(Ger.: ‘sung play’).
An opera, usually comic and in German with spoken dialogue.
PETER BRANSCOMBE (text) THOMAS BAUMAN (bibliography)
The German Singspiel, in the normal sense of that term, was developed from a variety of predecessors. Apart from medieval mysteries and church plays, important sources of the Singspiel are to be found in secular plays of all kinds. The tragedies and comedies of the travelling troupes frequently contained a number of songs (often with many verses, and sung to a popular melody) as well as instrumental music – dances, marches, flourishes for royal entrances, battles, hunting scenes. The songs were usually given to the principal comic character (Jean Potage, Jack Pudding, Pickelhäring, later Hans Wurst), whose part was in the early days often taken by the only actor fluent in the language of the country where the performance was taking place. The commedia dell’arte exercised a twofold influence, through the visits of Italian companies to theatrical centres in Austria and southern Germany in particular, and through the mediation of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris which, in the localized form of the Théâtres de la Foire in the early 18th century, also exerted a marked influence, especially on the Viennese theatre.
Baroque opera at the great Austrian and German courts set a standard of magnificence that the popular companies were unable to emulate, though their adaptations and parodies brought at least something of the splendours of the opera to the people. Occasionally, broadly comic musical entertainments and intermezzos were put on at the Viennese court that have close similarities to the world of Hanswurst in the Kärntnertortheater. Other forms of court entertainment, including pastorales and ballets, both mounted and danced, left a mark. The dramatic performances put on by religious orders are also of great importance in the rise of the Singspiel. In particular the Jesuits staged musico-dramatic performances of a magnificence to rival or even surpass the grandeur and lavishness of the court operas. In Vienna the use of German songs, parody and even mixed-language verse, as well as extensive musical sequences, helped to break down the barriers between the various art forms and prepare the ground for the plays with music of the comedians in the Kärntnertortheater who, from the beginning of the second decade of the 18th century, represent the oldest unbroken popular theatre tradition in the German lands. Theirs are the earliest works that deserve to be labelled ‘Singspiel’ in its usual sense.
Where German was normally or often the language of operatic performances (Hamburg, Brunswick etc., but not Vienna or Munich), the musical style was seldom markedly different from that of the Italian operas written for Austro-German houses, or the French models that to a more limited extent exerted an influence in Germany. But the use of the vernacular was certainly an encouragement to the German Singspiel writers, and the music of the peasant and servant scenes frequently has a frankly popular touch that assured its success and its survival – the melodies of many of the songs in collections such as Sperontes’s Singende Muse an der Pleisse (Leipzig, 1736–47) had their origins in more sophisticated musical forms, mainly of French origin, but they also included music by Bach, Handel, Telemann, Keiser, Vivaldi and others. In turn Sperontes’s collections were plundered by actor-dramatists such as Kurz-Bernardon in Vienna. On the whole, however, operatic works by German composers had little success or influence in Austria. Handel and Graun were hardly known in Vienna, and later Hiller’s Singspiele were seldom performed there, or were given as spoken dramas. Indeed, of the north German Singspiel composers only Benda (primarily with his melodramas) had any success in the Austrian capital.
Contrary to generally held opinion, the north and central German Singspiel of the mid-18th century arose only after a lusty and prolific Viennese genre had become firmly established. This was some time after Baroque opera had disappeared from the repertory of all but the most reactionary of German theatres. Writing in the fourth edition of his Critische Dichtkunst (1751), Gottsched prematurely congratulated the Germans on their taste and good sense in abandoning opera; the brief and dismissive sections on operetta and the intermezzo give no sign of awareness of the gravity of the new danger to what he considered good taste: the emergent Singspiel.
The main sources of the north German Singspiel were the French comédie mêlée d’ariettes, an offshoot of the Comédie-Italienne given with great success at the Foires St Germain and St Laurent after the banishment of the Italian comedians from Paris in 1697, and precursor of the true opéra comique; and the English ballad opera. The popularity of the Gay-Pepusch Beggar’s Opera and its successors in London in the late 1720s and early 1730s did not go unnoticed in Germany; C.W. von Borck, Prussian envoy in London, translated Coffey’s The Devil to Pay (performed in Berlin in 1743, probably with the original English tunes). The era of the German Singspiel proper opened with Standfuss’s setting of C.F. Weisse’s translation of The Devil to Pay, which under the title Der Teufel ist los, oder Die verwandelten Weiber was performed by G.H. Koch’s company at Leipzig in 1752. Despite its success (not least in sparking off a battle of pamphlets – Gottsched and his adherents objected to what they considered its coarse and tasteless nature), its sequel, Der lustige Schuster (based on Coffey’s The Merry Cobbler), was not given until 1759, in Lübeck; Standfuss’s third and last Singspiel, Jochem Tröbs, was given at Hamburg on 17 September 1759. It is not without significance that both these last works were first performed in north German ports with close trading links with Britain: in the 18th century Hamburg was the principal point of entry for English cultural influences in Germany (Borck also translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar).
