German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (review)

Cambridge University Press has done opera scholars and lovers an estimable service in publishing this volume. No one could be better qualified to lead us through the labyrinth of the history of German opera than John Warrack, and his accomplishment is little short of a miracle, especially considering the obstacles. Not only has he presented a straightforward chronological narrative (which must at times be adjusted to accommodate both specific composers and genre) with insights into musical style that reach both forward and backward, but he has put German opera into a political, sociological, and aesthetic context. He is, moreover, writing as a musician and true music scholar, not as a deconstructionist or Freudian psychologist. No borrowed or invented jargon is used; Warrack writes in clear, elegant English, and the reader need only be conversant with standard musical-analytical language. With the appearance of this volume, opera scholars now have two indispensable works surveying central national repertories of opera, the other being David Kimbell's Italian Opera (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

One central aspect of the history of opera in Germany is the pervasive theorizing avantla lettre. This is really two separate things: German opera composers and librettists and German aestheticians and philosophers were wont to theorize extensively about opera, and they did it in a prescriptive manner, citing what it could and should be. The goals for German opera were for centuries, it seems, far beyond the capabilities of either musicians (a prime example is E. T. A. Hoffmann, who theorized far in excess of his musical talents) or current technology to achieve. German theoretical ideas could come into practical being only when musical means allowed—the nineteenth-century coloristic-virtuosic orchestra and large-scale tonal modulations, for example. The most evident example of theorizing is the concept of the "collected/united work of art," which we would immediately tend to associate with Richard Wagner. It is no secret that others, such as Carl Maria von Weber, were calling for this operatic ideal decades before Wagner's Oper und Drama of 1851, but Warrack's chronological study makes it clear that this concept always existed, from the beginning. As early as the seventeenth century, societies were formed with "the serious aim of upholding the quality of German poetry by promulgating [Martin] Opitz's literary reforms," the most famous being the Nuremberg Blumenorden an der Pegnitz, founded in 1644 by Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and Johann Klaj (p. 21). In Frauenzimmer-Gesprächspiele (8 vols., 1641-49) Harsdörffer posits that German poetry, music, dance, painting, and stage design should be brought into a unified theatrical whole. As a corollary, Italian opera should be rejected as "affected, artificial and (worst of all) foreign: German opera should present heroic deeds and moral instruction" (Warrack's paraphrase, p. 21). This seems to be in nuce all that German opera actually became: reading Warrack's monograph straight through is almost like watching a photograph develop, for in Harsdörffer there is not only the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk but also the desire to make German opera autonomous, an offensive that was to develop in a dangerous way, based on beliefs of racial superiority, the rejection and attacking of other nationalities, and the need to instruct. Wagner's statements that Italian and French opera were debased entertainments ("tinsel opera") and that society was in need of redemption through his versions of Teutonic mythology and the subsequent Nazi appropriation of much of this immediately spring to mind.

A basic problem with any survey covering a few hundred years is the surfeit of information that must be sifted through and organized coherently, and that, of course, was a large part of Warrack's task. For the earliest stages of German opera history, however, the challenge is sometimes the lack of information. First of all, there is the question of the very definition of "German...