7

The German problem

According to a later composer of the greatest conceivable eminence, it was a seventeen-year-old girl wielding a pistol who secured Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) his place in operatic history. The girl in question was Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who in 1822 made her debut in a Vienna production of Beethoven’s Fidelio. The opera’s signature moment is a quartet in which the heroine, Leonore (soprano), disguised as a young man called Fidelio, confronts the prison governor, Don Pizarro (bass), who has made a special visit to the dungeons in order to murder her unjustly incarcerated husband, Florestan (tenor). When Pizarro threatens Florestan with death, Leonore shields his body with her own, singing, ‘First you will have to kill his wife!’ Pizarro and his reluctant accomplice, the wrinkled old retainer, Rocco (bass), shout back,‘His wife?’ A bit later, she pulls the gun on them, but the fact that they are now staring down the wrong end of a loaded pistol seems as nothing compared to their shock at realizing that Fidelio, whom they had employed as a trusty prison-worker, is a transvestite. A famous contemporary engraving shows Schroeder-Devrient in doublet, pantaloons and tights (we are spared the codpiece); her legs are tensed as if ready to pounce; she points her gun with scary intent (see Figure 15). This became an iconic image of its day. Maria Malibran, one of the greatest Leonores of the 1830s and a famous rival of Schroeder-Devrient, upped the ante by drawing two pistols.¹

The Schroeder-Devrient engraving has been reproduced time and again in accounts of Fidelio and of opera in the Napoleonic era. It even turns up in biographies of Richard Wagner (the eminent source of the story above), whose admiration for the singer was, he said, profound. In Wagner’s ‘A Pilgrimage to Beethoven’ (1840), the narrator describes his experience:

A very young maiden played the role of Leonore; but youthful as she was, this singer seemed already wedded to Beethoven’s genius. With what a glow, what poetry, what depth of effect, did she portray this extraordinary woman! She was called Wilhelmine Schröder. Hers is the great distinction of having set this work of Beethoven before the German public; that evening I saw the superficial Viennese themselves aroused to the strongest enthusiasm. For my own part, the heavens were opened to me; I was transported, and adored the genius who had led me – like Florestan – from night and fetters into light and freedom.²

As Wagner reminds us, Fidelio’s success depends enormously on the singer playing Leonore, a role generally taken by sopranos who otherwise feature in Wagner and as the weightier Strauss heroines. Schroeder-Devrient would go on to become a famous Agathe in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) and the first Senta in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843) – the latter another part that specializes in female exaltation and drive, even obsession. Leonore was, in short, the first important dramatic soprano in German opera, and as such bore many daughters.

Fidelio doesn’t have this effect on all listeners. It has indeed been worshipfully regarded by many; but others have judged it a lurching paradox, written by a composer who needed more operatic practice. Even the worshippers grant that Fidelio is a work in which single moments have a tendency to trump continuity. It opens as farce. Little Marzelline (soprano), Rocco’s gamine daughter, is in love with Fidelio and hopes to marry him. The fact that Fidelio is uninterested and oddly preoccupied seems to concern her very little. Marzelline is one of those head-tossing minxes familiar from eighteenth-century comic opera, and she and her despairing boyfriend Jaquino (tenor) at first seem important. Oddly, though, they virtually disappear after the first forty minutes or so, returning only to lend anonymous vocal heft to the finales. This anomaly is usually blamed on Fidelio’s libretto, which was adapted from a French opéra comique by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, Léonore, ou l’Amour conjugal (Leonore, or Married Bliss, 1798). Léonore has the combined registers that typified opera with spoken dialogue by around 1800: mortal action and philosophical hauteur freely mixed with flouncing soubrettes and mistaken identity. But whereas Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791) seemed to negotiate these registers with no apparent effort, Beethoven, arch-serious heroic composer, managed best with the elevated moments, and even then in no more than fits and starts. What’s more, he kept changing his mind. There are three quite different versions of the opera (1805, 1806 and 1814) and no fewer than four overtures. In the follow-up to that pistol-waving moment in the Act 2 quartet, an offstage trumpet call signals that salvation has arrived: beneficent Don Fernando (bass), a ‘minister and Spanish nobleman’, is heralded from afar. He makes a majestic, chorus-assisted entrance, releases Florestan, arrests Pizarro and generally sets the world to rights. Beethoven wove this trumpet call into the intricate symphonic music of his three rejected overtures, but omitted it from the final one, attached to the 1814 version. By then, the merely comic characters had gradually been cut back and Beethoven had also worked in some music from earlier choral pieces, showing once again that – in opera as in all lyric genres – the same music can, when pressed into service, suit disconcertingly different texts.

To add to the confusion, the long-standard 1814 Fidelio is now threatened by historically aware resurrections of its two earlier shades, both of which (usually called by the opera’s alternative title, Leonore) have their passionate advocates. Even before these versions were revived, there were alternative ways of performing the 1814 Fidelio. Although now it’s usually frowned on – in our austere times, any addition or change not explicitly sanctioned by the composer tends to be automatically excoriated – producers of yesteryear, anxious to pack every last ounce of Beethovenian seriousness into Fidelio, would sometimes interpolate a complete performance of one or other of the three rejected overtures – often the sublime Leonore Overture No. 3 – into Act 2. Sometimes it happened like this. After the quartet, Pizarro and Rocco depart to officiate at Don Fernando’s arrival, leaving Leonore and Florestan to sing an ecstatic duet, ‘O namenlose Freude!’ (Oh nameless joy!) Their voices echo in powerful arpeggios and short, almost breathless melodic snaps, by any standards a ferociously hard sing. What more natural, then, that after finishing the duet, newly reunited man and wife become sleepy and lie down for a nap in the dungeon; and what more fitting that the resulting pause is filled by Leonore Overture No. 3, performed by an orchestra deemed to have taken up residence in the vicinity. At the overture’s conclusion, the lovers awaken refreshed; the plot of Fidelio can continue its course, although with an added boost of instrumental music to remind us of Beethoven’s greatest glory.

