MICHAEL FEND

‘German Bel Canto’: Nineteenth-Century German Singing Manuals in a Political Context

A Conservatoire is the only educational institution which offers students a sense of being intellectually, emotionally and aurally immersed in their subject. In a Conservatoire music is everywhere. Many educationalists have found this fervent activity clearly too much of a good thing, which is why Conservatoires have always been located in separate buildings, away from the quieter practitioners of tertiary education in the Humanities and Sciences. Since their foundation in eighteenth-century Neapolitan and Venetian orphanages, the communal experience of musically vibrating Conservatoires also allowed teachers and students to escape from their often deprived background. The Conservatoires were the starting point for music as a way of life. With growing financial support, which conservatoires received from state governments in nineteenth-century Europe, composers and, later on, music historians adopted musicians’ life aspirations in the belief that their art, as much, if not more than, the other arts enjoyed the status of relative aesthetic autonomy that could justify a purely formal discourse about music among a mostly bourgeois public.

In the twentieth century, criticism of the elitism of classical music culture and the formalist discourse associated with it came, at least at first, from Marxist circles troubled by music’s role in social exploitation. After the declared end of all ideologies in the 1990s, another downside of music culture has come to the fore: its nineteenth-century role in fomenting polarities between European nations, a downright hatred which eventually led to the two world wars and countless other atrocities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we might be inclined to think that nationalism is no longer an issue, at least in the European Union of twenty-seven member States, but every day newspaper reports show nationalism’s malevolent face from around the globe. The extending rows of bookshelves in university libraries dedicated to nationalism reveal its undiminished importance to us and, for example, RILM lists no fewer than forty-two publications on the keyword “nationalism” in music for 2009 alone. “Nationalism” has, in other words, become a crucial issue for scholars working in the intellectual and political history of music. There is a simple way to gauge a wider change in scholarly approach: while Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart lacks a specific entry in its two issues from the 1950s and 90s, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians discussed the term for the first time in its 2001 edition. Based on a considerable body of mostly Anglo-Saxon research from the 1980s and 90s, Richard Taruskin’s article unmasked the parlance of music’s supposedly universal character as itself hiding a “nationalist agenda”.1 On a terminological level Taruskin took issue, in particular, with The Harvard Dictionary of Music (1969) whose editor, Willi Apel, although himself a victim of racial expulsion from fascist Germany in 1936, is quoted as writing that, “the nationalist movement [in

1 I would like to thank Roger Parker for editing this text. All remaining mistakes are my own. R. Taruskin, “Nationalism”, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London, 2001), XVII, 689.

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music] is practically nonexistent” in Germany, France or Italy, but that it was “principally embraced by the ‘peripheral’ European nations”, such as Bohemia, Norway, Russia, Spain, Hungary and Poland. Apel is further cited as saying that nationalism exhibited a “contradiction of what was previously considered one of the chief prerequisites of music, i.e. its universal or international character, which meant that the works of the great masters appealed equally to any audience”.2 Apel’s argument was based on two dichotomies: he distinguished between an earlier and a later concept of music, and detected a compositional practice in north-western Europe at variance with a practice in some other European countries. Taruskin considered Apel’s view ideologically loaded in so far as it both “demotes” later nineteenth-century music created outside the Franco-Italian-German triangle and neglects the nationalist attitudes with which especially German authors propagated their own music as universally valuable.3

With a focus on people’s social and ethical attitudes in Germany, Taruskin himself distinguished between an earlier, “liberal or inclusive”, and a later, “racialist, exclusive”, nationalism identifying a turning point in a notorious and ignominious document published in 1850. For him, “liberal” nationalism was exemplified in the public recognition of Mendelssohn when he was appointed chief conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and director of the city’s Conservatory, as well as director of the Berlin Cathedral Choir in the 1830s and 40s; whereas nationalist ideology took a pernicious turn with Wagner’s propagation of a “racialist, exclusive” nationalism in his 1850 article Das Judenthum in der Musik. Taruskin considered this pamphlet “the most vivid symptom to be found in musical writings of a change in the nature of nationalism that all modern historians now recognise as a major crux in the history of modern Europe”.4 Although Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were Germans, Wagner wanted to highlight their racial difference and cast doubt on their belonging to the German nation, although in 1850 Germany was not even a nation state.

Nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe was motivated by politically active ethnic groups who felt unified by language, religion and cultural tradition, but who did not usually feel represented by their rulers. Depending on the degree of political realisation, a nationalist ideology was a boost to the existing system, as in the case of Britain since the eighteenth century,5 or a force for rebellion against foreign rulers, as in the case of Italy before its unification in 1861. The ways in which different subgroups of a nation were

2 W. Apel, “Nationalism”, Harvard Dictionary of Music (London, 1970), 564f., quoted in Taruskin, “Nationalism”, (as above), 689. Apel’s entry was rewritten in The Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel (Cambridge Mass., 1986), 527. 3 Taruskin, “Nationalism”, (as above), 689. During the Second World War Alfred Einstein, who had left fascist Germany in 1933, wrote: “Nationalism is the worst enemy of liberty, independence, truth in the arts - and in the sciences.” A. Einstein, “Krieg, Musik, Nationalismus, und Toleranz”, Nationale und universale Musik (Zürich, 1958), 256.4 Taruskin, “Nationalism”, (as above), 694.5 Herder employed the term “nationalism” in English spelling when discussing its ambivalent political effect in: J. G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Werke, ed. W. Dobbek (Berlin and Weimar, 1969), II, 309. The unresolved tension between his advocacy of national relativism in cultural products and his developmental scheme of history with its inherent hierarchies is discussed in D. Gramit, Cultivating Music. The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770-1848 (Berkeley, 2002), 41-43.

