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Home , Der Vampyr, Grand opera, Hans Heiling, Heinrich Marschner, Richard Wagner, Romantische Oper

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

OPERA, THE NATION, AND THE IDEOLOGY OF GENRE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

A thesis submitted to the

Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF MUSIC

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music

2004

Kevin Robert Burke

B.M. Appalachian State University, 2002

Committee Chair: Dr. Hilary Poriss

ABSTRACT

Historians have struggled with how to define German opera of the early-nineteenth century. Those who adopt “German Romantic opera” as the sole designator of German opera

tend to focus on canonical works, purporting a teleological culmination with Wagner’s operas.

These approaches, however, fail to account for concurrent explorations with German Grand

opera and comic opera. This thesis investigates some historiographic problems and proposes a

contextual approach tied in with national identity for reassessing German opera in the early

nineteenth century. Theories of Anthony Smith and Benedict Anderson, among others, help to

explore themes of national identity in works of three overlooked or misrepresented composers:

Louis Spohr, Heinrich Marschner, and Albert Lortzing.

Spohr intended his opera Jessonda to fulfill a prescription for national opera outlined in

his essay, “Appeal to German Composers.” By calling for the removal of foreign elements and

for the integration of national ones, Spohr’s strategy resembles Aristotle’s view on how theater

morally affects audiences through a catharsis of purgation and clarification. Several scholars

have argued that national writings often employ gendered language. The gendering of the nation

as feminine in much nationalist discourse suggests how an individual’s national identity relates

to sexual identity. Marschner’s Hans Heiling presents several fictional characters that react to

constructions of gender in nineteenth-century life. Shifts in social structure in the age of

revolution created a more unified, nationally conscious middle class. An analysis of Lortzing’s

Czar und Zimmermann shows mediation between comic opera and art music for the emerging

middle class.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A University Summer Research Grant enabled me to complete this project in a timely manner. I wish to thank my committee members Dr. N. Kelly Hale and Dr. Mary Sue Morrow for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. A very special thanks goes to my thesis advisor,

Dr. Hilary Poriss, who oversaw this project from the beginning with her expertise and guidance.

Above all, I’d like to thank my father for showing me how to set goals and meet them, and my mother for encouraging me to be a critical thinker.

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ii

LIST OF CD TRACKS iii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1

The Historiography of German Opera 3

Theories of National Identity 14

German Opera and National Identity 17

Introduction to Case Studies 28

CHAPTER TWO: NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH CATHARSIS 29

CHAPTER THREE: GENDERING A NATIONAL OPERA 48

CHAPTER FOUR: NATIONAL OPERA AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE 65

CONCLUSION 83

BIBLIOGRAPHY 86

APPENDIX 91

i LIST OF FIGURES AND EXAMPLES

1.1 Excerpt from John Warrack’s German Opera Appendix 1.2 A. B. Marx’s Classification of Musico-Dramatic Genres 1.3 A. B. Marx’s Classification of Opera in Opposing Terms

2.1 Jessonda: No. 2 Recitative “Du hast dem Opfer dich entzogen” 2.2 Jessonda: No. 13 Recitative “Mein teurer Freund, ich teile dein Gefühl” 2.3 Jessonda: No. 12 Aria “Der Kriegestlust ergeben” (text) 2.4 Il barbiere di Siviglia: Finale “Di sì felice innesto” 2.5 Jessonda: No. 28 Finale “Mein Schritt, beflügelt von Entzücken” (chorale)

3.1 Hans Heiling: No. 3 Aria “An jenem Tag” 3.2 Hans Heiling: No. 14 Aria “Es nahet die Rache” 3.3 Hans Heiling: No. 7 Finale “Wir hupft mir von Freuden das Herz” 3.4 Hans Heiling: Vorspiel “Genug! Beendet euer emsig Treiben”

4.1 Czar und Zimmermann: No. 1 Introduction “Greifet an, greifet an und rührt die Hände” 4.2 Czar und Zimmermann: No. 15 Duet “Darf eine niedre Magd es wagen” 4.3 Czar und Zimmermann: No. 3 Recitative “Verraten! Von euch verraten” 4.4 Czar und Zimmermann: No. 3 Aria “Die Macht das Zepters” 4.5 Czar und Zimmermann: No. 4 Aria “O sancta justitia! Ich möchte rasen” 4.6 Czar und Zimmermann: No. 4 Cantabile “Diese ausdrucksvollen Züge”

ii CD TRACKS

1. Jessonda Recitative “Mein teurer Freund, ich teile dein Gefühlt” 0:00–0:25

2. Jessonda Aria “Der Kriegeslust ergeben” 0:00–0:48

3. Jessonda Finale “Mein Schritt, beflügelt von Entzücken” 4:08–4:35

4. Hans Heiling Aria “An jenem Tag” 0:00–0:15

1:30–1:58

5. Hans Heiling Aria “Es nahet die Rache” 9:38–9:50

6. Hans Heiling Finale “Wir hupft mir vor Freuden das Herz” 2:15–2:24

7. Hans Heiling Vorspiel “Genug! Beendet euer emsig Treiben” 13:45–14:26

8. Czar und Zimmermann Introduction “Greifet an und rührt die Hände” 0:00–0:36

9. Czar und Zimmermann Duet “Darf eine niedre Magd es wagen” 1:30–1:40

10. Czar und Zimmermann Recitative and Aria “Verraten!” 0:00–0:26

2:48–3:06

11. Czar und Zimmermann Aria “O sancta justitia!” 0:45–1:02

4:38–5:00

iii

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Here nature has made a new chain, the transmission from nation to nation! Arts, sciences, culture and languages have in a long procession refined themselves and have defined nations—nations which are the first link of the progression provided by nature.1

-Johann Gottfried Herder

What makes German Romantic Opera distinctively German? Is it simply the language, or

are there features of the libretto—like supernatural, chivalric and medieval themes—and the

music that clearly separate it in style and substance from contemporary Italian and French opera?

Can German operas manifest characteristics of foreign styles without losing their essential

Germanness? These questions come to mind when comparing works like Weber’s Der

Freischütz and Wagner’s Tannhaüser with operas of their contemporaries in France and Italy.

Stephen Meyer believes that “German opera did have a distinct voice, despite its dependence on foreign models.” 2 As Meyer recognizes, this claim becomes problematic because one can hardly

find a German opera composer who was not heavily influenced by foreign models in his/her own

opera compositions. In his study of Weber’s translation of Méhul’s Joseph into German, Meyer

explains that themes in the opera’s plot conform to the sentiments of post-Napoleanic German

nationalism. Meyer feels that Méhul’s dramatic use of orchestral motives and ensemble writing

“foreshadows similar techniques in Weber’s operas.”3

1 Harold James, A German Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989), 40.

2 Stephen Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for German Opera (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 51.

3 Ibid., 73.

Another concern with defining or recognizing a unique German operatic genre is that

opera did not occupy the minds of German critics; they were more concerned with instrumental

works. According to Mary Sue Morrow, at the turn of the century the German “aesthetic

preference for vocal music, especially opera, that pervaded the world of the German

Enlightenment gave way to an exalted view of the powers of purely instrumental composition.”4

Critics of instrumental works made up the majority of those who propagated these ideas. There is no doubt, however, that members of the educated class promoted absolute instrumental music as an art for Germany, whereas opera was a genre more commonly associated with Italy and

France. Why then, would there even be a need for a German national opera?

An understanding of German Romantic opera is as difficult for us as it was for contemporary German writers; David Charlton maintains that, “‘Opera’ meant no one single type of theater in 1813.”5 Thus historians of German opera have faced the challenge of interpreting these inconsistencies. The difficulties in establishing German Romantic opera’s meaning and significance within Western art music history are evident in its history and historiography—how historians and other writers on music have inconsistently struggled to define it with models used for identifying other musical phenomena.

4 Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.

5 David Charlton, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 173.

The Historiography of German Opera

Scholars do not always treat German Romantic opera as a distinct entity. Inconsistent

treatments of German Romantic opera in its history and historiography have made it difficult to

establish its parameters as a genre. Those who have attempted to define German Romantic opera

directly have done so in varying manners. Winton Dean describes the history of German

Romantic opera, for instance, as one largely concerned with the symbolic, the supernatural, and

with solving the problem of through-composition.6 Often historians have tried to explain it by

comparing it to other genres. Carl Dahlhaus chose to do so alongside opéra comique in order to

link the two to a larger aesthetic concern:

German romantic opera and French opéra comique, then, shared a complex of features that included not only an attraction to folk music but also a predilection for picturesque songs and choruses and a fondness for colorful timbres, tone painting, and descriptive orchestral music. As a whole this complex may be understood as a musical offshoot of an idea taken from aesthetics: the Characteristic.7

Other historians define German Romantic opera by what makes it different than other genres.

Stephen Meyer believes that while Italian opera in the eighteenth century was characterized by the establishment of musico-dramatic conventions like da capo aria, German opera was distinguished by a shared ideology of plot tropes: “It is in the character of this dichotomy

[between good and evil], not in any particular musico-dramatic form or gestures, that the German

Romantic opera found its distinctive voice.”8

6 Winton Dean “German Opera,” in The Age of Beethoven, 1790-1830, ed. Gerald Abraham, Oxford History of Music, vol. 8 (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), 455.

7 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. by Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 69.

8 Meyer, 80.

John Warrack’s recent history of German opera, however, seeks a broader system of

classification, which pays little attention to the nature of the plot and to the dramatic character of

the music. He identifies which works from his study are Singspiele by their use of spoken

dialogue (figure 1.1).9 Although spoken dialogue is a demarcating feature of German opera, his

confinement of these works to one tradition of comic Singspiele does not account for many other

elements that differ between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas with spoken dialogue.

Warrack does little to understand or come to terms with the significance of the composers’ genre

designators, such romantische Oper, tragische Oper, or komische Oper. His history offers only a

list of data and does not seek further meaning. His application of formalism—“understood as the

doctrine that music’s content and meaning are contained within or comprised by its musical

elements alone”10—contributes to the difficulty in defining German Romantic opera.

Since none of these writers have agreed on the essence of German Romantic opera,

describing instead its characteristics or its relation to other genres, conceptual difficulties often

arise, particularly in attempts describe history as a continuously evolving art form. Not only has the genre itself proved difficult to define; scholarship has inconsistently used the various titles given by the composers, such as romantische Oper (romantic opera) and grosse Oper (grand

opera). As a result, many historians employ the label German Romantic opera as an all-

encompassing descriptor for all German opera in the early nineteenth century. Though the label

itself is not inappropriate (since most of the librettos during this period from roughly 1810–1848

contain elements of Romanticism), many of the histories just cited assume that German

9 John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

10 Leo Treitler, “The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas John Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 372–3.

Romantic opera’s main historiographic function is to bridge the gap between Singspiele and

Wagner’s music dramas. In doing so, they have often created arbitrary definitions of the genre that will better suit their teleologic narratives and have mostly ignored the aesthetic, cultural, and

political factors that surround the works themselves.

In this chapter I wish to investigate these historiographic problems, particularly the

difficulty in defining German Romantic opera, the inconsistent use of the composers’ genre

designators for the works, the attempts to use the umbrella term “German Romantic opera” as a

bridge between Singespiele and Wagner’s music dramas, and the goal-oriented approach to

writing a history that culminates with Wagner. As an alternative, I wish to demonstrate how a

history of German Romantic opera tied in with the shaping of national identity will offer a more

nuanced perspective on the genre.

Winton Dean, Carl Dahlhaus, and Stephen Meyer are not the only scholars who have found it difficult to define German Romantic opera. Nineteenth-century attempts often followed the empirical approach promulgated in Enlightenment ideology, organizing musical works into systems of classification, by providing the heuristic evaluation of inner structures at the exclusion of social context. The early nineteenth-century German theorist, A. B. Marx published a classification of music-dramatic works in the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in

1828 (figure 1.2).11 The system sought to come to terms with the wide range of music-dramatic

works that were either through composed, had spoken dialogue, or included a chorus. He also

presented a classification system focusing only on opera (figure 1.3).12 This second classification

system divides opera into elevated and popular styles, based on subject matter, complexity, and

11 This diagram is reproduced in Meyer, 32.

12 Ibid., 33.

tone. The problem with this classification system is that it creates a binary opposition at a time

when many German operas exhibited traits considered both popular and elevated, as in Mozart’s

Die Zauberflöte.13 Marx’s classification also refers to German and Italian opera, but not to

French opera, even though by that time there had been many grosse Opern based in the tradition

of French Grand opera, such as Weber’s Euryanthe, Spohr’s Jessonda and Poissl’s Athalia.14

The difficulties in defining German Romantic opera are exacerbated by the variety of ways composers designated the genre of new German operas.

In the nineteenth century, German opera composers began to use more specific descriptors for their works than Singspiele.15 Although the choice in genre designators is not

consistent among nineteenth-century German opera composers, Meyer assesses how these

composers used the titles. Grosse Oper typically indicates that the work is through-composed

with a serious tone, and based on medieval or historical subject matter. Romantische Oper

usually refers to an opera with supernatural or fantastic themes, usually with spoken dialogue.16

Other titles used by German opera composers, such as heroische Oper, komische Oper, tragische

13 Ibid.

14 The use of French Grand Opera in this context is not to be confused with the French operas by composers like Auber and Meyerbeer that focused on realism beginning in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. Writers had referred to elevated forms of French opera in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as grand opéra. These works employed ballet and chorus, emphasized spectacle, and would have been performed at the Paris Opéra. Examples are Cherubini’s Démophon (1788), Mehúl’s Adrien (1799), and Spontini’s Fernand Cortez (1809).

15 There has been some disagreement in most scholarship over whether to accept the composers’ designation or to create new ones based on their content and structure.

16 Meyer, 116–7.

Oper, and Zauberoper described the subject matter of the opera. In some instances composers

combined these titles. For example, Weber calls his Euryanthe a grosse romantisch Oper.17

Instead of discussing the variety of contemporary German opera types, many historians rather emphasize German Romantic opera in a way that allows it to serve as a bridge between eighteenth-century Singspiele and Wagner’s music dramas. Winton Dean, for example, describes the early nineteenth-century German opera composer Peter von Winter as a step in the evolving state of German opera: “Winter commanded a feeling for the stage and for felicitous modulation, including a fondness for contrasting keys a third apart; this anticipates a favorite gambit of

Romantic opera but was probably derived from Mozart.”18 Carl Dahlhaus, however, stresses the problems of making such connections:

The notion that German romantic opera derived from the singspiel is not completely wrongheaded but merely askew. Terminologically, it is above reproach insofar as any German opera with spoken dialogue can be classified as a singspiel. However, it falls short historically, since neither the north German nor the Viennese singspiel represents an important step on the road to Der Freischütz…As seen from the history of genres, there was no line of development in German opera linking Der Freischütz with Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio.19

Dahlhaus raises some important concerns absent in histories like John Warrack’s, which makes

no distinction between Singspiele and German Romantic opera. Connections may exist, but

Darwinian histories of German opera written without adequate aesthetic and political contexts

are unconvincing.

17 Michael Tusa, Euryanthe and Carl Maria von Weber’s Dramaturgy in German Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 50. Tusa explores how the characteristics of how these two genre types of German opera play out in Euryanthe. His approach is primarily toward manuscript study.

18 Dean, 458–9.

19 Dahlhaus, 68.

Although Dahlhaus’s reluctance to draw a fixed connection between Singspiele and

German Romantic opera is compelling, his work raises a different problem by restricting German

Romantic Opera to a specific time span of “three decades, from Hoffmann’s Undine (1816) and

Spohr’s Faust (1816) to Schumann’s Genoveva (1850) and Wagner’s Lohengrin (1848).”20 I will discuss Dahlhaus’s goal-oriented approach to Lohengrin later, but will first question his reason

for placing the beginnings of German Romantic opera in 1816.

Dahlhaus provides no support for his claim that German Romantic opera should begin in

1816. What, afterall, is one to do with Weber’s Silvana (1810), Spohr’s Alruna (1808) and

Hoffmann’s Der Trank der Unsterblichkeit (1808), all titled by their composers as romantische

Oper?21 One could speculate that Dahlhaus may consider Undine as the realization of

Hoffmann’s feelings toward romantic opera, as expressed in the 1813 essay The Poet and the

Composer.22 If this is true, however, Hoffmann’s ideas conflict with Dahlhaus’s restricted view

of the history of German Romantic opera to the nineteenth century, for in describing the

aesthetics behind romantic opera, Hoffmann provides Die Zauberflöte as an example.23 It is thus

unclear what Dahlhaus’s intentions were for providing such arbitrary dates for German Romantic

opera.

20 Ibid.

21 Meyer, 221 n.2. It is uncertain whether Dahlhaus was aware of these earlier operas, for his main source, Siegfried Goslich, Die deutsche romantische Oper (Tuzing: Schneider, 1975), does not distinguish between the various genre signifiers. Meyer relies on secondary sources for the dates and genre designators of these works, and only one of Meyer’s sources predates Dahlhaus’s book: Hermann Dechant, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Oper “Aurora,” Regensburger Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 2 (Regensburg: G. Bosse, 1975).