All this confusion of registers and versions and production habits accounts for Fidelio’s reputation as a work of erratic genius, an opera with wonderful individual passages and less than wonderful overall sense. And then, there is the pervasive oddness of the vocal lines, which at times resemble brass instruments blaring primary notes in triadic fanfares rather than human voices raised in lyrical melodic arcs. But Fidelio nevertheless stands as a craggy monument to the confused state of German opera at a moment of transition. Why that swift move from the knock-about antics of Singspiel in the eighteenth century to the tragic German operas of the nineteenth? Why, in short, did opera in German quite suddenly become so serious?

A NEW ANTAGONISM

The term ‘German Romantic Opera’ covers much of this serious repertory, and Romanticism is an amorphous, geographically diffuse phenomenon. In German culture, as in all others, it did not arrive punctually in 1800. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has a wonderful Gothic description of midnight on 31 December 1799:

The clock struck midnight, clouds covered the sky from the north, a cold wind blew, the light of a thousand golden candles was extinguished, and, suddenly, those who had been dressed in diamonds and white silk hose and silver lace and peach satin wrapped themselves in gloomy velvets and jet bead ornaments. The nineteenth century had arrived.

This image of instant meteorological and sartorial transformation places in a perfect literary conceit the upheavals of several decades. Europe changed radically between 1789 (the start of the French Revolution) and 1814–15, when the Congress of Vienna orchestrated by Prince Metternich determined the future map of Europe as the Napoleonic adventure was coming to its last bloody end at the battle of Waterloo. The terrifying aftermath of the French Revolution; Napoleon’s ascension to the Imperial throne and his subsequent European conquests, defeats and exile; all this came in between. During this time, there were also huge changes in musical culture, including a marked acceleration in the slow-motion death of aristocratic patronage as a source of support for operatic entertainment, and a redefinition of composers as artists rather than employees. This is why the ‘starving artist’ became such an alluring accessory in Romantic lore. Left to support themselves by publishing enduring masterpieces, and/or by becoming migrant labourers, writing operas on commission for impresarios hither and thither, composers could now get seriously rich; but they could also remain spectacularly poor. Copyright laws had hardly taken force, and anyway differed from state to state. France, progressively, led the way with respect to royalties, but ideas of ‘intellectual property’ were mostly in the future. In the early part of the century, a composer often ceded his operatic score to the theatre that first performed it. Piracy was as rife in the theatre as it was on the high seas, and skirmishes concerning who owned what continued throughout the century.

Beethoven became the defining musical figure of this period in the German-speaking sphere. His position between the Enlightenment and Romanticism in some ways parallels that of Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) in the Italian world, even though Rossini was a generation younger than Beethoven. But generally these two great men have been seen as opposites, with Rossini, the operatic conqueror, supposedly showing little aptitude for instrumental music or the heroic gesture, and Beethoven, the presiding genius of the symphony and string quartet, showing equally little aptitude for opera. Rossini wrote operas at huge speed, sometimes on close to automatic pilot, and he could do so because he was a professional, knew the tricks of the trade. Beethoven was different and admitted it, in later life even offering faint praise to his upstart young rival. In a grumpy letter to a composer colleague, he wrote that Rossini’s music was

the translation of the frivolous spirit that characterizes our times; but Rossini is a man of talent and an exceptional melodist. He writes with such ease that for the composition of an opera he takes as many weeks as a German would take years.³

And Beethoven, in spite of all those years of labour on Fidelio, made amateur mistakes: forgetting about Marzelline and Jaquino; not giving his villain Pizarro nearly enough to sing; bestowing on beneficent Don Fernando, who turns up only for the last scene and thus cannot be taken by a principal singer, some of the most magnificent music of the evening. All these mistakes were probably born of moral sincerity: Marzelline and Jaquino belong to the opéra comique world that the opera begins with but then rejects; dark-voiced, attractively lyrical villains were, Beethoven felt, ethically wrong, and the fact that they were one of opera’s great pleasures concerned him not a jot; and although Don Fernando is indeed desperately late to arrive, he nevertheless makes sense of everything, perhaps even musical sense.