Once the Hamburg operatic venture had foundered in 1738, the only German-language Singspiel venture with a permanent home was the Hanswurst company at the Kärtnertortheater in Vienna. For the rest, operatic performances of a popular nature and in the vernacular were given by wandering troupes. This helps account for the short-breathed and usually simple nature of the early German language Singspiele: most of the casts were actors and actresses who could also sing, as opposed to fully trained musicians, and the expense of maintaining even a moderate-sized orchestra and a repertory of large-scale works was beyond the reach of almost all the companies. But several troupes in the third quarter of the 18th century gave notable performances of Singspiele; Anton Seyler’s performed at Weimar and Gotha for some years, with Anton Schweitzer and later (in Dresden) C.G. Neefe as musical directors and composers; and from the late 1770s G.F.W. Grossmann directed what was probably the most important opera troupe in Germany, with Neefe as Kapellmeister. Yet, for all they achieved, these companies only briefly enjoyed the settled conditions of a semi-permanent home, and the establishment of a tradition of sustained excellence of ensemble was impossible.
The most important figures in the rise of the German Singspiel are the dramatist and poet C.F. Weisse (1726–1804) and the composer J.A. Hiller (1728–1804). All but four of Hiller’s 14 Singspiele are settings of Weisse librettos, and his first attempts were adaptations of the two Coffey-Standfuss works, for which Weisse had arranged the texts. In most of his Singspiel texts Weisse leant on French originals (mainly by Favart), though in Der Ärndtekranz (1771) he wrote an original German libretto. The principal features of Hiller’s Singspiele are typical of the new genre (though it should be noted that Singspiele are not always comic; the Gotter-Benda Walder of 1776 is an example of the ‘ernsthafte Operette’). The story tends to be about lower-middle-class people or artisans, and is frequently pastoral (or at least rural) in vein, as well as comic. A firmly satirical attitude may be taken towards the upper classes or foreigners who threaten the simple idyllic life of the principals. Romantic interest nearly always plays a prominent part. The action is carried forward in spoken dialogue, normally in prose, with music reserved for introductions and emotional highpoints; dances, marches and narrative songs are frequent; recitatives occur only occasionally, normally in addition to the dialogue rather than in place of it; the vocal numbers tend to be fairly simple and often strophic songs, though there are some ambitious arias, usually but by no means invariably for upper-class characters; choruses and extended ensembles are infrequent in early Singspiele, though straightforward vaudeville finales are often found; marches, recruiting songs and other military touches reflect the Seven Years War through which Germany had recently passed.
The high quality of books and music kept the Weisse-Hiller Lottchen am Hofe (1767), Die Liebe auf dem Lande (1768) and Die Jagd (1770) in the repertory for several decades, and many of the songs soon achieved the lasting popularity of what were shortly to be called ‘folksongs’. Despite their excellent qualities (high spirits, melodic charm, pathos, pleasing instrumentation) there is something rather monotonous about them, especially by comparison with the livelier Viennese Singspiele. Georg Benda however achieved in his theatre scores a remarkable range and depth of musical characterization, variety of effect, humour and occasional elegiac power and elegance that make Mozart’s profound admiration for his melodramas entirely understandable. The best of the Singspiel scores of his contemporaries – André, Neefe, Reichardt, Wolf and Zumsteeg – would also repay occasional revival.
Two composers of more serious operas in German – works called ‘Singspiel’ at the time although outside the central, comic tradition – should be mentioned here. Ignaz Holzbauer wrote most of his operas to Italian texts, though as early as 1746, while still in Vienna, he set a German farce by Weiskern. His most important stage work is Günther von Schwarzburg (1777, Mannheim), to a libretto by Anton Klein on a German historical subject. The scoring is imaginative and the expressive accompanied recitatives were greatly admired; Mozart was struck by the fire and spirit of the music when he heard it in the autumn of that year. The case of Anton Schweitzer is very different, in that his 20 or so stage works were virtually all written to German texts. Historically the most important of these are Alceste (1773, Weimar) and Rosemunde (1780, Mannheim), both to librettos by Wieland; their partnership represented a then rare collaboration between a major German poet and composer, though musically and dramatically Schweitzer did not depart far from Neapolitan opera seria practice.
