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comprising only about eighty bars compared to more than 200 in the first instance. Instead of several build-ups all motifs and varieties of articulation are now telescoped and played simultaneously, culminating in a thirty-two bar pedal point on F that prepares the final cadence in Bb minor. Once more the triplets flicker in the violas  –  and the last vestige of the apparition vanishes in a fully scored but soft chord of Bb minor. But it does not sink without a trace. The vision of imperial glory, framed by the manifestation of the mountainous nature at its most uncanny, has a pivotal role in bringing about the darkness-to-light breakthrough, as a comparison between the first and the final movement will reveal. This contradicts the assessment of a twentieth-century concert guide that the middle movement is only a concession to the romantic appetite for the picturesque.98 The outer movements share the theme of struggle and warfare, contrasting defeat in the first with victory in the final movement. In both cases the Allegro sections are preceded by substantial slow introductions that each take up as much as a quarter of the entire number of bars. As quoted above, Hausegger wanted the first introduction to depict ‘the German people’, and he lavishes no fewer than four independent themes on their characterisation. The first with its distinct octave leap  –  the one which intrudes in the second movement  –  is sounded by horns surrounded by tremolo strings. From C minor (indispensable for a Beethovenian breakthrough model) the theme quickly moves on to Db major and even Eb minor in the course of only eight bars, finally emerging in the heroic key of Eb major. The second theme enters only seven bars later; it remains firmly in the tonal area of G  major but shares with its predecessor the fanfare-like outline and the energetic speeding-up towards the end (Ex. 5.7). The opening interval of a falling fourth relates the G major fanfare closely to the theme of imperial glory central to the second movement  –  something that first-time listeners can of course not anticipate. Nevertheless this thematic relationship hints at an essential unity of emperor and people. In contrast to the two fanfare themes the two other ideas from the slow introduction are more self-contained and prefer circular motion to modulation. The first of them is presented by the first violins in the high register, the key of B major adding even more light; the second with its distinct arch-shape is assigned to pairs of woodwind instruments and brings the formerly accompanying horn fifths into the melodic focus. Although Hausegger does not give individual name-tags to these four themes, they all belong to the greater complex portraying ‘the German people’ and the connotations of their gestures are easily decoded. Stately, upward striving fanfares, exploring the heroic tonalities of C minor and Eb major, denote military prowess and pride; yearning lyricism in delightfully clashing suspensions expresses romantic love and inwardness, and finally a pastoral landscape of the homeland is presented, complete with the sounds of shepherds’ oboes and hunting horns. German audiences, so proud of their uprightness, profundity and inwardness, will gladly have gazed at their reflection in such a flattering musical mirror. Although the musical language and political circumstances had changed considerably since Raff ’s First Symphony of 98 Hugo Borstiber, Führer durch den Konzertsaal: Begonnen von Hermann Kretzschmar: Sinfonie und Suite, vol. 2: Von Berlioz bis zur Gegenwart, 7th edn (Leipzig, 1932), p. 410.

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Example 5.7  Siegmund von Hausegger, Barbarossa, first movement Die Noth des Volkes, introduction, second theme, bars 17–24


 17

fl ob b cl

ff

tpt

  







               

 

 

  



ff

    

ff

ff

tuba db



         

   ff

hn

  

           

  

         

                          
                                

  

       

1859, the image of the Germans as a both heroic and peace-loving nation has not altered. At the end of the slow introduction the sounds of war intrude from the outside, distorting the first fanfare theme and leading towards the sonata-form Allegro in the ‘tragic’ principal key of C minor. At first the struggle proceeds in an orderly and dignified way. An energetic march in swift 2/2 time, modulating from C minor to D major and back again, frames an anguished thematic idea marked ‘wuchtig’ (massive, powerful) that is made up from arpeggiated diminished seventh chords. After the abbreviated repeat of the marching theme a tender secondary subject appears in the expected key of Eb major, its expressive suspensions and repetitive accompaniment reminiscent of the first lyrical theme from the introduction. Here Hausegger expressly states what the themes are meant to signify: ‘Main theme whose first part expresses the distress caused by the enemy, the second part expresses a defiance conscious of its strength.  –  Tender secondary subject: Yearning for liberation and peace.’ 99 It is worth noting that Hausegger does not assign any musical material to the adversaries of the Germans. What we hear of the enemies is not their ‘own’ music, nor is it a distorted version of the main thematic material (as, for example, Mephistopheles in Liszt’s Faust Symphony), but the reaction they provoke in the peace-loving Germans: courage, defiance, longing for peace. Of course, it would have been musically viable to characterise the adversaries musically as Slavs, but this could easily have backfired if the listeners had perceived the Slavonic elements as quaint and folksy rather than alien and threatening. Alternatively, Hausegger’s anger about the appeasing government, the Slovenians and the German-speaking Austrians still loyal to the Habsburg dynasty was simply too broad and unspecific to translate directly into music. Perhaps he consciously decided not to define the 99 Hausegger, ‘“ Barbarossa”, symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen’, p. 136: ‘Hauptthema, dessen erster Teil Bedrängung durch den Feind, und dessen zweiter Teil kraftbewußten Trotz ausdrückt.  –  Zarter Seitensatz: Sehnsucht nach Befreiung und Frieden.’

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enemies too clearly, so that his symphonic poem could be applied to all enemies of the Germans, not just to those from the East. Placing the conflict too firmly within the South Styrian tensions might have drawn attention to its regional nature, inappropriate for the grand rhetorical gestures employed in the symphonic poem. In short, Hausegger’s topic is his paranoia rather than the concrete political situation. With the development section the fighting starts in earnest, characterised by Hausegger as ‘desperate wrestling for freedom.’100 As both slow introduction and exposition (including their respective themes) already modulate through a wide range of harmonic digressions, the main task of the development is to explore the possibilities of the motivic material rather than to wander off into further keys. Hausegger whips up a frenzied battle through the segmentation, repetition and superimposition of the dotted march rhythm and the arpeggiated diminished chords. The second subject then enters, now transformed into a passionate plea, and makes way for a powerful build-up culminating in a triple-fortissimo diminished chord. Of this outburst only the interval of a third bb'' and d'' in the violins remains, the bb'' slides towards a'', the full orchestra enters on a D major chord, and the trombones articulate the Barbarossa theme central to the second movement (Ex. 5.4). Its specific meaning at this point is difficult to ascertain, and Hausegger’s programme is uncharacteristically silent. Is it a reminiscence of former imperial glories (but a reminiscence would need an anchoring point in previously heard music)? Is it an anticipation of the emperor who will appear properly in the second movement? Is it a fleeting vision of the splendour that awaits the German combatants in the third movement? In any case, the theme quickly makes way for the recapitulation which, like the return of the scherzo in the second movement, is shortened and condensed. The Barbarossa theme has not tipped the scales in favour of the Germans, the fighting rages even more wildly, or  –  in analytical terms  –  the techniques typical for a development section (fugato, fragmentation, tonal instability) spill over into the recapitulation. No resolution is yet in sight; consequently the secondary subject is not resolved into C major but subsumed into C minor. The recapitulation culminates, in parallel with the exposition, in a rendition of the second fanfare theme by the full brass chorus. After a sudden shift to E major a fragment of the Barbarossa theme suddenly flares up; however, both C minor and the fragmented gestures from the development section return immediately for a short coda that brings the movement to a –  in Hausegger’s words: total close with fiercely pounding C minor chords   breakdown.101 If Reinecke’s Hakon Jarl Symphony was careful not to betray its poetic inspiration by disruptive gestures, the first movement of Hausegger’s Barbarossa clearly draws attention to its narrative. The extraordinary length and richness of the slow introduction is justified because it sets out to portray an entire nation in all its manifold aspects. The ‘battle’ in the development and recapitulation remains strangely anonymous despite the effusive display of energy, partly because there is no recognisable thematic adversary and partly because the tonal and thematic 100 Ibid.: ‘Verzweifeltes Ringen um die Freiheit.’ 101 Ibid.: ‘Zusammenbruch’.

