Folk Revival - Germany

Topic: Folk Music Revival
The English folk revival, as mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019, was partly a reaction against events precipitated by the 1707 Act of Union that ended conflicts with Scots, and partly an outgrowth of the rise of a middle class in an economy dependent more on trade and textiles than agriculture.

The religious wars in Hapsburg-controlled lands did not end until Josef II issued the Patent of Toleration in 1781 that allowed Protestants to exist so long as they did not erect churches. [1] In other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, which he headed, religion was dictated by the beliefs of hereditary leaders.

The Empire finally died when Napoléon defeated the Hapsburgs at Austerlitz in 1804. [2] By then, many parts of the German-speaking states and Switzerland had been invaded. Interest in the rights of man promoted by the French Revolution mingled with the realities of military defeat and economic chaos.

A number of intellectuals, including university students, wanted a state larger than a duchy that was capable of defending its people. [3] Since it couldn’t be based on heredity or religion, they sought some other criteria to define themselves.

Johann Gottfried Herder had suggested in 1766 that nations were composed of individuals who shared a language that socialized them into a common culture. [4] This implied a criticism of his native Prussia where Friedrich Wilhelm III spoke French better than German. [5]

He refined his view of history after reading Michael Denis’ translation of James MacPherson’s Ossian collection mentioned in the post for 7 April 2019. [6] Herder implied German-speakers could recover the cultural integrity they lost in the Renaissance by reading poetry written in the Middle Ages. [7] He published his first collection of folk songs in the 1778 Volkslieder. [8]

In his preface to the Volkslieder, Herder emphasized folk songs must be heard to be appreciated. [9] Even though the "verse, form and contents be bad, the song will live and will be sung. It will be improved upon by people, but the soul of the song, the poetic tone, and melody will remain." [10]

The Lutheran’s [11] emphasis on the ballad as something sung set his interests apart from those of the English who stressed the words. The act of singing, rather than the antiquity of the texts, became the way middling volk asserted their importance [12] in a society still marked by rigid class lines.

In 1809, while Napoléon still controlled large parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, Carl Friedrich Zelter organized a liedertafel in Berlin where twenty-four men met to sing around a table in imitation of King Arthur. The repertoire was innocuous songs about nature, [13] but everything the group did dramatized Herder’s view that a language was shaped by the environment where people lived, "their own earth and sky." [14] Within a few years new groups were organized along the Rhine. [15]

The same year, in Zürich, [16] Hans Georg Nägeli suggested "if people started singing together with hundreds of thousands, from any background whatsoever, they would feel more closely related to one another to such an extent that it would mean a decisive step towards a more complete humanity." [17] The son of a Swiss-Reformed rector [18] organized a male liederkranz to sing four-part music.

In 1823, Nägeli was considering moving to Frankfort-am-Main and scheduled a series of lectures on music for the commoner. He followed with a lecture tour the next year in the southwest. His lectures were published in Stuttgart in 1823. [19] James Garratt said, "by 1830, male-voice choirs on the Stuttgart model had sprung up in around two dozen towns in Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria." [20]

Würzburg invited several liederkranz to come together in 1828. [21] John Tibbetts said "the participants loved it so much that two years later that had a huge Sängerfest in Franfurt-am-Maim." [22] He noted it was a free city, "a neutral ground where Protestants and Catholics together could sing." [23]

The repertoire became more political in the 1830s and 1840s, when songs from the 1813 uprising against Napoléon were sung. Especially popular were poems by Theodor Körner. [24] He had written some to German folk melodies and sung them to a guitar or recited them in camp before he died at Gadebusch in 1813. [25]

Some Körner poems were set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1815. [26] This excited the jealousies of professional musicians who believed amateur groups should limit themselves to the hunting and drinking songs [27] of elite student clubs, [28] and pay to hear trained musicians, like themselves, perform more complex music.

Many of these vocal groups did not survive the repression that followed the failure of the 1848 revolution. Barbara Lorenzkowski remarked, singers turned to folk music [29] in groups renamed sängerbunds. Such local texts overtly denied support for a supra-state identity associated with the early liedertafel, but they also may have been protests against the hegemony being imposed by Prussia.

End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Patent of Toleration."
2. Wikipedia. "Holy Roman Empire."

3. Many proposed "a modern German nation-state based upon liberal democracy, constitutionalism, representation, and popular sovereignty." [30] The dream animated the Revolutions of 1848, which were snuffed by conflicts between Prussia and the Hapsburgs who wanted to control the German-speaking state. [31] Their term, "pan German," was used for different ends by the Nazis, and fell into disfavor. Wikipedia had entries instead on "Romantic Nationalism," "German Nationalism," and "Civic Nationalism."

