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Overview
The author provides a comprehensive treatment of the writings both for and against the operatic forms that dominated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German theater. Included in her focus are the academic critics who denounced the failure of opera to comply with universally valid standards of beauty and the rules of drama; the various sermonizers who condemned opera's excessive emphasis on the senses and preached total abstinence; and the theatrical artists and patrons as well as the innumerable poets, philosophers, and writers who upheld the freedom to experiment and defended opera as a modern theatrical form with nearly unlimited artistic possibilities.
As a result of these controversies, the defense of opera helped to shape a distinctively German version of the classical ideal, enriched German criticism with new vocabulary, promoted the study of the performing arts, and emphasized music and spectacle as essential components of theater.
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691601274 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1763 |
| Pages: | 396 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Opera in the Development of German Critical Thought
By Gloria Flaherty
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06370-6
CHAPTER 1
ANCIENT OR MODERN
Quintessential Theater
The Holy Roman Empire comprised over three hundred territorial states at the turn of the seventeenth century. Its universal authority, like that of the church it supported, had already been irrevocably destroyed by the Lutheran Reformation and the accompanying cataclysmic events. Habsburg attempts to regain control over the German-speaking states met with increasingly violent opposition from within as well as from without. Politically ambitious German princes feared that centralized power would threaten their own sovereignty. To combat imperial encroachment, they promoted decentralization, banded together along religious lines, and solicited foreign assistance. The precarious balance created by the Peace of Augsburg (1555) was shortly to be upset by a civil war that would involve most European states for at least three decades.
It was on the eve of the Thirty Years' War that the newly developed Italian opera was introduced to the German-speaking lands. The first opera was performed in Salzburg in 1618 by the predominantly Italian group of musicians and singers assembled by Archbishop Marx Sittich von Hohenems (1574-1619). German princes, whether ecclesiastical or secular, were particularly receptive to the arts. They collected paintings, maintained musical ensembles, supported poets, and spent fabulous sums of money all for the greater glory of their office and, of course, themselves. German burghers were also interested in keeping up with the very latest foreign fashions. They might of necessity have been less extravagant than their rulers, but they too loved pageantry, music, and theatrical entertainments. Theater flourished in multifarious forms before, during, and after the Thirty Years' War. And so did interest in theatrical history, dramatic theory, poetics, philology, bibliography, and criticism.
Martin Opitz (1597-1639) stands out at the beginning of the seventeenth century as the most notable German consolidator of current European critical thought. Having immersed himself in the poetic theories of the Italian, the French, and the Dutch Renaissance, he strove to make them the basis for purifying and ennobling indigenous literature. His Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) synthesized those theories and outlined important metrical, linguistic, and generic reforms. The numerous works he either wrote, translated, or adapted were to serve as examples of what Germans could do to bring their country up to the artistic level of other polite nations. It was no coincidence that he was commissioned to prepare the first opera libretto in the German language. The history of German operatic criticism as well as opera begins with him.
Opitz's adaptation of Ottavio Rinuccini's (1562-1621) Daphne, the earliest of the Florentine Camerata's musical dramas, was set to music by Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) and successfully performed in 1627 during the festivities attending the marriage of the daughter of the Saxon elector to the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. The preface Opitz wrote for this pastoral tragicomedy shows that he did not share the Camerata's views about restoring ancient drama. Far more important to him were the dramatic standards that Renaissance theorists had purportedly derived from antiquity. Opitz explained that he would have preferred to construct his libretto according to such standards but had had to deviate from them in order to satisfy the tastes of his modern audience. In the dedicatory preface to Judith (1635), a heroic opera also adapted from an Italian source, Opitz again compared his work to pseudo-Aristotelian rules and offered excuses for its divergence. The main excuse this time was that it fulfilled a useful didactic function by reinforcing Christian beliefs and stimulating patriotic feelings.
Although Opitz never resolved the conflict between contemporary theatrical demands and so-called ancient dramatic theories, he set important precedents for his contemporaries and for those who followed. They carried out his verse reforms, continued his investigation of the Germanic past, elaborated on his poetic manual, and experimented with many of the genres he had sanctioned. His ambivalent attitude toward opera did not hinder some of his disciples from trying their hand at it. August Buchner (1591-1661), one of the most loyal of the Opitzians, recognized music's importance for the new metrics and collaborated with Schütz on a Singballet treating the Orpheus motif (1638). Like most early seventeenth-century operas, it too was performed during an aristocratic wedding celebration. Such celebrations generally included some form of musical theatrical extravaganza, which afforded ample opportunity for praising the lord of the principality, his family, or his visitors, in grand style.