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conflicts are not yet resolved. The most striking feature of this sonata form is that each of its sections is brought to a closure by the intrusion of themes imported from elsewhere, rather than as a result of inner musical logic. The second fanfare theme from the slow introduction cuts off exposition and recapitulation, while Barbarossa himself calls a  –  momentary  –  halt to the fight in the development. Such a procedure is reminiscent of Schubert’s Ninth or Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony that use a motto to define decisive formal events. Hausegger, however, is not interested in the formal possibilities of such a motto, e.g. its gradual integration in the musical process; for him the narrative possibilities of such interruptions take precedence. It is just possible that he may have been familiar with the disruptions that are such a prominent feature of Gustav Mahler’s first three symphonies with which his symphonic poem shares the grandness of the conception, if not its content. The decisive role of the thematic intrusions is even more obvious in the final movement where the long-awaited redemption of the suffering German people is played out. In Das Erwachen (The awakening) Hausegger feels obliged to recall the sad state of the German people in a slow introduction. The first forty bars (out of ninety-four) are characterised by ragged, angry short motifs, culminating in a desperate outburst. After this cry of grim outrage, as Hausegger describes it, the music sinks back into utter despondency.102 However, in contrast to the first movement, the encounter with the sleeping emperor in the magic mountain has changed the course of events, or, as Hausegger puts it: ‘The realisation of the German essential nature, as revealed by the sight of the heroic Emperor, now makes the people worthy of liberation.’103 The idea that self-consciousness is the prime prerequisite of self-assertion was commonplace in German idealist philosophy and became a cliché across all nationalist movements. It also resonated with the cruder sentiments of the Austro-German pamphlets, namely that the Germans had to remind themselves of their national mission in order to make a stand against the apparently all too self-conscious Slavs. After the moment of depression soft trumpet calls herald the advent of great things, to which a solo violin responds with a longing melodic line. In his revision of Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration, Richard Strauss suggests that a solo violin should never be used without a ‘compelling poetic motive’, such as the fervent prayer of a pure soul or the innermost secrets of a woman’s heart;104 in this instance the violin could represent the response of the personified German soul to the wake-up call. Repeated trumpet fanfares and a new, energetically ascending motif prepare for the entrance of Barbarossa, culminating in a French-sixth chord and a meaningful general pause. It is tempting to think here of an unusually early influence of Bruckner’s build-ups. Barbarossa’s triumphant theme is played by the four trumpets in unison, accompanied significantly with a military drum-roll of 102 Ibid., p. 137: ‘Einleitung: Wiederkehr in die düstere Wirklichkeit; ein Aufschrei grimmigster Empörung.’ 103 Ibid.: ‘Die Erkenntnis deutschen Wesens, wie sie der Anblick des Heldenkaisers offenbarte, macht nun das Volk der Befreiung wert.’ 104 Hector Berlioz, Richard Strauss, Treatise on Instrumentation, trans. Theodore Front (New York, 1991), p. 58.

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the snare drum, and then repeated by the full orchestra. At the end of the slow introduction the emperor has made his entry in full splendour. Although Hausegger describes the fast section of the finale in sonata-form terms, this is hardly adequate. In contrast to the dejected first movement, the narrative demands a decisive development towards the triumph of the Germans. Although such an outcome could of course be expressed within the template of sonata form, the composer’s priority clearly was to highlight the parallels with the first movement and tell an alternative version of the previous battle that had ended with the total collapse of the German cause. The musical result is a conscientious, almost obsessive tidying-up of any motivic or thematic loose ends left over from the first movement, while the harmonic realisation of the darkness-to-light model appears more as a by-product of this overriding concern. The opening march is melodically derived from the Barbarossa theme, while its sprightly rhythm characterises it as a friendlier version of the strained march from the first movement. Like its predecessor it quickly modulates to remote keys, and after about twenty bars less well-defined ideas intrude, starting a development-like section that reflects Hausegger’s description of ‘turmoil of battle’. 105 In contrast to the first movement, Barbarossa is now allowed to intervene himself on behalf of his people; his theme appears first in E major, then in F# major (spelled as Gb major), subduing the ‘fighting’ chains of dotted quaver-semiquavers into an orderly accompaniment. The musical procedure is almost identical in the two outer movements: chaos is interrupted and tamed by an outside power. As the listeners are in no position to understand that in the first movement the Barbarossa theme functions as a reminiscence or vision (and hence unable to achieve the desired breakthrough), while in the finale the emperor is meant to intervene in the battle in person, a decisive point of Hausegger’s narrative is probably lost on the audience (unless they are armed with Adolf Schultze’s concert guide which enumerates the themes in order of appearance).106 Since they have to follow the unfolding of the symphonic poem through time, the listeners might be able to understand the relationship of first to final movement as promise and fulfilment, but not as reminiscence and reality. A musical reminiscence, like a leitmotif, works only if the listeners know what to remember, and it is only the second movement that puts them in the position to know what the Barbarossa theme is actually about. Thus the liberal transfer of thematic material from one movement to the other actually counteracts Hausegger’s intentions and obscures his narrative. In Richard Strauss’s words, it becomes ‘literary music’. After a final breakthrough and a change to 3/2 metre, the ‘Glory’ theme from the second movement appears in resplendent C major, thus fulfilling the darkness-to-light template. The conductor is advised to beat minims in order to accommodate the semiquaver runs in the strings and to give the impression of greatest possible breadth. A passing shadow of C minor helps to bring about an even more triumphant reclaiming of C major. Hausegger characterised the 105 Hausegger, ‘“ Barbarossa”, symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen’, p. 137: ‘Schlachtgetümmel’. 106 Adolf Schultze, Siegmund von Hausegger: Barbarossa: Symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen (Leipzig, [1901]).

