Can One Be a Musician Without Being German?

by Alexander Rehding

Berthold Hoeckner. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xix, 364pp.

All modern music begins with C , as Wagner pointed out, with the first chromatic note of the Eroica Symphony. And it ends with another C , as Thomas Mann argued, with the subtle chromatic inflection at the return of the Arietta in Beethoven's op.111. Between these two Beethovenian C s unfolds the story of German music, whose story Berthold Hoeckner tells in his Programming the Absolute.