Art, Play, Labour: the Music Profession in Germany (1850–1960)

Front matter

THE MUSIC PROFESSION IN GERMANY

(1850-1960)

SERIES EDITED BY DAVID M. LUEBKE & CELIA APPLEGATE

Preface to the English Translation

Working towards the Recognition of Music as Labour (History) 1x Acknowledgements XVIII

List of Figures and Tables xx

Abbrevations xxI

PART 1 Lifeworlds in the Nineteenth Century ı Wilhelm Wieprecht or on the Life of the Musician in the Sattelzeit 29 Municipal Pipe Bands 31 Municipal Theatres 35 Court Orchestras 41 Military Bands 44 Musicians’ Lives in the Sattelzeit 48

2 The Discovery of the Social: Musicians’ Organizations between Art and Labour 50 Liszt, Wagner and the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein 52 A Rendezvous with Hirsch and Schulze-Delitzsch 58 The General German Musicians’ Union 64 Putting the Class Struggle on Hold 67

3 Musicians’ Plight: Education and Everyday Working Life around 1900 69 The Hell of Apprenticeship and Little Old Men Painting Pictures 71 Hungry Dogs Make Good Hunters 80 Versatile, Mobile, Flexible: Lifeworlds 91 Sombart’s Insights 101

VI CONTENTS

4 Ina Different World: Women in Musical Life 103 Role Models 105 Pianomania 108 Four Life Paths 113 Born to Play 124

PART 2 Projects of Professionalization, 1890-1930

5 ACircuitous Route into the Bourgeoisie: Self-Civilizing and Lobbying 129

Education Is Power 130 Knowledge Production as an Aid to Self-Help 133 Musicians’ Movement and Trade Unions 136 Musicians as Workers: Social Legislation 140 Social Democratic Terrorism: The Munich Orchestra Scandal 144 Reconciliation of Interests and Municipalization 150 David and Goliath: Against Military Competition 154 Nietzsche’s Freak Show 159

6 _ War Profiteers: Musicians at the Front and atHome 161 Privileges at the Front 162 Limited and Unlimited Solidarity 176 Good Prospects 179 Essential to the War Effort: Orchestral Musicians 185 Relative War Profits 188

7 Squabbling Professions: Musicians, Composers and Music Teachers 189 Perspectives on a Unified Chamber of Musicians 190 Turf Wars 200 A Search for Lost Unity: The Musikergemeinschaft 208 Vanity Fair 211

8 An Era of Experiments: New Media, Fashions and Musicians in the Cultural and Welfare State 214 War and Peace: Continuities 216 Musical Empire: the Cultural State 223 Curse and Blessing: the Welfare State 229 The Ephemeral Job Description of ‘Silent Film Musician’ 234

CONTENTS

A Playground for Conductors and Composers: Radio 241

Jazz, or the Emergence of Popular Music as an Independent

Genre 249 Emancipation in the Workplace 254

Musicians for the ‘People’s Body’ (Volkskörper): Occupational

Hygiene 258 In the Middle of Society 262

PART 3 Crisis, Collapse, Continuities, 1930-1960

Neglected Muse: Nazi Music Policy 267 Cutback Fever: the World Economic Crisis 269 The Reich Chamber of Music: Right-Wing Staff... 275 ... and Left-Wing Reforms 278 Exclusions: Jews and Opponents of the Regime 286 Civil Decline... 290 .. and Remilitarization 293

United in Discord: the Music of the Volksgemeinschaft 295

Beyond Instrumentalization 301

Forced Migrations: Lifeworlds in Times of War and Violence Global Refugee Movements 305 A Provincial Terminus: Exile in the United States 308 Music as Avenue of Escape? Deportations 316 Scattered by War 319 Managing Lack in the Reich 328 Twilight of the Musicians? 334

The Day of the Orchestral Musician: Ascent and Exit in West Germany 337 Flourishing Musicians in a Time of Rubble 339 Orchestral Revolution amid the Job Crisis 346 Money, Money, Money: Wage Agreements and Royalties Winners and Losers 365 At the Crossroads 375

VII

VIII CONTENTS Appendix: Statistics on the Music Profession in Germany 397 Bibliography 400

Preface to the English Translation Working towards the Recognition of Music as Labour (History)

When this book appeared in its original German version in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was still in its early stages. The dramatic consequences for people working in the cultural economy, and particularly the music industry, classical or otherwise, were still beyond imagining. Indeed, occasional struggles for economic resources notwithstanding, German musical life was flourishing — with its more than 130 publicly funded symphony orchestras and dozens of chamber orchestras, organized in diverse forms of publicprivate partnership, as well as countless freelancing musicians and bands of every genre. Music as the ‘most German of the arts’ and Germany as ‘the Land of Music’ seemed to be concepts set in stone, and virtually no one questioned the political and socio-economic conditions underlying this rich cultural tradition, let alone their historical trajectories.!