As Italian opera grew more and more fashionable in courtly and patrician circles, a steadily increasing number of German poets and playwrights became involved in operatic productions. While some translated or adapted Italian texts, others wrote original librettos. For many, it was a patriotic matter to vie with the Italians and stem the tide of their influence. Opposing current tendencies to ape other countries and produce Alamode works, these writers strove to renew ancient Germanic virtues by cultivating their own language and the indigenous forms that mirrored such virtues. Songs, ballads, and various kinds of musical accompaniment had long been popular in German moralities, Shrove Tuesday shows, farces, and plays. With the arrival of the englische Komödianten in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, music became the medium for the comic figure's jigs and antics. Jakob Ayrer (1543-1605), the Nuremberg dramatist who took as his model the low interpretation of English Renaissance drama provided by the englische Komodianten, wrote several plays based on folksong tunes and called them singets spiele. Sight and sound were the main elements of these plays as well as of the Liederspiele, marionette plays, pièces à machines, and intermezzos that were enthusiastically welcomed by German audiences. Some seventeenth-century librettists disavowed such popular traditions as too coarse and naturalistic. Nevertheless the newly imported operatic form gradually merged with them and, in so doing, satisfied contemporary demands for contrast, pageantry, suspense, excitement, and colorful spectacle.
By mid-seventeenth century, despite the Thirty Years' War, German operatic forms and their Italian counterparts had become so successful that they began receiving more and more critical recognition. It was a time of active inquiry and debate, for the recently founded literary societies (Sprachgesellschaften) labored to reconcile Germany's artistic practices, traditions, and needs with the ideas of ancient theorists, Renaissance scholars, and contemporary English writers. The membership of such societies, which often included musicians as well as poets, theorists, and critics, studied the German language, applied the Opitzian metrical reforms, discussed the significance of the so-called ancient rules, and analyzed the various poetic genres. Because of their high estimation of music, they were particularly concerned with the lied and the operatic form. Though frequently mentioning the intentions of the Florentine Camerata, they affirmed those tendencies to fuse word, action, spectacle, and music that were already latent in German theater. Many of them thought opera surpassed ancient drama in its manner of portraying actions.
Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607-1658), a leading member of the Nuremberg society known as the Shepherds of the Pegnitz, was one writer who believed that modern theatrical works were far superior to those of antiquity. In his Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele (1641-1649), eight volumes of conversations about the artistic aims, concerns, and ideas of the society, he unequivocally rejected the notion of Aristotle as the incontestable lawgiver and proudly asserted that Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles as well as Terence and Plautus would have much to learn if they returned to life in the modern world (VI, 164). Imitating them or observing the unities could not, he contended, be of any importance when the primary aim was effectiveness in modern living theater. What was important, in his opinion, was the playwright's ability to command the arts of dancing, stage design, painting, music, and poetry, and to bring them into one grand synthesis.
Harsdörffer's own attempt to produce just such an artistic synthesis was Seelewig, a spiritual pastoral set to music by Sigmund Gottlieb Staden (1607-1655). The fourth part of the Gesprächspiele contains both the libretto and the score (IV, 76-209 and 533-666). Harsdörffer had his speakers present the text line for line and then had them comment on the various artistic theories and problems that those lines suggested. This running commentary on the text not only provided detailed stage directions for musicians, actors, and designers, but also contained Harsdörffer's clearest explanation of opera as the quintessential theatrical form. The speakers first discuss Italian opera and compare it to a plant too tender and precious to strike root when transplanted into arid, infertile soil. Because they consider it incompatible with the hardy Germanic spirit, they suggest the cultivation of genuinely German operas presenting heroic deeds and Christian virtues. Their attention then turns to Seelewig, its German names, and its attempt to synthesize widely divergent arts.
To elucidate the concept of artistic synthesis, Harsdörffer had his speakers consider Pythagorean ideas of world harmony. After accepting music as an echo of the eternal verities radiating from heaven, they proceed to Simonides' distinction between poetry as a speaking picture and painting as a mute poem. Finally they conclude that opera is the supreme art form because its music blends poetry and painting into one entity just as divine music harmonizes the dissonances of the universe. As if unconsciously sensing the deficiencies of the libretto, the speakers bemoan the fact that there are too few human beings talented enough in all three arts to effect a perfect synthesis. Although Harsdörffer had earlier described this synthesis with the image of inseparably conjoined links in a great chain (III, 304), here he referred to it as being like the surveyor's level, an equally proportioned circle with three points (IV, 202). The use of images from surveying, architecture, or construction was not unusual because he, like numerous other writers since the Renaissance, considered the artist comparable to the divine architect of the universe.
In addition to opera's theoretical background, more practical matters like acting techniques, costuming, and staging are discussed by the speakers. Their comments about the kind of stage necessary for performing Seelewig reveal Harsdörffer's penchant for visualization as well as his complete disavowal of the unities and other restrictive rules. They claim the frequent scenic changes would be best facilitated with a revolving disk-shaped stage quartered off to display in proper perspective coastal, mountainous, meadow, and urban landscapes (IV, 208-209). Because the operatic medium allowed for greater novelty, variety, and change, Harsdörffer considered it a distinct advance over spoken drama. To him, musical theatrical works represented the greatest kind of poetic masterpieces possible.
