By plane

According to ETAIZHOU.INFO, Berlin’s only airport is Berlin Brandenburg Airport BER on the south-eastern outskirts of the city. Berlin Tegel TXL Airport in north-west Berlin ceased operations in 2020.

From BER airport to the city center

When you arrive at BER Airport, you have several options for getting into the city.

There are three terminals at BER . Terminals 1 and 2 were newly created when the airport was completed, Terminal 5 dates from the time of the former Berlin-Schoenefeld Airport, which is still used for passenger handling.

With the S-Bahn and the Airport Express

The train station “Flughafen BER – Terminal 1-2” is located directly below Terminal 1. From here you can take the S-Bahn and the Airport Express (FEX) as well as several regional trains to Berlin.

The Airport-Express FEX takes you to Berlin Central Station in about 30 minutes . On the way there, the FEX passes the Ostkreuz and Gesundbrunnen stations.

The regional trains RE7 and RB14 run hourly between 4:30 a.m. and 11 p.m. directly to the city center and stop at the Ostbahnhof, Alexanderplatz, Friedrichstraße, Hauptbahnhof, Zoologischer Garten and Charlottenburg stops. This is definitely the fastest option towards the middle .

If you are heading towards Potsdam, then we recommend the regional train RB22, which takes you to Potsdam every hour.

The S9 runs every 20 minutes , connecting the airport with the eastern and northern parts of the Berlin Ringbahn. After about 30 minutes you are z. B. at Ostkreuz, where you can change to other S-Bahn trains.

The S45 also runs every 20 minutes and connects the airport with the southern and western parts of the Ringbahn.

Note : The S-Bahn stops at the two stations “Terminal 1-2” and “Terminal 5”, the FEX and the regional trains only stop at “Terminal 1-2”.

By bus and subway

The X7 and X71 buses run right in front of both terminals and will take you to the Rudow underground station (U7) in just a few minutes. The connection can be worthwhile for you if you want to go to Neukölln, Kreuzberg or a place that is right next to a U7 train station.

There is also another express bus, the BER Airportshuttle Bus . Here you pay an additional surcharge for the express bus in addition to your normal public transport ticket.

Buy a ticket

In Terminal 1 of the airport you will find ticket machines on levels E0 and U2 . In Terminal 5, a ticket machine can be found in section L.

However, if several planes have just arrived at once, you might have to queue there in a long line. Also, don’t forget to stamp your ticket before departure . You will find the machines for this on the respective platform.

For all the options presented here, you need a single ticket for the ABC fare zone (EUR 3.80).

If you are taking the bus, you can easily buy your ticket from the bus driver.

By train

Traveling by Deutsche Bahn is often worthwhile. Most of the time you arrive at the Berlin Central Station and can change there to the S-Bahn. Many trains also stop either at Südkreuz and Gesundbrunnen or at Ostbahnhof.

Click here to find a cheap train ticket to Berlin .

By car

Parking spaces in Berlin are either scarce or very expensive. You also need good nerves for city traffic.

If you come by car, you should find out beforehand where you can park or whether your hotel offers parking spaces.

Frequently asked questions about Berlin

When is the best time to travel to Berlin?

Berlin is always possible! There is also no real off-season anymore, where maybe there is less going on. You can have a great time in Berlin at any time of the year and there is always a lot going on.

In spring, Berliners are drawn to the cafés and restaurants.

In the summer, all of Berlin is outside. Open-air cinemas are opening up everywhere, the parks are getting fuller, and there is always something going on at the markets.

In autumn, the operas, theaters and stages return from the summer break, and there are many exhibitions and events. It will also be colourful, e.g. B. at the Festival of Lights.

In December it gets Christmassy at over 60 different Christmas markets. In the cooler winter months you can go shopping or relax in wellness oases.

How many days do you have to plan for Berlin?

A weekend in Berlin is always a good start to get to know the start. As is so often the case, when you have more time, you can explore a city in a more relaxed manner and immerse yourself even more in city life.

It is best to plan a long weekend and maybe even stay until the beginning of the week, then the return journey is usually cheaper and you have more time to explore Berlin.

Is it safe in Berlin?

Berlin is generally a very safe city. Of course, there are always media-related incidents.

However, you should consider the following when traveling to Berlin:

As in any city, you should watch your valuables and maybe not walk alone through any unlit parks in Berlin in the middle of the night.

Alexanderplatz and especially the square around the TV tower is not that cozy late at night and there are a lot of questionable characters hanging around. There is a police station here, but it might be better to walk around it.

In Bavaria we owe to the very original Hans Stetheiner (who died in 1431) seven churches, listed on his tombstone, all notable for their audacity of spatial proportions (important among them San Martino in Landshut, San Giacomo in Straubing, San Francesco in Salzburg), with naves of equal height, high, airy and bright, almost without decoration and with slender round pillars that give the whole an aspect of unity. On the other hand, in the churches of the Madonna in Munich and Ingolstadt, as well as in the continuation of the cathedral of Regensburg, in an attempt to combine backward elements, derived from the cathedral of Strasbourg, with more recent solutions, the whole does not come to a perfect fusion. Franconia has buildings of various originality (San Giorgio in Dinkelsbühl, San Martino in Amberg, San Lorenzo choir in Nuremberg). A more homogeneous school instead operated in Upper Saxony, with intense constructive activity, in the sudden well-being produced by the opening of the silver mines. The parish churches of the city in the mining area, such as Zwickau, Freiberg, Schneeberg, Annaberg, Marienberg, built between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, have widely spaced pillars, naves of equal height, choir and central body united: they offer a vast environment for preaching, with complete renunciation of any external pomp. It seems that in these churches there is a Protestant spirit prior to the Reformation and a sense of spatial relations prior to the German Renaissance.

Secular architecture gained importance. The passage from the feudal lordships to the city bourgeoisie made the castle take second place with respect to the city buildings, both private and public. Of the former, secured by portals, loggias and pergolas, many have survived in the old German cities; of the latter, which with the continuous material and moral increase of the bourgeoisie incessantly increased in size and monumentality, there are enough left to give us an idea of ​​the variety and splendor of life at that time. Good examples are the municipal buildings of Regensburg (v.), Of Nuremberg (v.) With additions from the Renaissance, of Brunswick (v.), Of Münster, of Aachen (v.), Of Lubeck (v.), Of Lüneburg, etc., the House of Merchants in Constance (v.), The House of Grain in Nuremberg, the hospital of the Holy Spirit in Lübeck, the school of Wismar. In their style we can see the influence of the material used – wood, stone, brick – and the action of the currents of sacred architecture.

The development of bourgeois life, the freeing of painting and sculpture from the architectural function contributed to the luxuriant flowering of the figurative arts, while a rigorous corporate organization favored craftsmanship, without depressing the personality of the artists. Regional traditions continued to develop through a logical succession of stylistic phases. The period begins in painting with an international style (about 1400) which includes the master of Saint Veronica in Cologne, Conrad of Soest in Westphalia, the master of the gold table in Lüneburg, Mastro Franco in Hamburg, the master of the little paradise in Frankfurt, the altar master of Ortenberg in Darmstadt, the altar master of Tiefenbron (Luca Moser) and Stefano Lochner, which represents the transition period to the second phase. Characteristic of the latter is the effort to take possession of the plastic and perspective values ​​of the single figure and of the space, thus clearly distinguishing itself from the previous period characterized by abstract and linear tendencies. Corrado Witz from Rottweil, who worked between 1418 and 1446 and trained in the Burgundian-Flemish school, belong to this further phase; the “Tüchermeister” of Nuremberg; Hans Multscher from Ulm. The next generation, which operated around the middle of the century, is under the preponderant influence of Flemish painting in the manner of Roger van der Weyden and Dirk Bouts. Spatial composition and pathetic expression become the main purpose of painting, calmer, richer in feeling, but weaker, in comparison with the impetus of the previous phase; while in sculpture two currents – one robust and severe, the other pathetic and exuberant – variously interpenetrate. Among the painters are to be remembered, Caspar Iseman in Colmar, Hans Pleydenwurff in Nuremberg, Hans Schüchlin in Ulm, Rueland Früauf in Passau, the master of the Life of Mary in Cologne; among the sculptors, Nicola Gerhaert, active in the regions of the Upper Rhine and in Vienna, and Jörg Syrlin the Elder in Ulm. At the same time, the differences between the various regional schools are accentuated. Especially after the third quarter of the century, the two schools of southern Germany and northern Germany, hitherto joined, separate: while the first passes under the complete dominion of Flemish painting, the second is divided into various other regional currents in Franconia.

According to aparentingblog.com, the long industriousness of three generations of artists and the confirmation of regional characteristics led, at the end of the century, to the affirmation of strong individualities in each region; Martino Schongauer works in Alsace, in the upper and middle Rhineland two anonymous artists, the master “ES” and the master of the house book (Hausbuchmeister), in Ulm Bartolomeo Zeitblom, in Augusta Hans Holbein the Elder, in Nuremberg Michele Wolgemut, in Tyrol Michele Pacher; the latter tends towards Italian forms and joins painting with sculpture, both united in the altarpieces.

In the field of sculpture Nuremberg excels with three great masters: Veit Stoss, Pietro Vischer the Elder and Adamo Kraft; to these are added Tilman Riemenschneider in Würzburg, Jörg Syrlin the Elder and Gregory Erhart in Ulm and Erasmo Grasser, active in Bavaria. Southern Germany, on the other hand, which also has a considerable painter in the master of the Holy Family of Cologne, has a secondary place in sculpture. The predominance in this period belongs to northern Germany and its late Gothicism which consumes, without any restraint, its last vitality in countless isolated manifestations.

The picture of German artistic activity of this period must be completed with other features. The minor arts reach great perfection in all fields: in bronze works, goldsmithing, ceramics, glass art and textiles the century. XV was a golden century, in which the strength of tradition and the autonomy of the individual were equally balanced. But even more important for the last Gothic period was the engraving. Both in the history of woodcut and in that of copper engraving, Germany is in first place. The beginnings of German woodcut date back to the beginning of the century. XV; those of engraving to the next generation; that is, to the activity of the notable master of playing cards that stylistically corresponds to the art of Corrado Witz. This happens, from 1466 onwards, the master ES and finally, in the last quarter of the century, Martino Schongauer and the master of the house book. It responded to the character of German art to make use of woodcut and engraving for the dissemination of ideas and knowledge. The great art, to which the engraving on copper and wood was joined by its major masters, was brought to the attention of all the people, while both secular and religious culture obtained a means of immense diffusion. Like architecture, engraving set the stage for the impending Reformation and Renaissance.

The French Gothic style can be said to be completely accepted in Germany around 1250, except in the most secluded areas, where it arrived very late. The universalism of the church and the superiority of French culture – which the German Empire, weakened by the local centrifugal forces, could not offer any resistance – opened Germany to the influence of French art. On the other hand, the rapid growth and affirmation of the local states and above all of the autonomous cities meant that local and regional peculiarities manifested themselves more than before: and therefore the Gothic does not present itself with a compact stylistic unity, but in innumerable variations and nuances of local schools. Between 1250 and 1400 the subdivision, both political and spiritual, of Germany takes place and continues to this day. The domain of Pure Gothic art lasted until about 1400, that is, until local traditions, submerged by the international stylistic wave, regained such strength as to determine a new stylistic phase, which while maintaining the Gothic language affirmed specifically German characters with greater energy. This late Gothic style can be considered transitional; but this vision of the whole, which is in accordance with the general development of European art, could be replaced by another which, taking into greater account the German artistic spirit, sees in the two transitional styles the peaks of national artistic activity, including a period of recollection under foreign guidance – the pure Gothic period (1250-1400) -, since these two transition periods actually surpass it in originality and abundance of works. The architecture of the Rhenish regions, which had already been the most active, now has some of the most important creations. In the cathedral of Strasbourg, whose eastern side still belongs to the transition and the plan of an even older period, the central body, completed between 1250 and 1275, shows the purest Gothic style; but the facade, completed after a long interval caused by the fire of 1298, was then irreparably damaged. The cathedral of Freiburg im Breisgau derives from that of Strasbourg, and is notable above all for the perforated tower. In the cathedral of Cologne (v.), Begun in 1248 and completed up to the choir only in 1322 (most of the central body belongs to the 19th century), the

In Thuringia the main artistic center was Erfurt. In Saxony, the most important work of this period is the completion of the Magdeburg and Halberstadt cathedrals. In Swabia Wimpfen, Esslingen and Salem on Lake Constance constitute as many centers of artistic activity; Strasbourg, on the other hand, exerts its influence on Rottweil and other smaller towns. A historically important group is given by the churches with naves of equal height, such as the chapter church of Herrenberg, the church of the Virgin in Esslingen, the church of the Holy Cross in Gmünd: in them the Gothic verticalism is attenuated thus preparing the late Gothic, perhaps not without the influence of Austrian Cistercian architecture. In Franconia, where some important buildings stand in the old bishopric (church of St. Mary in Wiirzburg, superior parish church in Bamberg), Nuremberg stands out, autonomous, rich and industrious, favored by the Luxembourg dynasty, with its churches of San Lorenzo, della Vergine, San Sebaldo. In Bavaria, in addition to the votive church of Ettal, singular for its concentric plan, the cathedral of Regensburg is noteworthy, begun in 1275, but continued very slowly: its plan, of the French type, became in the region, where the Gothic reached with very faint reflections, model of the late Gothic style.

Meanwhile, regions that have hitherto remained secluded are beginning to participate in the development of architecture, such as Austria, Bohemia and Northern Germany, which created, using brick as a building material, a gothic style of its own, in which more surface and surface predominate. masses. This architectural variety developed at the end of the thirteenth century and throughout the fourteenth century, coinciding with the beginnings of the Hanseatic League and with the expansion of the Teutonic Order in Prussia. Typical examples for the Hanseatic region are the churches of St. Mary in Lübeck, Rostock and Stralsunda, the church of the Cistercians in Doberan, the cathedral of Schwerin; for Lower Prussia, the church of the Chorin convent and the cathedral of Frankfurt on the Oder; for the territory of the Teutonic Order, the church of S. Maria in Gdansk and the Frauenburg cathedral. Offshoots of this style extend to Poland, Latvia, Finland.

Monumental sculpture is not linked to the grandiose works of the previous period. A new close union with French art, completely accepted, breaks the previous tradition, while the ideal impulse of art is lost: compared to the previous one, the new style is more elegant, but also empty. This is clearly seen in Strasbourg, which had an industrious school of carvers throughout Germany from the mid-thirteenth century to the mid-fourteenth century. Even in his sculptures the cathedral of Freiburg im Breisgau depends on that of Strasbourg, with a complex iconographic system rich in subtle meanings, so much so that it is obscure. The hollow and massive forms of some of his statues are a prelude to the style of the fourteenth century. At the end of the thirteenth century belongs the portal of the Virgins in Magdeburg, also under the influence of the masters of Strasbourg. The style of the fourteenth century, already fully expressed in the Apostles of the choir of the cathedral of Cologne, renounces any organic architectural element and tries to infuse the figures with the utmost spirituality. In Swabia – especially in Rottweil – sculpture opens the way progressively followed in Gmünd, in Augusta, in Ulm. A very fruitful school, with a purely bourgeois spirit, then developed with the great architectural activity of Nuremberg.

