The Music Times, Vol.VIII, No. 5 10 September-October 2014

why study german?alice kuzniar

There are a few of us professors of German literature who entered into the field through the study of music.

We do not come from German ancestry. We did not initially learn German because we were exposed early in life to travel abroad. Our first love was music, and we came to learn the German language because it was important for our study of music. I am one of those people who followed a circuitous route to my profession and career. I took piano lessons since childhood. As a teenager, when I began to learn music history while studying at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto (my teacher was John Kruspe, who also was on the faculty at the University of Toronto), I soon became enthralled with the beauty and intensity of lieder (“art songs”) and German opera. I then took classes in German at high school, continued to study it as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, and went on to Princeton University to receive my MA and Ph.D. in German. One of my first German literature classes at the University of Toronto was on German Romanticism. At Princeton, I wrote my dissertation on Novalis and Hölderlin, and, after several years and various books, I have returned to write on the era around 1800. My current book is on how homeopathy is intellectually intertwined with German Romanticism and German Idealist philosophy.

My understanding and appreciation of music is inseparable from my knowledge of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Whenever I teach German Romanticism, either at the undergraduate or graduate level, I make sure to include a couple of sessions on music of the period. I have taken students to the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto to see The Tales of Hoffmann, discussing Rat Krespel and Der Sandmann in class beforehand. Last year, a group of students and professors from the University of Waterloo rented a bus for a trip to see Tristan; I lectured beforehand on Leitmotive, while a colleague spoke about the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Some of our graduate students have never experienced a live opera. Most of my undergraduates have no knowledge of instrumentation, the difference between major and minor keys, let alone sonata form. I think it is as important to aid in their musical literacy and historical literacy as it is to advance their linguistic competency. Above all, I want to be able to share my love of Mozart, Schubert, and Mahler with them, and how these composers have enhanced my life as much as my time spent in Berlin or Tübingen has. For me, the study of music is inseparable from the study of German. Both have enriched my life immeasurably and incomparably: I would wish the same for all my students.

But why should students of music learn the German language? What would German literature and culture offer them? Wouldn’t their time be better spent perfecting their performance technique? With all the time they have to spend practicing, should they be expected to take classes in German in addition? Such a view pits language against

music study, placing them in competition with each other, rather than seeing them as mutually enhancing. My own thoughts on the matter are that, if there is no foreign language requirement, there is yet another excuse for a student not to learn a language that will open doors to him or her. Yes, you do not have to have background knowledge of German as a music student, but you should. And because you should, you must. If you know only one language, it makes your world smaller. If you learn another language or more, it puts your whole world into perspective. Learning German as a music student opens new avenues for you, in terms of the nuances you can bring to your music performance as well as in terms of future employment opportunities. In short, it can be considered a key component of the professionalization of a music student.

I recently gave a lecture at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. While there, I met with several music students at the UNC School of the Arts, many of whom were MA students in the Fletcher Opera Program and were studying the German language with my colleague, Hans Gabriel. Much of what I have to say here is indebted to their comments. Let me start first with what the opera students had to say.

Understanding the texts in German was important for the performance and development of the roles they sang. They had to understand the words they were singing in order to stress them. Without that understanding there was little interpretive nuance. In singing comic roles, they had to understand the jokes. It was critical in singing to know how to put sentences together, for phrasing is crucial: they had to have a feeling for the cadence of sentences. Above all, as singers their goal was to tell stories through song. To be able to tell these stories and understand what they were singing made their performance

more musical. When singing lieder they recognized that poetry cannot easily be translated, and they hated to rely on translation for this understanding. They knew that they were interpreting poetry set to music, and that they had to have an intimate acquaintance of how each individual poem worked in the original language. They appreciated the emotive associations that came with assonances and rhyme. All too often, people think that German is a harsh, rough sounding language. These students knew far better

Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen in Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. Goethe

and spoke of the delicacy of such songs as Schubert’s “Heidenröslein,” “An die Musik,” and “Der Tod und das Mädchen.” The small differences in performance that knowledge of the German language would bring were important to them. Think in this context, too, of Schubert’s setting of “Wanderers Nachtlied II” (“Über allen Gipfeln”), a short poem by the mature Goethe that breathes serenity, dignity, and resignation. Being able to grasp the nuances of such a poem made the difference, in the students’ words, between art and reproduction.

In particular, the opera students and I discussed their performance of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, an opera that, to put it mildly, has a strange and convoluted libretto with a succession of embedded narratives. It helped the students to become familiar with the

stories by the German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, even if their German was not advanced enough to read the stories in the original. Incidentally, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann was also the focus

of Wilfrid Laurier’s vocal students, who performed arias from the opera within the frame of a German drama pedagogy course taught by Alexandra Zimmermann in 2005. This course gave them not only the opportunity to perform in German but also the possibility to be immersed in the overall literary, cultural, and historical German context of the opera, including the personal, biographical background: Hoffmann was infatuated with a certain Julia Mark.

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s lifelong ambition was primarily to be not a writer but a musician and composer. After all, he adopted the name Amadeus in homage to Mozart. But what if the opera one is studying has no ties to such a famous writer as Hoffmann? Here the cultural and historical context is just as important. One UNCSA student, for instance, maintained that studying the German Enlightenment and Classicism assisted him in understanding the costumes, the gestures, and the behavior of a Mozart character he was performing.

