Hearing Music in a Different Key

Jost Hermand (1930–2021) got his Ph.D. at the Marburg University in German literature and art history. Since 1958 he taught German cultural history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (USA). Between 2003 and 2013 he lectured as Honorary Professor of German at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Among his most important publications are a German cultural history in nine volumes (1959–2010) with Richard Hamann and Frank Trommler, a book about literary methodology entitled Interpretive Synthesis, books on the German opera, utopian thinking, the history of ecological awareness in Germany and German-Jewish history, as well as books on Ludwig van Beethoven, Heinrich Heine, Adolph Menzel and Bertolt Brecht.

Contents: Early Signs of Pietism in Protestant Church Music: Dieterich Buxtehude’s Evening Concerts in Lübeck (1667–1705) – More than Protestant Orthodoxy? Johann Sebastian Bach’s Church Cantatas (1713–1728) – Allons enfants de la musique: The Impact of the French Revolution on German Music (1789–1809) – «Moving Ahead» Even in «Desolate Times»: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 111 (1822) – Hope and Disillusionment: Franz Schubert’s 600 Art Songs (1813–1828) – A Checkered Past: The History of the German National Anthem (1842 to the Present) – Richard Wagner’s Last Cause: The Vegetarian Gospel of His Parsifal (1882) – From the Shtetl to Wunsiedel: Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (1889) – The Two Revolutions against Older Forms of Bourgeois Music: Expressionism and Materialist Aesthetics (1910–1933) – Deepest Misery – Highest Art: Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) – Conformism or Refusal? Paul Hindemith’s Mathis the Painter (1935) – More than an Aberration? Hanns Eisler’s Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain (1941) – The Hidden Meaning: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses for 23 Solo String Players (1945) – The Supposedly Apolitical «Modernism» in the Serious Music of the Early Federal Republic of Germany: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Groups for 3 Orchestras (1958) – Avant- Garde, Modern, Postmodern: The Music that (Almost) Nobody Wants to Hear Any Longer.