German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (review)

German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner. By John Warrack. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [xiv, 447 p. ISBN 0-521-23532-4. $64.95.] Music examples, map, bibliography, index.

While German opera has an established place in the repertoire and the literature on the subject is extensive, discussions of the genre in standard histories of opera are often disappointing. For some, German opera starts with Mozart and culminates with Wagner without necessarily incorporating the baroque milieu in which Handel developed his craft, the court operas of the middle to late eighteenth century, or the various composers who experimented with German opera in the early nineteenth century. Even such an enduring reference as Donald Jay Grout's Short History of Opera (3d ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988]) is lacking when it comes to Germany, and the result hardly represents the breadth of German opera since it emerged in the seventeenth century.

In contrast, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner by the British scholar John Warrack is a comprehensive study of opera in what has become modern Germany and Austria. In this book, Warrack traces the origins of the genre to the sixteenth century, when a discernible music culture began to emerge in what would eventually become Germany. By taking this approach, Warrack establishes a context for the development of the genre that, at times, seems to go hand-in-hand with the evolving language and the national image. This contextual approach pervades the book, and with magisterial and deft style, Warrack brings into his study the various strands of cultural history that underscore his discussion of musical trends. With his judicious comments on intellectual history, Warrack has written a detailed and highly textured history without making the book unnecessarily dense and diffuse.

Warrack achieves this focus by maintaining a perspective on the repertoire without necessarily relating the works teleologically toward Wagner. Although Wagner is the last composer to be considered in this study, he is by no means treated as the goal of it. As Warrack states in the closing lines of the book, "The distorting effect that the very greatest creative figures have on our perception of the long history of one art form in one national tradition is almost impossible to avoid . . ." (p. 400). Warrack uses this perspective to treat the German operas of Mozart in a balanced and informed manner. Even though he devotes an entire chapter nominally to these works, en route Warrack discusses music by other composers around Mozart. Likewise, the author deals with other major contributors to German opera without bias, and his approach enhances the overall effect of a book that is both satisfying to read while tantalizing us to further study into this repertoire.

The passages devoted to historical background are useful for the comments on intellectual history that often accompany it. Thus, mention of the Thirty Years War is neither gratuitous nor de rigueur, but prefatory to a discussion of the state of theater in Germany at the time. This leads, in turn, to an account of the various cultural and economic forces behind seventeenth-century German opera that affected the audiences and composers of the more memorable works in the eighteenth century. In fact, Warrack's chapter on the "Hamburg enterprise" (pp. 34-62), as he calls it, is an excellent exploration of the forces at work in northern Germany which involved at various times Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Mattheson, and George Frideric Handel.

In dealing with the succeeding generations of composers, Warrack discusses some of the attempts to create a more nationally identifiable style. These efforts went hand-in-hand with some of the goals of Enlightenment thinkers, who sought the creation of more meaningful works, rather than an emphasis on spectacle through artifice. In the attempts to achieve renewed earnestness, composers took up more serious subjects, including German adaptations of classical myth and, for the first time, the plays of Shakespeare. Among the...