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included or excluded by the ethnically dominant groups (Jews among Germans, Catholics among the British or Sicilians among the Italians) reveal the cultural practice of nationalism. The distinction made in saying that “nationality is a condition, nationalism is an attitude” requires interpretation,6 as is clear from Wagner’s Judenthum article and its impact on fascists that “nationality” was and is not treated as an unassailable possession. Nationality does not necessarily create a safe haven for its members; instead membership is open to conflict. It is a “condition” which can be annulled by nationalist “attitudes”. That is why nationalism is potentially inherent in a myriad of activities involving many decisions of in- or exclusion, wherever their authors want to add symbolic value to those activities, with the intention of generating a feeling of solidarity among participants.

This complex of activities, ideas and sentiments was communicated through written or spoken language or another symbolic system, such as music. Research into music’s role in fostering nationalist sentiment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has naturally favoured vocal music and has focused on many aspects of opera, such as the attitudes of composers, librettists, critics and the audience at large. What has been less scrutinised are the discussion and practice of singing during this period. In which ways did the opera repertoire and its reception, the singing manuals and their terminology, change? Crudely speaking, in Germany a clear dominance of Italian in all these areas gave way to a German hegemony. The dynamics of an exclusory nationalism in the discussion of Italian singing culture in nineteenth-century Germany are the subject of this article.

There is consensus among music historians that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Italian opera and vocal teaching were prevalent across Europe, with the exception of France. Singers, too, were mostly Italian and their schooling took place in Italy with very few teachers publishing an account of their methods. Depending on the national perspective, opera was an exported or imported art form. Assertions by German and French writers about the superiority of their music were at first eccentric but became numerous after the middle of the eighteenth century.7 Mozart’s letter of 1785, in which he complained about German singers in Vienna being forced to “remain at the Italian theatre” and in which he ironically enthused about “Germany’s everlasting shame if we Germans seriously started to think like Germans - to act like Germans – to speak German – and even to sing in German”,8 gives a snapshot of the practical and institutional constraints for the various nationalities of singers in the Habsburg capital under Joseph II. But Mozart’s view may not have been representative of the subsequent repertoire and

6 Taruskin, “Nationalism”, (as above), 689.7 S. Leopold, “Die italienische Hofoper als internationales System”, in: C. Dahlhaus (Ed.), Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1985), 147-154; Italian Opera in Central Europe 1614-1780. Vol. I: Institutions and Ceremonies, ed. M. Bucciarelli, N. Dubowy, R. Strohm (Berlin, 2006), Vol 2: Italianità: Image and Practice, ed. C. Herr, H. Seifert, A. Sommer-Mathis, R. Strohm (Berlin, 2008), Vol. 3: Opera Subjects and European Relationships, ed. N. Dubowy, C. Herr, A. Żórawska-Witkowska (Berlin, 2007); two of the early eulogists of German and French music respectively were: J. F. Reimmann, Versuch einer Einleitung in die historiam litteratiam derer Teutschen (Halle, 1709), 276, quoted in: A. Gerhard (ed.), Musikwissenschaft – eine verspätete Disziplin? Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen Fortschrittsglauben und Modernitätsverweigerung (Stuttgart, 2000), 10; J. L. Le Cerf de la Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (Brussels, 1704-1706). 8 W. A. Mozart, A Life in Letters, ed. C. Eisen, transl. S. Spencer (London, 2006), 505.

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performing conditions, as the “percentage of German composers [writing Italian operas] markedly decreased in the 1790s”.9

In 1813, at the height of the Napoleonic wars, which elicited a first wave of Germanic nationalist fervour, Carl Maria von Weber vented his own resentment against court-privileged Italian opera by sketching a satirical, allegorical representation of a prima donna from opera seria in his fragmentary novel Tonkünstlers Leben. The prima donna is characterised as “a tall, skinny, transparent figure, a face with no features to speak of and an immutable expression which, however, exudes intense sweetness. She is wearing a thin, colourless dress with a train sprinkled with small glittering stones which catch the audience’s eyes”. Her recitative, arioso and stretta consist exclusively of phrases such as “Oh Dio … addio”, “non pianger mio bene”, “per te morir io voglio”, “sorte amara”.10 Weber’s parodic imagery was not confined to Italian opera. French and even German opera received similar treatment. After his appointment as Hofkapellmeister in Dresden in 1817 Weber fought for the improvement of its German activities, to compete with the court’s Italian opera under Francesco Morlacchi. The association of the court and nobility with Italian opera, epitomised in Spontini’s appointment at the royal theatre in Berlin in 1820, fuelled existing political tensions because his engagement alienated the literary German class from the rising star of Rossini, whose European triumph ran counter to their musical and political aspirations.

Weber’s own position and ideology remained ambiguous. On the one hand he felt undermined by Morlacchi, on the other hand he wrote a number of arias and cantatas in Italian. In his opera criticism Weber adopted some of the topoi against Italian opera which German writers continued to repeat through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, such as his accusation that Rossini’s operas were of a “purely sensual, unspiritual nature”.11 Still, recent scholarship on Weber has modified the image of him as a German nationalist composer in the wake of his success with Der Freischütz, compositionally inspired by opéra comique and first performed for a middle-class audience at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1821. Weber, whose Dresden repertoire included many opéras-comiques and who would have included Italian operas by Spontini and Mozart, had they not been the prerogative of the court theatre, struck a broad-minded attitude in a letter to his friend Johann Gänsbacher of 1817: “Art has no fatherland and

