Franckenstein, Clemens (Erwein Heinrich Karl Bonaventura), Freiherr von und zu
(b Wiesentheid, nr Kitzingen, 14 July 1875; d Hechendorf, nr Munich, 19 Aug 1942).
German composer, conductor and administrator. The son of an Austrian ambassador, he grew up in the various diplomatic incumbencies filled by his father before receiving a secondary education in Vienna. He studied composition there with the Bruckner pupil Victor Bause (until 1894), then with Ludwig Thuille in Munich at the Bayerische Akademie der Tonkunst (1894–6) and at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt with Ivan Knorr (1896–8). While in Vienna Franckenstein established important connections with major literary and artistic personalities of the day, including Hugo von Hofmannsthal, through whom he was admitted to the Stefan George Kreis, whose members included Arthur Schnitzler, Anton Wildgans, Jakob Wassermann and Oskar F. Mayer; the last two were to become his librettists.

       From Frankfurt Franckenstein embarked upon a successful career as a conductor, administrator and composer of opera. His conducting career, which began when he was an itinerant theatre conductor in the USA (1900–01) took him to London, where he was staff conductor with the Moody Manners Opera Company (1902–7). Thereafter he was appointed by Baron von Hülsen as a principal staff conductor at the Wiesbaden Hoftheater, before being appointed, at Richard Strauss’s behest, to the Royal Prussian Opera in Berlin. In 1912 he became the last Hofintendant at the Munich Opera, where he introduced Bruno Walter as Generalmusikdirektor and arranged for first performances of new operas by von Klenau, Korngold, Braunfels, Courvoisier, Graener and Pfitzner (Palestrina). Rendered inactive during the Räterrepublik, Franckenstein resumed his responsibilities, now as Bayerischer Staatsintendant, in 1924 with Hans Knappertsbusch as his musical director; he retired in 1934 as a result of his disapproval of Nazi cultural policy and propaganda.

       As an opera composer Franckenstein gained increasing recognition, beginning with his first opera, Griseldis (1896–7), first produced at Troppau (now Opava) in 1898, thereafter with Fortunatus, then Rahab, first performed at Budapest (1909) and Des Kaisers Dichter Li-Tai-Pe at the Hamburg Staatsoper (1920). While Griseldis (subtitled ‘Mysterium’) and Fortunatus perpetuate the ideals and compositional practices of the post-Wagnerian music drama, the one-act Rahab, on a biblical theme, is an example of the large-scale Jugendstil symphonic drama, with the kind of exotic and opulent harmonic and orchestral usage encountered in works by Strauss (Salome), Schreker and Zemlinsky. In 1901, Franckenstein had in fact written a symphonic poem whose programme is identical with the scenario used by Strauss. Li-Tai-Pe (1920) is a Künstlerdrama in the tradition of Die Meistersinger and Palestrina with the famous Chinese poet Li-Tai-Pe as its central figure. Cast in three acts, the work combines motivic usage with the use of extended and recurrent closed forms, and was widely performed on German stages between 1920 and 1933. Franckenstein also wrote a pantomime, Die Biene (after Hugo von Hofmannsthal), first performed at Darmstadt in 1916.

       The Franckensteiniana collection at the Bavarian State Library of 171 letters to Franckenstein by leading composers, conductors and librettists (including 39 from Richard Strauss and 52 from Hofmannsthal) is a central source for German operatic history of the years 1900–34, in particular on the problem of evolving a suitable version of Ariadne auf Naxos between its first Stuttgart and Viennese productions.

WORKS

 
MSS in D-Mbs 
Griseldis op.6 (3, O. F. Mayer), Troppau, 2 Feb 1898 
Fortunatus op.10 (3, after J. Wassermann), unperf., vs (Berlin, 1901), full score (Berlin, c1905) 
Rahab op.32 (1, Mayer), Budapest, 4 Dec 1909 (Berlin, 1909) 
Des Kaisers Dichter Li-Tai-Pe op.43 (3, R. Lothar), Hamburg, 2 Nov 1920 (Berlin, 1920) 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PEM (A. D. McCredie) 
W. Zentner: ‘Clemens von Franckenstein. Zu seinem 60. Geburtstag am 14. Juli 1935’, ZfM, cii (1935), 740–43 
A. D. McCredie: ‘Some Jugendstil Lyric and Dramatic Texts and their Settings’, Miscellanea Musicologica. Adelaide Studies in Musicology, xiii (1984), 223–32 
A. D. McCredie: ‘Clemens von Franckenstein’, Bayerische Komponisten, xxvi (Tutzing, 1992) 
ANDREW D. McCREDIE