Harsdörffer's fellow Pegnitz Shepherds shared his high evaluation of such artistic syntheses and, in addition to experimenting with various types of poetic sound painting, wrote operatic texts and investigated the backgrounds of what had come to be known as the sister arts. Sigmund von Birken (1626-1681), who prepared two operatic librettos, considered music the oldest of the sisters. In Teuische Redebind- und Dicht-Kunst, a poetic manual that was published in 1679 after circulating since the 1650s, he explained that the noble art of poetry originated out of the songs primordial shepherds had sung in praise of their gods (sig. ):( vijr). Birken also credited those shepherds, who had presumably understood the fundamental relationship between music and poetry, with inventing musico-poetic plays (p. 314). He agreed with Scaliger (1484-1558) that such simple pastoral plays were the sources of other dramatic genres, and in explaining their evolution, applied rather primitive notions of progression to conventional ideas of decorum. Comedy, he explained, resulted after city dwellers imported pastoral plays and adapted them to portray common people; when courtiers and aristocrats subsequently transformed them to depict their milieu, they created tragedy (p. 322). Birken's interpretation of tragicomedy's origins, which omitted mention of Euripides or Plautus, places him in the same tradition as those sixteenth-century German humanists who believed that Christianity's promise of heavenly rewards for earthly pains precluded pure comedy or pure tragedy and justified the creation of new, modern mixed dramas. Like them, he rejected the concept of generic purity, arguing that modern sacred plays should not be created or judged according to ancient pagan standards. While accepting Opitz's Daphne as a revival of the early pastoral, Birken emphasized that modern musical theatrical plays should replace ancient pagan superstitions with Christian values (pp. 315-316).
Questions of opera's origins and historical development were equally important in North German cities, where operatic plays and semioperatic spectacles were enthusiastically produced and fostered by members of local literary societies. Some theorists and handbook writers continued relating opera to their own interpretations of the ancient pastoral, but others compared it to what they knew of Greek drama.
Konrad von Höveln (ca. 1630-1670), member of two Hamburg literary societies, considered opera a special kind of theatrical play in his Eren- Danz- Singe Schauspile-Entwurf, a discursive, often contradictory little treatise that appeared in 1663 under the pseudonym Candorin. He thought it comparable to spoken drama in that it portrayed certain human actions in a poetic manner; however, he found it differed in many respects. After vainly trying to apply Ciceronian ideas to what he claimed were actual practices, Höveln contended that opera must be a highly developed, modern version of the Greek dithyramb. To support his contention that the prototype of operatic song dated from remotest antiquity, he explained that Aristotle had divided all poetic works into epic, lyric, and dithyrambic categories and had included all dramas in the last one (pt. 2, pp. 2324). The musical theatrical form that had recently originated in Italy was, Höveln concluded, a more elevated kind of drama because it portrayed actions with the divine gift of modern music. He was one of the first theorists to grant composers primary control over the construction as well as production of operas (pt. 3, p. 19). He did so because he hoped they would know how to employ the recitative style in a way that would not interfere with easy comprehension of the words, which, after all, were most important for presenting the necessary "copy of life, mirror of custom, and reflection of truth."
Much more sophisticated was the treatment of opera by Daniel Georg Morhof (1639-1691), professor of poetry and rhetoric at Kiel and one of Germany's best known polyhistors. It reflected his wide learning and his concern about discovering the historical interrelationships between all branches of knowledge. Opera was just one of the many topics included in his influential Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie (1682), an encyclopedic work outlining the stages of German literary development within a general European framework. Morhof was as familiar with European theatrical practices as he was with the various schools of theoretical thought. Instead of speculating about them, he attempted to view them in historical perspective, and he developed a descriptive approach that was admired until Goethe's (1749-1832) day. The mimes and older theatrical traditions merited just as much of his attention as Cardinal Richelieu's attempt to rid French theater of drame libre by strictly enforcing neoclassical rules. If Morhof claimed that modern writers still had much to learn from Greek and Roman poetics, then he suggested they do so not only by studying the ancients but also by reading the criticism of Italians like Francesco Patrizi (1529-1597) who opposed pseudo-Aristotelian tendencies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Opera in the Development of German Critical Thought by Gloria Flaherty. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- ONE: ANCIENT OR MODERN, pg. 10
- TWO: RULE BY PRECEDENT OR BY CODE, pg. 37
- THREE: CONTINUITY IN CHANGE, pg. 66
- FOUR: COLLISION AND CONCESSION, pg. 93
- FIVE: TRADITION, TRANSFORMATION, AND TRANSITION, pg. 128
- SIX: INTERACTION IN BERLIN AT MID-CENTURY, pg. 159
- SEVEN: LESSING’S CONSOLIDATION, pg. 201
- EIGHT. ASSERTION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY, pg. 233
- NINE: CULMINATION AND CONTINUATION: WIELAND, pg. 257
- EPILOGUE, pg. 281
- NOTES, pg. 301
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 335
- INDEX, pg. 365