9 K. Pietschmann, “Zwischen Tradition, Anpassung und Innovation. Italienische Opern für deutsche Höfe im frühen 19. Jahrhundert”, in: S. Werr and D. Brandenburg (eds.), Das Bild der italienischen Oper in Deutschland (Forum Musiktheater, Bd. 1) (Münster, 2004), 109.10 G. Jaiser, Carl Maria von Weber als Schriftsteller. Mit einer… quellenkritischen Neuausgabe des Romanfragments ‘Tonkünstlers Leben’ (Mainz, 2001); quoted in: S. Döhring, “Tonkünstlers Leben. Das Bild der italienischen Oper bei Carl Maria von Weber”, Das Bild der italienischen Oper in Deutschland, ed. S. Werr, D. Brandenburg (Münster, 2004), 98f.11 An invariant dichotomy in the estimation of German and non-German music stretching from Forkel to Adorno is exposed in B. Sponheuer, “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in Music”, Music and German National Identity, ed. C. Applegate and P. Potter (Chicago, 2002), 36-38; this essay broadens the author’s extensive documentation of the same problem in: B. Sponheuer, Musik als Kunst und Nicht-Kunst. Untersuchungen zur Dichotomie von ‘hoher’ und ‘niederer’ Musik im musikästhetischen Denken zwischen Kant und Hanslick (Kassel, 1987); in addition see: S. Werr, “Sinnliches Vergnügen und reine Kunst. Das Italienische als Folie des Deutschen”, in Werr and Brandenburg, Das Bild der italienischen Oper, (as above), 9-20.

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we should treasure everything that is beautiful, whatever the sky under which it was created.” Reviewing Morlacchi’s oratorio Isacco (1817) Weber wrote: “The path to the goal is broad and it takes many forms. It allows space for everybody.”12

Weber’s conciliatory tone was not echoed by Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795-1866), composer, music historian, theorist and hugely influential editor of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung from 1824 to 1831, who canonised the formal analysis of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and, as educationalist, co-founded the Stern’sches Konservatorium in 1850. In Marx’s treatise on singing, Die Kunst des Gesanges (1826), the institutional and personal dominance of Italian court opera and Catholic church music, as well as Rossini’s triumphant reception among German audiences, is declared to be over. In this way Marx concurred with the growing hostility expressed in German music journals towards Italian opera in general.13 Adopting Hegel’s dialectical scheme of historical progress by necessity as well as a proselytising tone, Marx maintained that “with Rossini Italian music had to abandon everything spiritual and had unreservedly to profess its principle, namely sensual amusement, and, as perfect, it had to celebrate its international triumph, … so that we [the Germans] can acknowledge with total conviction: our spirit has a higher need, and only this higher something can give us true satisfaction”.14 As Sanna Pederson has shown, Marx aggravated his historical-philosophical argument with the accusation that Rossini’s operas lacked “dramatic sense” and only provided “fleeting sensual pleasure”.15 He nowhere defined the “higher something” (das Höhere) which was bestowed only on German music, yet he castigated readers who preferred to remain neutral to his mission. Two nationalistic strategies were at play here. He had recourse to Hippocrates’s and later authors’ climate theory, according to which German and northern music is defined in contra-distinction to Italian, southern music and, simultaneously, he either included or excluded musicians from the German fold, as the fate of Spontini in Berlin was to show.

Marx extended his disapproval of Italian music into the field of music theory and the teaching of singing. He believed that the construction of the tonal system, as well as melodic, harmonic and rhythmic rules had only been introduced to “facilitate the most euphonious sound and the most pleasurable comprehension”, as encountered in Italian opera.16 Italian and German music was thus reduced to two principles: according to Marx, Italians only compose to give pleasure whereas the Germans demonstrate a “natural

12 C.M. von Weber, Briefe, ed. H.C. Worbs (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 78, and Dresdner Abend-Zeitung, 1. April 1817, quoted in: S. Döhring, “Tonkünstlers Leben”, (as above), 107.13 See, f.e., C. Toscani, “’Dem Italiener ist Melodie Eins und Alles’. Italienische Oper in der Leipziger ‘Allgemeinen musikalischen Zeitung’”, and A. Jacobshagen, “Schmetterlinge und Adler. Die italienische Oper im Musikschrifttum des Biedermeier”, in: Werr and Brandenburg, Das Bild der italienischen Oper (as above), 137-149 and 159-169. 14 A.B. Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges (Berlin, 1826), III.15 S. Pederson, “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity”, Nineteenth-Century Music, 18/1994, 90. 16 Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, (as above), V. This critique bears resemblance to J. d’Ortigue, Du Théâtre Italien et son influence sur le goût musical françois (Paris, 1840), 276: “Que la musique y est sacrifiée au chant; que le chant y est sacrifiée à la roulade, à la fioriture, et à tous les autres procédés du mécanisme de la voix.”

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striving for idea and truth”.17 Likewise, the singing profession was perceived as in need of reform: “Nobody is more alien to German music than singers who emerge from Italian training. Many more of them can perform a scena by Rossini than a German song.”18 He held Italian singing schools responsible for German singers wrongly emphasising the last syllables of words, adding extra vowels or changing from darker to lighter vowels. In his view the limited success of German opera in the mid 1820s was directly related to singers’ schooling in Italian opera and language which, in his view, “almost exclusively teaches the shaping of the voice, very little theory, and a uniform manner of performance and embellishment”.19 Marx did not want to substitute the old, exclusively Italian singing practice for a new, exclusively German one, but he was confident that German musicians had appropriated the operatic culture of their neighbouring countries with the result that Italian and French music was “sublated” (as understood by Hegel), that is subsumed within future German opera.20 In a further bow to Hegel’s scheme, Marx believed that during his lifetime music had “received consciousness only on German soil”, whereas it had previously “existed unconsciously” in other countries.21

