Song game

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The play of songs was a fashionable theatrical genre in the first half of the 19th century and corresponded roughly to the French vaudeville .

characterization

In contrast to the comedic, frivolous acts of French comedies and the artistic arias of Italian operas, song play preferred sentimental, often patriotic subjects with folk song-like musical interludes.

The border to other musical theater genres is fluid. When the musical interludes were newly composed and went beyond folk-song simplicity, the pieces belonged more to the Singspiel (the German counterpart of the Opéra comique ).

The composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt was one of the first to use the term Liederspiel around 1801. His piece Lieb und Treue (1797) stayed in the Berlin repertoire for years. In the spirit of the “second Berlin song school” around Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter , the musical aspect of the song game should remain emphatically simple. It retained a local significance in Germany, but could not establish itself in Vienna, the largest German-speaking city at the time. By the middle of the century, the song game went out of fashion.

Performance practice

In contrast to the Singspiel or the Spieloper , the Liederspiel was not designed for specialized singers, but for singing actors. The inserted songs were not operatic, often only strophic , and were easy to sing. Sometimes new texts were sung to well-known "folk" melodies, and apparently the audience sometimes sang along with what might have seemed like a church chant brought to the theater. The theater was thus turned into a private space or sacred space , similar to how in Franz Schubert's songs the splendor of opera singing was transformed into an apparently intimate experience.

Authors and Examples

Important lyricists of lieder games were August von Kotzebue and later Karl von Holtei ( Der alten Feldherr 1825, with the then famous “Mantellied”), who appeared in them himself and accompanied himself on the guitar. Johann Wolfgang Goethe tried his hand at this genre, but was not successful with the public. Most of the Liederspiele were translated from French, despite the effort to create something specifically German with them.

One of the most famous song games (which was still talked about decades later in social circles) was the parlor game Rose, Die Müllerin, performed by Elisabeth von Staegemann in the Berlin Salon in 1816 . A cyclical setting of the inserted poems was carried out by Ludwig Berger under the title The beautiful miller - chants from a social song game (op. 11). This cycle precedes Schubert's song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin from 1823, because Wilhelm Müller also provided five of a total of ten poems for this.

Composers such as Ludwig Berger , Conradin Kreutzer , Friedrich Heinrich Himmel ( Fanchon or the Leyermädel 1804), Franz Carl Adelbert Eberwein ( Lenore 1829 on a text by Holtei), and later Carl Zeller ( Die Thomasnacht 1869) have set songs to music.

literature

  • Johann Friedrich Reichardt: “Something about the Liederspiel”, in: Allgemeine Musikische Zeitung 43: 1801
  • Susanne Johns: The scenic song play between 1800 and 1830. A contribution to the history of Berlin theater , Frankfurt am Main: Lang 1988. ISBN 3-631-40435-2