Against this backdrop, the pandemic was both curse and blessing for musicians. On the one hand, it robbed most of them of their daily activity, reduced the income of many and even forced some of them out of the profession entirely. On the other hand, never before, at least in Germany, had so much public attention been paid to working conditions in the cultural economy, access to and distribution of its resources and inequalities between high-brow and low-brow sectors and between publicly funded and privately run musical formations than in the wake of the first lockdown in mid-March 2020, when musical life shut down almost completely.

One side effect was a new and unexpected interest in the political economy of cultural life, which was discussed in the newspapers’ culture pages as well as in political debates. This generated greater interest in this book, well beyond the tiny community of professional historians and musicologists. It may even be that the German public paid more attention to the following account of the professional labour of making music since the middle of the nineteenth century than did German historians of labour. Addressed to both these audiences, as well as to musicology and music studies more generally,

1 Applegate, C. and P. Potter, ‘Germans as the “People of Music”: Genealogy of an Identity’, in C. Applegate and P. Potter, Music and German National Identity, Chicago 2002, 1-35. See also recently Gregor, N. and T. Irvine (eds.), Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Hall, New York 2019.

X PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION my book has a double agenda, seeking to recognize and analyse the work of musicians and to place the work of music within the category of labour history.

Fortunately, academic interest in music as labour has grown in recent years, especially when viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective. Established in 2016, the ‘Working in Music’ international research network serves as a hub for interdisciplinary exchange within Europe and beyond, albeit with a slight bias towards popular music and towards present-day challenges rather than past trajectories.? Most recently, Dagmar Abfalter and Rosa Reitsamer have edited a volume on Music as Labour with a special focus on long-standing and novel inequalities, as well as on the activism that seeks to combat them. Their book brings together experts from various disciplines, including history, sociology and anthropology along with cultural and gender studies, and business and management. The editors are both professors at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and the volume is based on several contributions arising from its International Summer Academy Conference in 2019. Given that volume’s prestigious origins, there can be no doubt that cultural work has established itself as an important field of research. My historical approach to the music profession in Germany shares common ground with that of Abfalter and Reitsamer. One of their main arguments is that ‘musicians’ working practices were marked by precarity, insecurity and short-term contracts long before capitalism invited everybody to be creative’. This lends further support to my overall historical account and my decision to look at ordinary musicians, their working worlds and their lives more generally. What is more, by stressing inequalities within the music profession, Abfalter and Reitsamer highlight the considerable agency of musical unions and collective action in general when it came to fighting, producing and reproducing unequal access, pay structures and societal recognition within their occupations. Indeed, time and again the trajectory of the music profession in Germany has been marked by this dialectical interplay of professional inclusion and sectionalism based on musical specialization, political orientation and even employment status. Another feature common to both their book and mine is a focus on gender issues. Abfalter and Reitsamer contend that ‘systematic gender inequalities have continued in local music scenes, where women remain significantly underrepresented at every level of cultural production and across music genres’, an assessment that,

2 For an overview, see https://wim.hypotheses.org/. 3 Abfalter, D. and R. Reitsamer, Introduction, in D. Abfalter and R. Reitsamer (eds.), Music as Labour: Inequalities and Activism in the Past and Present, Abingdon 2022, 1-22, here 1.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION XI viewed from a long-term perspective, reveals how little progress has apparently been made.*

Further, both their work and mine focus on education, technological innovation and geographical mobility. Taken together, the two books explore most of the key challenges the music profession has faced in both past and present.

Still, many more aspects of musical work remain to be investigated. Before I elaborate further, however, I need to address the main critique of my account put forward by musicologists who appreciated the subjects covered in my book but would have liked to have seen, in the words of Alexander K. Rothe, an ‘engagement with music and sound, an element that makes ‘music scholarship so exciting.? On the one hand, this criticism is well-grounded. I neither engage with general repertoire development nor with musical texts, nor (a few exceptions aside) with specific performances, their concrete background, programming or intended purpose. I also chose not to delve too deeply into the ways in which average musicians reflected on their music-making, its development and their musical preferences.