It is deeply ironic that Hegel, whose ideas A.B. Marx popularised, confessed his intense enjoyment of Rossini’s operas, which were much en vogue in Berlin in the 1820s, while completely ignoring Marx’s hero Beethoven: “Rossini’s music is decried by his opponents as a tickling of the ear. But once we live in its melodies, this music is full of sentiment, spirited and engaging for mind and heart. Admittedly, it does not embark on the kind of musical characterisation beloved by the strict German musical attitude.”22 On a visit to Vienna in 1824, Hegel vowed to stay put for as long as he could afford tickets for the Italian opera and his journey home. He declared his preference for Rossini’s Barbiere over Mozart’s Figaro, enthused over the soprano Angelica Catalani and the bass Luigi Lablache, concluding that “Italian music is made for Italian singers; everything is made to be sung”.23 Schopenhauer, too, acknowledged his unbiased delight in Rossini’s operas, castigating German jealousy over their success.24

Despite the popular enthusiasm for Rossini’s operas shared by Hegel and Schopenhauer, but opposed by the musical literati, the last institution for the exclusive performance of Italian opera, the Dresden court opera, mounted a dwindling number of productions and was dissolved in 1832.25 Still, the city remained the German centre for Italian singing instruction. The filiation of teachers and singers included the castrato Vincenzo Caselli,

17 Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, (as above), V.18 Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, (as above), VI.19 Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, (as above), VI.20 Marx, “[Review of] P. v. Winter, Vollständige Singschule (Mainz, 1825)”, Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 2/1825, 168; quoted in: Pederson, “A. B. Marx” (as above), 92. 21 Marx, Die Kunst des Gesanges, (as above), VII.22 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), XV, 210f.23 Quoted in: F. Brendel, Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1875), 395f. 24 A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Sämtliche Werke (Darmstadt, 1989), I, 365, and Paralipomena, in Sämtliche Werke, V, 544.25 According to Pietschmann, “Zwischen Tradition, Anpassung und Innovation” (as above), 120f., the last premieres of Italian operas in German-speaking countries were in Munich (1820), Dresden (1835) semi-public, Vienna (1812), Berlin (1801).

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who had moved to Dresden after studies with the Bolognese castrato Antonio Bernacchi (1685-1756). Bernacchi himself had set up a singing school in Bologna in 1738 after a highly successful career in which he had sung in Handel’s London operas. Bernacchi counted Anton Raaff among his pupils, while Caselli was known as the teacher of Johann Miksch (1765-1845). Miksch in turn was made chorus director of the German opera in Dresden in 1820 at the suggestion of Weber, and taught Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient (1804-1860) as well as Heinrich Ferdinand Mannstein (1806-1872) and Ferdinand Sieber (1822-1895). This generation drew very different lessons from their singing teachers. While Schroeder-Devrient became internationally known for her dramatically powerful performances of German and Italian operas, Mannstein became a professional singer and teacher after his theological studies could not provide him with an income.

By entitling his manual Das System der großen Gesangschule des Bernacchi von Bologna, Mannstein may have hoped, like A.B. Marx, to have history on his side, although he was describing singing as practised in the eighteenth century and Algarotti had already upbraided Bernacchi for his obsession with technical difficulties.26 Still, Mannstein confidently explained that Bernacchi’s singing principles had not been superseded in subsequent manuals and that they could be summarised in the motto: “Place your voice well, breath well, pronounce clearly – and your singing will be perfect”. The nature of Mannstein’s advice, remote from both concrete musical examples and a hands-on approach, is revealed in his distinction between musical “expression” and “performance”, where the latter is considered the “body”, and the former the “spirit” of singing. “Performance” is claimed to resemble “form or disposition in painting”, whereas “expression” is related to the “idea of the divine, which radiates in us when beholding the painting. Only under the best conditions of performance and expression can singing become a work of art.”27 The rudimentary nature of Mannstein’s advice confirms the long-held view that Italian musicians conveyed their ‘secrets’ orally and little was spelled out in writing. Although Mannstein’s treatise enjoyed a second edition, a further publication shows him hopelessly out of step with operatic developments.28 His subsequent career move to historical novel writing and to the civil service in Dresden hardly indicates the success of his music teaching.

A.B. Marx and Mannstein had set out two extreme positions for the future of music in Germany, neither of which left much space for the other. This polarity could not have facilitated the path of young German composers who might have been keen to incorporate aspects of the different national traditions in the 1830s. Wagner, who in 1839 sought and received Meyerbeer’s support in Paris, already revealed in his “Autobiographische Skizze” (1842) the competing nationalist values with which he retrospectively imbued his formative years. Four experiences stand out: (1) He explained his failure to see Die Feen performed in Leipzig in 1834 because of the dominance of

26 F. Algarotti, Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (Livorno, 1763), Reprint ed. A. Bini (Rome, 1989), 46.27 H. F. Mannstein, Das System der großen Gesangsschule des Bernacchi. Système de la grande méthode de chant (Dresden, [1835]), 68.28 “Since the beginning of our century the Germans have pushed the treatment of vocal music to complete unsungability. In their striving for musical character they imitated recent French composers in harmonic effect and instrumental superabundance.” H. F. Mannstein, Geschichte, Geist und Ausübung des Gesanges von Gregor dem Großen bis auf unsere Zeit (Leipzig, 1845), 138.

