Arguably one of the most conspicuous leitmotifs running through German cultural history is the degree to which music has assumed a role of national significance far exceeding that in any other European country. An obvious starting-point for explaining such a phenomenon would be the almost unbroken legacy of major German-speaking composers who have exercised a lasting international influence over musical developments over the past 200 years. But other factors have proved equally vital to the all-pervasive influence of music. Consider, for example, the multiplicity of opera houses and orchestras (something in the region of 150 at the present time) that have existed in each major provincial and metropolitan centre since the nineteenth century, or the unparalleled opportunities that Germany has offered for music education, drawing students from all over the world. Then one must take into account the strong musicological traditions in German-speaking countries which have provided the fundamental principles for almost all musical scholarship of recent years. In statistical terms, this preoccupation with musical analysis, research and theory has been exemplified by a much greater number of specialised periodicals devoted to music than in any other country.

In the roughly 150 years between the middle of the eighteenth century and re-unification, German society faced two major economic and socio-structural revolutions. The industrial revolution, which lasted from the early 1840s to the eve of the First World War, turned a still predominantly feudal society into a largely industrial society. The second revolution, which one might call a material revolution, transformed post-war German society between 1950 and 1970 from a society deeply scarred by dictatorship, defeat, and destruction into one of the most affluent societies in Western Europe. Despite the structural similarities of the two revolutions, their outcomes were radically different. The industrial revolution ended in totalitarian dictatorship and the most destructive war in European history; from the second revolution, the vast majority of the divided nation emerged as a stable and increasingly pluralist democracy.

Historians and social scientists have proposed a number of interpretations to explain how a combination of various 'peculiarities of German history' in the nineteenth century led to the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. Although the notion of a German Sonderweg (idiosyncratic development) has been significantly modified and to some extent discredited, it still retains some validity with respect to at least one problem: namely, that in Germany in the nineteenth century, the transformation of the social and political structure failed to keep pace with the progress of industrialisation. In Germany, unlike other industrialised countries, pre-industrial elites retained their predominant social and political position against the newly emerging industrial classes, stifling societal modernisation and inhibiting the evolution of a democratic political culture.

The birth of film in Germany

On 1 November 1895, nearly two months before the famous Lumière screening in Paris, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky showed a fifteen-minute film programme at the Berlin Wintergarten using their Bioscop, and by June of the following year the inventor and entrepreneur Oskar Messter had sold his first flicker-free projector incorporating the Maltese cross mechanism. Soon after the turn of the century Messter was experimenting with the synchronisation of film footage and gramophone records and establishing his reputation as Germany's first major film producer. Germany thus had its share of pioneers at the start of film history. However, large-scale production of narrative film was slow to develop, allowing French, Danish, Italian and American films to dominate until the First World War.

In the wake of increasingly vociferous attacks on cinema for its low moral standards and corrupting influence the term Autorenfilm (writer's film) was coined in 1913. This tag was intended to enhance the reputation of the medium through the script of a recognised author, as exemplified by Max Mack's Der Andere (The Other, 1913), a variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde motif, written by the playwright Paul Lindau. It was during this period that leading theatre directors, including Max Reinhardt, began to work in cinema, and filmmakers, drawing creatively on the German Romantic tradition, devised special effects to stage fantastic narratives: Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913) introduced the motif of the Doppelgänger, and Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen's Der Golem (The Golem, 1914) drew on the cabbalistic legend of the clay man.

The lyric poetry in German culture since the 1870s is caught between polarities of aesthetic and political allegiance perhaps more extreme than in any other genre. Between an ethically responsible poetry engaged with the real and a poetry of privileged inwardness, there can, it seems, be little common ground. The conflict between these impulses is demonstrated with unique clarity in reactions to the Holocaust. Yet, reviewing the period as a whole, it is striking how this central opposition is reformulated time and again in shifting constellations. What links these different impulses is a knowing reflection on the self and the character of poetic creativity. That, it might be argued, defines the crucial signature of the modern.

A new poetry: paths out of the 'Gründerzeit'

The period from 1870 to 1890 saw a definitive change in German poetry. Wide-scale literacy programmes, technical innovations in printing and paper-production and the popularity of lending libraries and masscirculation family magazines created a new appetite for culture among the middle classes. The great names of the dominant Erlebnislyrik (poetry of experience), Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller, published their final collections; the moral poetry of popular anthologies remained decorative but trivial; nationalist poets like Emanuel Geibel produced hymns of patriotic fervour and heroic cliche. Torn between inflated idealism and salon culture, the central problem for poetry as a genre was how to negotiate between public and private demands in a rapidly changing world.

