Editing Opera in German (section)

==Baroque era==

===Birth===
[[File:Schutz.jpg|thumb|left|upright|[[Heinrich Schütz]]]]
The world's first opera was ''[[Dafne]]'' by [[Jacopo Peri]], which appeared in [[Florence]] in 1598. Three decades later [[Heinrich Schütz]] set the same [[libretto]] in a translation by the poet [[Martin Opitz]], thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's ''[[Dafne (Opitz-Schütz)|Dafne]]'' is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of [[Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt|Hessen-Darmstadt]] to Princess Sophia Eleonora of [[Saxony]] in [[Torgau]] in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. [[Antonio Cesti]] was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza ''[[Il pomo d'oro]]'' for the imperial court in [[Vienna]] in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In [[Nuremberg]] in 1644, [[Sigmund Theophil Staden|Sigmund Staden]] produced the "spiritual pastorale", ''[[Seelewig]]'', which foreshadows the ''[[Singspiel]]'', a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. ''Seelewig'' was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.{{sfn|Parker|1994|pp=31–32}}{{sfn|Grout|2003|loc="Early German Opera", pp. 121–131}}{{sfn|Holden|1993|loc=Articles on Schütz and Staden.}}

===Hamburg 1678–1738===
Another important development was the founding of the [[Oper am Gänsemarkt|Theater am Gänsemarkt]] in [[Hamburg]] in 1678, aimed at the local middle classes who preferred opera in their own language. The new opera house opened with a performance of [[Johann Theile]]'s ''Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch'', based on the story of [[Adam and Eve]]. The theatre, however, would come to be dominated by the works of [[Reinhard Keiser]], an enormously prolific composer who wrote over a hundred operas, sixty of them for Hamburg. Initially, the works performed in Hamburg had all been on religious themes in an attempt to ward off criticisms by [[Pietism|Pietist]] church authorities that the theatre was immoral, but Keiser and fellow composers such as [[Johann Mattheson]] broadened the range of subject matter to include the historical and the mythological. Keiser drew on foreign operatic traditions, for instance he included dances after the model of the French tradition of [[Jean-Baptiste Lully|Lully]]. The [[recitative]] in his operas was always in German so the audience could follow the plot, but from ''Claudius'' in 1703 he began to include arias in Italian which allowed for florid vocal display. The hallmark of the Hamburg style was its eclecticism. ''[[Orpheus (Telemann)|Orpheus]]'' (1726) by [[Georg Philipp Telemann|Telemann]]<ref>Another prolific composer, Telemann began to eclipse Keiser as the leading opera composer in Hamburg from 1717.</ref> contains arias in Italian setting texts taken from famous [[George Frideric Handel|Handel]] operas as well as choruses in French to words originally set by Lully. Hamburg opera might also include comic characters (Keiser's ''Der Carneval von Venedig'' of 1707 has them speaking in the local Lower Saxon dialect), marking a great contrast to the elevated new style of [[opera seria]] as defined by [[Metastasio]]. Yet the immediate future belonged to Italian opera. The most famous German-born opera composer of the era, Handel, wrote four operas for Hamburg at the beginning of his career but soon moved on to write opera seria in Italy and England.<ref>Only one of Handel's German-language operas, ''Almira'', survives in a reasonably intact state.</ref> In 1738, the Theater am Gänsemarkt went bankrupt and the fortunes of serious opera in German went into decline for the next few decades.<ref>On the Hamburg opera: {{harvnb|Parker|1994|pp=32, 77–79}}</ref>{{sfn|Grout|2003|loc=Section on Keiser, pp. 176ff}}{{sfn|Holden|1993|loc=Articles on Keiser, Mattheson and Telemann}}<ref>Booklet notes to the recording of Keiser's opera ''Croesus'' by René Jacobs.</ref>

Other early opera houses in Germany included the [[Oper am Brühl]] in [[Leipzig]] and the [[Opernhaus vorm Salztor]] in [[Naumburg (Saale)|Naumburg]] in 1701. Both played during the trade fairs in the towns, presenting both German and Italian opera, and a combination of both. While the house in Leipzig was financed by the town of Leipzig, the house in Naumburg was initiated and supported by the ruler, [[Moritz Wilhelm, Duke of Saxe-Zeitz]], but offered public performances.

