German lessons

Complaints about the music curriculum hit a wrong note

Plans by the Government to make classical music composed between 1700 and 1900 the only compulsory field of study for pupils taking music exams have drawn the ire of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the society, says that focusing on the likes of Beethoven, Brahms and Liszt, at the expense of, say, Byrd, Tallis and Vaughan Williams, means saddling pupils with the study of a lot of “dead white Germans”.

Apart from sounding a little xenophobic, Ms Annetts might like to bear in mind that many of the classical composers of this period were Austrian rather than “German”, which, in any case, is a term of limited use to describe anyone before the creation of a German state in 1871.

Aligning the two is as inaccurate and as fraught as confusing the English with the Scots – or even with the Irish – on the grounds that they all speak the same language.

Even if we accept the use of the word “German” to cover all the composers of the classical period who had German-sounding names, where does this leave Liszt, who was Hungarian? What about Tchaikovsky, who was Russian, Dvorak, who was Czech, and Grieg, who was Norwegian? Or Verdi, for that matter?

All of them belong to the classical era, but none was in any sense “German”, even in Ms Annetts’ vague sense of the word.

It is a fair point to argue that no single period in history should be made compulsory for music students – but let’s leave the Germans, living and dead, out of it.