While monumental plastic is becoming impoverished and neither wall painting nor glass painting succeeds in gaining importance, two genres developed whose independence from architecture responded to the new habits of life: wood sculpture and panel painting, often associated in altarpieces with doors that soon became the main artistic furnishings of the German Gothic churches (altarpiece from the St. Peter’s Church in Hamburg, by master Bertram; Doberan altarpiece). To the fundamental sentiment of the fourteenth century corresponds the development of works of art of devotion, both painted and sculpted, then repeated continuously, the Pietà, the Ecce Homo, the Madonna della Misericordia, the group of San Giovanni with the Virgin. Their purpose is to act effectively on the viewer through their formal recollection and their spiritual concentration. Thus began, with the favor of the ecclesiastical tradition, that individualization of the work of art, which was also essential in Italian art of the time: the dependence on French Gothic begins to yield before the harbingers of the Renaissance that is being prepared in Italy.

According to animalerts.com, the last period of the German Gothic style, while on the one hand shows a process of dissolution and decomposition, like the “flamboyant” style in France and England, on the other hand it offers such a strong expression of national tendencies and capabilities to be said very special (“Sondergotik”). And it really would not do justice to its nature by persisting in wanting to see in it nothing more than that final phase of a style in which architecture and structure are resolved in whims of decoration. The renunciation of pure verticalism and the weakening of architectural robustness are instead the expression of a new sense of space, which is not analogous to that of the Italian Renaissance, but has some parallelism with it, or is affected by something, as in the individualism and in the naturalism of the figurative arts: in fact, when it is not already penetrated by the art of the Renaissance, the German Gothic style contains many traits derived from it. Then single Gothic forms will remain for a long time, up to the Baroque art. All the ideas and institutions of the Middle Ages, political or social and economic, religious and scientific, underwent a radical transformation, and the new spirit of the Renaissance was being prepared behind the apparently little changed facade of the medieval world.

Among the provinces that worked most actively in architecture, Swabia held the first place, where the Parler school had prepared the ground in Gmünd. Artists of this school had begun to build the choir of the parish church of Ulm in 1377: in 1392 Ulrich of Ensingen began the main body of this which was to become the largest Gothic church in Germany after the Cologne cathedral. The construction of the cathedral (huge for the small town) was started with the gigantic tower; continued by the sons and grandsons of Ulrico, only at the end of the fifteenth century was it provisionally finished by Matteo Böblinger. The contrast between architectural dryness and ornamental fantasy is singular and characteristic; thus the immeasurable greatness of the conception contrasts the inability to realize it.

Faced with this “continuity” of the more conscious classical tradition “- albeit of a” classicism “which matured in the adventurous climate of the years between 1920 and 1930 – the sensational innovations and enthusiastic discoveries of the post-war period end up acquiring a more normal and reasonable dimension. In the drama of personal tragedy, Wolfgang Borchert’s solitary experiment, a phenomenon of “return expressionism” destined, despite the frankness of the intentions and in part, also of the poetic results, to remain a voice without echo; now cleared the field of misunderstandings to Forestier or to Hagelstange,which he has never been able to repeat – in the Meersburger Elegie (1950) or in the Ballade vom verschütteten Leben (1952) – the happy exploit of the Venezianisches Credo (1945); finally resized within its proper limits the numerous ranks of decent artisans of the word very often endowed with a shrewd technique and broken to modern avant-garde experiences but with an often poor ideal heritage, some writers and poets with more robust lungs and definitely European format. Heinrich Böll is perhaps the surest discovery of German fiction in recent years: in the novels Der zug war pünktlich (1949), Wo warst du Adam? (1951), Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953), Haus ohne Hüter (1954), Billard um halbzehn (1959), and in the Wanderer stories, kommst du nach Spa… (1950), So ward Abend und Morgen (1956), Im Tal der donnernden Hufe (1957), etc. it reflects a painful, but not pessimistic and resigned vision of today’s human condition against the backdrop of war and post-war Germany. In the long story Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1955) the environment is no longer that of the conflict and the material and moral disarray that followed it, but a Germany that has risen from the ruins and is on its way to new prosperity; and precisely the German “economic miracle” as a symbol of a world entirely dominated by technology, in which human alienation has now reached dangerous peaks, is the more or less secret theme of some significant recent novels: Spätestens in November (1955) by Hans Erich Nossack, whose surrealist technique can also be explained in Interview mit dem Tode (1948), Spirale. Roman einer schlaflosen Nacht (1956), Der jüngere Bruder (1958); and Schlussball (1958) by Gerd Gaiser, who uses analogous means of expression, indeed with a more marked experimental accent (and here the reference to two Austrian writers would fall into place: Ilse Aichinger, with the lucid surrealism of Die grössere Hoffnung [1948] and Der Gefesselte [1953], and Ingeborg Bachmann, to whom we owe the remarkable lyrical collections Die gestundete Zeit [1953] and Anrufung des grossen Bären [1956], as well as the phantasmagorical and ballad radio drama Der gute Gott von Manhattan [1958]). Surrealism, in general, is one of the most striking stylistic constants in post-war German literature, starting with the two novels by Hermann Kasack Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (1947) and Das grosse Netz (1952), and is a counterpart to the documentarism of another area of ​​this literature, visible for example in the novels by Hans Werner Richter Die Geschlagenen (1949), Sie fielen aus Gottes Hand (1951) and Du sollst nicht töten (1951). Alfred Andersch’s technique is more lucid and brilliant, which he seems to use above all in Sansibar oder Der letzte Grund (1957), Die Nacht der giraffe (1958) and Die Rote (1959) the typical cut of the cinematographic story: with effects of poetic intensity in the first book, which, moreover, in subsequent tests seem to incline in the manner. Less striking, by comparison, is the particular tonality of Heinz Piontek, who is also a poet with a clear vein (Die Furt, 1952; Die Rauchfahne, 195i; Wassermarken, 1957): but in the short stories and apologues by Vor Augen (1955), which recall – albeit in a very different poetic climate – the Cassola del Cutting of the forest, his writing reveals a frank and intense grain, even if linked to an apparently “minor” vision of reality.

According to allunitconverters.com, it is obviously impossible to make clear cuts and distinctions: but it is certain that the theater offers one of the richest and most interesting fields of observation. In the wake of Brecht, the German Peter Hacks, author of some dramas (Eröffnung des indischen Zeitalters, 1955; Das Volksbuch vom Herzog Ernst, 1957; Die Schlacht bei Lobositz, 1957; Der Müller von Sanssouci, 1958) took place in an epic key. sociological and with an intelligent, imaginative mastery of stage technique; and in some ways the Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt is also connected to Brecht, although his comedies (Es steht geschrieben, 1947; Der Blinde, 1947; Romulus der Grosse, 1949; Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi, 1952; Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon, 1953; Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956), not unlike his novels (Der Richter und sein Henker, 1952; Der Verdacht, 1953; Grieche sucht Griechin, 1955; Das Versprechen, 1958; Es geschah am hellichten Tag, 1958), are informed by a substantially nihilistic and pessimistic vision of reality, which, within the framework of a “negative theology”, sees modern man abandoned to chaos and relieved, by virtue of a “reverse predestination”, by any moral responsibility. Also of considerable stature is the Swiss Max Frisch, for whom the name of Brecht was mentioned in connection with the drama Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1953): after Nun singen sie wieder (1945) he wrote for the theater Die chinesische Mauer (1946)), Als der Krieg zu Ende war(1949), Graf Oederland (1951), Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie (1953), but has also established himself as a robust novelist with Stliler (1954) and Homo Faber (1954). Next to them, then, are the Austrians Max Mell (the stories Verheissungen, 1954, the drama Kriemhilds Rache, 1951, second part of the cycle Der Nibelunge Not) and Fritz Hochwälder, who after the worldwide success of Das heilige Experiment (1941) has brought, with a series of works of different quality (Esther, 1941; Hotel du Commerce, 1945; Der Flüchtling, 1945; Der öffentliche Ankläger, 1948; Virginia, 1951; Donadieu, 1953; Die Herberge, 1957), a very personal note in the context of contemporary dramatic literature.

In the context of poetry, while Wilhelm Lehmann confirmed in Überlebender Tag (1954) the meaning and value of a now “classic” “Naturlyrik” (and the same can be said of Unter hohen Bäumen ‘s Britting, 1951); while on the other hand Peter Huchel was able to insert himself with his Gedichte (1948) among the most authentic voices of contemporary German lyricism; Karl Krolow and Paul Celan are the real revelations of recent years (even if names like Walter Höllerer, Günter Eich, etc. should not be overlooked). Krolow, of which it should be remembered Hochgelobtes, gutes Leben (1943), Gedichte (1948), Auf Erden (1949) Die Zeichen der Welt (1952), Wind und Zeit (1954), Tage und Nächte (1956), Fremde Körper (1959), is placed on the line of the most complex European poetic experiences, from Rilke to Lorca, from Auden to the surrealists; Celan’s expressive research, on the other hand, documented by the collection Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948), Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955), Sprachgitter (1959), is isolated in the panorama of the young Germanic lyric, and moves parallel to the most daring attempts of some modern, informal and abstract music and painting, in the framework of that “discontinuous poetry” (W. Höllerer) which represents a supreme effort to adapt linguistic modes to the polidimensionality of today’s vision of reality.

The years from 1949 to 1960 undoubtedly constitute an important moment in the development of contemporary German literature, because in them the actual consistency of trends, directions and individual personalities that came to the fore after the “year zero” was tested. The confused and contradictory panorama has cleared up, the perspectives have become clearer, the meaning of certain researches and experiments has been better determined; while some usurped fame has been reduced. It should be said, at this point, that the clearest picture that results appears to a large extent dominated by figures who certainly do not belong to the younger generations: and not so much by the assiduous work of those now “classic” exponents of contemporary German literature (from Heinrich Mann to Alfred Döblin, from Gottfried Benn to Arnold Zweig, from Hans Carossa to Thomas Mann, etc.) who have continued to give us significant works in recent years, in which the variety of ways and attitudes is only the variation of a “style” by now crystallized; rather, by Bertolt Brecht, whose personality is increasingly proving to be the keystone of today’s poetic situation (perhaps not even only German), and then by the recovery of some names which, already active for several decades, have only now been torn from oblivion to whom the disavowal of their real greatness had condemned them: we intend, above all, to allude to Robert Musil and Hermann Broch.

According to youremailverifier.com, Thomas Mann (d. In 1955) continued to develop the multiple and complex threads of his speech even in the extreme years of his existence: taking up the favorite themes of the previous essay (with the double Ansprache im Goethejahr held in 1949 in Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, and with the double Schillerian re-enactment of 1955) in the key of an even more explicit and combative humanism, but also welcoming some new names in the “gallery” of that ideal “nobility of the spirit” which is the fullest seal of the Mannian cultural position (Versuch über Tschechow, 1954); and providing, within the context of fiction, some admirable proofs of his formal teaching in the “gothic novel” Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull(1954), even if – undoubtedly – his superb style here tends to become stiff in a mannerist style. Similarly, his brother Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), whose novels Der Atem (1949) and Empfang bei der Welt (1950) resume, in the harsh and biting language, the usual themes of social satire; and then again Arnold Zweig, who in Die Feuerpause (1954) brought forward the great fresco on the First World War with happy epic and choral breadth; Anna Seghers, aimed at projecting her now classic into the environment of the German Democratic Republic and the socialist world engagement (see the stories of Brot und Salz, 1958, and the novel Die Entscheidung, 1959); Gottfried Benn (died 1956), whose tragic condition of contemporary man provided further incentive for his bitter nihilism in the verses of Destillationen (1953) and Aprèslude (1955), in the short story Der Ptolemäer (1949) and in the radio drama Die Stimme hinter dem Vorhang (1952). The name of Ernst Jünger should also be placed within this nihilistic trend, who in the most recent books, halfway between narration and essayism – Die gläsernen Bienen, 1957; An der Zeitmauer, 1959; but see also Der Waldgang, 1951 – applies his negative analysis to today’s mechanized and technicized, that is, wholly dehumanized world. Furthermore, Hans Carossa (who died in 1956), in Ungleiche Welten (1951) and Reise zu den elf Scharfrichtern (1953) reaffirms his fidelity to the poetry of memory; Alfred Döblin (died 1957), returns to vary in Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt kein Ende (1956) the theme of the previous period, through a novel that is – in a complex language and in a structure that does not disdain the ways of symbolism – a radioscopy of the modern human condition. Lion Feuchtwanger (died 1958) also confirmed, in the novels Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (1951), Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean Jacques Rousseau (1952), Spanische Ballade (1955) and Jefta und seine Tochter (1957), on the one hand his vocation for the historical novel, on the other the indisputable qualities of consummate and pleasant storyteller that we already knew them; similarly Hans Henny Jahnn (died 1959) continued to vary his insistent and obsessive sexual theme in the tragedy Thomas Chatterton (1955), while he returned to the problem of man’s innocence and his loneliness in the dark contemporary world with the romance trilogy Fluss ohne Ufer (1949 ff.) and with the long story Die Nacht aus Blei (1956). On the other hand, Fritz von Unruh’s most recent production is rather disappointing, represented by the plays Wilhelmus (1953) and Duell an der Havel (1954), as well as the novels Die Heilige (1952), Fürchtet nichts (1952) and Der Sohn des Generals (1957).).

