The Berlin Philharmonic, led for more than three decades by Herbert von Karajan, is among the world’s leading orchestras, as are the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, formerly conducted by Kurt Masur; the Bamberg Symphonic Orchestra; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Many German musicians, including the conductor and pianist Christian Thielemann and the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and concert vocalists, including Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Peter Schreir, enjoy international reputations. Moreover, the opera houses of Hamburg (the oldest), Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Munich are among the world’s most renowned. The system of state-supported opera has allowed many young North American and British singers lacking opportunities at home to train in Germany, and some remain in the permanent companies there.
Germany has also been proving ground for foreign rock musicians, from the Beatles apprenticeship in clubs along Hamburg’s Reeperbahn in the early 1960s to fellow Englishman David Bowie’s landmark recordings in Berlin and the collaborations of Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and American disco diva Donna Summer in Munich’s Musicland Studios in the 1970s. German performers have also left their mark on rock, not least the influential groups Can, Faust, and Tangerine Dream, whose innovative music emerged in the early 1970s and was dubbed “Krautrock” by Anglo-American critics. A wave of other German groups followed, making important contributions to a variety of genres. Kraftwerk helped lay the foundation for modern electronic music and influenced the development of hip-hop. The Scorpions, powered by the virtuosic playing of lead guitarist Uli Jon Roth, became Germany’s most-enduring heavy metal act. Germany was also a centre for industrial music, with acts like Einstürzende Neubauten and KMFDM achieving global popularity. Curiously, East Germany’s best-known rock performer was leftist American expatriate Dean Reed (the “Red Elvis”), who was especially popular in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s.
Dance also has been an important part of German cultural life. In the 18th century the waltz, a ballroom dance for couples, developed from regional social dances of southern Germany and Austria, such as the Dreher, Ländler, and Deutscher. The waltz quickly gained popularity in other European countries, perhaps because it appeared to represent some of the abstract values of the Romantic era, the ideals of freedom, character, passion, and expressiveness. Vienna became the city of the waltz. The early 19th century was the age of the Viennese waltz kings, most notably the composers of the Strauss family.
Ballet in Germany was generally relegated to various court opera productions. During the French choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre’s appointment at Stuttgart (1760–67), Germany briefly became a significant centre for ballet. However, German theatrical dance lacked a unified movement until the 20th century.
Modern dance was embraced in Germany, where it was known as Ausdruckstanz (“expressionistic dance”). Early modern dance pioneers such as Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, and Hanya Holm had a broad influence on dance practice, particularly in the United States. The Stuttgart Ballet at the Württemberg State Theatre rose to world prominence in the 1960s under its South African-born director John Cranko, and its success continued under Marcia Haydée and Reid Anderson after Cranko’s death in 1973. In Wuppertal in the 1970s the choreographer Pina Bausch pioneered the innovative form known as Tanztheater (“dance theatre”), which was widely influential into the 1980s. The Hamburg Ballet is also a lively centre of world ballet. (For further discussion, see Western music; waltz; and ballet.) The visual arts
Germany has a strong, rich tradition in the visual arts. In the medieval era, the reign of Charlemagne introduced German artists to the three-dimensionality of Roman art. Paintings and sculptures, often in the Gothic style popularized in France and Germany, were generally made to decorate churches, and illuminated manuscripts and stained glass were also created. In the 15th century, the design of altarpieces, which combined the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, became a popular pursuit, and the rise of book printing led to the design of many fine woodcut illustrations. In the late 15th and the 16th centuries, a generation of German artists emerged that included Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein the Younger, all of whom worked in a style influenced by the Italian Renaissance; their work represented a golden age in German art. During this era, the Protestant Reformation of the 1520s brought about the destruction of some art that was deemed idolatrous and led to more secular subject matter, as seen in the numerous self-portraits by Dürer.
Subsequent generations of artists explored French and Italian variations on the Baroque and Rococo, but German art did not develop a definite national character again until the mid-18th century, when a staid Neoclassicism, advocated by theorist Johann Winckelmann and a series of new art academies, took hold. At the turn of the 19th century, Romanticism blossomed, perhaps best exemplified in the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, who in the first quarter of the century explored nature with a passionate, almost religious fervour. By the late 19th century, artists began to form groups that seceded from the conservative teachings and exhibition opportunities of the academies. Nevertheless, the staid Neoclassical style mostly dominated until the late 19th century, when secessionist groups formed in Munich (1892), Berlin (1898), and, under the leadership of Gustav Klimt, Vienna (1897).
German painters of the 20th century, especially groups such as Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), developed a new Expressionist current in European art. Beginning in 1916, Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and others explored the more theoretical concerns of Dada, while in the 1920s artists such as Otto Dix and photographer August Sander worked in the realistic, socially critical style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”).
These and other developments came to a halt in 1933 with the rise of the National Socialists. Hitler and the Nazi regime condemned most modern art, holding the infamous Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) show in 1937 in an attempt to make a mockery of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Conservative, “heroic” German landscape art was instead promoted as an ideal art form.
After World War II, German art struggled to regain a sense of direction, challenged by the emigration of many important German artists to France or the United States. In East Germany a form of Socialist Realism dominated artistic practice, a trend that would continue until reunification. In West Germany, however, many artists experimented with avant-garde movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, minimalism, and Op art. Beginning in the 1960s, Joseph Beuys created sculpture, performance art, and installation art that challenged the very definition of “high art.” Incorporating materials such as fat and felt, Beuys’s work represented an individual take on Pop art’s goal of bringing art into the realm of the everyday experience; his example influenced a new generation of artists. Perhaps the most notable German figure of the 1970s was Gerhard Richter, who became known for his paintings based on photographs. Blurring the lines between the media of photography and painting, his beautifully executed works anticipated the challenge to traditional forms that would characterize postmodern art. German art was again at the centre of the international art world when Neo-Expressionism became the dominant international trend of the 1980s. Building upon German art’s long-standing interest in Expressionism, artists such as Georg Baselitz (who had been making important work since the 1960s), Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke combined a raw, expressive application of paint with challenging subject matter.