The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme by Celia Applegate

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme by Celia Applegate Jonathan Gentry The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme. By Celia Applegate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 402. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-1487520489. For over twenty years, Celia Applegate has maintained that historians need to study music. Her latest book, The Necessity of Music, contains fourteen previously published essays that collectively demonstrate why. These newly edited essays offer nuanced historical explorations of the relationship between music and German nationalism, a topic that has garnered increasing attention. Applegate leads a cross-disciplinary band of scholars who have convincingly argued that, despite seemingly paradoxical claims of universality and apolitical cultivation, the German music world has been routinely inflected by waves of nationalism, even during the foundational years of the early nineteenth century. Thanks to the combined influences of new historicism, the cultural turn, and nation theorization, it is now quite common to speak of Beethoven, Schumann, and other German staples of the classical music repertoire in the context of nation building. Applegate distinguishes herself from this crowd through a historian’s eye for detail, empathetic attention to the lived experience of her subjects, and by challenging stereotypes about German exclusivity. She champions, rather, the prominence and persistence of liberal nationalism in Germany’s institutions of music making. As a result, these essays can be read as fourteen measures to defend the German musical tradition from less favorable and less astute interpretations that it was inherently racist, classist, sexist, xenophobic, imperialist, state patriotic, or complicit in propelling Germany down a Sonderweg. Perhaps the most explicit link between these essays is the intersection of “high” and “popular” music worlds, such that their very bifurcation is problematic. This theme surfaces in Applegate’s repeated focus on choral groups, house music, military bands, film music, touring musicians, festivals, and fairs, all of which performed the high art canon and laid some claim to its capacity for Humboldtian Bildung. Indeed, the experience of the classics in everyday settings by such a wide demographic further underscores the argument that music served as a broad tool of nation building, reaching far beyond the elite sphere of philharmonic membership. Wagner’s music [End Page 172] comes across as especially protean, being performed by small town operas, rowdy brass bands, and families around the piano. Applegate’s demonstrations that highbrow and lowbrow overlapped counter arguments that the very genres of German art music were classist, especially as articulated by David Gramit in Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests and Limits of German Musical Culture (2002). Despite a stated division into three sections (Places, People, and Public and Private), the essays of The Necessity of Music really divide in half, eight dealing with the era before unification and six that mostly focus on what came after. The first half is more comprehensive, integrating nearly all the era’s major figures and locating them within broader social and institutional contexts. In addition to whole essays on Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and A.B. Marx, there are sections on Bach, Wagner, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. By contrast, the second half is highly episodic and relatively detached from the kind of canonic persons and events analyzed in the first half. As the collection makes no claim to evenness or coverage, the contrast between halves would hardly be an issue, except that one of the book’s more provocative arguments is precisely for musical continuity across the 1871 threshold. For the period of the Kaiserreich and beyond, Applegate argues for the sustained vibrancy of musical life, including its capacity for Bildung and nation formation, but she focuses almost exclusively on the realms of the private, the amateurish, and the lesser known. Consequently, her analyses of the complexities of nationalism and of the famous figures of German culture, so masterful for the period before 1871, dissipates as she addresses the eras when nationalism was more radical and problematic. This unevenness begs questions about the extent of such continuity and about the public role that music played in helping Germans negotiate a less liberal nationhood in the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, Applegate’s forthcoming and highly anticipated monograph, Music and the...