By comparison, the two Austrians Musil and Broch appear much newer and more modern, lucid and ruthless analyzers, in novels and critical essays, of the modern crisis of values. See above all by Musil Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, by Broch i 2 vols. by the Essays (1955) and the novel Die Schuldlosen (1950). They are distinguished exponents of that “methodical doubt” which makes them wary of any integral solution to the problems currently on the table, and basically theorists of this rigorously and virilly skeptical attitude as the only one that guarantees a scientific notion of contemporary reality; but ultimately they are prisoners of this paralyzing wisdom of theirs, which is also necessary for us as an instrument of control in the face of definitive and peremptory moral and gnoseological choices. Much less interesting, despite its European “launch”, is the “continuer” Heimito von Doderer, whose novels Die Strudlhofstiege, 1951 should be mentioned here ; Die erleuchteten Fenster, 1951; Die Dämonen, 1956, on the decline of Viennese civilization. Ultimately, Musil and Broch tend to bring the newest results of scientific research into the context of literature – as a particular habit and creative technique: who does not recognize science as the possibility of taking refuge in a neutral technique and evading all moral responsibility, is Bertolt Brecht (who died in 1956). True Archimedean point of contemporary German literature: where the problematic is always precise and yet linked to a broad perspective, linguistic research always open to the most diverse experiences but never forgetting its connection with tradition (with a certain tradition), the peremptory critical capacity in all its directions places him in a fruitful position, equally distant from some of the most disparate and closed intellectual adventures of the neo-avant-garde and from the easy, empty optimism of propaganda literature (in which even the names by Hans Marchwitza, Willy Bredel, Bodo Uhse and Johannes R. Becher himself, in which the formal decoration does not correspond to an authentic inspiration). The highest season of Brechtian production is contained in the years from 1938 to 1948; but even in the last period of his existence he has lived up to this commitment in the fragment of the novel Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar (1957) and especially in the field of gnomic and political lyric (cf. Hundert Gedichte, 1951, and Kriegsfibel, 1955), which touches accents of true moral and formal height; not to mention his theatrical activity, which certainly does not go beyond an objective evaluation of the specific Brechtian poetry, even if – naturally – it goes beyond the categories of pure literature. It is no coincidence, on the other hand, that Brecht aimed precisely at the literarization of the theater; and see his later remakes Der Hofmeister from Lenz (1951) and Coriolanus from Shakespeare (1959), to name two typical cases. Fewer, however, have kept the ambitious promises from which writers such as Carl Zuckmayer had started (the dramas Barbara Blomberg, 1949; Der Gesang im Feuerofen, 1950; Das kalte Licht, 1955; the short stories Engele von Loewen, 1952 and Die Fastnachtsbeichte, 1959); Ferdinand Bruckner (died 1958) with his skillful plays Fährten, 1949; Früchte des Nichts, 1952; Pyrrhus und Andromache, 1952; Der Tod einer Puppe, 1956; Der Kampf mit dem Engel, 1957; Das irdene Wägelchen, 1957); Arnolt Bronnen, who, in addition to a couple of interesting autobiographical volumes (Arnolt Bronnen gibt zu Protokoll, 1954, and Tage mit Bertolt Brecht, 1960), also published the diary of a journey through Germany, Deutschland kein Wintermärchen (1956) and Aisopos (1956), halfway between invention and documentary reconstruction; or Theodor Csokor, of whom we remember the autobiographical volume Auf fremden Strassen (1956), the novel Der Schlüssel zum Abgrund (1955) and the drama Caesars Witwe (1955).

The command of literature passes from mystical and sensualistic Silesia to Prussia who created the Zopfstil, to fat Hamburg, to multivariate Saxony. Prussians are the satirist C. Wernicke, the court poets FR von Canitz and the Bessers and professor poeseos JV Pietsch, champions of “good taste”; from Hamburg is Barthold Heinrich Brockes. They purge the baroque plumpness with the naturalness preached by Boileau; he comes out of the cathedral of the seventeenth-century ego to sing the Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott, as the title of his collection of verses sounds. Sharp eyes, all senses open, Brockes has to take possession of the world with an impressionism of modern and very colorful precision. But that lyrical review of creation aims to celebrate the creator’s goodness for man. In addition to the virtues of the Enlightenment, clarity and simplicity, Brockes’ poetry also has the pedagogical character and the idyllic tone, which become dominant in the new art. Pedagogy is political moralism in the Alpen by Albrecht von Haller, whose lyrical meditations, however, have a strength and depth rare in his time. The brilliant surface of which is shown by the idylls of his Swiss compatriot Salomon Gessner, all decoration, all serene enjoyment of nature posed in the graces of the Rococo. Nature is also now the great verb in Germany; in many ways it is sung, and there are those who try to see it without accessory purposes, and without idealizing disguises: Ewald von Kleist, Der Frühling, who imitating J. Thomson’s Seasons shows from which land the examples can come to Germany more fruitful.

In England, the Hamburg-born F. von Hagedorn, the initiator of the anacreontic fashion, had been trained, who chisels fugitive poésie with rare skill into a slender and harmonious verse, demonstrating that German is no less suitable than French for expressing grace and elegance. And this is a humanistic revival, which begins to be directed towards Greece as well as towards Rome. Hagedorn is followed by JW Gleim, JP Uz, JN Götz, whose stylistic exercises will also be studied by the young Goethe. Gleim, when the Seven Years’ War has broken out, will surprise you with the vigor of its Preussische Kriegslieder von einem Grenadier. The anacreontic world is naturally propitious to shepherd’s shops, and the gallant costume is willingly armed with wit. It also responds to the tendencies of the Enlightenment, that witty pastorellerie can have the appearance of a fairy tale and serve moral training: here CF Gellert teaches school. Teaching while having fun also requires satire, rarely personal (CL Liscow), more willingly generic (GW Rabener) and even dramatized in a heroic- comic poem (Zachariae’s Renomist).

This group of Bremer Beiträge he has already passed, without understanding its importance, the crisis point of the Enlightenment marked by the controversy on the essence of art. The efforts of J. Christoph Gottsched were directed to a practical work, not to theoretical speculations in “little Paris” (Leipzig). The state of national literature seemed to him one of chaotic disorder, arbitrariness, baroqueism, falsehood everywhere. Wolffian philosophy gave him the direction, French classicism the models he sought: according to the great passion of the century he set about reforming the theater, language, eloquence, all art, demanding reason, order, regularity everywhere. Today, more rightly, the work done by this gruff schoolmaster of German literature is considered useful, seeing him continue what was no less necessary, in his time, by Opitz. The fact remains that in the controversy with the Swiss JJ Bodmer and JJ Breitinger, supporters of the rights of the imagination, the main reason was on their side, even though they too were entangled in rationalism. To the classicist models of Gottsched, French and Latin, the Swiss opposed the English and the Greeks, and went back to ancient national poetry. All trends of the future: their incitements were answered by the voice of the first great poet of the new time, FG Klopstock. and they dated back to ancient national poetry. All trends of the future: their incitements were answered by the voice of the first great poet of the new time, FG Klopstock. and they dated back to ancient national poetry. All trends of the future: their incitements were answered by the voice of the first great poet of the new time, FG Klopstock.

According to themotorcyclers.com, Klopstock is in the rationalist century, after centuries of predominant intellectualism, the first incarnation of the poetic genius that creates by necessity, not by commitment, moved by inspiration, not by example, following its own law, not a pre-established poetic. In his work the Enlightenment is not denied, and even baroque tendencies resurface; reflection often intervenes to enlarge the data of the imagination and perhaps to drag them into rhetoric. But there remains an originality of which there was no earlier example, an even fresher originality in the Odes than in the Messiah. The Stürmer und Dränger generationhe will recognize in Klopstock the ideal image of the poet; and although he soon closes himself in a short world and disperses his lyrical talent in vain attempts at biblical and patriotic dramas, he will be able with a very personal poetic (Die Gelehrtenrepublik) to continue to comfort the new attempts of the young generation.

While Klopstock thus rises above his time, CM Wieland is the representative poet par excellence of the Enlightenment. Having also started from religious enthusiasm, he immediately moves on to the irony and epicurean wisdom of the gallant century. His whole thought hinges on the problem of the contrast of ideal and reality, of virtue and sensuality, the solution of which – to see under the deceptions of hypocrisy and imagination the vices and human needs to make honest accounts with them – responds to the practical wisdom and pedagogy of the time. This ever-returning debate Wieland varies him into comic novels, epic tales, novels, with a fantastic richness, a festivity of intonation and a virtuosity of style, which make him the most brilliant writer of the German eighteenth century. The young Goethe in Leipzig will also be willing to go to his school. Rococo finds its fulfillment in Wieland. But the Rococò was a harmony obtained on condition of silencing the deepest needs of the German soul, which a work of centuries had now matured. At their manifestation that harmony had to break. Before that, however, another study had to bring the critical thinking of the Enlightenment.

Silesian mysticism influences the religious poetry of other groups, such as that of the “Friends of Death” of Königsberg (S. Dach, H. Albert, R. Roberthin, etc.), but is especially felt in the work of Andreas Gryphius. All the contrasting elements of the time are gathered in Gryphius, Lutheran, raised in the most modern Calvinist culture, inclined to Stoicism, not oblivious to Böhmian doctrines, not indifferent to the reinvigorated Catholic religiosity. What does not allow his art to reach harmony is precisely the imbalance between irrationalism and intellectualism, a perennial tension in him, despite the imposed rational domination. However, a vigor derives from it, which has no example in other contemporaries. No one sang with greater power the ever-returning motifs of the seventeenth century, the transience of every human thing, the misery of the creature, the power and charm of death. That such a spirit sought an outlet in the drama is well understood. But however effectively Gryphius’s tragedies expressed his ethos and profound aspirations of the time, however much they made use of the experiences of Jesuit theater, and sometimes seemed to presage the future, they were an artistic fruit derived from classical and foreign writers; as they had no precedent, so they had no follow up. His comedies did not even have a sequel, although they could also attach themselves to a national tradition. No tension of the said kind was more in the tragedies of the other Silesian D. von Lohenstein, although they were more skilled, more confident in effect, tighter in technique. In Lohenstein passion arises from the excitement of the senses and imagination, precisely as in the lyrics of C. Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau, the gallant cavalier who leaves the school of Opitz for that of Marino. A road on which Nuremberg poets, indeed much more frigid, had already set out: Germany Ph. Harsdörffer, J. Klaj, S. von Birken, characteristically bowing to pastorellerie and to all sorts of conceptual games.

The synthesis, which Gryphius pursued in the play, was also attempted in the novel. Efforts to create a German novel lasted throughout the century. First it translates, then begins the original production of AH Bucholtz, P. von Zesen, HA von Ziegler, D. von Lohenstein, Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick. They are works each more voluminous than the other, stuffed with every kind of material, intertwining history with exoticism, the cruel with the pathetic, gallantry with heroism, religion and morality. However much imagination and skill in construction there is in these novels, the epic masterpiece of the seventeenth century, the Simplicissimus by HG Chr. von Grimmelshausen, is on a completely different level. Like the other Simplician writings, it belongs to the type of the picaresque story of Spanish import; but its content is an autobiography made up of events from the most tragic period in German history – the Thirty Years’ War – through which a new Parsifal unaware of good and evil makes the whole experience of life. The dominant feature of the most representative Baroque art is illusionism: Simplicissimus gives the hand to the mystics by teaching that “appearances can be deceiving”. It is no coincidence that the hero ends up anchorite.

The genre of the adventure novel continues to delight the people, of whose literature it is so much that it provokes the caricature of the adventurous liar Scheimuffsky by Chr. Reuter. But rather than this Grimmelshausen’s novel has a relationship with satire. JM Moscherosch, in his Gesichte (Visions, learned from those of Quevedo), he is also a disillusionist of the Baroque world; to whose vanity and shame and misery then Friedrich von Logau opposes the mirror of his intemperate conscience and his gentle soul, drawing with the contrast, not without melancholy, an image of noble humanity. Stoicism was not enough for Logau either. Who has not been touched by religious restlessness in this century? He is even, as well as a Fleming, a Rist, the gallant Hofmannswaldau. He wrote these, however, while religious poetry in Silesia continued to flourish – for example, in Chr. Knorr von Rosenroth – and sinanco raged in Quirinus Kuhlmann. The heated cult and growing sentimentality say that the rise of pietism is imminent (Spener, Pia Desideria, 1675). Pietism represents a reaction against the dogmatic rigidity of Lutheran orthodoxy, a liberation of sentiment from which the imagination will profit greatly. It has its own poets, among which Gottfried Arnold and Gerhard Tersteegen will be the most significant, but it will also act on all the new poetry, from Klopstock to Goethe. Parallel is another liberation, complementary and not contradictory, from the intoxications of intellectualistic sensualism by reason. A first literary manifestation is the struggle against Schwulst (rhetorical tumidity), which began towards the end of the century and of which Christian Weise is champion, seconded elsewhere by satirists and followers of French classicism.

According to relationshipsplus.com, the first trend of the eighteenth century is also in Germany towards the simple, the natural. Without understanding what the Baroque had wanted and attempted, it is summarily condemned by ridiculing its excesses and its sumptuous exterior. Another foreign fashion lends easy help; even philosophy now shows itself useful. This is a fact that also occurs elsewhere; in no other country, however, will the collaboration of philosophy with art be so intense. If Leibnitz’s system still has a relationship with the Baroque and his intellectualism still makes room for fantasy, willing vulgarizers soon adapt his thought to the desired measure. Chr. Thomasius and Chr. Wolff, ridiculing everything that does not fall within the limits of narrow rationalism with the name of prejudice, they spread in Germany the Enlightenment conception, which reduces reason to common sense, religion to morality, Leibnitz’s pre-established harmony to a utilitarian teleologism, believes that truth can be achieved with logic and art with study. A true poet like Chr. Gu̇nther, the last great Silesian, seems an anachronistic figure in this climate; his fellow countryman Ben. Neukirch, the publisher of the German marinists, underlines the change of time with his conversion to classicism. his fellow countryman Ben. Neukirch, the publisher of the German marinists, underlines the change of time with his conversion to classicism. his fellow countryman Ben. Neukirch, the publisher of the German marinists, underlines the change of time with his conversion to classicism.

The religious division, the importance of which is underlined by the Thirty Years War, can serve to draw a fundamental distinction between a literally more homogeneous Catholic Germany in the service of the Roman Church in the struggle for Catholic reconquest and a more varied Protestant Germany, less disciplined. but more fruitful in attempts. The dominion of the Catholic Church is so strong in the Rhenish and southern regions that the artists are almost exclusively ecclesiastics: they are not the authors of the Jesuit drama, a J. Bidermann, a N. Avancini, the building works, a Martin von Kochem, but also the lyricists, such as the Jesuits Jakob Balde, F. Spee, and even the convert J. Scheffler. That the theater was Latin does not consequently carry the exclusive character that one might believe; the fee is paid by evidence of the lavishly staged shows and the large contribution of the subsidiary arts. It triumphs above all in Vienna, where a brilliant actor, JA Stranitzky, simultaneously promotes the emergence of a popular comedy. And all people and all scene is Abraham’s preaching to St. Clara. With the Jesuit theater, Catholic Germany mainly achieves that sumptuous and stately ideal of art which is one of the most characteristic aspirations of the time. If in it the imagination may seem moved more by the apparatus than by the literary text, it has more free impetus in the Latin lyric of J. Balde and in the German songs of Spee and Silesio (Scheffler). Both operating in the border area, as if summing up the transcendent character of the southern Baroque, they create perhaps the most beautiful poetic flowers of the mystical one, a link with the spirituality and poetry of the Protestant side. Here it is true that at the beginning, tones that are anything but mystical are heard: humanistic and rationalistic is the character of the early Baroque. They are corifei in the West, at the courts of Heidelberg and Stuttgart, Theodor Höck and Georg Weckherlin, experts in Italian and French poetry and artists of singular sensitivity for the times. In Heidelberg JW Zincgref already gathers a cenacle of rhymers of the new way, of which the young student Opitz joined in 1618. The Gesellschaftspoesie, the impersonal, uniform, technical poetry of the courtier poet, capable of dealing with any subject by varying a certain number of conventional motifs in certain approved forms, with much effort of reflection to find acuteness, wit, color. It is the art of the new court society, learned and elegant, which is in a hurry to catch up with the beautiful world of European capitals, an art that helps to implement the ideal of courtly life, and is therefore utilitarian, rhetorical, anodyne until it seems like a collective creation and, above all, a cerebral product, it is taught and learned. In fact, he found a legislator: M. Opitz in the Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) outlines the limits, distinguishes genres, disciplines the verse and use of words, reaffirms the canon of imitation of the classics.