The attempts of major literary figures to raise the tone of the Singspiel by the provision of superior texts had only limited success; neither Wieland nor Goethe added to his reputation or to the permanent repertory of the Singspiel with his contributions (in Goethe’s case particularly numerous) to the genre, and Reichardt with his Liederspiele likewise hardly achieved the hoped-for union of a libretto of high quality with music of popular appeal and distinction.
By the early 19th century the borderline between the Singspiel and opera with dialogue is far from distinct. Whereas Weber subtitled Abu Hassan ‘Singspiel’, Der Freischütz is a ‘(romantic) opera’ and Oberon a ‘romantic fairy-opera’, notwithstanding very similar proportions between sung and spoken elements in the three works. In general it is probably fair to say that the term Singspiel in Germany as well as in Austria was frequently avoided by those wishing to make exalted claims for their works. There are inevitably many exceptions, yet on the whole a Singspiel made less exacting demands on the performers than did an opera; at least in the early days of the modern German Singspiel, the travelling companies could cope more readily with the demands of the play with songs.
A further designation that is frequently used for referring to a kind of 19th-century German Singspiel is ‘Spieloper’, a term used not so much by author and composer themselves as by more recent commentators (e.g. Lüthge, 1924). Thus Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, as well as Lortzing’s stage works, for which he himself was both librettist and composer, are often referred to as Spielopern, whereas Lortzing simply called them comic operas (preferring this appellation to the original ‘Singspiel’ for his adaptation in 1830 of the Weisse-Hiller Die Jagd). Among other notable early 19th-century German Singspiel composers are Himmel (especially for Fanchon das Leyermädchen, 1804, to a libretto by Kotzebue), E.T.A. Hoffmann (with several Singspiele, though his best-known and most important stage work, Undine, is a magic opera), Reichardt (most of whose once-popular Singspiele were in fact written before the end of the 18th century) and Conradin Kreutzer – though he, like Spohr, might be thought to invite consideration as a composer of operas with spoken dialogue, rather than as a master of the simpler and less exacting Singspiel.
Although the term Singspiel was rather seldom used by Viennese librettists and composers in subtitling their own works, there can be no doubt that the works themselves are most clearly described by this term. The combination of music and comedy was already firmly established by the court operas and the Jesuit dramatists and composers long before the popular Singspiel tradition had begun. It grew directly from these two Viennese theatrical forms, but also from the 17th-century tradition whereby strolling players used music as an added attraction in their works.
It was long held that music played no part, or at most a very restricted part, in the performances of Hanswurst-Stranitzky’s company that took over the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna in 1710, but numerous songs, dances and even complete ballets were performed by this company. The texts survive of some 16 Haupt- und Staatsaktionen (plays about historical or mythical characters, with a liberal larding of coarse comic scenes) by J.A. Stranitzky, in which an average of a dozen or 15 ‘arias’ were sung. After Stranitzky’s death in 1726, the musical components of the Viennese popular comedies were extended yet further. H. Rademin’s Runtzvanscad, Koenig deren Menschenfressern of 1732 includes four choruses, five duets and two dozen arias; and after 1744, with the establishment in the company of Joseph Felix von Kurz (whose guest appearances in central and southern Germany enriched the northern repertory), music began to play a still more important part. Even if the total of musical numbers in a typical Kurz work is lower than in Runtzvanscad, there was sometimes a remarkable preponderance of ensembles. The nine musical numbers of Das zerstöhrte Versprechen des Bernardons (probably from the late 1740s or early 1750s) comprise three quintets, a quartet, a trio, two duets and a mere two arias. By comparison, Kurz’s libretto for Haydn’s Der neue krumme Teufel (probably printed in 1758) includes as many as 32 arias and only one duet, one trio, one extended solo number and three choruses among its 38 numbers.
