Wagner and 19th Century Drama

            Wagner truly dominates the 19^th century as far as German opera is concerned. Indeed, a very logical argument could be made that he dominated 19^th century music in general.  Wagner, however; did not spring out of thin air – devising his system of Lietmotifs and theories of Gesamtkunstwerk without any artistic forerunners.  Some of these composers include Beethoven (of course), Weber, Louis Spohr, E.T.A. Hoffman and Heinrich Marschner. All of these composers contributed to the theatrical landscape that Wagner would eventually take over as well as plant seeds of compositional styles that would profoundly impact later music making.

            In the early 19^th century Germany, there was a proliferation of what might be called “horror operas,” these dealt with the supernatural world in a way that usually led to death and torment of the human characters. One such piece is Undine (1816) by Hoffman and Fouque, in which a water spirit is given a human soul when she is married to a knight Huldbrand. Undine warns that Huldbrand must always be faithful to her or she will have to kill her, the knight ignores her and goes astray which leads to his final death by water in the final scene of the opera. Another is the opera Der Vampyr (1828) by Marschner. Evidently there were many plays, books and stories about Vampires as a craze was sweeping German-speaking lands, and I could not help myself but laugh about the current craze of teenage girls with their face nose deep in Twilight books.  Der Vampyr is not so romantic though, it is the story of a vampire let go of hell to find Satan three virgins to extend his stay, sadly (or happily, depending on one’s outlook) there are not that many virgins around which provides for some comic moments.

           Barry Millington, contributor to the Oxford text, states that Carl Maria von Weber was “not quite the first to write a through-composed opera” in a discussion on the piece; Euryanthe (1823). This work did not use spoken dialogue and therefore was taken out of the Singspiel genre. Also musically dramatic, traces of the sound are found in Lohengrin and Siegfried. Another through-composed opera of the same time was Spohr’s Jessonda (1823) which told the story of a widow of a rajah, set to perform an act of self-immolation to join her husband in the afterlife. She is saved by the “civilized” forces of the west, anthropomorphized in the Portuguese general Tristan. I imagine that this type of production played well to the audiences who had been told of Europe’s responsibility to civilize the rest of the world as the French, British and Spanish military continued to march all over the globe stamping out individual cultures in the name of profit and religion.