CHAP. III - “Comic Opera” in Berlin

Summary

“You must wait for our grand operas till the review is over, when the court comes back from Potsdam, and the orchestra is in full force,” was in 1839 the unanimous answer to my complaint against the weak and languid performance of “Der Freischutz:”—“They do some of Gluck's magnificently; and Spontini's ‘La Vestale’ and ‘Fernand Cortez.’ ”— “And which of Marschner's?” —“None.” “And Weber's ‘Euryanthe?’”— “Very rarely:” and out came the hundredth tale of cabal and court predilection. From all I heard, I might as well,—in indulgence of my intense curiosity as to antique German Opera, have bespoken “La Costanza e Fortezza,”— the composition by Fux, performed in the open air at Prague one hundred and twenty years ago, on the coronation of Charles VII. as King of Bohemia; which Quantz described to Dr. Burney as being in the old church style, coarse and dry, but at the same time “grand” and as having “a better effect, perhaps, with so immense a band, and in such an immense space, than could have been produced by more delicate compositions.”

As regarded the slighter German works of the day,—the operas of Glaser, and Lortzing, and Conradin Kreutzer, I suspect I might have waited for the return of King Sebastian, before I should have been treated to anything of the kind at the Grand Opera in 1839.