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Italian and French operas in the repertoire. His enjoyment of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Schroeder-Devrient in the title role only led him to morally castigate contemporary Italian and French composers with the aim that the “serious, scrupulous German” should take steps to “supersede his rivals”.29 (2) In the same year the twenty-one year old Wagner bore witness to a sense of internationalism: “’The young Europe’ was haunting me all over, Germany appeared to me only a very small part of the world. … I was delighted by the beauty of a dramatic plot, wit and esprit: as far as my music was concerned, I found these two among the Italians and the French. I abandoned my model, Beethoven. … With this in mind I continued the composition of Das Liebesverbot. I did not care in the least about its French and Italian reminiscences.”30 However, the Magdeburg premiere was a disaster, in part because of the dissolution of the company. (3) As musical director in Riga in 1837, Wagner hated the daily rehearsals and performances of French and Italian operas. His realisation that he himself had begun to compose “à la Adam” “disgusts” him.31 (4) The description of Wagner’s financially and professionally humiliating life in Paris between 1839 and 1842 culminated on his return in a vow of “eternal loyalty to my German fatherland” upon seeing the Rhine with tears in his eyes.32

During the 1840s singing instruction was revolutionised by Manuel Garcia (1805-1906), whose physiological investigation, while serving in the administration of a French military hospital, led him to recognise the position of the larynx and the mouth as crucial factors in sound production. As his teaching repertoire consisted not only of Italian but also French opera, he described the pronunciation of different consonants in addition to conventional pedagogical topics such as vocal timbre, breathing, projection, agility, articulation, phrasing and expression.33 Ferdinand Sieber learned from the shortcomings of Mannstein and the systematic approach taken by Garcia. Sieber followed up his lessons from Miksch with studies in Italy and enjoyed an international singing career before settling in 1854 as a teacher at Kullak’s Musik-Akademie in Berlin, where he eventually became professor in 1864. Beginning in 1856 Sieber published a series of highly popular studies (including many solfeggi) as well as theoretical books over a span of forty years with many twentieth-century re-editions. One of Sieber’s earliest publications, the Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Gesangskunst, demonstrates his more comprehensive approach, which even included advice on health. Manuals derived from

29 R. Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze”, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. W. Golther (Berlin, n.d.), I, 10. Wagner’s argument is reminiscent of Marx’ quoted above.30 R. Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze”, (as above), I, 10f.31 R. Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze”, (as above), I, 12.32 R. Wagner, “Autobiographische Skizze”, (as above), I, 19.33 M. Garcia, Traité complet de l’art du chant (Paris, 1840-1847); for a summary of his teaching see D. Mason, “The Teaching (and learning) of Singing”, The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. J. Potter (Cambridge, 2000), 211-213. Garcia’s recourse to physiology did not remain without its detractors. The singing teacher Heinrich Panofka (1807-1887), who worked in Paris in the 1830s, in London in the 1840s and in Florence in the 1860s, chastised fellow teachers for brainwashing pupils with their expertise in physiology: “Sarebbe lo stesso che un maestro di ballo volesse spiegare a un alunno I movimenti che debbono fare I differenti muscoli per eseguire questo o quel passo. E d’altro lato, che sono tutte le teorie che poggiano sulla fisiologia? Ipotesi! Null’altro che ipotesi sostenute da fisiologi famosi, e combattute da altri non meno famosi fisiologi.” E. Panofka, Voix et chanteurs (Paris, [1870]), 26, quoted in Durante, “Il cantante”, Storia dell’opera italiana, ed. L. Bianconi and G. Pestelli, vol. 4 (Torino, 1987), 405.

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the Italian training methods can be characterised by their focus on textless exercises, so that Sieber’s discussion of the pronunciation of vowels and consonants marked a decisive deviation from tradition. But consonants, which receive special emphasis in German, are nevertheless treated by Sieber as intrusions to be made as inconspicuous as possible in performance.34

In this way Sieber spelled out a common problem in contemporary German opera performance, namely the difficulty of understanding the German texts.35 To all appearances, one of the crucial advantages of hearing opera in one’s own language had not come to fruition. In response to this malaise and as a compromise to contemporary conditions, Sieber introduced into his treatise a section on “Singing with words”, although his remarks only serve to underline his primary interest in Italian language and textless exercises.36

A completely rewritten version of his textbook, published twenty years later, indicates that Sieber felt challenged. Now he wanted to remind students of the “golden rules and traditions of the old Italian masters” which he “solemnly vowed to uphold” against critics who promoted “screaming recitation” instead of singing and who “dared to maintain that, with regards to dramatic expression, contemporary singing culture had superseded the singing of the previous century”.37 Sieber had a clear remedy for the ills he perceived. His advice on the treatment of consonants in singing was identical to the earlier manual except for a footnote, in which he decried the emphasis on consonants in the textbook of an unnamed colleague.38 All Sieber’s model singers were Italians and his repertoire was taken from German and Italian composers of previous generations. The Italian terminology was explained in an appendix. His last manual, Il bel canto, showed his increasingly vociferous opposition to a differing aesthetic without providing a theoretical exposition of his own and resorted to a list of musical examples that could be compared with a museum display.39

Were Mannstein’s and Sieber’s singing manuals not providing what German singers and composers needed? A critique of the practice, widespread among Italian teachers, to train only the “mechanics” of the voice, had been formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Marcello Perino, director of the Conservatoire San Sebastiano in Naples.

34 “In a vocal song each syllable ought to be completed with its vowel, while the following consonant is taken along to the beginning of the next syllable. In this way we gain the special advantage of the Italian language, in which every word ends with a vowel, and, simultaneously, we render a beautiful tone without in the slightest way offending the language, as we can stay until the end on a series of vowels.” F. Sieber, Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Gesangskunst (Magdeburg, 1856-8), 90.35 Sieber, Lehrbuch, (as above), 357.36 “The clarity of pronunciation must never be sought at the expense of the beauty of the tone; otherwise the song will denigrate into a musical parlando. This might be appropriate in some kind of recitative or opera buffa but it would be insufferable in a cantilena.” Sieber, Vollständiges Lehrbuch, (as above), 357.37 F. Sieber, Die Kunst des Gesanges (Offenbach, [1877]), II. 38 Sieber, Kunst des Gesanges, (as above), 17.39 “In our time, when the most revolting screaming is propagated with the extenuating device of ‘dramatic singing’, a collection of songs might be welcome which wants to contribute in giving justice again to bel canto.” F. Sieber, Il bel canto (Berlin, 1886), Preface.