It certainly made performing more fun! Students playing in the orchestra pit below recognized, too, that they needed to understand what was transpiring onstage. Piano students who were accompanying the lieder grasped that they had to comprehend as deeply as possible the poetry, including the context in which it was written. How else could they accompany effectively? Drawing out such depth made practising more meaningful. One student I met was

an organist, and he expressed that, in a recent trip to Germany, upon seeing the ornate Baroque architecture of Bavarian churches, he recognized better the ornateness of the music that was performed in them. He valued better the contra-punctual complexity and ornamentation of Baroque music. Sumptuous organs were built into an architecture that matched them: in his words, music and instrument were part of the architecture. I mentioned to the students that the luminous tenor, Ian Bostridge, has a degree in history from Oxford and did postgraduate work at Cambridge, during which time he wrote on witchcraft in the 18th century. In order to attain Bostridge’s level of sophistication in performance, I would maintain, the truly excellent musician requires such a wide-ranging command of European history. The students I met with were on the right path, and it was enormously exciting to share their experiences of learning about German culture.

This cross-disciplinary interchange can be developed in so many directions. I once directed a Masters thesis on the concept of absolute music in Novalis and Schopenhauer. The student went on to write a Ph.D. dissertation on absolute music in the novels of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Indeed, the reflections on music in Novalis, Hoffmann, and Mann help contextualize intellectually the rise and prominence of pure instrumental music and the forms of the sonata and symphony in Germany in the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Music for these writers was the epitome of pure artistic expression, to which the literary and visual arts needed to aspire. Not surprisingly, my graduate student also had training in playing the piano, and brought her knowledge of music history to bear on the trajectory of German intellectual history. Another example: a colleague of mine in German studies who plays violin for the Des Moines Symphony pointed out to me that, in order to perform lieder and chamber music, one needs to appreciate the cultural context in which this art form came to perfection in the 19th century, the intimate, personal setting of the bourgeois home. The performers in such settings were amateurs of art, people who believed that learning an instrument or vocal lessons were a key component of their Bildung, or individual growth and development. This concept was developed in the unique German

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The Music Times, Vol.VIII, No. 5 11 September-October 2014

German, from p.10

literary genre of the Bildungsroman. The increasing chromaticism of 19th-century music, meanwhile, reflected the German Romantic values of intensity and longing, first expressed in poetry and novels.

What is the status of Bildung today-- of an all-rounded personality and education? The cross-disciplinary, interrelated endeavors I have been talking about need to be recognized and encouraged as much as possible by university teachers and administrators. But all too often our separate fields become isolated from each other and strictly compartmentalized. Only on rare occasions have I taught music students in my 30+ years of teaching German Studies, a situation that truly saddens me and for which reason I very much respect the endeavors of the Fletcher Opera program to ensure that their students learn German. To be sure, a student of music should be encouraged to study Italian, French, and Russian; but, more than any other language, you sing German and you read German musicology. As a musicologist you want, for instance, to be able to go to archives in Germany. As a performer or musicologist you do not want to restrict your research to English alone: you want to make more original sources available to yourself in order better to understand a composer. And there are superb, intellectually brilliant assessments of German composers written by media scholars, such as Jochen Hörisch on Wagner, that have not been translated into English. Finally, as a performer,

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because you are sharing your experience with others, you want your experience to be as wide as possible. One of the German language students I met in North Carolina said poignantly, when he traveled to Germany and Austria, he met several European students who had the experience of living and studying in another culture. He was envious of their exposure and wished the same for himself. No doubt, he will aspire to achieve that rich experience, and his university education and opportunities for study abroad will enable him to do so.

One final word about the career opportunities that learning German opens to students of music. All the students I spoke to considered preparation in German language crucial for studying further in German-speaking countries. Furthermore, they recognized that speaking German considerably opened more job prospects to them. Why this is the case has a historical explanation. Unlike France or Britain, Germany does not have a history of centralized government. Up until the late 19th century, Germany was composed of small principalities and dukedoms, each of which had their own opera house and symphony orchestra. Today this tradition is still in place: there are so many stages in Germany and hence many more job options and opportunities than here in

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mäßigCanada. Indeed, the UNCSA Fletcher Opera Program has sent graduates to opera houses in Aachen and elsewhere. Furthermore, because of this tradition, classical music is much more available to the average person and is not considered an elitist privilege. It is music that is lived, which students spending time abroad quickly recognize. On a two-month visit to Salzburg, for instance, one student remarked to me that he inhabited a culture where music was so much more important to people’s lives than here in North America. Another student remarked that he appreciated exposure to different styles of performance by traveling in Germany. Music was no longer a concept: it existed vibrantly, as part of the everyday life of the people in German-speaking lands.

Of course, I would like to remind my own students of German, most of who know very little about classical music, that, to have the full experience of studying abroad, to share in the experience of the Germans they meet, they too need to understand classical music and its tradition. But I would also like to remind students from other disciplines and their parents that, if you choose to study German at university there are many opportunities for study abroad, as well as the generous financial support to enable it. The Waterloo Centre

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for German Studies, for instance, has an endowed half-million dollar travel fund for University of Waterloo students, not restricted to discipline. For all students, study abroad enriches lives and opens doors to future job prospects, but particularly for

photos L to R:Goethe, Schubert, E.T.A. Hoffmann, J.S. Bach

music:Heidenröslein, Wanderers Nachtlied, snippet from Bach Cantata BWV14

Alice A. Kuzniar is Professor of

German and English, University of Waterloo