The sound makers

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist, satirist and incisive cultural critic, once advocated building a Festspielhaus modelled on the one in Bayreuth on Richmond Hill, near London. He did not do this because he thought the English were a musical match for the Germans. He appealed for an English Bayreuth because he hated the railway line that ran along the left bank of the Rhine and considered German food inedible.

Whether the food in the United Kingdom was really superior at that time to the food in Upper Franconia, and whether the Chatham or Great Eastern Railway was more luxurious than the German equivalent with its “chain of wobbly trash boxes”, as Shaw sarcastically put it, must remain undecided. As for German music, in so far as it was properly performed, Shaw would not hear a word of criticism of it. His mother was a singer and avid Wagnerian, he himself could play the piano quite well and, as a slightly peculiar music critic, alarmed his compatriots under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto.

There was another prominent artist who could be counted among the great admirers of Germany as a musical country: French composer Hector Berlioz, who in his story Euphonia sketches a fantastic picture of the neighbouring country in which every child played an instrument, every adult had to have something to do with music and the police ensured that things remained that way. Shaw and Berlioz may well have expressed their sometimes bizarre homage to musical life in Germany so as to deliberately provoke and encourage their own country in matters related to the practice of music. Yet Germany was basically seen, and still is seen, as the music national par excellence, and its cultural infrastructure was considered unique in the world. One outstanding example of this is the incredible number of symphony and opera-house orchestras, currently 131, which reflect the history of Germany with its countless small duchies and royal courts.

Many of those orchestras, including the oldest, which is that of today’s Hessian State Theatre in Kassel, founded in 1502 by Landgrave Wilhelm II, were established in German royal courts between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The list is topped by famous traditional orchestras such as the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, the Staatskapelle Weimar and the Mecklenburgische Staatskapelle Schwerin. The foundation of these court and church musical ensembles was followed from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries by the emergence of a broad middle-class orchestral culture, which was complemented from the 1920s onwards and after the Second World War by radio orchestras and other municipal and state orchestras in both West and East Germany.

German reunification in 1990, however, brought with it a tangible caesura. While the absolute number of orchestras and theatres naturally increased with unification, soon afterwards, in a phase of consolidation, orchestras were merged, reduced or even dissolved – not always for plausible reasons or to the advantage of the particular region. Yet Germany’s orchestra landscape is still astonishing, especially when one considers that roughly a quarter of the world’s publicly funded orchestras are located in Germany. The musical infrastructure is even more impressive when, in addition to the 131 ensembles with 83 music theatres, you also take into account the closely knit training network, consisting of 922 music schools (with approximately one million students and 37,000 teachers), 27 music academies, five church music acad­emies, countless universities, teaching colleges and universities of applied sciences, which are also very popular with foreign students. Of the 30,639 students studying for a career in music at German universities in the 2011/2012 winter semester, 7,654 were from abroad, which is a share of 25%.

If Germany is so popular with up-and-coming musicians, this is not just because of the big symphony orchestras and opera houses offering permanent positions. North American, Asian and 
South American musicians do not only come to Germany because it is easier to be accepted at a music academy or into one of the many orchestras here. They also come here because they consider the musical climate so attractive – that difficult to define atmosphere made up of the general awareness of the cultural tradition and the special musical public, the dense network of state, municipal, church and private music organizations, the whole lively hubbub of musical activity in a federally structured country which still presents itself, culturally, as if the Customs Union, with its extraordinary advantages, had just been realized: mu­sical goods can travel unimpeded, while each location produces independently.

The quantity of musical activity harbours the quality, so to speak. After all, the broader the musical basis, the more solid the founda­tion, the more stable the tip of the cultural pyramid. It should therefore come as no surprise that German orchestras attract so many famous international conductors and that German orchestras are so highly rated. The Berliner Philharmoniker, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Gewandhausorchester zu Leipzig, the Berliner Staatskapelle, the Bamberger Symphoniker and the Philharmoniker in Munich are six highly respected orchestras, not just in Germany, that have foreign conductors: Simon Rattle, Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Jonathan Nott and Lorin Maazel. Vice versa, many German conductors have held, and still hold, important positions with international orchestras – from Cleveland and New York City to Paris, Prague and Tokyo – or are much lauded worldwide with their national ensembles: Christoph Eschenbach, Christoph von Dohnányi, Kurt Masur, Gerd Albrecht, Markus Stenz, 
Matthias Pintscher, and last but not least, Christian Thielemann, who, as chief conductor of the Sächsische Staats­kapelle Dresden and with his position in Bayreuth, is currently perhaps the 
German conductor most in demand internationally.

Of course, when it comes to music, the national aspect – above and beyond a country’s musical tradition and irrespective of an incomparable cultural landscape – should not be overestimated. The reality of the music world is more like this: American orchestras with European chief conductors; Japanese pianists trained in Philadelphia by Polish teachers; German capellmeisters perfecting their craft in Houston so as to take French orchestras to global renown; English bassoonists studying in Vienna with an Austrian Croat and earning their living in Canada; Israeli oboists setting the agenda in Budapest; Finnish orchestra educators teaching the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra how to play the soundtracks to old Hollywood films; Georgian bass players causing a sensation in Italian theatres. And finally: Luxembourgish orchestras in which – to the constant surprise of laypeople – musicians from 20 nations all start playing at the same time and then stop at the same time. If there is one field of activity in which the nationality of the active members, the location of the school, the ethnic make-up of the ensemble or the origin of the final product do not play an essential role, then it is music.