It was a practical school that Opitz invited his compatriots to and not useless. The linguistic academies also performed a useful task, which grew in number following the example of the first, the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft in Weimar (1617), modeled on the Accademia della Crusca. In Strasbourg as in Lübeck, in Hamburg as in Nuremberg, efforts were made to ennoble the German language with a training which, gradually gathering the scattered forces, put again the concept of a national literature. Opitz was Silesian, but his action as a great impresario of the new literature, as he was called, made itself felt throughout Germany. Not only did the flexible P. von Zesen and J. Rist and EC Homburg and K. Stieler (the author of the Geharnschte Venus), but also P. Fleming, the freshest and most spontaneous of these rhymers, and religious poets such as Simon Dach and J. Heermann.

According to recipesinthebox.com, the guide to Silesia, a region new to literature, is one of the salient facts of the century. Territory not much colonized against the Slavs, it was the most sensitive point of the meeting of the two religions, that is, of the two Germanys. The mystical emotions left unsatisfied by the Reformation and the germs, brought by the Counter-Reformation, of the new Catholic religiosity, flowing into it as if in a catchment area, aroused an inexhaustible fervor of speculations and fantasies. Suffice it to recall the name of Jakob Böhme. Here the main nourishment is that second main current of the Protestant seventeenth century, the religious-irrationalistic, which variously intertwining with the humanistic-rationalistic forms the contrast from which the art of the whole era is imprinted. Outside Silesia, Protestant religious poetry remains faithful to the Lutheran tradition, even when it is the product of a strong personality capable of originally feeling the love of God and the beauty of the world, like P. Gerhardt. In Silesia the tradition is already broken by J. Heermann; from the Böhmian groove then arises, with A. von Franckenberg, JT von Tschesch, D. Czepko, who in the intellectualistic vase par excellence of the Alexandrian couplet, the favorite verse of the time, collects all the fruits of the mystical speculation of the Renaissance. J. Scheffler is a convert to Catholicism, who achieves in this way the highest poetic expression of the longing for the divine with his Cherubinischer Wandersmann. With another lyric collection, Die heilige Seelenlust, he also contributes validly to preparing the psychological art of the next century.

The figure of Luther brings back to the people: the nightingale of Wittenberga had greeted him by another man of the people, the most representative poet of the sixteenth century, Hans Sachs. There are thousands of Meistergesänge, Lieder, spiritual songs, visions, allegories, fables, jokes, dialogues, etc. attributed to him; hundreds of his Fastnachtspiele and tragedies and comedies. The old and new materials converge in his work as in a large collecting basin, where they re-arrange with an amiable and good-natured gentleness in the old forms, or are rejuvenated in a lively way. Conventional and schematic where he exceeds the limits of his common experience, within these he is precise, witty, firm in his homely morality, his municipal patriotism, his common sense, but capable of making use of these average virtues with his own characteristic humor. The last German medieval century, the century of the Reformation finds its idyll in the work of the cobbler of Nuremberg.

They can be put to dominate these figures, because they summarize the literary values ​​of the time. Below them one is easily led to see only shapeless mountains of literary genres: religious chant (Lutheran, Calvinist, dissident), Volkslied, Meistergesang, Volksbücher, the various kinds of religious and profane drama. This very lively one is multiplied in schools and squares, first an instrument of the confessional struggle, then, after the pacification in the middle of the century, more varied, realistic and colorful. Even learned people are willing to try it out, using, not without originality, the experience of classical theater and alternating Latin with German. T. Naogeorgus, J. Chryseus, N. Frischlin; B. Ringwaldt, P. Rebhuhn, Niklas Manuel, Sixt Birk, H. Bullinger and others give life to an abundant production, which seems to start a national theater. But the omen will not come true in the following century either.

The German sixteenth century is full of beginnings that will mature only slowly and even very far away. A legendary subject destined for the most illustrious of artistic transfigurations, the legend of Doctor Faust, now begins to crystallize and finds its first literary expression in the Volksbuch of 1587. In Theophrastus Paracelsus, the mystical and naturalistic doctrines of the Renaissance brilliantly fertilized science and faith, making him a teacher of many generations. We recall the novelty of the spiritualistic and historical positions of Sebastiano Franck, the great opponent of the Lutheran church, the audacity of the speculations of Valentin Weigel and the modernity of the historical method of J. Aventinus. But these are too evidently loners and precursors. The freedom of the spirit promised by the Reformation must be achieved by a very long road; meanwhile Faust is only a necromancer, and the mask of Eulenspiegel then responds to that, albeit satirical, of Grobianus.

The last decades of the sixteenth century show signs of the future and interesting references to major European literature in the structure of Jörg Wickram’s novels and in the remakes, fantasies and language of Johann Fischart. However, the new German literature would no longer take a bourgeois and popular road; with the prevalence of the principality, the guidance of poetry passed into the hands of the learned. In the language of the learned, Latin, is already a large part of literary production even after, by detaching itself from the reformist movement, Humanism has lost its importance. And we do not speak here of the scientific production carried out in the various cultural centers, Basel, Strasbourg, Ingolstadt, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Vienna, etc. Here and elsewhere, poetry in Latin was busily cultivated, as was the case in Italy. Italians were the first models. He began by addressing lesser poets, F. Beroaldo, Tiferna, Battista Mantovano, Molza, Sannazzaro, Bembo, Vida and especially Flaminio were more willingly preferred than Pontano and Poliziano. The ranks of poets that are experienced in lyric, epic and didactic compositions, which fight with drama, with satire or epigram, are very conspicuous, but they are ordinary exercises, reflective and occasional creations, in which the aristocratic character of Italian humanistic poetry often yields to a provincial narrowness. However, there is no shortage of artists. Here and there one begins to be able to give expression to individual sentiment, and Petrus Lotichius Secundus sings his own events and moods in elegies, poems, eclogues

According to prozipcodes.com, the custom of calling that poem lyric of the German Renaissance is not yet lost, which held the field most conspicuously at the beginning of the seventeenth century and which under the guidance of Martin Opitz hoped, with the imitation of the formal conquests of the French and Italian Renaissance, to to bring Germany out of the isolation into which the Reformation had thrown it. But this designation is misleading, since there is in that poem a very different spirit than the harmonious one of the Renaissance, and of this today rather bows to seek the German equivalent in the art of the great poets of the eighteenth century. Not classicism, but a derivative and scholastic classicism is in the precursors and followers of Opitz, a classicism that found a ground naturally prepared by neo-Latin poetry. Even in this, however, they had been manifesting themselves, already in last quarter of the sixteenth century, of the Baroque spirits. And in Germany, as elsewhere, the signature of the entire seventeenth century is baroque, with various shades depending on the origin and the quality of the influences suffered. The first influence was brought by the Jesuit theater, which in the second half of the century. XVI from the Rhine to Silesia firmly took hold in all Catholic countries, constituting the dominant literary phenomenon. A little later is the beginning of the influence of the Spanish, French and English novel, down from the Amadigi to pastoral novels, to picaresques, to political historians. And quite soon the derivations from French lyric (Ronsard, Du Bellay, etc.), from Italian (Petrarca, Marino) began; and for the pastoral fable they went to school from Tasso, Guarini, Rinuccini, and for the tragedy from the Dutch and for the opera again from the Italians. Germany is open to all European influences. This circumstance, combined with the scarcity of figures of original relief, makes it difficult for an arrangement that is not only external and schematic.

At the cradle of German Humanism are F. Petrarca and Cola di Rienzo. The relations of the two Italians with the imperial court of Prague earned the chancellor of Charles IV Johann von Neumarkt and his officials for the new movement. Initially ennobled the official Latin, this Germanic protohumanism immediately tends to raise even the mother tongue to the “beautiful style” and to fertilize national spirits originally in the classical school. In Ackermann aus Böhmen Johann von Saaz’s (circa 1400) flourished humanistic rhetoric is capable of giving shape to a problem of capital importance and deeply felt: the debate between the widowed young bride and Death claims the new meaning of value of life and ends by affirming, while acknowledging the divine order, human dignity. With surprising happiness the new spiritual and literary demands harmonize with those of the German mystical tradition in a work of art worthy of opening an original literature.

But the promising debut was left without a sequel. Instead of continuing on the path of originality, German Humanism allowed itself to be overwhelmed by the overwhelming Italian influence, of which Enea Silvio Piccolomini led the second assault from Vienna; and, attracted by the double mirage of science and eloquence, despising his own language as barbarian, he totally submitted to the canon of imitation of antiquity. They were thus fought in Latin, in numerous universities and schools founded between the middle of the century. XIV and the end of the XV, the battles for the renewal of science, the reform of teaching, the autonomy of the spirit. And Latin was the art literature of the new German educated class in great prevalence. The Reformation, which was also an affirmation of Germanism,

Humanism had made a very valid preparation contribution to the Reformation. Soon oriented towards divine things, he had subjected ecclesiastical texts to philological criticism especially and, declaring himself animated by moral zeal and patriotic pride, he had become the initiator of the movement of detachment from papal Rome. Luther’s rebellion had a natural ally in Humanism; but then the theological and dogmatic struggles, the political commotions aroused by the new religion, its exclusivism and democratism, the threat it feared to culture caused a separation. A separation which, aiding the new courtly taste spread by Spain throughout Europe, produced a serious estrangement between the depository classes of culture and the people, precluding them from the sources of national sentiment.

At the end of the fifteenth century and in the first decades of the sixteenth century, the reforming movement, which prepares itself and explodes, fills every literary work with its passion. The moralism of Sebastiano Brant is already affected; and the satirists, as the storm approaches, become more lively and combative. Thomas Murner passes from the generic nature of his various Narrenbeschwörungen to the plasticity of the anti-Lutheran pamphlet. The humanists (Reuchlin, Wimpheling, Bebel, Erasmus) are inspired by Luciano to bite their adversaries more and more bitterly. To defend the good cause of the freedom of study, that is, of the spirit, Crotus Rubianus and Ulrich von Hutten joined together, composing the most ingenious of jokes of the time, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. The new way of the humanists to conceive life more fervently and joyfully is empowered by the Reformation in its emergence. But already at the death of U. von Hutten (1523), when the conflict between Luther and Erasmus broke out, the irreconcilability was revealed. Then, while Humanism withdraws into its Latin Olympus, the demands of the religious struggle weigh on every literary manifestation of their tendentiousness. Even without taking into account the professions of faith, programs, sermons, speeches, dialogues, treatises, commentaries in Latin and German, most of the Protestant side, the trend is visible in the drama, from the biblical drama and from the scholastic to Fastnachtspiel, in opera, from Meistergesang to Volkslied. A lot is written, a lot is spread with the new art of printing, often on loose sheets decorated with woodcuts; but it is an exotic mass, from which more and more imagination and art are escaping. Certainly, a new literary era cannot begin with the Reformation. Very few rise up on the monotonous chorus: the most poet is Ulrich von Hutten. It came from Humanism; his fate, very hard, allowed him to overcome the virtuosity of the imitator to find in fiery songs the words of indignation, will, anger, pain, pride in the service of God and of the country. And just as his German is no longer a translation from Latin, and his images are no longer translated with concepts, so his verse has a rhythmic wave, in which passion becomes melody. The controversy does not hinder the fantastic motion,

According to proexchangerates.com, Luther has a completely different temperament. The word has always above all importance for him as a means. The immense activity to which he is forced does not allow him, in the propaganda writings he accuses defense explanation, to pay attention to art. The artistic effect arises episodically, unwanted, between one and the other of those mighty hammer blows. And in the Lied not the poet speaks religious in the first place, but the confessor and the animator. His songs could have enormous effectiveness precisely because they were typical models, because the Latin of the psalms, of the hymns, of the commandments had in them a simple German expression, adapted to the new needs, persuasive, because the new faith showed itself armed with all the his strength and all his confidence. Even when religious emotion created ghosts and rhythms, it was always the corago of a singing multitude; and his followers in fact varied it without ceasing, giving rise to an endless hymnology. The greatest literary work of the Reformer, the maxim of the century remains the Bible, a translation that was able to make the divine word popularly German and which, widespread in every house, has up to now constituted the first linguistic as well as religious foundation of every Lutheran.

According to petsinclude.com, the art, although very learned, of this young, vehement composer is oriented towards a counterpoint made light and lively by the strength of the rhythm. In addition to the theater (Cardillac, the farce Neues vom Tage, etc.) it manifests itself in all sorts of compositions, from the highest forms (concerts, quartets, etc.) to simple collections of school studies. Next to him we must remember, in the same objectivist address, E. Krenek, well known for the farce Johnny spielt auf, inspired by jazz; E. Toch, author of instrumental music dense with polyphony; Kurt Weill with the musical drama Die Bürgschaft, etc. A separate place is occupied by H. Kaminski, a composer of mystical nature who is connected with his choral works and with a large Concerto to the more austere tradition of Bach and Beethoven.

One of the movements that today can entrust us for the vitality of German art, in conditions such as today, not really favorable, is the Musikalische Juhgendbewegung (F. Jöde and W. Hensel), whose purpose is above all of a practical nature; to bring the cult of music back into the bosom of the multitude by means of societies of singers, guilds, etc., on the traces of ancient German traditions. One of the most important means of achieving this return of musical practice in families and schools is seen by the Jugendbewegung in a radical reform to be implemented in the school’s choral education.

The reconstruction work is vigorously helped by the contributions of musicology, which in Germany has always been in honor.

We only mention the exponents of this science in the last two centuries: in the eighteenth century we find the names of Mattheson, M. Gerbert (Scriptores eccl. De musica sacra, Paris 1784) and JN Forkel (Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, Leipzig 1788-1801), by C. Prinz and JG Walther (authors of the oldest German music history and the oldest German music dictionary respectively). In the nineteenth century AW Ambros of Prague studied ancient polyphony (History of music, 1862-76); O. Jahn with his Mozart (1856), Bro. Chrysander with his Handel (1858), and Ph. Spitta with his Bach (1879) gave the example of modern bio-critical work. Edited by H. Kretzschmar an important collection of works is published, each one dedicated to the history of a genre, while H. Riemann composes an important musical dictionary and, among other things, a substantial manual of the history of music. In the same century, complete critical editions of Bach, Haendel, Schütz, Lasso, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms appear, and the publication of Praetorius, Buxtehude, Scheidt, Haydn, Weber, Liszt, Bruckner begins.. A rich educational material is offered by the Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (up to now seventy files) and by the Bavarian and Austrian alike; from Publikationen älterer Musik, as well as from important periodicals Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1884-94), Monatshefte für Musikgeschichte (1869-1904), Sammelbände der internat. Musikgesellschaft (1898-1914), Archiv für Musikwissenschaft (1918-24) and Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1918). Musicology is represented in the German university more than in other countries (around 50 professors). Higher schools of music (in addition to the German conservatories of Vienna and Prague) are located in Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, Cologne, Stuttgart, Würzburg, Weimar, Karlsruhe, in addition to numerous municipal or private conservatories. There is also a state academy for sacred and didactic music in Berlin. In Germany there are more than 50 opera houses and more than 100 symphony orchestras; almost in every city there are concert and choral societies; in the Deutsche Sängerbund, in the Arbeiter S ȧ ngerbund and in the Reichsverband der gemischten Chöre about two million singers are organized. Furthermore, each category of musicians and people who have relations with musical life is framed in its own organization, from publishers to critics, from instrument makers to concert subscribers (Bühnenvolksbund, etc.). Important music libraries are open in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Munich, Regensburg, Münster.

