Papageno's legacy [electronic resource] : opera and the marvelous in the era of German romanticism
Keywords: Music

This dissertation situates German opera of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the broader aesthetic, cultural and literary contexts of German Romanticism, with a specific focus on the Romantic category of the marvelous (das Wunderbare). The marvelous is the state of astonishment, enchantment, and ultimately disorientation produced by an encounter with supernatural and fantastic elements. The Romantics' fascination with the mind and its imaginative capacities drew them to theorize an aesthetic mode that particularly aimed to persuade the post-Enlightenment audience to re-engage with the marvelous. Rather than a visually spectacular presentation of the marvelous, as in French Baroque opera, the Romantics located it in the structural and poetic content of a dramatic work. Writers Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann thus idolized the dramatic works by William Shakespeare and Carlo Gozzi as paradigms of the marvelous for their mixture of genres and their deliberate juxtaposition of disparate comic and supernatural characteristics. It is this mixture that, according to the Romantics, is well suited to triggering the imagination of the audience. For the Romantics, music had a privileged access to the realm of imagination, and for that reason it could perform a unique role in realizing the marvelous in the genre of opera. The Romantic experiment of the marvelous thus flourished prominently on the operatic stage. Both theoretical and compositional approaches to the marvelous mixture in opera are central topics of this project. I argue that the hybrid comic, magical, and earthy character of the bird-catcher Papageno from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (1791) embodies the marvelous as defined by the Romantics and served to establish Mozart's work as the new paradigm for German opera. I examine how Peter von Winter's Das Labyrinth, oder der Kampf mit den Elementen (1798) and Friedrich Himmel's Gozzi-based Die Sylphen (1806) both directly quote the figure of Papageno and extend his influence into the nineteenth century. Another exemplary source of the Romantic marvelous, Shakespeare's The Tempest, provided a basis for Ludwig Tieck's ground-breaking interpretation of the English playwright, "Shakespeare's Treatment of the Marvelous" (1793). This essay serves a foundation for understanding two 1798 operatic adaptations of The Tempest, both entitled Die Geisterinsel, by composers Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, who realized the marvelous on stage by synthesizing the dramatic elements of Shakespeare with conventions of the contemporary magic opera. In another influential text of the Romantic marvelous, E. T. A. Hoffmann's dialogue on the aesthetics of Romantic opera, "The Poet and the Composer" (1813), the mixture of fairy tale and the improvisatory commedia dell'arte in Gozzi's fiabe teatrali (dramatized fairy tales) was selected as an ideal subject matter for German opera, although Hoffmann's proposal, as I show, was tinged with a paradox. Despite his activity as a composer, Hoffmann never set Gozzi's play to music and he gradually rejected the comic from the operatic stage. His tacit devaluation of dramatic heterogeneity as an element of the marvelous prefigures the impending disappearance of the comic characters from the later Romantic magic operas, including most of Richard Wagner's works. Situated at the intersection of music, literature and drama, the marvelous provides an aesthetic context that allows us to understand a repertoire largely forgotten in the shadows of Mozart and Carl Maria von Weber. Tracing the history of the marvelous, I also offer a new perspective on the canon of German Romantic opera and the ways in which the operatic repertoire closely reflects the literary and dramatic ideas of the Romantic marvelous, as theorized by the likes of Tieck and Hoffmann.