In the third act of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the young knight Walther has already failed the masters’ singing test. He wants to write a new song, and he asks the shoemaker and master singer Hans Sachs: Wie fang’ ich nach der Regel an? (How do I begin according to the rule?) Sachs answers: Ihr stellt sie selbst und folgt ihr dann. (You set it yourself, and then you follow it.)
music
The National Anthem by Letter
Germany’s national anthem rests on an exchange of letters. In May 1952, after an exchange of letters between Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Theodor Heuss, the Lied der Deutschen became the official anthem of the Federal Republic, with one rule: Bei staatlichen Veranstaltungen soll die dritte Strophe gesungen werden. (At state events, the third verse is to be sung.) After unification, President Richard von Weizsäcker wrote to Chancellor Helmut Kohl on 19 August 1991 that the third verse ist die Nationalhymne für das deutsche Volk, is the national anthem of the German people. On 23 August 1991, Kohl agreed in writing, namens der Bundesregierung, on behalf of the federal government.
The Orchestra’s Trial Year
A musician who wins an audition for a German orchestra is not yet a member for good. The collective agreement for German orchestras allows a fixed-term trial contract of up to eighteen months. Before a musician is hired, before the contract is extended and before a dismissal, the orchestra’s board must find out the opinion of the orchestra. In one case, a violinist in the first violins at a state theater had a twelve-month trial from October 2013 to September 2014. The orchestra voted against her in June 2014, and her contract was not extended. In 2017, the Federal Labor Court ruled the fixed term invalid. Counting her earlier work with the same orchestra, the trial had been too long.
The Elbphilharmonie
Hamburg’s concert hall on the Elbe was first planned to be finished in 2010. The city’s share of the cost was first calculated at 77 million euros. In the end, construction cost about 866 million euros, and the first concerts took place on 11 January 2017. A committee of inquiry of the Hamburg parliament examined what had gone wrong. It found that when the work was put out to tender in 2006 and the contract was signed in 2007, the planning noch nicht weit genug fortgeschritten gewesen, had not yet advanced far enough.
The Yes-Sayer and the No-Sayer
In 1930, Bertolt Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill wrote Der Jasager, the Yes-Sayer, a school opera to be performed by students. It was first performed on 23 June 1930 in Berlin and broadcast live on radio. In it, a boy agrees, according to the Großen Brauch, the great custom, to be thrown into a valley. In November 1930, students at the Karl-Marx-Schule in Berlin-Neukölln performed the piece and discussed it. On 9 December, their teacher sent Brecht the minutes of the discussions. Brecht printed extracts of the students’ suggestions in his own publication. Based on their objections and on the reviews, he wrote a counterpart: Der Neinsager, the No-Sayer, in which the boy refuses and successfully contradicts the verdict.
Ask, Not Demand
On 16 November 1976, the leadership of the East German ruling party stripped the singer Wolf Biermann of his citizenship while he was on a concert tour in West Germany. The next day, a group of leading writers and artists met at the home of the poet Stephan Hermlin. Among them were Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, Stefan Heym and the sculptor Fritz Cremer. They wrote an open letter: Wir protestieren gegen die Ausbürgerung, we protest against the expulsion. They asked the state to reconsider the measure. According to a witness, the word bitten, to ask, replaced the original fordern, to demand, at Cremer’s suggestion. More than one hundred other artists joined them. Some were expelled from the party, others received party penalties, and more than one hundred artists and writers eventually left the GDR.
The Marker in the Master-Singers
Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg premiered in Munich on June 21, 1868. The town clerk Beckmesser holds the guild office of Merker, the marker. In the first act, the young knight Walther sings for admission to the guild. Beckmesser writes each of his faults on a slate with chalk, loudly. Because of the many faults, the masters decide that Walther has versungen, sung himself out. The real Hans Sachs, who lived from 1494 to 1576 and belonged to the Nuremberg guild, once proposed that the judgment of master-songs should not be left to the four markers alone. Several times a year, the audience should judge.
Where the jury crossed the line
The RTL talent show Deutschland sucht den Superstar first aired on 9 November 2002, with the producer and composer Dieter Bohlen on the jury. In February 2008, the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media demanded a fine of 100,000 euros from RTL over daytime repeats of the show, which it judged harmful to children. It cited the degrading nature of the jury procedure and the editing of the casting sessions, which made a laughing stock of the candidates in front of millions of viewers. Erich Jooß, head of the council of the Bavarian media regulator, spoke of inszenierte Infamie, staged infamy.
Brahms and His First Symphony
The first sketches for Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony date from 1862. Including interruptions, the work took him more than fourteen years. The premiere was set for 4 November 1876 in Karlsruhe, under Felix Otto Dessoff. Brahms is reported to have told the conductor Hermann Levi: Ich werde nie eine Symphonie komponieren! Du hast keinen Begriff davon, wie es unsereinem zu Mute ist, wenn er immer so einen Riesen (Beethoven) hinter sich marschieren hört. “I will never compose a symphony! You have no idea how someone like me feels when he always hears such a giant (Beethoven) marching behind him.” The remark comes to us as reported speech, and the edition that quotes it does not name its written source.
To God Alone the Glory
Johann Sebastian Bach signed many of his works Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory. Georg Friedrich Händel used the same signature. Composers usually shortened it to the letters S.D.G. The composer puts his name to the work and gives the glory away in the same place.