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Perino demanded a “philosophical” approach.40 He explained that both composer and singer ought to be comprehensively educated so that the latter could clearly understand the plot of a composition and bring the emotions to life in performance. In opera a singer should know how to “conformare non meno la voce col canto al sentimento delle parole, che l’portamento ed il gesto per ben sostenere il carattere che rappresenta”.41 It is not clear to what extent his postulate was taken up in manuals of the subsequent decades, but it would be wrong to assume that Italian singing and tuition was monolithic. In a letter dated 24 April 1840 Morlacchi complained to Felice Romani about the substitution of bel canto with “canto declamato” in contemporary Italian opera.42

As we saw earlier, German writers’ hostility towards Italian opera became a constant theme in the wake of the public’s triumphant reception of Rossini. In the 1850s even a seasonal appearance of Italian opera in Vienna could not elicit praise from an anonymous critic. He felt that the audience had taken against this repertoire as old fashioned and uniformly dull. Moreover, the Viennese opera’s incompetent director did not offer value-for-money and Verdi’s operas were only enjoyed by the uneducated section of the general public. The reviewer ended that this three-month season also disadvantaged local employees and therefore its disappearance would not be missed.43 We might be inclined to think that such a statement was balanced in 1860 by Leopold von Sonnleithner (1797-1873), a barrister and former friend of Schubert, who wrote that there was “altogether only one truth, - not an Italian or German or French. Likewise, there is only one true school of singing which in all countries and nations must proceed from the same principles, if it is committed to the same goal, namely the complete education of singers. This school is described as ‘Italian’ only because it happened to have first acquired fixed rules and a definite method in Italy, from where also stemmed a significant number of excellent singers. … The true school … is the most natural, in so far as it treats the human voice at first as a sounding instrument, just like any other.”44

However, Sonnleithner’s views were not shared in the writings of the musically much more prominent Franz Hauser (1794-1870). After an internationally successful career as a

40 “Pochi, anzi pochissimi … sono stati quelli che, senza brigarsi d’altro che di assegnare alcune pratiche regole intorno a tal scienza, trascurando quelle ricerche che della filosofia son proprie, con farsi cioè principalmente ad indagare tutto ciò che dalla natura è stato per tale oggetto disposto ed ordinato, si sono ristretti ne’ confini del puro meccanismo dell’arte, dal quale non mai si sono allontanati.” M. Perrino, Osservazioni sul canto (Napoli, 1810), 5, quoted in S. Durante, “Il cantante”, (as above), 4, 405. 41 Perrino, Osservazioni (as above), 55.42 “Secondo le musiche che si scrive ora in Italia vedo che tutti si danno al canto declamato, ma non più come io intendeva, bensì esagerato e nauseante. Mi pare, che tutto il bello delle moderne composizioni teatrali consiste nel gridare. Che ha migliori Polmoni è il meglio cantante! E il bel canto espressivo dov'è andato? E tu nel tuo giornale non levi la tua possente voce per reprimere questo torrente devastatore?” A. Roccatagliata, Felice Romani librettista (Lucca, 1996), 416f. In a private communication Roger Parker suggested that Morlacchi probably had Donizetti’s Parisina (1833) in mind.43 Recensionen und allgemeine Bemerkungen über Theater und Musik, V/1854, 148-158; the repertoire included Rossini’s La Cenerentola,Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Otello, Bellini’s Norma, five unspecified operas by Donizetti, one by Mercadante, and four by Verdi encompassing Rigoletto and Il Trovatore.44 L. von Sonnleithner, “Bemerkungen zur Gesangskunst”, Recensionen und Mittheilungen über Musik, 6/1860, 315, quoted in: T. Seedorf, “’Deklamation’ und Gesangswohllaut’ – Richard Wagner und der ‘deutsche Bel Canto’”, “Mit mehr Bewußtsein zu spielen”. Vierzehn Beiträge (nicht nur) über Richard Wagner, ed. C. Jost (Tutzing, 2006), 189.

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bass singer in both Italian and German opera, including a guest appearance with Schroeder-Devrient in London, Hauser became a well-known teacher in Vienna and Munich; in 1846, he was promoted to the directorship of Munich’s newly founded Conservatoire. Ominously, he took the sentence from Mozart’s letter, quoted above, as the motto for his Gesanglehre (1866) and proceeded to denigrate the Italian teaching tradition, which Mannstein had claimed for himself, for the simple reason that it had never been codified in writing. Hauser strategically hoped to establish his own scholarly credentials by vilifying the Bolognese school as a “myth”.45 He considered Italian singing technique part of a venerable past which budding singers should learn by visiting Italy after they had become “independent artists”, although the technique would always remain partly inaccessible to a German student. Likewise, the terminology would probably forever remain Italian, although he himself took pains to use German vocabulary wherever possible. While some of his solfeggi are taken from Italian singers, the texted examples were all borrowed from German composers, with Hauser himself and his friend Moritz Hauptmann in prominent positions. Crucially, Hauser focussed exclusively on the singing voice.

