Tenebrous Teutons.(German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner)

John Warrack German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner. Cambridge University Press, 4-59 pages, $62.95.

Italian opera before the mid-nineteenth century is a cavalcade of great names, from Monteverdi to the young Verdi. France's pre-1850 operatic tradition, less consistently impressive, still boasts a humbling succession of notables from Lully and Rameau to Berlioz and the young Gounod (whose Faust appeared in 1859, only just after our cutoff date). By contrast, Germanic-language music theater before Wagner's advent resembles not an artistic canon but a lunar landscape, with a few mountains jutting forth from seas of all too forgettable tranquility. There are three awe-inspiring peaks (The Magic Flute, Fidelio, and Webers Der Freischutz); tallish markers elsewhere (Weber's Euryanthe and Oberon; Mozart's Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail). The rest, pretty much, is silence. (Don Giovanni, Cosi, and Figaro, of course, are in Italian.)

It somehow typifies early Teutonic theatrical underachievement that the first opera ever composed by a German--Dafne, by Heinrich Schutz--was hailed at its 1627 premiere but is irretrievably lost, its manuscript having perished in a 1760 fire. Imagine where a comparable disaster in, say, early English drama would have left mankind. Suppose fate, while revealing the name of Everyman's playwright, had robbed us of the actual text.

We must therefore salute John Warrack, whose biographies of Weber and Tchaikovsky are laurels on which any scholar could rest with abundant pride, for artfully hammering out to over four-hundred pages a tale about which frankly the musical world does not give a damn and is unconvinced that it ever should. When a music lover contemplates in Warrack's narrative such tenebrous names as Johann Caspar Kerll, Reinhard Keiser, Johann Adolf Hasse, Carl Graun, Johann Adam Hiller, Paul Wranitzky, and Heinrich Marschner, is he justified if his heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains his senses as if of New Grove he had drunk? Probably not: because CD catalogues--and the book's own staff-notation extracts--suggest that while he might seldom have overlooked outright genius, the above list's minor masters aimed at a higher mean level than comparably obscure Italian contemporaries, far more prolific than most of their transalpine equivalents, managed.

A handful mentioned above had about them nothing minor at all. Keiser (1674-1739) exhibited rare business acumen: in early eighteenth-century Hamburg (devoid of aristocratic patronage), he administered that unbelievable thing, an opera house that for years stayed in the black. As to Keiser's own musical creations, Handel several times paid him the compliment of plagiarizing therefrom. Keiser's Croesus achieved in late 2000 the honor of a complete commercial recording from Harmonia Mundi; were it or some rival record label to take seriously the other twenty-odd Keiser operas that survive, we might pity our former selves for our total ignorance of Keiser's accomplishments, much as we now pity our great-grandparents for their ignorance of L'incoronazione di Poppea and Les Troyens.

Even when the musical significance of Warrack's subject matter looks elusive--as with the eighteenth century's deliriously popular singspiel genre, which separated footling ...