THE RISE OF NATIONALISM in music, one of the outstanding features of the nineteenth century, is nowhere more striking than in the rapid growth of the Romantic opera in Germany.1 Before 1820 German opera was known outside its own country through a very limited number of Singspiele, of which Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte was the principal example. With the performances of Weber’s operas, especially Der Freischütz at Berlin in 1821, German Romantic opera became fully established and its ensuing developments culminated in the worldwide triumph of Wagner’s music dramas fifty years later. Since Germany displays more clearly and completely than any other country the effects of the Romantic doctrines on opera, it will be convenient to summarize here those features of German Romanticism that came to light particularly in German opera between 1800 and 1870.
If we were to search for the most general principle of difference between the opera of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century, we should probably find it in the contrast between the idea of distinctness on the one hand and that of coalescence on the other. The contrast begins with the relation of the composer to his music. The eighteenth-century composer was a craftsman who stood outside the artworks he created; the nineteenth-century composer thought of music rather as a means of self-expression, a projection of his own feelings and ideas. His music has consequently a certain subjective quality that demands that the hearer shall place himself in sympathy with the composer, failing which he may not understand the music. Moreover, the music itself is directed more to the listener’s emotions and less to his intellect than in the eighteenth century. The horror and rescue operas—the works of Weber, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi, and Wagner—make a direct assault on the nerves and feelings of the audience in a manner that to Hasse, Gluck, or Mozart would have been inconceivable. In pursuit of this aim, and emancipated by the authority of individual freedom from the old restrictions, the nineteenth century proceeded to create a new aesthetic and a new set of musical procedures for opera, all of which were dominated by the idea of coalescence as against the eighteenth-century idea of distinctness.
Another example of the difference lies in the relation between libretto and music in the two periods. We have already seen how in the eighteenth-century opera seria these two elements were harnessed together in a kind of marriage of convenience that, provided certain conventions were observed, left each to a great extent free and unimpeded; the same libretto might receive many different musical settings, and the same music might be used for different words. This conception was no longer prevalent in the nineteenth century, even in Italy. Everywhere, and to an increasing degree, the ideal, expressed or implicit, came to be a complete union of words and music in one perfect whole. But in Germany, this ideal was carried in theory even further to advocate generally the amalgamation of music, poetry, and all the other arts in one supreme art that should be greater than the sum of its individual constituents. The ideal took various and sometimes fantastic forms; thus August von Schlegel wrote:“The arts should be brought together again, and bridges sought from one to another. Perhaps columns shall come to life as paintings, paintings become poems, poems become music.”2 Poets and painters saw in music the ideal toward which the other arts were striving—immediate in its expression of feeling, limited in its power to depict the world of objects, but by this very indefiniteness supporting all the more strongly that flight from the outer to the inner world, toward those “somber longings, depressions, and joyous elation without any recognizable cause,” which are typical of certain Romantic temperaments.3 The arts were united not only in ideal but also in practice: poets and painters composed music, and musicians wrote essays, novels, and poetry. The ultimate stage as far as opera was concerned came with Wagner’s theory and realization of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total, all-inclusive work of art.
In the librettos of many German Romantic operas we find also that the eighteenth-century distinction between man and nature, and between nature and the supernatural, is broken down. In the eighteenth century, nature appears in opera only as scenery in the background, and the music that depicts nature is of an imitative or descriptive sort, such as bird-song arias, comparison arias, orchestral storms, and the like. The supernatural in eighteenth-century opera is either a dramatic convention (as in Rameau and Gluck) or else a source of farce (Dittersdorf) or pageantry (Mozart). But in much German opera of the nineteenth century, both nature and the supernatural are closely identified with the moods of man, nature becoming as it were a vast sounding board for the murmurs of the unconscious soul, and the “invisible world of spirits” constantly impinging for good or evil on the affairs of everyday life. The storms in Mozart’s Idomeneo are only incidental; the storm in Wagner’s Fliegende Holländer is the whole mood of the drama. In Weber’s Freischütz, both the natural background and the supernatural happenings must be taken seriously or the plot is meaningless; yet here we have scarcely emerged from the fairy-tale stage. In Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, the supernatural begins to have symbolic importance. Finally, in the Ring, both nature and humanity become absorbed into a supernatural and superhuman realm ruled by transcendent moral forces, so that the whole action takes place on a symbolic, mythical plane.
All this fairy tale, legend, and myth in German Romantic opera is national in character, as opposed to the earlier use of Greek mythology, medieval epic, or Roman history. The emphasis on national subject matter in opera followed the movement in literature that had begun in England with the publication of Macpherson’s “edition” of Ossian and Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in the 1760s. In Germany, Herder’s cosmopolitan Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1778–79) was followed in the years 1805 to 1808 by an exclusively German collection, Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Interest in German legends and medieval literature was revived by the brothers Grimm with their Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812–15) and Deutsche Mythologie (1835). Folk tales, fairy tales, patriotic odes, and historical novels and dramas were produced by many authors. Much of this literature was not only national but also popular, that is, “of the folk.” Glorification of “the folk,” of humble scenes and pleasures and the instincts of simple people, is common in the early Romantic period, and the imprint of these features remained on German opera even after 1830, when new influences were at work in literature.4
Turning now to the music of Romantic opera, we find likewise a coalescing of formerly distinct factors. In the eighteenth century, the functions of voice and orchestra were clearly defined. The orchestra accompanied the singers; it was heard by itself only on specified occasions, as in the overture, ritornellos, ballets, marches, or descriptive pieces. In the nineteenth century, the orchestra not only creates moods and provides exotic suggestion but also enters intimately into the pattern of the drama itself. Eventually it becomes a continuous web of instrumental sound, thereby freeing the voice for more realistic, varied, and pointed declamation of the text. The overture achieves a close connection, both thematic and structural, with the opera itself. Improvement of the brass and woodwind instruments, and the introduction of new instruments, make possible an enormously enlarged and variegated color scheme in operatic music. With increasing emphasis on the inner voices and increasing chromaticism in the harmony, the orchestra becomes more and more dominant in the musical texture. Curt Sachs has pointed out how this growth in importance of the orchestra in opera coincides with the rise of non-Italian schools: “the eternal antithesis between the playing North and the singing South.”5 The climax comes with Wagner’s music dramas, in which the orchestra develops the entire action in a polyphonic tissue of sound.