As it happens, or at least as it was told, Beethoven and Rossini exchanged words in 1822, when Rossini came to Vienna for a performance of his opera Zelmira. In a period that later became dubbed ‘the age of Beethoven and Rossini’,⁴ this meeting has taken on the status of a mythological clash of titans. We have no real idea what went on, since Rossini seems to have told the story only in 1860, during an encounter with none other than Richard Wagner. The later discussion was reported (with what accuracy we can only guess) by Edmond Michotte, a Belgian friend of Rossini’s who had introduced the two. To beat a path back to what Rossini and Beethoven might have said or gestured to each another in 1822, by way of the recorded reminiscences of a senior citizen playfully sparring with Wagner in 1860, is of course impossible. Could Beethoven really have communicated, in Italian (as told by Rossini to Wagner via self-styled note-taker Michotte), ‘Ah! Rossini, you are the author of Il barbiere di Siviglia? Congratulations; it’s an excellent opera buffa. I have read it with pleasure and I enjoyed myself. So long as there is Italian opera, it will be performed’? Atmospheric details about the rain that could pour in through gaps in Beethoven’s ceiling, or Rossini’s comments on Beethoven’s appearance, have the ring of genuine fiction:

What no etcher’s needle could express was the indefinable sadness spread over his features, while from under heavy eyebrows his eyes shone as from out of caverns, and, though small, seemed to pierce one through and through.⁵

The mythic meeting is cast even further in doubt by other Rossini anecdotes that circulated freely after the composer’s death. According to one source, Rossini was asked if he had met Beethoven in Vienna. ‘ “No,” replied Rossini; “he was a very bad character, he refused to receive me; he detested my music. Which does not,” he added with a smile, “prevent him from being the greatest composer in the world.” ’⁶ An important background to Michotte’s account is that, by 1860, German and Italian music had taken on fixed and opposing identities, identities that were even then easy to parody as grave, important and world-historical on the one (German) side, and light, melodic and pleasurable on the other (Italian). Moving back from 1860, the same distinction appears in Wagner’s treatise Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama, 1851) and in Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini’s Filosofia della musica (Philosophy of Music, 1836); even Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany and the Germans, 1810) aired the problem. If debates about Italian versus French style were the defining aesthetic conundrum of eighteenth-century opera, after 1800 the story inexorably becomes one about Italians versus Germans.

What had German composers done to make this happen? The interregnum between Mozart’s death in 1791 and the 1820s was a critical time for German opera. Partly this was the result of social change. The old aristocratic guard, who had for so long controlled opera, were mostly cosmopolitan in outlook, an international fraternity that thought little of national boundaries. But the increasing emergence of the bourgeoisie as a social and political force saw the onset of a more fervent nationalism about German operatic art, and also a new cultural xenophobia that arose in literature and from there fed into opera libretti. By the 1810s, rumours began to circulate that Mozart had not died a natural death, but had been poisoned by a rival, the Italian opera composer Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). This scurrilous invention was dignified by Alexander Pushkin, who turned it into a play in 1831. The successful but ultimately mediocre Italian perfidiously destroys the Austrian whose genius he envies: paranoia about rivals across the Alps could not be clearer.

It would be too simple and neat to see Mozart’s death as marking the end of a tradition in which Austro-German composers moved fluently in and out of the world of Italian or French opera. Beethoven’s operatic career is an excellent case in point. When he began to think about possible operatic subjects, he enrolled on a course of instruction about Italian word-setting – and chose as his tutor none other than Vienna’s respected Hofkapellmeister Salieri, both men as yet blissfully unaware of Salieri’s future in music history’s hall of shame. Beethoven dutifully produced homework assignments, including a duet for soprano and tenor, ‘Ne’ giorni tuoi felici’, to an antediluvian text by, of all people, Pietro Metastasio. His foray into Italian territory eventually proved something of a dead end, but at almost the same time his ear was caught by an important new operatic style coming from France, one proving enormously popular in Vienna. This new style, which seemed to emerge directly out of the major political event of the past decade, once more brings French opera into view.

FAITS HISTORIQUES

The revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s had stimulated French operatic activity in a way that later revolutions would not, at least overtly. This sudden politicization of opera partly reflected the theatrical nature of the revolution itself, in particular the fact that so-called faits historiques – vast open-air allegorical stagings of revolutionary deeds – were a primary means of state propaganda in the first years after 1789. Equally important was a daring gesture made by the Constituent Assembly in January 1791. After decades of strict control over theatrical privilege (tragédie lyrique only at the Opéra, comic works at the Opéra-Comique, and so on), the Assembly, radically iconoclastic in culture as in so many other spheres, proclaimed that any genre of opera could be performed in any type of theatre. This revolutionary pronouncement did not last long. The first decade of the nineteenth century, the years of the Consulate (1799–1804) and then the Empire (1804–14/15), saw a backing-away from the Constituent Assembly's position and in 1807 Emperor Napoleon restored many of the old theatrical privileges. Despite this retrenchment, a new type of opera had been born in the interim. The 1790s saw a mass of overtly propagandistic operas in a proliferation of genres, from opéra comique to vaudeville to pantomime. Republican tales, in which the heroic deeds of the Revolution were allegorized, crowded on to Parisian stages, often in the form of so-called ‘rescue’ operas, in which beleaguered heroes and heroines were miraculously saved from mortal danger in the final moments of the plot.

The surge of innovation in opéra comique during the 1790s and after, one that made the great tradition of tragédie lyrique at the Opéra seem somehow less exciting, produced several composers who influenced Beethoven. One was Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817), who had made his name in the 1790s as both an opera composer and a contributor to revolutionary faits. Befriended by none other than Napoleon, Méhul continued to create successful works during the Empire, among them opéras comiques that derived some of their character from Italian composers such as Paisiello. But Méhul was also a committed innovator, and modern scholars have been more interested in his Ossian cult opera Uthal (1806), which tapped into a vein of early Romanticism that was to prove prophetic. This was not simply a case of subject matter: Uthal omitted violins from the orchestra in an attempt to give a darker, more Romantic flavour.