The three concepts of Volkskultur, mass culture and alternative culture are seminal for an understanding of the history of German modernity. They reflect different conceptions of the popular and it is important to outline their functional significance within the development of German cultural, ideological and political history. Special attention is to be paid to the authors of high culture as both promoters and critics of popular culture in order to highlight the negotiation of attitudes between the educated classes and the rest of the population. Paradoxically, the varieties of 'low' culture are in some respects creations of the same elites who otherwise insist on keeping the sophisticated and reflexive culture of the minority separate from that of the majority. Just as folk culture, mass culture and alternative culture spell out distinct phases within the trajectory of modernity, so the relationship between the cultural intelligentsia and the mass of the people changes. While the three basic forms of popular culture today stand for parallel and intermixing trends within the diversification of contemporary civilisation, they arose within successive historical conjunctures which were laden with both liberating and fatal potential. The ideological functions of popular culture reveal most conspicuously the contradictory set of hopes and prejudices as well as the antagonistic discourses which accompanied civil society as it unfolded in Germany during the past couple of centuries.

Since 1871 Germany has had five different constitutions and six different forms of the state - monarchical and republican, democratic and dictatorial, federal and unitary, divided and unified. There are no countries where the exercise of political authority and the perception of civil rights derive solely from the letter of the law or the structure of institutions; they depend as much on mentalities, traditions and conventions. It is difficult enough to maintain a consensus on such matters in countries with stable constitutional systems, like Britain or the United States. It is therefore hardly surprising that the roles of the state and the citizen and the rival claims of order and liberty are subject to dispute and misunderstanding in a country like Germany, with its broken constitutional history.

Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

The Empire that was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871 was the first approximation to a nation state in German history. Yet it had come into being not through popular acclamation or plebiscite, but through Prussian military victories. It was a nation state in that the great majority of the German-speakers of Europe were included in it; except for a Polish minority in the East and smaller Danish and French minorities in the North and the West, its population was homogeneously German. But the people had played little part in its creation, except as conscript soldiers.

The divided culture

On 10 May 1933, the Association of German Students staged the burning of more than twenty thousand books in the square in front of Berlin's opera house. Like all National Socialist acts of allegedly spontaneous public violence, the burning of the books was carefully orchestrated. As they flung works of named writers such as Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky into the flames, and before they let everyone join in the destruction, nine specially selected 'callers' pronounced what they expected from a culture they would regard as German. Their declamations sounded like a litany of anti-modernism: 'Against decadence and moral decay! For decency and propriety in family and state!' 'Against anti-German views and political treason, for devotion to people and state!'

The cultural cleansing by the student ideologues of 1933 highlights more sharply than any other event in the history of German culture the rifts that have divided it. These manifested themselves well before the First World War in a division between cultural traditionalism and modernism. The year 1896, for instance, saw the erection of the Kyffhäuser memorial commemorating Frederick II, also known as Barbarossa, a medieval emperor and the subject of a myth of resurrection and national unification. In 1913, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, a monumental structure near Leipzig, celebrated the victory over the French one hundred years earlier as the onset of German national unification.

The significance of Germany's contribution

One might imagine that a nation's lack of a strong tradition in the performing arts would inhibit its ability to develop exciting and internationally acclaimed achievements in theatre and dance in the modern period. However, in the case of Germany, it may be argued that it was precisely because of this lack of tradition that the conditions were created for innovation and experiment, so that over the last hundred years the German-speaking nations have excelled in theatre, dance, opera and dramatic literature, in both theory and practice, in ways that have been both adventurous and influential. The story of modern theatre could not be told without reference to Brecht, nor that of dance without mention of Laban, and these are merely the best-known names of the many practitioners who worked in German-speaking nations to transform the performing arts of this century.

Eighteenth-century Germany had no golden age of theatre to look back on, no Shakespeare, no Racine, no Calderon. The reasons for this were several: for centuries Germany had served as the battleground of Europe; the German language itself was held in low esteem; and, most importantly, Germany did not exist as a nation, comprising in fact several hundred kingdoms, dukedoms, bishoprics, etc., with no major cultural centre like London or Paris.

Theoretical foundations

Most lists of the critics of modern culture would include Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and T. W. Adorno before writers in other languages. The perceived importance of such German critics of modern culture has much to do with the desire to understand the disastrous course of German history in the first half of the twentieth century as a model of the dangers of modernity. From the Romantic period onwards many of the critiques of culture which preceded the catastrophic events reflect concerns about the destruction of tradition which became central to those events, and during the events themselves ideas about culture became dangerous political issues. It is, though, often unclear what links together the abovementioned thinkers as proponents of a 'critique of culture': neither term in this notion - which, as Adorno says of the word Kulturkritik, 'like “automobile” ... is stuck together from Latin and Greek' - is self-explanatory. The meaning of the word 'culture', with its links both to the search for permanence and to growth and development, is, for example, significantly suspended between the ideas of identity and change.