These revolutionaries were driven by the principle of “progress” and definitive goals to be achieved, to inaugurate the era of true art. Apart from these theories, we must note that, in addition to the minors, in the work of the great Neudeutschen: Liszt, A. Bruckner, H. Wolf, R. Strauss (not to mention Wagner now), precious musical values ​​appear: at Liszt the amplification of the realm of harmony in a fiery chromatism, the heady rush of rhythms and of golden sonority, the formal freedom and the evocative force of symphonic poems (genre from Liszt developed in the footsteps of Berlioz) and finally the complete revolution of piano technique and composition; at A. Bruckner – considered among the greatest in Germany – the breadth and originality of the symphonic conception (trithematic, often based on fugati and choral), the richness of chords of his lyricism, which goes from moving, profound meditation to the naive joy of country dance. As already mentioned, so in spirit (programmatic and philosophical intentions, regenerative function of music, etc.) as in technique (extensions of forms, writing, harmony, orchestration, etc.) these symphonists are more or less closely related to the dominating figure of Wagner. In fact, the work of the great playwright had not only theatrical values, but also of philosophical thought, and finally technical-musical values ​​of extreme importance, so that his influence was exerted on the entire complex of the intellectual life of his time, in Germany and somewhere else.

The fundamental criteria of the Wagnerian Musik – drama, as exposed in the master’s theoretical works, often recall those of the Camerata Fiorentina and Gluck: a subordinate function of music with respect to the poetry that aroused it (and that shapes it into new forms, dramatic nature, by virtue of conductive reasons); adherence of Melos to the inflections of the German speech (SprachMelodie); the orchestra’s explanatory task – with respect to the intimate feeling and thinking of the characters in the drama – in a sort of continuous, immense, formally free symphony. The consequence of the necessary unity of the poet and the musician arises from the first of these principles; unity that found its greatest historical achievement in the author of Tristan, of the Master Singers and of Parsifal. In the history of musical technique it represents especially the apogee of tonal chromatism (Tristan) and the modern resumption of “horizontal” writing, that is, coherently contrapuntal (Maestri cantori).

The Wagnerian legacy is collected, to continue the movement of Liszt and Bruckner, by many composers, including H. Wolf with his Lieder, R. Strauss with his theatrical and symphonic works, H. Pfitzner with the musical drama Palestrina and with powerful orchestral and choral works.

At H. Wolf we find a refined and nervous writing, in whose intense chromatism, in whose strict declamation property the artist reaches an expressiveness that adheres, like few others, to the sense of poetry. At R. Strauss, the ruler of post-Wagnerian Germany, every element of the art of composition reaches extreme exploitation in works aimed at the grandeur of forms and effects. The style is freed very quickly from Wagner (although all his daring represents only the extreme consequence of the Wagnerian premises) and becomes recognizable and personal – despite his ever growing eclecticism – to the point of imposing its own imprint in its turn. part of the world of contemporary composers. The chromatism, exasperated by now (Salome,), often borders on overlapping shades; the counterpoint becomes complicated as in an immense game; the orchestra finally draws on a virtuosity never seen before that can obtain the most powerful sound effects without giving up a nervous, brilliant lightness (Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, etc.).

The art of H. Pfitzner is linked, in the theater, to that of Wagner; whose principles he applies and suffers the stylistic influence in the mighty Palestrina (which for ethical values ​​can be considered the highest work that appeared after Parsifal); while in his symphonic and chamber production (cantatas, concerts, Lieder) he shows himself as the closest continuer of the romantic tradition that goes from Weber to Schumann.

According to paradisdachat.com, the most important composers of this period are, together with the aforementioned, the Wagnerian E. Humperdinck, author of successful theatrical fairy tales; Gustav Mahler, famous author of symphonies of intentions and titanic masses but who, due to their composite style and frequent banality of ideas, allow a certain doubt about their actual value (he improves his Lieder with orchestra); Max Reger, very strong counterpoint, author of instrumental and Lieder music in which the Bach background is sometimes oppressed by heavy neo-baroque structures; M. Schillings, F. Schreker, S. Wagner, all authors of plays as well as instrumental music. Ferruccio Busoni with his Doktor Faust also had great importance in German theater, both for the depth of thought and for the original conception of musical drama.. In the work of today’s young generation we find that, after a period of excessive hermeticism, represented by the tenacious and refined intelligence and morbid sensitivity of Arnold Schönberg with his difficult polyphonies, we begin to understand the need to leave the cenacle towards greater simplicity. of spirit. At the head of this new movement, which for its hatred of the psychological analyzes of so-called expressionism takes the name of Neue Sachlichkeit and prefers to be inspired by Bach rather than Beethoven, is Paul Hindemith.

At Mozart we find a sovereign sense of grace and lightness, expressed above all in the melodic invention of an almost Italianizing character, which sometimes overshadows the thematic development; a subtle and infallible orchestral sensibility, probably never surpassed by anyone; and in the play (which Mozart cultivated, the only one of the three great classics, with supreme excellence of results) a singular psychological penetration and therefore a perfect characterization of the various characters.

At Beethoven a new dynamism appears in the history of music; dynamism that from the symphonic theme exerts a powerfully constructive rhythm; a wealth of dialectical consequences that leads the composer to an amplification of the form (especially in the areas of elaboration); a dramatic sense which confers to the various tempos of the symphony the value of moments of a single spiritual process, and which practically often determines an enhancement of the last of these tempos, resolution or catharsis of the symphonic drama (III, V and IX symphony). With Beethoven, music, having abandoned the criterion of art for art, becomes a real individual confession. This is a character that the nineteenth-century romantics hastened to take on their own.

Close to the formidable dialectic and builder of symphonic dramas lives and works the first group of romantics formed by: F. Schubert, whose sweet lyricism is poured out in the Lied for voice and piano (bringing this genre to its highest peak) and in instrumental pages notable for the freedom of speech (which borders on fantasy from the closed form); from CM v. Weber, the founder of the romantic opera, so representative of the German people and country; by minor masters, such as the singular poet-musician ETA Hoffmann, author of plays; the violinist L. Spohr, notable not only for instrumental music but also for the opera Jessonda, full of a romanticism that is a prelude to Wagner; the operas HA Marschner, AG Lortzing, O. Nicolai, whose last two cultivate musical comedy with happy results; while, outside Germany, the Berliner J. Meyerbeer came to fame with his eclectic-style Grand-Opéra aimed at predominantly outward effects.

In this lapse of time, a lively movement towards popular choralism should also be noted, probably under the influence of the then reinvigorated patriotic currents. Vast associations of a not only artistic nature are formed, which benefit greatly from choral singing: Fr. ex. the Liedertafel founded by Zelter in Berlin; and in southern Germany these organizations are of considerable importance. Together with this movement, the custom of large gatherings or musical festivals was born, which still remain typical of German artistic life today; especially those of the countries of the Lower Rhine, whose centers are Cologne, Aachen, Düsseldorf, soon take on great value, leading, among other things, to a renewed love for great symphonic-choral performances and, consequently, to a new flowering of compositions of this kind, as p. ex. the oratories of F. Schneider, L. Spohr, C. Löwe (the popular author of ballads for voice and piano) and, later, F. Mendelssohn.

But the strongest musical currents in the German nineteenth century were those of instrumental music and theater. We have already seen the beginning of romantic instrumental music with the group Schubert, Weber, Spohr, etc. The continuation of his activity is especially due to two masters of very different nature but of perhaps equally great value: F. Mendelssohn and R. Schumann. In the work of the first, the dreams and inspirations of romanticism are resolved in a calm, ethereal expression of eurythmy. On the other hand, the darkest mystery envelops the unbridled romanticism of R. Schumann, in which the beauty and impetus of inspiration does not respond to the same ease of elaboration in great classical forms. Sommo is therefore Schumann in the short and imaginative pages, especially piano, and in the Lied, although the musical substance of his symphonies also places these works among the greatest of the post-Beethoven period.

Towards the middle of the century, German instrumental music split into two currents: conservative (J. Brahms) and revolutionary (F. Liszt), the latter, also called Neudeutsche Schule, connected to the Wagnerian theatrical movement.

According to loverists.com, the activity of the first group, despite the seriousness and wisdom of many of its exponents (F. Kiel, J. Rheinberger, C. Reinecke, M. Bruch, R. Franz, J. Joachim), has a real great value for us, aesthetic and historical, almost only in the work of J. Brahms, who in the severe architectural construction finds – far from scholastic formalism – precisely the expression of the most powerful spiritual motion. Nourished by Bach and Beethoven, but also by romantic fantasy, this art represents the legitimate Germanic tradition, as well as in the powerful symphonic architectures as in chamber music and in the Lied, in the face of the ardent insurrection of the guided Neudeutschen, on the traces of style Wagnerian, from the cosmopolitan F. Liszt.

The instrumental forms are fixed in common patterns: the theme is symmetrical in the quadrature of the eight bars, imposing this quadrature on the entire composition. What counts in the bitematic Sonata (ie with two contrasting themes) is not so much the elaboration as the theme itself. The dynamics and color are particularly valued and the crescendo effects are used extensively. This epoch of transition draws its strength especially from the art of JS Bach’s sons – on the one hand W. Friedemann and Ph. Immanuel (who last in his harpsichord sonatas lays the spiritual and formal foundations of Haydn’s richly developed sonata and Beethoven) on the other J. Christian (who exercised a great influence on Mozart with his typical “Allegro singer”) – and from the great center of the new instrumental style: that Mannheim school which, rich in Bohemian contributions Germanica (J. Stamitz, FH Richter, A. Filtz, J. Holzbauer), above his formal innovations (frequent use of crescendo and other colors, introduction of the Minuet in symphonic composition), ended up creating a true Sturm und Drang fueled by delicious spring freshness and a keen sense of nature.

Around the Mannheimers and the sons of JS Bach, Stamitz’s pupil, F. Beck, J. Schobert (probably the greatest of the pre-romantic German harpsichordists), K. Ditters von Dittersdorf (author of symphonies and quartets of descriptive intention), A. Rösler, M. Haydn and JG Albrechtsberger. Meanwhile, the German genre of the Lied is developingfor singing and harpsichord which, already living with Telemann and Görner, is cultivated in the Berlin of Frederick the Great by Ph. I. Bach, KH Graun, Germany Krause, J. Ph. Sack until reaching the most favorable conditions at the time of Klopstock, Goethe and Schiller, whose poems were set to music by Chr. Germany Neefe and JP Schulz, by JF Reichardt and KF Zelter; the latter two continued the activity of the Berlin group, while in Swabia a more popular tendency developed led by D. Schubart and JR Zumsteeg, author of ballads of the type later cultivated by Schubert and Schumann. Nor should we forget Gluck’s Lieder su odes by Klopstock, very famous in their time, that is, until the birth of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s Lieders.

Meanwhile, musical theater was reborn in the late eighteenth century: under English and French influences work A. Hiller, Neefe, Reichardt, A. Schweitzer and Germany Benda, initiators of a so-called Kleinkunst in which serious opera was left for smaller theatrical forms, suitable for the new bourgeois public. Other comic operas and fantastic comedies by FL Gassmann, Dittersdorf and Wenzel Müller open a way where Mozart will find The Magic Flute and his musical comedies. Another form loved by some of those masters (especially Germany Benda) and then cherished by Mozart was the monodrama (based on the melologist). The serious opera was moving towards national characters with A. Schweitzer, with I. Holzbauer, while N. Jommelli, T. Traetta and finally Chr. W. Gluck carried out the reform of the musical drama.

In the Gluckian drama – whose principle (triumphant for the first time in Vienna with the Orpheus on the text of the great collaborator and inspirer of Gluck, Ranieri de ‘Calzabigi) is that of the submission of music to poetry – the old dry recitative is replaced by an expressive declamation supported not by the harpsichord but by the orchestra; the Arias spring from the logical course of the drama, framed in great architectures of scenes; the choir summarizes an essential value and a character of ancient grandeur; the melody (not very varied at Gluck) rediscovers the purity of line and the intensity of expression that had long been overwhelmed by the virtuosic practice of the so-called “bel canto”. The great currents of modern theater represented by Cherubini, Spontini, Weber etc. derive from Gluck’s theater, of international significance.

According to localbusinessexplorer.com, the variety of stylistic currents that had animated German instrumental music of the late eighteenth century, towards the end of the century, ends up merging into the broad and majestic style of the so-called Viennese school; style which remained, almost par excellence, the name of symphonic. Its main characteristics could be summarized in those of a very free thematic elaboration, in dialogue between the parties, outside of any rigor in the application of technical means (being able to occur mainly melodic-accompanied passages mainly, but always slightly, counterpoint); elaboration contained in the typical form of the Sonata and in the subordinate ones of the Lied instrumental, variation, minuet and rondo. This school, which represents the apogee of modern instrumental music, has remained – due to the wide architecture in whose clearly traced lines every impetus and every aspiration is ennobled and aesthetically explained – with the name of classical, and classics are called its three high representatives: J. Haydn, WA Mozart and L. v. Beethoven. At Haydn we find a keen sense of thematic elaboration, though still very light and free from great complexity, and – a fact intimately connected with this – a great thematic value of invention, of ideas; a rare balance between the areas of the composition, that is – in the sonata – between the period of exposure and the period of development (a balance that is not always achieved, for various reasons, by Mozart and Beethoven). With Haydn, moreover, the type of orchestra that is still the basis of the symphonic score can be said to be fully mature and efficient. Haydn has too often emphasized only the aspect of naive, almost rustic joy; an aspect which is certainly his most proper and personal but which should not make us forget the other significant ones: the calm religious expression and the singular acuity of his dialectic, truly worthy of a contemporary of the great German philosophers.

JS Bach’s physiognomy is twofold; from a certain point of view Bach appears as a subtle counterpoint who delights in canons, problems and artifices to the point of almost recalling the ancient Flemings; his religious spirit is radically detached from the pietism of his time, from the rhetorical sacred poems then in fashion, to return to the ancient mysticism of the Middle Ages and to the bare words of Luther’s Bible: a giant figure that contemporaries could not understand. Under another aspect Bach shows himself, as Beethoven said, the father of modern harmony, and his audacities precede the romantic technique; his spirit is nourished with such complex feelings, with such varied and subtle sensations that even today they have not touched. But at the bottom of his art these two elements, far from contradicting each other, they prove to be together and inseparable, as aspects of a deeply meditative and religious spirit that seems to come from the distant Gothic period. For his austerely religious spirit, for his concentrated reflexivity, for the so to speak analytical quality of his composition, JS Bach was an isolated person in the musical life of his time. The riches to which he had brought in his work of supreme valorization of counterpoint in modern harmony were not what the taste of the moment demanded. His own son, Ph. Immanuel, is on a road to somewhere else; but these riches must not be wasted: even today they constitute the most precious substance, nor yet fully explored, of the technique of musical art. modern harmony were not what the taste of the moment demanded. His own son, Ph. Immanuel, is on a road to somewhere else; but these riches must not be wasted: even today they constitute the most precious substance, nor yet fully explored, of the technique of musical art. modern harmony were not what the taste of the moment demanded. His own son, Ph. Immanuel, is on a road to somewhere else; but these riches must not be wasted: even today they constitute the most precious substance, nor yet fully explored, of the technique of musical art.