22 E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. by David Charlton, trans. by Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

23 Hoffmann, 206–7.

Dahlhaus also confines German Romantic opera to these dates by relying only on well-

known works that may or may not adequately represent the genre. His reluctance to connect

German Romantic opera to early German operas as other historians have done has caused him to place restrictions on which works fall under the umbrella of the title German Romantic opera and

to overlook others that may share similarities. By citing Friedrich Himmel’s Die Sylphen (1806),

for instance, Aubrey Garlington demonstrates the appearance of “the hallmarks of the German

Romantic opera long before Hoffmann and Spohr moved toward this genre.”24 Ranges of dates

are helpful for addressing specific issues surrounding a genre, but are counterproductive when

presented in such a restrictive manner, for exceptions almost always exist. The problems arising

from the temptations to use German Romantic opera as a link between eighteenth-century

Singspiele and Wagner’s music dramas and to confine it within arbitrary dates continue to make

German Romantic opera difficult to understand as a genre.

Dahlhaus’s reference to Lohengrin as the endpoint of German Romantic opera

exemplifies historians’ tendency to construct a teleology that culminates with Wagner. A survey

of several sources shows how historians have continued to perpetuate this goal-oriented strategy.

In 1945, Richard Engländer stated, “Only in Lohengrin is this union [of subject matter and

through composition] present and the creation of a German Romantic opera complete.”25 Even while questioning the origins of German Romantic opera, Garlington accepts Lohengrin as its culmination, citing Engländer:

Thirty years ago Richard Engländer set the stage for the present investigation with his thought-provoking contention that German Romantic opera came fully to fruition in one

24 Aubrey S. Garlington, “German Romantic Opera and the Problem of Origins,” Musical Quarterly 63 (1977): 242-60.

25 Richard Engländer, “The Struggle between German and Italian Opera at the Time of Weber,” Musical Quarterly 31 (1945): 486.

work only, Lohengrin. And Lohengrin, of course, marks the end, not the beginning, of a phase in Wagner’s development.26

By the end of the century, scholars had internalized Engländer’s argument, perpetuating it in

their own writings without acknowledging the source. In 1992, while constructing a linear

development of German Romantic opera from Hoffmann through Weber up to Wagner, Steven

Paul Scher wrote:

If all this seems a roundabout way to get to my topic, I beg your indulgence. I first wanted to give some practical reasons why Hoffmann’s all-important role—in initially formulating the concept of German Romantic opera and decisively influencing its subsequent development, which culminated in Wagner’s Lohengrin—has not been duly appreciated.27

Engländer’s article appears in Scher’s bibliography but is not cited for the above quote,

demonstrating that at this point the idea had become received opinion.28

The progress of this teleological idea can be traced through the various Grove

dictionaries. In A Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1889 and in the 1927 and 1955 versions

of the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the discussion of composers like Weber and

Spohr within the main heading of “Opera” is completely separate from Wagner.29 In fact, they

are not even in close proximity, marginalized to opposite ends of the article by an account of

Italian opera from Rossini to Verdi. Not until the publication of the New Grove Dictionary of

26 Garlington, 262.

27 Stephen Paul Scher, “Hoffmann, Weber, Wagner: The Birth of Romantic Opera from the Spirit of Literature?” in German Literature and Music in the 19th Century, eds. Gerald Chapple, Frederick Hall, and Hans Schulte (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992), 229.

28 Ibid., 241–2n13.

29 A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1889 ed., s. v. “Opera”; Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1927 ed., s. v. “Opera”; Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1955 ed., s. v. “Opera.”

Music and Musicians in 1980 were Weber, Spohr, and Wagner discussed together in a subsection

dedicated entirely to Germany (Opera IV).30 Not only are they included in same section, but the author connects the subject matter of Wagner’s librettos to that of the early nineteenth-century romantics. Engländer’s teleology culminating with Lohengrin was original in his 1945 article,

and by 1980 the connection between Wagner and the early romantics discussed in the New

Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians was received opinion.

In communicating goal-oriented histories, some historians employ a type of narrative that

Hayden White has referred to as the Romance: “The Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-

identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory

over it, and his final liberation from it.”31 German opera historians have often relied on the

Romance narrative. Dean, for example, treats Weber’s contributions to German Romantic opera

as the acts of a hero: “Weber’s life-work is a paradigm of German Romantic opera in its glories,

its hesitations, and the obstacles with which it was confronted.”32 Moreover, Engländer emplots

the development of German Romantic Opera itself as a Romance narrative: “it is one of those

cases in the history of opera in which artistic and political motives united in giving the impetus

for the final attack which led to victory.”33 Although such a model is useful, providing an

accessible context for processing historical information, historians often attribute disputes

between entire cultural groups to individuals within those groups. Engländer reduces the conflict

30 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980 ed., s. v. “Opera IV: Germany and Austria.”

31 Haydn White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 8–9. White’s theory of a romance narrative is based on Hegel’s theory of historical emplotment (93).

32 Dean, 488.

33 Engländer, 485.

between German and Italian opera down to a narrative struggle of two composers: “Although the

Italian language was no longer a factor, this moment—when Weber and Spontini stood face to

face—was perhaps the most dramatic in the decisive battle between German and Italian opera.”34

Engländer thus simplifies the opposing forces of two cultures to the interaction between two individuals, Weber and Spontini, providing a limited view of the surrounding contexts. White refers to this reduction as a trope in historical language, metonymy: “By Metonymy, then, one can simultaneously distinguish between two phenomena and reduce one to the status of a manifestation of the other.”35

The difficulty in defining German Romantic relates back to inconsistencies in the

histories of German opera. Narratives are an effective way of communicating history and

meaning, but the few histories of German Romantic opera do not provide enough of a

comprehensive view of the surrounding cultural, aesthetic, and political forces necessary to

create an adequate narrative. New and contextual approaches, which offer new and fresh

perspectives, will aid in gaining a more comprehensive view. As Lawrence Stone has observed

in new forms of narrative histories:

The many-faceted changes in content, objective method, and style of historical writing, which are all happening at once, have clear elective affinities with one another: they all fit neatly together. No single word is adequate to sum them all up, and so, for the time being, ‘narrative’ will have to serve as a shorthand code-word for all that is going on.36

I suggest approaching the history of German opera from marginalized issues related to its historical context. Producing narratives driven by a contextual approach can enrich the larger

34 Ibid.

35 White, 35.

36 Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 96.

scope of German Romantic opera by filling in the holes that exist in our published histories. One

such work on German opera has already demonstrated how a small, focused study enriches the

larger picture of German Romantic opera. Meyer’s recent book Carl Maria von Weber and the

Search for a German Opera presents a compelling study of German Romantic opera from a new perspective. He closely examines Weber’s production of Mehúl’s Joseph, an opéra comique, which the composer translated into German, and the production of Winter’s Das unterbrochene

Opferfest, a Singspiel for which Weber composed recitatives. By observing the alterations he made for productions of these works in Dresden, Meyer teases out a wealth of similarities to

Weber’s own operas, Der Freischütz and Euryanthe.37 Common aesthetic choices that Meyer

identifies may also be relevant to discussing other German opera composers, and thus may

enrich our view of German Romantic opera as a whole. Meyer’s work thus focuses on a unique

tenet of German opera production in the early-nineteenth century without relying on pre-

conceived notions of where German opera was heading at that time and of what dates it

encompasses. I wish to build on his study by examining a context that he does not consider:

national identity.

37 Meyer, 26–7.

Theories of National Identity

Before considering nationalism’s relationship to German Romantic opera, however, we

should attempt to clarify what we mean by “nation” and “nationalism.” Benedict Anderson

argues that nation, nationality, and nationalism are all “notoriously difficult to define, let alone to

analyze.”38 He believes that a nation is “imagined because the members of even the smallest

nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in

the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”39 Thus for Anderson, despite national borders, a central government, and even a distinct language (common identifiers for many present-day nations), the only common characteristic a nation holds is that members of that nation space (either conceptual or physical) can conceive of their relation to others members a priori.

How do members of a nation recognize each other, and how do they identify those who do not belong? Since Anderson does not rely on language, borders, or a central government to make these distinctions, he takes a step further to differentiate between nations: “In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”40 Instead of relying on objective criteria, the common perspective

and way in which the individuals conceive of their national membership identifies them as

belonging to a nation. Although Anderson’s strategy is helpful and avoids some of the problems

38 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), 12.

39 Ibid., 15.

40 Ibid.

of essentialism or criteria based on objective characteristics, there is little way of knowing how to understand one’s imagined sense of belonging to people with whom they have had no contact, without relying on religion and ethnicity. Other writers have explored alternative means for defining nation than Anderson’s.

Anthony D. Smith isolates the cultural, ethnic group that makes up a nation, identifying it as an ethnie, “characterized by a sense of origin, a sense of distinctiveness and a sense of place.

They are more than categories, they are communities.”41 Smith recognizes four recurrent

dimensions of cultural community and identity:

1. A sense of stability, and rootedness, of the particular cultural unity of population; 2. A sense of difference, or distinctiveness and separateness, of that cultural unit; 3. A sense of continuity with previous generations of the cultural unit, through memories, myths, and traditions; 4. A sense of destiny and mission, of shared hopes and aspirations, of that culture- community.42

A nation has more definite parameters:

1. A definite historic territory or homeland (and not just an association with it); 2. A common economy, with territorial mobility throughout; 3. A shared public, mass education-based culture; 4. Common legal rights and duties for all members.43

During the nineteenth century, Germany was in the process of shifting from an ethnie into a nation.44 According to Smith, “the process of turning an ethnie into a nation is one that is

associated with the politicization of culture, the delimitation of space, and the standardization of

41 Anthony D. Smith, “The Formation of National Identity,” in Identity, ed. Harris, 132.

42 Ibid., 131.

43 Ibid., 135.

44 Smith’s discussion focuses on nations and ethnies rather than states. Unlike an ethnie or nation, a state is not a cultural or social community, but a political-legal organization. Even though states may include some of the latter four features listed above, they are not as significant in relation to national identity formation because they are not culturally defined.

social life.”45 Although other well-known writers on nationalism have provided their own astute

characteristics for defining and recognizing nations (Hobsbawm, Anderson, Gellner),46 Smith’s

models are of particular interest because his writings embrace a substantial focus on national

identity.

To understand German Romantic opera as a national genre, one must explore the

intersection of its development with the period of Germany’s shift from an ethnie to a nation.

This study will apply Smith’s first four dimensions of an ethnie and the second and fourth

parameters of a nation to an exploration of the ways in which German opera is intertwined with

contemporary discussions of nationalism. In order to explore German Romantic opera and

national identity in terms of Smith’s theories, I wish to identify parallels in the German nation,

German music making, and German Romantic opera.

45 Ibid., 137.

46 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York: World Publishing, 1962), and Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983).

German Opera and National Identity

Smith’s characteristics of identity, cultural community, and nation are evident in

contemporary writings on German nationalism and German music. A brief survey of these

themes demonstrates the relationship of German Romantic opera to contemporary ideas of the

nation.

1. A Sense of Stability, and Rootedness, of the Particular Cultural Unit of Population

A cultural community’s stability depends on unification and self-sufficiency, where all

members contribute to the group’s aspirations without having to rely on outside sources. This

theme occurs frequently in writings on German nationalism and on the goals for German operatic

composition. In 1846 Hermann von Beckerath wrote, “The spirit of the Volk in material form

strives for the unity of the nation.”47 The arts increased Germany’s ability to recognize itself as a

distinct culture group, for cultural expression thrived when the community came together and worked internally.

In his essay The Poet and the Musician, E.T.A. Hoffmann argued that the composer and librettist be the same person. In his Socratic dialogue, the character Ludwig expresses his desire for this unification:

Indeed, in that far realm which often envelops us in curious presentiments, from where mysterious voices echo down to us and awaken all the resonances dormant in the burdened breast, which once awake shoot joyfully upwards like tongues of fire, so that we become partakers in the bliss of that paradise—it is there that poets and musicians are

47 James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 28.

closely kindred members of one church; for the secret of words and sounds is one and the same, unveiling to both the ultimate sublimity.48

Troubled by the popularity of Italian opera in Dresden, Carl Maria von Weber presented his own goals for achieving a German opera that resulted in a unified and “self-sufficient” work of art in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung:

Of course when I speak of opera I am speaking of the German ideal, namely the self- sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are molded together in a certain way and dissolve, to form a new world.49

And later in the essay:

Whereas other nations concern themselves chiefly with the sensuous satisfaction of isolated moments, the German demands a self-sufficient work of art, in which all of the parts make up a beautiful and unified whole.50

As Germany envisioned its future involving the unification of its member states to achieve self-

sufficiency and an ability to have an economy as strong as that in England and France, promoters of German opera, like Weber, sought to create a distinct and unified genre independent of foreign opera and to stabilize Germany’s cultural identity.

48 E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Poet and the Composer,” in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 195.

49 Carl Maria von Weber, Writings on Music, ed. By John Warrack and trans. by Martin Cooper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 201.

50 Weber, Writings, 207.

2. A Sense of Difference, of Distinctiveness and Separateness, of that Cultural Unit

In order to promote unity within the German-speaking cultural group, German writers

defined themselves by what they were not. A demarcation of national styles is evident in

contemporary literary writings. Friedrich Schlegel lamented Germany’s historic lack of

significance in poetry, envisioning a future for German expression through the art of verse:

The poetry of former times has disappeared and with it the virtue, its sister. Instead of the furore Tedesco, mentioned so frequently by Italian poets, patience has become our first national virtue, and beside it humility, in contrast with the formerly reigning mentality which caused a Spaniard who traveled with Emperor Charles V through Germany to call the Germans los fieros Alemanos. But as far was we are concerned, we wish to retain firmly the image or rather the truth of these great times and not become confused by the present misery. Perhaps the slumbering lion will wake up once more, and even if we should not live to see it, future world history will be full of the deeds of Germans.51

Schlegel thus recognizes German poetry as distinct from that of other countries and seeks

Germany’s past as a means of cultivating its future in poetry.

The result of separating Germany from foreign styles was an increased negativity towards foreign influence and foreign customs. In 1842 influential socialist writer Ludwig Feuerbach distinguished between national traits to suggest the perfect conditions for philosophical thinking:

The true philosopher who is identical with life and man must be of Franco-German parentage. Do not be frightened, you chaste Germans, by this mixture. The Acta Philosophorum already spelled out this idea in the year 1716. “If we compare the Germans and the French with each other and ascertain that the latter have more agility in their temperament, and the former more weightiness, so one could justly say that the temperamentum gallico-germanicum is best suited for philosophy, or a child who had a French father and a German mother would (caeteris paribus) be endowed with a good ingenium philosophicum.” Quite right; only we must make the mother French and the father German. The heart—the feminine principle, the sense of the finite, and the seat of materialism— is of French disposition; the head—the masculine principle and the seat of idealism—of German. The heart makes revolutions, the head reforms; the head brings things into existence, the heart sets them in motion. But only where there is movement,

51 Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experience 1789–1815 (Princeton: Nostrand, 1967), 182–3.

upsurge, passion, blood, and sensuousness is there also spirit. It was the esprit of a Leibniz, his sanguine materialistic-idealistic principle, that first pulled the Germans out of their philosophical pedantry and scholasticism.52

Note that Feuerbach depicts France as effeminate, or the “mother,” in the marriage of French and

German thinking. Although he recognizes positive qualities in both cultures, by deeming the

German parent the masculine one, Feuerbach clearly prioritizes the German side.

Contemporary writings on music also illustrate an antagonism toward other

national styles. During one of his trips to Milan, Ludwig Spohr displayed disdain for Italian

music and Italian music making. In his autobiography, he recalled, “what the Italians consider

new in Rossini’s operas is not new to us; for they consist of ideas and modulations for the most

part long since known in Germany.”53 The source of this scorn for Italian music may relate to a

defensiveness toward the negative way he thought they felt toward German musicians: “The

Italians really might be induced to believe that we have never heard any thing so good in

Germany. When will Germans cease to be the blind admirers and the apes of foreigners!”54

The negative depiction of other national styles helped to promote German music above others. Sanna Pederson’s study of A. B. Marx’s criticism in the Berliner musikalische Zeitung, for example, identifies Marx’s three main tactics:

1. To depict foreign opera as an enemy invading German lands 2. To encourage renouncing pleasure for a morally superior stance 3. To employ Hegelian historical-philosophical reasoning.55

52 “Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy,” in German Socialist Philosophy, ed. by Wolfgang Schirmacher, trans. by Virginia Cutrufelli (New York: Continuum, 1997), 52– 3.

53 Ludwig Spohr, Autobiography, trans. unknown (London: Reeves &Turner, 1878), 286.

54 Ibid., 300.

55 Sanna Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity,” Nineteenth-Century Music 18 (1994); 89.

Marx’s criticism in Berlin played a part in a larger concern for elevating serious German music

in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by defining it in opposition to foreign

models.

On the other hand, writers who thought that Germany embraced all of the positive traits

of other nations and that Germany’s art would serve to better all of humanity made another type

of distinction between nations styles:

A man is a supreme creature, so one might call the German the most perfect human, because in fact he unites all the characteristic properties, talents and virtues of all countries…The German nation has no national character in the way that other nations have, because it has become generalized as a world people through the application of reason…We are as conscientious, hard-working and skilful as the Chinese; we have or had their piety towards old people…We have English thoroughness and accuracy…We have French skill and elegance in all technical arts…We understand music and all beautiful arts better than the Italians…We are tillers and herdsmen with a love of nature and a patriarchal sentiment as are the old Poles and the Hungarians.56

The mix of national traits, however, “made the language of nation into a perfect vehicle of expression for disagreements about how German national life should be conducted.”57 A

cathartic approach to creating a pure German nation or German music was another alternative.

