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Albert Lortzing was married before he was twenty, and lived busily as singer, composer, and instrumentalist, travelling here and there with a family that increased along with his debts. It was not till after his death, and then by a public subscription, that his family knew the end of worry. Similarly the public came to the aid of Robert Franz, before his death, thanks to Liszt and others.
He might more justly have been called the English Lortzing, since he undoubtedly learnt more than a little from the composer of 'Czar und Zimmermann, whose comic operas he heard during his student days at Leipzig. But Sullivan owed very little to anyone. His genius was thoroughly his own and thoroughly English, and in that lies his real value to posterity.
Actuated by this modest ambition he had completed an opera, Farinelli, for which he had also written the libretto, with no other aspiration than that of attaining the same reputation as his brother-in-law Lortzing. He brought this score to me, and begged me it was his first visit before he had heard one of my operas in Dresden to play him something from Rienzi and the Fliegender Hollander.
The romantic movement touched it into new life, and a school arose which contrived by dint of graceful melody and ingenious orchestral device to invest with real musical interest the simple stories in which the German middle-class delights. The most successful of these composers were Kreutzer and Lortzing.
His strongest points are a clever knack of treating the voices contrapuntally in concerted pieces, and a humorous trick of orchestration, two features with which English audiences have become pleasantly familiar in Sir Arthur Sullivan's operettas, which works indeed owe not a little to the influence of Lortzing and Kreutzer.
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