Most important, though, was the Italian-born Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), who had made a considerable reputation in the 1790s with hybrid works such as Lodoïska (1791) and Médée (1797), both performed at Paris’s Théâtre Feydeau (which merged with the Opéra-Comique in 1801). Cherubini’s greatest popular success was with Les Deux Journées (The Two Days, 1800), a comédie lyrique in three acts, also with a libretto by Bouilly, which Beethoven studied in some detail while preparing to write Fidelio. The opera’s first Paris production enjoyed more than 200 performances, and it also became popular in German-speaking lands, still being revived there in the 1840s. No less a luminary than Goethe praised its libretto. Just like Bouilly’s Léonore libretto (hence, like Fidelio), it tells a story of rescue and humanitarian triumph. Although set in the seventeenth century, the plot was clearly meant to resonate with the revolutionary tastes of the audience, featuring characters with strongly defined abstract virtues. It tells of a Savoyard water-carrier who hides a parliamentarian and his wife from Cardinal Mazarin. In common with many such ‘rescue’ operas, the parliamentarian is finally pardoned: the opera ends by reminding everyone that ‘le premier charme de la vie c’est de servir l’humanité’ (the principal pleasure of life is to serve humanity).

In many ways Les Deux Journées is a typical opéra comique of the period. It makes full and dramatic use of its various modes of delivery, from spoken dialogue to mélodrame (a genre featuring words spoken over musical accompaniment, as discussed in the previous chapter), to accompanied recitative, to aria and then ensemble. But there is an imbalance between these last two: the opera’s only arias are its first two numbers after the overture (out of a total of fifteen), and both of them are simple, strophic, ‘characteristic’ pieces – a narrative ballad and a prayer – which recur at key moments in the plot. The rest of the work is made up of choruses and ensembles, the most ambitious of the latter being multi-tempo and multi-key, not unlike a Mozartian opera buffa finale. Cherubini’s opera, and indeed all those other French-language works that celebrated the impact of the French revolution, are little seen today, but their impact on nineteenth-century opera was long-lasting and intense, particularly in the German lands. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), often ambivalent about opera, saw Les Deux Journées in Düsseldorf in 1834 and wrote to his father, ‘it was the most pleasurable evening I have had in the theatre in a long time, for I took part in the performance as a spectator, smiling and clapping along, and shouting bravos’.⁷ His enthusiasm, which was coupled with continuing worries about the state of his own national opera, was symptomatic. The oratorio-like manner and grand symphonic gestures of Don Fernando’s final scene in Fidelio, which may now seem so utterly Beethovenian and Germanic, are cousins of the French-Revolution-inspired choral hymns to liberty that were a commonplace of Cherubini’s opera.

THE GERMAN RESPONSE

Even as Fidelio was going through its agonized, multi-national genesis, new, narrower ideas of what ‘German’ might mean were beginning to circulate. In this increasingly xenophobic world, anyone who passed effortlessly from his native culture to a foreign one was liable to be seen as dubious and deceitful. To be bilingual became immediately suspect. One need look no further, for instance, than Wagner’s sustained polemic against Giacomo (Jakob) Meyerbeer, a rival German composer who wrote Italian and French operas, and whose great successes in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s we will consider in a later chapter. What lay behind Wagner’s anti-Meyerbeer polemic was largely anti-Semitism, but German xenophobia in the early nineteenth century also had roots elsewhere. It was nurtured in the trauma of the Napoleonic invasions and occupations of the German states, and in the subsequent imposition of the Napoleonic code, which enfranchised various residents considered alien, including the Jews. The spectre of invasion, the fear that a protected homeland would be violated, became a dominating theme in German Romantic literature after 1800. Its cultural results in the nineteenth century were often glorious; its repercussions in the twentieth century were unprecedentedly violent and tragic.

An important player in the German opera saga was Die Zauberflöte (1791), which became hugely popular in the decade following Mozart’s death and was often cast as the originating work in a new genre: serious opera in German that, despite the Singspiel remnant of spoken dialogue, aspired to grandiose, even transcendental status. Mozart became a cult figure very soon after his death, with Die Zauberflöte regarded as something far distant from Singspiel, in fact as high art. One important moment in this elevation, briefly mentioned at the end of the last chapter, came in 1794, when Goethe planned a sequel libretto, Die Zauberflöte zweiter Teil (The Magic Flute Part Two). Goethe wrote this curious piece, together with various essays praising Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni, for a particular purpose: to show that these operas’ magical and supernatural themes could be seen as a meeting place between the human and the transcendent or numinous. He argued, in other words, that Mozart’s works elevated the use of supernatural and magical plots, taking them out of the realm of farce and making them elevated and serious. Although there were, understandably, no composers willing to take on Goethe’s sequel, German librettists in the early decades of the nineteenth century had new volumes of magical stories to draw upon, including the Grimm brothers’ first collections of German Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Domestic Fairy Tales, 1812–14) and its companion work, Deutsche Sagen (German Sagas, 1816–18).