Writers could denounce anything unpleasant or threatening “as alien—liberalism as English,

classical education as Greek or French, conservatism as Russian, commerce as English or

Jewish, and modern capitalism as American” to promote a distinct national style.58

Wagner did not see the mixing of national styles as the key to Germany’s success in opera composition. Rather, he considered a lack of distinct national style in a composer’s works

as a sign of weakness: “We opera composers cannot be European—so the question is—either

56 James, 12–3.

57 Ibid., 31.

58 Ibid.

German or French! You can see the damage that a fool like Meyerbeer has caused us; he spends

half his time in Berlin and the other half in Paris, with the result that he never achieves anything

anywhere, least of all in Berlin.”59 Wagner’s distinction between national styles thus recalls

earlier German writers’ efforts to promote a unified musical culture defined in opposition to

foreign styles.

3. A Sense of Continuity with Previous Generations of the Cultural Unit, through Memories, Myths, and Traditions

As mentioned in Schlegel’s ode to a future of German poetry, a heightened sense of national identity developed in the nineteenth century with an increased interest in folklore and mythology. Embracing the history of previous generations helps to establish identity by recognizing customs and preserving them for generations to come. Thus Herder wrote that,

“[Every] fatherland…has a moral tendency. It descends from fathers; with the name father it brings to our minds the recollection of our times of youth and games of youth; it awakens the memory of all the men of merit before us, of all the worthy men after us to whom we will become fathers; it links the human species into a chain of continuing members who are to each other brothers, sisters, betrothed, friends, children, parents.”60 As many opera composers

struggled to create a German opera, they did so by returning to Germanic folklore and medieval

chivalry. Hannu Salmi sums up Wagner’s main interest in the past:

59 Richard Wagner, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. By Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987), 108.

60 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by Michael N. Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 378–9.

The concept of the past is a significant factor in his [Wagner] attempts to define Deutschtum. Wagner’s central standpoint in his definition of Deutschtum was a binary contrast “past/present”, which he combined with the oppositions “interpretation/imitation”, “true/false” and “noble/decadent”. The Germans had to find their true selves, their noble nature, by recovering their past. The German of the past was to be the German of the future.61

This interest in mythology and folklore is evident in the other arts as well. Jakob Grimm, famous

for working with his brother on compiling fairy tales in the nineteenth-century, refers to these

many stories and to how they have been persevered:

In our time a great love of folk songs has developed and it will also draw attention to the sagas and folk tales, which still circulate among the same people and are preserved in a few forgotten places. The ever-growing realization of the true nature of history and poetry has aroused the wish to save from oblivion what previously appeared contemptible, at the very last moment when it still could be collected.62

The perpetuation of these myths and stories in a culture about their past and their ways of life

reinforces identity and helps to shape a strong sense of belonging and comradeship among an ethnic group.

4. A Sense of Destiny and Mission, of Shared Hopes and Aspirations, of that Culture-Community

If folklore and myths answer questions of origin and shape present identity, destiny and

aspiration give a cultural community a sense of purpose and a goal for the future. Many

nineteenth-century German philosophers and writers decreed various missions and goals for the

German people. Concerning Germany’s leadership of all of humanity, Johann Fichte recognized

that, “ the greatest capacity for understanding this knowledge lies with that nation which had the

61 Hannu Salmi, Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 33.

62 Kohn, 177–8.

force to create it. The German alone, by possessing the knowledge and understanding the age

through it, can perceive that this is the next objective of humanity.”63 Germany’s mission thus

extended to include all of Europe, in which the Germans regarded themselves as universal leaders.

In order to develop their own national genre, composers of German Romantic opera maintained similar goals. In The Poet and the Composer, for example, E.T.A. Hoffmann writes:

My country needed me, and I could not hesitate to follow the call. It was with joy, with that burning enthusiasm a noble cause kindles in any breast which cowardice had not condemned to slavery, that this hand, previously accustomed only to guiding the gentle quill, took up the sword. My blood has already been shed and only chance, which caused the Prince himself to witness my deed, obtained the decoration for me.64

Thus the same rhetoric, which would encourage German citizens to fight to protect their nation,

finds its way into essays on opera composition. Outspoken propagators of German Romantic

opera like Hoffmann and Weber could reach their audiences through national identity. The last two parameters focus specifically on nations rather than ethnies.

5. A Definite Historic Territory of Homeland

In the late eighteenth century, Herder had discussed the significance of a historic location to forming a German nation: “Light, enlightenment, sense of community; noble pride in not letting oneself be organized by others, but organizing oneself, as other nations have done from time immemorial; in being Germans on our own well-protected piece of territory.”65 This

63 Ibid., 234.

64 E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Poet and the Composer, 192.

65 Herder, Philosophical Writings, 377.

territory included landmarks like the Rhine and the Alps, which had significant presence in many musical works of the nineteenth century. In the London Treaty of 1840, France threatened to take their “natural frontier of the Rhine,” sparking frustration among Germans who had adopted the

Rhine as a national symbol.66 German musicians responded by publishing and re-releasing over four hundred Rheinlieder set to Rhine poems. The setting of Weber’s Der Freischütz in German- speaking Bohemia after the Thirty Years War and the mythological landmarks of Germanic and

Nordic myths, such as Wallhala, in Wagner’s ring cycle illustrate that an historic territory has its place in the settings of many German operas.

In addition, many writers on music began to allude to national terrain and landmarks in discussing national styles of music. One anonymous nineteenth-century writer published his theory on distinguishing the national characteristics of music that considered local circumstances and nature causes, contending that, “the same epithet which applies to the characteristic qualities of national music, not only marks the taste and dispositions of the inhabitants of that nation, but also the natural appearances of its situation and surface.”67 Germany thus became a nation and shared a sense of national identity not only from establishing a state to govern all the people within, but because those people carried a history and shared natural characteristics tied to that territory.

66 Cecelia Hopkins Porter, The Rhine as a Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 4.

67 “On the National Characteristics of Music,” Harmonicon LXXX (August, 1829), 187.

6. A Shared Public, Mass Education-Based Culture

Educational developments in the nineteenth century produced a larger, educated German

middle class, in part because of ideals and goals of the Enlightenment. The determination to cultivate widespread education among German citizens is clearly defined in the mission statement of a Hamburg education society, “So unite together, German workers, journeymen,

helpers, or whatever else you call yourselves. Put your pennies together in order to attain

education and training and thereby to become the pride and honor of the state in a golden

Mittelstand.”68 The emphasis on education found its way to music instruction as well. Choral

societies, such as Reichardt’s Liedertafeln, developed in almost every town across Germany.

Their proliferation helped to promote German superiority: “Music instruction, such as every

village school in Germany has, is even now not to be thought of at all in France.”69 The results of

this widespread musical training are documented in an 1840 essay in the Neue Zeitschrift für

Musik:

What effect hasn’t Leipzig, for instance, had on the furthering of musical cultivation and on the shaping of musical taste, not just in Saxony, but in all of Germany! But who would question that it owes at least the greater part of its musical significance, effective near and far, to its universities and other learned institutions? In [Leipzig], so exceptional with respect to music, thousands of youths and young men achieved, along with their scholastic education, a higher musical one as well, which they then later, as officials of the state or church, were able to spread farther in the circle of their influence.70

68 Sheehan, 33.

69 G. W. Fink, “Frankreich—französische Musik,” in Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, oder Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst, ed. by Gustav Schilling (Stuttgart: Franz Heinrich Köhler, 1836), 3:43; quoted in David Gramit, Cultivating Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 112.

70 Gramit, 122.

An upsurge in musical training across Germany united its citizens as members of a nation who valued music at a high level. German composers and critics helped create interest in music making and readership of music journals such as the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and the

Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung.

Introduction to Case Studies

The above examples deal solely with writings on Germany, German music making, and

German opera. Envisioning German Romantic opera as a product of growing nationalism requires due consideration of the structural makeup of the opera and the social significance of its contents. A closer inspection of German operas plays a large role in the remaining chapters.

These analyses will take up the themes of the exclusion of foreign models, gender, and class structure.

The following three chapters each focus on an overlooked or misrepresented composer of

German opera in order to gain a stronger sense of nation-building and the culture surrounding their works: Louis Spohr, Heinrich Marschner, and Albert Lortzing. With these case studies I consider the motivations behind their works, their critical reception, and the interplay of foreign genres and models within the structure of their works to illustrate their contribution to German

Romantic opera in regards to the nation. Such considerations will thus contextualize these composers and their works in the larger developing genre of German Romantic opera in the early nineteenth century. My choices for these case studies are not motivated by a goal of “rescuing” these composers and incorporating their works to the canon. Rather, my aim is to rethink

German Romantic opera as a genre in the nineteenth century from a position less centralized on

Weber and Wagner and to demonstrate how the conception of German Romantic opera as a genre is undoubtedly tied to the idea of national identity.

CHAPTER TWO

NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH CATHARSIS

No people have been so slow and so uncertain as the German in determining its own specific art forms. Both the Italians and the French have evolved a form of opera in which they move freely and naturally. This is not true of the Germans, whose peculiarity it has been to adopt what seems best in other schools, after much study and steady development…If an artist’s production is not marred by any alien elements, it has already achieved something very valuable, namely the impression of unity. This can only be brought about by enthusiasm, devotion and the correct use of all the elements concerned.71 -Carl Maria von Weber

In his essay “To the Art-Loving Citizens of Dresden,” Weber touched on an important

aspect of national identity connected with the development of German Romantic opera:

catharsis. Understood as the purging of unwanted, foreign, or harmful elements, catharsis best

describes the method of many German composers to develop a distinct German opera, in which

the influence of and dependence on Italian and French operatic conventions were rejected in

favor of specifically German elements that would evoke a sense of German identity.

Aristotle’s theatrical katharsis, according to Leon Golden, can mean three things:

clarification, purgation, or purification.72 In catharsis of clarification, concepts of human emotion

such as pity and fear are reinforced by artistic representation of them on stage.73 The purgation

theory derives from its association with medicinal techniques, in which music purges the body of

71 Carl Maria von Weber, Writings on Music, ed. by John Warrack, trans. by Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 206–7.

72 Leon Golden, “Epic, Tragedy, and Catharsis,” Classical Philology 71 (1976): 79.

73 Leon Golden, “The Purgation of Catharsis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1973): 473.

wild and excited emotions.74 Catharsis of purification has two meanings, a structural one that

occurs in the narrative on stage, and a moral one that focuses on the audience.75

Though Golden finds all three meanings suitable for understanding Aristotelian catharsis,

John McCumber maintains a more distinct definition: “[Catharsis] is not an intellectualization or

cleansing of emotions, as in the purification view, but a purgation of them. Tragedians thus heal

the soul much as doctors, often, heal the body: by getting rid of bad things in it.”76 In

McCumber’s view, catharsis was ultimately the goal of mimesis in Aristotelian tragedy. The

drama imitated human pity and fear on stage, aroused those feelings in the spectators who

eventually realized the spectacle was not real, allowing the emotions of pity and fear to escape

their body. Discussed in this manner, catharsis is conceptualized as the telos of mimesis. If

spectators, actors, or creators of drama were consciously or subconsciously aware of the effects

of catharsis, their contributions and reactions can be viewed in a new light. McCumber argues

that tragic catharsis is “clearly connected to the pursuit of the Noble, because one who undergoes

catharsis is always freeborn or educated.”77 Nonetheless, in both the purification and purgation view of catharsis, the concept is related to a sense of difference. Both can be useful in discussing the goals of many German Romantic opera composers to rid their works of foreign elements, and

74 Golden does not find this theory convincing, but recognizes it as one existing in discourse. He traces the purgation theory back to nineteenth-century writer J. Bernays, whose reading of Aristotle’s Politics (1340) and Poetics (1448) led him to believe that Aristotle suggests a moral purification catharsis in Politics and a purgation catharsis in Poetics. Golden, however, argues that the shift in Aristotle’s view on art and on the audience in the two works really suggests a catharsis of “intellectual clarification” in the latter, in which catharsis reinforces aspects of human existence. 477.

75 Ibid., 473.

76 John McCumber, “Aristotelian Catharsis and the Purgation of Women,” Diacretics 18 (1988): 54.

77 Ibid., 61.

build a sense of national identity in audiences. Nineteenth-century proponents of German

Romantic opera, such as Weber, viewed their opera as an organism to be purged of unwanted

elements and understood that German audiences would only come to accept such changes if

sentiments of national identity were clarified for them on stage.

An understanding of catharsis in terms of a national identity in opera depends on one of

Smith’s dimensions of community and identity in ethnies, “a sense of difference, of distinctiveness and separateness, of that cultural unit.”78 One must acknowledge this difference

to recognize what elements are to be purged and which ones are to be clarified. Catharsis also

resembles the modes of thought many scholars adopt to define national identity: “for Homi K.

Bhabha, the national self is constructed in relation to the Other, i.e. significant to outsider, who

thereby defines the self.”79 Bhabha believes that a consideration of outside entities not only helps

to define national identity, but fuels the social groups who promote national identity: “A

centralizing, homogeneous mode of social authority is derived from an ever-ready reference to

cultural otherness.”80 Stressing difference becomes a strategy for the motivating forces of

nationalism: “By insisting on cultural particularisms (even if this frequently means accentuating

them), nationalist entrepreneurs seek above all else to distinguish their people as much as

possible from the other so as to give full legitimacy to their inclination for political

78 Anthony D. Smith, “The Formation of National Identity,” in Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, ed. Henry Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 131.

79 Anthony D. Smith, “Interpretations of National Identity,” in Modern Roots: Studies of National Identity, ed. by Alain Dieckhoff and Natividad Gutiérrez (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2001), 22–3.

80 Homi K. Bhabha, “A Good Judge of Character,” in Race-ing, Justice, En-gendering Power, ed. by Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 235.

independence.”81 As much as social groups and autonomous individuals are aware of the other,

they are also aware of the self and can only attain identity by purging the other from the self.

Unlike Bhabha, who focuses on defining the national in relation to the other, Benedict

Anderson claims that nations and national identities are self- rather than other-defined.82 To

distinguish otherness from a collective social group there must be “one or more common cultural

characteristic which can serve to demarcate members from non-members, such as color,

language, customs, religion, and institution.”83 Weber’s call to the people of Dresden illustrates a

motivating force in cultivating an identity for German opera: a genre of opera that reflects the

color of the landscape, the unique language, the preserved customs of the people, and serves as

an institution in which an audience participates as loyally as in religion. A German opera suitable

for national identity is therefore unmarred, in Weber’s sense, by the blemishes of cultural

otherness, and replete with references to the self and to the communal group. As catharsis aims

to clarify certain elements and purge others, national identity formation relies on reinforcing internal qualities while removing those deemed foreign. A closer look at Louis Spohr and his opera Jessonda (1823) highlights the role catharsis played in shaping national identity, for as he

laid out in an essay entitled “Appeal to German Composers,” Spohr called for the gradual

“removal of all the foreign elements of German opera if namely without substance.”84

81 Alain Dieckhoff, “Culture and National Identity,” in Modern Roots: Studies of National Identity, ed. by Alain Dieckhoff and Nativdad Gutiérrez ( Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2001), 284.

82 Smith, “Interpretations of National Identity,” 23.

83 Smith, “The Formation of National Identity,” 133.

84 Louis Spohr, “Aufruf an deutsche Komponisten,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 29 (16 July 1823): 458, “alles Fremde (wenn es nämlich gehaltlos ist) nach und nach davon zu verdrängen.” An English translation of “Appeal to German Composers” is available in

Difficulties in determining what a pure German style entailed, however, highlight the challenges

Spohr faced in following his own prescription for a national opera.

It is difficult to form an impression of a pure German opera devoid of foreign influence, for many historic accounts have defined the national style by citing outside sources. In the eighteenth-century, writers commented on the cosmopolitan style of German music, which borrowed the best techniques from other national traditions. Johann Joachim Quantz, in his treatise on playing the flute, described the German national style in this way: “Germans…are all the more capable in taking whatever they like from another style, and they know how to make use of the good things in all types of foreign music.”85 Quantz recognized a pure German style not by its absence of foreign elements but by its integration of them: “If one has the necessary discernment to choose the best from the styles of different countries, a mixed style results that, without overstepping the bounds of modesty, could well be called the German style.”86

By the nineteenth century, writers began to shift from the perception that German music

was a polyglot of national styles to conceive German music as the universal music for all

humankind. Forkel’s biography of J.S. Bach, for example, portrayed the composer’s genius as

simultaneously German and Universal.87 While comparing Bach to the Greek and Roman

classics, Forkel secured Bach’s stature in Western musical culture by simultaneously “writing

Harmonicon 11 (1823): 159–61. I will, however, provide my own translation, since my assessment of Spohr’s ideas demands a close consideration of the source.

85 Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, trans. and ed. by Edward R. Reilly (New York: Schirmer, 1966), 338.