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following passage as ‘Middle section: Barbarossa travels through the country as prince of peace.’107 Consequently the lyrical themes, which in the introduction to the first movement signified the German landscape and rural bliss, reappear. This section is clearly unified by its key signature of E major, despite internal modulations, and it is closed by yet another statement of the ‘Glory’ theme  –  an effective frame for this vision of national paradise regained. The ‘recapitulation’ starts with the return of the 4/4 metre and the marching theme, now intended to signify ‘victorious joy’,108 which is first expressed by exuberant dotted rhythms, then by accelerated statements of the Barbarossa theme accompanied by flurrying triplets. The association with the magic mountain is inevitable: magic, memory and reality finally merge. Again the time signature changes to 3/2, but this time not the ‘Glory’ theme but the two fanfares from the slow introduction of the first movement make a triumphant comeback. If we follow Hausegger’s statement that the introduction depicted ‘the German people’, the message of the restatement is clear: finally the Germans have overcome their adversaries, they have reclaimed their national identity and now bask in the splendour of transfiguration. Musically, the composer creates a large-scale symmetry between the introduction of the opening and the coda of the final movement, as he acknowledged in his programme notes.109 The arch-like structure is not undermined by a short postlude beginning after the final V–I cadence, which gives Barbarossa the opportunity to bid farewell to his liberated people with his majestic theme. It is somewhat ironic that Hausegger’s avowedly German symphonic poem corresponds quite closely to what Hepokoski has distilled as the ‘nationalistic formulas’ employed by non-German composers to express their ethnicity. This is particularly apparent in his description of the typical final movement, the goal of the symphonic process which, in varying degrees, was to feature the folk-reduction down to its essence. As the most folk-like of the movements, the finale could be understood as representing the full emergence of the group, more or less on its own terms. Towards that end these finales often featured vigorous dance-like music, or, especially, the tracking of thematic, repetitive loops, as if finally centring around a core of ethnic being within an otherwise linear work.110 Hausegger’s finale does not exactly feature ‘dance-like music’, but there is definitely a thematic ‘loop’ back to the first movement, in addition to vigorous marching tunes that might be considered as the second-best German equivalent to a national dance. By conforming to this ‘formula’, Hausegger inadvertently ‘ethnicises’ the Germans: they are cast in the role of a linguistic and ethnic minority that has yet to come into its own, as if they were Czechs or Finns languishing 107 Hausegger, ‘“ Barbarossa”, symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen’, p. 137: ‘Mittelsatz: Barbarossa durchzieht als Friedensfürst die Lande.’ 108 Ibid.: ‘Reprise: Das Marschthema als Ausdruck der Siegesfreude.’ 109 Ibid.: ‘Abschluß: Wiederholung des ganzen ersten Teiles der Einleitung des ersten Satzes.’ 110 Hepokoski, ‘Beethoven Reception’, pp. 442–3.

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under foreign rule. While affirming the aspiration of a pan-German nation in the future, Hausegger’s Austro-Germans are ‘the Other’ from the perspective of the existing, kleindeutsch German Empire. Effective as this music undoubtedly is, as any performance will attest, it poses some serious problems.111 Contemporary reviewers criticised the music’s lack of form and the audible dependence on Wagnerian and Straussian models.112 This is hardly surprising, as aspiring composers were habitually reproached for overreliance on established models unless they were branded as outrageously avantgarde. The impression of an opaque accumulation of sounds might be the result of the ubiquitous short build-ups that pervade each movement and threaten to overshadow the unfolding of grand narrative and musical lines. Similarly the frequent and often abrupt modulations distract rather than absorb the attention of the listener. However, even the grand lines are problematic in themselves, as Hausegger doubles  –  or even triples  –  the quite straightforward darkness-to-light breakthrough. On the one hand, the model shapes the symphonic poem as a whole, leading from the despair of the first movement through the magic mountain to the joyful celebration of the last. On the other hand, the breakthrough structure is also hinted at in the first movement with the intrusion of the Barbarossa theme; a similar breakthrough is achieved in the second movement, symbolising the journey from the misty mountain to the enchanted kingdom within, and the finale reiterates the entire process on a smaller scale within its slow introduction. Thus Hausegger’s symphonic poem could be classified as neither conventional symphony nor new-German tone poem, but as a three-movement work that sets out as a symphony and finishes in a tone poem. In addition, as has been remarked above, the transfer of thematic material from one movement to the other intervenes with the musical cohesion and sense of unity and obscures the actually quite simple narrative programme. Nevertheless, many contemporaries were impressed with the imaginative orchestration, the sheer scale and the rhetorical persuasiveness of Hausegger’s Barbarossa. They also wholeheartedly concurred with its political implications. After Strauss had shocked audiences with tongue-in-cheek tone poems such as Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895) and Don Quixote (1897), a more lofty offering from a young new-German composer must have come as a relief, particularly when its programme coincided with contemporary political sensibilities. Oskar Noë, who also produced the piano four-hand version of the symphony for domestic consumption, dutifully noted Hausegger’s nationality and the political conflict in the Habsburg Empire that had inspired the composition. He was even more delighted with the work’s relevance to Germans everywhere as he raved: ‘It is so German, so true down to the smallest note, a true glorification of German nature, a hymn to the German 111 I would like to thank Christoph Held from the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne who gave me access to a not-yet released recording of Barbarossa by the Nord­ west­deutsche Philharmonie, conducted by Georg Fritzsch. 112 For example Arthur Seidl, ‘Siegmund von Hausegger: I. Der Symphoniker (1903/04)’, in Neuzeitliche Tondichter und Zeitgenössische Tonkünstler (Regensburg, 1926), vol. 1, pp. 182–7.

