Steve Schwartz wrote:

>In general, I found most Germans as classical-music ignorant as most
>Americans.

So true ...

>And the home-grown pop music was worse.

What is "the" pop music?  Would you say that there's anything like "the"
classical music?  German pop music offers a lot of pure crap, loads of
boring mass-produced chart-ware, which is forgotten after six weeks, and
there are - as always in music - some hidden pearls.

>However, they sure had a lot of live classical music going on -- as
>far as I know, all state-subsidized -- so a classical musician could
>make a nice middle-class living.

If a musician is lucky enough to get hold of an orchestra vacancy, you're
right.  And it's true, there are still a lot of orchestras in Germany.
But most of them suffers from financial trouble.  The orchestra of the
Hamburg Staatsoper has to play at pop music sessions sometimes, and you
may have heard that currently even the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is
jeopardized (!).  Funds are slashed; several orchestras - esp. in the
former GDR - are to be closed down; some cities are planning to unite
their opera houses and share one orchestra.  Okay, Germany is the reigning
world champion in lamentating, but there *is* a lot of trouble on the
way ...  The times when a well-trained musician could be fairly sure to
make a nice middle-class living are gone.

The most musicians never gets a job in an orchestra.  Most of them finally
ends up as (private) music teachers.  Which is of course not too bad,
but it's not what they had in mind when entering the conservatory for
the first time ...

Regards from Hamburg,
Jan