Medievalism and Nationalism in German Opera

Euryanthe to Lohengrin

Michael S. Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351806367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música de ópera

Medievalism, or the reception or interpretation of the Middle Ages, was a prominent aesthetic for German opera composers in the first half of the nineteenth century. A healthy competition to establish a Germanic operatic repertory arose at this time, and fascination with medieval times served a critical role in shaping the desire for a unified national and cultural identity. Using operas by Weber, Schubert, Marshner, Wagner, and Schumann as case studies, Richardson investigates what historical information was available to German composers in their recreations of medieval music, and whether or not such information had any demonstrable effect on their compositions. The significant role that nationalism played in the choice of medieval subject matter for opera is also examined, along with how audiences and critics responded to the medieval milieu of these works.

In this book, readers will gain a clear understanding of the rise of German opera in the early nineteenth century and the cultural and historical context in which this occurred. This book will also provide insight on the reception of medieval history and medieval music in nineteenth-century Germany, and will demonstrate how medievalism and nationalism were mutually reinforcing phenomena at this time and place in history.

1 German opera, the rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and the building of a nation

Siegfried exonerates Genoveva, her life is spared, and the couple is reunited. The bishop blesses the happy pair, and the elated throng is overcome with joy as they sing a robust four-fold declamation of “Heil!” (“hail!”) in a sunny E major. The curtain falls, and all may now leave the theater filled with a glorious image of a nation’s past, along with an optimistic vision for that nation’s future. Such may have been the intention, at least, for Robert Schumann’s only opera Genoveva of 1850, set in Germany’s fabled medieval past. Medievalism, or the reception or interpretation of the Middle Ages, was a prominent aesthetic for German opera composers in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹ Just a cursory look at the works of early nineteenth-century German opera composers shows that almost all of them wrote at least one opera with a medieval setting, if not more (see Appendix: Medievalist German Opera Table). Fascination with medieval times was a ubiquitous artistic feature in the European-wide Romantic era, and in Germany specifically, it served a critical role in shaping the desire for a unified national and cultural identity. But despite the significance of medievalism for German opera composers, relatively little attention has been paid to how different composers treated this unifying subject matter. This work seeks to provide such a study by investigating the interplay of Romantic fantasy, historicism, and nationalism as it is musically expressed in six German operas that will form the heart of this investigation: Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe (1823), Franz Schubert’s Fierrabras (1823), Heinrich Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin (1829), Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (1845) and Lohengrin (1850), and Robert Schumann’s Genoveva (1850).²

Interest in the Middle Ages and in medieval lore has been a common theme throughout the post-medieval history of Western Europe. In Germany during the “pre-unification era” of 1800 to 1870, the allure of a shared medieval past carried strong political implications. Following the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), a prevailing sense of economic and cultural inferiority to France throughout much of the eighteenth century, the Napoloenic wars (1803–1815), and with the onslaught of industrialization and a population boom from 1815 to 1848 that left many with inhumane working and living conditions, Germans in the first half of the nineteenth century desired to build their own sense of strength and unity as a people. In this period, however, Germany was not a single, unified cultural entity, but rather comprised an assortment of different states and principalities with their own unique cultures and dialects. As the Parisian Madame de Staël stated in 1810: “The Germans are Saxons, Prussians, Bavarians, Austrians; but the German character, on which the strength of them all must be based, is as fragmented as the land itself which has so many different rulers.”³ Indeed, regional interests persisted before and well after unification in 1871, causing Ernst Moritz Arndt in 1812 to advise German soldiers not to think on whether “you are called a Saxon, Bavarian, Austrian, Prussian, Pomeranian, Hessian, or Hanoverian, but remember only that you are called and you are a German and you speak in the German language.”⁴

Considering such fragmentation alongside the desire for a nation, the question as to what was German was perhaps most open to debate and definition in the early to mid-nineteenth century than at any other time. The question “was ist deutsch?” was in fact a contested one, with Richard Wagner weighing in on the matter in an 1865 essay featuring that exact question as its title. Wagner looked to the nation’s past to uncover the “German spirit,” singling out Johann Sebastian Bach as truly emblematic of said spirit in the way he humbly toiled at his craft in relative obscurity.⁵ Wagner evidently, and one would now say mistakenly, believed Bach to be the “culmination of the medieval world,” and he was not alone in glancing toward an idealized medieval past as a foundation for national identity.⁶ Indeed, the Germans were arguably more influenced by a growing awareness and rediscovery of the Middle Ages than any other country at that time, and their interest in medieval times formed a decisive motivational impetus to unite as a nation.⁷ Regarding the special significance of medievalism for German nationalism, Francis Gentry and Ulrich Müller write,