More in keeping with the musical style of his time was the great contemporary of Bach, GF Händel of Halle: while very powerful in the expression of austere and religious ideas and feelings, Handel proceeds in a simpler art towards the immediate synthesis, which he outlines with clearly marked outlines. Harmony and counterpoint, artifices and formal schemes serve him only to increase the variety and power of the overall effects. Hence the triumph of his work as a theatrical musician and of his great oratories, destined to arouse entire peoples in religious or patriotic transport. Handel’s art, which spread especially in German countries and dominated England up to our times (for which nation he composed his major works), is nourished by elements not only German but also Italian,

According to intershippingrates.com, the era of Bach and Handel saw the affirmation, around the two great masters, of numerous very notable musicians, such as J. Mattheson in Hamburg, Germany Ph. Telemann, Chr. Graupner in Darmstadt, GH Stölzel in Gotha, G Walter in Weimar, JF Fasch in Zerbst. Of the most famous of them, Germany Ph. Telemann, for a long time fertility and eclecticism were despised, however the insatiable thirst for novelty and different experiences did not prevent this musician from reaching many times, as in the superb cantata Ino (1775) for soprano and orchestra, a high artistic level. More famous than him, as well as in Germany also in Italy and Austria, was JA Hasse di Bergedorf, who in Italy was also favored by A. Scarlatti and who throughout his life worked for the theater (however he also composed oratorî) on librettos Italians (Metastasio). Indeed, he was one of the most fruitful and illustrious representatives of serious Italian opera. Excellent pages appear both in the works and in the oratories and instrumental pages. Hasse was greatly admired by the King of Prussia Frederick the Great himself, himself a good musician (composer and flute virtuoso), among the best in Berlin together with JJ Quantz and the Graun brothers. At that time, in Munich, the Italians Pietro Torri, opera player and EF, were also distinguished from the Abaco author of instrumental music; in Vienna JJ Constance and fortress (from 1722). Minor masters were Germany Reuter, Germany Muffat and Germany Chr. Wagenseil, whose artistic direction leads up to the first Haydn.

At the twilight of the baroque counterpoint the style undergoes a sudden change, and even in music the new spirit of deliberate ingenuity, of ostentatious feelings of sincerity, of freedom, of a sense of nature, introduced by Rousseau, is felt. Music simplifies and favors the work of amateurs, while professional composers speak only of Stimmung and “sensitivity”.

We also note A. Hammerschmidt who could almost be said to be the popularizer of Schütz’s religious art, J. Rosenmüller, assiduous importer of the continuous Venetian novelties, the Cantores of Leipzig J. Schelle and S. Knüpfer, not devoid of force and effect, J. Kuhnau, author of important harpsichord sonatas inspired by biblical scenes, J. Christoph Bach, the brilliant master of the late seventeenth century, great-uncle of the great Bach, the pupils of Schütz, M. Weckmann and C. Bernhard of Hamburg, C. Förster author of oratories in the style of Carissimi. Important are Buxtehude’s cantatas a solos and choir, gathered in popular allegorical cycles entitled Lübecker Abendmusiken. Also worthy of mention is the type of cantata libretto created by pastor E. Neumeister, evidently modeled on the form of a melodramatic scene, with arias and recitatives; the musicians were JP Krieger of Weissenfels, Ph. H. Erlebach of Rudolstadt, Germany Ph. Telemann and especially JS Bach in his Weimar period. On Catholic soil, in those years, Venetian masters were in great favor (in Vienna, for example, A. Draghi had been called), but even the emperors gave themselves to vocal and religious composition, almost professionals; so did Ferdinando III, Leopoldo I, Giuseppe I and Carlo VI. The greatest representative of the Baroque-Jesuit style is the Bavarian JK Kerll in his legends of martyrs; Kerll was succeeded in Munich in 1717 by the youngest of the Bernabei family.

A similar development took place in the same century in secular music. At the beginning of the century we already find the type of the suite with variations, very well formed and frequently explained in truly vital works, consisting of a series of dances for wind or string instruments (JH Schein, P. Peuerl, M. Franck, V. Hausmann). The violin favored by the English Brade and the Italians B. Marini and C. Farina finds German representatives in the Hamburgese J. Schop, N. Strungk, famous virtuoso, T. Baltzar and JP von Westhoff from Lübeck, appreciated in London and in Paris for their typically German art of violin polyphony, and above all the very learned Franz Biber (died in 1704). Meanwhile, starting from the middle of the century. XVII the penetration of sonata tempos into the body of the suite of dances became more and more notable.French Ouvertures, while Germany Muffat in Passau composes excellent Concerti grossi (1701) in the style of Corelli.

Equally interesting masters devoted themselves to the viola bass, such as A. Kühnel, J. Schenk, the Buxtehude, the Reinken; on the harpsichord JJ Froberger, W. Ebner and A. Poglietti, authors of variation suites; the magnificent harmonist KF Fischer, Germany Böhm and C. Ritter; to the lute E. Reusner, with its substantial suites, which together with some other Viennese master precedes JS Bach.

Schein and his pupils Th. Selle of Hamburg, A. Hammerschmidt of Zittau, and above all Schütz’s cousin, H. Albert of Königsberg, contribute to the development of solo singing on numbered bass, while A. Krieger, in Leipzig and Dresden, he brought to it elements typical of a now mature style (such as, for example, the intervention, between one verse and the other, of orchestral refrains) creating songs of great freshness and modernity, which they now know in practice of German amateurs a period of renewed favor. New contributions to vocal chamber music were then offered by the new genre of the Italian Duet created in Munich and Hanover by A. Steffani and his young friend GF Händel, from the Quodlibet with several voices (of a popular nature), as well as from the religious soloist song that from JW Franck in Hamburg and from J. Löhner in Nuremberg reaches, through Ph. Erlebach, up to the Bach of the Schemelli – Lieder, with characters of nobility and seriousness.

According to homeagerly.com, the formation of the theatrical work derives, in Germany as well as in Italy, from various elements: thus from the prose theater, that is, as from the old religious legends and from the old cantatas of a comic nature; cantatas that had an almost theatrical character. But the model was naturally given by the Italian melodrama of the Venetian school, whose representatives dominated the German and Austrian scenes. To find German melodramas of sufficient vitality we must leave behind the work of S. Ph. Staden (the spiritual allegory Seelewig) and reach the works given in Nuremberg, in the last decade of 1600, by Lohner, and those of JF Krieger represented in Weissenfels. At that time, JS Kusser and JK Schürmann were working in Brunswick. But the most important opera school is that of Hamburg, started by J. Theile, a pupil of Schütz, who in 1678 had his opera Adam and Eve represented. This school was to experience a period of great rise, from Strungk and W. Franck to Kusser and the eminent R. Keizer (died 1739). The latter can be considered, together with Lulli, Purcell and Händel, one of the greatest opera composers who were able to adapt the Venetian model to their countries. After the Keizer, the Hamburg theater, despite the presence of the famous Germany Ph. Telemann, rapidly declined and towards 1740 theatrical performances in Hamburg, Leipzig, Danzig, Berlin, Bayreuth, Darmstadt, Baden-Durlach ceased: evidently the taste national was not yet oriented enough towards the new musical art form.

A golden age for German music was the late Baroque represented by Bach, Handel, and other notable masters. Of the concrete art of the two great composers (for whom see the relative voices) it is above all important, with regard to the development of German music, to highlight some dominant characters.

From 1607 onwards we witness the penetration in Germany of the new Italian constipation, from the low numbered (1607) to the use of a counterpoint with a few voices, which the Viadana practiced in his ecclesiastical concerts (known in Germany since 1612, the year in which they were published in Frankfurt), and finally to the monody affirmed in the New Music by Germany Caccini; all the Italian forms from the solo Cantata, to the Oratorio, from the Opera to the solo Sonata, to the Concerto grosso etc. invade the Nordic countries.

The German seventeenth century was productive, above all in the field of religious singing and organ elaboration of the choir. In this field, the collections of sacred poems of the pastor J. Rist of Hamburg, whose poems were many times placed in choir music, and those of the lyric noble P. Gerhard, to whom excellent composers such as J. Crüger and JG Ebeling. Thus also Catholic singing had good collectors and scholars, such as DG Corner abbot in Göttweih, F. von Spee in Cologne, J. Kuen in Munich.

Among the master organists, S. Scheidt of Halle should be mentioned first of all, who worked especially on the elaboration of the evangelical choir; and precisely in his Tabulatura nova (1624) the choral is treated as a still song through all the voices, while in his Görlitzer Tabulaturbuch (1650) it is harmonized for the first time for the purpose of execution by the faithful in church. The style of composition for keyboard instruments is now beginning to differentiate, even in Germany, according to the particular instrument (organ or harpsichord) to which it is directed. This happens clearly with Frescobaldi’s pupil JJ Froberger (died in 1667) who assigns touches and fantasies full of vehemence and technical audacity to the organ, anticipating the organ writing of JS Bach, while he dedicates the Suite to the harpsichord.which immediately becomes a genre very rich in resources for the virtuous. The southern German and Austrian school represented by JK Kerll, Germany Muffat, J. Pachelbel is also important in both fields, that is both in the organ and in the harpsichord. Thus Pachelbel like Germany Böhm of Lüneburg lead us to Bach’s art, the first in his fughette for organ which treat the evangelical choral as a verse of still singing; the second in its choral versions in which the fundamental melody passes through an ornamentation of elegant blooms. But even more important is the development of the seventeenth-century organ schools in the North, especially those of Hamburg and Lübeck represented by A. Strungk, author (as well as plays) of valuable Capricci that came to be studied by Handel; by J. Reinken, who develops the choral with breadth, from V. Lübeck baroque artist to the point of recalling the audacity of the Greek. A daring virtuosity emerges from the compositions of the Hamburger H. Scheidemann; finally, in Lübeck, Franz Tunder (Frescobaldi’s pupil) is succeeded by his son-in-law D. Buxtehude, whose superb and imaginative compositions (preludes and fugues) will no longer be surpassed by Bach.

The general character of all these pre-Bachian organists appears to be typical of a tenacious, rough and solitary race of gigantic strength; and JS Bach himself often gives the impression, in comparison with their simple and powerful inspirations, almost of a graceful Rococo.

In the meantime, between the two generations of organists, the Praetorius-Scheidt group and the Buxtehude group (and later Bach), an important change had occurred in the need for sound: the organ of the first group (the best manufacturer was Esajas Compenius) had to obtain clarity and evidence of the lines. The one of the second group (whose main builder was Gottfried Silbermann) was supposed to produce waves of silvery sonority. (The modern movement in German organ-making has led to a revival of these old types, with their long-dissuaded registers, to fight against the too cumbersome type of the gigantic 1910 organ.)

In vocal religious music the seventeenth century, under the direct influence of the great Italian schools (especially Venetian), determined a movement in a certain sense connected to the new dramatic forms then appeared: so that from the motet, for the intermediate form of the so-called Spiritual Concerts (Geistliche Konzerte), we come to the solo cantata.

According to getzipcodes.org, the transition is represented by the greatest German master of the time, H. Schütz (died 1672). This pupil of Giovanni Gabrieli composes Italian madrigals in the style of Monteverdi and Gesualdo da Venosa, Davidic psalms with multiple choirs, in a grandiose style animated by a sovereign force, crossed by wholly Baroque impetus, and then Cantiones sacrae, motets, in the which style seems almost to return to the ancient a cappella models, Lutheran psalms for church use (almost in contrast to the psalms of the Reformed churches) and finally – after the second visit to Venice (1628) – concertante music, for voices and instruments, on subjects religious, which he entitled Sacred Symphonies like the analogous compositions by Giovanni Gabrieli, small spiritual concerts expressing with intensity the sadness of the German people in those years of misery, and then again oratories and Passions. Other masters also inspired by the then dominant Italian influence contributed to the movement initiated in Germany by Schütz: JH Schein with the low numbered Villanelle, with the German madrigals and with the impressive spiritual concerts.

At this time it happened to German musicians that they had to suffer the consequences of the foreign supremacy that had already existed for centuries: around 1550-90 it was Flemish supremacy, then up to 1620 of the English and finally of the Italian. The example, in preferring the Flemish chapel masters, was given by the Emperor of Germany Charles V himself, who led with him in all his residences, even temporary, his chapel in Brussels, directed by Th. Crecquillon, from C. Canis and N. Gombert.

In Dresden he was called M. Le Maistre, from Bergamo A. Scandello. Monaco became from 1556 onwards one of the major musical centers of the time due to the presence of the brilliant Orlando di Lasso, who, then came from Flanders, had already made himself famous with a collection of motets and madrigals. The influence exerted by Orlando on the various European schools and therefore also on the German one was very great; in Germany his best pupils were I. de Vento, J. Eccard, L. Lechner. Eccard, who had come to Berlin after Augsburg and Königsberg, became one of the most important masters of the so-called Currende – Motette Protestant (these motets were intended to confer solemnity to processions, processions, etc., and were sung on the way, generally by school children; Eccard’s motets were published under the name of Preussische Festlieder by the pupil J. Stobaeus). Lechner, who came from Val d’Adige to Stuttgart, could be called (for his Passion according to St. John, his Motets on the Song of Songs, the sayings on life and death) a faithful to the a cappella style. In the time of Lasso, another famous Flemish composer was working in Augusta: J. de Kerle; in Graz, Annibale Padovano and Johannes de Cleve; in Heidelberg C. Hollander; in Ansbach and Königsberg T. Riccio da Brescia, in Prague the inexhaustible madrigalist Ph. de Monte and that Jakob Regnart who, with the introduction of light Neapolitan villanelles, put into disuse the elaborate style (on still song) they had illustrated the Senfl, K. Othmayr, Germany Forster, Jobst von Brant. These villanelle are happy and short triplets, which ironically accentuate their rustic character with series of parallel fifths; quick southern forms that opened the way to Germany for the so-called Falala o fa – la (see fa -la), songs and ballets by GG Gastoldi and L. Marenzio. In Vienna he met Jacob Vaet, successor of the famous Arnold von Brück, and the organist J. Buus, a pupil of A. Willaert; in Innsbruck the Belgian A. Utendal.