Introductory background

The course of modern art in Germany has followed a path significantly different from that of its neighbouring European cultures. The artistic achievements of its Renaissance period, notably those of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Matthias Grünewald and Hans Baldung Grien, were to remain unequalled in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation, the Peasants' War and the Thirty Years War which worked to weaken both the economy and the morale of the country. The political fragmentation of Germany made cultural communication difficult. In the early nineteenth century the lack of a metropolis and a 'grand tradition' led painters and sculptors to look for enrichment through the adaptation of philosophical, religious and poetic issues and sensibilities. Artists such as Phillip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, the Nazarenes or the Neo-Romantics Feuerbach and Bocklin were deeply influenced by religious and philosophical treatises and tried to create pictorial expression for them. It is here that we can identify the roots of what is becoming increasingly acknowledged as one of the main hallmarks of German modernism, namely, the unique interconnections between ideas, events and artistic representations within this school of painting and sculpture.

Introduction

This chapter addresses three closely related questions: Where was/is Germany? Who were/are Germans? What kind of a nation state was/is the German state? The discussion will concentrate on politics and their impact on 'ordinary' Germans, leaving aside the well-studied subject of nationalist doctrines.

Nationalism is modern. As a doctrine it asserts a connection between culture and politics. First, it claims to identify and describe a particular nation, an all-encompassing group of people, usually concentrated into a particular territory, which is constituted variously through common language, history, sentiments, customs, racial characteristics, etc. The precise form of the claim varies from case to case and within each case. The German National Assembly of 1848-9 had a different conception of the nation from that of the Third Reich but there was a common assertion of the existence of a nation.

Second, nationalism demands that the nation should be selfdetermined. This normally means that the nation should have its own territorial state. There are disagreements concerning the type of autonomy and how the nation state should be organised. Nevertheless the 'core' doctrine of nationalism combines assertions about cultural identity with demands for self-determination. The manner in which this core doctrine is elaborated into particular forms of nationalism is most easily and frequently studied through the writings of nationalist intellectuals and the programmes of nationalist movements. More difficult to estimate is the impact of such ideas upon state and society.

‘Take it for granted from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so.’ So wrote Busoni two years before the beginning of the twentieth century, prophesying the extraordinary explosion of compositional innovation which the new epoch would bring, and in which the development of the piano's technical and sonorous capabilities would play a crucial role. Yet in spite of the apparent desire on the part of several composers at the turn of the century to break firmly with tradition and cultivate an almost avant-garde approach to pianoforte composition, with hindsight it now seems abundantly clear that the exciting new developments in piano music in the early years of the century were firmly rooted in nineteenth-century precedent.

By 1916 the piano's impact on compositional developments had become sufficiently evident for E. J. Dent to publish an article entitled ‘The pianoforte and its influence on modern music’, in which he expressed the opinion that Liszt had been the ‘foundation of modern pianoforte-playing and pianoforte composition’ in spite of his various ‘shortcomings as a composer of real music’. The influence of Liszt's technical virtuosity and harmonic experimentation is to be seen clearly enough in Ravel's Jeux d'eau (1901), which owed much to the water-figurations of Liszt's Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este (1877). The impressionistic application of virtuoso figurations to create atmospheric effects was adopted by Debussy in his piano music from the Estampes (1903) onwards, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (1908) marked the apparent limits to which such technically demanding figurations could be stretched.

Introduction

Many factors shaped the piano music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a period of change during which keyboard instruments extended from five to seven octaves, and from the relatively light-framed instruments of the 1760s and 1770s to the much more robust concert pianos of the 1820s (see chapter 2). It was also a period which saw an increasing emphasis on virtuoso performance and technique. At the same time, amateur music making increased rapidly and publishing houses expanded to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for cheaper, popular music. These and other factors led composers to write in certain ways for certain audiences, and if we are to understand the piano music of this period we must first give some attention to the circumstances in which composers worked as well as the settings in which music was performed.

One of the most significant developments of the late eighteenth century was the establishment of the public concert. Concerts for a paying audience had existed prior to this time, but their popularity grew in importance at the end of the eighteenth century to such an extent that composers who might previously have devoted their energies to the service of a rich aristocratic patron now found themselves writing to satisfy the public taste. London was the most important centre for the public concert at the time, with its newly rich mercantile class, and concert promoters such as Johann Christian Bach and Johann Peter Salomon lost no time in engaging a wide variety of musicians for their series of subscription concerts.

Italy and the Iberian peninsula

Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1732) is generally credited with the invention of the piano in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century. Although some earlier accounts of keyboard actions survive, it is only from Cristofori that a continuous line of development can be drawn.