86 Ibid., 341.

87 Celia Applegate, “What is German in Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation,” German Studies Review 15 (1992): 28.

music history and promoting national consciousness.”88 Some of Wagner’s ideas expressed in

early essays on German music also reveal his belief that Germans could adapt foreign styles:

The German composer who aspired to write an opera, must learn the Italian tongue and mode of singing, and could hope to be applauded only when he had completely denationalized himself as artist. Nevertheless it was frequently Germans, who took first rank in this genre as well; for the universal tendency of which the German genius is capable made it easy to the German artist to naturalize himself on a foreign field.89

Wagner undoubtedly is referring to Mozart. In another passage, however, he stresses that

German composers must retain their national identity when engaged in writing “universal” music:

The German genius would almost seem predestined to seek out among its neighbors what is not native to its motherland, to lift this from its narrow confines, and thus make something Universal for the world. Naturally, however, this can only be achieved by him who is not satisfied to ape a foreign nationality, but keeps his German birthright pure and undefiled.90

Wagner’s statement, albeit speaking of a universal, still defines the German in music in

opposition to other traditions, for he emphasizes that only Germans could create music with such a wide appeal. His logic constructs a polemical analogy: German music speaks to all humankind

as Italian music speaks to Italians (and to German speakers who are not pure Germans).

The expression “national identity” is an oxymoron in some regards. A sense of identity

develops only after humans begin to recognize themselves as autonomous individuals. National

unity, however, implies a collective, a group of individuals who are aware of their identity as

individuals as well as members of a society. Thus national identity seems to encompass part of a

88 Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Genealogy of an Identity” in Music and German National Identity, eds. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5.

89 Richard Wagner, “On German Music,” in Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays, trans. by W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 94.

90 Ibid.

spectrum between individual awareness and group collectiveness, both of which are defined in

opposition to others. Group consciousness is thus also conceptualized as a self. According to

Smith,“[nationalism] signifies the awakenings of the nation and its members to its true collective

‘self,’ so that it, and they, obey only the ‘inner voice’ of the purified community.”91 The difficult

task of achieving a “ pure community” depends on removing elements that reside already within that same community. For example, the alien elements Weber criticized in German opera could only be removed by excavating components integral to the genre itself. It is thus impracticable to oust everything foreign when German opera has historically relied on conventions established in other countries. However, Spohr’s national agenda led him to believe that such a goal was worth pursuing.

During a trip to Italy, Spohr recorded his observations of Italian music making as well as of life in general in Italy: “Here we found Italian filth in all its perfection, and oil cooking, so offensive to German palates.”92 His distaste for Italians explains why he would have wanted to

exclude their music from German opera. His criticism was not just for Italians but also of

Germans who indulged in the southern culture. “When will the Germans ever desist from their

blind admiration and imitation of everything foreign?”93 Robert Schumann shared Spohr’s

negative attitude toward German composers’ dependence on Italian conventions: “[German

composers] scold about Italian composers, but do not disdain to make use of the same means

91 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), 77.

92 Louis Spohr, The Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr, trans. and ed. by Henry Pleasants (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 145.

93 Ibid., 166–7.

frequently; they know it is nonsense, and yet they perpetuate it.”94 These observations indicate

Spohr and other composers’ desire to persuade Germans to deny this foreign dependence and to

cultivate their own national style.

For German opera audiences to become acquainted with Germanness, they would need to

educate and introduce themselves to pure German art forms so they could distinguish themselves

and their art from foreign forms. This process reflects Anderson’s theory of national identity

formation, one focusing on self-defining. Commenting on German-born Johannes Simon Mayr’s

success in Italy, Spohr articulated how Mayr retained his national identity while employed in

another country: “My guess is that, quite aside from his native talent, he has distinguished

himself from his colleagues by the assiduous study of the works of German masters.”95 The constant reminder of identity through difference plays a large part in the rhetoric behind Spohr’s essay. Another strategy for convincing opera audiences and composers to eschew foreign decadence was to compare Italian music to something harmful: “This proves that the German nation has finally become permeated with the incomparable perfection of these masterpieces and

cannot be seduced by the sweet musical poison being wafted in our direction from south of the

Alps.”96 Spohr’s nationalist agenda is evident in such critical writings as several letters from

Paris and the “Appeal to German Composers” essay.97

94 Robert Schumann, “German Operas,” Music and Musicians: Essays and Criticisms, 2d series, trans. and ed. by Fanny Ramond Ritter (New York: Edward Schubert, 1877), 14.

95 Spohr, Musical Journeys, 182.

96 Ibid., 228.

97 Louis Spohr, “Briefe aus Paris von Louis Spohr: Erster Brief, den 18ten December 1820,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 9 (1821), 139–44; “Zweiter Brief, den 31sten December 1820,” AMZ 10 (1821), 156–62; “Dritter Brief, den 12ten Januar 1821,” AMZ 11 (1821), 177–84;

In his second letter from Paris on December 31, Spohr wrote: “Were there only half as

much to gain with an opera in Germany, we would soon be just as rich in excellent theater

composers as we are now in instrumental composers, and then one would no longer need to transplant foreign elements to our stages, which is for the most part so unworthy of the artistic

cultivation of the German people.”98 Spohr’s “Appeal to German Composer” appeared in the

Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung before the premiere of Jessonda in 1823, and it articulates

several of Spohr’s aesthetic goals for German opera, including replacing dialogue with recitative,

integrating national melodies, and providing spectacular scenery to catch the eye. A brief survey

of Spohr’s main arguments provides the basis for establishing a theoretical approach to studying

his opera Jessonda and for considering how his concern for national identity through opera is

tied in with catharsis.

Spohr begins his essay by addressing the proliferation of foreign opera at German courts

and its attraction for German audiences: “There [in Vienna] is still a public who, seduced

[bestochen] by the virtuosity of the current Italian singers, lend their ear to the sweet cooing.”99

Spohr also sees an opportunity for German composers to succeed in providing opera audiences with new German opera, since the director of the Italian opera there has “keine neuen Sänger.”

By eliminating these foreign distractions, the German audience would soon realize the potential

“Vierter Brief, den 30sten Januar 1821,” AMZ 12 (1821), 189–95. “Aufruf an deutsche Komponisten,” AMZ 29 (1823), 457–64.

98 Spohr, “Zweiter Brief, den 31sten December 1820,” 159, “Wäre in Deutschland auch nur halb so viel mit einer Oper zu gewinnen, so würden wir bald eben so reich an vorzüglichen Theater-Componisten sein, wie wir es jetzt an Instrumental-Componisten sind, und man würde dann nicht mehr nötig haben, das Fremde auf unsere Bühnen zu verpflanzen, das der Kunstbildung der Deutschen grösstenteils so unwürdig ist.”

99 Ibid., 457. “Dort ist immer noch ein Publikum, das, bestochen von der Virtuosität der dort anwesenden italienischen Sänger, dem süssen Girren sein Ohr leiht.”

of its own national opera. It is worth noting, however, that Spohr makes a small concession for keeping some foreign techniques, for he called for the “removal of all foreign elements in the opera if namely without substance.”100 It is unclear how he meant to evaluate which borrowed

techniques had substance, for the essay does not elaborate on that point.

His suggestions for promoting a national opera were not restricted to the audience and the

composers; Spohr also considered the business side of German opera promotion. He first blames

publishers whose arrangements of only the select, popular parts of German operas have “robbed

the composers of their sourly acquired profits.”101 He then instructs directors “to purchase works

directly from the composer, who is to possess the legal rights to the work, and to pay the

composer a proper fee for the work.”102 By extending his argument to the production aspect of

German opera, Spohr defined how a composer of German opera should be treated in order to

develop and provide a worth national opera for Germany.

To reconnect with German audiences, Spohr suggested including national melodies and

folk songs in German opera, but warned that they might attract unworthy crowds at the expense

of the opera’s dignity. Spohr expressed this dilemma in the essay:

If one feels talented enough to invent national melodies, he can, through a mixture of such songs, enliven the crowd and have joy in hearing the tunes persist in parades and church fairs on the hurdy-gurdy. The dignity of the music must suffer by this, however, for so loveable a folksong is as such, it does not go well with the refined music of our theater. Thus the songs of the beer halls should also be excluded, along with their language and jokes.103

100 Ibid., 458, “alles Fremde (wenn es nämlich gehaltlos ist) nach und nach davon zu verdrängen.”

101 Ibid., 460, “dem Komponisten seinen sauer erworbenen Gewinn zu rauben.”

102 Ibid., “nur vom Komponisten, als einzigem rechtmässigen Besitzer die werke anzukaufen und ein anständiges Honorar dafür zu bezahlen.”

The solution Spohr later suggests in the essay is to employ a subject matter that would appeal to

a wide audience, whose themes could captivate the multitude while allowing the composer to

create dramatic music suitable to the tastes of the cultivated audiences.104 Though Jessonda is set

in India, and therefore has the allure of exoticism, its plot does not offer the sensationalism of the

supernatural subjects in such romantic operas as Weber’s Der Freischütz and Spohr’s own Faust.

Spohr’s last concern in the essay is for replacing spoken dialogue with accompanied

recitative.105 His subscription to German Romanticism’s fixation with unified, musical compositions led him to believe that setting dramatic music to the entire libretto would elevate a national German opera. With this last idea, he gives three conditions: “An opera in which all is to be sung, 1) must have a poetical action from beginning to end, 2) should be so simple that the audience, without understanding the lyrics, can guess the content, and 3) should demand a cast of only a few people, at most five or six.”106 By giving the conditions, Spohr criticizes some failed

attempts at writing German opera and offers a plan for ridding the genre of its weaknesses.107

Spohr’s overall appeal to the German composers indicates many strategies that are related in the

103 Ibid., 462, “Fühlt man in sich Talent, Volksmelodien zu erfinden, so kann man auch durch Einmischung solcher auf die Menge einwirken und vielleicht die Freude haben, sich auf Paraden und Kirchenmessen zu hören und in den Drehorgeln fortzuleben. Die Würde der Musik muss aber notwendig darunter leiden; denn so schätzenswert ein Volkslied als solches auch ist, so passt es doch nicht zur veredelten Musik unserer Theater, von der die Lieder der Bierhäuser so gut ausgeschlossen sein sollten, als die Sprache und Spässe derselben.”

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid., 463, “die Dialoge in Recitative verwandeln.”

106 Ibid., 463–4, “eine Oper in der alles gesungen werden soll, muss 1) eine, vom Anfang bis zu Ende poetische Handlung haben, 2) eine so einfache, dass der Zuschauer durch das was geschieht, auch ohne den Text zu verstehen, den Inhalt erraten kann, und 3) zur Besetzung nur wenige Personen, höchstens fünf bis sechs verlangen.”

107 Ibid., 458.

effort to purge unwanted elements, whether they come from foreign conventions or are tied up

with earlier German opera. He thus believed composers must eschew not only techniques from

other nations, but also those found in older, unsuccessful German opera that would hinder the

prospect of an elevated, national genre. The last footnote in Spohr’s essay offers a starting point

for evaluating how well his conditions for German opera play out in his own work: “Jessonda, a new grand opera, which I completed a month ago, complies with these demands and is composed in recitative throughout. With the next performance, I will now be able to test whether my theory put forth above is right, and whether the crowd will be attracted by the magnificence of the spectacle, just as I hope to see the educated satisfied by the action and by the music itself.”108

According to Clive Brown, it is “evident that Spohr saw Jessonda as the embodiment of

his theories, and it is equally evident, from the reception which the opera met with throughout

Germany, that he was right in feeling he had produced a work that was ripe for its time and for the mood of his compatriots.”109 The work won him acclaim across Europe and remained in

German theaters’ repertoire well into the twentieth century. However, Spohr’s success did not

come from the fulfillment of every goal for German opera in the “Appeal to German

Composers,” because he was unable to distance the work from the foreign styles he had always

criticized. Spohr could not even produce a purely German work for audiences abroad, for he

108 Ibid., 464, “Jessonda, eine neue grosse oper, die ich vor einigen Monaten vollendet habe, entspricht diesen Anforderungen und ist daher durchaus in Recitativen geschrieben. Bei der, nächstens stattfindenden Aufführung werde ich nun selbst erproben können, ob meine oben aufgestellte Theorie richtig ist und ob durch die Pracht der Ausstattung die Menge so angelockt werden wird, wie ich die Gebildeten durch die Handlung selbst, und durch die Musik befriediget zu sehen hoffe.”

109 Clive Brown, Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 162.

conceded to having Jessonda performed in Italian during an invited visit to London in 1853.110

Still, his intention to oust these influences demonstrates how catharsis of purgation is tied in with his nationalist agenda. And furthermore, Spohr’s ability to incorporate national themes into the opera illustrates how catharsis of clarification helped establish national identity for German audiences.

Unlike Spohr’s earlier romantic operas Faust (1816) and Zemir und Azor (1819),

Jessonda is a grand opera, or as Weber defined, “an opera in which the musical numbers are connected by a continuous recitativo accompagnato, fully orchestrated—in fact, a scene where music holds court, surrounded by her courtiers who are in perpetual activity.”111 It is ironic that

Spohr chose a grand opera, rather than a romantic one, as the exemplar of his nationalist goals,

since the early proponents of German grand opera cited Gluck as their model, a composer whose

reform operas are a mosaic of different national styles and conventions.112 The connection to

Gluck and grand opera makes it difficult to see how Spohr’s prescription for a national opera

could call for only German techniques. As a closer look will show, Jessonda relies on the

adaptation and integration of foreign models.

The opera is set in India and involves a story of love caught between the strife of

Portuguese soldiers and Brahmins. Dandau, a Brahmin priest who is conducting a ceremony for

the death of the Rajah, sends his son, Nadori, to inform the Rajah’s widow, Jessonda, that she

must burn on the funeral pyre. Before he reaches her home, Jessonda confides in her sister,

110 Dorothy Moulton Mayer, The Forgotten Master: The Life and Times of Louis Spohr (New York: Da Capo, 1981), 178.

111 Carl Maria von Weber, qtd. in John Warrack, German Opera: From Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 293.

112 See Johann Friedrich Reichardt, “Study of Armide” in Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung 28 (1805):109–12.

Amazili that her real love was for a Portuguese soldier whom she met before she was forced to marry the Rajah. When Nadori arrives he becomes enchanted with Amazili’s beauty and, to express his feelings for her, vows to protect Jessonda from her inevitable death. As the

Portuguese soldiers display their precision through drills, Tristan expresses grief over a lost love from years past to his friend Lopez. He then reminds his friend that he made a pact with the

Indians not to interfere in their religious ceremonies. Jessonda and Amazili sing by the river as

Jessonda purifies herself for the sacrifice. Tristan arrives to investigate, having been informed by

Nadori of the horrible act, and recognizes Jessonda as his lost love. In the finale, Dandau arrives and reminds Tristan of his oath and has Jessonda escorted back to the city. As Tristan agonizes over his inability to break his oath, Nadori enters to announce that the Brahmins have just broken their half of the pact by attacking the Portuguese soldiers. Relieved of his oath, Tristan follows

Nadori through a secret passage into the city. As a mighty storm has begun, Dandau proceeds quickly with the sacrifice, fearing the growing anger of the gods. Jessonda pleads to the gods for her life, but receives news from Amazili that the Portuguese soldiers are on their way. Dandau makes one last attempt to kill Jessonda, but is immediately stopped by the arrival of Tristan. In the end, the two couples are united.

Themes of catharsis by purgation are evident in the synopsis: for example Jessonda’s purification of evil spirits before the sacrifice. However, the plot does not always exemplify

Spohr’s goals. After the soldiers have quelled the barbarism of a foreign culture, the plot consequentially contradicts Spohr’s intent to rid the opera of foreign elements, as the Portuguese invite the “Orientals” to their homeland. This bond of camaraderie in the journey home reinforces the nationalistically patronizing idea of a European soldier rescuing an Indian woman

from the “inferior” traditions of her homeland through catharsis of clarification. Despite the

exotic locale, aspects of the national purgation and clarification are present in the score as well.

Jessonda is a much larger production than Spohr’s earlier operas with its use of ballet and large chorus. While in Paris at the time he wrote his critical letters, Spohr had commented on the use of ballet at the Paris Opéra in his journal: “As little as I like ballet, I cannot deny that the

Paris Ballet can be pleasantly diverting, at least for a while, until the monotony of the mimic movements and the even greater monotony of the dances becomes tiresome.”113 However, the

opening to the second act of Jessonda contains an extensive use of ballet. The scene begins with

the chorus of the Portuguese soldiers over a processional fanfare in a stately 3/4 time signature.

Later the scene moves into a couple ballet numbers: beginning with a tempo di Marcia in

common time, and after the chorus resumes singing, closing with a Waffentanz. It is a wonder

that ballet—so historically connected with French theatrical works—would have prominence in

Spohr’s national opera.

The purgation/purification themes of catharsis suggested in Spohr’s critical writings are

not always represented in the score of Jessonda. In elevating German opera through the

substitution of recitative for dialogue, Spohr brought German opera closer to the traditions of

Italian opera, which uses recitative in both comic and serious opera, in his use of recitativo

secco. In the recitative sections, Spohr maintains the chatty, Italianate style of recitative, even

though it is ill suited for the German language. For example, in the first act, to connect the

introductory scene with Dandau and Nadori’s duet, a short recitative section outlines scalar

passages of short rhythmic value, as the two discuss their disagreements over the Brahmin’s

113 Spohr, The Musical Journeys, 231. Spohr is commenting on Clari, a major ballet in three acts with music by Kreutzer. On this same trip Spohr had also written, “one does not need to be here long to adopt the frequently expressed opinion that the French are not a musical people.”

religious beliefs (figure 2.1). The Brahmins’ duet is not a unique example. Although there is frequent use of a more dramatic arioso style, the dry Italian style pervades each act of the opera.