On the other hand, this criticism points up differing disciplinary priorities. Arguably, it would be counter-productive, even otiose, for history and musicology to converge. Put bluntly, I do not see this book as part of ‘music scholarship’ It is a case study in the history of work in the cultural economy. Music as text and sound features less prominently in this book because I allowed myself to be led by ‘ordinary’ musicians, who cared as much or even more about their working conditions, social status, remuneration and societal recognition than about musical styles, performance practices or the intended messages of specific concerts. Taking this kind of labour history approach seriously means leaving other dimensions of musical life to scholars specializing in other fields, such as sound studies, audience research and the study of musical materiality. In recent decades, musicology and some strands of cultural history have come to embrace these topics and approaches. In contrast, almost no one would lament the missing ‘labour dimension’ in a well-researched study on musical audiences or in one of the other fields mentioned. Thus, there still seems to be some unease within musicology about conceiving of music as labour, a reflection in some measure of the historically tardy recognition of this perspective on music within the music profession itself.

4 Ibid., u.

5 Rothe, A. K., review of M. Rempe, Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit. Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960, Göttingen 2020, Revue de musicologie no. 107, 2020, 176-179. See also the review by Wasserloos, Y., on the German web portal hsozukult: https://www.hsozkult.de/review/id/reb -29267?language=en.

XII PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Ironically, this sense of unease puts musicologists and labour historians on the same side. Do both not conceptualise making music essentially as art or play, and certainly not as labour? These unarticulated attitudes are all the more unfortunate because studying music as labour turns our attention to new, under-researched aspects of the social fabric I call musical life, while also shedding new light on fundamental historical issues. I will begin with a couple of aspects to which a music-as-labour perspective may be fruitfully applied and that deserve more thorough treatment in future research. The first is the basic question of how modern the musical world was in the Sattelzeit, that is, at the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on precepts from professionalization theory, I argue that German musical life retained astonishingly pre-modern characteristics until far into the nineteenth century. This conclusion undermines accounts that put famous musicians’ and recipients’ perspectives centre stage, that focus on musical metropoles such as London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, or that approach the world of music mainly through the writings of music intellectuals.6 Friedemann Pestel is right to call for a more nuanced picture, one that differentiates spatially between musical centres and peripheries, rather than constructing a stark chronological dichotomy between a pre-modern and modern phase of musical life.”

One under-researched aspect of musical life that a labour perspective cannot avoid is the armed forces as one of the leading employers of musicians in the nineteenth century. Indeed, I consider the military such a significant and neglected player in musical life, especially from a global perspective, that I will dedicate my next book exclusively to the relationships between this ‘forgotten force’ and its musical units on the one hand and society at large on the other. In my account of the music profession, it is safe to say that the armed forces get their fair share of attention. Nonetheless, the recent, well-crafted edition of Wilhelm Wieprecht’s correspondence and writings by Achim Hofer and Lucian Schiwietz should be mentioned here for those wishing to do further research on this key figure and on military musical developments in nineteenth-century Germany. Meanwhile, the revival of military music and

6 See Blanning, T. C. W., The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art, Cambridge, MA 2008; Applegate, C., Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion, Ithaca, NY and London 2005.

7 See the review by Pestel, F., sehepunkte no. 10, 2020, URL: http://www.sehepunkte.de/2020 /10/33845.html.

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION XIII its impact under the ‘Third Reich’ remains a genuine gap in the research on musical life in Germany.®

This lacuna notwithstanding, the development of musical life under Nazi rule is an issue that continues to spark debate. Drawing on ground-breaking research by Alan E. Steinweis, Pamela Potter and others, I have sought to further elucidate how deeply Nazi ideology imprinted on cultural life and to what extent the regime managed to improve working conditions. I also tried to shed light on how the dictatorship affected musicians’ everyday working routines. In light of my recent case study of the opera orchestra in Nuremberg, based on an extraordinary inventory of sources still stored in the office of the orchestra board, I am inclined to slightly modify the argument made in the book and put more emphasis on the pervasiveness of Nazi ideology and practices. At least in Nuremberg, one member of the orchestra was extremely active in the Nazi Party, the sa and the ss. He enjoyed the support of several fellow party members, with whose help he managed to exert a degree of control over the rest of the band, doing all he could to win them over to Nazi ideology. Still, I continue to heed Potter’s general warning to be more careful with our sources and not to confuse Nazi propaganda statements with the realities of cultural life. Probing the everyday life of the Franconian orchestra players also revealed their conflicts with the regime as well as their remaining room for manoeuvre under it.!0