Still another contrast between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera is seen with respect to musical forms. The older opera consisted of a series of distinct numbers, without thematic interconnection. The tendency throughout the Romantic period is for the separate numbers to coalesce into larger units, and this process is finally carried to a point where the music flows uninterruptedly from the beginning of an act to the end. This continuity may be simply a matter of concealing the joints, or it may be the kind of organic unity in Wagner’s music dramas, with a number of musical motifs used continually and systematically throughout a whole act, or a whole opera, or even several different operas. What is true of the form as a whole is true also of the details: distinction between aria and recitative becomes less marked; recitatives, arias, ensembles, and choruses combine freely in large form-complexes. In harmony, the boundaries of tonality become less definite, while modulations become more frequent and are made to more distant keys; chromatic alterations, progressions motivated by chromatically moving inner voices, become characteristic. In the later works of Wagner, even distinct cadences are avoided, so that the music seems never to come to a full stop but to move on in an endless melody. Finally, dissonance, especially in the form of suspension or appoggiatura, takes on new and special importance as a leading means of expression, and the indefinite postponement of its final resolution becomes a symbol of the eternal romantic longing after the unattainable.
The actual historical course of opera in early nineteenth-century Germany was affected by a number of factors that tended to interfere with the steady development of a truly national type. The original inspiration of German Romantic opera, both for the poetry and for the music, came from France—in part directly from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century opéra comique and in part indirectly through the Singspiel, which, as we have seen, was largely dependent in the beginning on French models. There being no national center of opera in Germany, the Singspiel developed in relatively isolated localities, preserving everywhere, however, two traditional characteristics of the form: the choice, indifferently, of either serious or comic subject matter (or of a mixture of the two) and the use of spoken dialogue. One factor that constantly hampered the growth of a national opera was the rooted public favor for foreign works, or works of essentially foreign cast, so that composers who might otherwise have devoted their full energies to the building of German opera often felt induced to write in imitation of French or Italian models. Beethoven’s Fidelio, for example, was a French revolutionary rescue opera. Later, it was the French grand opéra or the Italian opera of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti that offered the fatal attraction to German composers. Nevertheless, the native Singspiel continued to flourish in a modest way and to make progress during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.
Two general types of libretto are discernible in the Singspiel at the beginning of the century. One type, specializing in familiar, homely scenes and characters idyllically or sentimentally treated, is illustrated by Die Schweitzer-familie, first given at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna in 1809. The music is by Joseph Weigl (1766–1846), who wrote more than thirty works for the Vienna productions. They include Italian and German operas, operettas, and Singspiele. He made his debut as a composer in 1782 with a work for a marionette theater production. The success of this initial venture caught the attention of Salieri, who not only offered to serve as a mentor for Weigl’s composition studies but also sought opportunities for him to be involved with the court theater. It was in his capacity as a rehearsal accompanist that Weigl worked closely with Mozart in preparing several of his operas for the stage.6 By 1791 he succeeded Salieri as Kapellmeister at the court theater and soon thereafter came forth with his first important opera, La princessa d’Amalfi (1794). This was followed by L’amor marinaro (1797), which was staged throughout Europe. It was his Singspiele, however, that earned him particular acclaim. Die Schweitzerfamilie, which has some romantic orchestral coloring and makes use of Swiss themes and reminiscence motifs, was one of the most popular Singspiele ever staged in Germany or abroad.
The other type of Singspiel libretto in the early nineteenth century emphasized legendary or magic elements, strange happenings to men and women living in a “real” world but ever subject to the mysterious intervention of unseen spiritual powers. It was this eminently romantic kind of subject matter that was to furnish the material of German Romantic opera.
Important examples representing both types appeared in the period bounded by Die Zauberflöte and Der Freischütz. Their titles leave no doubt that romantic motifs had become increasingly prevalent in the librettos: Die Geisterinsel (The Isle of Spirits, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest), Der Unsichtbare (The Invisible), Der Kobold (The Goblin).
Winter
Two works inspired by Die Zauberftöte were given at Vienna in 1797 and 1798, respectively: Babylons Piramiden and Das Labyrinth, oder der Kampf mit den Elementen: Die Zauberflöte, zweiter Teil. Both were on librettos of Emanuel Schikaneder, with most of the music by Peter Winter, Munich’s most celebrated composer at the turn of the century.7 Winter received Schikaneder’s commission to write the music for the sequel to Die Zauberflöte presumably because he had become very popular and successful in Vienna, having secured an international reputation with the highly acclaimed productions of Das unterbrochene Opferfest (1796), a Singspiel with many exotic and magical features. Das Labyrinth, based upon a fairy tale of the same title from an anthology by Wieland, involves all the main characters of Die Zauberflöte plus a few new ones. Winter’s setting, an extravaganza with magnificent choral numbers, shows allegiance to both Mozartean and Gluckian ideals, but it is the influence of French grand opéra that dominates. Winter composed works in the form of opera seria, opera buffa, tragédie lyrique, and Singspiel, and set librettos provided for him by Schikaneder and Da Ponte, the latter for works created in London. From Helena und Paris (1782) and La grot-ta di Calipso (1803) to Colmal (1809), a through-composed German “reform” opera, Winter’s musical style derived from an assimilation of French, German, and Italian influences and contributed to the initial phase of German Romantic opera. Especially noteworthy of this style was Winter’s “handling of the brass instruments” in his rich orchestration and the “splendor of his choruses.”8 But above all, it was Winter’s exceptional melodic style that won him a place in opera history.