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people!’113 Arthur Seidl, Wagnerian, avid writer for the Bayreuther Blätter and sympathiser of the pan-German movement, even heard the finale as a depiction of military efficacy: ‘If this  –  such a fresh, dashing, determined, victorious force  –  were to break loose as the “German army” and, like an unleashed storm, to attack the mortal enemy, then God help all Huns, Turks, Jews and Southerners together!’114 Here the pan-German ideology found a new application for the old Barbarossa myth: the messianic medieval emperor promised salvation not only to the Germans left outside the German Empire, such as the poor oppressed brothers in Styria, but to Germans all over the world, threatened by their ‘mortal enemies’ from without (Slavs, Italians, Frenchmen) and within (Jews). From today’s perspective it is apparent that Seidl’s  –  and Hausegger’s  –  assessment of the political situation was informed less by real threats than by an irrational paranoia. While the German Empire  –  and the German-speaking elite in Austria  –  enjoyed unprecedented economic affluence and political influence, its inhabitants felt constantly under siege and victimised by a nebulous enemy. With hindsight, it is obvious that this collective hysteria, which clamoured for a new Barbarossa in every generation, was one of the contributing factors that made so many artists and intellectuals welcome the outbreak of the First World War. Although they were born two generations apart and brought an entirely different artistic outlook to their work, Reinecke and Hausegger share several important traits. Both chose a heroic individual from the past as inspiration for their symphonic works, and both opted for a darkness-to-light model proceeding from the gloomy heroism of C minor to the regal splendour of C major. Both composers  –  implicitly or explicitly  –  believed in the relevance of symphonies to the national culture and contributed large-scale works to the German symphonic tradition with its awe-inspiring legacy. Both composers came from the periphery of the German-speaking world and brought a specific outside perspective to their task, subscribing to German culture with perhaps greater fervour than an artist who felt more ‘native’. Despite these common characteristics their works represent the opposite ends of the symphonic spectrum with regard to both musical style and to the visions of national greatness they invoke. Reinecke’s Hakon Jarl Symphony focuses on an individual hero, his lover Thora and his adversary Oluf. Even while celebrating the triumph of Christianity and advent of the new order it wistfully looks back to the Golden Age of Nordic heroism on the one hand and the Golden Age of the Classic-Romantic symphony on the other. Reinecke’s vision of Germany was based on Schumann’s idea of musical poetry or poetic music that did justice to the one without violating the other, and like Mendelssohn he wholeheartedly embraced national ‘tones’ and national myths without, however, having to separate them into ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’. In his approach to musical form the 113 Oskar Noë, ‘Tonsetzer der Gegenwart XIII: Siegmund von Hausegger’, NZfM 72 vol. 102 no. 48 (22 November 1905), p. 970: ‘Es ist so deutsch, so echt bis in die kleinste Note, eine wahre Verherrlichung deutschen Wesens, ein Hochgesang auf das deutsche Volk!’ 114 Seidl, ‘Siegmund von Hausegger’, p. 183: ‘[W]enn das  –  eine solch’ schneidigfrische, entschlossen-sieghafte Macht  –  als “deutsches Heer” erst einmal ausbricht und wie ein entfesselter Sturm über den Todfeind herfällt, dann Gnade Gott allen Hunnen, Türken, Juden und Wälschen zusammen!’

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parallel with Adam Oehlenschläger is particularly significant. Just as the Danish poet modelled his dramas on Schiller’s tragedies right until the end of his long life, the composer Reinecke felt indebted to the traditions of Viennese Classicism and the early Romantic school as whose guardian he had been appointed on becoming Kapellmeister to the Gewandhaus orchestra. If this conservative stance and his personal modesty made him old-fashioned in the eyes of the new-German avantgarde, he pretended not to care. Hausegger’s Barbarossa, on the other hand, is almost aggressively modernist and can even be classified as a manifestation of fin-de-siècle maximalism in its reckless aspirations, along with Taruskin’s examples of Mahler, Strauss and Skryabin.115 The sheer scope of the work, its elaborate orchestration and the grandiosity of its narrative programme that arose in response to a revolt of pro-German students and workers against the pro-Habsburg establishment  –  all this makes his symphonic poem an emphatic statement about the present and the future, not a nostalgically transfigured past. Although the work bears the name of a heroic individual, the story is actually not about Barbarossa at all: it is the story of the German people  –  or of the German soul  –  that comes into its own after overcoming strife, discord and adversity with the help of a mythical father figure and military leader. Even after the final breakthrough is achieved and Barbarossa roams the German countries as prince of piece, there is no place in Hausegger’s universe for merry a folk-dance, or love. The triumph is total indeed. Hausegger stands for a young generation of artists in whose eyes both the small-German compromise of 1871 and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 were too petty to contain their vision of German greatness. Rather than moving from the periphery of German culture to its centre, as Reinecke had done on his personal and artistic journey from Altona to Copenhagen to Leipzig, the pan-Germans wanted to abolish the idea of a periphery altogether. If Barbarossa returned and brought the final victory over their adversaries, the non-German citizens of the Habsburg Empire (or indeed all enemies of the Germans everywhere), then  –  so they might have argued  –  the German-speaking Austrians would once more find themselves at the political centre of a greater-German Empire, just as they had been at the cultural centre of Germany since the days of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

115 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5: Music in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2005), pp. 5 ff.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Scores and Vocal Scores Abt, Franz, Siegesgesang der Deutschen nach der Hermannsschlacht, op. 267 (Leipzig, n.d.) Becker, Valentin Eduard, Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Walde: Große lyrischromantisch-heroische Oper in 3 Akten: Text von van Brouver: Musik nach berühmten Mustern und Meistern (nachgelassenes Werk) (Coburg, [1893]) Brambach, Carl Joseph, Velleda: Gedicht von G. Pfarrius für Männerchor, Soli und Orchester, op. 7, 2nd edn (Mainz, [1881]) Bruch, Max, Arminius: Oratorium für Chor, Solostimmen und Orchester: Dichtung von J. Cüppers, op. 43 (Berlin, [1877])   — Frithjof: Szenen aus der Frithjof-Sage von Esaias Tegnér, op. 23 (Leipzig, n.d.) — Bruckner, Anton, Kantaten und Chorwerke, ed. Franz Burkhart, Rudolf H. Führer and Leopold Nowak, Sämtliche Werke 22 (Vienna, 1987) Cornelius, Peter, Gunlöd: Oper in drei Aufzügen, ed. Max Hasse (Leipzig, 1893) Dorn, Heinrich, Die Nibelungen: Große Oper in 5 Acten von E. Gerber (Berlin, [1854]) Grammann, Carl, Thusnelda: Grosse Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von H. Dickmann, op. 29 (Leipzig, [1881]) Hausegger, Siegmund von, Barbarossa: Symphonische Dichtung in drei Sätzen für grosses Orchester (Berlin, [1901]) Hiller, Ferdinand, Aus der Edda: Zwei Gedichte von Ellar [sic] Ling (Breslau, [1863]) Hofmann, Heinrich, Armin: Heroische Oper in 4 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn, op. 40 (Berlin, [1877])   — Frithjof: Sinfonie für grosses Orchester, op. 22 (Berlin, [1875]) — Kistler, Cyrill, Baldurs Tod: Musikdrama in 3 Akten: Dichtung von Frhrr. v. Sohlern, 3rd edn (Bad Kissingen, [1906]) Mangold, Carl Amand, Gudrun: Grosse Oper in vier Acten, bearbeitet nach dem altdeutschen Heldenlied ‘Gudrun’ (Darmstadt, [1851]) Meinardus, Ludwig, Luther in Worms: Oratorium in zwei Theilen: Dichtung von W. Rossmann, op. 36 (Hamburg, [1876]) Nicolai, Willem Frederik Gerard, Bonifacius: Oratorium in drei Theilen: Dichtung von Lina Schneider, op. 17 (Leipzig, [1874]) Raff, Joachim, ‘An das Vaterland’: Eine Preis-Symphonie in fünf Abtheilungen für das grosse Orchester, op. 96 (Leipzig, [1863])

