German National Opera
German National Opera has been the ideal idea of an opera since the end of the 18th century, without there having been a clearly defined opera genre or a specific institution of this name.
Similar to the ideal of the national theater , the idea of a “national opera” attempted to bridge the gap between court theater and popular theater . The aristocracy and the common people should come together in the awareness of a “national” and differentiate themselves from the “foreign”. This idea took on political weight in different contexts, because the German-speaking area never had a common state connection and most operas were imported from the Italian and French-speaking areas, whereas the German-language products only achieved local importance.
Works
There is no genre history of the “German National Opera”, as very different works were presented as such. The common denominator is an actual or longed-for triumph over foreign language operas. In 1776, in the run-up to the French Revolution , the Austrian Emperor Joseph II called today's Burgtheater “Teutsches Nationaltheater next der Burg” in order to show itself close to the people, because the language of the nobility was still French. Composers like Mozart wrote German-language operas for this theater, of which the Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) became the best known. In addition, other works in German were created for other stages. Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte also falls into this category .
During the French period , demands arose to demarcate the fragmented German-speaking area from powerful France, which also dominated contemporary opera production. An attempt in this direction is the opera Fidelio (since 1805) by Beethoven , which turned against lighter, mostly imported entertainment art with humanitarian ideas. The romantic opera tried in the field of nature and mythology to find "national" opera substances such as ETA Hoffmann with Undine (1816).
With Der Freischütz (1821), Carl Maria von Weber achieved one of the rare international successes of a German-language opera by combining the “German” forest with the poaching theme, which at the time was socially explosive. Successors included Heinrich Marschner ( Der Vampyr , 1822, Hans Heiling , 1833), Richard Wagner ( Tannhäuser and the Singing War on Wartburg , 1845, Lohengrin , 1850, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , 1868) or Robert Schumann with Genoveva (1850) .
Competitive thinking
Except for the Freischütz , none of these operas reached the performance figures of the successful French and Italian operas. Max Maria von Weber accused the extremely successful Berlin composer Giacomo Meyerbeer in 1866 of writing Italian and French operas. Instead, he should “return to the German fatherland and help to build on the building of a German national opera with the few who truly honor art”. As German-language operas, only Wagner's musical dramas had a lasting international success since the 1880s.
Decoupling from nationalism
In nationalistic depictions from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the middle of the 20th century, the “German national opera” is often presented as a genre with definable content that has prevailed, sometimes based on the visions in music journalism by Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner (e.g. Was ist deutsch ?, 1878). The gradual rethinking since the end of the Second World War was sealed by the suggestion of the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus to understand “the national as a functional rather than a substance concept”.
literature
- Celia Applegate , Pamela Potter (Ed.): Music and German National Identity, University of Chicago Press 2002. ISBN 978-0-22602-131-7
- Hermann Danuser, Gerfried Münkler (Ed.): German Masters - Evil Spirits? National self-discovery in music, Argus, Schliengen 2001.
- Wolfgang Michael Wagner: Carl Maria von Weber and the German National Opera, Schott, Mainz 1994. ISBN 978-3-79570-284-7
Individual evidence
- ^ Max Maria von Weber: Carl Maria von Weber. Ein Lebensbild , Keil, Leipzig 1866, vol. 3, p. 217. Online: http://www.zeno.org/nid/20007800541
- ↑ z. B. von Gerhart von Westerman : Knaurs opera guide . A story of the opera . Munich 1952.
- ^ Carl Dahlhaus: The music of the 19th century , Laaber 1980, p. 204. ISBN 978-3-79970-748-0