This week’s stop on our tour of Europe’s great musical centres is the northern German city of Hamburg, the country’s second largest, the eighth biggest in the EU and – Wikipedia tells me – the second biggest port in Europe.
Wikipedia is less useful when it comes to music: the entry for Hamburg leads with the fact that the German premiere of Cats took place there 30 years ago. But the city is also the birthplace of Johannes Brahms and where the Beatles cut their teeth between 1960 and 62. It is also big in heavy metal and hip-hop.
Hamburg is one of those great cities that creeps in under the tourist radar. Musically, it’s going to get much more exciting in January, with the opening of a state-of-the-art music venue on the banks of the River Elbe . Designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the Elbphilharmonie looks like a vast galleon floating down the Elbe and, in keeping with the city’s eclectic musical heritage, is promising something for everyone, with pop, world music and jazz alongside classical.
But back to Brahms. He was born in the city in 1833, the son of an impoverished musician. The prodigiously talented teenager was forced to supplement the family’s income by playing the piano in taverns and other, dubious institutions: an early immersion in the Hamburg nightworld that has led to various psychological theories about the bearing this might have had on his commitment-phobic attitude to women.
Brahms’s early works were composed in this city, including his Piano Sonata No 1, written in 1853 and his first work to be given an opus number. His second sonata had been completed earlier, but he thought this work superior so made it his Opus 1. As he became more famous, Brahms gravitated to Vienna, but after his death in 1897 he was made an honorary citizen of Hamburg and there is a museum devoted to him close to his birthplace.
Felix Mendelssohn was also born here, in 1809, though in rather more prosperous circumstances – his father was a banker. But the city can’t quite claim ownership of Mendelssohn as his family moved to Berlin two years after his birth. Still, any excuse will do to play the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The overture, which he wrote when he was 16 and incorporated into the later extended work, is the greatest piece of music by someone so young. Felix’s intensely musical sister Fanny, a notable composer in her own right, was also born in the city.
Two other composers inextricably linked with Hamburg are Georg Philipp Telemann, who became director of music in the city’s principal churches in 1721 at the age of 40, and his godson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, son of Telemann’s friend JS Bach. CPE Bach succeeded his godfather as music director in Hamburg.
The indispensable @abkquan has come up with appropriate works by each: Telemann’s delightful suite Hamburger Ebb und Fluth (Hamburg ebb and flood), written in 1723, and CPE Bach’s six Hamburg symphonies. @abkquan says he loves the latter, with their “wild modulations and dramatic structure”.
@Grishnakh also puts in an appeal for Telemann, and in particular his opera Pimpinone, which was premiered in Hamburg in 1725. Telemann had a fraught second marriage: the opera’s portrait of a couple at war may have drawn on painful personal experience.
@PositivistDinosaur cites several other opera premieres in the city, including Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt – competition between German opera houses to stage the premiere was so intense that it was first performed on the same day, 4 December 1920, in Hamburg and Cologne – and Hans Werner Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg, premiered in 1960.
@thesecretorganist, who despite his protestations I do think of as heroic for his contributions, suggests the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who has made Hamburg her home for the past two decades. Since we have already established Hamburg’s connection with the Bach dynasty, her Johannes Passion, premiered in 2000 to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of JS Bach, neatly completes the circle.
Hamburg has proved a congenial city for composers. Gustav Mahler was chief conductor at the Hamburg State Opera, Germany’s oldest public opera house, in the 1890s. Mahler conducted the German premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in the city – the composer was in attendance and pronounced Mahler’s conducting “astounding” – and worked on his own second and third symphonies while employed at the opera house.
Almost a century later, Hungarian composer György Ligeti was professor of composition at the city’s music academy in the 70s and 80s. One of his last works was the Hamburg Concerto, for solo horn and chamber orchestra.
Alfred Schnittke lived in Hamburg for the last eight years of his life – he died in 1998 – and his first few years there were, despite chronic ill health, highly productive. The works he wrote included the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth symphonies. There was even a Ninth, produced after a devastating stroke in 1994, though the fact that the score was barely decipherable and has had to be reconstructed by other composers has contributed to arguments over its critical value.
Finally, of course, there are the Beatles. John Lennon once said: “I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg.” It was where the group, who spent long periods there from 1960-62, came of age musically – and indeed, in every other way. They went from five members to four while performing in the city: Stuart Sutcliffe opted out and then died suddenly; they met Ringo Starr, who in 1962 replaced drummer Pete Best; and they had their early image defined by Hamburg-based photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who was engaged to Sutcliffe before his sudden death from a brain haemorrhage.
Hamburg helped make the Beatles just as it helped make Brahms, Mahler and CPE Bach. Quite a city. Next time we will trace Rome’s musical connections, and once again I will rely on your contributions. Please offer your thoughts on Roman musical connections below.
Previous cities in this series: London | Paris | Venice | Helsinki | Prague
• This article was amended on 3 October 2016 to correct the year of Brahms’ death.