ANOTHER COMPOSER WHO SHARED in the formative stages of German Romantic opera was Paul Wranitzky (1756–1808), a Czech composer and head orchestra director of the Viennese court theaters, whose Oberon (1789) for a time rivaled Mozart’s Singspiele in popularity. Oberon was also accorded a special gala performance, with Wranitzky conducting, during the festivities for the coronation of Leopold II in Frankfurt. Among other composers who shared in the formative stages are George Christoph Grosheim (1764–1841),9 with Titania (1792); Ferdinand Kauer (1751–1831), with Das Donauweibchen (1798), which inspired many imitations; Johann Rodulf Zumsteeg (1760–1802), with Die Geisterinsel (1798); Friedrich Heinrich Himmel (1765–1814),10 with Fanchon das Leiermädchen (1804), Die Sylphen (1806), and Der Kobold (1813); and Carl David Eule (1776–1827), with Der Unsichtbare (1809).
Hoffmann
A decisive stage in the creation of German Romantic opera came with two works first performed in 1816: Undine (a “number” opera with spoken dialogue) by E. T.A. Hoffmann, at Berlin, and Faust by Ludwig Spohr, at Prague. Hoffmann (1776–1822), the famous Romantic author, is important in the history of German opera for both his writings and his music.11 The writings contain persuasive arguments for the creation of a German Romantic opera, Hoffmann’s interest in the subject no doubt having been sparked by his awareness of Carl Theodor’s campaign to establish a national opera, by his association with Friedrich Rochlitz (editor from 1798 to 1818 of Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung), and by his studious reading of August von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808–9).12 They also reveal Hoffmann’s concern for the literary quality of texts used for stage works, something generally lacking in the German librettos of the period. And indeed, the libretto for Hoffmann’s masterpiece, Undine, is an exception, for it is of real literary merit.13 Adapted by Friedrich Henrich Karl de La Motte Fouqué from an earlier, merely fanciful play—a fairy tale about a water spirit in love with a mortal—the libretto conveys a feeling of human significance, thus achieving some dramatic force in spite of a complex and fantastic plot. The music suffers from some technical faults and the more ambitious arias are the less successful ones, but the romantic mood of Weber’s Der Freischütz is distinctly foreshadowed. This is especially true in the scenes depicting supernatural beings, in the many folk-like melodies and choruses, and in the thematic reminiscences (anticipating the leitmotif principle)—the same features Weber found impressive. He mentions them in a review of Undine along with his definition of “the opera which the German desires—an art work complete in itself, in which the partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world.”14
Spohr
Ludwig Spohr (1784–1859) is now remembered chiefly for his oratorios and violin music,15 but his Faust and Jessonda are important landmarks in the development of a German Romantic musical style. Weber conducted the first performance of Faust (Prague, 1816) and immediately proclaimed its merits, for at long last he had found an opera with the degree of dramatic and musical unity he considered essential for this art form. That this unity was not accidental is made clear in Spohr’s preface to the score for the 1852 version of his opera, where he indicates how the thematic motifs are meant to represent various facets of Faust’s personality. These motifs, stated first in the overture, are used as reminiscence motifs throughout the opera. In this later version of the opera, spoken dialogue has been replaced with newly composed musical material, the whole patterned after the fluid design of his Jessonda (1823). Like Undine, the opera has many features that point toward Der Freischütz. Though the music is less masculine and forceful than Weber’s, it is nonetheless interesting for its freedom of key relationships and chromatic progressions.16 Moreover, its expressive suspensions and upward-resolving appogiaturas often suggest the style of Wagner, although the romanticism of Spohr is mostly a matter of such details as these rather than a fundamentally new approach.
Examples of German grand opera in the 1820s and 1830s are rare indeed. It therefore is of special importance to consider Spohr’s Jessonda (1823), for here is a fully sung opera that is also a masterpiece of that genre.17 Spoken dialogue has been eliminated and in its place Spohr has reinstated the recitative, but in a style that more nearly resembles the arioso. A special affinity with French rescue operas is felt not only in the exotic story of a Portuguese adventurer in India rescuing a widow from suicidal death on a funeral pyre but also in the musical conception of the important arias and grand finales. Given the romantic spirit of Spohr’s operas, it is surprising that he was unsympathetic to the music of Weber and the late Beethoven, but he was one of the earliest champions of Wagner in Germany, and in his own Kreuzfahrer (1845) he attempted to write a national Romantic opera after the model of Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser (these operas having premiered in Dresden in 1843 and 1845, respectively).
Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann
The operatic production of Franz Schubert (1797–1828) extends from 1814 to 1823 and was no doubt influenced by the performances of operas, such as Weigl’s Das Waisenhaus and Die Schweizerfamilie and Beethoven’s Fidelio, that he attended in Vienna. Schubert composed sixteen operas (counting those that have been preserved incomplete), but only three ever reached performance during his lifetime.18 These were the one-act Singspiel, Die Zwillingsbrüder (1819); the melodrama Die Zauberharfe (1820), which was Schubert’s first big work for the stage, consisting of choruses and some particularly beautiful orchestral numbers in a fantastic play by Georg von Hoffmann; and the well-known incidental music for Helmine von Chézy’s drama Rosamunde von Cypern (1823). But Schubert’s principal dramatic works were a very popular one-act Singspiel, Die Verschworenen (composed c.1823, first heard in concert and staged performances in 1861), and the two large operas Alfonso und Estrella (composed 1822, first performed 1854) and Fierrabras (composed 1823, first performed 1897).
