In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Euryanthe: Recon¤guration and Transformation The Plot Structure of Euryanthe The origins of Euryanthe may be traced back to a letter that Weber received from the impresario Barbaja on 11 November 1821, inviting him to write a new opera for Vienna. Barbaja may have envisioned something along the lines of Der Freischütz, which had just enjoyed an enormously successful premiere. Weber had something else in mind. The similarities between the structure of Freischütz and Euryanthe as well as between the individual numbers in the two operas cannot obscure the fact that Euryanthe belongs to a fundamentally different operatic genre than its predecessor. Weber called Euryanthe a grosse romantische Oper, a description that requires some elucidation. The term, as Tusa points out, was remarkable for its “commixture of two genres, ‘grand opera’and ‘romantic opera,’that for the most part had previously been kept apart,”1 and was hardly common during the ¤rst decades of the nineteenth century. (According to Hermann Dechant, the¤rst work to be called a grosse romantische Oper was Hoffmann’s Aurora, written in 1811–12.2 ) In the context of an operatic title, both “grosse” and “romantische” were “combinatorial” terms, which suggested various things about the relationship between text and music, the subject matter of the opera, and even the general character of the work (see the discussion of operatic genre in chapter 1). The precise de¤nition of grosse Oper during this period was far from clear, but the “genre boundaries” of romantische Oper were perhaps even more elusive. The notoriously slippery adjective “romantic ” seems to have been applied to opera in two primary senses, senses that were themselves interrelated. First, the term suggested that the subject matter of the opera would have something to do with the marvelous, the supernatural , or the fantastic. Weber’s description of his Silvana as a Romantische Oper seems to have come from this sense of the word, and the poet and composer in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous story of the same name also use the term in this manner. But the term also had less distinct associations, bound up with the more general idea of “romantic music.” Weber’s use of the term in this sense appears perhaps at its most succinct in his introduction to Cherubini’s Lodoiska, in which he describes the temperament of the composer as typically “romantic”: A serious composer, often to the point of gloomy brooding; always choosing the most sharply de¤ned means, hence his glowing palette; laconic and lively; sometimes apparently brusque; throwing out ideas which in fact have a close inner connexion and when presented with their full harmonic ®avour are the distinguishing feature of this composer and explain the depth of his musical character, which, in the vast contours and masses conjured up by his imagination, still takes full account of every apparent detail: that is Cherubini.3 In this passage, of course, Weber is describing a romantic composer and not a romantic opera; nevertheless, it is the music itself that is the subject of his prose. It is the expressiveness of Cherubini’s music, and not its “fancifulness ,” that is truly romantic. In Weber’s description the term is associated with another group of ideas—seriousness, inner organic connection, harmonic richness, depth, and imagination—ideas which (as we have seen) were also central to the search for a German opera. A romantische Oper in this sense was not so much one which featured a marvelous or fantastic plot, but rather one in which music played more than an adjunct role in the drama, an opera whose music served as a gateway into the sublime. Each of the two adjectives in the subtitle for Euryanthe thus served to differentiate the new opera from its illustrious predecessor. The term große Oper suggested that dialogue would be replaced by recitative, but by using this term Weber was also placing Euryanthe in a different context, connecting it to the serious operas of Gluck and Mozart rather than to the traditions of German dialogue operas. The context of “grand opera” implied ¤rst that Euryanthe would maintain a serious and elevated tone throughout—the folksy Singspiel scenes that relieve the tension of Freischütz would have no place in the new opera. The differences between Freischütz and Euryanthe are in this sense analogous to the transformation of Das unterbrochene Opferfest from a heroisch-komische into a heroisch-tragische opera—the de®ating comedy of Ännchen’s “Einst...

Share