My effort to scrutinize Nazi efforts in support of the music profession alerted me to the active role of Hermann Voss in the regime’s cultural policy during the war, both at home and in the occupied territories. Voss was one of the founding fathers of the post-war German Orchestra Union (Deutsche Orchestervereinigung or DOV). As a consequence of my discovery, the DOV not

8 See Hofer, A. and L. Schiwietz (eds.), Wilhelm Wieprecht (1802-1872). Korrespondenz, Schriften und Dokumente zu Leben und Wirken, Würzburg 2020. Apart from my chapter, see also the path-breaking article by Applegate, C., ‘Men with Trombones, in C. Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme, Toronto 2017, 21-37. When it comes to Nazism, the recent book by musicologist Heike Frey, in focusing on the entertainment of troops in the Second World War, covers only parts of this complex. See Frey, H., Lili Marleen hatt’ einen Kameraden. Musik in der Wehrmacht-Truppenbetreuung 1939-1945, Münster 2020.

9 Potter, P., The Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts, Oakland 2016; Steinweis, A. E., Art, Ideology & Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, Chapel Hill, NC and London 1993.

10 Rempe, M. ‘Die Entwicklung des Städtischen Orchesters’ 1922-1965, in G. Holzer, J. Krämer and M. Rempe (eds.), Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg. 100 Jahre Kulturgeschichte eines Orchesters, Münster 2022, 15-114, here 44-69.

XIV PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION only changed the title of a prize named after Voss, which is awarded to individuals who render outstanding services to the German music profession, but began to take an active interest in exploring its own history. It is good news indeed that the Dov and other music institutions in Germany are at last discovering their own past, not as a means of self-promotion but to acknowledge their role as significant players in the history of post-war West German musical life and society. For both historians and musicologists, there remains a lot to be done in this field. Particularly with regard to music unions, there may be one or more lessons to be learned at a time when the covıp-ıg pandemic has made the future of cultural work a contemporary issue once again.

Another dimension which deserves further research is the changing status and subjective perception of women in musical life, particularly in the music profession. Empirically, the Archiv Frau und Musik, located in Frankfurt am Main, may be a fruitful new gateway into the lifeworlds of women musicians, though its archival focus is essentially on artistic notables and women composers rather than everyday musicians. But it also holds a large postcard collection featuring women bands and orchestras, dating from the days of the German Empire. This trove of images has the potential to broaden our knowledge about these ensembles, whose standing and status remain quite ambiguous.

Conceptually, approaches that pay attention to issues of intersectionality may furnish us with more nuanced accounts of how class, race and gender combined in various ways to curtail the professional careers of individual musicians and reproduce inequalities in the music profession. In a pioneering study of female classical musicians in the present-day United Kingdom and Germany, sociologist Christina Scharff has gone a long way to shedding light on their daily experiences and on the effects of gender, class background and racial hierarchies on their professional activities. Interestingly, the musicians she interviewed played down the effects of gender inequalities. Scharff convincingly explains this reluctance to discuss any problems of discrimination as arising from a determination to separate one’s own experiences from larger societal and structural gender imbalances. This impulse was likely present in the past as well. Similarly, Scharff’s interlocutors only partially acknowledged the ‘whiteness’ of the classical music profession as a problem, though for different reasons: given the persistent lack of diversity within this branch of the music profession, it may be that few of her interview partners have confronted the issue personally.”

11 See Scharff, C., Gender, Subjectivity and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession, London 2017.

Preface To The English Translation XV

Two recent historical studies may help fill this gap. Kira Thurman’s much acclaimed account of Black musicians and ensembles ‘in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms’ tells the story of why, going back to the 1870s, so many Black musicians longed to perform German classical music in Central Europe and how they were received by a German public under very different political regimes. Though Thurman only rarely reflects explicitly on the labour dimension of her story and alludes rather incidentally to socio-economic prospects and problems for these Black musicians touring the German lands, she carefully uncovers the various and sometimes contradictory layers of prejudice, racism and hierarchy associated with their performances in Germany and Austria as well as in the United States."