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Reinecke, Carl, Hakon Jarl: Dichtung von Heinrich Carsten componirt für Alt, Tenor und Bass-Solo, Männerchor und Orchester, op. 142 (Leipzig, [1876]) —   — Symphonie (No. 2 Cmoll) für grosses Orchester, op. 124 (Leipzig, [1875]) Schillings, Max, Ingwelde: Dichtung in 3 Aufzügen von Ferdinand Graf Sporck (Leipzig, [1894]) Silcher, Friedrich, 150 Männerchöre: Gekürzte, verb. Ausgabe d. Ersten Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart, 1940) Strauss, Richard, Werke für Chor und Orchester, Orchesterwerke 30 (Vienna, 1999) Vogl, Heinrich, Der Fremdling: Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn: Scenische Anordnung vom Komponisten (Leipzig, [1899])   — Der Fremdling: Oper in 3 Aufzügen: Dichtung von Felix Dahn: Scenische — Anordnung vom Komponisten (Leipzig, [1899]). Vocal score of the ‘Inspektion’, D-Mbs, St.th.1247 Volbach, Fritz, Am Siegfriedbrunnen: Ein Stimmungsbild für Männerchor und Orchester, op. 31 (Leipzig, Zurich, 1906) Zöllner, Heinrich, Jung Siegfried: Gedicht von Heinrich Heine für Männerchor und Orchester mit Benutzung von Motiven aus Richard Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’, op. 14 no. 2 (Leipzig, [1882])

Periodicals Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung Aufsätze über musikalische Tagesfragen / Tagesfragen: Organ für Musiker, Musikfreunde und Freunde der Wahrheit Bayreuther Blätter Illustrirte Zeitung The Meister: The Quarterly Journal of the London Branch of the Wagner Society The Monthly Musical Record The Musical Times Musikalisches Wochenblatt Neue Berliner Musikzeitung Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung für Kunstfreunde und Künstler Die Sängerhalle Signale für die Musikalische Welt

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Index Aachen, 213, 215, 258 Abt, Franz All-Deutschland (chorus), 192 Auf dem See (chorus), 203 Siegesgesang der Deutschen nach der Hermannsschlacht (chorus), 209–11, 226 Adorno, Theodor W., 121, 162 Altona, 235–7, 252 Ambros, Wilhelm, 233 Andersen, Hans Christian, 251 Armin (role in Hofmann’s Armin), 88, 103–4, 106–8, 110–12, 114–15 Arminius (historical figure), 16–17, 18, 25, 32, 39, 81–2, 84, 85, 88, 91, 116, 167, 168, 181 Arminius (role in Bruch’s oratorio), 172, 175–8 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 201 Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland, 10, 55, 200–1, 202, 233, 236 Wer ist ein Mann, 86 Augsburg, 21, 147 Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, 255, 272 Austro-Prussian War of 1866, 9, 191, 233 Aventinus, Johannes (Turmair), 106 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 4, 15, 164 St Matthew Passion, 33, 171 Badeni Decrees, 254, 257 Bagge, Selmar, 215, 217 Baldur (Nordic god), 128, 139, 146, 159–60, 214 Baldur (role in Kistler’s Baldurs Tod), 146, 148–54 Baldur (role in Mangold’s Gudrun), 69 Baldur (role in Vogl’s Der Fremdling), 138–43 Bandel, Ernst von, 83; see also Hermann monument

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Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (historical event), 16, 81, 84, 91, 172 featured in musical works, 88, 107, 116, 208, 226 Baußnern, Waldemar, 131 Bayreuth Circle, 121, 148, 158–9 Bayreuth Festival, 25, 37, 87, 90, 104, 118, 126, 143, 147, 162 Bayreuther Blätter, 159, 259, 271 Bechstein, Ludwig, 129, 131 Becker, Valentin Eduard, 116 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1, 4, 25, 227 Egmont Overture, 249 Fidelio, 78 influence on symphonic tradition, 31, 229–32, 234, 237–8, 243 Symphony no. 5, 241, 248 Berlin, 8, 14, 36, 49, 50, 51, 52–3, 62, 82, 87, 90, 181, 224, 254 Berlioz, Hector, 50, 237 influence on new-German school, 227, 234 orchestration, 267 Beständig, Otto, 166 Bielefeld, 186 Bischoff, Ludwig, 213, 215 Bismarck, Otto von politics, 9, 10, 258 reception, 9, 19, 20, 25, 174, 257 Bohlman, Philip V., 29, 33 Bolck, Oskar, 68 Boniface, 15, 39, 167–8, 181 oratorios on, 168–71 Börne, Ludwig, 212 Brahms, Johannes, 30–1, 33, 36, 68n83, 232, 235 German Requiem, 5 Symphony no. 1, 230 Triumphlied, 35–6 Brambach, Carl Joseph, 166 Brandes, Friedrich, 225 Brandl, Johannes, 82 Brendel, Franz, 8, 28, 41–2, 43, 70, 234

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History in Mighty Sounds

Breslau, 51, 195–6, 201, 225, 226, 237 Bronsart, Ingeborg von, 39, 127 Bruch, Max, 37, 223 Arminius, 172–81 Das Feuerkreuz, 173 Frithjof, 213–17, 241 Gustav Adolf, 21, 172 Bruckner, Anton, 221 Germanenzug, 37, 222, 223 Helgoland, 37, 222–4 symphonies, 232, 255, 267 Bülow, Hans von, 130, 249, 259 Buskies, R., 233 Campistron, Jean Galbert de, 82 Candid, Peter, 135–6 Carl Alexander, Grand Duke of SaxeWeimar-Eisenach, 79 Carmen (operatic role), 104, 108, 110 Chabrier, Emanuel, 124 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 158 Charlemagne, 25, 201, 261n96 Chausson, Ernest, 117 Chelard, Hippolyte André-Baptiste, 83 Chopin, Fryderyk (Frédéric), 30 Christian VIII, King of Denmark, 236 Christian IX, King of Denmark, 9 Chrysander, Friedrich, 220 Clasen, Lorenz, 114 Cologne, 63, 213, 237 cathedral, 8, 170, 190 male choir festival in 1846, 190, 221 Männergesangverein, 208 Congress of Vienna, see Vienna Copenhagen, 236, 251 Cornelius, Peter Der Barbier von Bagdad, 50, 128, 135 Der Cid, 128, 135, 137 Gunlöd, 39, 119, 128–38, 146, 152, 155, 161–2 relationship with Wagner, 128–9, 130, 137 Crompton, Mary, 147 Cüppers, Adam Joseph, 173, 179, 181 Daehne, P., 201, 226 Dahlhaus, Carl, 31, 34, 35, 230

