Music and German National Identity

Is it merely a coincidence that the three "Bs" of classical music?Bach, Beethoven, Brahms?are all German composers? Why do concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire? Over the past three centuries, supporters of German music ranging from music scholars to politicians have nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music.

This book explores the questions of how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated as "the most German art." Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars in German history, musicology, and German literature, the essays assembled here examine philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents, as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, and pop to explore the ways in which music has continued to play a central role in the German national imagination and in shaping German identity.

CONTENIDO:

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

-Germans as the "People of Music": Genealogy of an Identity (Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter)
-Reconstructing Ideal Types of the "German" in Music (Bernd Sponheuer)
-Einheit-Freiheit-Vaterland: Intimations of Utopia in Robert Schumann's Late Choral Music (John Daverio)
-Wagner's Die Meistersinger as National Opera, 1868-1945 (Thomas S. Grey)
-Landscape-Region-Nation-reich: German Folk Song in the Nexus of National Identity (Philip V. Bohlman)
-Kein schöner Land: The Spielschar Ekkehard and the Struggle to Define German National Identity in the Weimar Republic (Bruce Campbell)
-Hosanna or "Hilf, O Herr Uns": National Identity, the German Christian Movement, and the "Dejudaization" of Sacred Music in the Third Reich (Doris L. Bergen)
-National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of "German" Music (Hans Rudolf Vaget)
-Culture, Society, and Politics in the Cosmos of "Hans Pfitzner the German" (Michael H. Kater)
-"Für eine neue deutsche Nationaloper": Opera in the Discourses of Unification and Legitimation in the German Democratic Republic (Joy Haslam Calico)
-Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, and the West German Search for a New Musical Identity (Gesa Kordes)
-American Jazz in the German Cold War (Uta G. Poiger)
-Postwar German Popular Music: Americanization, the Cold War, and the Post-Nazi Heimat (Edward Larkey)
-On the History of the "Deutschlandlied" (Jost Hermand)
-Ethnicity and Musical Identity in the Czech Lands: A Group of Vignettes (Bruno Nettl)
-"Is That Not Something for Simplissimus?!" The Belief in Musical Superiority (Albrecht Riethmüller)

List of Contributors
Index