Editing Opera in German (section)

===''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.