Was the assumption of German musical supremacy merely a constituent part of an emergent German nationalism between 1870 and 1918?

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What the German nation is and what its boundaries are have always puzzled historians of the early construction of the German nation-state. Indeed the further back into history one searches, the more elusive the very notion of a German national identity becomes. According to Herder, nationalism has little to do with the state, let alone politics or citizenship. Nations are pre-political, their roots lie in language, culture and ethnicity. The German nation-state, at the beginning of Wilhelmine Empire, was a strong, politically widely accepted one. The completion of unity in 1870-71 stands in a complicated relationship with what had been created in 1866-7. The state was accordingly less unitary than the greater Prussia of 1867. Consequently, the federalism of the Second Empire took the form of tolerating different kinds of governments, rather than "devolving power from the centre on a uniform basis".

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[...] As G.Eley acknowledges it, it is because the process of shaping German nationness was conducted without benefit of an existing state power”[4] that German nationalism has required subjective ways of talking to the German people. The more the ideal of the nation, as against other principles of state-political organization, became a source of extraordinary legitimizing power, the more the State wanted to justify people's loyalty to it through common emotionally patterns of expressing one's love for his country. In this case, music, as irreducible to German cultural past and pride, seemed to best way to achieve the settlement of the nation in every German heart. [...]

[...] However, if by the 1870s, certain music could usefully demonstrate the Germanness of the new state[6], and thereby legitimate the new state's particular solution to the question of what was the German fatherland, the belief in a German musical superiority hardly embraced nationness completely. It is clear that musical pride has been highly used to the Wilhelmine Empire's advantage, to serve the new state's will to settle nationness. But other conceptions of the nation were at stake. De facto, one should challenge the idea of German musical superiority as merely a constituent part of the early German nationalism. [...]

[...] Not only was a healthy musical culture seen as something to which a self-respecting nation such as Germany could aspire, it was seen as something that could be achieved only through recognition and cultivation of indigenous resources and national qualities”.[16] For G.Cubitt music and nationess are closely linked: the evocative power of music is dependent on its ability to “draw on and appeal to a fund of common experience and shared forms of expression”. In other words, German musical superiority is contingent upon its national resonance as great music must spring from and resonate within the soul of a people bonded together by language, customs or common history . [...]

[...] However successful musical pride may have been in ingraining nationess into the German people, it hardly embraces completely nationess. Numerous definitions of nationalism were at stake under the Wilhelmine Empire: most of them highly at odds with one another ( M.Hugues). For Konrad H.Jarausch, the only thing fixed about Germany seems to have been the continual dispute about what being German might mean.[17] The same idea has been taken up by Pamela Potter when talking about Reitmuller's essay: Germaness question remains in limbo while the legend of Gemans as the people of music lives Indeed it hard to explain nationess a moving, malleable content through a musical pattern, if we take German pride for its musical past as a strong historically asserted component of Germany. [...]

[...] Indeed, Schonberg's groundbreaking atonal composition, Pierrot Lunaire, was set to the German translation of a French text, and for Salome, Strauss's most daring break with German operatic traditions, the composer used Oscar Wilde's play.[25] D.Dennis has underlined the grotesqueness of linking great music to nationalism, as music was too high to be associated with the nation, and Beethoven's achievements too great to be transformed in ugly political songs”[26]. In the same manner Kurt Eisner- editor of the leading socialist newspaper, Vorwärts, in 1889, lengthily blamed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for its incapacity to talk to the German people: the masses had no idea that they were heirs of such a rich legacy”.[27] Indeed, great music was already too elitist to match with the patriotic ideal of talking to every German heart. This does not mean that after 1871 the public has been ignored. [...]