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Dahn, Felix, 123, 258 Armin (libretto), 88, 102–4, 106, 110, 111, 114, 138 Der Fremdling (ballad), 138, 148 Der Fremdling (libretto), 138–42, 148 Ein Kampf um Rom, 18, 22 Siegesgesang nach der Varusschlacht / Hermannsschlacht (poem), 208, 209 Dickmann, Hermann, 88, 91, 100–1, 106 Doepler, Carl Emil, 25 Dorn, Heinrich Deutsche Nationalhymne, 61, 63 Festgesang, 63 Die Nibelungen, 38, 41, 46, 49–64, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 80 Draeseke, Felix, 68, 130 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 17 Dürer, Albrecht, 20, 25, 192, 198 Düsseldorf, 148, 213 Dvořák, Antonín, 30–1 Edda, 22, 24, 118, 123, 129–30, 133, 138, 149, 155, 159; see also Snorri Sturluson Havamál, 130 Skaldskaparmál, 130 Völuspá, 130, 146, 150, 152 Eichborn, Hermann, 39 Elben, Otto, 181–2, 188n69, 192, 193, 198, 205 Ellis, William Ashton, 148 Engel, Daniel, 169 Erbfeind, 7, 92, 107 Erkel, Ferenc, 27 Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 187, 192, 253 Esslingen, 184, 197 Eulenburg, Philipp zu, 39 Faust (historical figure), 34; for art works see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Kistler, Cyrill; Liszt, Franz; Schumann, Robert; Wagner, Richard Faust, Carl, 233 Fink, Gottfried Wilhelm, 41 Flügel, Ernst, 225 Franchetti, Alberto, 117 Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, 9, 23, 86, 92, 107, 110, 194

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Index Frankfurt am Main National Assembly in 1848–9, 1, 8, 79, 212 male choir festivals, 183–4, 186, 190 Franz II, Emperor, 7 Franz Joseph, Austrian Emperor, 258 Freigedank, K., see Wagner, Richard Freytag, Gustav, 22–3 Friedrich I ‘Barbarossa’, Emperor, 21, 32, 164, 198, 258, 260, 271; for musical works see Hausegger, Siegmund von; Hopffer, Bernhard; Silcher, Friedrich Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, 8, 17, 33, 50, 54 Fuller-Maitland, J. A., 87, 147 Gade, Niels W., 48, 236, 237, 242, 253 Symphony no. 1, 242 Symphony no. 3, 252 Gagern, Heinrich von, 79 Garratt, James, 33, 163–4, 182, 190 Gärtner, Marie, 135 Geibel, Emanuel, 213, 254, 258 Gerber, Ernst, 51, 58, 61 German Confederation, 7–9, 190, 223, 236, 253 German-Danish War of 1864, 9, 253 Germania (allegorical figure), 85, 114, 202; for literary work see Tacitus, Publius Cornelius Gernsheim, Friedrich, 223 Gerster, Carl, 195 Glasenapp, Carl Friedrich, 148 Gluth, Viktor, 126 Goebbels, Joseph, 48 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 20, 25, 227, 252 Faust, 133, 134, 147, 149 Goldmark, Karl, 81 Grammann, Carl, 87, 90 Thusnelda, 38, 81, 87–8, 90–102, 107, 116, 117, 174 grand opéra, 35, 39, 45, 51, 59, 62, 69, 73, 81, 102 Graun, Carl Heinrich, 164, 228 Graz male choir festival of 1902, 195–6, 257 riots of 1897, 254, 257 greater-German (großdeutsch), 9, 191, 211, 258

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Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste, 73 Grimm, Jacob, 24, 118 Grimm, Wilhelm, 66 gymnastics associations, 7, 75, 86–7, 183, 186, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 223 Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der, 46–7, 54, 66 Hahn, Theodor, 70, 72 Halévy, Jacques Fromental, 35 Hamburg, 8, 194, 209, 235 Hand, Ferdinand, 164–5 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 85, 164, 176, 180, 181, 220, 228, 238 Belshazzar, 170 Judas Maccabaeus, 253 Messiah, 169, 191 Hanslick, Eduard, 118, 224, 234, 259 Hasse, Johann Adolf, 185 Hasse, Max, 131 Hausegger, Friedrich von, 257, 259 Hausegger, Siegmund von, 39, 230, 257, 259 Barbarossa, 235, 253–5, 258–72 Zinnober, 254n69, 259 Haydn, Joseph, 1, 164, 228, 229, 238 Hegar, Friedrich, 208 Heine, Heinrich, 83, 203, 217–18 Helgoland (island), 222–3; for the musical work see under Bruckner, Anton Hepokoski, James, 232, 235, 240, 259, 269 Hermann, Franz Rudolph, 51 Hermann the Cheruscan, see Arminius Hermann monument, 83, 88–9, 174, 179 Hiller, Ferdinand, 192, 213, 233 Aus der Edda, 211–13 Hirschbach, Hermann, 233 Hirschfeld, Robert, 224 historicism, 5–6, 18–21, 32–5, 38, 50, 165, 198–9, 202–3, 221 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 44 Hofmann, Heinrich, 37, 87–8 Armin, 38, 81, 87–90, 102–15, 117, 122, 174, 175, 179 Frithjof Symphony, 87, 240–1 Hofmann von Wellenhof, Paul, 256 Holstein, 9, 67, 189, 235–6, 252–3; see also Schleswig Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, 7, 21, 27, 45, 168, 235

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History in Mighty Sounds

Holzbauer, Ignaz, 44 Hopffer, Bernhard, 36–7 Hormayr, Joseph Freiherr von, 20 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 126, 149 Hutten, Ulrich von, 82 Ibsen, Henrik, 25 Jäger, Ferdinand von, 197 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 86, 196n103 Joachim, Joseph, 235 Jung, Bertha, 128, 135 Kaiserliederbücher, 208, 225 Kaiserpreissingen, 208, 224 Kamphausen, Emil, 174, 179 Karlsbad Decrees, 7 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 18, 261n96 Keck, Karl Heinrich, 67 Kissingen, Bad, 147–8 Kistler, Cyrill, 39, 126, 147–8, 159 Baldurs Tod, 54, 119, 146, 148–58, 160–1 Faust (opera), 147 Kunihild, 147, 148 Kleist, Heinrich von, 86, 227 Klenke, Dietmar, 182, 191, 194 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 1, 82, 85, 203, 226–7 Klughardt, August, 68 Koenen, Friedrich, 170 Köhler, Louis, 101, 234 Königsberg, 51, 82, 88 Körner, Theodor, 92, 199, 201–2 Korngold, Julius, 118 Kotzebue, August von, 82 Krause, Ernst, 160 Krause, Theodor, 90, 108 Krefeld, 191 Kreis, Wilhelm, 25 Kremser, Eduard, 222 Kretschmer, Edmund, 35, 81, 117 Kreutzer, Conradin, 203, 206 Kudrun (medieval epic poem), 65–9, 79–80, 199; for the opera Gudrun see Mangold, Carl Amand Kulturkampf, 10, 23, 84, 96, 167–8, 170, 256 Kulturnation, 12–13, 16, 28 Kyffhäuser, 21, 164, 258, 260–1

