Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture

Music is "about becoming," said Daniel Barenboim, "it's not the statement of a phrase that is really important, but how you get there and how you leave it and how you make the transition to the next phrase."¹ We might say the same thing about Germany as a collective entity, in a state of becoming where the now of it matters less than all its yesterdays and tomorrows, less than how it understands those yesterdays and uses that understanding to navigate into the future. But then again, perhaps we should resist the analogy because, after all, the assertion of some deep current of affinity between German identity and music amounts to one of the greatest and most seductive of clichés about modern Germany. Ever since the nineteenth century, writers have been exploring this connection and wondering aloud if there isn't something even providential about the German relationship to music. Nor have the Germans been alone in noticing this. A conviction that there is something special about the conjunction of music and Germans has, for good or ill, informed the concert schedules, travel plans, career decisions, institutional reforms, public and private spending, movie scripts, and innumerable other things, even government policy (in the fascinating case of the postwar occupation of Germany), all of non-Germans, for at least a hundred years, if not longer. Given all that, music is indeed the key to something in modern German history, a something that I will simply label continuity, that is, the very human search for things that persist in the face of fragmentation, integration, disintegration, catastrophe, and starting over. Yet, to the same extent that music has for so many years been caught up in the German sense of identity, so too, to just that extent is its current capacity to serve as a carrier of the past and a source of collective identity compromised. This is the paradox of German identity, expressed in a particularly wrenching way in the case of music. With collective identities especially, as with the collective life to which they give meaning, there is no starting over, just carrying on. And yet the stronger the links of any aspect of German culture to the past, the more suspect, guilt-ridden and hence unbalanced that carrying-on can be.

On the surface, nothing has been simpler over the course of the past century than for Germans to reaffirm, again and again, just how enduring is their special relationship to music. If the Germans before unification in 1871 engaged in a lengthy process of cultural definition, with musical life as one of the most important arenas of their activity, then the Germans after unification tended more toward repeated assertions of a cultural identity now supposedly achieved, assertions that built in volume and intensity to the awful clamor of the Third Reich. The point of transition, from tentative explorations of music's meaning for the Germans to more confident, less subtle statements of an unassailable superiority, is of course difficult to determine. Many people assume that Wagner is to blame for the change. But the reality is more recalcitrant. As musicologist Bernd Sponheuer has shown, German writers began to define the nature of Germanness in music already in the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth believed that Germans held a unique place in the history of music, developing music's spiritual and introspective qualities far beyond any other nation, to the point that Germans alone had awoken all peoples to "the highest meaning of humanity."² No one could say precisely what Germanness in music actually was, neither music theorist Johann Joachim Quantz in the eighteenth century nor Theodor Adorno in the twentieth nor anyone in between. In what Wagner called his "final word upon the sadly earnest theme" of "what is German," he declared the issue "more and more puzzling" and himself "unqualified for further answering of the question."³ But the question was unanswerable because it was the wrong question. The continuity in German musical life consisted not in a quality demonstrably present in music itself but in a kind of ideology, or...