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Updated: May 7, 2025
In Germany, Italian opera, early introduced, long remained fashionable. Native dramatic tastes, once fostered by minnesingers and strolling players, were kept alive by the "singspiel," or song-play, composed of spoken dialogue and popular song, which furnished the actual beginnings of German national music drama.
I have authorized Schoneck to announce "Tannhauser" as a "Singspiel," but he himself is doubtful whether the thing can be managed. He loses in this manner a fine opportunity of making himself favourably known and of raising himself above his hole-and-corner circumstances. I lose a nice income for this summer, for the undertaking would have brought me in a few thousand francs.
It is their raciness of the soil that gives such zest to, and has procured such immense popularity for the German classics. They began with the simplest musical forms, the lied and the Singspiel, the little flowers of everyday life which impregnated the childhood of men like Mozart and Weber. Do you do the same. Write songs for all and sundry.
Mozart's success had raised up a crop of imitators, of whom the most meritorious were Süssmayer, his own pupil; Winter, who had the audacity to write a sequel to 'Die Zauberflöte'; Weigl, the composer of the popular 'Schweizerfamilie' the Abbé Vogler, who, though now known chiefly by his organ music, was a prolific writer for the stage; and Dittersdorf, a writer of genuine humour, whose spirited Singspiel, 'Doktor und Apotheker, carried on the traditions of Hiller successfully.
Mozart saw that Italian comic operas often succeeded in spite of miserable libretti, because the entire interest was concentrated upon the music, and all the rest was forgotten. The German Singspiel writers made the mistake of letting their music be, for the most part, purely incidental, and conducting all the dramatic part of their plots by dialogue.
Mozart borrowed the underlying idea of the opera buffa, applied it to the form of the Singspiel, which he kept intact, and produced a work which succeeded in revolutionising the history of German opera. But, apart from the question of form, the music of 'Die Entführung' is in itself fine enough to be the foundation even of so imposing a structure as modern German music.
For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to dry recitative. Wagner was determined that his music should flow on; but the inspiration of the sea was gone, and he could only fill up with uninspired stuff.
Much of 'Die Entführung' is so thoroughly and characteristically German, that at first sight it may be thought surprising that it should have succeeded so well in a city like Vienna, which was inclined to look upon the Singspiel as a barbarian product of Northern Germany. But there is a reason for this, and it is one which goes to the root of the whole question of comic opera.
Did not Wagner himself recommend a budding bard to start his musical career with a Singspiel? It is safest as a rule to begin building operations from the foundation, and a better foundation for a school of English opera than Sullivan's series of comic operas could hardly be desired. In his younger days Sullivan had many disciples.
There, in 1678, some years before the production of Purcell's 'Dido and Æneas, an opera-house was opened with a performance of a Singspiel entitled 'Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch, the music of which was composed by Johannn Theile. Three other works, all of them secular, were produced in the same year.
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