Fierrabras has some spoken dialogue, but Alfonso und Estrella—exceptionally for German opera in this period—is sung throughout. Schubert had hoped to see Alfonso und Estrella staged at Berlin, but it was rejected because of the alleged difficulty of the music and because the libretto was considered “unsuitable.”The score contains a wealth of arias in great variety, a generous number of choruses (often subdivided into separate groupings of singers), and a tremendously big finale—altogether a work in the grand Romantic style, with characteristic Schubertian harmony and orchestral colors.
Fierrabras is equally rich in large scene-complexes comprised of intermingled arias, dramatic accompanied recitatives, and choruses, and in addition contains many instances of recurring themes in the orchestra, a device used here with consummate skill and effect. Outstanding numbers in this score are the lovely duet for two sopranos “Weit über Glanz und Erdenschimmer” and the four-part unaccompanied men’s chorus “O theures Vaterland” in Act II; the melodrama scene near the end of this act; and the finale complex at the end of Act I. In both Fierrabras and Alfonso und Estrella, Schubert uses unexpected changes of key during highly dramatic situations and makes frequent excursions into tonalities related by either a major or minor third. It is indeed tragic that Schubert never had the opportunity to hear these two operas in the theater, for he might then have gone on, with that experience as a guide and with the help of better librettos, to adapt his great lyric genius more fully to the practical requirements of the stage and attain in this field the success that always just eluded him.19
Two other Romantic composers, Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) and Robert Schumann (1810–56), also attempted opera without much success. The only opera by Mendelssohn to receive a public production in his lifetime was Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1827), fashioned from a tale from Cervantes’ Don Quixote.20 Its success, however, was limited; after a few performances at Berlin, it was withdrawn. Of the half-dozen other stage pieces that he composed in the Singspiel tradition, several had private performances. They include the one-act Soldatenliebschaft (1820), the three-act Der Onkel aus Boston, oder Die beiden Neffe (1824), and the one-act Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (1829).21 Left unfinished was his large opera, Die Loreley.22
Schumann’s Genoveva was performed at Leipzig in 1850 under the composer’s direction, but neither then nor since has it obtained enduring public favor.23 Its libretto is poorly constructed and the music lacks genuine dramatic directness and characterizing power, though there are many beautiful passages (for example, near the beginning of Act IV, Genoveva’s recitative and aria from the words “Die letzte Hoffnung schwindet”). Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust, for chorus, soloists, and orchestra, is intended for concert performance; it is perhaps, of all Faust music, the most appropriate to Goethe’s drama and ranks equal with the composer’s better-known cantata Paradise and the Peri.
Weber
Hoffmann and Spohr had prepared the way, but the real founder and hero of German Romantic opera was Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826).24 Weber’s father was a theater director, and the boy was reared in an atmosphere of the stage. His experience as impresario and conductor at Breslau (1804–6) and Prague (1813–17) gave him a firm knowledge of the essentials of dramatic style. At Prague, he staged works by Spontini, Méhul, and Cherubini, Grétry’s Richard, Mozart’s Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Titus, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and other leading operas of the current repertoire. Vogler’s influence, as well as the whole intellectual milieu of Weber’s life, inclined him strongly toward Romanticism, and in 1814 his settings of ten songs from Körner’s Leyer und Schwert made him the idol of the patriotic youth of Germany. Weber’s first extant dramatic work, of which only fragments remain, was a Singspiel, Das stumme Waldmädchen (1800); it was not successful, but parts of the music were incorporated into a later work, Silvana (1810).25 Two comic Singspiele, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn (1803) and the highly successful Abu Hassan (1811), and an unfinished work in a Romantic style, Rübezahl (c. 1805),26 complete the list of Weber’s earlier dramatic compositions. Though he showed in these works an original talent for instrumentation, a gift for comic writing and characterization, and a feeling for the quality of German folk melody, there is little in the music to suggest the romantic power later to be unloosed in Der Freischütz. Abu Hassan may be regarded as a forerunner of Oberon, and the medieval-romantic Silvana anticipates some features of Euryanthe.
Early in the year 1817, Weber, who had just been appointed director of the German opera at Dresden, persuaded his friend Friedrich Kind to work with him on a libretto based on the tale “Der Freischütz,” which had appeared in the Gespensterbuch (Book of Ghosts, 1810) by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun.27 The legend itself was at least a hundred years older, and some of its principal themes belong to still more ancient folklore.28 The title is difficult to translate: it means literally “The Free Marksman,” but the usual English title “The Charmed Bullet” is sufficiently descriptive and certainly more graceful. Interest in the Gespensterbuch tale prompted immediate dramatizations. Franz Xavier von Caspar’s Der Freyschütz, a “romantic tragedy in four acts” with music by Carl Neuner (1778–1830), was one of the earliest, with his first version for Munich (1812) followed by a second, five-act version (with a tragic ending) in 1813. The similarities between Caspar’s play and Kind’s subsequent libretto suggest a strong dependence of the latter upon the former.29 Weber’s music was not completed until 1820, and still another year elapsed before the first performance, at Berlin, on June 18, 1821. The work was fabulously successful from the start and spread like wildfire all over Germany and abroad, being performed in German and in many other translations. After its reception in Vienna, Weber wrote in his diary. “Greater enthusiasm there cannot be, and I tremble to think of the future, for it is scarcely possible to rise higher than this.”30 His words were prophetic, as the fate of Euryanthe was to prove, but with Der Freischütz, he had set German Romantic opera on its road and dealt a blow to the century-long Italian reign in the German theaters.