===''Opera seria'', ''Singspiel'', melodrama, early serious German opera===
[[File:Abel Seyler silhouette - Basel.svg|thumb|upright|Theatre director [[Abel Seyler]], a major promoter of German opera who pioneered serious German opera in the 1770s]]
The other leading German composers of the time tended to follow Handel's example. This was because the courts of the various German states favoured opera in Italian. In 1730 the chief proponent of opera seria, the Italian librettist [[Metastasio]], took up residence as the imperial poet in Vienna. [[Johann Adolph Hasse]] wrote operas in Italian for the court of the Elector of [[Saxony]] in [[Dresden]]. Hasse also wrote operas for the court of [[Frederick the Great]] in Berlin, as did [[Carl Heinrich Graun]]. The king himself supplied the libretto for Graun's ''[[Montezuma (Graun)|Montezuma]]'', first performed in 1755.

[[File:Johann Adam Hiller.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Johann Adam Hiller]]]]
Deprived of aristocratic patronage until the mid-1770s, opera in German was forced to look to the general public to survive. This meant theatrical companies had to tour from town to town. The ''[[Singspiel]]'' became the most popular form of German opera, especially in the hands of the composer [[Johann Adam Hiller]]. Hiller's 1766 reworking of the ''Singspiel Die verwandelten Weiber'' was a landmark in the history of the genre, although his most famous work would be ''[[Die Jagd]]'' (1770). These ''Singspiele'' were comedies mixing spoken dialogue and singing, influenced by the similar genres of the [[ballad opera]] in England and the [[opéra comique]] in France. Often having sentimental plots and extremely simple music, ''Singspiele'' were no match for contemporary opera serias in artistic sophistication.

The 1770s marked an important decade in the history of German-language opera. The theatre company of [[Abel Seyler]] pioneered serious German-language opera, and Seyler commissioned operas by Hiller, [[Georg Benda]], [[Anton Schweitzer]] and other composers.<ref name="Kratzsch">Konrad Kratzsch, ''Klatschnest Weimar: Ernstes und Heiteres, Menschlich-Allzumenschliches aus dem Alltag der Klassiker'', p. 48, Königshausen & Neumann, 2009, {{ISBN|3826041291}}</ref>{{sfn|Bauman|1985|p={{page needed|date=December 2023}}}} A milestone of German opera was [[Anton Schweitzer]]'s ''[[Alceste (Schweitzer)|Alceste]]'', with a libretto by [[Christoph Martin Wieland|Wieland]] and commissioned by Seyler, which premiered in 1773 in [[Weimar]].<ref name="Lawrence">{{cite magazine
| last = Lawrence
| first = Richard
| url = https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/schweitzer-a-alceste
| title = Schweitzer, A. ''Alceste''
| magazine = [[Gramophone (magazine)|Gramophone]]
| date = July 2008
| access-date = 20 July 2017
}}</ref> ''Alceste'' was called "a model for German opera" by [[Ernst Christoph Dressler]]<ref>{{NDB|1=4|2=113|3=|4=Dreßler, Ernst Christoph|5=[[Hellmuth Christian Wolff]]|6=100112269}}</ref> and has been described as the first serious German opera.<ref>Francien Markx, ''E. T. A. Hoffmann, Cosmopolitanism, and the Struggle for German Opera'', p. 32, [[Brill Publishers|Brill]], 2015, {{ISBN|9004309578}}</ref> It was also in the 1770s that composers, like [[Georg Benda]], began experimenting with [[melodrama]], a type of music theatre which some commentators saw as a viable alternative to opera.{{sfn|Glatthorn|2022|p={{page needed|date=December 2023}}}} Early melodramas that proved popular with theatre troupes throughout German-speaking Europe included Benda's ''[[Ariadne auf Naxos (Benda)|Ariadne auf Naxos]]'' and ''[[Medea (Benda)|Medea]]'' (both premiered in 1775). Other important contributions to a growing repertoire of German operas appeared shortly after. This includes ''[[Günther von Schwarzburg (opera)|Günther von Schwarzburg]]'', a through-composed opera noted then as now for its topic taken from German history, by composer [[Ignaz Holzbauer]] and librettist Anton Klein which premiered in 1777. An increasing amount of operas originally set to Italian and French texts by composers like [[André Grétry|André Ernest Modeste Grétry]] were translated and adopted for performance in German. By the end of the decade, German opera could be heard throughout Central Europe owing in part to travelling theatres and German states that began supporting ''Nationaltheater'' that further developed the repertoire, such as those founded in [[Mannheim National Theatre|Mannheim]] and Vienna.{{sfn|Glatthorn|2022|p={{page needed|date=December 2023}}}} Alongside those already mentioned above, notable composers of German-language opera from the 1770s and 1780s include [[Johann André]], [[Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf]], [[Christian Gottlob Neefe]], [[Ignaz Umlauf]], and [[Ernst Wilhelm Wolf]]. With successful works that appeared on stages across Germany, like ''[[Doktor und Apotheker|Der Doktor und Apotheker]]'', Ditters was a particularly successful composer of German opera between the mid-1780s and mid-1790s.