20th Century Music of Germany

The first half of the 20^th century saw a split between German and Austrian music. In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg and his groups Alban Berg and Anton Webern moved along an increasingly avant-garde path, pioneering atonal music in the year 1909 and twelve-tone music in the year 1932.

source of picture: www.limelightmagazine.com.au

Meanwhile, composers in Berlin took a more populist route, from the cabaret-like socialist operas of Kurt Weill to the Gebrauchsmusik of Paul Hindemith. In Munich there was also Carl Orff whose Carmina Burana was and remains hugely famous. Several singers settled in the United States when the Nazi party came to power, including Hindemith, Erich Korngold, and Schoenberg. During this time, the Nazi Party embarked on a campaign to rid Germany of so-called degenerate art, which became a catch-all phrase that included music with any link to Jews, Jazz, communist and anything else though to be dangerous. Some of the figures like Karl Amadeus Hartmann remained boldly in Germany during the years of Nazi dominance, continually watchful of how their output might be interpreted by the authorities.

After the dissolution of the third Reich, artists were also subjected to the allied policy of denazification. But here, the supposed non-political nature of music was able to excuse many, including Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwanhler (who had actually joined the Nazi Party in the year 1933). They both claimed to have concentrated mainly on music and to have ignored politics, but also to have conducted pieces in forms that were meant to be gestures of defiance.

In the West Germany in the second half of the 20^th century, German and Austrian music was largely ruled by the avant-garde. In the 60s and 70s, the Darmstadt New Music Summer School was a major center of European modernism; German singers such as Hans Werner Henze and Karlheinz Stockhausen and non-German ones such as Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez all studied there. In contrast, singers in the East Germany were advised to avoid the avant-garde and to compose music in keeping with the doctrines of socialist realism. Music written in this pattern was supposed to advance party politics as well as be more accessible to all. Hanns Eisler and Ernst Hermann Meyer were among the most popular of the first generation of GDR composer.

More currently, singers like Olga Neuwirth and Helmut Laxhenmann have extensively explored the possibilities of extended methods. Hans Werner Henze largely dissociated himself from the Dramstadt School in favour of a more lyrical approach, and remains possibly Germany’s most acclaimed current singer. Although he had lived outside the country since the 1950s and until his death in the year 2012, he remained influenced by the Germanic musical tradition.