Ask a visitor to name a German composer and you will almost always hear the same three: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. Two out of three isn’t bad. Mozart was born in Salzburg, spent his working life in Vienna, and never once held a post in what we would now call Germany.
He also did not write “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
That one stings a little, I know. So let’s clear the decks first, and then get to what actually came from here.
Mozart Was Austrian, and So Was “Silent Night”
The melody everybody sings as “Twinkle, Twinkle” is French. It was printed in Paris in 1761 as Ah! vous dirai-je, maman, and Mozart wrote twelve piano variations on it around 1781, when he was roughly twenty-five and hardly the child prodigy of the story. The English words came later still, from an English poet named Jane Taylor, published in 1806.
“Silent Night” is the other one. Written in 1818, yes. German-language, yes. German, no. Joseph Mohr wrote the text two years earlier in Mariapfarr, Franz Xaver Gruber set it to music, and the two of them sang it for the first time on Christmas Eve in the church of St. Nikola at Oberndorf bei Salzburg. Oberndorf sits on a river, not on a mountain, and everyone involved was Austrian.
Same story with Haydn, Schubert, and Bruckner. All Austrians. Handel was born in Halle and later became a British subject, which makes him a shared asset. Beethoven, though, is ours without an asterisk: born in Bonn, baptized there in 1770, and the house he was born in is still standing and still open to visitors.
None of this makes the Austrians worse company. It just means that when you go looking for German music, you should look somewhere else on the map.
Bach Country Is a Real Route Almost Nobody Drives
Johann Sebastian Bach spent his entire life inside a fairly small patch of central Germany, and the towns he worked in are all still there, all still small, and all within an easy day’s driving of each other. Most visitors never hear about this. They go to Munich instead.
Start in Eisenach, where he was born in 1685. Then Arnstadt, where he got his first organ job as a teenager and promptly annoyed the church council. Weimar next, then Köthen, where the Brandenburg Concertos took shape.
And finish in Leipzig, which is the one that matters, because of the Thomaskirche. Bach was cantor there from 1723 until his death in 1750, wrote a staggering share of his output in those twenty-seven years, and lies buried in the chancel. The boys’ choir he directed, the Thomanerchor, traces its founding to 1212 and still sings motets in that church on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons, most weeks of the year.
Read that again. The same choir, in the same building, over Bach’s grave, eight hundred years running.
Go on a Saturday if you can pick. The Saturday motet usually includes a full Bach cantata with orchestra and soloists, and the Friday one is shorter. Get there early either way, because the church fills up and there is no reserved seating.
Wagner, Bayreuth, and the Ten-Year Waiting List That Isn’t
Richard Wagner built himself a theater. Not a stage in an existing opera house, an entire purpose-built house in Bayreuth, with the orchestra hidden under the stage and the acoustics tuned to his own music. The festival there has run since 1876 and performs nothing but Wagner.
Here is where half the internet will steer you wrong. You will read that tickets take a ten-year wait. True for decades, no longer how it works: a share now goes on straight online sale, and the festival itself says that during the ordering window everyone has the same shot regardless of waiting years. Demand still badly outruns supply. But the old ritual of writing letters for a decade is over.
One warning nobody puts on the poster: the seats in the Festspielhaus are wooden, there is no air conditioning, and Götterdämmerung runs past five hours with intermissions. Bring a cushion. I am not joking.
The Songs Your Grandmother Sang
If your family came over from Germany, the music that actually traveled with them wasn’t Wagner. It was Volkslieder, the folk songs, and the Christmas carols.
“O Tannenbaum” is the big one. The words as we know them were written in 1824 by Ernst Anschütz, a schoolteacher and organist in Leipzig, set to an older folk tune. And the song took root in America in a way that would have baffled him: “The Song of Iowa,” Iowa’s official state song since 1911, is sung to that melody. The man who wrote it, S. H. M. Byers, was a Union officer being held in a Confederate prison in Richmond when he heard bands outside playing “Maryland, My Maryland” to the same German tune, and decided Iowa deserved its own set of words.
“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” is older and stranger, first printed in Cologne in 1599 with nobody’s name on it. Michael Praetorius arranged it for four voices in 1609, and that arrangement is what choirs everywhere still sing, usually in English as “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.”
The German Christmas traditions page goes further into how we actually celebrate. The short version for our purposes here: the carol repertoire is one of the few things Germany exported that came back unchanged.
Your Guitar Probably Has German Grandparents
This is the part of German music nobody writes about, and it is the part with the strongest American connection.
Twelve Bohemian violin makers, Protestants who had fled the Counter-Reformation, settled in the Saxon Vogtland and founded Germany’s first instrument makers’ guild in Markneukirchen in 1677. By 1800 you could buy every instrument in an orchestra in that one small town. By 1900 it was, per head of population, the richest town in the country, and the American trade ran so heavy that the U.S. government kept a consular agency there from 1893 until the First World War closed it. A third of everything the region built crossed the Atlantic.