The earliest surviving music definitely composed for the Viennese popular theatre dates from the mid- or late 1750s (the so-called Teutsche Comedie Arien; all ed. in DTÖ, lxiv and cxxi); the composer of some of the numbers may well be Haydn, whose puppet opera Die Feuersbrunst (Das abgebrannte Haus), probably dating from 1776–7, was rediscovered in the late 1950s. Among other composers named on librettos or in contemporary account books as writing music for the popular theatre are Holzbauer (Arlekin, ein Nebenbuhler seines Herrn, 1746), and the otherwise unknown Eder, Fauner and Ziegler.
The most important period of the Viennese Singspiel began in 1778, with Joseph II’s institution of the ‘German National-Singspiel’, which was intended to encourage native poets and composers to produce works in the vernacular for the benefit and improvement of lovers of German rather than Italian or French art. Despite the emperor’s good intentions and the competence of J.H.F. Müller, the National-Singspiel’s first director (he went to Germany in search of good new artists), the encouragement of the best native talent failed to produce the hoped-for results. Year after year, the principal public successes in the court theatre were translations of foreign originals rather than German-language plays, and the same happened with the opera. Two companies, those of Johann Böhm and J.C. Wäser, performed operatic works in the Kärntnertortheater in spring and summer 1776. Böhm’s repertory consisted entirely of French operettas, badly translated and poorly performed, which had no public success; and Wäser too failed to please, though he gave a number of original German Singspiele. It was against this background that Joseph II went ahead with his plan to establish a German Singspiel company in Vienna, and many of the works it later performed were revivals from the Böhm and Wäser guest seasons.
The work chosen to open the National-Singspiel venture, Ignaz Umlauf’s one-act opera Die Bergknappen to a libretto by Weidmann, was first heard on 17 February 1778 and received 30 performances in four years; the second new Singspiel, Diesmal hat der Mann den Willen!, was also by a native composer, Ordonez (born in Vienna, despite his Spanish name); but thereafter translations once again preponderated. Seven of the 15 works given in the opening season were original German works, yet only Ulbrich’s Frühling und Liebe and Benda’s by no means new Medea, apart from Die Bergknappen, were to attain ten or more performances, compared with four of French or Italian provenance that averaged some 25 performances each. In later seasons the discrepancy was more clearly marked, the only native successes to rival the most popular importations being Umlauf’s Die schöne Schusterin oder Die pücefarbenen Schuhe and Das Irrlicht, Gluck’s Die Pilgrime von Mekka (itself a translation from its French original), and Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (with around 40 performances by the final night of the venture, it was the most successful work written for the National-Singspiel; in absolute terms Gluck’s Pilgrime and Grétry’s Zemire und Azor, with 56 performances each, were the most often heard). The company closed its doors on 4 March 1783, though a second extended season ran from autumn 1785 until 4 February 1788, including among its few native successes Dittersdorf’s Der Apotheker und der Doktor (Doktor und Apotheker, to a libretto by Stephanie), which was first heard on 11 July 1786. The comment that its success eclipsed Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (first performed on 1 May 1786) is at best based on unjust comparison: circumstances and criteria differed considerably between the German company that gave Dittersdorf’s work and the Italian company that gave Mozart’s.
The final closure of the National-Singspiel in February 1788 left Vienna without any theatre specifically catering for vernacular opera. Karl Marinelli, the director of the theatre in the Leopoldstadt suburb, seized the opportunity. In Wenzel Müller he already had a highly gifted young composer who had shown his abilities in Singspiel; with Ferdinand Kauer and other competent musicians to assist him, the Leopoldstadt ensemble was soon able to mount a series of very popular, unexactingly tuneful Singspiele, the best of which held their place in the repertories of Austrian and many German theatres for several decades, and ran up some 200 and more performances in the Leopoldstadt alone. Martín y Soler, Schenk and Gluck (Die Pilgrime) were the most successful of the ‘court’ opera composers whose works were taken into the Leopoldstadt repertory (Gassmann, Salieri and Dittersdorf were less successful in this respect), though none of them could rival the best of Müller’s own works in popularity. The return to Vienna of Emanuel Schikaneder in summer 1789, when he took over the direction of the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, soon provided Marinelli with a dangerous rival in Singspiel, though Schikaneder did not have house composers quite of the quality or resilience of Marinelli’s. Nevertheless Schikaneder’s series of ‘Anton’ Singspiele (with music mainly by the singers Schack and Gerl) enjoyed great popularity, and the performances he gave of works by Mozart, Süssmayr, Seyfried, Henneberg, Winter, Wranitzky and others (and composite works, such as Der Stein der Weisen, rediscovered in 1997) added greatly to his reputation at least until megalomania clouded his judgment and led to ever more lavish stagings of third-rate new works, or revivals of old favourites.
