This collection of essays offers a compelling argument for the vital importance of music for understanding German history, society, and national identity from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Written in a graceful and sensible style, Celia Applegate's The Necessity of Music gives voice to the peculiarities of German music and of musical Germanness, demonstrating through sheer example how deeply music was embedded in the history of the German-speaking lands.

Applegate lays out her work in three parts: “Places,” “People,” and “Public and Private.” Her consideration of place includes how music could travel widely, in terms of compositions and players, yet draw people together. The section begins with an essay framed as a question: “How German Is It?” Originally addressed primarily to specialists in nineteenth-century music, it remains broadly relevant because of the way the essay acknowledges the centrality of music by composers from the German lands for the development of Western music in the nineteenth century, yet complicates that picture by showing how what we now perceive as a unitary nationalist project in music is better understood as a fragmented response to multiple factors affecting musicians and their livelihoods.

Location, Applegate avers, is the “hidden dimension” (50) of musical culture: it was one of the mechanisms that drove the formation of the nineteenth-century canon so dominated by composers from the German-speaking lands. Beyond the significance of the specific location of important musical performances (e.g., at Bayreuth), musicians themselves were frequently on the move, so that even as the music of Johannes Brahms or even Franz Liszt might have helped to consolidate an understanding of a national identity, the trajectories of these two composers and of thousands of other musicians suggested just the opposite. Music, and those performing it, helped to form an idea of a German nation by “making it a lived experience” (71). Applegate traces the evolution of musical work in the German-speaking lands by showing how changing labor conditions for professional musicians in the eighteenth century—and the wide participation of amateurs, particularly in choral groups in the nineteenth century—pointed to a fluid musical culture that helped to define a collective sense of nation.

International fairs—which offered a space where music might serve to present a unified image of a country, on the one hand, yet blur borders between states, on the other—were places where musicians and their music were flung together for dramatic performances, often simultaneously. Organs and orchestras had to compete with brass bands, and each ensemble's or player's contribution was offered up to celebrate specific musical cultures. The 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco is the central extravaganza Applegate examines here, and she persuasively shows how performances from many countries were used to celebrate different forms of music and also showcase the ability of musicians to rise above nationalist concerns during a war that remained very far away.

The section titled “People” looks at three composers and one music critic. “Mendelssohn on the Road” continues the theme of itineracy from the previous section, making the point that the composer's travels and the cultural exchange they enabled can tell us much about how a national community took shape in an international context. Applegate concentrates on Felix Mendelssohn's travels as part of a developing Anglo-German cultural network that built on the groundwork laid by Georg Friedrich Handel and Franz Josef Haydn. Mendelssohn's performances in Great Britain and his compositions inspired by that country placed him in the category of a cosmopolitan artist—one who, while proudly hewing to his home culture, could celebrate and elevate that of another place.

Musical internationalism, according to Applegate, was central to most of nineteenth-century output, even of those composers we tend to think of in nationalist terms. She takes the suggestion of music historian Carl Dahlhaus that nineteenth-century nationalism should be understood as a “means, not a hindrance, to universality” (137), and applies it to the music theory and criticism of Adolf Bernhard Marx, who tended to see German music as a national art form that had most successfully enveloped all other musical forms, taking and refining the best, creating something particularly universal.

Robert Schumann and Brahms are the last two composers considered in this section. With regard to Schumann, the question is whether he was an overly narrow creator of “merely” German art, or whether he had a broader vision for his music. Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche thought the former; Applegate suggests that they (yet again) missed the mark. In her view, Schumann should be understood as a liberal nationalist, though one who cultivated that sense of nation via one locale: Leipzig, a center of not only political liberal nationalism but also music publishing. Schumann saw in this provincial and thoroughly bourgeois city a place of musical universality. Brahms was also a local patriot, pointing throughout his life to his Hamburg origins. How do we square that pride with the oft-told tales of Brahms's need to leave Hamburg because he could not find proper work there? Applegate suggests that the solution is to look to the work of middle-class amateur choral societies dedicated to performing large religious works: they not only developed and sustained a vibrant musical culture locally, but also demonstrated how musical Protestantism served to help build the nation.

Bringing us into the twentieth century, the final six essays cast a wider net by addressing matters both public and private: military bands, female Wagnerites, amateur chamber music (Hausmusik), and, of course, Nazis. The ubiquity of German military bands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created conflict with civilian musicians but was also a means of popularizing many tunes usually confined to concert halls and opera houses. Such bands may have broadcast military culture into civilian life, but they also brought music to wider audiences. Applegate excavates as well the artistic and sensual responses of women to Wagner, in Germany and beyond, and shows how they channeled those private emotions into broader public efforts on behalf of musical education and outreach.

Applegate suggests that Hausmusik in the Third Reich provides another opportunity for seeing how the private and the public spheres can be separate yet also interdependent: what had been a primarily bourgeois practice in the nineteenth century was recast in the 1920s and 1930s as a new and revolutionary means of articulating the eternal verities of German culture. Applegate shows that amateur music-making may have developed a National Socialist veneer, but that musical Gleichschaltung had its limits. Wagner's music returned not as a means of private emotional expression but as an idée fixe: “the score for the Third Reich” (275), with particular reference to the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Despite there being far more Herbert Windt and Horst Wessel in the score of Triumph of the Will than Richard Wagner, the film is still viewed by many as a smoking gun of the Wagner-Nazi nexus. Such an interpretation, Applegate suggests, says more about the expectations of scholars than about what they are hearing.

The book's subtitle, Variations on a German Theme, is apt: this is history structured to be variations on a theme showing how music and the lived experience of Germans have harmonized in the modern era. In the musical form, variations highlight the inventiveness of the composer and offer multiple means of hearing the original theme anew. The Necessity of Music works beautifully in this way: it showcases the considerable scholarly accomplishments of its author and convinces the reader to “hear” all the ways in which music, its players, and its listeners have all been entwined at the core of German culture and history in the past and present.