Another example is the Portuguese soldiers dialogue No. 13, “Mein teurer Freund, ich teile dein

Gefühl” (figure 2.2). As Tristan confides in his friend Lopes about his lost love, the dialogue is set over repetitive pitches of short rhythmic value. The accompaniment in the orchestra is hardly in the recitativo accompagnato style Weber described, offering occasional chordal support from only the string section of the orchestra and not contributing to the drama on stage.

Thus Spohr’s adaptations of the German language to recitative for both the Brahmin and the

Portuguese follow the Italian method closely, resulting in a lack of clarity in the declamation of the German text

The arias, however, follow a different method. Instead of adopting contemporary Italian models, such as Rossinian two-part form, the arias in Jessonda are mostly in modified strophic form, a style more akin to German folk and art songs and French comic opera. The setting of the text of Tristan’s aria “Der Kriegeslust ergeben,” from act 2, illustrates this approach to strophic composition (figure 2.3).114 The aria contains no tempo changes, as in Rossinian arias, but

instead creates drama through slight variations in each strophe. For example, the first strophe

moves from g minor to the dominant of D major, the second strophe from D major back to g

minor. The vocal line of the second strophe begins on the same melodic pitches as the first

strophe, albeit with different harmonic support in the first complete measure. In the third strophe,

however, Tristan does not sing the opening melody at first. Instead, the melody set at the

beginning of the other two strophes begins in the orchestra and Tristan joins in with the tune

previously set to the last half of the first quatrain of each strophe. Drama and emotional depth are

114 The Roman numerals in the figure indicate the beginning of each new strophe of music.

thus conveyed through the manipulation of the vocal line, orchestration, and key with each

strophe.

Although the aria escapes Italian convention in its form, its music is much more foreign

in style. The opening rhythms in the orchestra, the triple meter and moderate tempo, and the

ornamented downbeat of Tristan’s melodic line stylistically resemble a polonaise. Early nineteenth-century Italian opera began to adopt the polish style, alla pollacca, to bravura numbers, such as in the finale to Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (Figure 2.4). The characteristic polonaise rhythm is evident in the accompaniment of both Tristan’s aria and the finale to

Rossini’s opera. Although Spohr’s goals for German opera suggest a catharsis of purgation, the work is not entirely free of foreign elements due to his compositional vocabulary of several

Italian and French opera conventions. However, one could still argue that Jessonda is a

successful national opera, since the use of the chorus provides a cathartic experience of clarification for German audiences.

Choral societies, Liedertafeln or Gesangvereine, were very popular in nineteenth-century

Germany, and the dramatic use of the chorus is evident in several well-known German Romantic

operas.115 The use of chorus to create dramatic effects is not a concern here. That German

audiences would have been reminded of their communal interest in the type of choral singing

found in the protestant church or in their singing societies in opera, on the other hand, might be read as a cathartic “clarification.” Just as Aristotle had hoped catharsis through clarification

would reinforce moral behavior in the audience, the presentation of the chorus singing themes

associated with Germany could inspire national sentiments in German audiences. Thus Wagner

115 In Weber’s Der Freischütz, the chorus creates the eerie mood of the “Wolf’s Glen Scene” in a similar manner as the chorus of the crew on the ghost ship in Wagner’s Der fliegende Höllander.

noted that the “rich and forceful harmonies upon…which the Germans set their choral melodies,

evince the deep artistic feeling of the nation.”116

In the finale to the third act, after Tristan has rescued Jessonda from the funeral pyre, a

solo chorus set in the four-part chorale style of the German Protestant church prepares the end of

the opera. Following Dandau’s death, the Portuguese soldiers shout “victory” as the dynamics

and texture of the orchestra taper away. At pianissimo, the two couples begin the German

chorale, announcing the final key of the opera, E-flat major (figure 2.5).117 The text expresses

how Jessonda has escaped the arms of death and how her love for Tristan has prevailed. The

reduction of the orchestral texture and the rhythmic complexity to alternations of quarter notes and half notes distinguishes this passage from the dramatic music that has preceded it. Following the chorale, Tristan expresses his thanks to Nadori for aiding him in rescuing Jessonda, exclaiming that a heavenly bond embracing him and his soldiers returns with them to their

fatherland.118 Although the exotic fantasy of a European soldier winning the heart of an Indian

woman and freeing her from the horrible religious sacrifices would have appealed to many

German audiences, however, it is the presentation of the chorus, imitating the chorales of the

church, and the bond of comradeship in the journey home to the fatherland that would arouse a

sense of national identity through catharsis of clarification.

Even though Aristotle’s theories of catharsis may not have been on Spohr’s mind, and

that purgatory catharsis does not play out the same in Jessonda as in his critical essays, the idea

that stage works can mimic emotions and sentiments, and clarify those feelings in audiences

116 Wagner, “On German Music,” 93.

117 The first act begins in c minor.

118 “Kommt mit in unser Vaterland, dass uns ein heilg Band umschlinge!”

helps to explain how German opera helps to shape national identity. Spohr succeeded in creating an elevated German opera with a strong dramatic presentation by employing recitative, national tunes, and an exotic subject matter, and also provided a significant resource for understanding how German music shapes national identity by instilling self awareness through difference and clarification in German audiences. It is evident that German Romantic opera composers could not completely remove foreign elements from their work; however, they were still able to cultivate a tradition of opera composition suitable for the growing German nationalism in the early nineteenth century.

CHAPTER THREE

GENDERING A NATIONAL OPERA

Ideas of empire…are suffused with notions of gender. And so too are the ideas about the nation. Not only have nations often been imagined as masculine or feminine, but women are often imagined as the signifiers of the heart of a nation, so that protecting them from outsiders often becomes integral to nationalist struggles.119 -Mona Domosh

As Mona Domosh suggests, national identity is a cultural construct in the same manner

that gender is. As I discussed in previous chapters, national identity is frequently shaped through defining what one is not in order to understand what one is. This is also true of distinctions of gender. Women—at least by the way Western society has constructed gender and perpetuated such constructs—know they are women because they are not men, and vice versa, just as

Germans know that they make up a cultural, ethnic nation because they are not French, English,

Italian, etc. These relationships are reciprocal, but never symmetrical.120

As Benedict Anderson has written, people feel a sense of belonging or membership in a

national community as something imagined and implicit: “[In] the modern world everyone can,

should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender.”121 Much as with gender, national

identities carry with them metaphors and constructed meanings, including strength, vigor, and

industry. Relationships bound up within culture between men and women also reflect a treatment

119 Mona Domosh, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 160.

120 Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Summer, and Patricia Yaeger, “Introduction,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.

121 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 16, 14.

of power carried through these genders. Thus an exploration of national identity can be enhanced

by a consideration of the way gender plays into the rhetoric of composers and their contemporary

music critics, focusing on power relationships, cultural identities, and behaviors. As the editors

of the volume Nationalisms and Sexualities have noted, nineteenth-century rhetoric “generated a

hierarchy that valued nations and the males who created them over females and feminized non-

nations. The rhetoric, however, also specified a role for women. A spiritual and maternal

presence was also required as an accompaniment to the political male, if for no other reason than

to secure a male-directed history.”122

Opera, therefore, as a reflection of society as well as a conditioning agent for cultural

ideology through audience experience, represents a suitable lens for examining the development

of national identity through the interplay of gendered characters, narrative themes, and musical

depictions. Heinrich Marschner’s most successful operas, Der Vampyr (1828) and Hans Heiling

(1833), present a relatively new, dynamic role for male villains as protagonists, which earns

them sympathy from the audience much like the Don Giovanni character of Mozart’s opera.123 In this chapter, I wish to examine the interplay of power relationships between the characters in

Marschner’s Hans Heiling in order to see how constructions of gender are written into themes surrounding the development of national identity. I will also consider Marschner’s aesthetic goals, as expressed to librettist Eduard Devrient, in order to understand which gender construction he wanted to emphasize in each of his characters.124 A reductive opposition between

122 Parker et. al., 6.

123 I have not found any evidence that Marschner based his hero-villains specifically on the Don Giovanni character. But as I show later in this chapter, however, Marschner’s letters with librettist Devrient reveal an interest in the audience’s reaction to the main character.

male-dominant and female-submissive, however, is much too deterministic. Therefore, first I

wish to touch on the more nuanced manner in which many studies of nationalism have dealt with

these constructions, highlighting their benefits to a detailed study of Marschner’s opera.

National identity discourse often relies on metaphors of sexuality. Some nationalist

writings gender the nation as feminine, as in Germany (Germania).125 When the nation is

characterized as a virgin, nationalism becomes the active agent in protecting the nation from

being “raped” by the impurities of foreigners. According to Susan Zantop’s interpretation of

several accounts of the French Revolution, the description of “frenzied revolutionary masses as

‘feminine’ [is] evident in much of the German eye-witness reports from France, and the fear of

becoming ‘feminized’ through the French ‘rape’ of German territories seems to have

preoccupied…many German intellectuals of the time.”126 A mother-like figure can also stand for the nation. As Joachim Müller put it, “the yearning for the mother is the yearning for Germany, and the yearning for Germany is the yearning for the mother.”127 When nation stands as the

124 These letters are published in E. Istel, “Aus Heinrich Marschners Produktivster Zeit: Briefe des Komponisten und Seines Dichters Eduard Devirent,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 7 (1910): 774–820. I will refer to the authors of each dated letter in further citations rather than the name of the compiler.

125 For a chronological survey and discussion of the representation of and fascination with Germania in Germany see Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, “Looking for Germania,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, eds. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), 1–18.

126 Susan Zantop, “The Beautiful, the Ugly, and the German: Race, Gender and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century Anthropological Discourse,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, eds. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), 30.

127 Qtd. in Russell A. Berman, “How to Think about Germany: Nationality, Gender, and Obsession in Heine’s ‘Night Thoughts,’” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, eds. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), 68.

mother of the country, the government keeps watch of and protects the “sexuality” of the nation

in order to maintain its purity.

The relationships these writers have observed between gendered themes of power, domination, and submission in many nationalist writings, makes the connection with race and class also worth noting. Domosh describes the connections between sexuality and nationalism, while also acknowledging their relationship to ideas of race and imperial domination:

Ideas about sexuality, then, in addition to ideas about gender and race, are integral to understanding the historical and contemporary constructions of nationalisms. Nationalisms based on conquest, for example, often contain within them unspoken assumptions about sexuality. Much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western imperialism was legitimized through a way of thinking that envisioned non-Western cultures as the exotic “other” that was naturally submissive to the masculine West.128

The aim behind the imperialistic tendencies of many political nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to subvert and control the threatening influence of non-Western cultures mirrors the approach that many nations used to define themselves in opposition to “outsiders,” such as the German culture’s antagonism toward Italian culture in the early nineteenth century.

A female labeling does not only apply to the actual nation in such narratives. As a representational feature in opposition to the masculine virtues of nationalism, foreign elements are often gendered feminine. But this is not the virgin or pure feminine that stand for the nation, but the threatening “other” to the masculine, or the femme fatal. In his Letters on Germany,

Heinrich Heine expresses the relationship of gendered constructions of nationalism to contemporary attitudes toward women in politics. Heine reveals this relationship in his response to the well-known book on German Romanticism by the Baroness de Staël:129

128 Domosh, 170.

I am one of the greatest admirers of her intellectual abilities; she has genius; but unfortunately this genius has a sex, and what is more, it is feminine. It was my duty as a man to oppose that brilliant cancan, which had an even more dangerous effect since she brought forward in her information about Germany a mass of things that were unknown in France and that fascinated the spirits because of the charm of novelty. (287)

Heine’s description of de Staël resembles Spohr’s own gendered descriptions of foreign musicians. In his second letter from Paris, Spohr wrote, “to a German it soon becomes very clear that these [French] singers, who execute Italian music, and that of Rossini especially, in the highest perfection, cannot give the music of Mozart with the same excellence; the genre is too different. The effeminate (weichliche), sweet execution which accords so well with the former obliterates too much the energetic character which distinguishes Don Juan from other of

Mozart’s operas.”130 Spohr claims that an “effeminate” treatment can be damaging to a German

composer’s work. Nineteenth-century writers, therefore, often employed constructions of gender as a rhetorical device to emphasize the difference between foreigners and nationals. Women and feminine qualities aided Heine’s allegiance to German history and politics and contributed to

Spohr, Weber, and their contemporaries’ separation of Italian and French operatic styles from

German ones.

It is rash, however, to assume from the gender associations widespread in nineteenth- century German nationalist and aesthetic writings that German qualities are always to be

129 Anne Louise Germaine (Necker) Baronne de Staël-Holstein, De L’Allemande (Paris: Hachette, 1967). Originally published in 1810. There are inconsistencies in the spelling of the Baroness’s last name among many sources: Stäel, Staël, Stael, etc.

130 Louis Spohr, “Zweiter Brief, den 31sten December 1820,” AMZ 10 (March 1821), 161, “einem Deutschen aber doch bald klar, dass diese Sänger, die neue italienische, besonders Rossini’sche Musik in höchster Vollendung geben, die Mozart’sche nicht mit gleicher Trefflichkeit executiren können; die Gattung ist gar zu verschieden. Der weichliche, süssliche Vortrag, der bei jener ganz an seinem Platze ist, verwischt hier zu sehr den energischen Charakter, der dem Don Juan vor allen andern Mozart’schen Opern eigen ist.” The adjective weichlich commonly translates to “soft”, “mushy”, or “effeminate.” This adjective relates to the verb verweichlichen, which translates “to render effeminate” or “to mollycoddle.”

masculine and French and Italian feminine. In fact, encoding national characteristics as

masculine and foreign ones as feminine is common for other European countries. At least as far

back as philosopher Christoph Meiners’s (1747–1810) theories of racial superiority, nationalists

of many different countries tend to gender themselves strong and masculine and the citizens of

other nations as weak and effeminate.131 In the late nineteenth century, French nationalists faced

the difficulty in defining French music with respect to the “overwhelming aesthetic and musical

presence of German music.”132 As France had served German rhetoric in the early nineteenth

century as the feminized “other,” France needed to retaliate with a similar gender encoding

procedure. Annegret Fauser states that French discourse on music at this time “contributed to and reflected…nationalist undertakings to redefine French music as an inherently national art

through essentializing ‘Frenchness’ in music and masculinizing both France’s musical heritage

and her overcoming of Germanic influences.”133 Thus one should not construe the nationalist

rhetoric through constructions of gender as solely a German tendency.

Like Weber and Spohr, Marschner had a clear opinion about national styles of opera and

their effect on German audiences. In one letter, Marschner feared that the increased production

of foreign operas would condition German audiences to be unable to appreciate German operas,

and cause them to view German musicians differently: “The French operas and our cuts in the

scores of many of them, without exception have spoiled our public. Thus it would not be good

for the first work in which you appear before us gave any reason to dismiss it with the usual

131 Zantop, 29.

132 Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse on Music (1870–1914),” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism, eds. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001), 88–9.

133 Ibid., 72.

criticism of German musicians: ‘They are broad and longwinded.’”134 In looking back on his

career in 1851, Marschner wrote, “Unfortunately, my struggles remained isolated, unsupported,

and my strength was too weak to protect the German stage, which was degenerating from year to year [into] a maid of easy virtue from the penetration of foreign [styles].”135 In this reflection,

Marschner’s concern for his compatriot’s reception of the opera resonates with gendered

language. Nationalist pursuits such as these may also tie into how gender roles interact in his

operas. Although the story of Hans Heiling is similar to many German romantic operas with

supernatural subject matter, the unique ways in which these characters maintain varying degrees

of power associated with their gender is worth a closer look.

In Devrient’s libretto, Heiling, a half-human prince, complains of his life in the

underworld to his mother, queen of the earth spirits. He has fallen in love with a human, Anna,

and wishes to marry her. He rejects the riches in the underworld for love—the opposite of

Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold.136 His mother and the other spirits urge him to stay, but

determined, he leaves, taking with him bridal jewelry for Anna and his magic book, the source of

his power. Gertrude, Anna’s mother, encourages her to marry the wealthy Heiling. Anna asks

him to accompany her to a dance, and after much frustration he agrees as long as she does not

dance. When alone, Anna notices the pages of Heiling’s book turning and frightened, asks him to

134 Marschner, letter dated 13 July 1831, reprinted in Istel, 780. “Die französischen Opern und unser vieles Abkürzen in allen Partituren, ohne Ausnahme, hat unser Publikum verwöhnt, dazu wäre es auch wohl nicht gut, wenn gerade das erste Werk, mit dem Sie bei uns auftreten, in irgend einer Stelle auch nur den Vorwand gäbe, es mit dem gewöhnlichen Vorwurf gegen deutsche Musiker abzufertigen: ‘Sie feien breit und weitschweisig.”

135 Ludwig Schiedermair, Die deutsche Oper: Grundzüge ihres Werdens und Wesens (Leipzig, 1930), 235.

136 Derek Hughes, “ Wie die Hans Heilngs’” Weber, Marschner, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10 (1998): 196.

throw it in the fire. His love for her causes him to oblige, resulting in the destruction of his magical power. At the dance, Konrad, a soldier and a friend of Anna’s since childhood, asks her to dance, and she agrees, breaking her promise to Heiling. Heiling, jealous and now impotent from the burning of his magic book, interferes without success, and storms off in anger. Anna begins to realize she loves Konrad more than Heiling.

