The German Genius

for the feudal elite.” 70 This change boosted the sale of instruments and sheet music and the opportunities for music teachers, stimulating a virtuous cycle of which Germany as a whole would be the main beneficiary.
    The practice grew up in the first quarter of the eighteenth century for musicians to frequent the music rooms of inns, and it was these gatherings that eventually evolved into more formal concerts. Blanning says this took place in particular in Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Leipzig and that what these four cities had in common was their commercial character, a factor which links the rise of concerts with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Concert halls proliferated as never before in the 1780s.
    All this refers to musical consumption . Musical innovation , on the other hand, innovation in instrumental music, and in particular the symphonic form, occurred in Mannheim, Eisenstadt, Salzburg, Berlin, and Vienna, residential cities centered on the courts, where such public as existed consisted mainly of state employees, mostly nobles rather than “bourgeois.” The high educational level of the Viennese nobles, musically speaking, made them particularly receptive to innovation. This, argues Blanning, helps account for the speed with which Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven evolved the different forms of their art. In 1784, in the thirty-seven days between February 26 and April 3, Mozart played twenty-two benefits in Vienna. 71 The sheer quantity of music helped the evolution of new forms, as innovation was demanded.
    The symphony—purely instrumental music—was seen as a particularly German art form at the turn of the nineteenth century. Immanuel Kant had dismissed instrumental music—music without voices, without words—as simply pleasure, a form of “wallpaper,” not culture. But, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the rise of the symphony brought about a new way of listening to music, as people began to think of instrumental music as having great philosophical depth. A final factor was the performance of sacred texts in the vernacular, accompanied by music, a practice that had spread in the first place to Catholic Austria from Italy. In Protestant Germany it was adapted to the Lutheran tradition of the historia , in which biblical stories were set to music (Georg Friedrich Handel’s oratorios in particular). The importance of the genre was that it made public music making respectable . “The oratorio was edifying, lending itself admirably to the raising of money for charity, so it overcame the old association of listening to music in public with ale-house ‘musique rooms’ or dance halls…Here is seen the beginning of a phenomenon that is very much still with us: the sacralization of art.” 72
    And so, just as the German language was developing and reading and educational standards were rising, music also helped to change the image of the Germans as backward in cultural matters. The proliferation of distinguished composers could not be ignored, as the names of Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and Georg Friedrich Handel (1685–1759) confirm. Tim Blanning quotes a periodical published in 1741 in Brunswick, titled Der musikalische Patriot (The Musical Patriot), which boasted: “Must not the Italians, who previously were the tutors of the Germans, now envy Germany its estimable composers, and secretly seek to learn from them? Indeed, must not the high and mighty Parisians, who used to deride German talent as something provincial, now take lessons from Telemann in Hamburg?” 73
    T HE G ERMAN M OSES
     
    A quite separate factor specific to Germany, which helped finalize its transformation into a great political and cultural power in Europe, was another king, Friedrich Wilhelm I’s son, Friedrich the Great. The generally accepted view of Friedrich, now, is that he was a divided soul, devoted on the one hand to monarchical autocracy, yet at the same time a lifelong admirer of John Locke, who at least in theory favored liberalism for its cultural and political freedoms. In reality, this division within Friedrich did no more than reflect the evolving politics of the eighteenth century. His was a conservative administration in comparison with the political systems then in existence elsewhere in Europe and in North America, reflecting above all the German idea that freedom and equality could