Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera

Notes

Notes 1. Introduction 1. Carl Maria von Weber to Hinrich Lichtenstein, 28 April 1822, Briefe von Carl Maria von Weber an Hinrich Lichtenstein, ed. Ernst Rudorff (Braunschweig, 1900), 111. Quoted by Michael Tusa in “Euryanthe” and Carl Maria von Weber’s Dramaturgy of German Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 57. 2. Carl Maria von Weber to Franz Danzi, 1 March 1824, quoted in Max Maria von Weber, Carl Maria von Weber: The Life of an Artist, trans. J. Palgrave Simpson (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869; New York: Greenwood, 1969), 2:347. The original German may be found in Hans Christoph Worbs, ed., Carl Maria von Weber Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 119–20. 3. Hunters’ choruses were fairly common in German opera from the ¤rst decades of the nineteenth century. Weber’s own Preciosa includes one, as do Conradin Kreutzer’s operas Libussa and Der Taucher. Poissl’s Der Untersberg and Marschner’s Hans Heiling also contain hunting choruses. For a discussion of some of these works, see John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 321, 322, 332– 34. Alexander Ringer’s dissertation, “The Chasse: Historical and Analytical Bibliography of a Musical Genre” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1955), includes a chapter on the chasse in the Romantic era (pp. 316–51) which is also of interest. Ringer’s preliminary catalog of chasse compositions, unfortunately , is inadequate with regard to early-nineteenth-century operas. 4. The hunters’ chorus from Freischütz includes a refrain in which a small group of four or eight singers sings in four parts while the rest of the chorus repeats a short rhythmic ¤gure on a dominant pedal point. 5. John Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 281. 6. Tusa (“Euryanthe,” 31–33) also discusses the formal similarities between the opening scenes of Freischütz and Euryanthe. 7. Wagner’s critique of Euryanthe (quoted in chapter 5) is perhaps the most famous example of this critical approach to the opera. See also the review of Euryanthe from the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode 8 (1823), quoted by Tusa, “Euryanthe,” 63. 8. Aubrey Garlington, “Mega-Text, Mega-Music: A Crucial Dilemma for German Romantic Opera,” in Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Barbara Russano Hunning, Festschrift Series no. 11 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1992), 381–93. This search, writes Garlington, “remains one of those rare moments in the western humanistic tradition when polemical theory and speculation are more signi¤cant and have a greater effect on the future than do any immediate creative realizations of the dream itself” (393). 9. Wolfgang Becker, Die deutsche Oper in Dresden unter der Leitung von Carl Maria von Weber, 1817–1826, vol. 22, Theater und Drama (Berlin and Dahlem: Colloquium Verlag, 1962), 10. The quotation comes from Johann Gottfried Herder, “Einzelne Blätter zum ‘Journal der Reise 1769,’” in Herders sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1878), 4:484. Herder wrote these words attending opera performances in Paris, which he found vacuous and insipid. 10. Gottfried Günther, Albina A. Volgina, Siegfried Seifert, eds., HerderBibliographie (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1978). 11. For a discussion of opera and criticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Gloria Flaherty, Opera in the Development of German Critical Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 12. Herder, Adrastea (23:329–30 in Herders sämtliche Werke, ed. Suphan). 13. Ibid., 331. 14. Ibid., 332–33. 15. Ibid., 335. 16. A selection from Algarotti’s work may be found in Wye Jamison Allanbrook, ed., The Late Eighteenth Century: Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, vol. 5, The Late Eighteenth Century, Oliver Strunk, series ed., Leo Treitler, gen. ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 175–88. 17. That Wagner’s operatic theories form a subcategory of this “holistic narrative ” does not need to be emphasized. 18. In the third issue of Adrastea Herder writes: “The course of the century will bring us to a man who, despising the cheap peddler’s stock of wordless tones, saw the necessity of an intimate combination of purely human feeling, and of the plot itself, with his tones. From that dominant eminence, on which the ordinary musician arrogantly requires that poetry serve his art, he descended and, as far as the taste of the nation for which he wrote in tones permitted it, he caused his tones to...