Celia Applegate. The Work of Music: Labor and Creativity in Germany’s Long Nineteenth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025. 164 PP. Cloth $49.95. ISBN: 9780299353308.
Celia Applegate’s The Work of Music: Labor and Creativity in Germany’s Long Nineteenth Century is an expanded version of the Mosse Lectures she delivered in Jerusalem in 2022. Consistent with her impressive and groundbreaking contributions to recognizing music as a core component in German self-definition, this new work ties the touted German characteristics of industriousness and diligence with the project of elevating musical activity to the status of national importance. The title alone is a form of word-play on a concept we take for granted — a work of music, or a musical work — and serves to tease out how music in the German context has been treated not merely as a recreational activity (even though one “plays” music), but as a serious preoccupation that warrants extensive scientific study, a devotion to honing skills, and the application of those skills toward educational and professional fulfillment. Even though romance-language terms such as opus, oeuvre, and opera are similarly derived from the concept of work, Applegate’s three chapters explore the peculiarly German investment into studying, understanding, and applying the ways in which music and work complement each other and define German identity.
Although the subtitle designates the long nineteenth century as the scope of the three chapters, Applegate offers a much broader overview of the German proclivity to tie music with work, going back to early modern sources and extending into the first half of the twentieth century in an epilogue dedicated to the Nazi years. The introduction surveys the ways in which the ancients and the moderns investigated music for its philosophical, mathematical, scientific, and aesthetic dimensions. German thinkers and practitioners immersed themselves in these discourses as well but branched off into an understanding of music as a human activity and product of labor. Applegate notes how the nineteenth-century fascination with composers and their creative processes manifested in the increasingly prevalent biographies of “workaholic” composers.
The three chapters that follow each take on distinct aspects of how German theorists and practitioners devoted themselves to developing concepts of music as work and applying them to the expansion and organization of musical activity. The first chapter, “Describing the Work of Music,” demonstrates how German writers broadened the approaches to writing and thinking about music, helping to create an educated reading and listening public and raise their awareness about music’s contribution to the national project. Chapter 2, “Music as a Profession,” investigates how Germans institutionalized the activities of music in innovative and comprehensive ways, far outdistancing the efforts of other nations. The third chapter, “Music at Work,” looks at German efforts to understand the symbiosis of physical work and rhythm and to explore the use of communal singing to increase the efficiency of manual labor.
In “Describing the Work of Music,” Applegate focuses on the writings of key figures who started to regard music as an object of education and criticism. The first of these figures is the important but often underestimated eighteenth-century music critic Johannes Mattheson, whom she credits with broadening the engagement with music beyond science and aesthetics and heightening the public’s awareness of what lies behind the various activities of music-making. Mattheson opened up multiple discourses on music: on the acquisition of performance skills, the processes of composition, and the importance of music-making for an educated public. Indeed, crediting Mattheson with “creating” a music public, Applegate demonstrates how his voluminous writings generated a “crowded field” of music pedagogy treatises, creating a new space in the eighteenth century for musicianship to be seen as a skill requiring practice, guided training, and hard work. This expectation applied not only to those making their living as musicians but also to the educated middle class, both men and women, who were encouraged to make music in the home (Hausmusik). These amateurs developed an interest not only in the pedagogical treatises but also in the scientific studies on music, such as Theodore Billroth’s investigations into the mysteries of musical talent. The chapter ends with a focus on Paul Bekker, in a sense the Mattheson of the twentieth century, who commented extensively on music’s role in times of crisis following World War I and continued to argue for the need to sustain musical activity.
Chapter 2, “Music as a Profession,” explores the Germans’ central contributions to the professionalization of music practice, music education, and music industries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The very nature of Germany’s political fragmentation created an environment where courts and municipalities large and small staked their claims by building impressive musical ensembles that only continued to grow. The sounds of music were changing as well, fueled by advancements in the creation of new instruments, the growth in the size and repertoire of orchestras and military bands, and the development of skills needed to realize the potential of these new sonic directions. Music education was also undergoing a profound transformation. No longer served by guilds and apprenticeships, the shifting musical terrain required new institutions that could systematize and regulate the acquisition of musical skills and address the needs of those whose livelihoods depended entirely on musical pursuits. As these new types of music professions were evolving, awareness was also rising about the precarious existence of freelance musicians and the need to ensure social and economic safeguards for them, leading to the creation of organizations which lobbied for the rights of music professionals and industries. At the same time, a new hierarchy of music-making was taking hold, giving rise to a breed of music celebrities — virtuosi, conductors, and military band leaders — and creating opportunities for enterprising individuals to capitalize on the need for someone to manage their affairs. Concert agencies were created to fill this role and to help musicians navigate new opportunities for guest appearances and, thanks to expanding transportation networks, to take advantage of the growing popularity of touring.
The third chapter, “Music at Work,” offers insights into a completely different aspect of music’s relationship to work, indeed the most basic one. It follows the attempt of one late-nineteenth century social scientist to unlock the mystery of music’s function in coordinating labor. A political economist and economic historian of note, Karl Bücher considered how manual labor in all societies turned to music, and particularly rhythmic repetition, to increase efficiency. His work received attention for its applicability to the modern workplace, but the pioneers of ethnomusicology rebuffed Bücher’s focus on rhythm at the expense of harmony and melody. Bücher also compiled collections of work songs, joining a host of collectors going back to the early nineteenth century romanticists who catalogued the origins of folk traditions in music, seeking to discover core elements of German national culture by giving voice to the simple folk. Composers, too, turned these folk expressions into the art form of the Lied, perhaps the only genre of classical music that can trace its origins (and its name) to German innovation. Song as a communal activity was also playing a greater role in mobilizing political movements, especially labor movements, where it served as an important vehicle of solidarity in festivals, rallies, and the expansive network of workers’ choral societies.
The epilogue to this volume is structured to mirror the three approaches explored in the preceding chapters and apply them to the National Socialist period, during which time the activities and preoccupations of the preceding centuries were both continued and perverted. Applegate looks at the continuity of scholarship in Nazi-era musicologists’ submission to Nazi ideology, the vast reorganization of music professions into institutions such as the Reich Music Chamber, the investment in amateur music-making as exemplified in the musical activities of the Hitler Youth, and the use of music to enhance labor efficiency in the inhuman exploitation of concentration camp victims. This unsettling conclusion reiterates one of the most perplexing patterns of German history: after opening our eyes to the astounding achievements of German thinkers and practitioners in enlisting music as a partner in national self-fulfillment, Applegate shows how these impressive pursuits could be turned to the insidious purpose of hypernationalist extremism.
Pamela M. Potter is the Michael Ochs Professor Emerita of German and Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (1998; translated into German and Portuguese); Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (2016), and Music Metropolis Berlin: Three Centuries of Musical Culture in the Capital City (forthcoming in 2027). She co-edited Music and German National Identity (2000) with Celia Applegate; Music in World War II: Coping with Wartime in Europe and the United States (2020) with Christina Baade and Roberta Marvin; and Measuring the World (special issue of Monatshefte, 2016) with B. Venkat Mani. Her current project is an examination of how themes of denazification have persisted in writing about prominent figures in the visual and performing arts who were active during the Nazi years.