The German Genius

accomplished musician after Mozart. A fine pianist, he was also the greatest conductor of his day and the greatest organist. He was an excellent violinist and was well read in poetry and philosophy. Born in Hamburg in 1809, he came from a wealthy Jewish banking family and was the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A fervent German patriot, he believed that his fellow countrymen were supreme in all the arts. Indeed, if there is such a thing, Mendelssohn was over cultured. As a boy he was made to get up at 5:00 A.M. . to work on his music, his history, his Greek and Latin, his science, and his comparative literature. 36
    Like so many of the other Romantic musicians, he was a child prodigy, though he was doubly fortunate in that his parents could afford to hire their own orchestra and he could have them play his own compositions, where he would conduct. He went to Paris and met Liszt, Chopin, and Berlioz. For his first work he took Shakespeare as his inspiration: A Midsummer Night’s Dream , a fairyland that was perfect Romantic material (though Mendelssohn never had much in the way of internal demons). After Paris, he went to Leipzig as musical director and quickly made it the musical capital of Germany. One of the first conductors to use the baton, he employed it to turn the Leipzig orchestra into the foremost instrument of musical performance of the day—precise, sparing, with a predilection for speed. 37 He increased the size of the orchestra and revised the repertoire. In fact, Mendelssohn was probably the first conductor to adopt the dictatorial manner that seems so popular today, as well as being the main organizer of the basic repertoire that we now hear, with Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone, Haydn, Bach (whose St. Matthew Passion Mendelssohn rescued from a hundred years’ slumber), and Handel not far behind, and with Gioachino Rossini, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert, and Schumann also included. 38 It was Mendelssohn who conceived the shape of most concerts as we hear them: an overture, a large-scale work, such as a symphony, followed by a concerto. (Until Mendelssohn, most symphonies were considered too long to hear at one go: interspersed between movements there would be shorter, less demanding pieces.)
    Mendelssohn’s own music was very popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, but his reputation today is divided. There are those who feel he was the nineteenth-century equivalent of Mozart, others that he never quite lived up to his promise.
    Germanistik AND THE C ENTRAL D RAMA OF M ODERNITY
     
    Underneath and around Biedermeier culture, another concept was developing in nineteenth-century Germany. This was the idea of Volkskultur , allied to mass culture. It developed out of the ideas and activities of Herder and the Grimm brothers, described earlier, which, as the nineteenth century wore on, extended to Volkskunst , Volksmusik , Volksliteratur , Volkstheater , Volksdichtung (folk or national art, music, literature, theater, poetry), Volkstum (folkdom), and Volkskunde (popular culture, of which a big strand was occupied by the Volksbuch , or popular narrative). 39
    Behind these was the idea that there was such a thing as a collective genius in Germany, which gave the nation an organic unity, a Volksgeist , or national spirit. This enabled Germans to feel that their culture and history represented a proud alternative to the classical Latin culture of France, Italy, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, which had dominated European thought for centuries. On this vision, high culture and Volkskultur were seen as different sides of the same coin, different expressions of a common root, an essentially uncorrupted collective genius. This emerging speciality came to be known as Germanistik , German Studies. Writers like Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1831) and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) were united—and increasingly strident—in their belief that there was a genius in the Volk “whose voice must be preserved and articulated by transposing oral traditions into a written record of folk tales, folk plays, fairy tales and folk songs.”
    In the years before 1848, the term “Volk” became gradually interchangeable with the term “ Masse .” The meaning of this term, “mass” in English, was subtly different in the nineteenth century from its meaning today—it meant a class of people without political representation, meaning that “mass culture” was likewise denied the standing it was