Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera

3. Der Freischütz and the Character of the Nation

3 Der Freischütz and the Character of the Nation Charakter The mid-nineteenth-century German dictionary of Daniel Sanders de¤nes Charakter as 1) originally an impressed or engraved sign, a particular sign for an object or a concept, for example, an astronomical, algebraic . . . etc. character. 2) The label or emblem that differentiates and distinguishes a being and marks its particular properties; its essence or distinctiveness; by extension also a person with particularly strong, sharply de¤ned qualities. Every being that feels itself to be a unity wants to retain its indivisible and unalterable essence—this is an eternal and necessary gift of nature. . . . But the word “character” is usually used in a higher sense, namely, when a person abides by his or her own distinguishing particularities and can in no way be estranged from them. . . . [In this sense] there are strong, consistent, thick, elastic, ®exible, malleable etc. characters.1 That this word should have such strong positive connotations in nineteenthcentury Germany is no surprise, for in many ways the idea of a distinguishing mark or emblem articulated the yearning for national unity that was so important to the cultural and political zeitgeist. Arndt’s mythologized history can easily be read through the context of these words, as the story of how the Germans were estranged from this “eternal and necessary gift,”and of how they might rediscover their own character. “Every nation,”we might paraphrase the words of the de¤nition, “wants to retain its indivisible and unalterable essence—this is an eternal and necessary gift of nature.” The term Charakter also found its way into the numerous musical lexica and “conversation books” of early-nineteenth-century Germany. But in these works the emphasis often falls on diversity rather than on unity. In his Musikalisches Lexicon of 1802, for instance, H. C. Koch de¤ned Charakter in the following manner: When one speaks of musical pieces one understands character as those properties and signs through which one piece is distinguished from another. Meter, tempo, rhythm, the type of melodic ¤gures and how they are used, the form, the accompaniment, modulation, style, the basic feeling and the particular way in which it is expressed, all of these things contribute now more and now less to the particular character of a musical piece.2 For Koch Charakter is above all composite—it emerges from a dynamic interplay of many different features. It should therefore not be surprising that the term should play such a large part in the criticism surrounding the search for a German opera, for it embodied the concept of creating unity out of diversity that was so central to the enterprise. Here, as in other instances , criticism often played a compensatory role: the idea of “character” took on such importance for early-nineteenth-century critics in part because the ideal of a charaktervoll opera, in which the different elements of the artwork would be informed by a single distinctive and unifying spirit, seemed so distant. The problem of how to ¤nd that unifying spirit forms the keynote of I.F.Mosel’s Versuch einer Aesthetik des dramatischen Tonsatzes (1813).3 Although Mosel’s work contains a historical section, it is primarily a guide to composition, related in style and structure to the works of Riepel, Koch, and Mattheson.4 Mosel devotes almost a third of his book to a discussion of character, which operates on three distinct levels. (1) Character in the Opera as a Whole “Above all,” Mosel writes, “the composer should attempt to penetrate into the spirit of the poetry that he must then clothe with music”: He contemplates exactly the type, the progress, and the goal of the plot that is placed before him, and then determines the general character of his musical composition. In tragic opera this character should be great and deeply moving, in heroic opera brilliant and worthy, in romantic Singspiel tender and touching, and in comic Singspiel charming and cheerful.5 (2) Character within the Individual Musical Numbers For Mosel, just as for Koch, the composer must create character within the individual musical numbers by skillfully manipulating many different parameters: Der Freischütz and the Character of the Nation 77 In addition to this general character, every piece of music (following the content of the text) also demands a certain key, movement, rhythm, intervals and accompaniment; everything is important, and everything makes its own essential contribution to the...