Anna retreats to the forest where the queen of the earth spirits appears to reveal Heiling’s true identity and to beg for his release. After the queen vanishes, Konrad appears and Anna admits that she loves him. When the two return home to Gertrude, Heiling offers the bridal jewels he brought from the underworld to secure his relationship with Anna. She rejects them, revealing that she knows his true identity. Heiling, furious, stabs Konrad, but he does not kill him, and retreats to the mountains, where he decides to return to the underworld. He attempts to summon his subjects to aid his revenge on the humans, but they remind him of his earlier renouncement. Heiling swears his allegiance to the underworld and recruits them to aid in his plan. As Konrad heals from his wound, he and Anna make preparations for marriage. However,

Heiling appears and enters into combat with Konrad. Konrad makes the first blow, but unsuccessfully. Before Heiling resumes battle, the queen appears and convinces him to return with her to the underworld where he will never see the humans again. Heiling complies, leaving the light of day forever.

The shaping of national identity is connected with how audiences might identify with the variety of character roles in the opera. The different levels of power the characters espouse do not always match traditional gender stereotypes for operatic characters. The letters Marschner sent to Devrient as he worked on the score, however, provide a more nuanced look at how

audiences might respond to the characters and at the concerns the composer and librettist had with each character’s role in the opera.

The letters show the amount of attention Marschner and Devrient dedicated to the staging of the dynamic character of Heiling. A critic at the opera’s premiere in Berlin even recognized their tenacious efforts: “The local presentation of the opera was highly successful and prepared painstakingly under personal direction of the composer and in cooperation with the poet in the difficult roll of Heiling (which requires a large exertion of power).”137 On 18 October 1831,

Marschner made it clear how the audiences might identify with Heiling and how as a lead character, he arouses both distaste and sympathy:

It is the task of each dramatist to rouse sympathy for his hero. One foreign to the interests of humanity leaves them cold. That Heiling from the beginning is cold, short and dark (which motivates Anna’s distaste for Heiling and her affection for Konrad) makes the audience find Anna’s dislike just…If Heiling’s love is described as passionate, ravishing, and irresistible, his sacrifice has twice as much weight and his misfortune and scorn excites a certain level of sympathy and compassion that are fitting to his standpoint and case. So it appears to me that this reaches a higher dramatic purpose and greater approval than by the pure singularity of some kind of character.138

This statement also reveals how Marschner believed a more dramatic character type might elevate the artwork.

137 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 35 (1833): 466–7. “Die hiesige Vorstellung der Oper war höchst sorgsam unter eigener Leitung des Componisten vorbereitet und gelang unter Mitwirkung des Dichters in der schweren Rolle des Heiling (welche grosse Kraftanstrengung erfordert).”

138 Marschner, letter dated 18 October 1831, Ibid., 794. “Es ist die Aufgabe jedes Dramatikers, Teilnahme für seinen Helden zu erwecken. Ein der Menschkeit fremdes Interesse lässt sie kalt. Ist Heiling, von Anfang gleich kalt, kurz und duster (wodurch Annas Abneigung gegen Heiling und ihre Zuneigung zu Konrad…motiviert) so findet der Zuschauer zwar Annas Abneigung gerect….Ist nun Heilings Liebe auch in seinen Aufzerungen so feurig, hinreissend und unwiderstehlich geschildert, so fällt sein Opfer doppelt ins Gewicht, und sein Unglück, seine Verschmühung erregt eine solche Höhe von Teilnahme und Mitleid, wie sie, seinem höheren Standpunkt und Fall nur immer gebührt. So scheint mir der höheren Zweck des Dramas und der grössere Beifall daran besser erreicht, als durch blosse Sonderbarkeit irgend eines Charakters.”

Marschner was not always satisfied with the effectiveness of the libretto in portraying

Heiling’s emotions. At one point, Marschner charged Devrient with wanting “Heiling to be

laconic and almost taciturn throughout, never repeating himself. What he says he says reluctantly

since he is unwilling to speak about himself. His emotions never show.”139 Audiences might feel

sympathy for Heiling because he wanted to be human like the audience members themselves.

His rejection of the underworld and of his magic powers, foreign to German audiences (albeit

intriguing), and his aspiration to be loved, forms a connection with the audience. Marschner’s

description of Heiling’s purpose in the opera relies on metaphors of a growing child and of

someone recovering from an illness: “Doesn’t he [Heiling] himself say in the prologue that ‘on

this prospering earth I would become entirely human’? He does all he can to achieve his

intention of becoming human; and when he says, still in the prologue, ‘farewell you gloomy and

friendless brothers,’ there remains a saturation of his dissatisfaction with their company and a

desire to wean himself of every friendless, numbing cold in the warm sun of life.”140 Marschner

describes Heiling’s role in the opera as a model of human aspiration and achievement to rid

oneself of an ill-natured surrounding in seek of virtues like love and prosperity. Audiences could

identify with Heiling’s human dreams.

At the end of the opera, however, after Anna’s rejection, he becomes a dependent son

once more who must rush, a “broken figure,” into his mother’s arms.141 Heiling loses his

139 Weisstein, 155.

140 Marschner, letter dated 18 October, 1831, reprinted in Istel, 793. “Sagt er nicht selbst im Vorspiel, ‘dass ich auf der blühenden Erde ganz zum Menschen werde’? Diesem Vorsatz, ganz in die Menschlichkeit einzugehen, sucht er auch möglichst nachzukommen, und wenn er noch, ebenfalls im Vorspiel, sagt: ‘Fahrt wohl, ihr trüben, freundenlosen Brüder,’ so liegt darin ein Gesättigtsein an ihrer trüben Genossenschaft und der Wille, sich selbst auch…jener freundlosen, starren Kälte in der warmen Sonnen des Lebens zu entwöhnen.”

independence, his power, and his strength, the masculine-gendered confidence in his initial quest a faint image of the past. Even if some German nationalists identified with the masculine quest for self-discovery and growth in the beginning, others might have criticized Heiling’s abandonment of his homeland. Heiling is punished for rejecting his mother, a metaphor of the nation, in his unsuccessful attempt at fitting into the human world.

Three of the main characters in the opera make dramatic shifts in character due to degrees of power and their gendered constructions. Heiling’s power and determination wane as Anna’s disobedience grows and the queen reclaims her matriarchal power. The change in these characters is reflected in Marschner’s musical settings. Heiling makes a gradual shift resulting in the distinct roles he plays at the beginning and end of the opera. Anna and the queen both make dramatic changes, distancing themselves from the oppressed, gendered roles they initially play by seizing power.

A comparison of Heiling’s musical passages at the beginning and end of the opera highlights the transition in his character and its gendered roles. Heiling has two main arias in the opera.142 His first is “An jenem Tag” in act one. The second is his scene complex of melodrama,

scena, and aria with chorus at the opening of the third act, “Herauf ihr Geister.” In the first act,

Heiling openly expresses his love for Anna, confident with his decision to leave the underworld, and determined to marry her and assimilate himself into human culture: “I have awoken to a bright life.”143 His first aria is one of the most conventionally structured solo numbers in the

opera. It is in E major with a three-part form that resembles da capo aria. The two main themes

141 Hughes, 202.

142 A third aria for Heiling, “Ha! Ihr glaubt euch shon am Ziel,” was later inserted into the third act for a performance in Vienna.

143 “Bin ich zum hellen Leben da erwacht.”

contrast in meter and tempo and each have regular, four-bar phrases (Figure 3.1a and 3.1b). As

Heiling aspires to be human in the first act and celebrates his newfound love with Anna, the conventional aria form portrays him as a heroic protagonist. What keeps the aria from being da

capo, however, is the lack of tonal closure in the original key before the B section and the clear divergence of the melodic lines in each occurrence of the A section with different texts. Still, the aria is closer to the Italian tradition with its lyrical line, regular phrasing, and melismatic figuration and thus assures the audience of Heiling’s role as the protagonist. However, that assurance is lost in the harsh and declamatory style of Heiling’s other aria, “Es nahet die Rache.”

By the third act, audiences find Heiling weakened and broken-hearted, having been humiliated by Anna. Some audience members may sympathize, but his vengeful turn on the human world causes his role as a leading male protagonist to wane. Heiling’s second aria, at the beginning of the third act, differs from his first in its more declamatory nature, maintaining a resolute rhythm of dotted half, half, quarter in six-four time as he conspires with the earth spirits to take revenge on the humans: “When they are dizzy from the joys of the festivities, then I will take justice!”144 (Figure 3.2) Marschner eschews a closed tonal structure for a dramatic shift

from D-flat major to F minor over the course of the song. Heiling utters the first stanza of text only once as the harmonic motion is already leaving the tonic. Both Heilng and the chorus repeat

the second stanza of text many times through the rest of the aria, emphasizing Heiling’s

determination to take revenge. Thus as Heiling fades from acceptance in the human world, the

style of his arias changes from one familiar to audiences and appropriate for heroic protagonists, to one more suited to an estranged villain.145 Heiling’s lyrical melodic style from the first act

144 “Wenn ihr beim Feste im Taumel der Feuden, dann halte ich Gericht!”

returns when he pleads with Anna in the opera’s Finale, quoting melodic phrases from his first

act aria.

Anna makes a dramatic shift in character that is reflected in changes to her musical

setting. Derek Hughes describes her initial role in the opera: “The idealized, redemptive woman

for whom [Heiling] has sacrificed everything is an ordinary peasant girl, Anna, who loves the

local huntsman, Konrad, but has been browbeaten by her socially ambitious mother into

betrothal to the forbidding, mysterious but rich Heiling.”146 Her mother, Gertrude, also represents a conventional female role, whose material obsession with Heiling’s riches overshadows her concern for her daughter’s love (“Holy Mary! What a Glamor”).147 She is the opposite of Heiling

in the beginning of the opera who renounces his riches in the underworld for love, and thus

represents a character along the lines with Wagner’s Alberich, or the Jewish mother. Anna, on

the other hand, represents the ideal German woman. She falls in love with Konrad, a longtime

family friend who maintains a respectable hunting profession, rather than for the foreigner who

(although he really does love her) bribes her with bridal jewelry.

Anna is not, however, completely dominated, for she will not comply with Heiling’s

order that she is to avoid dancing in the village. Marschner expressed clear thoughts about Anna

to Devrient: “It is not too excessive for Anna to return her beloved fiancé’s rude behavior; and it

puts the fundamental character of the role in the right light. Moreover, such spots plaster over a

145 The only reminiscences of Heiling’s earlier aria, “An jener Tag,” in this drastic change in style, are the opening arppeggiated accompaniment in the orchestra and Heiling’s utterance of “dann, ja dann”in Figure 3.2 (Compare with “da, ja da” in Figure 3.1a).

146 Hughes, 196.

147 “Heil’ge Jungfrau! Welch’ ein Glanz”

great part of the music, which will soften harshness every time.”148 Anna is Heiling’s object of

conquest and Konrad’s object of protection. Heiling fails to instill obedience in Anna and to

domesticate her with his imperialistic behavior. The finale to the first act reflects Anna’s

dramatic shift as she rejects Heiling and the obedient role he assigns her.

The finale opens with a waltz in F major. When Anna enters, however, she foreshadows

her future protest by inverting the waltz’s ascending melody with a descending line that includes

the lowered third scale degree, A-flat. (Figure 3.3a) She sings of her love for dancing and begs

Heiling to grant her request to dance.149 As she pleads, Konrad joins her, singing first in

imitation and then in parallel sixths, showing his support for and protection of her. As Heiling continues to refuse, the accompanying music changes from the staccato quarter- and eighth-notes of the waltz to piano, yet accented alternations of half and quarter notes. Anna ascends with the same long note values chromatically from D to F over the text, “I will never be your maidservant!”150 (Figure 3.3b) The finale thus shows the shift in Heiling’s character from one of

the protagonist to the antagonist as Anna thwarts his power by exercising disobedience. Heiling’s

mother also rejects the actions of her son in a similar outburst.

The spiritual world of the underworld differs from the realities of the world of the

German audience; it is a matriarchy with a queen ruler and racially mixed beings (Heiling is half

human and half spirit). The spiritual world stands in opposition to the mortal world. Heiling

rejects the underworld because he can find no love there (“Close yourself forever, you dark

148 Marschner, letter dated 7 August 1832, Ibid., 801. “Es ist gar nicht zu viel, was Anna ihrem nicht gleibten Bräutigam auf sein patziges, unvergnügliches Wesen erwidert, und es kommt auf die Grundcharakter der Rolle ins rechte Licht zu stellen. Überdies übertüncht solche Stellen grösstenteils die Musik, wodurch jederzeit etwas zu Herbes gemildert wird.”

149 “Wollt, o wollt die Bitte, die Bitte ihr gewähren.”

150 “nimmer werd’ ich eure Magd!”

corridor, I will go to you no more”), and the queen rejects the human world, believing they have

kept her son prisoner (“Give me my son back, let him free!”).151

The queen’s shift in power, however, parallels the same dramatic changes as Anna’s

character in the human world, and as Heiling’s character in the human and supernatural worlds.

Each world thus both mimics and contrasts with each other, or as Derek Hughes puts it, each

world is “Other to the Other.”152

The queen’s musical writing reflects both her power as a matriarchal ruler and, in contrast, more traditional constructions of gender. Marschner wanted the role to carry weight.

Although his concern was mostly for the performer of the role, he felt at first that Devrient’s

libretto did not give her a strong enough presence: “In this version, the queen has less

prominence. We must note that the singer because of this has fairly little to do, and therefore

must be compensated for this neglect. ”153 Marschner’s final version of the prelude illustrates the

two extremes in her demeanor: powerful and helpless. She represents a strong, monarchal ruler

over the spirits. She is also, however, Heiling’s mother, so her grief over his departure suggests

the empty nest syndrome: “My son, will you not return to me, never?…Oh poor childless

mother!”154 A dramatic point for analysis comes at the end of the prologue, where there is an abrupt change in her tone and musical setting.

151 “Auf ewig schliesse dich, du dunkler Gang.” “Meinen Sohn gib mir zurück! Lass ihn frei.”

152 Hughes, 200.

153 Marschner, letter dated 21 September 1831, Ibid., 790. “In dieser tritt die Königen weniger hervor, worauf wir der Sängerin wegen merken müssen, die ohne dies weniger beschäftigt sein wird und deshalb ein wenig schadlos gehalten werden muss.”

154 “Mein Sohn, kehrst du mir niemals wieder, nie?…O arme kinderlose Mutter!”

Instead of dwelling on self-pity and loathing, the queen seizes command of the earth spirits to rescue Heiling from the perils that wait him. As the orchestra announces the dramatic

resolution to E minor from the dominant chord sustained with the chorus’s text, “Oh poor

childless mother,” the queen reveals her ability to wield force, “Nein!” (Figure 3.4) Her previous

melodic line consisted of diatonic scalar passages coupled with pleading appogiaturas at the end

of several phrases. However, following her dramatic shift in character, she introduces a new

queen to the opera with the descending harmonic minor (augmented second) scale over the text,

“I won’t posses power for nothing. I won’t rest.”155 Another feature of her change in melodic line

is the addition of large, declamatory leaps, such as minor and diminished sevenths, reflecting her

unease with the situation, but also her will to overcome it. Thus in the opening prologue, the

queen expresses two constructions of the female gender, both the helpless pleading of a mother

who cannot control her son, and the perseverance and will of an austere queen. The queen’s

sudden shift from submission to aggression parallels Anna’s turn on Heiling in the finale of the

first act, confirming how the supernatural world reflects the human world and maintains similar

constructions of gender.

Marschner’s dramatic musical settings of the changes in these characters help shape the

national sentiments of the opera, by providing contexts some audience members might attribute

to their own situation in the world. The foreigner, whose ambition and confidence provides the

audience with a clear protagonist, is unable to buy his way into love and acceptance in the human

world. His imitation of their musical style cannot aid his assimilation. His imperialist, masculine

role is thwarted by women in both worlds who overcome the oppressed positions as a childless

mother and obedient wife by seizing power over his fate in the story.

155 “Nicht umsonst will ich die Macht besitzen. Ich ruhe nicht.”

That many writers have not found a way to represent Marschner’s significance to German

Romantic opera in any other way than as a “bridge” between Weber and Wagner, explains why most accounts of his music focus on such elements as his supernatural subject matter and his increasing use of the orchestra for color and drama. These aspects of his operas are notable; however, when one addresses national identity while considering Marschner’s contributions to

German opera, a new array of possibilities arise for interpreting this dramatic compositional style. As one explores power shifts and behavior among the characters of Hans Heiling,

Domosh’s assertion that the nation is “suffused with notions of gender” becomes readily observable.

CHAPTER FOUR

NATIONAL OPERA AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The age of music begins only where higher art is practiced not just by representatives—where higher art has become the common possession of the people, the nation, indeed the whole company of European people, where humanity itself is taken up in the element of music.156

-Hans Georg Nägeli

Nägeli’s aim in his essay was to promote a culture of music by educating and including

the mass public in an increasingly higher form of art. The German romantics of the first part of

the nineteenth century began to realize that their attempts to create a national opera to counteract

popular foreign operas found at court theaters would succeed only if they could find a larger

support base in the working-class public. Although the supernatural, romantic operas of Weber,

Spohr, and Marschner began to have some appeal to the lower classes, the comic operas of

Albert Lortzing were immediately accessible to an audience that included both educated bourgeois and the working-class.

