opera: German and Austrian Opera in the Eighteenth Century

The ballad opera eventually led to the singspiel, the German comic opera with spoken dialogue, which was to reach its highest development in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Although the early court opera of Germany showed preference for the Italian school—Frederick the Great is said to have compared German singing to the neighing of horses—in the 18th cent. German composers began to turn their attention to singspiel.

Georg Philipp Telemann had anticipated the technique of Pergolesi's La serva padrona in his Pimpione (1725), a comic opera with only two characters. In the same vein is Johann Christian Standfuss's (?–1756) Der Teufel ist Los (The Devil to Pay, 1752), an unpretentious composition written in the simple style of folk melody. However, it was Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782) that fully established singspiel in Vienna, the international music capital. Singspiel had now become fused with Italian aria-oriented opera.

The increasing taste of the 18th-century public for musical portrayal of emotion in a more earnest manner and on a more human scale had its most significant impact on opera seria in the works of Christoph Willibald von Gluck. In a letter to the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, Gluck stated his principal aim: “I sought to restrict music to its true function, namely to serve poetry by means of expression—and the situations which make up the plot—without interrupting the action … .” He accomplished that aim with Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) and Alceste (1767).

The unity of drama and music was continued by Mozart, through his explorations of and expansions on the comic styles. His music manages to present characters familiar to every age, with all the virtues and foibles of the human race. Goethe compared him with Shakespeare. His major librettist was Lorenzo Da Ponte, who produced texts for three of Mozart's greatest works: Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (Women Are Like That, 1790). In La clemenza di Tito (1791) Mozart used the work of Pietro Metastasio for his libretto. The libretto for Mozart's last great opera, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791) was written by Emmanuel Schickaneder (1751–1812).

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Twentieth-Century Opera
• Russian Opera
• Verdi and the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy
• Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera
• The Development of French Grand Opera and Opéra Comique
• The Romantic Movement in Germany
• German and Austrian Opera in the Eighteenth Century
• The Development of English Opera
• Italian Opera of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• Early French Opera
• The Baroque in Rome and Venice
• Florentine Beginnings
• Characteristics
• Bibliography

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