The Grimms were relative latecomers in the vogue for collecting and inventing fairy tales, which had begun in seventeenth-century France and moved to Germany a little later. Such tales had already been the basis for many opera libretti with spoken dialogue in French, German and English. But what was different now was the tragic gravitas attached to magic. Take the case of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), already heard as a trenchant music critic, whose opera Undine (1816) is based on a literary fairy tale by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Hoffmann the writer was a famous bard of the uncanny, whose stories about the clash between human and non-human worlds typify the disquieting and pessimistic aspects of early German Romantic literature. Undine (soprano) is a beautiful water spirit adopted in infancy by a human couple. She falls in love with Huldbrand (baritone), and they are betrothed even though Undine warns Huldbrand that if he is unfaithful, she must return to her natural element and will become a danger to him. The obligatory sinister-bass tempter appears in the form of Kühleborn, a powerful water spirit who represents the lure of the unseen realm. Sure enough, through Kühleborn’s machinations Huldbrand is tricked into proposing to another girl and Undine sinks back into her watery realm. But she emerges from a fountain at the betrothal celebration and drags Huldbrand down into the waters.

DER FREISCHÜTZ: THE BOOK OF GHOSTS

Undine represents the archetype for German Romantic operas with supernatural plots. The setting is normal – a self-contained human society with its small emotions and tightly knit family structures – but the visitors from outside, the violent invaders of this safe space, are not. A seductive female spirit entoils a virtuous man; the nastier male variety seeks converts or brides or victims (sometimes bride and victim are the same thing), seducing mortal targets. Human order is invariably restored at the end, but often after considerable sacrifice. And although comic versions of magical plots continued, along with so-called ‘Turkish operas’ in which (as we saw in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, 1782, discussed in the previous chapter) clever Westerners outwit scheming Easterners, the serious and semi-serious supernatural libretti represent the ground note. The most famous opera of this new genre was Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), an operatic cornucopia in which the fairy-tale genre crashes against social anxiety and parochialism. Even the title is so local as to be impossible to translate sensibly. ‘Freikügeln’ are literally ‘free bullets’, and ‘Freischütz’ is ‘free marksman’, but the word ‘frei’ has here the sense of magic or enchantment; a ‘Freischütz’ is a ‘hunter who has bargained his soul away for magically infallible bullets’, but that’s too long for a title. Not just for this reason, it is now rather rare to find productions of Der Freischütz outside Germany, and those that occur are almost invariably estranging and critical, the folkishness and the phobia about aliens are otherwise too problematic. But Weber’s opera was a global success in the early nineteenth century, a success that depended on its reputation for being authentically quaint and German. As mentioned in Chapter 1, when Der Freischütz was revived in Paris in the 1840s, Wagner felt he had to write an explanatory note for innocent French opera-goers who might not understand its German seriousness; yet the opera’s easy dissemination – it played Cape Town, Rio and Sydney, all before 1850 – suggests that Wagner’s note reflected little more than a secret contempt for the French character.

Gespensterbuch, ‘the Book of Ghosts’, was the collection Weber’s librettist, Johann Friedrich Kind, mined for the Freischütz story. The protagonist is Max (tenor), a huntsman and sharpshooter whose bullets have, of late, gone all awry. As the opera opens he is in despair: if he doesn’t win the shooting contest to be held the following day, he can’t marry his beloved Agathe (soprano). Caspar (bass), another huntsman, suggests a rash remedy: Max should come with him that night to the ‘Wolf’s Glen’, where a demonic Black Huntsman called Samiel (speaking role) will help them forge magic bullets that never miss the target. After two acts and many tuneful numbers for Agathe, her feisty cousin Aennchen (mezzo-soprano), Max and assorted others (Samiel sometimes appearing silently on the edges of things), Max meets Caspar in the Wolf’s Glen, where Samiel speaks for the first and only time in the opera. Caspar, we discover along the way, has sold his soul to Samiel and now intends to trade in Max as his replacement. The bullets are duly cast amid much thunder. In Act 3 the shooting contest is held; Samiel directs Max’s seventh bullet towards Agathe, but she is saved by a miracle and Caspar is killed instead. Max is forgiven and all ends well.

Even from this description it will be clear that Der Freischütz’s dramaturgy is as creaky as a first-night scene change, and the pantomime-level spoken dialogue has the added problem that talk of shooting matches and bagging sixteen-point male stags lays a minefield of doubles-entendres. One glances randomly at the libretto to find ‘Leid oder Wonne, beides ruht in deinem Rohr’ (roughly: Sorrow or joy, both reside in your barrel). But there are more troubling aspects underneath. What, for example, is at stake in a libretto so saturated with anxieties about things that lurk in the woods, and with fiendish people (the Caspars of this world) who might be infiltrating our society while seeming to be part of it? This second phobia – about the apparently native speaker who is really something else – was both a general cliché and a specifically anti-Semitic worry. Once German Jews assimilated and became middle- and upper-class secular citizens, there was perilously little to mark them as different; the special cunning of these foreigners and aliens within was to be indistinguishable in voice or appearance from true Germans. There have been numerous sociological and psychological explanations for this new obsession with the uncanny on the part of the German Romantics. Freud, famously, psychoanalysed Hoffmann and his confrères retrospectively, discovering a whole range of mental pathologies in their preferences for terrifying Doppelgänger (self-doubles), dark figures who keep coming back and feet that dance by themselves. But the stories – especially when music is wrapped around them – are not always so black and white. In Heinrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr (The Vampire, 1828), the titular un-dead person, a quasi-Byronic figure called Lord Ruthven (baritone), gets many of the best tunes. Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer was indebted musically to Marschner’s score, and in Wagner the sinister supernatural insurgent became a romantic anti-hero and tragic matinée idol, to be pitied, adored and of course given great music to sing.