Cristofori entered the service of Prince Ferdinando de'Medici in 1688 as curator and instrument maker. In this capacity he maintained harpsichords, spinets and organs and made a variety of keyboard (and possibly stringed) instruments. His work on the piano may have begun as early as 1698, certainly by 1700, and in 1709 or 1710 Scipione Maffei noted that Cristofori had ‘made three so far, two sold in Florence, one to Cardinal Ottoboni’. In 1711 Maffei published a detailed description of Cristofori's pianos, including a diagram of the action (Fig. 1.1).

The action in Maffei's diagram works in the following way: as the key (C) is depressed one end of the intermediate lever (E) – which pivots around the pin (F) – is raised. This causes the escapement (G) to push the hammer (O) towards the string (A). The escapement then ‘escapes’ from contact with the hammer and allows it to fall back to its resting position, on a silk thread (P). When the key is released, the escapement, which is hinged and attached to a spring (L), slides back into its resting position and the damper (R) – which had been lowered when the key was depressed – comes back into contact with the string in order to damp the sound.

The Cambridge companion to the piano brings together in a single volume a collection of essays which covers the history of the instrument, the history of its performance and a study of its repertory. Each chapter is written by a specialist with access to the most recent research on his or her topic, but all the authors have written accessibly, with the student of the instrument, or an enthusiastic amateur, in mind.

Chapters 1–3 bring together as much up-to-date piano history as is possible in the space available. In recent years, some extremely important work has been published on the early history of the piano. Stewart Pollens's The early pianoforte and Michael Cole's The pianoforte in the Classical era between them provide a comprehensive survey of the technical developments which took place in the eighteenth century. These developments are summarised in chapters 1 and 2 along with information about the specific kinds of instrument played by the early pianists. Necessary technical terms are explained in the glossary at the end of the volume. The equivalent history of the piano in the first half of the nineteenth century is much less well documented and a new, detailed history of the piano in the nineteenth century is urgently needed. It is remarkable that Rosamond Harding's book The piano-forte, first published as long ago as 1933, remains the standard text for this period.

Mark Hambourg's (1879–1960) cavalier approach to Mozart, as recalled by Artur Rubinstein (1887–1982), typifies one popular image of the Romantic virtuoso pianist: stylistically insensitive, contemptuous of textual fidelity and, to cap it all, too loud – especially in chamber music. Rubinstein heard Hambourg in 1915, but equally harsh criticisms of the ‘virtuoso school’ had been penned at least as far back as the nineteenth-century heydays of Liszt and Thalberg, whose concert triumphs served as models for many later pianists. Even today, some critics seem unable to utter the word ‘virtuosity’ without the appendages ‘empty’ or ‘meretricious’. This contrast between playing that somehow metaphysically exposes the soul of music without drawing attention to technical accomplishment, and playing in which tasteless display is paramount echoes Mozart's two-hundred-year-old criticism of Clementi as ‘a mere mechanicus’. Of course, in a fundamental sense this contrast is misleading. No player, however elevated his interpretative ability, can communicate his intentions without a sound instrumental technique (unless he becomes a conductor), and most of the great Romantic pianists were both interpreters and virtuosos of the highest order.

The golden era of Romantic pianism lasted roughly one hundred years, the famous musical duel between Liszt and Thalberg in 1837, and the death of Paderewski (the most highly paid concert pianist of all time) in 1941 being convenient, if slightly arbitrary, markers at either end.

Introduction

The underlying acoustical principles of sound production on the piano are very straightforward. When a key is depressed, it causes a small, felt-covered hammer to be thrown against a set of strings tuned to a specific note of the scale. The key incorporates an escapement mechanism which detaches the hammer from the key just before striking the strings so that they receive a single, unimpeded blow from the hammer. The exchange of momentum causes the strings to vibrate, and it is these vibrations which are the origin of the musical sound. The strings do not radiate sound directly, however, because they are much too small to interact with the surrounding air. Instead, they are coupled to a soundboard, a lightweight plate of wood, which is specifically designed to vibrate in sympathy with the strings. It is the structural vibrations of the soundboard which induce pressure changes in the air, rather in the manner of a loudspeaker cone, to create the sound we hear.

This is, of course, just the start of the story. This simple explanation of the mechanical action of the piano invites more questions than it answers. Why do different pianos have different sound qualities? What is the function of double and triple stringing? What control does the performer have on the final sound quality of an instrument? In searching for the answers to these questions, we discover that the piano has a few hidden secrets of surprising complexity, and we have to marvel at the ingenuity of the craftsmen who have played their part in the development of the modern instrument and at the skill of the technician who keeps a piano at the peak of its performance.