One man who left was Christian Friedrich Martin, born there in 1796 into a family of cabinetmakers. The violin makers’ guild insisted only they could build stringed instruments, guitars included; the cabinetmakers disagreed; the squabble dragged on until Martin gave up and sailed for New York in 1833. He settled in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and the company still carries his initials. So the most American guitar there is came out of a guild dispute in Saxony. :-)
Two more, both worth a detour:
- Trossingen in the southwest, where a clockmaker named Matthias Hohner started making harmonicas in 1857 and shipped his first batches to America through relatives who had emigrated. His 1896 model, the Marine Band, became the harmonica of American blues. The Deutsches Harmonikamuseum sits in the old factory buildings.
- Seesen in the Harz, where Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg built pianos before emigrating in 1850 and becoming Henry Steinway. The first piano his New York firm produced got the serial number 483, because he had already built 482 back home. That instrument is in the town museum in Seesen today.
The trade never stopped. Over a hundred workshops still work around Markneukirchen and neighboring Klingenthal, which went in for accordions and harmonicas, and a marked cycling route of about 115 km (72 mi) links the villages if you would rather take it slowly. The instrument museum in Markneukirchen holds several thousand pieces and is one of the best small museums in Saxony.
What the Nazis Took Out of German Music
Berlin in the twenties was the loudest music city in Europe. Cabaret, jazz, film scores, a recording industry going flat out. The Comedian Harmonists, six young men who started rehearsing in an attic room in Berlin-Friedenau around the turn of 1928, sold records across three continents singing close harmony about a little green cactus.
Three of the six were Jewish. After 1933 the Reichsmusikkammer squeezed them out by degrees, first with cancellations, then with permits, until in early 1935 the three were barred from working altogether. The group’s last recording session in Berlin produced a song called “Morgen muss ich fort von hier”—tomorrow I must leave this place. Three of them emigrated. The three who stayed were told to find new members and a properly German name.
They were not alone. Kurt Weill, Friedrich Hollaender, Arnold Schoenberg, and dozens more went into exile or were silenced, and much of what made German music interesting relocated to Los Angeles and never came back. That is part of the ugly Third Reich, and there is more of that story on the German history page.
What came after 1945 had to be rebuilt from very little.
Schlager, and Why We Still Sing It
Schlager means “hit,” and it covers the sunny, singable, unashamedly sentimental German pop that has been going since the fifties. Foreign visitors tend to treat it as a punchline. Fair enough, some of it earns that.
But the old line that Schlager is something only grandparents listen to is badly out of date. It fills arenas here, and the crowds are young. If you find yourself in a German bar at midnight and the entire room suddenly sings along to something you have never heard, that is Schlager, and the polite move is to hum.
Related but not the same thing: Volksmusik, the regional folk-music tradition, and the brass bands that go with it. Those live in the villages and at the beer festivals, not on the charts.
Kraftwerk Rewired American Music
Four men from Düsseldorf in matching shirts, standing behind synthesizers, refusing to move. Kraftwerk started in 1970, and calling them an electro-pop band, as a lot of write-ups do, badly undersells what happened next.
In 1982 Afrika Bambaataa and producer Arthur Baker built “Planet Rock” around the melody of Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” and the drum pattern from “Numbers.” They rebuilt both by hand, since nobody had a sampler yet, and they still had to settle with the Germans afterward. “Planet Rock” is one of the founding records of hip-hop and electro. A year later Juan Atkins in Detroit used the same raw material on “Clear,” and Detroit techno followed from there.
So the throughline runs Düsseldorf to the Bronx to Detroit and back again. Not bad for four quiet men who wouldn’t dance.
The rest of it, briefly. Krautrock in the late sixties and seventies, meaning Can, Neu!, Faust, and Amon Düül, which sold almost nothing here and turned out to be hugely influential everywhere else. The Scorpions from Hanover, who have outlasted nearly everyone.
Then the Neue Deutsche Welle of the early eighties, and with it the strangest chart fact we have. Nena’s “99 Luftballons” reached number two on the American Billboard Hot 100 in 1984, in German, while the English version she cut for the U.S. market went nowhere. American radio preferred the language it couldn’t understand.
The East had its own scene the whole time, largely unknown in the West: Puhdys, Karat, City, Silly, all working inside a state that licensed lyrics. Rammstein formed in Berlin in 1994, after reunification, out of musicians who had grown up over there. They are usually filed under heavy metal, though the label we use here is Neue Deutsche Härte.
Berlin after Midnight
When the Wall came down, Berlin was suddenly full of empty buildings that nobody legally owned, in a city with no closing time. Techno moved straight in. Frankfurt had a club scene of its own, but Berlin had the space.
In 2024 Berlin techno culture went onto Germany’s national register of intangible cultural heritage, the list the German UNESCO commission keeps. This caused a fair amount of amused eye-rolling among people who had been going out since 1991. Officially protected raving. Only in Germany :-)
Practical note, because every guide skips it. The famous clubs run selective doors, and a polite foreign tourist in a nice shirt is close to the worst possible look. Go in twos or threes, not eights. Go late, meaning after two in the morning. Speak quietly in the line, and accept that you might not get in, which happens to Berliners too.
Where This Leaves You
Here is the thing I would actually recommend, and it costs nothing. If you come over to find the village your family left, look for the Musikverein when you get here. Almost every place here has one, an amateur brass or wind band, and plenty of them were founded in the 1800s—which means they were probably already playing when your people packed up and went.
They rehearse in the evenings and they play at every village festival. Nobody will mind if you stand at the back and listen.
For more of what we make and how we live, see German culture, German art, and German cinema.