Der Freischütz was called a romantische Oper on its title page, but its Singspiel and opéra comique legacy can be heard everywhere, first of all in that perilous spoken dialogue. When it was put on at the Paris Opéra, Hector Berlioz was enlisted to turn the dialogue into interminable recitatives, lengthening the performance time significantly and, in Wagner’s opinion, adding inappropriate frills: ‘When you replace a naïve and often humorous dialogue by a recitative which always dawdles in the singer’s mouth, don’t you think you will efface the stamp of robust heartiness that marks the scenes of the Bohemian rustics?’⁸ But that was the rule. When Bizet’s Carmen was done at the Opéra in 1883, it too was bolstered with added recitatives (as it had been in many other respected venues, where speech would just not do). However, Der Freischütz also has links, not entirely happy ones, with the comic tradition. These are particularly prominent in the soubrette character Aennchen, another head-tossing minx, who in a duet with Agathe in Act 2 describes her outlook on life as follows: ‘Pessimism is not my style! To dance through life with a light heart, that is what suits me best. You need to banish cares and woes!’ This lightness of being tells us that she is definitely not the leading lady; yet Agathe’s moody counterpoint to Aennchen comes off as unrelieved solemnity, which Aennchen in Act 3 skewers when she sings a mock-Gothic ballad number.

If the libretti for these German Romantic operas seem quintessentially local – in the sense that their anxieties and (usually) their literary sources are Germanic – the same is hardly true of the music. German opera composers of the early nineteenth century often argued vociferously about the superiority of the local product; Weber referred in 1816 to Rossini as ‘the sirocco wind blowing from the South, whose heat will soon be cooled’.⁹ But like his contemporaries Hoffmann and Louis Spohr, Weber had greedy ears for what was going on elsewhere, especially in Italy; like it or not, cosmopolitan musical habits emerged. In Act 2 of Der Freischütz, Agathe sings a famous aria, ‘Leise, leise, fromme Weise’ (Softly, softly, pious song). It begins with a slow verse whose opening melody is recapitulated at the end. Then there’s a break, a recitative-like transition in which Agathe observes the landscape outside her window and, finally, sees Max approaching in the distance. ‘O heavens! O newly won happiness’, she sings – and we’re off into a rapturous, virtuosic, fast final movement. In other words, the whole number is a slow–fast, multi-movement aria, very close to the Italian manner established by the despised Rossini. It’s not, of course, that every aria beginning slowly and ending fast is automatically Rossinian: two-part arias of this sort had been around since the eighteenth century; Mozart has several famous examples. But the style of Agathe’s aria, as well as its form, strongly suggests that Weber had his own sirocco moments.

Strophic songs in German Romantic opera, on the other hand, typically represented reassuring folk idioms, as they had in Singspiel going back to the mid eighteenth century. But we know from examples in Die Zauberflöte that the strophic form was also beginning to assume more complex meanings: far from merely asserting rustic simplicity, the repeating stanzas could now represent reassuring order, a musical antithesis to chaos or unpredictability. In Act 3 of Der Freischütz, the hunters in a local tavern sing a strophic song (‘Was gleicht wohl auf Erden des Jägers Vergnügen’) accompanied by onstage hunting horns, about the pleasures of their profession: ‘What pleasure on earth can compare to the joys of the hunter? For whom is life’s cup so fizzy and full?’ The strong, close harmony of the male voices and the thunder of the horns make for an astonishing acoustic picture; a moment in which the safe, homely setting of the tavern and its male camaraderie seem to spill out as sheer sound, as a snapshot of the collective Voice of the People. But these days the scene is extremely difficult to stage (or watch) with a straight face. It’s hard not to think of Gaston, the boorish hunter in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), who sings with similar exuberance, ‘I use antlers in all of my decorating!’ Exhilarating though the sound may be, we’ve heard too many tight-blazered, all-male glee clubs doing this sort of thing – their style, indeed, derived from the male Gesangsvereine (singing clubs) that were popular in Germany in Weber’s time and beyond. As successful as Der Freischütz was, it was also, from the outset, ripe for parody and mockery.

Strophic song, however, was transcending its folk origins, and not just in the German tradition. By the 1820s, a particular kind of strophic ballad number was becoming ubiquitous in operas with supernatural plots. A character is urged or volunteers to tell a story in the form of a song. The story is about a supernatural figure who haunts human terrain; and the fairy-tale ballad turns out to enact in microcosm the plot of the opera itself. We have seen predecessors of this in the previous chapter: in Mozart’s Die Entführung, Pedrillo’s serenade in Act 3 narrates a story about rescuing girls from a harem, which is exactly what Pedrillo is doing. And there are also august followers, not just in the German tradition. In Verdi’s La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny, 1862), by some distance the composer’s most Gothic opera, the vengeful baritone Don Carlo’s Ballata in Act 2 (‘Son Pereda, son ricco d’onore’) is nothing more than a mock-comic re-enactment of the opera’s plot so far; small wonder that when La forza became a cult opera in 1920s Germany, a suitably translated, heavily northern version of this aria was a particular favourite.

