Germans! Fugues and Strettos

Actually, my principle area of expertise isn't economics, it's music. And as a musician, it's always been clear that the Germans are Europe's most talented nation, and by quite a distance. It is possible to craft an alternative to holy trinity of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but as soon as you try, you find you're still speaking German, even if you're in fact in Austria (Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Mahler?).

Let's not deny other nations their very considerable moments: God smiled upon France when he gave her Debussy and Ravel; he scowled on England when he cut down Purcell so soon, and silenced Howells before he had even really got into full swing. We will always sing with Italy, a nation that squeezes a whole opera into its national anthem. We can let Hungary off for Liszt (blame France!) since they also produced Bartok. And so on. But alone, Germany is irreplaceable.

Why? It's certainly not a distinctively German ear for song: who would sit through Fidelio if they had an Italian alternative? Nor is it being particularly open to flights of improvisation: unlike their jokes, you really ought to laugh at German jazz. It isn't exquisite sensitivity to mood: 'Prelude de l'apres midi d'un faune' morphs alarmingly into 'Auftag der nach Mittag eines Fauns' – it's a crime, isn't it?

But what German music displays time after time, throughout the ages, is an extraordinary understanding and command of order – its necessity for structure, its complexity and simplicity. Understanding (and almost always sticking with) the rules allows German music to work simultaneously in horizontal and vertical dimensions, simultaneously on a micro and macro time-scale. It's unique: Bach can do the trick in a minute, Wagner can stretch it to hours (days even). German music isn't constrained by the demands of order – time after time it is liberated by it.

Perhaps the epitome of the German approach to music is the fugue – a piece structured around the harmonic interplay of voices all using the same musical fragment in all possible ways (straight ahead, upside-down, back-to-front), yet somehow cohering. Obviously, the more voices, the more difficult a trick this is to pull off – it's far easier to write (and play) a three part fugue than a five-parter. But that's not all, it's technically possible to do it with more than one tune at a time – a double, or triple fugue. At this point it gets seriously complicated.

Then it gets worse. At the epicentre of a fugue, we meet the stretto, in which all the fragments concatenate, yet somehow what emerges from this pile-up is music. As a pianist responsible for all the voices at once, things can get seriously weird. I had been playing a Bach five part double fugue for months, and it was drilled into my muscle memory. Then one day, I decided to really take a good analytical look at the eight bars of stretto. Armed with a pencil and patience I got to work. What I discovered over the next half hour was so intricate, so extraordinary, so impossibly demanding, that when I went back to the piano, I found myself physically quite unable to play it. Rather, when I got to the stretto, my brain was overwhelmed by the monstrous and monomanical complexity it was encountering. Utterly preoccupied, my brain paralysed my fingers – I was quite literally fugueing.

And so back to today. Or rather, to the German approach to the Euro-crisis. The German analysis of the underlying problem of the Eurozone being one of fiscal discipline isn't entirely wrong. But Germany's fugal concentration on it is. Actually, they've been fugueing for more than a year now. Last week, saw the first attempt at a 26-part stretto on the theme of fiscal discipline, facilitated by explicitly-written rules. If achieved, it would be a thing of wonder all by itself – a thing, actually, of beauty. But long before we get there,it will cause paralysis and breakdown. What Germany's policymakers should bear in mind is that, mighty as Bach's fugues are, he was sufficiently wise to know that to work, even the best fugue needs its Prelude of diverse and complementary material.