All European language and cultural groups sought their self-affirmation and national identity in their own past, which, for most, meant the Middle Ages. This process applies especially to the Germans, who lived without a unified national state in territorial fragmentation and political impotence and who had to procure their political utopia from the alleged glorious past of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.’⁸

The “statehood” of the Holy Roman Empire from the medieval past had in part facilitated and enabled a growing sense of nationalism that ran parallel with the overwhelming regional patriotism that dominated throughout much of nineteenth-century Germany.⁹ A sense of continuity with the past as well as a sense for a shared common history among the different German-speaking regions and cultures became an essential tool for engendering national identity and for furthering the nationalistic cause. As Gentry and Müller indicate, it was precisely because of Germany’s political and territorial divisions that the Middle Ages—with its sense of united statehood under the Holy Roman Empire—carried such significance for the development of the modern German nation. The first seeds of nationalism began to sprout in Prussia, and the Prussian character initially dominated the nationalist movement. Nevertheless, German identity could be mined from the common language that united the many diverse territories and regions.¹⁰

Medievalism was one of the most prominent features of the Romantic movement in Germany, and the very term “romantisch” emerged in the eighteenth century to describe in a positive light the poetic style of medieval romances and epics. Interest in the German Middle Ages among eighteenth-century German philosophers arose in part due to feelings of cultural inferiority to France and other European nations and as a counter to regional loyalties in favor of a higher national ideal, and philosophers like Johann Gottfried Herder espoused that Germans look to their own past as a model for a future nation.¹¹ His collection of essays Von deutscher Art und Kunst of 1773, which combined some of his own writings with those of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Paolo Frisi, and Justus Möser, became an influential document for budding nationalist fervor in the early part of the nineteenth century. Herder’s valorization of folk song and folk art, Goethe’s praise for medieval German art and architecture, and Möser’s elevation of German history and traditions triggered patriotic sentiment and fostered a greater awareness of the past as the root of national and cultural identity.¹² In his 1774 essay Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind, Herder expounds on the glories of medieval times when he writes that

the spirit of the age weaved and bound together the most diverse characteristics—courage and monkery, adventure and gallantry, tyranny and magnanimity—into the whole that confronts us, standing between the Romans and ourselves, like a ghost or a romantic adventure. It was once nature, once—truth.¹³

He later in the essay exalts the time period in nationalistic terms by praising the

many communities of brothers living beside one another, all sharing the same German descent, one constitutional ideal, one religious faith, each struggling with itself and its parts, each moved and driven almost invisibly but very pervasively by a holy wind, the Papal prestige.¹⁴

Such a statement vividly portrays how the perceived ethnic, political, and religious unity of the Middle Ages ultimately served as a fitting model or influence toward a united German nation in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought and culture.

Interest in history proliferated through all levels of German society from 1800 onward in a number of different ways, as nostalgia for the past had become commonplace throughout Western Europe following the French Revolution.¹⁵ German historiographers in particular revered the Middle Ages as a time when German culture and institutions were able to flourish devoid of foreign interference, while scholars and common citizens alike searched through libraries and records for old tales, legends, and information on the beliefs and practices of their ancestors.¹⁶ One of the most influential works of medieval literature at this time was the Nibelungenlied or “Song of the Nibelungs,” a thirteenth-century Middle High German epic poem that was rediscovered in the mid-eighteenth century and that would eventually form part of the basis for Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). Interest in the epic poem grew in the early part of the nineteenth century due in part to the Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages and to growing nationalist sentiment sparked by the Napoleonic wars. Throughout the nineteenth century, the poem continued to accrue patriotic significance through a number of Nibelungenlied-based dramas that captured the mood and desire for German independence and national autonomy, with Friedrich Hebbel’s 1861 three-part tragedy Die Nibelungen standing as one of the most famous of the Nibelungenlied-based dramas in this century. National festivals that dealt with historical subject matter emerged in the early nineteenth century as well, as interest in both a united nation and in a rediscovery of ancient ancestral roots took shape throughout German-speaking lands. Such festivals as the Wartburgfest of 1817—led by Protestant Burschenschaften (youth fraternities)—involved pilgrimages to the Wartburg Castle, famous for being the site where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. At Wartburg, members of the Burschenschaften would dress in what they thought was medieval German garb, and the festival came to represent a sort of connection or union with a common German past and heritage. Other festivals involved the staging of “medieval” tournaments and grandiloquent proc...