The Emperor

Back in my University days, I had a music history professor who was big on pieces of music being musical paintings of the reality of music of the day.  They, for instance, showed that Beethoven wrote his piano concertos with an abbreviated keyboard and therefore selected the keys in which he wrote simply because the tension of the strings in a piano couldn't be held in place with the technology as it existed.  Pipe organs all over Europe differ vastly in pitch - one being out of tune to another often by half a tone - and musical instrument development and construction can be traced to what the nearby church organ sounded like. The Brandenburg Concertos of Bach were more about being an example of instruments of the day and how a skilled musician/composer would write for them (and what they were capable of) than anything and when Bach wrote these for the Margrave of Brandenburg in hopes of securing a job he was, subtly showing him what style of music he could expect to hear and what he expected from the court musicians (the difficulty of the music that he would write for them).

That got me to thinking about all things Prussian for a bit as the Margrave of Brandenburg was the head of that area of Prussia that was consolidated in the 19th century by the Emperor Wilhelm family (that Hohenzollern term you might remember).  Movies and books talk about Kaiser Wilhelm with Kaiser being the dialect for Emperor (Kaiser Rolls shaped like crowns etc.). I recently met someone who is in that family (without the crown or the title that I know of) so that sped on this galloping thought process. All to the good.

We in the United States neither suffer nor enjoy the aspect of royalty and royal families as our founding was based on NOT having leadership brought about by genetics and marriage but rather by merit and popular appointment.  Occasionally we have some families like the Kennedys and Bushes who figure on some sort of birthright and we grow tired of them and replace them.  But there is something to this having a royal line that ties a nation or region together historically and who serve as something of a picture of a great deal of time and history; as vivid as Bach's music painted the state of music at the time or the physics of Beethoven's piano determined the key of the concertos.

I'll proceed to think about the work of the day now, but occasionally it doesn't hurt to think about other things.