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Lachner, Franz, 203 Lachner, Vincenz, 192, 203, 233 Leipzig, 48, 223, 249, 252–3 Gewandhaus, 114, 230, 234, 237, 238, 242, 251, 252, 272 leitmotif, 57, 110, 118, 127, 150, 218–19 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 125–6 Liedertafelstil, 62, 206 Ling, Etlar (= Eduard Wilhelm Baltzer), 211, 212–13 Liszt, Franz, 8, 49–50, 51, 57n50, 128, 135, 227, 234, 237, 239 Faust Symphony, 133–4, 250, 265 Löffler, Johann Heinrich, 159 Lorenz, Carl Adolf, 165–6 Lübeck, 87, 190, 236 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, 17, 33, 83, 168 Ludwig III, Grand Duke of HesseDarmstadt, 78–9 Luise, Queen of Prussia, 82–3, 201 Luther, Martin, 15, 18, 25, 82, 165, 168, 170–1; for Luther oratorios see Meinardus, Ludwig; Schick, Bernhard; Venus, Wilhelm Macpherson, James, see Ossian Mahler, Gustav, 267, 272 Mainz, 135, 167, 219, 220 Makart, Hans, 18 Mallet, Paul Henri, 22 Mangold, Carl Amand, 44, 46, 64–5 Gudrun, 38, 41, 65–6, 67–80 Hermannsschlacht, 65, 78–9, 172 Mann, Thomas, 3 Männerbund, 85, 212 March Revolution, 8–9, 12–13, 43, 61, 63, 75, 79, 190–1, 212, 223 Marschner, Heinrich, 41, 44 Mascagni, Pietro, 125–6 masculinity, 85–7, 91–7, 116; see also Wehrhaftigkeit Maximilian II, King of Bavaria, 17 Meinardus, Ludwig, 171–2 Meinecke, Friedrich, 12, 17 Mendel, Hermann, 231 Mendelssohn, Moses, 15

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Index Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix, 28–9, 33, 48, 50, 176, 181, 196n103, 199, 203, 208, 221, 230, 232, 237, 243, 271 Elias, 179 Festgesang an die Künstler, 190 Paulus, 169, 179 Sommernachtstraum Overture, 248, 250 Symphony no. 3, ‘Scottish’, 242, 252 Mendès, Camille, 124 Menzel, Wolfgang, 123–4 Merz, Oskar, 148 Meßner, Georg, 208 Mettenleiter, Johann Georg, 191 Metternich era, 7, 212, 224 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 45, 49, 57, 62, 90, 104 Mihalovich, Ödön, 130 Milde, Rosa von, 135 Miller, Julius, 82 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1, 43, 69, 137, 199, 229, 238 Müller, Wilhelm, 51 Munich, 129, 135–6, 147–8, 162, 168, 254–5 performances at the court opera, 83, 142–3 male choirs and festivals, 194, 203, 205 Mussorgsky, Modest, 27 Nägeli, Hans Georg, 181, 205 Napoleonic Wars, 7, 14, 21–3, 26, 45, 66, 82, 86, 92, 163, 188, 202, 227, 252 national school(s), 4, 27, 30–1, 232 new-German school, 234, 237, 248, 250, 270 Nibelungenlied, 24, 34, 45–8, 50, 52, 54–5, 63, 66–7, 68, 79–80, 199 Nicolai, Willem Frederik Gerard, 169–70, 172 Niemann, Albert, 37 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–2, 9, 18, 119–21 Noë, Oskar, 270 Novalis (= Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 21 Nuremberg, 2, 21, 177, 191–3, 197, 198, 201–2, 205, 222; for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg see under Wagner, Richard

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Oehlenschläger, Adam, 129, 251–2 Hakon Jarl (tragedy), 238–40, 249, 250–1, 272 opera seria, 85 Ossian, 17, 21 Osterwald, Wilhelm, 169, 170 Otto-Peters, Louise, 42–3, 45, 47, 48–9, 70 Pasch, Oskar, 68, 124 Pasquini, Giovanni Claudio, 85 Passau, 191 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 205 Pfaff, Karl, 183, 184, 197 Pfarrius, Gustav, 166 Pfitzner, Hans, 34, 118 Pfordten, Hermann von der, 143 Piloty, Karl Theodor von, 18, 88–9, 102 Puccini, Giacomo, 125 Raff, Joachim, 233–4, 264 Ranke, Leopold von, 17 Raupach, Ernst, 18, 49, 50–1 Reckling, August, 233 redemption opera, 39, 117–19, 127–8, 161; see also under Wagner, Richard Regensburg, 17, 198 Reimar, Reinald (= Adolf Glaser), 51 Reinecke, Carl, 37, 39, 230, 233, 235–7, 251, 253, 271–2 Hakon Jarl (cantata), 249 Symphony no. 2, Hakon Jarl, 235, 238–9, 240, 241–52, 271–2 Reißiger, Carl Gottlieb, 43 Reissmann, August, 68, 231 Rellstab, Ludwig, 49, 50 Rheinberger, Joseph, 33, 147 Rhine crisis, 63, 189, 218 Rietz, Julius, 191, 237 Risorgimento, 5, 10, 233 Ritter, Alexander, 125–6, 137 Röder, Georg Valentin, 82 Römer, Maximilian, 189–90 Rosegger, Peter, 257 Rossini, Gioachino, 62 Rossmann, W., 171 Rothschild, Anselm von, 184 Rückert, Friedrich, 135, 206, 258 Rückert, Marie, 135

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History in Mighty Sounds

Rudolstadt, 186 Sachs, Hans (historical figure), 192, 198; for the operatic character see under Wagner, Richard Saint-Saëns, Camille, 102, 110 Salomon, Heinrich, 52–3 Salvi, Antonio, 85 Die Sängerhalle (journal), 188, 195, 225 San-Marte (= Albert Schulz), 65–6 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyne, 135 Scheffel, Joseph Victor von, 18, 83–4 Schick, Bernhard, 172 Schiller, Friedrich (von), 1, 6, 62, 68, 78, 240, 252, 272 festivals and monuments, 18, 223 Schillings, Max (von), 127–8, 161 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 82 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 45 Schlegel, Elias, 85 Schleswig, 9, 67, 189, 235–6, 253; see also Holstein Schmitz, Oskar A. H., 3 Schneider, Friedrich, 43, 134, 169, 203 Schneider, Lina, 169–70 Schubert, Franz, 50, 267 Schubring, Julius, 167, 169 Schuch-Proska, Clementine, 114 Schumann, Robert, 30, 48, 49, 50, 134, 229, 237, 238n34, 242, 243, 253, 267, 271 Scott, Sir Walter, 173 Scudéry, Georges de, 82 See, Klaus von, 20, 22, 46, 61, 63 See, Philipp, 219 Seidl, Arthur, 125–6, 155, 159, 271 Shakespeare, William, 1, 229 Sibelius, Jean, 232 Silberstein, August, 222–3 Silcher, Friedrich, 205–8, 221, 224 Simrock, Karl, 24, 46, 65, 67, 129, 131 Smetana, Bedřich, 232, 239 Snorri Sturluson, 24, 130, 139, 146 Sohlern, Carl Edgar Freiherr von, 146, 148–9, 152, 155, 158, 161 Sonderweg theory, 11–13, 28–9, 38, 190 Specht, Richard, 118–19 spirit of the people, 19, 24, 128, 208 Spitta, Philipp, 204–5

