Introduction

Summary

In 1844, at a time of great expectations, the philosopher and critic Friedrich Theodor Vischer prophesied a new departure for German music:

I must be very mistaken, or there is another, a new world of sounds left, which is yet to unfurl; music has had a Goethe in Mozart, a Klopstock in Haydn, a Jean Paul in Beethoven, a Tieck in Weber: it shall have its Schiller and Shakespeare, and the German shall yet hear his own, great history surge towards him in the waves of mighty sounds. … The heroic operas of Gluck, his Alceste or Iphigenie, are by no means lacking in great heroic moments. However, these sounds of emotion were part of a foreign world, and we want a native world of our own, a national one in music as well as in poetry.

Vischer's plea for a national art is nothing less than a wake-up call to his composing contemporaries to make music as relevant for the German nation as literature had long been. While German music already excelled in the fields of all-embracing humanism, sublime learnedness, brilliant wit and romantic idyll, it had yet to take up the mantle of Shakespeare and Schiller: a heroic art inspired by the great events of a national past that would – like the natural forces invoked in the sea metaphor – sweep away his compatriots in a great surge of elation.