Back in the 1820s, the cultural and literary complications within Gothic plots came to the fore in both the poetry and music of such ballad numbers. Take the case of La Dame blanche (The White Lady, 1825), an opéra comique by Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834). As Die weisse Dame, the opera became hugely popular in Germany in the 1830s and beyond. The text was by Eugène Scribe, the most important French librettist of the early nineteenth century, and it was drawn, like so many other Romantic libretti, from the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. In the course of Act 1, a minor character called Jenny sings a strophic song (‘D’ici voyez ce beau domaine’) about the legend of the White Lady, a benign ghost who watches over the Avenel family, and who once saved them from importunate enemies. Sure enough, the same thing happens in the opera (although the White Lady turns out to be a real girl: the Avenel’s helpful ward, Anna, craftily disguised in a white sheet). Marschner also included a striking ballad number in Der Vampyr: one of Ruthven’s future victims warns her audience, in song, about unfortunate girls who met the very fate that is about to overtake her. In all such numbers, there is a fundamental tension at work. The musical and poetic pattern, being strophic, is ordered to the highest degree, repetitive and predictable. But the content of the story describes a disruption of human life and order brought about by all those supernatural insurgents. In this sense, it’s as if the music refuses to recognize the narrative. By remaining so closed and simple, it distances itself; a dangerous vision is kept at bay or, better, is heard through a protective filter. Marschner’s ballad, in the strange key of E♭ minor, has an ensemble refrain at the end of each verse whose music seems to come from a lost past, a strange slow gavotte sung by a mesmerized circle of listeners.

DER FREISCHÜTZ: SCENIC MUSIC

Weber’s opera is also revolutionary in its advanced taste for ‘scenic music’, music (either solely instrumental or sung) expressly written to accompany some occurrence onstage, whether a mundane procession or an epic disaster. As we saw in Chapter 4, this habit had roots in the eighteenth century, in particular inspired by the French operatic taste for visual spectacle. Rare indeed was a tragédie lyrique that did not feature a storm, whether at sea or on land, with accompanying musical effects. One given of scenic music in opera is that it can be much messier, far less formally predictable, than would be the case in a purely instrumental piece. After all, the music has an added responsibility: it has to convey disruptions of nature, or match the pageantry of people coming and going, and if incongruous things take place visually, then incongruous or surprising things also happen musically. One need only compare the storm scenes in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) or La Cenerentola (1817) with the equivalent, and musically much better behaved, passages in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808) to hear the difference.

Scenic music established an aesthetic of visual–musical collaboration that would shoulder a considerable burden of operatic meaning in the next hundred or so years, particularly in German opera. Again, Weber was a leader. One of opera’s most spectacular storms – indeed, one of opera’s greatest instances of scenic music – comes in the finale to Act 2 of Der Freischütz, the bullet-casting scene in the Wolf’s Glen. It became a benchmark for visual–musical extravaganza, and one of the first proto-cinematic moments in opera. The finale is best described as a fascinating musical pile-up. It mixes spoken dialogue with Melodram (speaking over orchestral music, discussed in the previous chapter), singing and instrumental scenic music into a multi-section number that includes instructions for marvellous and, in 1821, more or less unrealizable special effects. We are deep in the woods at midnight; Samiel – an otherwise mute character – is now firmly in his element and thus able to speak. But he never sings. A hierarchy is strictly maintained: when interacting with Samiel (who is very bad), Caspar (half bad) sings while Samiel speaks; once Max (mostly good) arrives and starts singing, Caspar reverts to speech. But after Max has carried out the bullet-casting ceremony he too can no longer sing. Of course, and to keep the opera going, both Caspar and Max recover their capacity for melody during the interval that follows the Wolf’s Glen scene: they are needed in Act 3.

What happens in this finale? The curtain opens to a scene described in the libretto in extraordinary detail, with a veritable roll-call of German Romanticism’s visual markers:

A terrible woodland glen largely planted with pines and surrounded by high mountains. A waterfall rushes down from one of them. The full moon shines wanly. Two thunderstorms are brewing from opposite directions. Nearer to us a tree struck by lightning and withered, decayed inside so that it seems to glow. On a gnarled branch at the other side sits a huge owl with fiery, circling eyes. Crows and other wood birds on other trees. Caspar, without hat or coat, but with hunting bag and knife, is busy with black boulders, laying out a circle in the middle of which a skull lies: a few paces away are a pair of eagle’s wings, a casting-ladle and a bullet mould.

A ghostly chorus (F♯ minor Sostenuto, with occasional shrieks) sings about moon-milk and murdered brides; a clock in the distance strikes midnight; Caspar plunges his hunting knife into the skull, raises it up, turns round three times and summons Samiel; Samiel appears and demands to know Caspar’s purpose; Caspar sings a monologue (C minor, Agitato and sensuous, a strong moment for the bass) asking for a revised contract if he can give Max to Samiel in exchange; Samiel agrees but alludes to the seventh bullet and Agathe before disappearing; Caspar frets about Max (Melodram, with the orchestra reacting nervously). The music moves to the major mode for the first time (E♭ major) and a silvery blast from a quartet of horns announces Max’s arrival – he is first seen on a rocky peak above a waterfall, peering down into the glen; he climbs hesitantly down, pausing frequently and voicing his reluctance; Caspar yells encouragement; various visions appear in the air, including the ghost of Max’s mother warning him away and finally, courtesy of Samiel, Agathe dressed as a madwoman (‘hair strangely adorned with leaves and straw’) and poised to commit suicide (minor mode and molto agitato); Max finally reaches Caspar. There’s a brief pause, after which Caspar describes the ingredients needed for the bullets (ground glass from a church window, the left eye of a lynx, and so forth) and blesses the brew.