The popularity of Der Freischütz was due not only to the music but also to the libretto, which, for Germany in the early Romantic period, literally had everything.31 Most of its elements were inherited from the late eighteenth-century Singspiel: a background of nature and a foreground of humble and happy village life; a pure heroine and a well-intentioned but credulous hero; a villain caught in his own trap; the supernatural in many picturesque and shuddery forms; and finally, the time-tested figure of the magnanimous prince as righteous judge and father of his people. But though the ingredients were old, the mixture was new. For the first time in opera, all these details were convincingly presented as aspects of something important; the trial of marksmanship took on the character of Armageddon, the ultimate battle of good against evil, one sustained by the power of the church and the other aided by the maleficent spirits of ancient heathendom, and the triumph of good was felt as the triumph of the German soul. Thus the national appeal of Der Freischütz was not limited to the Romantic period but has remained equally strong to this day. “There never was an opera, and there is no likelihood that there ever will be one, so intimately bound up with the loves, feelings, sentiments, emotions, superstitions, social customs, and racial characteristics of a people.”32
The overture is a model of its kind. Although made up entirely, except for the opening horn theme, of melodies from the opera, it is not a mere medley but a finished composition in symphonic first-movement form. The mysterious last twelve measures of the introduction (diminished sevenths with low clarinets, tremolo strings, pizzicato basses, and kettledrums on the afterbeats) are the quintessence of Romanticism in music, and so, in a different way, is the clarinet melody in E-flat of the vivace movement. The return of the closing triumph theme in C major, heralded by a recurrence of the last part of the introduction and three impressive “general pauses,” is electrifying. In the larger arias, the music of Der Freischütz approaches grand opera, and it is natural to find in Caspar’s “Der Hölle Netz” (end of Act I) a resemblance to Italian style, or in the opening section of Max’s “Durch die Wälder” a mild echo of Méhul. Both the latter aria and Agathe’s “Leise, leise” are complex musical structures, splendidly dramatic and of Beethovenian amplitude. Aennchen’s “Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen,” with its polacca rhythm, is in keeping with the Singspiel tradition of differentiating the social standing of the characters by means of different musical styles and forms. The contrast between Agathe and Aennchen, mistress and maid, so neatly established in their duet at the beginning of Act II, is confirmed and emphasized in their two arias that follow.
Parts of the score that did much to endear it to the public were those which glorified the songs and dances of the people: the hunters and bridesmaids’ choruses, the march and waltzes in Act I, and the shorter pieces (lied, romance, cavatina) in popular form. In Der Freischütz, Weber succeeded as no other composer had done in raising the music of the folk to the dignity of serious opera and combining it skillfully with more pretentious elements. The most celebrated part of the opera has always been the finale of the second act, the “Wolf’s Glen” scene, one of the most effective evocations of supernatural thrills ever created for the stage. Among the devices Weber uses may be pointed out the mysterious harmonies (tremolo strings) at the beginning, the monotone choruses of the spirits (note the unison of tenors, altos, and sopranos on á), the dialogue between the singing Caspar and the speaking Samiel, and the melodrama for the casting of the magic bullets, a Walpurgisnacht of legendary phantoms of the dark forest.33 The C minor themes of the overture, associated throughout the opera with the demonic powers, are much in evidence. The systematic recurrence of these motifs and others, especially the triumph motif (overture, in E-flat and C major;Agathe’s aria, E major; last finale again in C major), contributes much to the feeling of unity that is one of the outstanding qualities of the work. The overture gives the musical plan of the whole, as it were, in embryo, and the structure thus sketched is fully expanded in the course of the three acts.
Weber’s incidental music to P.A. Wolff’s play Preciosa (adapted from a novel by Cervantes) was composed immediately after Der Freischütz and came sooner to performance, March 14, 1821, at Berlin. At about the same time, he started, but did not finish, a comic opera on another Spanish subject, Die drei Pintos.34
Weber’s Euryanthe was first performed at Vienna on October 24, 1823. The source of the plot was a thirteenth-century fabliau that had been employed by Boccaccio in the Decameron (day 2, story 9) and by Shakespeare in Cymbeline; Schlegel had published a version in 1804 under the title “Die Geschichte der tugendsamen Euryanthe von Savoyen” (The History of the Virtuous Euryanthe of Savoy). Helmine von Chézy, after many revisions and with considerable help from Weber, produced a libretto. In planning the work, Weber, in accordance with his lifelong habit, deliberately tried to correct the faults that critics had found in Der Freischütz. The criticisms had been mainly to the effect that the work was deficient in large, highly developed musical forms; that is, it was too much of a Singspiel and not enough of an opera. Euryanthe, therefore, is set to music throughout (it is the only opera of his that does not have spoken dialogue) and is on a greater scale than any of his other works. However, he did not wish to make the music dominant as in Italian opera, but conceived rather a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, “a purely dramatic attempt, aiming to create its effect by means of the combined effects of all the sister arts.”35 Unfortunately, the results did not correspond to this ideal, nor did the success of the opera come up to Weber’s hopes and expectations. It has never become a public favorite, but its interest for musicians is shown by numerous attempts to promote it in revised forms. There can be no doubt that it includes some of Weber’s greatest music, as evidenced by the overture; the arias are broad and powerful;36 and the way the chorus is used in the drama reminds one of Gluck. Weber’s usual skillful handling of the orchestra is evident, as is his tasteful use of folk-like motifs, as in Der Freischütz. Contrast of key is used as an aid to characterization, and there is a significant employment of reminiscence motifs. All in all, Euryanthe is a grand opera both in form and in loftiness of conception, a landmark in the history of German opera between Fidelio and Lohengrin, and a work that deserves to be performed more frequently.
