Music of Germany
claims some of the most renowned composers, singers, producers and performers of the world. Germany is the largest music market in Europe, and third largest in the world.
German classical music is one of the most performed in the world; German composers include some of the most accomplished, influential, and popular in history, among them Georg Friedrich Händel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, many of whom were among the composers who created the field of German opera.
German popular music of the 20th and 21st century includes the movements of Neue Deutsche Welle, disco, metal/rock, pop rock, and indie. German electronic music gained global influence, with Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream being pioneer groups in this genre. The electro and techno scene is internationally popular.
Germany hosts many large rock music festivals. The Rock am Ring and Rock im Park festival is among the largest in the world. Since around 1990, the new-old German capital Berlin has developed a diverse music and entertainment industry.
Minnesingers and Meistersingers (Man and Woman)
The beginning of what is now considered German music could be traced back to the 12th-century compositions of mystic abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote a variety of hymns and other kinds of Christian music.After Latin-language religious music had dominated for centuries, in the 12th century to the 14th centuries, Minnesinger, singing in German, spread across Germany. Minnesinger were aristocrats, traveling from court to court, who had become musicians, and their work left behind a vast body of literature, Minnelieder. The following two centuries saw the Minnesinger replaced by middle-class Meistersinger, who were often master craftsmen in their main profession, whose music was much more formalized and rule-based than that of the Minnesinger. Minnesinger and Meistersinger could be considered parallels of French troubadours and trouvère.
Among the Minnesinger, Hermann, a monk from Salzburg, deserves special note. He incorporated folk styles from the Alpine regions in his compositions. He made some primitive forays into polyphony as well. Walther von der Vogelweide and Reinmar von Hagenau are probably the most famous minnesingers from this period.
Classical music of Germany
Germans have played a leading role in the development of classical music. Many of the best classical musicians such as Bach, Händel, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, or Schoenberg were German. At the beginning of the 15th century, German classical music was revolutionized by Oswald von Wolkenstein, who travelled across Europe learning about classical traditions, spending time in countries like France and Italy. He brought back some techniques and styles to his homeland, and within a hundred years, Germany had begun producing composers renowned across the continent. Among the first of these composers was the organist Conrad Paumann. The largest summer festival for classical music in Germany is the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.Chorale
Beginning in the 16th century, polyphony, or the intertwining of multiple melodies, arrived in Germany. Protestant chorales predominated; in contrast to Catholic music, chorale was vibrant and energetic. Composers included Dieterich Buxtehude, Heinrich Schütz and Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation. Luther happened to accompany his sung hymns with a lute, later recreated as the waldzither that became a national instrument of Germany in the 20th century.Opera
's Die Zauberflöte is usually said to be the beginning of German opera. An earlier starting date for German opera, however, could be Heinrich Schütz's Dafne from 1627. Schütz is said to be the first great German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach, and was a major figure in 17th-century music.In the 19th century, two figures were paramount in German opera: Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner. Wagner introduced devices like the Leitmotiv, a musical theme which recurs for important characters or ideas. Wagner based his operas of German history and folklore, most importantly including the Ring of the Nibelung. Into the 20th century, opera composers included Richard Strauss and Engelbert Humperdinck, who wrote operas meant for young audiences. Across the border in Austria, Arnold Schoenberg innovated a form of twelve-tone music that used rhythm and dissonance instead of traditional melodies and harmonies, while Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaborated on some of the great works of German theater, including Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Three-Penny Opera.
Following the war, German composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze began experimenting electronic sounds in classical music.
Germany is also very well known for its many subsidised opera houses, such as Semperoper, Munich State Theatre and the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
Baroque period
Baroque music, which was the first music to use tonality in the modern sense, is also known for its ornamentation and artistic use of counterpoint. It originated in Northern Italy at the end of the 16th century, and the style migrated quickly to Germany, which was one of the most active centers of early Baroque music. Early German Baroque composers included Heinrich Schütz, Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein, and Samuel Scheidt. The culmination of the Baroque era was undoubtedly in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel in the first half of the 18th century. Bach established German styles through his skill in counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and adapted rhythms, forms, and textures from Italy and France. Bach wrote numerous works, including preludes, cantatas, fugues, concertos for harpsichord, violin and wind, orchestral suites, the Brandenburg Concertos, St Matthew Passion, St John Passion and the Christmas Oratorio. Händel was a cosmopolitan composer that wrote music for virtually every genre of his time. His most famous works include the orchestral suites Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks and the oratorio Messiah.Another important composer was Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the most prolific musicians in history.
Classical era
By the middle of the 18th century, the cities of Vienna, Dresden, Berlin and Mannheim had become the center for orchestral music. The Esterházy princes of Vienna, for example, were the patrons of Joseph Haydn, an Austrian who invented the classic format of the string quartet, symphony and sonata. Later that century, Vienna's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart emerged, mixing German and Italian traditions into his own style. Mozart was a prolific and influential composer who composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most popular of classical composers, and his influence on subsequent Western art music is profound; Ludwig van Beethoven composed his own early works in the shadow of Mozart.Romantic era
The following century saw two major German composers come to fame early—Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. Beethoven, a student of Haydn's in Vienna, used unusually daring harmonies and rhythm and composed numerous pieces for piano, violin, symphonies, chamber music, string quartets and an opera. Schubert created a field of artistic, romantic poetry and music called lied; his lieder cycles included Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.Franz Schubert was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. He is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical era and early Romantic era.
Early in the 19th century, a composer by the name of Richard Wagner was born. He was a "Musician of the Future" who disliked the strict traditionalist styles of music. He is credited with developing leitmotivs which were simple recurring themes found in his operas.
Carl Maria von Weber was a composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school. His operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon greatly influenced the development of the Romantic opera in Germany. Felix Mendelssohn was a composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. He was particularly well received in Britain as a composer, conductor and soloist. He wrote symphonies, concerti, oratorios, piano music and chamber music. Robert Schumann was a composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann's published compositions were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later composed works for piano and orchestra; many Lieder ; four symphonies; an opera; and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Johannes Brahms honored the music pioneered by Mozart and Beethoven and advanced his music into a Romantic idiom, in the process creating bold new approaches to harmony and melody.
The later 19th century saw Vienna continue its elevated position in European classical music, as well as a burst of popularity with Viennese waltzes. These were composed by people like Johann Strauss the Younger. Richard Strauss was a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems. Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.