The previous chapters have not dealt with divisions within German society, and although a more detailed survey of various classes, their origins, ideology, and development might inform a broader study on German society and opera, I wish to address this distinction on a more general level here. Most of the aesthetic writings on German nationalism came from only the “upper bourgeoisie, the narrow stratum of highly educated men and women that German scholars have

156 Hans Georg Nägeli, “Die Pestalozzische Gesangbildungslehre,” 833–834, qtd. in Gramit, 105.

called the Bildungsbürgertum.”157 Early nineteenth-century periodicals rarely shared a broad

readership and wide circulation, and until mainstream magazines like the Gartenlaube surfaced

in 1853,158 the working classes were rarely exposed to writings that promoted a culturally unified

national identity. Thus, the early nineteenth-century attempts to cultivate a national German

opera by excluding foreign opera conventions were relatively unknown to the masses whose

entertainment was housed in other venues.

Histories of German opera, particularly those focusing on its development from German

Romantic opera to Music Drama, have paid little attention to Lortzing’s comic operas of the

1830s and 40s. Even though his works remain in active repertoire, scholars often dismiss his

contributions due to his formulaic approach to composition and his overall commercial

popularity at a time when German Romantics yearned for expression through high and individual

art. According to John Warrack, Lorzting’s “rejection of the aspirations of Romantic or grand

opera was made in honest admission that his talents did not lie in those realms.”159 Some writers,

however, have addressed the importance of his output in shaping a national operatic repertory

and national identity. Rose Rosengard Subotnik has been among the most vocal, arguing that

Lortzing’s major works received “at their own time a fair amount of critical praise in terms not

altogether different from those developed in Romantic criticism.”160

157 Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 15.

158 Kristen Belgum, Popularizing the Nation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), xi.

159 John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 359.

160 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Lortzing and the German Romantics: A Dialectical Assessment,” Musical Quarterly 62 (1976): 247.

In this final chapter, I will examine Lortzing’s operas to show how popular opera also contributed to national identity formation by appealing to a growing middle-class audience with

themes that inspire unity across class divisions. I will refer to Subotnik’s dialectical assessment

of Lortzing’s operas against the backdrop of German Romantic opera to understand both the

similarities and differences in which the two genres arouse national identity for German

audiences. In my attempts to illuminate how comic and high art conventions interact, I have

chosen to analyze Lortzing’s opera Czar und Zimmerman, because the work itself presents a

dialogue of social classes. First, I will offer a brief discussion of the different social classes in

Germany so that the distinction between the educated, middle-class bourgeois and the working

class is clear. I will then show how Lortzing’s dependence on receiving the approval of a large

audience led him to stage a libretto that unites members of two different classes, and ultimately

presents an opera suitable for a widespread national audience.

In Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera, Stephen Meyer discusses

how an interest in nationalism originating with the educated, bourgeois Bildungsbürgertum

began to include a larger portion of the middle class and ultimately created a much stronger

group of nationalists in German-speaking lands. Unlike such cosmopolitan cities as London and

Paris, in Vienna, for example, the upper-middle class had a much closer interaction with the rest

of the middle class than the aristocracy.161 Intellectuals defined this large middle-class group as a

Mittlestand or Mittglieder, which stands for a conceptual class between the aristocracy and the

peasant class. The members of this group were more concerned with moral issues than economic

distinction in forming their identity. Early attempts at cultivating German national opera, by

rejecting foreign styles, elevating the genre, and integrating the folk element, parallel the

161 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class, 2d ed. (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 16.

reconciliation of varying classes into this middle-ground social group: “Just as the Mittelstand

carved out a place for itself between the aristocracy and the lower classes, just as liberal

politicians decided on the borders of a hypothetical national state, so critics struggled to identify

a specifically German operatic genre from a plethora of different styles and traditions.”162

In Cultivating Music, David Gramit analyzes the ways in which a tradition of high art

music developed in Germany beginning in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth

century, relying heavily on a connection between music and class.163 Any discourse on German

opera and its developments at this time, Gramit argues, must take into account the way opera

shapes and reflects social structures. Studies of German Romanticism have made great strides in connecting the aesthetic ideas of the rising individual in society to German art music, but their

analyses often ignore how German operas for mass audiences share characteristics with

developing art music, despite their modular construction and preference for popular song styles.

The rise of the Mittelstand was possibly due to the increase in educated German citizens

who became more aware of their surroundings and the national movement. Between 1820 and

1850 the number of students at Prussian primary and middle schools rose 80 percent and

between 1770 and 1830 the adult literacy rate grew from around 15 to almost 40 percent in

German-speaking lands.164 There was also a movement to educate the middle classes in music.

According to Gramit, singing instruction in primary schools grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, forming “the disciplinary processes through which music educators sought to shape

162 Meyer, 18.

163 David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 63.

164 Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 59.

individuals who would both carry on the practice of music and embody the claims of music’s

advocates that that practice contributed to a more highly cultivated society.”165 Also, as

mentioned in Chapter 2, Liedertafeln became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century, bringing amateur singers from all social classes to various music societies and to the discipline of

music instruction. The nineteenth-century proponent of music education Hans Georg Nägeli

determined that the “age of music begins only where higher art is practiced not just by

representatives— where higher art has become the common possession of the people.”166 Efforts to bring German opera to larger audiences were also underway. The educated bourgeois regularly attended the theater. Because of their shared tastes, they made connections with conductors, managers, and critics in an effort to promote both old and new German opera and to reach out to the general public.167

Gramit suggests that folk music was another means to transcend the divide between

popular music of the working class and art music of the educated bourgeois: “the autonomous

integrity of that [folk] style and its products is the result of the propitious coincidence of a broad

public audience and a stylistic language that enabled ‘the creation of a popular style which

abandons none of the pretensions of high art.’”168 Developments of a national German opera

were successful because the folk element was accessible to each of Germany’s disparate regions

and classes. The separation between working class and the intellectual bourgeois was therefore not as marked as the distinction between the overall middle class, who despised the decadence of

165 Gramit, 94.

166 Ibid., 105.

167 Subotnik, 244.

168 Gramit, 92.

the wealthy elite, and the aristocracy, who traditionally favored the foreign styles rejected by

Spohr, Weber, and others. Nationalists attempted to “distance the musical values of the middle classes from stereotypes of an effeminate, internationalized aristocracy and its pastimes” with

“accusations of frivolity and lack of substance.”169 Accusations aimed at the cosmopolitanism of the aristocracy coupled with the promotion of folk and choral music strengthened the national identity of the middle-class encompassing intellectuals and working-class citizens.

Changes in nineteenth-century German art song presaged the integration of folk music into German national opera. A popular song style of the period for bourgeois social gatherings, the Volkston or Volksleid, introduced the folk style to the urban audience. Herder had coined the

term Volksleid in the late eighteenth century, and his “stature and eloquence lent authority to the

songs and their context that might otherwise have continued to be regarded as trivial.”170 Gramit

defines:

“A Lied im Volkston, literally, a song in the tone of the people, but more often, as we will see, it implied a song written by a cultivated poet or musician in a style thought to be simple enough for the people. The Volkston, then, is not a concept that can be defined in purely stylistic or aesthetic terms; although the simplicity that had become a standard rallying cry of eighteenth century aesthetics was rarely absent from discussions of the Volkston, the concept implies considerably more than just a simple tone, for notions of the popular are inevitably bound up with social distinctions.”171

Not only does the Volkston mark the distinction between the cultivated musician and the people,

but the music also defines the essence of the folk for the intended audience. The vagueness over

whether Volk applied to all people of a nation or only to the lower classes gave it mass appeal

and thus bridged the gap between classes, providing a national style embraced by a wide range of

169 Ibid., 130.

170 Warrack, 83.

171 Gramit, 65.

different audiences.172 Lortzing is one such composer concerned with his relationship to society

and with the acceptance of his works by a varied audience.

With the exception of Weber’s Der Freischütz, German Romantic opera of the early

nineteenth century sustained little popularity and name recognition, even within the upper tier of

the middle class that made up their prime audience. Lortzing was a celebrity whose name was

familiar to the bulk of the middle class. His three most famous operas, Die beiden Schützen

(1837), Czar und Zimmerman (1837), and Der Wildschütz (1842), were already well established

in the repertoire by 1845, earning him the reputation as the greatest German composer of comic

opera at the time.173 A steady opera composer up to his death in 1851, Lortzing wrote over a

dozen operas. His aesthetic decisions in composing his works relied much more on what the audience of the public theater demanded, since he lacked the financial backing composers like

Weber and Spohr enjoyed from the courts.

Lortzing wrote what would bring him the most profitable return, aiming to reach the greatest number of pleased concertgoers.174 A review of the premiere of Czar und Zimmerman in

the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung raved about Lortzing’s skill at pleasing audiences: “Herr

Lortzing understands the theater and the way of the world, and with clever diligence gives the

public nothing but what is to its taste … He knows only too well that on the German stage

nothing a German does can succeed unless it unites pleasure with amusing taste. This he both

wants and understands, and therefore the opera is recommended as the best.”175

172 Ibid., 64.

173 Subotnik, 241.

174 Ibid., 247. 175 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 40 (1838), 30. “Herr Lortzing versteht das Theater und den Lauf der Welt, der er mit klugem Fleisse nichts Anderes gibt, als was sie schmackhaft

Subotnik’s Marxist criticism of Lortzing’s operas and their place in nineteenth-century

German society paints an interesting picture of how different social groups either embraced a

similar national aesthetic or remained in a marginal position due to the focus on individual thought in German Romanticism. Her study applies the dialectical philosophy of the social

thinker Theodore Adorno, who was critical of the way an industrial and capitalist society limited

the potential of popular mass culture. Adorno’s criticism, however, causes him to draw a strong

division between popular culture and the high art of the social elite:

The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasized itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning brought with the exclusion of the lower classes—with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscious of serious art. The truth, which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premise, gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth; it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa, but that is what the culture industry attempts.176

He explains how popular art’s existence is necessary to “legitimize” and even to recognize a

different value attached to art music.

Subotnik’s application of Adorno’s dialectical method to the popular success of

Lortzing’s comic operas with the masses and to the individual autonomy of the artist, however, aims to draw more in-depth connections between the two. Adorno terms this approach

findet…[Er] weiss zu wohl, dass auf deutschen Bühnen von einem Deutschen eben nichts durchget, als was sich dem Behagen mit heiterem Sinne fügt. Das will und das versteht er, und darum ist die Oper bestens zu empfehlen.”

176 Theodore Adorno, “The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1976), 135.

“mediations” or the “blind spot of cognition.”177 Subotnik claims that Lortzing’s success was due

not only to the accessibility of the comical plots and the predictability of the song forms, but that

his compositional style also met goals common among the German Romantics: “The qualitative

similarities between Lortzing’s compositional unity and the mid nineteenth-century bourgeois

German public suggest some intimate connection between the two.”178 Thus, he was able to

appeal to the diverse interests of a middle class encompassing the working class and bourgeois,

ultimately contributing to the cultivation of national identity promoted by intellectuals.179

Subotnik recognizes that bridging the divide between German Romantic opera and popular German opera relies not only on a compensation in musical style, but in reconciling the inherent conflicts in the autonomy of romantic individualism and the social order of a national middle class: “The growing self-consciousness of the individual as a unique, free, and potent being was inseparable from an awareness of society as a huge collective entity, whose need for order directly discounted the possibilities of the individual.”180 Subotnik extends this

contradiction to national aims in the operas themselves, for like Spohr and Weber, Lortzing

wanted to create an opera that “symbolized large-scale unification,” but could not reconcile

“individual freedom and social order in a conception of the national.”181 His success in drawing

crowds for his works depended on how well he could present characters who could appeal to

177 Subotnik, 260.

178 Ibid.

179 Ibid., 258.

180 Ibid., 261.

181 Ibid., 262.

both bourgeois and working-class audiences. Lortzing’s correspondence with Hans Christian

Lobe reveals his attitudes towards the characters and music of Czar und Zimmerman:

“All Hail! What should I have done? The public duly accepted the song. For whom do I write, if not for the public?—And is a song within the action so wrong?…Do we know of any person, arguably, who did not have these absolute thoughts and these emotions in any moment of his life? And particularly, when acting as official characters, statesmen, monarchs, emperors, and kings! What do we learn from them?! Their political doings in office are not directed from the heart but to a single anecdote, quick tongues, often contrived, often distorted, from characters or enemies! A man should not be born who never had soft, melancholy hours…but there the villain should only have bad attitudes and feelings, the good only have noble thoughts and emotions. This is unnatural. Everyone can also once think and feel like the other, the others once feel and think like them.”182

Lortzing concerned himself with creating meaningful experiences for the audience, by representing identifiable scenarios and lifestyles. In the case of this opera, Lortzing also touches

on how difficult it would be to connect with the audience on a personal level by including stock

characters that represent only the good and bad of human nature. Lortzing’s libretto for Czar und

Zimmerman presents a free exchange of characters of different social classes rather than ones restricted to protagonist and antagonist labels. Lobe reacted to an unexpected use of social class stereotypes in his reply to Lortzing’s letter: “Upon my soul! A czar from Russia, who concerns himself with the best of his folk, who issues his high dignity, and who lives and works in a

182 Albert Lortzing, Johann Christian Lobe, “Ein Gespräch mit Lortzing,” Consonanzen und Dissonanzen: Gesammelte Schriften aud älterer und neuerer Zeit (Leipzig: 1869), 307–8, qtd. in Schirmag, 151–2. “Alle Hagel, was hätte ich tun sollen? Das Lied wurde vom Publikum besonders beifällig aufgenommen. Für wen schreibe ich denn aber, wenn nicht für das Publikum?—Und ist denn das Lied in der Tat so unwahr?…Kennen wir denn irgendeinen Menschen so genau, um behaupten zu können, diesen Gedanken und diese Empfindungen kann er absolut in keinem Moment seines Lebens gehabt haben? Und zumal, wenn es sich um öffentliche Charaktere, Staatsmänner, Herrscher, Kaiser, Könige handelt! Was erfahren wir von ihnen?! Ihre politischen Taten, die von dem Amt, nicht von dem Herzen dirigiert werden, dazu einige Anekdoten, flüchtige Züge, oft erfunden, oft verdreht, von Schmeichlern oder Feinden! Der Mensch soll noch geboren werden, der niemals eine weiche, wehmütige Stunde hätte…Aber da soll der Bösewicht nur schlechte Gesinnung und Gefühle, der Gute nur edle Gedanken und Empfindungen haben. So ist es nicht in der Natur. Jeder kann auch einmal wie dieser, dieser einmal wie jener denken und fühlen.”

foreign land as a common servant, if it were not believed historical, one would take it as the

greatest unlikelihood.”183 The story’s plot reveals many examples of these uncommon roles for characters of different social classes.

Lortzing wrote his own libretto for Czar und Zimmerman based on the comedy Der

Bürgermeister von Saardam oder die beiden Peter by Georg Christian Römer. The story is of two Russians working as shipbuilders in the Dutch town of Saardam, Peter Michaelov and Peter

Ivanov. Both are in hiding: Michaelov is really Peter I, Czar of Russia working under an alias to learn how to build ships, and Ivanov is in hiding after deserting the Russian army and is in love with the Mayor van Bett’s daughter, Marie. Falling on opposite ends of Russia’s class system, the two Peters find themselves as equals in the shipyards. Both seek something: Ivanov wants to marry Marie, but cannot impress her father the mayor with his low social status, and Czar Peter wants to return to Russia to end the uprising that has sprung in his absence.

The Peters’ identities soon become mixed up. Unaware of the other Peter (Michaelov) working in the shipyard, the mayor begins to believe that the rogue shipbuilder Peter Ivanov is the Czar when an Englishman, Lord Syndham, announces he is looking for the Russian Czar disguised as a shipbuilder. Meanwhile, the Czar works with his army’s general, Lefort, to form an alliance with the Marquis de Chateauneuf of France, who has been flirting with Marie and upsetting Peter Ivanov. Ordered to imprison all unidentified foreigners, Mayor van Bett, thinking that Peter Ivanov is the Czar, arrests Lefort, Chateauneuf, and Michaelov, preventing the real

Czar from returning home to control the political instability there.

183 Johann Christian Lobe, in Lobe, 141. “Potztausend! Ein Zar von Rußland, der um des Besten seines Volkes willen sich eine Zeitlang seiner hohen Würde begibt und in fremden Lande als gemeiner Matrose lebt und arbeitet, wäre es nicht geschichtlich beglaubigt, man würde es für eine der gröblichsten Unwahrscheinlichkeiten erklären.”

Ivanov and the imprisoned Czar make a deal to achieve both aims. Ivanov will pose again

as the Czar and will give an order to release the real Czar who will pose as the Czar’s new chief

supervisor, thus as Peter Ivanov. The Czar, once released and granted leave to Russia, will reveal

his identity and give the real Peter Ivanov a prestigious rank in Russia and permission to marry

Marie. The two successfully fool the mayor and sail off to Russia. The opera’s narrative shows

heroic and identifiable characters across the whole class system to appeal to a much wider

audience.

Many opere buffe traditionally delegate moral characteristics of virtue, love, and duty to

separate classes, as if members of those classes personify those traits.184 In Czar und

Zimmerman, however, those characteristics apply to the Peters of two different classes, leaving

the frivolous Mayor van Bett with such negative traits as greed and vanity. The main characters

are also more dynamic and realistic than the Mayor. Both pose as carpenters and take the place

of the Czar within the opera, displaying the respective roles of those professions. However, the admirable and despicable traits are not restricted to one of those roles, making their dual position as protagonists from two different backgrounds more believable.