4. Michael Forster. "Johann Gottfried von Herder." Standford University Plato website. 23 October 2001; last updated 25 August 2017. He cited Herder’s On the Change of Taste from 1766, This Too a Philosophy of History, and On the Cognition and Sensation.

5. Rulemann Friedrich Eylert. Characteristic Traits and Domestic Life of Frederick William III, King of Prussia. Translated by Jonathan Birch. London: George Bell, 1845. 140–141. The emphasis on French culture was mentioned by Wilson [6] and by Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. [32]

6. William A. Wilson. "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism." Journal of Popular Culture 6:819–835:1978. 821. Wilson stressed Herder was influenced by the notes that drew on ideas developed in 1725 by Giambattista Vico in Scienza Nuova.

7. Wilson. 824. One could point to 1232 when Frederick II granted princes territorial autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire as the time when the idea of a shared culture began to disintegrate. [33]

8. Wilson said it was retitled Stimmen der Volker in Liedern after Herder’s death (page 828). "Lieder" is the German word for song.

9. Louise Kathryn Goebel. "Herder’s Conception of Popular Poetry." BA thesis in German. University of Illinois, June 1912. 12.

10. Herder. Preface to Volkslieder. Translated by Goebel. 13.

11. Andrew Hamilton. "Herder’s Theory of the Volksgeist." Counter-Currents website. 20 May 2011. "Ordained in 1765, Herder became assistant master (teacher) at the Lutheran cathedral school in Riga."

12. Herder wrote: "there is only one class in the state, the Volk (not the rabble) and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant." Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Translated by Robert Reinhold Ergang. Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism. New York: Octagon Books, 1966 edition. 206.

13. John C. Tibbetts. Schumann: A Chorus of Voices. Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2010. 59–60.

14. Quotation from Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Translated as Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind by T. Churchill. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966 edition. 197. Cited by Alan Patten. "‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism." Princeton University website. June 2010.

Elsewhere Patten said "Herder also associated nations and peoples with a particular territory, marked by a certain climate and topography." William Wilson observed: "From the writings of Charles de Montesquieu, Herder received further support for his concept of independent culture types. From them he also received a new idea-that these culture types are to a large degree determined by the physical environment in which nations are located." [23]

15. Tibbetts. 60.
16. Zürich had been a battlefield in 1799. [35]

17. Quoted by Kristinz Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. "Introduction." 1–13 in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Lajosi and Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 3.

18. "Hans Georg Nägeli." Wetzipedia website.

19. Celia Applegate. Bach in Berlin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Publication information and page number not provided in on-line version.

20. James Garratt. Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 117.

21. Tibbetts. 60. Garratt said the first regional festival was held in Plochingen, Würtemburg, in June 1827. [36] Charles Frederic Goss thought the Würzburg festival occurred in 1845. [37]

22. Tibbetts. 60. Sängerfests were festivals that brought together musical groups from several areas; some were small, and others drew from large geographic areas.

23. Tibbetts. 60.
24. Garratt. 188.

25. Wikipedia. "Lyre and Sword." The collection was published in 1814 as Leyer und Schwerdt. [38]

26. Carl Maria von Weber and Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt, opus 41. Berlin: A. M. Schlesinger, 1815. It was republished in 1830 and 1848.

27. Garratt. 120.

28. The student drinking tradition grew out of the kneipe held by the studentenverbindungen, who were members of the still-strong aristocracy. The also were known for their dueling traditions and promotion of military values. [39]

29. Barbara Lorenzkowski. Sounds of Ethnicity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 107. While her book focuses on Buffalo, New York, it is the best book in English on choral singing traditions in Germany.

30. Dirk Verheyen. The German Question: A Cultural, Historical, and Geopolitical Exploration. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999. 7. Cited by Wikipedia, German Nationalism.

31. Verheyen. 7–8.

32. Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh. "Herder and the Idea of a Nation." Human Figurations. May 2018.

33. Wikipedia. "Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor."
34. Wilson. 821.
35. Wikipedia. "Switzerland in the Napoleonic Era."
36. Garratt. 117.

37. Charles Frederic Goss. Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912.

38. Theodor Körner. Leyer und Schwerdt. Berlin: Nicolai Universitäs- und Landesbibliothek, 1814.

39. German Wikipedia. "Studentenverbindung."