German Noise: Four Part Harmony, German Lieder, Stephen Foster & the Cable,  and Theater
O Psalmist of the weak, the strong,
O Troubadour of love and strife,
Co-Litanist of right and wrong,
Sole Hymner of the whole of life,

I know not how, I care not why,
Thy music brings this broil at ease,
And melts my passion's mortal cry
In satisfying symphonies.

Yea, it forgives me all my sins,
Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme,
And tunes the task each day begins
By the last trumpet-note of Time.
From Lanier's "To
Beethoven":
Tyrolean music sung by traveling groups of singers became incredibly popular in the early to mid-
19th century world and ended up giving America its first taste of four part harmony. They called
themselves Nationalsänger (natural, national singers). In groups of various sizes, they first traveled all
over Europe before visiting America, and later even ventured to Australia. The Zillertal Valley gave
the world its first two famous groups of this genre and they would be the model for American groups.

Both the Strasser Familie singers from Laimach and the Rainer Familie brothers and sisters of Fügen
began by travelling throughout Europe in the 1820's performing traditional Tyrolean folk songs
(Volkslieder) wearing their colorful trachten. They influenced notables such as Goethe and
Beethoven ("Tiroler Lieder"), Rossini, Franz Liszt (variations on a Tyrolerlied) and others.

The Rainer Family was at first comprised of siblings Maria, Franz, Felix, Joseph and Anton Rainer
who performed before English royalty in 1827 and Russian royalty in 1822. They toured through
Bavaria, northern Germany and Sweden, singing for kings, princes are ordinary folk alike in palaces,
theaters and concert halls. In 1827 they met in London, where they were given special favors from
the Court, and as a result of their triumphant tour in London, their first song repertoire was printed
and published. Above: the Family in 1873

After touring Europe they went to America: to New Orleans, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia,
using New York as their base of operations from November of 1839 through January of 1840. Here,
they studied English and arranged the next phase of their tour. In May 1843, they set off for home.
Encouraged by their great success in the Americas, the Ludwig Rainer Society grew from five to up
to fifteen singers and musicians by 1851.

Their travels took them again to England, where they sang before Queen Victoria, and then to
Scotland and Ireland. In the following years, they concerted in Italy, then France, where Napoleon
III. received them in the Tuileries Palace, then Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In 1858, they came
again to Russia and stayed for ten years, interrupted only by five brief visits home to attract new
members. In the summer they played and sang in St. Petersburg and in winter in Moscow. Ludwig
Rainer came with his group back to Austria in 1868, stayed in Vienna for six months and then
traveled to Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia and Turkey. Tired of traveling, he opened a hotel at
home in 1870, taking only short tours until 1884. On his way to a wedding, he died in May of 1893.

The original Rainer Family Singers sang Franz Gruber's little known carol "Silent Night!" in the parish
church of Fügen in 1819 and in a performance at the Castle of Count Dönhoff on the occasion of a
visit from Emperor Franz I of Austria and Czar Alexander I of Russia in 1822. They included the
song on their tour of America. Thus, the first time "Silent Night!" was sung American soil was on
Christmas Day of 1839 in New York City in front of the Alexander Hamilton Memorial in the
cemetery of the Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street. It had to take place outside in front of the
Hamilton Memorial in New York because Trinity Church, where their performances was scheduled,
had been damaged by fire. It was a quarter of a century before it was published in English.

In 1834, the Strasser family first sang Silent Night in Leipzig, where they worked as glove vendors at
the Christmas market. They were also a sensation, as was their performance of the carol, which was
actually sung to attract customers to their ware. The publisher A.R. Friese of Dresden decided to
publish some of the Strasser Family's songs, including Silent Night, and it was immensely popular.
Even the King of Prussia ordered it sung every Christmas Eve by his cathedral choir. When it was
first printed around 1830, it was as a Tyrolean style song, however, and this version differed in many
details from Gruber's original composition because the singers had adapted it to their style, a folk
style which helped make it so immortal.

Lied is a German art song for solo voice and piano. The earliest basic forms of lied come from the
15th century. In the 17th century, a new kind of lied arose, the general bass or continuo lied, mainly
for upper classes and students, and they were simpler than the formal solo songs of other countries.
After 1750, the lieder was set to folk type melodies with simple harmony and independent
accompaniment. It was Schubert's setting of Goethe's Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814) and Erlkönig
(1815) that first embodied the close identification with poet, scene, singer, and character, as well as
the concentration of lyric, dramatic and graphic ideas into a single unit which characterize the finest
19th-century romantic lieder. Schubert's 610 songs became personal and corresponding to nature and
emotion. Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms and Strauss all cultivated the lied.  

During the pre-Civil War period, a taste for the German lied crept into America, in part due to
concerts by the likes of Jenny Lind, who introduced German song to American audiences. It spread
even more rapidly because of Foster's influence. After the Civil War, interest and admiration for
German culture even more steadily increased and Liederkranz societies formed in nearly every city.

With the blossoming of interest in German music and international admiration of German culture at
its height, many American composers went to Germany for study. They came home with a genuine
appreciation and fresh approach to American popular music. German American singing groups sprang
up all over America, preserving German musical tradition and keeping the culture alive. By the time a
New York Sangerfest was held in Brooklyn, New York in 1900, over 6,000 singers from 174
German American singing societies flowed into the city. It was not until the Anti-German hysteria of
World War One that America freed itself from the "bonds" of German music.

Stephen Foster's songs are deeply associated with the Civil War. Not many people realize what an
admirer of German music Foster was, or that he spoke German fluently and translated German songs
into English and even cooperated with German composers, making their songs popular in America.

