Goethes Musiktheater: Singspiele, Opern, Festspiele, 'Faust' (review)

This book, Tina Hartmann's first on Goethe, covers his entire output of works of music theatre. His thirty-six librettos are expertly analysed in chronological order, starting with Erwin und Elmire and closing with Faust, in a series of chapters and excursions outlining the biographical and historical context of each work. During his lifetime remarkable strides were taken in the sphere of German music theatre. Hartmann was thus faced with an enormous challenge in delineating his achievement, including the need to master the immense secondary material on Goethe and to absorb it into her own account of the Singspiels, operas, Festspiele, and Faust.

The alarming rate of production in Goethe studies shows no sign of abating, but perhaps this book will at the very least give some pause to the prolific. In its own domain it is an achievement comparable with that of Boyle's sterling investigation of Goethe's poetry in the light of the spirit of his age or Youens's pioneering analysis of Schubert's Winterreise. After it the deluge of commentary can only continue with a heightened sense of the conditions of its own possibility—which is all to the good.

Hartmann sets out her objectives in her preface: to analyse the musical structures of Goethe's librettos and reveal their relation to contemporary developments, and to trace the growth of his musico-theatrical aesthetics, which reached its pinnacle in Faust. The point of departure is her recognition of the affinity between Goethe's Walpurgisnachtstraum and large passages of Faust II and developments in music theatre in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth, namely, Purcell's King Arthur and The Fairy Queen. What she has done is of such quality that it refreshes our views of Goethe's own practice of the 'perfection' of one's life in art. Goethe's endeavour to develop north German opera is here analysed as much as it imaginably could be in the light of music theatre at the time.

Goethe was a remarkable voice in the German quest for a national music theatre that began to intensify in the decade after his birth with the first German Singspiel, Hiller's Der Teufel ist los (1766), swiftly followed by Wieland and Schweitzer's Alceste (1773), Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1781) and Die Zauberflöte (1791), Beethoven's Fidelio (1814), and Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), and reaching culmination with Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer exactly one decade after his death.

The local detail of Goethe's Germany was notably different from Wagner's Bayreuth. Weimar was the seat of letters and philosophy in Germany during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, much as the Vienna of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert was the city of music. Despite its constellation of geniuses such as Schiller, Goethe, Herder, and Wieland, and their high intellectual culture, with their ideas on Bildung und Kultur (Education and Culture), Weimar was not a musical centre until Liszt went there in 1848. J. S. Bach had been court organist and Kammermusikus there from 1708 to 1717, but not until Hummel arrived in 1819 did another composer of stature settle there. In Goethe's lifetime Duchess Anna Amalia strove to enhance the musical life of the court through her employment of the composer Count Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff, through the semi-permanent residency granted to Bellomo's troupe of actors and singers, giving the duchy a repertory mainly of opere buffe, and through her own theatrical endeavours, yet the music she herself composed still sat comfortably among the polite conventions of the court. Goethe's knowledge of European music theatre greatly expanded Weimar's musical world. In his early years of writing Singspiels for the Liebhabertheater, the lack of professional musicians attached to the court became an immediate concern for him, and he was responsible for granting Corona Schröter, a professional singer, her residency in 1776. During these years Goethe's librettos...