In any case, this group belongs as much to a history of the music profession in Germany as do the Black jazz musicians active in the country since the 1920s, of which my book considers only very few. Fortunately, musicologist Harald Kisiedu has recently reconsidered the emergence of the jazz experimentalism movement in both Germanies between 1950 and 1975. Focusing on four particularly influential German proponents of this trend and their musical and intellectual encounters with Black jazz musicians, Kisiedu argues that theoretical adaptations and practical collaborations acted as ‘prime sites for contestations over definitions of cultural, national, and racial identities. Hence, the development of post-war Jazz destabilized prevalent musical dichotomies such as ‘German’ versus ‘foreign’ music, but also ‘low-brow’ versus ‘high-brow’ music. Like Thurman, Kisiedu says little about the professional implications of these encounters for both Black and White jazz musicians. Nonetheless, viewing both studies together illuminates the extent to which the music profession in Germany was shaped by Black musicians, their musical ideas and their performances.

Finally, there is much to say about the fate of freelancing musicians, not least because, from a comparative perspective, they made up the overwhelming majority of the profession throughout the twentieth century and beyond.!* While the emergence of a so-called independent scene (freie Szene) in Germany dates back only to the 1980s and thus lies outside the period

12 Thurman, K, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Ithaca, NY 2021.

13 See Kisiedu, H., European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany 1950-1975, Hofheim 2020, 12.

14 Perrenoud, M, ‘Performing for Pay: The Making and Undoing of the Music Profession’, in K. Nathaus and M. Rempe (eds.), Musicking in Twentieth Century Europe: A Handbook, Berlin 2021, 59-78.

XVI PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION examined in this book, by highlighting ‘the day of the orchestra musicians’ and stressing ‘winners and losers’ around 1960, my narrative may seem somewhat teleological. Particularly in view of the renaissance of entrepreneurial forms of orchestra organization within the last three decades and corresponding strategies of self-promotion among present-day, early-career musicians, it would be worth digging deeper into the world of freelance musicians over the longue durée in order to better understand the changing political economy underpinning live music in Germany.’

To sum up, the issues covered by this book, along with many other aspects worthy of consideration, testify to the importance of studying music as labour. Indeed, if we broaden the music-as-labour perspective even further, additional promising themes and approaches come to the fore, of which Id like to mention just two recent manifestations. Building on an intellectual history perspective, Celia Applegate turns our attention to the many ways scholars brought understandings of work and sound together during the nineteenth century, in the sense of how music works on audiences and how it relates to the workforce beyond musical work proper. Among her key witnesses are prominent social scientists such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart and, above all, Karl Biicher, who, in his best-seller on Work and Rhythm, highlighted the significance of singing to manual work since time immemorial. For Applegate, these reflections are evidence of music’s centrality to the rise of industrial modernity, a strong link that she deciphers in Wagner’s oeuvre as well.16

Another recent example is musicologist Wiebke Rademacher’s social history spotlighting the reception of classical music beyond middle-class audiences. This history is a breath of fresh air that departs from the obsession of audience research on classical music with the Bildungsbürgertum and complicates our understanding of the changing publics listening to this sort of music. Rademacher focuses on art music events organized both by the labour movement proper and by middle-class initiatives aimed at educating industrial workers and other non-bourgeois groups. Her work sheds new light on labourer cultures in which, according to the extant literature, classical music was largely absent.!”

15 As an entry point, see Rempe, M., Die deutsche Orchesterlandschaft. Kulturförderung, Interessenorganisation und Arbeitsbedingungen seit 1900, edited by Freie Ensembles und Orchester in Deutschland e. V., Berlin 2019.

16 Under the title ‘Music and Work‘, these topics were the subject of Applegate’s George Mosse Lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in December 2022.

17 See Rademacher, W., Jenseits der Konzertsäle. Klassische Musik für breite Bevölkerungsschichten in Berlin um 1900, Stuttgart 2023 (forthcoming).

Preface To The English Translation XVII

Ultimately, musical life constitutes just one of many working worlds in the cultural economy. Recognizing this sector as a serious object of study, particularly with respect to the twentieth century, would not simply complement the current state of the art in contemporary labour history. It would reveal what this field has in common with and where it differs from other forms of labour, just as it promises to provide us with key insights into post-industrial work as a whole. This is the focus of a three-year grant from the German Research Foundation recently awarded to Klaus Nathaus and myself. We will establish an international scholarly network uncompromisingly geared ‘towards a history of work in the cultural economy’. It will bring together scholars from history, sociology, and cultural and literary studies working in a variety of areas, from literature to film and from music to advertising. The goal is to promote a perspective within the historiographical debate that heeds the demands of a new labour history and holds out the prospect of a much deeper understanding of post-industrial work in general. It would thus appear that the history of cultural work is on the rise. If the translation of my book helps consolidate this trend, then much will have been achieved for both musicology and labour history as well as for social and cultural history more generally.