Stephen Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania on July 4,1826, on the same day that John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, the ninth child of a prosperous family. His father was a
Pittsburgh businessman and politician, his brother a builder of the Pennsylvania canal system and the
Pennsylvania Railroad, and his sister the wife of President James Buchanan's brother. He was largely
self taught until he received some formal musical training from a friend, German Henry Kleber.

On a German piano purchased by Kleber, an accomplished musician who was also a merchant,
performer, composer, impresario and teacher, Foster composed many great songs before he married
Jane MacDowell and became a professional songwriter.  Foster's first hit was “Oh! Susanna.” His
early minstrel songs became widely popular, and between 1850 and 1860 Foster wrote many of his
best songs and most of their lyrics, including “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Massa's in
de Cold Ground,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” and “Old Black
Joe,” a total of  285 songs, hymns, arrangements, and instrumental works. His unhappy marriage led
to several separations.

Although he was popular, Foster suffered great poverty, and combined with domestic problems, the
death of his parents in 1855 and his journey into alcoholism, his life fell apart. From 1861, Foster
lived alone in New York City, and in 1864 he died in the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital in New
York City from complications after a fall from his bed. Shortly thereafter, his renamed publishing
company, William A. Pond Co., published the last song he wrote a few days before his death,
"Beautiful Dreamer." During his lifetime he earned only $15,091.08 in royalties from his sheet music.
He died with 38 cents in his pocket. He is probably the most underrated composer in history.

Kleber, an immigrant from Darmstadt, Germany, was quite well known in his own right and
composed light operas popular in the era. He composed one especially for the great event of the first
transatlantic cable being laid. Until the cable was laid, the fastest communication between Europe and
North America took at least a week. The idea of a transatlantic cable was first proposed in 1845, and
took years to complete. A massive project, it took Cyrus W. Field on the American side and Charles
Bright and brothers John and Jacob Bretton on the British side of the Atlantic much hard work and
financial maneuvering to do it.

The manufacture of the cable started in early 1857, and by the end of July it was stowed both on the
American ship Niagara and the British ship Agamemnon. On August 5,1858, after five attempts, both
ships met and the two continents were joined. On August 16, communication was established with
the message "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to men." But damage
inflicted on the cable by the high voltages caused it to fail soon after and it took until July 27,1866 for
the final, successful, cable to be laid with virtually no problems. The first message sent on this, the
final and successful cable, was: "A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia".

There were thousands of miles of undersea cables linking all parts of the world within 20 years. The
original two cables stopped working in 1872 and 1877 but four other cables were in operation by
then. It was not until the 1960's that the first communication satellites offered a serious alternative.

Another of the many figures of the day who were steeped in German writers and German
romanticism was Sidney Lanier. Lanier was born on February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia to a well-
to-do family. He began playing the flute as a youngster, and his love of music continued throughout
his life. He attended college, graduating first in his class shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War.
At age 19, he enlisted in the Confederate infantry and served for almost four years, ending his
experience in a Union prison in Maryland. Lanier's health, which suffered in the War, worsened in
prison and he struggled with tuberculosis until his death in 1881.

Shortly after the war, he taught school then moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he clerked and
was a church organist. He wrote his only novel, "Tiger Lilies" (1867) there before moving to
Prattville where he taught and served as principal of a school. He married, moved back to his
hometown, passed the Georgia bar and practiced as a lawyer for several years, during which time he
wrote a number of poems in the "cracker" and "negro" dialects of his day about poor white and black
farmers in the Reconstruction South.

He then moved to Baltimore and played flute for the Peabody Orchestra, becoming famous for a
flute composition called "Black Birds," which mimicked the birds' song. He also wrote poetry for
magazines, including his most famous works, "The Marshes of Glynn" (1878) and "Sunrise" (1881).
Next, he became a lecturer and a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
specializing in the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer and the Anglo-Saxon poets. He published a series
of lectures entitled "The English Novel" and a book entitled "The Science of English Verse"  in which
he developed a novel theory exploring the connections between musical notation and meter in poetry.
In several of his poems, he attempts to find an equivalent for music in the written word. Only one of
Lanier's musical compositions was published during his lifetime, but recently, manuscripts have been
made available.
An Example of the German American Theater Scene
German theater in New York City by the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s presented drama, comedy, farce
and operetta. The first professional performance of a German play in New York, however, was in
1849 at Magner's Hall on Elizabeth Street and one of the earliest German theaters was the
Stadttheater on the Bowery, which closed in 1853 after a fire. It was later the site of the "People's
Theater". Other early theaters were the Windsor, the Thalia, Germania, the Bowery, Irving Place
Theatre (Amberg's German Theatre), and Wallack's. The Roman Catholic Church of St Annes 148
Eighth Street between Broadway and Forth Avenue was converted into a theater in 1879. It was
leased to several German groups and was known during the 1890s as the Germania.

To some outsiders, the refreshments were better than the art:

"It is generally conceded that the German Theatre evolved from a dilettante enthusiasm displayed at
the German Vereins. In these social gatherings, private theatricals were given, and talent was eagerly
sought for among the members. On Sundays, plays were preformed in the different Verein hall. It
was a matter of art and beer, and even though the art might be bad, the beer was unfailingly good."
from "The Life of Heinrich Conried" by Montrose J Moses, 1916

The general German population might have loved musicals and comedies, but they also appreciated
Shakespeare, who had been popular in Germany from the eighteenth century. In fact, Shakespeare
was performed more in the German speaking countries that in the English speaking countries!

The "Star" or Wallack's theatre on Broadway, below, was built in 1861. It was run by the Wallack
family until 1881 and presented German language drama and opera. It was demolished in 1901.