Play opera

In the 19th century, a game opera was understood to be a cheerful opera in the successor to the Singspiel . In contrast to opera buffa , game opera and singspiel do not contain recitatives , but spoken dialogues . A game opera was usually an opera with a fun-play-like or sentimental plot and light, pleasant music, in contrast to serious opera.

The game opera is derived from the French Opéra comique of the later 18th century, a specifically petty-bourgeois expression of the opera. The boundaries between the less musical “ farce with song”, the music-dramatic vaudeville and the more modern operetta are fluid .

Analogous to this, there are the role subjects or vocal subjects of the "play tenor" or "play bass" for singers with a lighter voice and acting, mostly comedic skills. Game operas were often performed on traveling theaters, in whose repertoire there was no clear distinction between drama and opera.

The works of Albert Lortzing are often cited as prime examples , such as Zar und Zimmermann , Der Wildschütz , Der Waffenschmied , or Otto Nicolais The Merry Wives of Windsor . Even Carl Maria von Weber's Peter Schmoll and his neighbors , Abu Hassan , The Three Pintos and Oberon and Heinrich Marschner wood thief and the Bäbu deemed's operas. Well-composed operas such as Conradin Kreutzer's Night Camp in Granada and Friedrich von Flotow's Martha are usually not counted in this genre.

The term game opera has often been used in German for a “national style” since the late 19th century.

literature

• Irmlind Capelle (ed.): Albert Lortzing and the conversation opera in the first half of the 19th century. Roundtable report on the occasion of Albert Lortzing's 200th birthday , Munich: Allitera 2004. ISBN 3-86520-076-1