By the time of the publication of Hauser’s singing manual, Munich’s musical world had been turned upside down. In 1864, the newly crowned Bavarian King, Ludwig II (1845-1886) had sent Hauser into retirement and had invited Wagner to Munich where he hoped, among other things, to set up a “German Music School”. In 1865 Ludwig even closed the Munich Conservatoire and made all its employees redundant.46 At first Wagner solicited the support of the former tenor Friedrich Schmitt, who had started his teaching employment at the Conservatoire in the year of its closure. Departing from his own education in Italian methods, the foundation for Schmitt’s teaching career became his manual, Große Gesangsschule für Deutschland (1854), in which he “sought an education of the voice founded on the particularities of the German language, although his exercises unmistakably indicate the model of Italian vocal teaching”.47 However, the collaboration with Wagner never came to fruition, nor could Wagner realise his own plan for a “German music School”, which he sketched in a memorandum to King Ludwig in March 1865. In this text Wagner maintained that the “correct” relationship between language and singing “still required discovery”, since the model of Italian singing “could not be applied to the German language. Here language ruins itself and singing is disfigured.” The foremost goal of the new school would be a “correct development of singing on the basis of the German language”. Wagner envisioned “the character of this singing” to be “distinguishable through an energetically spoken accent as opposed to the Italian extended vocalising”. Still, German singers would only be able to reach this goal, “if the 45 “Es findet sich, daß die ganze Geschichte mit Bernacchi und seiner Schule eine Mythe ist, daß weder er noch sein Lehrer irgend etwas, weder Theoretisches noch Praktisches hinterlassen haben, woraus man auch nur annähernd auf ihre oder ihrer Zeitgenossen Gesangweise, oder auf die Art ihrer Stimmbehandlung, auf die sich doch zunächst eine Schule gründen muß, schließen könnte, daß also eine Schule des Bernacchi von Bologna gar nicht existiert.” F. Hauser, Gesanglehre für Lehrende und Lernende (Leipzig, 1866), 3.46 See C. Jost, “Wagners Münchener Gegenentwurf zum Hauser’schen Konservatorium”, Musical Education in Europe (1770-1914). Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges, ed. M. Fend and M. Noiray (Berlin, 2005), 2, 463.47 Seedorf, “’Deklamation’ und ‘Gesangswohllaut’”, (as above), 188. Schmitt’s curse of the “Italian weed on the German field of opera” is corroborated in: J. Hey, Richard Wagner als Vortragsmeister, ed. H. Hey (Leipzig, 1911), 92.

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euphonious singing (Gesangswohlklang) of the Italian school remains part of his education”. A “reflective engagement with Italian singing” will, thus, be part of the curriculum in the proposed School.48

Wagner thereby radicalised the tension over the presence of Italian teaching methods and operatic repertoire in vocal tuition among German teachers. To be sure, the “Bericht” only confirms views that Wagner had apparently first formed when working with Friedrich Schmitt in Magdeburg in 1834-1836.49 Wagner’s common theme was a dissatisfaction with singers performing German operas. More specifically, he bemoaned singers’ imperfect comprehension of the drama and inadequate acting and realisation of the sonic possibilities afforded by the plentiful combinations of consonants in the German language. Only when working on Rienzi, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin with the tenor Joseph Tichatschek (1807-1886) and the baritone Anton Mitterwurzer (1818-1872) in Dresden in the 1840s did Wagner “realise the special quality of semi-vowels as a convenient binding agent for legato text-phrasing”. This feature had been overlooked, he claimed, because it “was not mentioned in any Italian manual”.50

It is debatable, however, whether Wagner’s intended German singing style amounted to a “modification of the Italian model”, that is an “amalgamation” of the two models.51 Harking back in his memorandum to Schiller’s distinction between ancient (ingenuous) and modern (reflective) art in the essay on “Naive und sentimentalische Dichtung”, and more closely adopting its nationalist application in the manner of A.B. Marx (as discussed earlier), Wagner distinguished between the “immediate” pleasure supposedly granted to Italians and the “reflected” pleasure enjoyed by Germans as a result of continuous effort. Comparable with Marx’s scheme of operatic development, Wagner, in fact, demoted Italian singing technique to the status of an “element of education” (Bildungsmoment), or a propedeutic tool. Bel canto was clearly meant to be ‘sublated’ in German singing. On the other hand, in Hey’s memoir, Wagner is quoted as saying that Tichatschek animated his hope for the “artistic ideal of a German bel canto” and Wagner’s private enjoyment of Bellini’s melodies is well known.52 This discrepancy will not be settled by recourse to one unambiguous text, as no text enjoys such privileged status and the meaning of the central terms were subject to historical change.

When the new Royal Music School opened in Munich in 1867, its artistic director Hans von Bülow might have seen his dream realised that “in our Wagnerian organisation only Wagner’s idea will be present,”53 although the composer himself had been ordered by Ludwig II to leave Bavaria at the end of 1865. Given Wagner’s penchant to “envelop and

48 R. Wagner, “Bericht an seine Majestät den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule”, Sämtliche Schriften, (as above), 8, 135f. “Gesangswohlklang” is a German paraphrase of Bel canto.49 J. Hey, Richard Wagner, (as above), 85.50 J. Hey, Richard Wagner, (as above), 135.51 T. Seedorf, “’Deklamation’ und ‘Gesangswohllaut’”, (as above), 189f.52 J. Hey, Richard Wagner, (as above), 135.53 H. v. Bülow, Briefe und Schriften, ed. M. v. Bülow, 8 vols. (Leipzig, 1895-1908), 4, 61, quoted in Jost, “Wagners Münchener Gegenentwurf”, (as above), 472.