Caspar begins to cast the bullets. ‘The mixture in the mortar begins to foment and bubble and gives out a greeny-white glow. A cloud passes over the moon, so that the surroundings are lit only by the fire, the owl’s eyes and the rotten stump of the tree.’ As Caspar counts the bullets into the mould, strange things begin to happen. First (‘One!’) the woodbirds act oddly, to orchestral murmurs and rushing; at ‘Two!’ a black boar rushes about to the accompaniment of some bizarre, trombone-like slides in the cellos, basses and bassoons; at ‘Three!’ a storm begins and trees wave in the wind (string runs up and down, discordant); at ‘Four!’ ghostly, fire-rimmed wheels roll on- and offstage, to more of the same. At ‘Five!’ we have to use our imaginations because no staging can make it happen: a horde of dead huntsmen ride across in the night sky with spectral hounds baying; they sing sinister rhymes while blowing on their mistuned horns (marked in the score as sempre tutto fortissimo possible); at ‘Six!’ comes thunder and lightning as the storms meet, trees crashing, a huge, C-minor tempest, with strings, wind, brass, timpani and conductor all on overdrive, Presto and fortissimo. Then Caspar, unable to manage the seventh bullet, cries out ‘Samiel! Help!’ and his words echo back to him – at which point (‘Seven!’) Samiel, who is the worst disturbance that can possibly happen, much worse than the thunderstorms, returns and reaches for Max’s hand, an appearance that generates a musically outlandish modulation from C minor to F♯ minor: polar opposite keys that don’t belong anywhere near each other. Max makes the sign of the cross and falls to the ground. The offstage clock strikes one, but little more than fifteen minutes of performance time have passed and we’re done.

Music carries a large part of the burden of conviction when the scene is staged, of course. At the 1821 premiere, in Berlin’s Schauspielhaus, the visual effects were conjured up partly with magic lanterns: projections of coloured transparent images, which in German were called Phantasmagoria. Nowadays, the Wolf’s Glen is always a director’s ‘signature scene’. Some try to match nineteenth-century surround sound with twenty-first-century IMAX-quality visual effects. In an English National Opera production from the late 1990s by David Pountney, the magic bullets were concocted with much violence in the mouth of a sleepwalking (or imagined) Agathe, and then extracted from her with spasms and groans of sexual release; in the background various period scenes were enacted, among them a naked female dancer chased around by some very nasty-looking supernumeraries. The whole episode was finished off by a chorus of First World War soldiers with full trench accoutrements – given the volume of coloured smoke enveloping the stage, they may have needed their gas masks. This may sound impressively modern, but other directors question more fundamentally an audience’s taste for overwhelming Gothic illusion. In one recent Hamburg production, the finale ended with emergency lighting going on in the theatre, flashing red lights from (apparent) ambulances parked just outside. The audience (as captured on the DVD) were left in a state of indecision, half afraid that a fire had broken out or that someone had died, half suspecting that this was all part of the plan and smiling broadly. That Weber’s music can accommodate both these imaginings is a tribute to its sheer unruliness and visionary energy.

Weber’s daredevil finale, the sense that he simply let everything fly at once, is a remarkable moment in the history of opera. The fact that the performers can never hope to get through it with neatness or precision – as some conductors say, you just close your eyes and pray – is integral to the scene’s effect, to all its intimations of disorder and inhuman forces. There is a famous special effect built into the music, one whose implications are much the same. If you look at the keys that are central to several sections in the finale – F♯ minor at the beginning and end, C minor in Caspar’s monologue and the storm sequence, A minor for the Agathe manifestation and E♭ major for Max’s entrance – you see that Weber has played a trick. Earlier in the opera, he has punctuated references to Samiel and his underworld menace with a particular harmonic sonority, a so-called ‘diminished chord’ made up of stacked minor thirds. This idea of attaching musical ideas to prominent elements of the drama, and then recalling them at critical moments, has been seen before, notably in French operas such as Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-Lion (discussed in the previous chapter). It had, via the French examples, become popular in German opera: Weber may have been particularly influenced by Spohr’s Faust, which he helped to stage in 1816 and which he praised for its use of ‘a few melodies, felicitously and aptly devised, [which] weave like delicate threads through the whole, and hold it together artistically’.¹⁰ But in the Wolf’s Glen scene he took the process a stage further. The pitches that make up Samiel’s diminished-chord motif (F♯, A, C, E♭) have been spread out in time and buried deep into the music: they become the pitch foundations on which the finale’s harmonic journey is composed. This device has attained some notoriety. It is a subliminal symbol of Samiel’s domination, and Weber’s sketches for the opera show that it was carefully planned and worked out, almost in the manner of a symphonic movement. Yet again, as we saw with Mozart in Chapter 5, German composers were bringing to opera some harmonic and orchestrational techniques from the instrumental genres in which they were increasingly regarded as the masters. It would be a gateway to many further experiments. But the French origins of the reminiscence motif, and for that matter of Weber’s scenic music spectacular, demonstrate that the German Problem was also a matter of symbiosis, of Beethoven’s and Weber’s cosmopolitanism and of greedy ears and profitable exchanges both ways across the Rhine.