Weber’s last opera, Oberon, was composed to an English libretto by James Robinson Planché37 and first performed under the composer’s direction at London in April 1826. The fatigue of the journey and the labor of the production hastened Weber’s death, which occurred at London on June 4, 1826. In some ways, Oberon was a backward step: the story, a rambling oriental fantasy with numberless scene changes, gave only limited occasion for development of character or genuine human emotion; there were many non-singing actors, and so much of the action took place in spoken dialogue that the music was reduced almost to an incidental position. Weber intended to rearrange the work for German theaters, and though he did not live long enough to do so, many more or less thoroughgoing revisions and additions have been made (some in accordance with Weber’s plan) by later musicians.38 Oberon is historically important chiefly because of its fairy music, such as the opening chorus of Act I, the finales of the second and third acts, and above all the beginning of the overture, with its magic horn call, muted strings, and swift figure in the woodwinds. Such music was in the air: Mendelssohn’s octet with its scherzo had appeared the year before, and his Midsummer Night’s Dream overture was composed in the summer of 1826. Vigorous, ardent, stormy Romanticism as in Rezia’s aria “Ocean, thou mighty monster” (the closing theme of which had appeared in the overture), is also well represented in Oberon.
Weber died in midcareer. Had he lived to complete his work, the history of German opera for the next twenty years might have been one of steady development. As it was, although Der Freischütz continued its triumphal course, no German work was produced for nearly a generation that could match it either in popularity or in musical worth. The early Romantics had created a world of opera in which the lives of simple human beings were felt to be so intertwined with the processes of nature, and both man and nature so informed and governed by all-encompassing spiritual powers, that the three realms seemed as one. This original unity was lost after Der Freischütz, with unfortunate results for both libretto and music. Poets and composers began to exploit the supernatural for mere sensation and the human for sentiment or comedy, and periodically they would be distracted by the allurements of grand opera.
Marschner
If Weber can be said to have had a successor, it was Heinrich Marschner (1795–1861), whose first opera, Heinrich IV und D’Aubigné, was produced in Dresden in 1820.39 When Weber died in 1826, Marschner had hoped to succeed him as director of the opera, but when that appointment failed to materialize he moved to Leipzig. He first became widely known with the 1828 production of Der Vampyr, an opera now remembered mainly because it was one of Wagner’s models for Die fliegende Holländer (see especially the ballade in Act III). Marschner wrote a very successful comic opera, Der Bäbu (1838); his Templer und Judin (1829) was adapted from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.
Marschner’s masterpiece, Hans Heiling (1833), was on a libretto by Eduard Devrient from a story by Körner, originally intended for Mendelssohn. As the central situation of Templer und Judin is similar to that of Lohengrin, so the figure of Hans Heiling, half man and half earth spirit, in love with a mortal woman, has many points of resemblance to Wagner’s Holländer. Yet in the working out of the story as well as in the music, much of the trivial is mingled with the serious. The style for the most part is that of the popular Singspiel, with simple tunes in symmetrical patterns, interspersed with spoken dialogue. Echoes of Weber, Italian opera, and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable are heard. In some respects, the music looks ahead to Wagner: the frequent chromatic passing tones in the melody, especially at cadences; the use of modulating sequences; and occasionally a passage of grimly powerful declamation. Many of the choruses are interesting, and the finales of the first and third acts are well constructed. The opening scene, in the Kingdom of Earthly Spirits, is unusual in that the overture follows rather than precedes the choral prologue, a dramatic touch that had its imitators later in the century. The most original number, and one that shows Marschner’s gifts to good advantage, is the melodrama and lied at the beginning of the second scene of Act II.40 Yet on the whole, his talent was of second rank, the Biedermeier spirit in music. His later works, in which there are many traces of the fashionable Italian and French opera of the time, contributed nothing to his fame.
Along with the Romantic traits of Marschner, there survived in German opera a current of sentimental or comic drama, descended from the eighteenth-century Singspiel. A very popular opera of this kind was Nachtlager in Granada (Vienna, 1834) by Konradin Kreutzer (1780–1849).41 The libretto, based on Friedrich Kind’s play of the same title, uses the old reliable motif of the good prince in disguise conferring rewards on humble virtue and innocent young love and offers occasion for romances, hunting choruses, a conspirators’ chorus, a prayer, airs, and ensembles, all somewhat in the manner of Auber and Donizetti—light, sometimes trifling, but on the whole pretty and pleasing music in a harmless way.
Lortzing
A more spirited comic vein was worked by Gustav Albert Lortzing (1801–51) in his most successful work, Zar und Zimmermann (1837), and especially in Der Waffenschmied (1846), first staged in Vienna.42 The latter abounds in humorous situations like those of the older Viennese Singspiel, with a fresh, pleasant, often witty melodic style and some ensembles that recall the spirit of Mozart. Most characteristic, however, are the simple songs in folk idiom, reminiscent of the tunes of J. A. Hiller. Zar und Zimmermann is a musical version of a play, Le Bourgmestre de Saradam by three French authors. The plot retells the tale that Peter the Great came to Holland and worked (incognito) in the shipyards as a carpenter. Particularly noteworthy are the Burgomaster Van Bett’s entrance song in which he boasts that he is clever and wise (which, of course, he is not), the sextet in Act II that begins a cappella and concludes with a spirited cabaletta, and the chorus-lesson scene that opens Act III. Zar und Zimmermann became an international success with productions at Berlin (1839), Vienna (1842), New York (1857), and in English as Peter the Shipwright at London (1871).
With another three-act comedy Der Wildschütz (1842) and even more pronouncedly with his four-act magic opera Undine (1845), Lortzing—who in all these works was his own librettist—ventured on the ground of Romantic opera with its supernatural beings and theme of redemption through love. Lortzing was hardly capable of composing music equal to the emotions and characters of this libretto, but his systematic use of recurring motifs and his powers of musical description (especially the water spirits’ music, first heard in Act II, scene v) are interesting both in themselves and as predecessors of the music of Wagner’s Ring. Another of Lortzing’s comic operas Hans Sachs (1840) is one of the numerous sources of Die Meistersinger.