Close to many foreigners, many Germans are now beginning to assert themselves and historically place themselves as masters of the late Renaissance. The Lutheran tradition of J. Walter, by a group of Thuringian musicians, J. von Burgk, L. Schröter, Gallus Dressler, to which are added the East German B. Gesius, J. Stobaeus and Germany Lange, is conducted (through the various motet currents of Clemens non papa and Orlando di Lasso) up to the threshold of the early Baroque. Under the Italian (Venetian) influence, J. Gallus (died 1591) and HL Hassler (died 1612) nevertheless succeeded in founding musical buildings which were very significant for the development of national art. Especially HL Hassler, a pupil of A. Gabrieli, managed to give a clearly German tone to his music, even though it was built in the Italian style. Neue deutsche Gesänge (1596) and its Lustgarten (1601); and famous melodies of the German musical heritage date back to him, such as Fr. ex. Mein Gemüt ist mir verwirret and O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, the latter of which occupies such an important place in the Passion according to St. Matthew by Bach. In his versions of evangelical songs, two stylistic versions are distinguished: one is very simple, in a homophone style; the other more complex, in an imitated style. Moreover, the coexistence of different stylistics was not limited to the work of Hassler: while the masters of Augusta: C. Gumpelzheimer, B. Klingenstein, C. Erbach practiced the fugitive style of a Venetian nature, in the work of Germany Aichinger (died in 1628) the influence of the Roman style of Palestrina was felt. In Hamburg H. Praetorius is influenced by the Gabrieli, while in Stettin F. Dulichius continues the style of Lasso, but bringing the number of voices from five to seven.

More or less common in all these musicians, however, is a tendency to move away from the beauty of the contrapuntal lines to reach that resulting from the great sounds of compact groups of voices: a sign of the spiritual change that the Baroque brought.

According to diseaseslearning.com, the restlessness and dynamism, the search for the powerful and dramatic effect, typical of the early Baroque, take the place of the tight Gothic construction and the learned in depth contemplative work of the early Renaissance; so that the year 1618 which marks the beginning of the Thirty Years War can also be considered a decisive year for the evolution of German musical art. Exponent of this transition period is M. Praetorius of Wolfenbüttel (died 1621). This representative of the tradition of J. Walter di Torgau ended up becoming a passionate apostle of the Italian concertante style. In his theoretical work (Syntagma musicum, 3 vols., 1614-18) he teaches a very baroque composition technique, based on the juxtaposition of various and variously important vocal and instrumental masses.

Apart from these lively musical currents, mention should be made of the singular use of the German humanists, consisting in the composition of music on ancient odes and on tragedy choirs, note against note, for scholastic purposes (for scanning) and also for serve the representations given by pupils (authors: P. Tritonius, L. Senfl, P. Hofhaimer, B. Ducis).

According to computerminus.com, the Reformation also had great importance for music. Passionate about music was Luther himself, who, not unaware of song and composition, must have probably been the author of those melodies of his religious songs which appear for the first time in Wittenberg; we mention Ein festa Burg ist unser Gott, Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir, Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her, melodies without which cantatas, passions could not have been bornnor Bach’s organ fantasies. Luther, who in Rome had exalted himself for Josquin Des Prés and in Munich for Senfl, placed music alongside theology in his famous prefaces to choral books. He was responsible for the institution and form of the Mass sung in German (Formula Missae et Communionis, 1523, Die deutsche Messe, 1526) and a new function given to singing in the liturgy (main sources: the Wittenbergisches Sangbüchlein a 4-5 voices, by J. Walter, cantor in Torgau, 1524). It is useful to remember, with regard to the diffusion of the new musical spirit, that the so-called wittenbergische Psälmlein they went as far as Hungary and the Scandinavian countries. Another important collection of motets on evangelical songs, also including works by masters from southern Germany (L. Senfl, S. Dietrich in Constance, B. Resinarius in Böhmisch Leipa (now Česká Lípa), Ducis in Ulm, U. Brätel in Stuttgart), consists of the Lieder für die gemeinen Schulen published by Germany Rhaw in Wittenberg (1544), who was the most important publisher of the early Protestant era, for his remarkable collections of antiphons, responsories, hymns, psalms, magnificat, masses etc. of the Lutheran liturgy.

In the beginning the liturgical melody was entrusted to the tenor, while later in the work of L. Osiander, preacher at the court of Württemberg, he passed to the soprano. At that time the Lutheran church polyphony was reduced to a simple harmonic support, and towards the beginning of the century. XVII could even be entrusted indifferently to the voices or the organ; and certainly there was then a noticeable stiffening of the rhythm in the same choir. But Luther very soon organized the ancient choirs of the chapels in societies of civic and country singers, thereby creating the ground for a flowering of music, in Saxony and Thuringia, from which Schütz, Bach and Handel could then emerge. The use of figurative chant gave the counterpoint great possibilities of adapting to the most diverse needs of the liturgy, and even the passages of the Gospel were thus composed in the form of grandiose motets (O. Herpol,

Far less favorable were the conditions created for music by the so-called Reformed (Zwingli, Calvino, etc.) who at first even abolished the use of the organ and that of polyphony, treating it as an “old abuse of the church”, and did not want to, in their anti-artistic puritanism, leave to the community other than simple psalms. Their only songbook was the psalter of Marot and Beza, with the melodies of C. Goudimel. But later this intransigence eased somewhat.

Meanwhile, during the century. XVI was taking place a vigorous rise of instrumental music. Methods began to be published on the same technique of the instruments: those of S. Virdung, M. Agricola (in burlesque verses) and M. Praetorius are famous. Hofhaimer’s pupils illustrated themselves among the organists: H. Buchner in Constance, H. Kotter in Basel and Bern, Brumann in Speyer, H. Oyart in Torgau, W. Grefinger in Passau; this was the typical school of elegant ornamentation, which towards 1590 was replaced by the so-called Passaggisti: NE Ammerbach in Leipzig, B. Schmidt in Strasbourg, J. Paix in Augusta. Around 1590 the typical organ style of the Chapel of S. Marco brought the victory over the others (German exponents of this style were HL Hassler, JH Schein, C. Erbach), and then, towards 1620, giving way to a new northern coloristic current to which JP Sweelink’s pupils belonged: S. Scheidt, M. Schild, P. Siefert. In the art of the lute they excelled: in Vienna, around 1520, the Swabian H. Judenkünig; in Nuremberg, about 1530, H. Gerle; in Augusta, around 1540, the Neusiedler family; to which masters followed numerous other and expert composers for their instrument. From their small town of Füssen on the Lech the Tiefenbrucker family supplied Europe with lutes as the Cremonese masters did for violins. The trumpets of H. Neuschel of Nuremberg and the wind instruments (woodwinds) of Swabia were sought after. As for the organs, between the Germans and the Italians there was a notable difference: while the Italians sought a set of closed sounds such as to produce the

Almost simultaneously the melodic art of the Minnesänger was built on Gregorian and troubadour (Provençal) elements on the one hand, and on elements derived from the national cantata dance on the other. If by Walter von der Vogelweide nothing else remains for sure and integral that the Doric Palästinalied, Neidhart of Reuental has left us a rich collection of popular melodies, which are accompanied by the songs (of a more religious nature) by Heinrich Frauenlob (who died in 1306) and Prince Wizlav von Rugen; the main document is the manuscript of songs which is preserved in Jena. Around 1400 a second flowering of this Minnesänger art appearswith the names of Ermanno monaco of Salzburg, of the realistic Tyrolean poet Oswald of Wolkenstein and of Count Hugh of Montfort, of Bregenz; especially Wolkenstein draws his art from the full movement of profane polyphony, and often shows that he knows the currents of the ars nova of Florence and of the French from F. di Vitry to Germany Machault. A notable monument of profane polyphony is found in the canon for St. Martin of the convent of Lambach.

After this second flowering, from the chivalrous costume of the Minnesänger we pass, in the cities, to a monodic current in the bourgeois and artisan schools of the Meistersänger that culminates in the work of Hans Sachs, and to a polyphonic current in the practice of vocal chamber music. instrumental, of contents taken from the repertoire of folk- song books of Locham (Nuremberg, 1450) Glogau and Monaco.

At the same time an organ school develops, based on the so-called Colorierung (v. Color), which gives the first essays in the work Fundamenta organisandi by Corrado Paumann (contemporary of A. Squarcialupi and well known also in Italy, where he was for some time) and in the Orgelbuch of Buxheim. For the organ and the lute, Germany had its own tablatures and, during the century. XV, came to spread numerous compositions for these two instruments. At the Duke of Milan and at the Duke of Ferrara we find the famous lutenists Bertoldo of Basel and N. Schlifer, and the organist R. Agricola (the famous humanist); in Venice he was the first organist of S. Marco E. Murer; in Milan the cathedral organ was built in 1487 by A. Dilmann; in Modena the titular composer was Giuseppe Martini, a priest from Costanza, whom we later find also in Milan and Ferrara: in which last city Hans von Bebris directed a chapel of young German singers and the German Peter Bonus enjoyed great favor as lutenist. We also remember that the famous organist of S. Marco Dionisio Memmo was a pupil of a German: the

Regarding the large polyphonies intended for church choirs, the Strasbourg exponents (Zeltenpferd, H. Laufenberg of Friborg) should first be noted around 1420, and around 1440 a codex of the convent of St. Emeran in Regensburg (H. Edlerau, P. Wilhelmi), around 1460 the first volumes in mensural notation, due to Bishop J. Hinderbach, preserved in Trento, which introduce us above all to the repertoire of the court chapel of Emperor Frederick III (Graz and Wiener Neustadt). In these volumes there are among other things a solemn 8-part pilgrim song In Gottes Namen fahren wir and a beautiful Mass on the German folk song Grüne Linden. Many German composers of this period came from the Rhenish countries and Westphalia. Of the style close to 1480 we are informed by the most recent volumes of the chapter of the cathedral of Trento due to J. Wiser, a collection of various authors edited by Nicolas Leopold of Nuremberg (originally from Innsbruck), a volume that is preserved in Munich, plus other sources among them contemporaries preserved in Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau. In these works the dominant influence of the Dutch schools (G. Dufay, J. Obrecht, J. Okeghem) and that of the English of the Dunstaple school is manifested; the Flemish H. Isaac, former organist with Lorenzo de ‘Medici in Florence, was able to direct the stylistic movement of the German polyphonists from his post as court composer of the emperor Maximilian. Imposing among the Choralis Constantinus composed by him for the chapter of the cathedral of Constance; no less important are his masses, while the noble melodies he sang on popular songs, such as Fr. ex. the famous Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen.

Moreover, according to equzhou.net, it must be remembered that at that time the custom of elaborating popular songs with three, four or five voices flourished, and equally the music of private or chamber use for voices and instruments flourished; so that the religious and profane popular song had the field of generating hundreds of beautiful melodies, admirable not only for the quality of the invention but also for the richness of the rhythms. The main masters in this art were Adam of Fulda chapel master of Frederick the Wise in Torgau, Erasmo Lapicida (died 1519) chapel master of Emperor Frederick III, Enrico Fink (died 1527), the Silesian T. Stoltzer (died 1526) and above all Isaac’s favorite pupil, Ludwig Senfl of Zurich, occupied first in the chapel of Maximilian in Augusta, then in Munich (died in 1555). The main sources for the study are the printed particles of Oeglin (Augusta 1511), of Arnt von Aich (Cologne 1512), of Pietro Schöffer (Mainz 1513), and the tablatures of Arnoldo Schlick, the blind organist from Heidelberg; in 1535 the rich collection of songs by H. Ott appeared; in 1536 what Fink had left, as well as a songbook by Schöffer and Apiarius (Strasbourg), a series of Frankfurt notebooks due to Egenolf (entitled Songs of the streets, of the brushwood, of the herbs). The classic collection par excellence, especially containing works by Senfl, is the Aufzug frischer deutscher Liedlein by Germany Forster, preserved in Nuremberg.

At the banquets each guest was called, in turn, to sing the stanzas of these songs accompanying himself on the harp that was passed from one to the other, while the choir sang the refrain. Later a recognized line of highly learned epic singers arose, roughly as was the case in Homeric times (although epic singers were less well organized than bards). In Carolingian times the epic cantor was replaced by the professional mime, which was known in the Roman world since the time of Justinian.

We find ourselves on more solid ground with the spread of Christianity which, thanks to the convents, introduced the singing of psalms and hymns, first in the empire of the Franks, then in that of the Saxons. However, the introduction of Gregorian chant was not very easy, since the tonal system of the Nordic peoples (existing, almost certainly, since ancient times) was different from that used in Mediterranean civilizations: while the tonal system of these civilizations was based on the ancient ranges and on the ways of the church, the Nordic systems seem to have always been based on the three elements of the major perfect chord. In any case, however far we can peer into the centuries, we are always faced with a melodic scheme based on fifth and third intervals.

According to cancermatters.net, Germany, despite its willingness to stick to Roman usage, throughout the Middle Ages preserved its own dialect in Gregorian liturgical chant: p. ex. where in Italy intervals of thirds appeared, often in Germany series of fourths were followed, where in Italy the fourths were used, in Germany the fifths were used and so on. Evidently the Nordic people gave their choral singing a more violent movement, a more tormented line than the southerners. The greatest effort to reach a sufficient unification of the liturgical chant was made by Charlemagne, who in the Roman liturgy also saw a useful means of merging ever better the different members of his empire; an effort in which he had Alcuin as his main help. During this period various scholae cantorum were founded, as in Aachen and Fulda; the first organs, a gift from those emperors, were received from Byzantium, while neumes in the chapels of Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Hildesheim and Minden began to be seen on the models of the Metz school. The further development of liturgical chant in Germany was mainly the work of the Benedictine monasteries of St. Gall and Reichenau, which received visits from the Saxon emperors with solemn ceremonies in which lauds rich in music were held. Of this period we remember especially the sequences of Notker and the tropes of Totila, as well as important imitations of the magnificent Roman and oriental models, such as the Ave praeclara by Henry of Limburg and the Laus Tibi Christe of his pupil Godeskalk, who died in Aachen in 1098. To these songs, which were renowned throughout Europe, we must add the noble antiphon Alma redemptoris Mater by Hermann of Reichenau (Ermannus Contractus) and the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes (1050) by the poet, musician and historian Wipo. Worthy of attention is, in the century. XII, the art of female monasteries, whose main monument is the codex of St. Hildegard in Wiesbaden, containing the Singspiel ” Ordo virtutum “with 80 intermediate songs (only the Devil recites it, instead of singing). Even in these times it was customary to draw from profane songs the musical material for religious songs, as happens in the religious sequences taken from sequences of lay bards, which are preserved in Wolfenbüttel and Cambridge manuscripts with the indication modus Ottinc, modus Liebinc, etc. Church Latin still dominates everywhere, but the sangallese Notker Labeo (who died in 1022) already wrote the first music treatises in Old High German. The main theorists after him were Berno of Reichenau, the aforementioned Ermanno Contratto, St. William of Hirschau, Aribo of Freising. The last important exponents of Gregorian art and aesthetics were Hugh of Reutlingen (died in 1360) and Conrad of Zabern (died about 1480).

The Franciscan movement also has its manifestation in the history of German music, first determining the composition of cyclical offices (in rhyme) for St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua, due to the monk Giuliano di Spira chapel master of the Parisian church of S. Luigi (died 1250).

Polyphonic music begins its development especially in the work of Abbot Hoger of Werden (died in 902), author of the treatise Musica enchiriades (organum theorist), wrongly known under the name of Ubaldo, and of Francone of Cologne, Pontifical protonotary (died 1247) who was the main teacher of mensural theory. The art of the motetists of the Notre-Dame school spread in Germany, as we see in a famous Bamberg codex, and found there a new, properly German development, which is manifested in a brilliant page such as Brumans est mors.

