Nordrhein-Westfalen - Books and Movies

The Books

I've read five books, as part of my research for Nordrhein-Westfalen.  Here's the list with links to blog posts, where relevant:

Germany: Insight Guides (2005) ed. Tony Halliday and others.  This book provided me with a good overview of German history and culture.  It's got me really interested in visiting the Rhine valley again, perhaps a cycling or walking trip will be on the cards in the near future!

Reading list for Nordrhein-Westfalen

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque.  I wrote a blog post about this fantastic novel back in April.  I read the 1996 Vintage edition with an afterword by Brian Murdoch, who is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Sterling and an expert on Remarque.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974) by Heinrich Böll. I also wrote a blog post about Böll's novel.  I read the Minerva edition of 1993.

Protestantism: A Very Short Introduction (2011) by Mark A Noll part of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.  Regular readers will know how much I love these books and I found Noll's Protestantism invaluable when I was researching my blog post on Protestantism in Germany.

Beethoven: The Music and the Life (2003) by Lewis Lockwood.  I must admit, I didn't read the entire book - it was very much a last minute addition to my reading list and I just didn't have time to read the whole thing, although I found the bits I read enjoyable.  Lewis is a musicologist from New York city, who is an expert on Beethoven.  This book was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer prize for Biography.  He alternates each chapter, to combine biography and musicology and I found this approach really engaging, although I can't tell my arpeggio from my adagio!  I used the early chapters of this book to inform my blog post on Beethoven.

The Movies

Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984)

I didn't really know anything about Wim Wenders before I started blogging about Nordrhein-Westfalen and I'd never seen any of his movies, although some of the names (e.g. Paris, Texas) would have been familiar to me.

He's quite an iconic film director, originally from Düsseldorf, his movies portray an emptiness and silence that, in many ways, symbolise the broken soul of post-war Germany.  Wenders also has a lot to say about American culture and some of his most famous movies are set in the United States.

I couldn't get my hands on all of the Wim Wenders' movies I wanted to see, but I managed to watch the following:

Alice in the Cities (1974)
Paris, Texas (1984)
Wings of Desire (1987)
Don't come knocking (2005)

Opening sequence from Paris, Texas (1984)

His movies are quite slow-moving and should definitely be appreciated for their artistic qualities rather than story-telling.  I particularly loved Alice in the Cities, one of his earliest movies - shot in black and white, it's mostly set in the Rhine valley and the industrial cities of the Ruhr.

In Paris, Texas I can see the influence of Wenders on a whole generation of US movies - those bleak landscapes and slightly surreal shots.  I've just recently finished watching the popular US series Breaking Bad and I can see hints of Wenders in the deserts of New Mexico.  The boundaries between TV and cinema are increasingly blurred these days and I like the fact that TV programmes are embracing style as well as substance.

Here are some of the themes that Wenders' movies tend to deal with:

Typically stark Wenders shot from Wings of Desire

- Individuals who are outside the norms of society (the character of Stanton in Paris, Texas or the angels in Wings of Desire)
- Road trips
- Alienation from a world which is incredibly materialistic
- Timelessness
- Children being abandoned by their mothers
- Adults who disappear
- Shots of faces within faces
- the trauma of progress (ubiquitous television in United States, changing landscape of the Ruhr valley)
- melancholic and repetitive music

As well as learning about Wim Wenders, I also watched both movie versions of All Quiet on the Western Front, the fantastic 1930 film and the less engaging version from 1979.

I had a really nice Easter weekend with my sister in Leeds, when we devoted several hours to my research and watched Amadeus (1984, dir. Miloš Forman), the slightly crazy movie about Mozart and Immortal Beloved (1994, dir. Bernard Rose) starring Gary Oldman.  I loved both movies and they helped me contextualise the development of music in the Classical period and the influence that Mozart may have had on the work of Beethoven.  I'd recommend either of these movies to anyone who wants to learn more about these composers.

I'm going to leave you with a trailer from Immortal Beloved so you can get a sense of what the movie is about:

Image credits:

The image of the books was taken by me.

The images of the stills from Wim Wenders' movies are from photos taken by me. These images are being used to illustrate this blog post and promote these movies. By publishing these images, I'm not condoning or encouraging reproduction of these images on the Internet or anywhere else. These images are not meant to bring the actors into disrepute or suggest their endorsement of this blog post, but are meant to highlight the performances of these actors in these movies. 

Nordrhein-Westfalen - Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy'

As well as having been the capital of West Germany for a good part of the 20th century, Bonn was also the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of Europe's greatest composers.  At a time when Vienna dominated Europe's musical scene, it's hard to imagine how a backwater like Bonn could have produced a talent as prodigious as Beethoven's.

Except that Bonn wasn't really a backwater in the late 18th century, being part of the Electorate of Cologne, a vestige of the Holy Roman Emperor, it was ruled by the Archduke Maximilian Francis, youngest child of the Hapsburg ruler Maria Theresa.  Max Franz was a big music fan and an early patron of Beethoven, Bonn's very own child prodigy, later seen as a musical successor to Vienna's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  

In the Shadow of Mozart

It's hard with the distance of time, to separate the different eras in which European composers lived, so I was surprised to learn that Beethoven wasn't so much a contemporary of Mozart, as a generation later than Mozart and a composer who, in many ways, grew up in Mozart's shadow.  Mozart was the original child prodigy who took Europe by storm in the years immediately before Beethoven's birth in 1770.  

