German Opera: from the Beginnings to Wagner. (Books).(Brief Article)

German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner by John Warrack Cambridge University Press, 447 pp. $64.95

Starting from "Sixteenth--Century Beginnings," this readable but definitely scholarly book leads the reader on a long hike through the highways and byways of German opera.

John Warrack, a critic for The Sunday Telegraph, is co-author of The Oxford Dictionary of Opera and author of books on Carl Maria von Weber and Die Meistersinger (the latter for Cambridge Opera Handbooks). He starts off by discussing how opera developed from all sorts of theatrical entertainment involving music, not just from a sudden birth at the Florentine Camerata. After the Thirty Years' War, French and Italian elements entered Germany to join the traditional singspiel, and "It was generally in courts with less grandeur ... that interest turned toward German opera." After warning that "Most of the stage music of the period is lost," Warrack moves ahead to introduce us to Hasse and Graun, remembered today alongside Handel. The city of Hamburg, relatively spared during the Thirty Years' War, gets its own chapter; there the Theater am Gansemarkt opened right after New Year's 1678, a date from which German opera began in earnest.

There are chapters devoted to the Viennese singspiel and Mozart's German operas, the growth of Romantic and grand opera. Many of the composers are barely even names to most music-lovers today -- Mosel, Poissl, Weigl, Gyrowetz. Others, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Louis Spohr, are scarcely more than that. Warrack describes some of the more important works, ...