But what makes Czar und Zimmerman an effective work for promoting a unified bourgeois and working class, is Lortzing’s music. As Carl Dahlhaus has observed in Lortzing’s works, “the music, then, breaks the rules of social standing which the libretto takes as its starting

184 Example works that show a clear separation of these characteristics by class are Le nozze di Figaro and Rigoletto.

point.”185 And because of Lortzing’s arsenal of familiar song conventions, John Warrack labels this opera a “skilful mixture of Singspiel and opéra comique.”186

Peter Ivanov easily identifies himself with the uplifting pride espoused by the working-

class shipbuilders in the opera. The carpenter’s chorus in the introduction to Act one reveals

these feelings: “Do not rest from your work! Day by day, blow by blow! The handyman has his

nuisances, but delight in work helps to endure them.”187 The chorus’s text expresses the integrity

of the working class, whose work does not cause pains but alleviates them.188 Peter Ivanov, however, is not the only main character to find solace in this industry. Czar Peter I also enjoys the honest work and simple life of a ship builder. As the character in the opera who is most out of place, his interest in life of the working class is evident both in his avid participation in the singing chorus and in his observations of the working-class characters, “Fortunate, enviable people!”189 In the “Zimmermannslied,” the repetitive short and declamatory notes supported by

simple, diatonic harmonies give the song a folk-like character (figure 4.1). The chorus’s

tunefulness and carefree style are universally attractive. Furthermore, Subotnik has suggested that the alternation of two- and three-measure phrases, without destroying the popular character

185 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. by J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176.

186 Warrack, 356.

187 “Rastet nicht in der Pflicht! Tag für Tag, Schlag für Schlag! Handwerksmann hat seine Plagen, Lust zur Arbeit stets geweiht.”

188 There is also a bit of irony in the text of this chorus. One might question the honesty of the workers in the age of revolution. While Lortzing was Kappelmeister at the Theater an der Wien in the mid to late 1840s, he wrote some male-voice choruses and freedom songs inspired by revolutionary ideals.

189 “Glückliche, beneidenswerte Menschen.”

of the song, also “lend it a more sophisticated character.”190 A musical hybrid of art and folk

elements supports the multiple classes who find comfort in such a tune and what it stands for.

And the Czar finds himself singing in accord with the people he envies.

It is when the Czar and Ivanov abandon the companionship of the carpenters that more

negative characteristics surface. Ivanov is jealous of Marie’s flirtatious relationship with the

French Envoy, Marquis de Chateauneuf, and his actions to win her father’s approval by presenting himself as a member of a higher social class replace the integrity of the working class

earlier suggested in the carpenter’s chorus. When Marie pretends to believe that Ivanov is the

Czar, he plays along by acknowledging her through disrespectful epithets:

MARIE: He’s getting angry, awful angry. If your Majesty will permit it, I am free and will excuse myself. IVANOV: So go now. MARIE: That I’ll do. IVANOV: In God’s name MARIE: I am excusing myself. IVANOV: Servant! MARIE: That sounds very gallant.191

Marie’s sarcastic remark confirms how unconvincingly Ivanov presents himself as the Czar. The

duet to which this dialogue is set illustrates the awkwardness Ivanov displays in his charade

(figure 4.2). As Ivanov and Marie argue back and forth, their disjointed vocal lines contrast with

that of the carpenter’s chorus in their alternations of octave leaps, which land on the offbeat. The humor from this duet comes not only from the short snippets of text in alternation between the

two characters, but also from the unconvincing performance of Ivanov as the Czar. Even Mayor

190 Subotnik, 252.

191 “MARIE: Er ärgert sich, er ärgert sich fürchterlich. Wenn Euer Majestät verlangen, so bin ich so frei und empfehle mich. IVANOV: So geh nur. MARIE: Das tu’ ich. IVANOV: In Gottes Namen. MARIE: Empfehl’ mich. IVANOV: Diener! MARIE: Das klingt sehr galant.”

von Bett acknowledges this change in Ivanov’s character, when he falsely concludes that Ivanov is of a higher class instead of a ship builder: “If Peter Ivanov is a Prince, no one can know.”192

The real Czar, Peter Michaelov, reveals the depth of his character when he recollects his relationship to his subjects in Russia. He makes the clear distinction between classes in his aria

(No.3), abandoning the uplifting themes of unity and brotherhood exchanged in the carpenter’s chorus for a juxtaposition of angry and woeful remarks toward royalty. Subotnik’s analysis reduces the number to a standard buffo aria, despite the more complex emotions evoked in the song.193 The text of the recitative describes his contempt for the Russian citizens who have, in his absence, begun to doubt his leadership and mobilize for a revolt:

Betrayed! Betrayed by them! Whom I granted trust and love! Hellish, ungrateful subjects! Treason! Crown of Vice! Only for your happiness was my life. Only for your greatness I dedicated myself, And you betrayed me!194

Since he only received news of the political uprising in Moscow by letter, his response is rash.

The orchestra accompanies the recitative passage with forceful E-flat octaves, which abruptly move to E minor via the dominant seventh (figure 4.3). Like Ivanov, the Czar gives up the unity of the chorus when he resumes a position as an authority in opposition to the masses.

The cantabile section, however, reveals the motive behind the Czar’s wish to go into hiding and his sincere feelings towards those in the lower class. He explains that their contempt for his power is blind, for he has earnestly dedicated his life to them: “Bitter ingratitude, hate is

192 “[Ist] der Peter Iwanow ein Prinz, so kann man nicht wissen.”

193 Subotnik, 253.

194 “Verraten! Von euch verraten! Denen ich Vertraun und Liebe geweiht. Höllischer Undank! Verrat! Des Lasters Krone! Nur eurem Glück war mein Leben. Nur eurer Grösse geweiht, und ihr verratet mich!”

often the fruit for the ruler’s troubles.”195 The cantabile is in A-flat major, the rhythm of the

Czar’s line rarely drifting from steady triplets in the accompaniment. The section concludes with

ornamented runs and a trill over the conventional resolution of dominant seventh to tonic in A-

flat. The text of this resolution agrees with the main theme in the opera, “The folk of posterity

full of thanks” (figure 4.4)196 The recitative-aria scene displays a drastic change in style from a

declamatory recitative idiomatic of the German language to a virtuosic Italian aria style. The

Czar transcends class distinctions and focuses on more unified sentiments for all of humanity by displaying a musical style both artistic and accessible to the public. Lortzing excels in attaining this dramatic shift of a complex character all within one number by including a large vocabulary of operatic conventions familiar to members of different classes.

Mayor von Bett’s character rejects this unification of classes, for he depends on maintaining class divisions to carry out his plans. His objection to Ivanov the shipbuilder as a suitor for his daughter is an example. However, when the mayor receives news that the Czar is hiding as a shipbuilder, his arrogant display of reasoning fails him: “Oh, I am clever and wise, and no one ever deceives me.”197 Having already met Ivanov, and believing he is a common carpenter, the mayor concludes that Ivanov must be the disguised Czar, showing that his dependence on class distinctions has misled him. He reacts similarly to people he believes are of a high class as well. He welcomes Ivanov’s courtship of his daughter when he imagines her as a

Czar’s wife.

IVANOV: How’s that? Mayor, you are not against me?

195 “Doch bittrer Undank, Hass zum Lohne ist oft die Frucht für Herrschers Müh’.”

196 “Das Volk der Nachwelt dankerfüllt.”

197 “O, ich bin klug und weise, und mich betrügt man nicht.”

VAN BETT: I? Oh, sir Ivanov, how could you believe me to be so apolitical?198

When he learns of the true identity of the envoys from Russia, England, and France, he quickly changes his attitude toward them from foreigners to revered politicians:

VAN BETT: Answer me, who are you? Speak! LEFORT: Envoy of the Czar of all of Russia, Admiral Lefort I am called. VAN BETT: Forgiveness, exalted Admiral! How can a man be so dumb?199

The mayor, whose error provided Ivanov with the opportunity for the deception in the first place, becomes the bungling fool of the opera due to his blind reliance on class distinctions.

The mayor’s aria in the first act (No. 4) displays a clear relationship to the buffo tradition.

He denounces the virtues of the carpenter’s chorus, “Perique hominum. All men on earth rest poorly for their cares and troubles.” The text is set in short, descending sequences, playfully doubled by the flute, with an accompaniment of repeated chords in static harmony of tonic to dominant in A major (figure 4.5). The way he conducts himself in life extends from his perceived place in society from his office rank. He refers to himself as the second Solomon, a self-appointed title not to be taken seriously. In the passage that follows, as he descends in a scale with the text “With a word, I am entirely nice,” the orchestra bassoon finishes the scale for him on a low F (figure 4.6).200 The mayor abandons his song to speak “Thank you,

colleague.”201 This humorous addition illustrates how Lortzing connects with the audience by

employing comedy to satirize the social elite. Unlike Ivanov and the Czar, the mayor lacks the

198 “IVANOV: Wie? Herr Bürgermeister, Sie sind also nicht gegen mich? VAN BETT: Ich? O, Herr Iwanow, wie können Sie mich für so unpolitisch halten?”

199 Note the informal use of “du.” “VAN BETT: Antworte mir, wer bis du? Sprich! LEFORT: Gesandter des Kaisers aller Reussen, Admiral Lefort nennt man mich. VAN BETT: Verzeihung, erhabner Admiral! Wie kann der Mensch so dumm sein.”

200 “Mit einem Wort, ich bin ganz netto.”

201 “Danke sehr, Herr Kollege!”

complexity of character and—despite the one bassoon—lacks the support of a large ensemble

like the carpenter’s chorus. Thus the humorous buffo aria discredits the mayor and the class system in which he puts so much faith.

Although Lortzing’s operas are rarely considered German Romantic operas because of their formulaic structure and their appeal to the masses, Subotnik’s claim that his works deserve closer attention in light of the German Romantic operas earlier in the century is well founded considering how well this appeal spreads from the working class to bourgeois intellectuals.

Adorno’s dialectics, however, are of limited value, due to his strict adherence to divisions in class. Czar und Zimmermann shows how two men of different classes work together for their own advantage, bonded by the virtues they share posing as shipbuilders, even though they end up as members of the same class by the end of the opera. Lortzing’s scene complexes, which integrate simplified versions of traditional aria types and folk-like music, allow the theme of the two Peters to ring well for a much larger, nationally conscious audience.

CONCLUSION

In recent years musicological discourse has become more drawn toward social and

historical context and more accepting of subjective approaches to studying music’s significance

in cultural settings. However, the techniques of empirical studies in music linger. As many cultural musicologists have criticized the labeling of musical trends through such material considerations as form, subject matter, and harmonic language, they too are just as susceptible to criticism for favoring one or more cultural trend over others. Therefore, I have shied away from affixing a single label to German opera in the early nineteenth century, such as “national German opera,” even though I remain convinced that one could explore the parameters of national identity in any of these works. I do not want to discount the significance of nationalism to the operas of other nations, or even its more profound manifestation in German opera of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the inconsistent treatment of early nineteenth- century German opera and German Romantic opera in many histories must be addressed and situated in broader contexts.

Many historians have struggled with explaining what German opera in the early nineteenth century entailed. The proliferation of German aesthetics and the ideas of Romanticism

in contemporary writings on music in Germany have led many scholars to discuss German opera

along those lines. However, the concurrent development of romantic opera and grand opera

reveal the composers’ divergent strategies for cultivating an elevated opera suitable for the

German language. The shifting structure of society in the decades leading up to the revolution in

1848 deserves close attention when exploring these German operatic developments. National

identity offers a suitable context for reconciling the divergences in the various histories of

German opera.

Germany’s historical adaptation of various musical traditions made it difficult for

German nationalists to pinpoint a unique national style. Louis Spohr’s dedication to nationalist causes in his essay “Appeal to German Composers” and his opera Jessonda illustrates this struggle with his own ideas for German opera. Like many writers of the time, Spohr felt that only

when foreign characteristics were removed would the true German style emerge. As Aristotle

believed a purgation of unwanted sentiments and a clarification of desirable feelings and

emotions would morally affect audiences, an emphasis on national traits in German opera

provides audiences with a cathartic experience suitable for shaping national identity.

Writings on nations and nationalism in early nineteenth century Germany reveal the

subtext of gendered language. With the growth of individual autonomy out of Enlightenment

thought, Germans became more conscious of their own sexual and national identities. The

allegorical figures of nations, such as Germania, suggest how audiences might connect their own

relationship to the nation with fictional characters on stage. Marschner’s Hans Heiling offers a

variety of characters whose battle for power and autonomy responds to constructions of sexual

and national difference in the nineteenth-century life familiar to German audiences.

Changes in class structure in nineteenth-century Germany are also tied in with German

opera, especially with the mediations between art music and popular comic opera Lortzing

espoused in Czar und Zimmermann. Although early writings on nationalism by Herder and other

intellectuals circulated only in small circles of the aristocratic and upper-middle classes, the

growing literacy rate and social ascendancy in the broad middle class in the mid nineteenth

century illustrate a move toward unification and national consciousness that crosses social divisions.

Histories that consider a national context for German opera in the first half of the nineteenth century will allow new aesthetic trends and developments that surround these works to emerge. We must adopt a broad ideology of genre to account for the disparate traits of German operatic culture that will continue to surface, and to bring together the wealth of information credited to the work of past scholars. A focus on national identity can effectively bind such a large conceptual framework.

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APPENDIX

Figure 1.1: Excerpt from John Warrack’s Appendix

This is intended as a checklist of the German works discussed or mentioned in the text. Under genre, what seems to be the composer’s preferred appellation is first given, though this often varies from MS to published scores to catalogues, playbills and other references; the description Singspiel (Spl) covers a very wide range, from plays with song insertions to large-scale operas, but here indicates that a work has spoken dialogue. Account is not generally taken of different versions.202

Composer Title Text Genre Acts 1st prod.

André Der Töpfer Composer Komische Oper (Spl) 1 (1773) Erwin und Elmire Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Schauspiel mit Gesang (Spl)2 (1775) Das wütende Heer Christoph Friedrich Bretzner Operette (Spl) 3 (1780) Belmont u. Constanze Christoph Friedrich Bretzner Operette (Spl) 3 (1781) Asplmayr Die Kinder der Natur Johann Joseph Felix von Kurz Singspiel 2 (1778) Beethoven Vestas Feuer Emanuel Schikaneder (Grosse Oper) unf. (1803) Fidelio 1 J oseph Sonnleithner Oper (Spl) 3 (1805) Fidelio 2 rev. Stefan von Breuning Oper (Spl) 2 (1806) Fidelio 3 rev. Georg Friedrich Treitschke Oper (Spl) 2 (1814)

202 John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Figure 1.2: A. B. Marx’s Classification of Musico-Dramatic Genres

1. Opera 2. Dramas with occasional music (such as in Shakespeare or in Jungfrau von Orleans) 3. “Older melodramas” (such as Benda’s Medea) 4. Dramas with choruses 5. Dramas with choruses and occasional music 6. “Newer melodramas”

Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 5 (1828): 195–7.

Figure 1.3: A. B. Marx’s Classification of Opera in Opposing Terms

Elevated Popular

Serious Comic

Music very important Music less important

Complex musical forms Simple musical forms

Recitative Spoken dialogue

Classical subject matter Folklike subject matter

Singers Actors

Present-day Italian opera Present-day German opera

The German opera of the future

Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 5 (1828): 203–6.

92 Figure 2.1 No. 2 Recitative “Du hast dem Opfer dich entzogen”

Figure 2.2 No 13 Recitative “Mein teurer Freund, ich teile dein Gefühl”

93 Figure 2.3a No. 12 Aria “Der Kriegeslust ergeben”

I. Der Kriegeslust ergeben, Zog ich mit wüstem Sinn Durch’s wildbewegte Leben Ein Abenteurer hin.

Sieh, da sank wie Mondesstrahlen Sanft in meine Brust ihr Blick, Führte mich zu Frieders Thalen Zu den wahren stillen Glück.

II. Sonst herrschten feur’ge Triebe Blind in des Jünglings Brust Und schüchtern schwieg die Liebe Bei Stürmen roher Lust.

Doch so bald ich siegeschen Die den Engeln lieben glich Kam es wie des Friedens Wehen Wie ein Segen über mich.

III. Was Männer auch er streben An Ruhm und goldnem Schein Sie geistig zu erheben Gelingt der Lieb’ allein.

94 Figure 2.3b No. 12 Aria “Der Kriegeslust ergeben”

95 Figure 2.4 Finale from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia

96 Figure 2.5 No. 28 Finale “Mein Schritt, beflügelt von Entzücken”

97 Figure 3.1a No. 3 Aria “An jenem Tag”

98 Figure 3.1b No. 3 Aria “An jenem Tag”

99 Figure 3.2 No. 14 Aria “Es nahet die Rache”

100 Figure 3.3a No. 7 Finale “Wir hupft mir vor Freuden das Herz”

Figure 3.3b No. 7 Finale “Wir hupft mir vor Freuden das Herz”

101 Figure 3.4 Vorspiel “Genug! Beendet euer emsig Treiben”

102 Figure 4.1 No. 1 Introduction “Greifet an, greifet an und rührt die Hände”

103 Figure 4.2 No. 15 Duet “Darf eine niedre Magd es wagen”

104 Figure 4.3 No. 3 Recitative “Verraten! Von euch verraten”

Figure 4.4 Aria “Die Macht des Zepters”

105 Figure 4.5 No. 4 Aria “O sancta justitia! Ich möchte rasen”

Figure 4.6 Cantabile “Diese ausdrucksvollen Züge”

106