Grass, GünterGünter Grass, 2007.Zuma Press/Alamy
The German theatre has long been faced with the dilemma of either being bold and innovative or relying on the rich repertoire of German classics from the 18th and 19th centuries, a limited number of established 20th-century dramas from artists such as Brecht, Carl Zuckmayer, or Max Frisch, and contemporary plays in translation from Britain, France, and the United States. While the system of public subsidies and ticket subscriptions favours a steady diet of Goethe, Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Anouilh, Anton Chekhov, and Brecht, it also allows for risks and for the plays of late 20th-century dramatists such as Martin Walser and Patrick Süskind to be performed. Small experimental theatres enjoy a lively, if hazardous, existence in the major cities and often closely resemble Germany’s still vibrant political cabaret.
In East Germany all theatres were state-owned. The German Theatre (Deutsches Theater) in Berlin reopened in September 1945 and was the first German theatre to perform following the Nazi collapse. The old German National Theatre (Deutsches Nationaltheater) in Weimar was the first to be rebuilt after 1945. Understandably, Berlin dominated theatrical developments, especially because of the work of Brecht at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Given a haven in East Germany—a theatre and a company, along with the political and artistic latitude he required—Brecht was able to produce and perform his own works exclusively. Nevertheless, the Berliner Ensemble, as his group was named, possibly commanded more critical and popular attention in the West, where his plays are still widely performed, than on its home ground. (For further discussion, see German literature.) Music and dance
In the 12th and 13th centuries, German poets and musicians known as minnesingers, influenced by the troubadours and trouvères of France, composed and performed songs of courtly love for the Hohenstaufen dukes of Franconia and Swabia. Their most prominent representative, Walther von der Vogelweide, is recognized for his didactic moral and religious poetry as well as for his poems of love. Later, fraternities of mostly middle-class singers developed into singing schools (Singschulen), organized as craft guilds, in free cities such as Mainz, where the first such school is said to have been founded in the early 13th century by the minnesinger Frauenlob. The schools of the Meistersingers, as they came to be known, spread to other German cities, notably Nürnberg. The outstanding 16th-century Meistersinger Hans Sachs is celebrated in the opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner.
In the mid-16th century the leader of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, composed chorales, many of them based on older Latin hymns and secular tunes, for performance in religious services. The chorale, a musical form characteristic of the Protestant church in Germany, was developed in sophisticated ways in the early 17th century by the composer and musicologist Michael Praetorius. Heinrich Schütz, widely considered the greatest German composer of the 17th century, produced sacred vocal music that melded the newer styles of his Italian teachers (notably Giovanni Gabrieli) with traditional German forms; his Dafne was the first German opera.
The late Baroque period of musical history (the first half of the 17th century) was dominated by Johann Sebastian Bach, a brilliant and prolific composer for the organ and harpsichord, who produced masterpieces of instrumental and sacred vocal music, including the six Brandenburg Concertos and the Mass in B Minor, and by the German-born English composer George Frideric Handel, who is best remembered for his operas and oratorios, especially the Messiah, and for the instrumental pieces Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Another major figure, Georg Philipp Telemann was considered Germany’s leading composer during his lifetime and is arguably the most prolific and versatile composer in history.
Bach, Johann SebastianJohann Sebastian Bach, oil on canvas by Elias Gottlieb (Gottlob) Haussmann, 1746; in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, Germany.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Germanic music until the early 20th century is understood to include the contributions of Austrian composers. Indeed, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose work bridged the 18th and 19th centuries, is generally regarded as the pivotal transitional figure between the Classical period—best represented by the works of Austrians Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—and the Romantic period. Mozart, considered by many the greatest of all musical geniuses, was the master of all genres, especially the symphony, chamber music for strings, and opera. Beethoven developed the major forms of Classical instrumental music—especially the symphony, the sonata, and the quartet—in radically new directions. The passion and heroic individualism of his music, and Beethoven’s own uncompromising commitment to the purity and integrity of his art, inspired many composers and writers of the Romantic Movement. Also influential was Beethoven’s contemporary the Austrian Franz Schubert, remembered principally for his chamber music.
Ludwig van Beethoven, portrait by Josef Karl Stieler.University History Archive/UIG/Shutterstock.com
Felix Mendelssohn (Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream), the first of the major German Romantic composers, was also a conductor and led a 19th-century revival of interest in Bach, whose music had been neglected for nearly 100 years. Other significant 19th-century German composers included Robert Schumann and his wife Clara Schumann, Carl Maria von Weber, Johannes Brahms, who, with the Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was one of the most important symphonic composers of the second half of the 19th century, and Richard Wagner, who created a revolutionary new form of musical drama grounded in complicated psychological, religious, and philosophical symbolism.
Felix Mendelssohn, painting by Wilhelm Hensel.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
In the late 19th and the early 20th century Richard Strauss composed operas and operettas but is best remembered for his tone poems, especially Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra. His contemporary the Austrian Gustav Mahler anticipated the compositional techniques of the 20th century and is generally regarded as the last great composer in the Austro-German tradition. In the early 20th century the Austrian Arnold Schoenberg invented the atonal method of composition known as serialism, or the 12-tone technique, to which German composer Paul Hindemith responded by developing a system of composition that expanded traditional tonality. Also shaped by Schoenberg, the Austrian composer Alban Berg produced exceptional works—notably his operas Wozzeck and Lulu—in atonal style. Carl Orff, in addition to composing, created an innovative system of musical education for children.
In the late 1920s Kurt Weill collaborated with Brecht to satirize the corruption of modern capitalism in Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera; including the standard “Mack the Knife”) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (“Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). In these and other works, Weill employed a “cabaret” style incorporating popular tunes, jazz, and ragtime. The rise of the Nazis in 1933 forced many German composers and musicians to flee to the United States. In the decades after World War II, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the most eminent of contemporary German composers, produced avant-garde electronic music that radically extended the expressive possibilities of serialism. Other significant German composers of the second half of the 20th century included Bernd Alois Zimmerman, best known for his opera Die Soldaten (“The Soldiers”), and Hans Werner Henze.