The German Genius

in the establishment of German national identity. 38 Friedrich Rochlitz, editor of the newly established Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , wrote an editorial in 1799 expressing his hope/expectation that music would be used in the “education [ Bildung ] of the nation.” “Without being accused of national pride,” said another writer in 1805, “the German can declare that he deserves first place among all the nations in the realm of musical composition.” 39 Music was both a producer and a product of nationalism, underlined by the growth of music festivals. These were more important than they might otherwise seem because in Germany at the time the rights of assembly were severely curtailed and so festivals, spread over two or three days and devoted to the symphony and the oratorio, attracted hordes of “music lovers” who, while devoted to an aesthetic, were also drawn to a microcosm of what an imagined Germany might be—a state in miniature but also a cultural rather than a territorial power. Here too the symphony was seen as a parallel to an organic community, the ideal structure of society. 40
    The symphony was the German genre par excellence for one final reason. Besides being “serious,” with a sound philosophical basis, it also comprised a counterweight to opera, long dominated by the Italians and the French. This attitude/belief was to have a long and important legacy. Wagner put into the mouth of one of his characters the idea that, in writing the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven, who was “no general,” nevertheless explored “the territory within which he could accomplish the same thing that Bonaparte had achieved in the fields of Italy.” For Wagner, Beethoven’s symphonies represented a stage in the progressive synthesis of the arts. Unable to deny Beethoven’s achievements with the symphony, Wagner neatly trumped him, arguing that the master himself had announced the culmination of the genre with his Ninth Symphony. By incorporating words into what was traditionally wordless, Beethoven, Wagner insisted, had implicitly conceded that instrumental music had run its course. It fell to himself, Wagner said, to take up where Beethoven had left off. 41

Cosmos, Cuneiform, Clausewitz
     
    A braham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) was by all accounts an extremely eccentric man. At the School of Mining in Freiberg in Saxony, where he taught, he had a fire in the lecture room, “no matter what time of year.” He invariably “wore fur over his bowels,” fussed endlessly over the placements for his many dinner parties and the arrangement of the books in his library, and above all was “crazy about his stones.” According to one of his pupils, he had amassed a collection of 100,000 rocks, each one composed of different minerals. On one occasion, when the specimen tray was being passed around his class, someone jostled it and nearly spilled the contents on to the floor. “At which point…Werner turned pale and could not speak…it was seven or eight minutes before [he] could command his voice.” 1
    This singular soul was the founder of modern geology. At the end of the eighteenth century the main concern in geology (not that the term was used as we use it now) was not with basic science but with reconciling the biblical account of earth’s origins with the record in the rocks. 2 Germany was at the forefront of this because of its mining history. 3 Silver provided the backbone of the money supply in Europe at that time, a period when a subsistence economy was giving way to a money economy. The explosive growth of silver mining in the German states—most of all in Saxony—stimulated the foundation, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, of entire towns such as Freiberg, Saint Joachimstahl, and Chemnitz. The discovery of silver in the New World caused a slump in the mid-sixteenth century, but the other abundant mineral resources in Germany—which included kaolin (the raw material for the growing porcelain industry, stimulated by the introduction of high-quality Chinese porcelain into Europe in the sixteenth century)—fostered a healthy demand for mineralogists. Freiberg was the busiest region and played a leading role in the development of mineralogy and geology. Besides silver, the introduction of high-quality Chinese porcelain into Europe produced a race to find the secret of its manufacture, a search that was a boon for mineralogists. The French installed the first works at St. Cloud