Nicolai, Flotow, and Cornelius
Other German operas produced around the middle of the nineteenth century can be mentioned only briefly. Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849) by Otto Nicolai (1810–49),43 is a fine comic work in which Italian and German characteristics are happily blended; ensembles are especially well wrought, and the use of the orchestra for dramatic pictorialism is noteworthy. Its sparkling, cosmopolitan style contrasts with the simple “home-made” quality of another popular contemporary work Martha (1847) by Friedrich von Flotow (1812–83), a sentimental old-fashioned piece that has inexplicably survived while many better operas have been forgotten.44
An important younger figure of this period was Peter Cornelius (1824–74), disciple of Liszt and champion of Wagner, a poet and composer who wrote his own librettos.45 His Barbier von Bagdad (1858) is a wholly delightful oriental comedy in a sophisticated musical idiom. The rhythms, deriving in part from oriental verse forms, are particularly varied and interesting: for example, the aria “O holdes Bild” (Act II, scene ii) is in alternate 4/4 and 3/4 measures; five-measure phrases are also common throughout the score. Each of the two acts runs continuously, without marked division into numbers. The orchestra has an important role not only in the formal scheme but also in the provision of many humorous details in the accompaniments. A halfdozen recurring motifs are used systematically. Der Barbier is not high comedy like Die Meistersinger but a farce, cleverly using every resource of music for farcical purposes (see, for example, the canonic duet “Wenn zum Gebet” in Act I). The freedom of rhythm, the declamatory melodies, the frequent wide intervals and chromatic harmonies often foreshadow the style of Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. There is also some parody of Italian opera, especially in the sentimental unison love duet “So mag kein anders Wort erklingen” in the second scene of Act II. (This scene is also an unintentional parody of the love duet in the second act of Tristan, with the Barber filling the role of Brangäne.)
During the 1830s and 1840s, it seemed almost as if the Italians had been driven from German opera houses only to be replaced by the French.46 The works of Herold and Adam were particularly popular, while the equally gifted native composers Marschner and Lortzing were neglected. The situation was saved by Wagner, who, after early experiments in the Italian style and that of French grand opera, went on to create a new epoch of national German Romantic opera in Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin.
1. See 19th Century Music (a journal, initiated in 1977, with excellent articles and reviews); Dent, The Rise of the Romantic Opera; Warrack, “Germany and Austria”; Smith, The Tenth Muse. See also Chantavoine and Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Le Romantisme dans la musique européenne; Istel, Die Blütezeit der musikalischen Romantik, chap. 5; Goslich, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen romantischen Oper; idem, Die deutsche romantische Oper; Daninger, Sage und Märchen im Musikdrama; Richerdt. Studien zum Wort-Ton-Verhältnis im deutschen Bühnenmelodram; Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 782–97.
2. Quoted in Adler, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, 2:865. Cf. Schelling’s well-known definition of architecture as “frozen music” (Die Philosophie der Kunst, 576, 593), and Goethe’s similar statement (Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 1:261, 23 March 1829). Such conceptions were not peculiar to the nineteenth century. Compare, for example, [Harsdörffer], Frauenzimmer Gesprechspiele, 3:242, and Mattheson, Die neueste Untersuchung, 86, although the latter clearly asserts not the identity of the arts but only their cooperation.
3. The quotation is from Berlioz’s program for the Symphonie fantastique.
4. One interesting manifestation of this emphasis on national subject matter appears in Hans Sachs im vorgerückten Alter (Dresden, 1834), a successful Singspiel on the life of the sixteenth-century poet Hans Sachs, by Adalbert Gyrowetz (1763–1850), Czech composer and conductor at the Vienna Court Theater.
5. Sachs, “The Road to Major,” 403.
6. For additional information about the works Weigl composed for the stage and his association with Mozart, see Reichenberger, “Joseph Weigls italienische Opern”; idem, “Giuseppe Weigl”; Bollert, “Joseph Weigl und das deutsche Singspiele”; Angermüller, “Zwei Selbstbiographien.”
7. The overture and Act I of Babylons Piramiden were composed by Johann Mederitsch. For more on Winter, see chapter fifteen. See also Frensdorf, Peter Winter als Opernkomponist; Kuckuk, “Peter Winter als deutscher Opernkomponist”; Henderson, “The Magic Flute of Peter Winter”; Cole, “Peter Winter’s Das unterbrochene Opferfest: Fact, Fantasy, and Performance Practice in Post-Josephinian Vienna.”
8. These features were singled out by the anonymous author of Winter’s lengthy obituary that appeared in the Allgemeine musicalische Zeitung xxviii (1826), cols. 372–73.
9. Grosheim. Selbstbiographie.
10. Odendahl, Friedrich Heinrich Himmel; see also Garlington, “German Romantic Opera.”
11. Hoffmann’s literary works are published in an edition by Griesebach; his writings on music, separately (Musikalische Novellen und Aufsätze). See Greeff, E. T A. Hoffmann als Musiker; Garlington, “E. T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Dichter und der Komponist”; Schafer, E.T. A. Hoffmann and Music.
12. See Garlington, “August von Schlegel and the German Romantic Opera.”
13. Schläder, “Undine von E.T.A. Hoffmann”; Kosmetschke, “Von der Handlung zur Form: Operndramaturgie in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Oper Undine”; Hsu, “Weber on Opera.”
14. See Strunk, ed., Source Readings (1950 ed.), 802–7, for a translation of the review, which appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.
15. Göthel, ed., Ludwig Spohr: Lebenserinnerungen; Wassermann, Ludwig Spohr als Opernkomponist; Salburg, Ludwig Spohr; C. Brown, Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography; idem, “Spohr, Faust, and Leitmotif.