Acknowledgements

This book was published first in German in 2020, and its origins go well back into the previous decade. I had a number of reasons for writing this book. But without the continuous, stimulating and friendly support of Jiirgen Osterhammel it would never have seen the light of day. He took me on as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz in April 2011. Though we hadn't met before, our common interest in music — his knowledge of the classical repertoire and performers is nothing short of encyclopaedic — connected us beyond history from the very beginning. He led his department in a pleasingly unpretentious manner, was always on hand as a source of advice and let me do my own thing. For this, for countless insights and for much more besides, I offer him my sincere thanks.

Thanks to a DFG research grant, I wrote part of this book at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. I have fond memories of a rich exchange of views at the German History Seminar. In David Blackbourn, Helmut Walser- Smith, Meike Werner, Stephen R. Press, Patrick Anthony and especially Celia Applegate I found hugely inspiring interlocutors. Furthermore, their openmindedness and passion for German (music) history showed me a lived culture of scholarship that made a lasting impression on me. Beyond Nashville, Harry Liebersohn provided me with further opportunities to present my project and forge new contacts through several invitations to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I would like to thank all of them for their generous hospitality.

Celia Applegate and Jiirgen Osterhammel also acted as assessors of my habilitation, which was accepted by the University of Konstanz and forms the basis of this book. The other requisite assessments were undertaken by Sven Reichardt and Wolfgang Seibel, for which I am very grateful. In Konstanz, the ‘Global Processes’ DFG Leibniz Prize Research Group (DFG- Leibnizpreisforschungsstelle ‘Globale Prozesse’) furnished me with a fertile environment for my project. I benefited greatly from intensive discussions with Cornelia Escher, Franz L. Fillafer, Stefanie Gänger, Lisa Korge, Jan C. Jansen, Pascale Siegrist, Martina Steber, Alexandre Bischofberger and many others. Wibke Rhein was a great help when it came to literature research and acquisition, while Heidi Engelmann ensured the cohesion of both chair and research unit in organizational terms and beyond.

Outside the University of Konstanz, the opportunity to present and discuss my project in research colloquia led by Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Birthe Kundrus, Alexander Nützenadel and Jörn Leonhard provided me with a great

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XIX deal of valuable stimulation. Individual chapters were read, commented on and thus improved by Boris Barth, Jan C. Jansen, Isabella Löhr, Klaus Nathaus, Kiran Klaus Patel, Laura Rischbieter, Nina Schläfli, Pascale Siegrist, Claudius Torp, Martin Urmann, Heike Wieters and Hansjakob Ziemer — my huge thanks to all of them. David Bruder proofread the entire German manuscript and provided me with reliable advice and support on tricky language issues.

The same holds true for Alex Skinner who did an excellent job in translating the manuscript with great care and wit. Special thanks go to the editors Celia Applegate and David M. Luebke who kindly agreed to include this book into the SCEH series. The translation was generously supported by funds made available by the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (zKF) at the University of Konstanz as well as by the German Research Foundation. Luisa Pfeifer was greatly helpful during the editing process. Many thanks are also due to Alessandra Giliberto from Brill and the production team, Loreta Ruzgiené, Ausra Kundreckaité and Kęstutis Vizbaras from VTeX, for their patience, advice and very good work.

The staff of the archives and libraries I visited went out of their way to help me track down sources. Special thanks are due to the executive director of the German Orchestra Union, Gerald Mertens, and his colleagues, who so helpfully facilitated my access to relevant documents. For the original German book’s inclusion in the series Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, I thank the editors and especially Hans-Peter Ullmann for his close reading and outstanding stewardship.

When I arrived in Constance, I did not expect to put down roots. I made a number of good friends among my new colleagues, for which I am truly grateful, while Sebastian Eichhorn, Rolf Exner, Michael Koss, Philip Topolovac and my siblings Tobias, Julia and Clara could always be relied upon when I wanted to ‘get away’. It was their conviviality and the diversion they provided, but above all my shared lakeside life with Nina, that enabled me to finish this book in such a positive frame of mind. Well, I’m still here, and now that there are three of us I know more than ever before why, and how much I owe her and our daughter Marla.