13-year old Beethoven, by an unknown artist

Like all child prodigies, both Beethoven and Mozart had pushy fathers who channelled their own creative frustrations into their progeny.  Beethoven's father was an alcoholic who lied about Beethoven's age, to promote the idea of him as a child prodigy, the 'in' thing in European courts on the lookout for a 'new' Mozart. 

Actually, Beethoven's father held him back in many ways.  Because of his father's alcoholism and the death of his mother when he was just seventeen, Beethoven took over the guardianship of his younger siblings, a responsibility that hampered his creative development and kept him in Bonn, at a time when he wanted to live in Vienna.

We're not sure whether or not Beethoven actually met Mozart, when he first travelled to Vienna in 1787. It's possible that Beethoven sat in the audience at one of Mozart's concerts, but didn't actually get to meet the great maestro.  By the time Beethoven moved to Vienna in 1792, Mozart was dead.  

Phenomena and Noumena

The music of Mozart and Beethoven heralded a new departure in European culture and a move from the highly-ornate and complicated Baroque period, to the thematically simpler and romantic period, now known as Classical.  Both Mozart and Beethoven were influenced by the principles of the Enlightenment and the wider political and cultural changes that were transforming late 18th-century Europe.  

Rain, steam and speed (1844) JMW Turner

Revolutions in the American colonies and in France rocked the status quo and prompted an artistic response that celebrated the 'brotherhood of man', the poetry of Friedrich Schiller and William Blake, as well as the music of Mozart, Beethoven and many others. Beethoven spent his teenage years reading Schiller and he used the words of Schiller's Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony, perhaps his most famous work. 

Artists of the time were also influenced by the Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant.  Kant talked a lot about the difference between phenomena, i.e. things as we experience them and noumena, things as they exist in themselves, beyond our direct experience.  When you listen to Beethoven's music, you can sense that he moved his art into the realm of noumena rather than phenomena.  I guess it was the noumena which gave Romanticism its characteristically uplifting (and occasionally frightening) nature.  Just look at the paintings of J.M.W. Turner or read the poetry of John Keats and you'll see what I mean.  

A self-sustaining Artist

Beethoven graffiti in Graz by southtyrolean

Both Mozart and Beethoven gave us an image of 'the artist', that remains popular today; tortured by their own creativity, misunderstood, impoverished, romantic and wild.  Beethoven's appearance was shabby and many in his audience wondered how such an unkempt figure could produce music that was so beautiful.

In the Baroque period, composers and musicians were seen as little more than servants, more important than the kitchen staff, but less important than the valets. However, at a time when revolution loomed and royal purses became more constrained, many courts could no longer afford to pay for an entire orchestra and this seems to have prompted a move towards the self-sustaining artist.  Mozart was one of the first to attempt to have a career that was independent of the patronage of a single court and this unsettled his contemporaries.  He was a bit ahead of his time, unfortunately, and died in poverty at the early age of 35.  

By the time Beethoven came along, the idea of a self-sustaining artist had gained more currency and Beethoven was able to win patronage from many different sources and sustain an unprecedented level of independence.  It's interesting when you compare this with Joseph Haydn, who spent most of his career in the servitude of the Hungarian Esterházy family and was only able to work for himself towards the very end of his life.  

The Music of Beethoven

During my research into Beethoven, I sometimes found it difficult to get my hands on full-length versions of many of his symphonies, piano concertos and sonatas or string quartets.  These days, our 'knowledge' of classical composers like Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn, generally comes from television advertisements or popular CD collections along the lines of Best of . . . In our increasingly fast-paced world, it seems as though we don't really have the patience for an entire symphony or concerto.  

It means that much of Beethoven's work will remain unheard by a sensory-overloaded 21st century audience. I tried to listen to as much of Beethoven's work as I could, but there was so much of it that I find myself discriminating (as The Best of collections do) in favour of his most well-known works.

If you only listen to one entire symphony in your life, then it should be the Symphony no. 9 in D minor, opus 125, aka 'Beethoven's Ninth'. It's perhaps the best piece of music ever written and resonates down the centuries in a way that inspires the noblest feelings, even in a 21st century listener.  I'm embedding a YouTube video, so you can listen to the whole thing (it's only an hour long - just sit back, close your eyes and submit to Beethoven's noumenal journey to the essence of human existence).  

The terribly sad thing about Beethoven's Ninth is that he never got to hear it himself.  Perhaps because of his rigorous training in childhood, Beethoven began to lose his hearing when he was only 26 years old.  It's quite tragic that he couldn't fully interact with the world and enjoy the full volume of the orchestra performing his greatest works but, perhaps, his deafness forced the music inside him and increased the noumenal quality of work he produced in later life?

A Song for Europe

The final movements of Beethoven's Ninth contain the Ode to Joy, Schiller's words set to music.  It's a really inspirational piece and exudes an optimism that promises a better world in which all men (and women?) are equal.  

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen,

und freudenvollere.

Freude!

Oh friends, not these sounds!

Let us instead strike up more pleasing

and more joyful ones!

Joy!

This piece of the Ninth Symphony is used as the Anthem of Europe, by the European Union.  On a day when the results of the recent European elections have come in, I find myself wanting to listen to Beethoven's Ninth more than ever!

Image credits:

The image of the painting of 13-year old Beethoven by an unknown artist is taken from Wikimedia commons and is believed to be in the public domain.  You can see more information about the file at its description page.

The image of Turner's painting is also in the public domain.

The image of the Beethoven graffiti in Graz, Austria is by flickr member southtyrolean, who is originally from South Tyrol in Italy.  You can see more of southtyrolean's photos at his photo stream.  Thanks for sharing this image with us, using the Creative Commons license.