16. See also the passage from the first finale of Jessonda, quoted in Bücken, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, 88.
17. Spitta, ‘Jessonda”; C. Brown, “Spohr’s Jessonda”; A. Abert, “Webers Euryanthe und Spohrs Jessonda als grosse Opern.”
18. Krott, “Die Singspiele Schuberts”; King, “Music for the Stage”; Waidelich, Franz Schuberts Alfonso und Estrella: Einer frühe durchkomponierte deutsche Oper.
19. See Liszt’s essay on Alfonso und Estrella, in his Dramaturgische Blätter, 3:68–78.
20. A revised version of Die Hochzeit des Camacho was staged in 1987.
21. In addition to Die Hochzeit des Camacho, several of Mendelssohn’s other operas had publically staged productions after 1847. See, for example, Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (1851) and Soldatenliebschaft (1962).
22. Schünemann, “Mendelssohns Jugendopern.”
23. H. Abert, “Robert Schumann’s Genoveva”; Abraham, “The Dramatic Music,” in Abraham, ed., Schumann: A Symposium, chap. 7.
24. On Weber, see editions in German and English of his diary, letters, and other writings, together with biographical studies by his son M. M. von Weber; Schnoor; Moser; and Warrack. See also Warrack, ed., Carl Maria von Weber: Critical Writings on Music; W. Wagner, Carl Maria von Weber und die deutsche Nationaloper.
25. Act II of the 1810 production of Silvana is missing; thus the only available score is based upon later versions prepared for Berlin and Dresden.
26. Rübezahl is the name of a mountain spirit of the Riesengebirge, a prominent figure in the folklore of Silesia and the subject of many folk tales, plays, and operas. Only two vocal pieces and a fragment of a third from this opera are extant, along with the overture, which is occasionally played in a revised form under the title “The Ruler of the Spirits.”
27. So scarce were good German librettos that Weber sometimes had to resort to more than “persuasion.” See, for example, his advertisement in the Prague Allgemeine Musik Zeitung, in which he invited German poets to send their manuscripts to him (quoted in Smith, The Tenth Muse, 251).
28. For a thorough discussion of the sources of the libretto, see Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber.
29. Georg Schünemann’s introductory essay to his edition (1943) of Weber’s Freischütz provides background information on the sources for the libretto. See also Mayerhofer, Abermals vom Freischützen.
30. Quoted by Philipp Spitta in his article on Weber in Grove’s Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., 5:652.
31. For a synopsis, the reader is referred to Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 216–29, or to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, s.v. “Der Freischütz”; many editions of the music do not give the spoken dialogue, which is essential to the understanding of the plot. It was, perhaps, the large amount of spoken dialogue that prompted numerous translations of the text within a short time after the initial performance; the opera was staged in English, for example, in London and New York as early as 1824 and 1825, respectively
32. Krehbiel, A Book of Operas, 207.
33. Newcomb, in “New Light(s) on Weber’s Wolf’s Glen Scene,” draws attention to the influence phantasmagoria (popular at the turn of the eighteenth century) may have had on Weber’s handling of this scene, given the rapidity with which events transpire on stage.
34. It was completed by Gustave Mahler, partly from Weber’s sketches and partly from other works of the composer, and performed at Leipzig in 1888. For an excellent discussion of the Mahler reconstruction, see Warrack, Weber, chap. 13.
35. Quoted in Moser, Geschichte der deutschen Musik, 3:73n. 1.
36. See especially Lysiart’s aria at the beginning of Act II and Euryanthe’s aria with chorus “Zu ihm, und weilet nicht” in Act III.
37. Planché’s text was based on William Sotheby’s 1798 English translation of “Oberon” (1780), a poem by Christoph M. Wieland that was based on a thirteenth-century French epic.
38. Theodor Hell, for example, created a German version that had its premiere in 1826 at Leipzig.
39. See Fischer, Musik in Hannover (2nd ed.); Gaartz, Die Opern Heinrich Marschners; Gnirs, Hans Heiling; Köhler, “Rezitativ, Szene und Melodram in Heinrich Marchners Opern”; Palmer, Heinrich August Marschner; Weisstein, “Heinrich Marschner’s ‘Romantische Oper’ Hans Heilig.”
40. The melody at the words “Sonst bist du verfallen” is the original for Wagner’s death-announcement theme in Die Walkure.
41. Riehl, essay in Musikalische Charakterköpfe, vol. 1.
42. See Laue, Die Operndictung Lortzings; Burgmüller, Die Musen darben; M. Hoffmann, Gustav Albert Lortzing, der Meister der deutschen Volksoper; Subotnik, “Popularity and Art in Lortzing’s Operas”; idem, “Lortzing and the German Romantics”; Schläder, “Die Dramaturgie in Lortzings komischen Opern.”
43. Nicolai began his career as an opera composer in Italy, with works such as Enrico Il (1839) and II templario (1840). Following his move to Vienna to become conductor of the Hofoper at the Kärntnertor Theater, he produced German-language versions of these and other operas he had originally created for Italian audiences before he attempted to compose his first opera in German, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor. For more about his career, see Nicolai, Tagebücher; Kruse, Otto Nicolai; idem, “Otto Nicolais italienische Opern”; Durr, Opern nach literarischen Vorlagen: Shakespeares The Merry Wives of Windsor.
44. Its style derives from both the Singspiel and the opéra comique, but it does not use spoken dialogue. See Flotow, Friedrich von Flotows Leben; Dent, “A Best-Seller in Opera.”
45. Biography by C. Cornelius. See also M. Hasse, Peter Cornelius und sein Barbier von Bagdad;W.Jacob, Der beschwerliche Weg des Peter Cornelius zu Liszt und Wagner.
46. For a contemporary account of this period, see Chorley, Modern German Music.