Apart from Mozart, the best of the Viennese Singspiel composers of any pretension was Dittersdorf. Although his indebtedness to Gluck and Mozart is obvious, he was experienced in the Italian idiom, and he also showed himself prepared, as was Hiller (whose Singspiele were seldom performed in Vienna), to include solo numbers ranging from simple songs to full-scale coloratura arias. Dittersdorf’s greatest successes – Der Apotheker und der Doktor, Der Betrug durch Aberglauben, Die Liebe im Narrenhause, Hieronymus Knicker and Das rothe Käppchen – were Singspiele, all from 1786–90, though he sometimes favoured the description ‘komische Oper’. All contain thoroughly attractive melodies, skilful scoring (with quite rich use of wind instruments) and lively, well varied ensembles. By any standard other than comparison with Mozart, his feeling for musical characterization and humour is exceptional, and the ensembles (for example the two act finales in Der Apotheker und der Doktor) are both extensive and well developed. If he was content to accept the large proportion of non-dramatic arias and songs provided by his librettists, these numbers are undoubtedly neat and pleasing; and in this respect he was more adept than Mozart at providing the public with what it wanted.
Among the other successful exponents of the Viennese Singspiel at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th a few stand out: Johann Schenk, whose Der Dorfbarbier (1796) was one of the most successful of all stage works for two or three decades, Peter Winter with Das unterbrochene Opferfest (1796), Joseph Weigl with Die Schweizerfamilie (1809) and Gyrowetz with Der Augenarzt (1811); Schubert’s Singspiele however have neither in the composer’s lifetime nor since enjoyed the success that the beauty of their music merits. Beethoven’s only operatic work, Fidelio (1805, rev. 1806 and 1814), hovers uncomfortably between the light, unpretentious world of the Singspiel and the melodramatic world of the ‘rescue opera’ for quite half its length, and for all its positive virtues and importance in the later history of opera its influence was not wholly beneficial (Weber’s dramatic arias often contain exactingly unvocal writing of a kind that can be traced back to Fidelio).
The supreme example of the Viennese Singspiel is the Schikaneder-Mozart Die Zauberflöte (1791), though it was not mere pride or pretension that led librettist and composer to subtitle it ‘eine grosse Oper’ or ‘deutsche Oper’ rather than ‘Singspiel’. Despite the extensive scenes of spoken dialogue, most of the musical numbers are of a size and complexity that left the world of the average Singspiel far behind (the same is not true of settings of Schikaneder’s later librettos, for singularly few of which was he content to use the modest subtitle of Singspiel). The enormous and lasting success of Die Zauberflöte (223 performances in the Theater auf der Wieden alone before Schikaneder moved to his new Theater an der Wien in 1801) led Schikaneder to try ever more desperately and vainly to emulate it; scores from Süssmayr, Mederitsch and Winter, Wölfl, Henneberg and Seyfried all enjoyed at best ephemeral success while failing signally to add anything original to the recipe that had worked so superbly in Die Zauberflöte.
Whereas most of the Singspiele given at the court theatres in Vienna from around 1800 tended to reduce the number of solo arias and songs and increase the number of ensembles, the emphasis in the popular suburban theatres continued to lie in the solo song – initially buffo or sentimental lieder, later the satirical couplet perfected by Nestroy and his composers. Early in his career Wenzel Müller had occasionally written act finales of a length to rival those of Die Zauberflöte; but in his later works, he and Ferdinand Kauer and the other principal composers for the Theater in der Leopoldstadt tended to limit the number of concerted pieces and place the musical interest firmly in simple solo songs with the occasional more challenging aria. This tendency does not exclude simple choruses and other numbers for more than one singer, but it is rather rare to find even duets that are more than mere alternating solo strophes. The term Posse (or Posse mit Gesang) is sometimes attached to such works (see Posse), especially those of a farcical kind. The twilight of the Viennese popular Singspiel extends from Müller’s later scores of the period after his return from Prague in 1813, until the late years of Adolf Müller, the principal purveyor of scores to the Theater an der Wien and the Theater in der Leopoldstadt from 1828 until the late 1870s. The advent of the Viennese operetta in the 1860s, following the vogue of the French vaudeville and the more recent arrival of Offenbach’s Parisian operettas on the Viennese stages, may be held finally to end the era of the Viennese Singspiel.
See also Opera, §IV.
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