The German Genius

promoted both vocal and instrumental music. In New England the Handel and Haydn Society had by far the most famous choir. Founded in 1815 by Gottlieb Graupner, owner of a music store, who also organized and conducted the first prominent orchestra in America, which was rivaled only by a band of musicians from Hamburg in Philadelphia. About the middle of the nineteenth century, New York took over as the center of American music making, and this had something to do with the arrival of the German Orchestra, upward of a score of young musicians, many of them “Forty-Eighters.” 43 Choral societies were founded soon after in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Charleston (the Teutonenbund). These competed at annual singing festivals, some of which grew into Musikvereins. Beginning in Milwaukee, they were not just choirs but also commissioned new operas and oratorios.
    The first German-American periodical was founded in 1739 by Christopher Sauer; this was the Der Hochdeutsch-Pennsylvaniesche Geschicht-Schreiber, oder Sammlung Wichtiger Nachrichten aus dem Natur und Kirchen-Reich . Published in Germantown, its title was (thankfully) shortened to Germantown Zeitung as it changed progressively from a semiannual to a quarterly to a monthly and then, from 1775, to a weekly. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were five German newspapers in Pennsylvania, one of them published half in German and half in English. It was the early years of the nineteenth century that saw the great boom in circulation and influence: Die New Yorker Staats-Zeitung was founded in 1834, Der Anzeiger des Westens in St. Louis in 1835, and the Cincinnati Volksblatt in 1836. 44
    In 1813 Caspar Wistar, a glass manufacturer, took over from Dr. Benjamin Rush as president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery and, two years after that, followed Thomas Jefferson as president of the American Philosophical Society. 45 As a result, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the Young Hegelians received growing attention.
     
     
    It should not be overlooked that this was a period of strong cultural exchange. There was also a great deal of interest about Britain and America inside Germany. It was at this time, for example, that Rudolf von Gneist wrote his four-volume work on local government in the United Kingdom, a work used north of the Channel. It wasn’t globalization as we know it in the twenty-first century, but not everyone was as nationalistic in the nineteenth century as is sometimes made to appear.

Wagner’s Other Ring—Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
     
    T homas Mann said that Richard Wagner’s acquaintance with Arthur Schopenhauer was the greatest event of the composer’s life. It occurred in the autumn of 1854 when he read—and was overwhelmed by— Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ( The World as Will and Representation ), two volumes of well over a thousand pages, yet which he read four times in one year. Few—if any—great composers studied philosophy as seriously as Wagner did. According to Bryan Magee, himself a philosopher, neither Tristan und Isolde nor Parsifal would have taken the form they did without Wagner’s absorption of Schopenhauer’s ideas, and the same argument applies to entire sections of Der Ring des Nibelungen . 1
    The reason Wagner was so different from his fellow composers can be put down to politics, in particular his disillusionment following the revolutions of 1848, which caused him to turn inward, away from activity, thus opening himself up to other influences, of which philosophy proved decisive. A passionate—and active—left-wing revolutionary when he was young, Wagner has often been depicted as lurching to the right in middle age. It is truer to see him as someone who fell out of love with politics itself, as someone no longer convinced that the most pressing human problems are amenable to political solutions. 2
    Born in 1813, the same year as Giuseppe Verdi, Wagner died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1883, the same year as Marx. He knew very early on what he wanted to do, which was to compose operas, and he started while he was still in his teens.
    At the time, three forms of opera were popular: the German Romantic opera of Weber; the Italian Romantic Realism of Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, and Gaetano Donizetti; and French opera, epitomized by the spectacles of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy. Wagner tried his hand at all three, deciding that the best way forward