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Spohr, Louis, 41 Spontini, Gaspare, 18, 45 Sporck, Ferdinand Graf von, 128 Springer, Anton, 19 Staatsnation, 12, 16 Stabreim, 118, 132, 141 Stainheimer, Rosina, 147 Stegmayer, M., 82 Stein, Heinrich von, 148 Strauss, Richard, 118, 126, 221, 248–9, 259–60, 267, 270, 272 Bardengesang, 197, 222, 224–8 Strindberg, August, 25 Stuntz, Joseph Hartmann, 191 Stuttgart, 26, 82, 194 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 23, 81–2 Taruskin, Richard, 4, 27–8, 29, 31, 36, 231, 272 Tegnér, Esaias, 213, 215 Teutoburger Wald, see Battle of the Teutoburg Forest Thiessen, Karl, 208 Thusnelda (historical figure), 84–5, 88, 91n35 Thusnelda (role in Grammann’s Thusnelda), 90–1, 96–7, 101–2, 106, 117 Thusnelda (role in Hofmann’s Armin), 102–4, 106–7, 111–15 other art works, 82, 116 Tieck, Ludwig, 1, 252 Tschirch, Rudolf, 192 Tübingen, 205, 252 Uhlig, Theodor, 72–3, 75 Ulm, 198 Unger, Georg, 87 Untersberg, 260–1 Varus (historical figure), 81, 106 Varus (operatic role), 103, 116 Venus, Wilhelm, 172 Vercingetorix, 16–17 Verdi, Giuseppe, 5, 27–8, 32, 101, 125 Versailles, Treaty of, 9

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Index Vienna, 30, 51, 82, 87, 88, 128, 135, 194, 223–4, 233–4, 257 Congress of, 7, 206 male choirs and festivals, 194, 208, 222, 223–4 Vierling, Georg, 166 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 33 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 1, 5, 46, 47–8, 50, 61, 79 Vogl, Heinrich, 39, 143 Der Fremdling, 119, 138, 140–2, 144–6, 161 Vogl, Therese, 50 Volbach, Fritz, 219–21, 227 Volkert, Franz, 82 völkisch movement, 23, 158–61, 196, 232 Volkmann, Robert, 233 Volksgeist; see spirit of the people Vormärz, 8, 11, 41, 43, 83, 163, 182, 189–91, 194, 212–13, 236 Die Wacht am Rhein, 63, 202, 253 Wagner, Cosima, 81 Wagner, Johanna, 50 Wagner, Richard, 4, 27–9, 31, 32, 38–9, 41, 75, 79, 88, 90, 124–6, 128–30, 148, 213, 217, 231, 234, 237 anti-Semitism, 28, 150, 158, 217 art-work of the future, 73, 119 influence, 38–9, 68, 90, 117–19, 121, 124–5, 129, 132, 148–9, 155, 161–2, 248, 259, 270 redemption, 119–22, 124–5, 155, 162 l writings Der junge Siegfried, 146 Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, 81, 120 Die Sieger, 123 Die Wibelungen, 146 regeneration writings, 158 l musical works Faust Overture, 127 Der fliegende Holländer, 117, 120, 240 Kaisermarsch, 233 Lohengrin, 27, 45, 50, 51, 70, 72–3, 81, 94, 108, 110, 117, 120, 137, 140, 248

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Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 5, 217 Parsifal, 34, 90, 102, 108, 110, 117, 120, 125, 130, 134, 147, 148, 150, 161 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 25, 48–9, 50, 54, 55, 71, 80, 92, 104, 120, 129, 133, 138, 146, 149, 217–19, 223 Das Rheingold, 50, 140, 142–3, 149, 150, 179 Die Walküre, 143, 149, 219, 261 Siegfried, 218–19 Götterdämmerung, 25, 50, 104, 120, 123, 143, 146, 152, 161, 219 Tannhäuser, 50, 64–5, 70, 72–3, 81, 117, 120, 125 Tristan und Isolde, 127, 128–9, 137–8, 161 Wagner, Siegfried, 126 Wagner Societies, 146–7, 162, 254, 256 Wars of Liberation, see Napoleonic Wars Wartburg, 34, 65 Wastian, Heinrich, 196 Weber, Bernhard Anselm, 82 Weber, Carl Maria von, 1, 41, 92, 137, 199 Der Freischütz, 44, 116, 215 Wehrhaftigkeit, 86, 100, 115; see also masculinity Weimar, 49–51, 59, 70, 128 Weimar Classicism, 38, 227, 252 Weimar Republic, 11, 38, 48 Weingartner, Felix, 118, 121–2, 161 Weitzmann, Carl Friedrich, 59, 75 Werner, Anton von, 18 Wesendonck, Mathilde, 68 Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, German Emperor, 9, 18, 21, 25, 83, 233, 258 Wilhelm II, German Emperor, 11, 25, 208, 258 Winfried, see Boniface Wirth, Moritz, 155 Wohlgemuth, Gustav, 225 Wolzogen, Hans Freiherr von, 148 Würzburg, 82, 182, 189–90, 198, 205 Zelter, Karl Friedrich, 181, 206 Zöllner, Carl, 43, 217 Zöllner, Heinrich, 167, 196, 217–19, 221

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HistoryMightySoundsv.2_PPC 08/08/2012 15:57 Page 1

Music played a central role in the self-conception of middle-class Germans between the March Revolution of 1848 and the First World War. Although German music was widely held to be 'universal' and thus apolitical, it participated – like the other arts – in the historicist project of shaping the nation's future by calling on the national heritage. Compositions based on – often heavily mythologised – historical events and heroes, such as the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest or the medieval Emperor Barbarossa, invited individual as well as collective identification and brought alive a past that compared favourably with contemporary conditions.

BARBARA EICHNER is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Oxford Brookes University.

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge Suffolk, IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

Barbara Eichner

Cover design of the programme of the third imperial singing competition for German male choirs, Frankfurt am Main, 1909 (Festbuch zum 3. Gesang-Wettstreit Deutscher Männer-Gesangvereine, Frankfurt am Main, 1909).

History in Mighty Sounds maps out a varied picture of these ‘invented traditions’ and the manifold ideas of ‘Germanness’ to which they gave rise, exemplified through works by familiar composers like Max Bruch or Carl Reinecke as well as their nowadays little-known contemporaries. The whole gamut of musical genres, ranging from pre- and post-Wagnerian opera to popular choruses to symphonic poems, contributes to a novel view of the many ways in which national identities were constructed, shaped and celebrated in and through music. How did artists adapt historical or literary sources to their purpose, how did they negotiate the precarious balance of aesthetic autonomy and political relevance, and how did notions of gender, landscape and religion influence artistic choices? All musical works are placed within their broader historical and biographical contexts, with frequent nods to other arts and popular culture. History in Mighty Sounds will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century German music, history and nationalism.

HISTORY IN MIGHTY SOUNDS

MUSIC IN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

HISTORY IN MIGHTY SOUNDS

Barbara Eichner

Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914