As for Italy, so also for Germany music has assumed such an importance over the times that a picture of the spiritual values ​​of these nations would result in which music was not sufficiently taken into account.

It should be noted that the function of music is very different in the Nordic countries and in Italy (e.g. in Germany the collaboration exercised in a certain sense by the public in the existence and particular developments of musical theater is much lower than in the peninsula), but it is expressed with equal intensity especially in the love of popular song and in the tendency to instrumental music. Italian immediately understands music under its plastic aspect, in its appearing to the senses as a voice. as a real sound, and is therefore a very keen critic of everything related to interpretation; the German instead sets out to immediately seek the guiding idea of ​​the composition, the intention, rather than, in short, that the how, only to be somewhat indifferent to the means put into use for the execution. Therefore simply loving music is not enough for him (this contrast was put in extreme relief by Ferruccio Busoni): for the German being a musician means being such as to be able to receive (as one receives grace) music; this virtue is inherent in the most profound of human nature. It is therefore natural that he is drawn to put philosophical-moral intentions and thoughts in music. From this arises a singular relationship between form and substance in German music. The German is always a bit wary of too great a formal ease, which he gladly accuses of empty formalism, while he prefers to witness the same struggle that the idea supports for its full explanation: a struggle that, far from having to follow, of course, a predetermined program, the more easily it will be victorious the more directly it follows the course of inspiration. He therefore loves in music above all the expression of dreams, of titanic wills, of anguished problems of the spirit; and he will be moved by those works in which, in the struggle that thought has lasted for its formal explanation, there is still something unexpressed, unattained: for example. Bach’s Mass in B minor, Beethoven’s Solemn Mass, Schubert’s Symphony in C major,Wagner’s Parsifal and A. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

According to calculatorinc.com, a similarly different tendency from Italian demonstrates German with regard to the proper sonic qualities of music; and this could moreover be connected to the difference, in the two languages, between the bases of vocal articulation: although the German has great admiration for the great Italian singers he will always find their voice too clear and bright, while he will prefer the half tone, darkness and shadows (think by analogy of the difference between Raphael and Rembrandt); he will love complexity instead of transparency, and this is even noticeable in the writing: particularly German we show the appearance of the pages of Bach, R. Schumann, EW Wolf, H. Pfitzner. This is the Gothic complexity of lines, which is already announced in Dürer’s contemporary German lute tablature.

Popular music itself, which constitutes the common ground of all German music, is scarcely brilliant: it is rather naive nor is it distinguished by characteristic national rhythms, as happens in Italy with the tarantella, in Spain with the bolero, in Hungary with the csardas, unless you want to take the place of German dance par excellence the peaceful Ländler in ³ / ₄. But often a deep passion, a rude ardor, a yearning for freedom emanate from these popular songs, as if to express that need for all or nothing that Tacitus had already referred to as typical of the character of the Germans.

Already in the very ancient narrative poems the singing of the Spirits of the waters, the magical melodies, etc. they are frequently remembered. Even greater value, with regard to the study of the origins of German musical history, have the various discoveries that have been made of instruments, such as hunting horns of gold, Luren Scandinavian (7th-6th century BC), found in the swamps of northern Germany from Hanover to Mecklenburg, superbly crafted twisted trombones, which will probably have been used in pairs (responding to each other). From the time of the barbarian invasions, recorders and harps have also reached us. Not much can be said about the music performed in these early days. From documents offered to us by the deliberations of the various councils, as well as by hagiographies from the century. VI to XII, we can deduce that in pagan worship were practiced choral songs similar to our hymns, sung dances, ringing of bells, and likewise the images of the gods were carried in procession between songs and dances of masks; after all, since the time of Tacitus the so-called sword dance was in use (which was maintained until the 18th century). It is likely that in the origins of Christian worship in Germany it was customary to use ancient pagan sung dances for Christmas ceremonies and functions. Ausonio mentions numerous sorts of songs by artisans from the Moselle, and Venanzio Fortunato recalls the rough Bavarian convivial songs. As for the old magical melodies, one could still get an idea of ​​them by thinking about the refrains and playing songs (pentatonic) of our children.

It was during the wars fought between Charlemagne’s successors that a German state emerged for the first time, autonomous and comprising in a unitary political organism all the Germanic populations east of the Rhine: the kingdom known as the Eastern Franks (later also regnum Theutonicum, or Saxonorum), recognized by the Treaty of Verdun (843) to Louis the German, grandson of Charlemagne, the year following that Strasbourg oath which, due to its bilingual redaction (Old French and Old High German), is proof of the existence of an autonomous and distinct German nationality within the Frankish world, albeit through the internal differences of customs, habits and in part also of language that were still found among the ancient populations. The German nation confirmed and consolidated in the following centuries its achieved unity with its own civilization which made its influence felt throughout Europe; the construction of a national state proved to be much more difficult. Under the reign of the last Carolingians the compactness of the political formation that had been created was severely tested both by the contrasts (and by the subdivisions) between Ludovico’s successors, and by the recurring aspirations for a reunification of Charlemagne’s Empire. Between the end of the century. Furthermore, during the reigns of Arnolfo of Carinthia and Ludovico il Fanciullo, continuous invasions by Hungarians, Slavs and Danes followed one another.

This situation of serious weakness of central power resulted in the strengthening of those ethnic-based particularisms that were linked to the traditions of the ancient peoples subdued by the Franks and determined the formation of political units governed by leaders who took the name of dukes, the national duchies. of Saxony, Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria, which was later joined by that of Lorraine, not corresponding to an ethnic group, but to the constituent territories of ancient Lotharingia, definitively incorporated into the German kingdom starting from 925. The extinction of the Carolingians of Germany (911) made the dukes – who had previously recognized at least nominally the authority of the sovereigns and their hereditary monarchy – arbitrators of the situation: they gave life to a national monarchy, in which the elective principle was tempered by the tendency to choose the sovereign at the interior of a single lineage (dynasties of Saxony, from 919 to 1024; of Franconia, from 1024 to 1125; of the Hohenstaufen, from 1138 to 1250). With Henry the Bird, first of the house of Saxony, and above all with his son, Otto I, the German state was strengthened thanks to the creation of a rudimentary administrative structure (palatine and ministerial counts), to the support of the bishops, appointed by the king and in charge of important political functions, and to that of the minor nobility, which was favored over the great feudal lords. A policy of founding frontier marches along the Elbe (of the Billunghi, from the North, from Lusatia, from Merseburg, from Meissen; and, further south, Orientale, of Carinthia, of Carniola) which not only ensured the defense of the German territory against the invaders (the Hungarians had been beaten at Riade in 933 and on the Lech in 955; the Slavs stopped near the Recknitz in 955), but also laid the foundations for expansion towards the East (Drang nach Osten) of the German settlement and for the Christianization of the Slavs, through the creation of a new series of bishoprics: Schleswig, Oldenburg, Brandenburg, Meissen, Prague, Olmütz, etc., subjected to the metropolitan see of Magdeburg and Mainz. However, even with Otto I emerged (or re-emerged, if we think of the Carolingian matrix of the German state) those imperial and universalist aspirations which then conditioned the action of the German sovereigns for centuries.

In 962, according to globalsciencellc, Ottone encircled the imperial crown in Rome and inaugurated a policy of constant intervention in the political events of the Italian peninsula, which would have required ever new commitment and energy from his successors. The Italian policy of Otto I was made with Otto II and with Otto III also Mediterranean and Eastern, even arousing the utopian program of a renovatio imperii; the ever closer relations with the Church and with the papacy involved the Empire in the exhausting struggle of investitures, from the middle of the century. XI to 1122 (Concordat of Worms); the same political program of Frederick I, centered on the restoration of state power, was conceived within the framework of a universal empire, with Rome as its capital and Italy as its center, and forced the Hohenstaufen to clash with the Italian communes and the papacy; and when in 1194 Henry VI inherited the crown of the Kingdom of Sicily, the ancient mirage of a dominium mundi flashed once again, extended to Byzantium and the Levant. This policy required enormous financial commitments for the recruitment of armies, forced the sovereigns to continually descend into Italy, to long and frequent absences from Germany; above all it prevented them from creating strong structures of government and from opposing the development of particularistic forces: the urban centers, which always claimed new autonomy, the nobility, which by now began to found its power, feudality, on territorial bases, which, far from constituting that hierarchical system of links between the emperor and the potentos hoped for by Barbarossa, it turned out to be the most serious element of disintegration. Thus, while in the West, and above all in France and England, the national monarchies – albeit through a bitter and long struggle – promoted the construction of an increasingly centralized and unitary state organism, ordering and regulating cities and local lordships, large principalities and autonomous provinces, in that slow process that leads to the formation of the modern state, the German monarchy wore out its energies and its authority in pursuit of the dream of a universal empire.

Population

Germany is the most populous state within the European Union. The number of residents shows a slightly increasing tendency due to migration gains. Nevertheless, according to projections, it will decrease continuously from around 2030, mainly due to the low birth rate (2019: 1.54). The rising number of births (from 2012) contrasts with a rapidly growing number of deaths, so that the gap between those born and those who died is widening. Demographic change is particularly evident in increasing aging (overaging) and a decline in the labor force. The number will probably be lower than the number of people over 65 by 2030.

Population development in Germany

year	total (million) 1)	Territory – old federal states	Territory – new federal states and East Berlin
1939	59.7	43.0	16.7
1947	65.9 2)	45.4	20.5 3)
1950	68.4	50.0	18.4
1956	70.7	53.0	17.7
1960	72.7	55.4	17.2
1965	75.6	58.6	17.0
1970	77.7	60.7	17.1
1975	78.7	61.8	16.8
1980	78.3	61.5	16.7
1985	77.6	61.0	16.6
1990	79.4	63.3	16.1
1995	81.7	66.2	15.5
2000	82.2	67.1	15.1
2005	82.4	65.7	16.7 3)
2010	82.1	65.7	16.4 3)
2014	80.8	64.8	15.9 3)
2019	83.2	67.0	16.2 3)
1) According to the territorial status of 1971.2) Of these 1.13 million displaced persons, disarmed members of the armed forces and civil internees. 3) Including all of Berlin.

Births and deaths in Germany

Per 1,000 residents
year	Live born	Died
1946	14.3	15.5
1950	16.3	10.9
1955	15.8	11.3
1960	17.3	12.0
1965	17.5	12.0
1970	13.5	12.6
1975	9.9	12.6
1980	11.0	12.1
1985	10.5	12.0
1990	11.4	11.6
1995	9.4	10.8
2000	9.3	10.2
2005	8.3	10.1
2010	8.3	10.5
2014	8.8	10.7
2019	9.4	11.3

Development: Until 1939, almost exclusively Germans lived in Germany; the strongest minority were Poles. After the Second World War, the continuous growth of the population in the western federal states was mainly due to an influx of people from outside, in addition to an initial surplus of births. By 1953, around 10.6 million displaced persons and refugees had come from the former German eastern regions and states of east-central and south-eastern Europe. Up until 1961, immigration from the GDR played a major role in the growth in the West. Since the 1960s, the cyclical immigration of foreign workers (“guest workers”) has played the greatest role. As of 1972 there was a surplus of deaths.

In the area of ​​the GDR, the population initially increased after the end of the war as a result of the influx of refugees and resettlement from the east, but then decreased until the second half of the 1970s. The strong emigration of workers to the Federal Republic of Germany until 1961 (construction of the Berlin Wall) and a high surplus of women as a result of the war contributed to this. A total of almost 900,000 people went to West Germany and West Berlin in 1961–88. After the democratic change in 1989/90 (German unity) once again a large number of residents, especially those of working age, left the eastern German parts of the country. 1991-2018 a total of 3.8 million people migrated from East to West Germany, in the opposite direction there were 2.5 million removals. The migration balance has been almost balanced since 2014, after the East German migration losses had already declined since 2001.

Immigration from abroad fell from a peak in 1992 (1.5 million people); In 2008, Germany recorded a loss of migration for the first time since 1984. From 2010, however, the number of immigrants again exceeded that of emigrants. A total of around 11.2 million people with foreign citizenship were living in Germany at the end of 2019. More than twice as many residents had a migration background. Almost 70% of the foreigners came from European countries, 43% from EU countries, primarily Poland, Romania and Italy. At around 13%, the highest proportion of foreigners was made up of Turkish citizens. The number of German repatriates fell significantly in the 1990s (Russian Germans). Belong to the national minorities Sinti and Roma, Danes in southern Schleswig, Lusatian Sorbs and Frisians.

Distribution: The average population density of 233 residents per km ^{2 in} 2019 was almost twice as high as the average in the European Union. The population distribution is quite different, mainly due to the continued growth of the economic and urban agglomerations for around 100 years. The largest conurbation is the Ruhr area. Other areas of population concentration are the Rhine-Neckar area, the Rhine-Main area, the Saarland, Hanover, Munich and Nuremberg / Fürth. In the heavily industrialized south of the East German federal states, three densely populated areas stand out: Halle – Leipzig, Chemnitz – Zwickau and the Dresden area. Overall, the East German settlement structure is more rural than the West German one.

After the Second World War, cities in particular experienced above-average growth, so that a noticeable lack of living space became apparent, even if many families with children in particular migrated to the outskirts (suburbanization). One third of the population lives in each of the 81 large cities (100,000 residents and more) and in municipalities between 10,000 and 50,000 residents.

The biggest cities in Germany

Residents (December 31, 2019)
Berlin	3 669 500
Hamburg	1,847,300
Munich	1 484 200
Cologne	1,087,900
Frankfurt am Main	763 400
Stuttgart	635 900
Dusseldorf	621 900
Leipzig	593 100
Dortmund	588 300
meal	582 800
Bremen	567 600
Dresden	556 800

Religion

The Basic Law (Articles 4 and 140) obliges the state to tolerance, neutrality and parity towards all religions and religious societies and guarantees freedom of belief, conscience and belief, subject to general state laws. The Catholic Church and the member churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) have the status of a corporation under public law, as do most of the free churches. The Catholic Church (2019) has around 22.6 million members, the EKD member churches 20.7 million. The numbers of registered members of both denominational groups are precisely recorded at regular intervals; they are steadily falling. More than half of the population in Germany belongs to Christian denominations, including groups that refer to Christian-Biblical traditions, such as the New Apostolic Church and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

According to mysteryaround, the largest non-Christian religious community is Islam with an estimated 5 million members. The majority of the Sunni Muslims are of Turkish origin. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have organized themselves in mosque associations or other Islamic associations. The largest local Islamic community are the Muslims in Berlin (around 250,000–300,000 believers).

The Jewish religious communities have a total of almost 95,000 members (2019); Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Düsseldorf have the largest individual Jewish communities. The umbrella organization of Jewish communities and associations is the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

Under the umbrella of the German Buddhist Union – Buddhist Religious Community (DBU; founded in 1955) 62 member communities came together (2019). It is estimated that around 0.3% of the population actively follow Buddhism. The assumed total number of Hindus living in Germany is around 0.1% of the population. One of the largest Hindu temples in Europe is located in Hamm.