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devour his appointees like a ravenous reptile”,54 it cannot be claimed with any certainty that the proposal for newly appointed teachers to reconsider their methods and publish new manuals would have acted against any “autocratic style”.55 Among the new teachers at Munich’s Royal Music School was Julius Hey (1832-1909), who had been a student of Schmitt and who took over his role as the consultant and executor of Wagner’s ambitions. Despite, or perhaps because he lacked a performance career, Hey is credited not only with coaching singers at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876, but also with systematising Wagner’s views in a magisterial treatise of unprecedented scale. While Sieber discussed the spoken aspect of singing in a mere seven pages, Hey devoted the whole first volume of his theory to spoken discourse, discussing each vowel, semi-vowel, diphthong and, above all, each consonant in minute detail, adding a host of poetic examples but no music ones. From the start, he turned his manual into a training ground for a national project in which musical and political ambitions were intertwined.56 His “reasons for the necessity of a ‘German singing manual’” repeated all the stereotypical dichotomies concerning German and Italian opera and people. He particularly criticised Italian tutors for wrongly taking “the vowel ‘a’ … as the sole foundation for the entire development of vocal technique”, whereas German tuition would accord all vowels, diphthongs and consonants equal importance in order to enhance the words’ “expressive plasticity”.57 “The throat fluency of the virtuoso singer” supposedly was practised south of the Alps, while “difficult” work and dramatic “motivation”, “logical emphasis” and “deep artistic seriousness” were to be found in the north. Of this development “the Italian singer has no idea”.58 Although the posturing superiority could not be clearer, Hey’s programme did not amount to a total rejection of Italian schooling. He made his case for an ideal Wagnerian singer who would “combine vivid emphasis on the meaning of a word with the melodic accentuation of a vocal phrase in a natural unit, with the aim of creating a ‘German bel canto’, that is: a singing of simplest truth clothed in a declamation of perfect style, the melodic rules of which emanate exclusively from the life-giving rhythm of our language.”59 But in a subsequent long footnote Hey reminisced about the Italian style before Rossini’s “decline”, when “melody had received shape in the most noble and universal manner, based on rules of performance that will remain valid for all times and schools”.60 In support of this statement Hey listed a series of practical studies written by Italian, French and German singers and teachers, although in this sense he undermined the case for the existence of an Italian theory of singing.

By the time this treatise was published, Wagner was dead and Hey had lost his influence in Bayreuth despite his Kurwenalian loyalty. When Cosima Wagner opened a school in

54 M. Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner. His Life, His Work, His Century (London, 1983), 347.55 Jost, “Wagners Münchener Gegenentwurf”, (as above), 472.56 “All those who follow the calling ought to see it as a matter of honour to participate in the improvement of the art of German singing with new vigour and an honest will, so that singing might find precinct homestead, heedful cultivation and fresh prosperity in the fatherland, that has gained unity and grandeur, and the most inward expression of the German sentiment – singing – has reached its most ideal form, … and a vocal future is still reserved for the German people.” J. Hey, Deutscher Gesangsunterricht. Lehrbuch des sprachlichen und gesanglichen Vortrags, 4 vols. (Mainz, 1882-1886), vol. 1, Sprachlicher Theil, 7. 57 Hey, Deutscher Gesangsunterricht, (as above), vol. 2, Gesanglicher Theil, 1, 3f.58 Hey, Deutscher Gesangsunterricht, (as above), vol. 2, Gesanglicher Theil, I, 6.59 Hey, Deutscher Gesangsunterricht, (as above), vol. 2, Gesanglicher Theil, I, 83.60 Ibid.

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style training in 1892, she placed in charge the pianist and conductor Julius Kniese (1848-1905), who had been chorus master at the Bayreuth festival since 1882. As Jens Malte Fischer remarks: “Under Cosima’s aegis and Kniese’s direction, the Wagnerian idea of speech-song – or Sprechgesang, as it was later called – was wildly exaggerated. … Bel canto became a term of abuse.”61 Hey’s treatise was far too bulky and long-winded to become a pedagogical success. His son published a smaller version for different voices, only reusing a fraction of his father’s text. When Hans Erwin Hey described recitation of a free, rhythmic-melodic phrasing without text, he rephrased his father’s description of bel canto: “The kind of preparation, which employs a purely vocal sound in order to develop positively the expressive potential of a voice, should form a German bel canto, that is a singing of simplest truth and highest beauty, the melodic rules of which exclusively emanate from the rhythm of our language.”62 Yet, by omitting his father’s adjacent footnote with its references to the Italian studies, bel canto became an ever more abstract term.

The preceding, all-too fragmentary survey allows two provisional conclusions: (a) the comprehensive identification of Italian operatic singing with the concept of “bel canto” is untenable, as it was already questioned by Francesco Morlacchi in 1840 in his horror vision of Italian opera composers adopting a “canto declamato”. It demonstrates that the characterisation of Italian singing was dependent on the taste, attitude and agenda of the authors involved. (b) Between the early nineteenth and twentieth century a historical dynamic took hold in Germany whereby non-German features of opera became marginalised and German aspects were ever more essentialised. Musicians and music scholars played their part at all stages. In a German edition of Mozart’s La finta giardiniera from 1934 the editor thanks the “national-socialist cultural community” for their “self-sacrificing enthusiam … dedicated to the great German master and fiery patriot Mozart as well as to the effort in finally rendering justice to the German language as found in Mozart’s operas, which he under the constraint of fashion had to write in Italian”.63 The political consequences of such an exclusive musical nationalism were cast.

61 J. M. Fischer, “Sprechgesang or Bel Canto: Toward a History of Singing Wagner”, Wagner Handbook, ed. U. Müller and P. Wapnewski (Cambridge Mass., 1992), 528ff, with documentation and examples. 62 H.E. Hey, Der kleine Hey (Mainz, 1913), II, 172.63 S. Anheisser (ed.), W.A. Mozart, Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe (Berlin, 1934), Preface. I owe this reference to Michel Noiray.

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