-=-=-


Cadman, Charles Wakefield
(b Johnstown, pa, 24 Dec 1881; d Los Angeles, 30 Dec 1946).
American composer. He was largely self-taught; having seen a production of De Koven’s operetta Robin Hood when he was 14, he composed three operettas by the age of 20. His most famous work, the song ‘At Dawning’, which was inspired by American Indian tribal songs, was written before he was 25. Cadman made his livelihood from royalties, piano concerts, music journalism, film scores, and lecture tours of the USA and Europe, which included a celebrated talk on American Indian music. Two of his operas were based on American Indian tales and songs, developed after research into their culture. One of Cadman’s main interests was to ‘idealize’ American Indian music by adding conservative 19th-century harmonies to the native melodies, a treatment that the musicologist John Comfort Fillmore claimed the American Indians themselves approved. While his opera Shanewis, based on the life of the Creek Indian Tsianina Redfeather, was the most successful and lasting of his opera ventures, his dramatic works also include cycles for vocal quartet with piano, one of which, The Full Moon, was intended to be staged. His radio opera The Willow Tree was likewise originally conceived for a vocal quartet. He saw productions of all but his first opera Daoma (‘The Land of Misty Water’), which he continued to revise until late in his life under the title Ramala. While he considered his ‘serious’ compositions, particularly the operas, to be his most significant works, it was for his shorter novelties that he was best known.

See also Shanewis.

WORKS

 
Daoma [The Land of Misty Water], 1909–12 (3, N. R. Eberhart), unperf., rev. as 
Ramala, 1939 (4), unperf. 
The Garden of Mystery, 1915 (1, Eberhart, after N. Hawthorne: Rappaccini’s Daughter), concert perf. New York, Carnegie Hall, 20 March 1925, vs (New York, 1925) 
Shanewis (1, Eberhart), New York, Metropolitan, 23 March 1918, vs as The Robin Woman: Shanewis (New York, 1918) 
A Witch of Salem, 1922 (2, Eberhart), Chicago, Auditorium, 8 Dec 1926, vs (Boston, 1925) 
The Willow Tree (radio op, 1, Eberhart), NBC, 26 April 1932 

THOMAS WARBURTON

-=-=-=-=-
Mancinelli, Luigi
(b Orvieto, 6 Feb 1848; d Rome, 2 Feb 1921).
Italian conductor and composer. He had music lessons from his brother, and later studied in Florence with Mabellini. He was a cellist in the Orvieto cappella (1862) and later in the Pergola theatre orchestra, Florence, then (1874) at the Teatro Morlacchi in Perugia, where he was also assistant maestro concertatore; he made his conducing début in Aida, taking over at short nonce from Usiglio. The impresario Jacovacci was present and engaged him for the Teatro Apollo, Rome, where he appeared until 1881.

       A success from the beginning, Mancinelli soon attained great authority as a conductor; in 1877 Boito called him the ideal interpreter of Mefistofele, and the publisher Giovannina Lucca, holder of the Wagner copyrights in Italian, saw him as Mariani’s successor as a Wagner conductor. He also began to be known as a composer through his incidental music for Cossa’s tragedies Messalina (1876) and Cleopatra (1877). In 1878 he conducted concerts in Paris, Milan, and in Bologna, where he was a founder and director of the Società del Quartetto and initiated the popular concerts at the Teatro Brunetti; he also conducted the opera season at the Comunale. From 1881 he taught at Bologna Conservatory and was maestro di cappella at S Petronio. In January 1883 he conducted at a concert in honour of Liszt and Wagner in Venice.

       His first opera, Isora di Provenza, was successful in Bologna in 1884, but failed in Naples in 1886. On returning from that production, Mancinelli resigned his posts in Bologna and left the city. Gui stated that ‘under the threat of a disgraceful lawsuit … he had to leave Italy and live an exile for many years’. However Mancinelli conducted in Bologna in 1887 and elsewhere in Italy in 1892. Augustus Harris engaged him as sole conductor of a season of Italian opera at Drury Lane in spring 1887 and as chief conductor at Covent Garden in 1888, a post he held until 1905. In 1888 he went with Harris to Bayreuth in preparation for Die Meistersinger with Jean de Reszke. He was chief conductor at the Madrid opera, 1887–93, and at the new Metropolitan, New York, 1893–1903, taking leave when he was composing his operas Ero e Leandro (1895–6) and Paolo e Francesca (1901–2). He conducted opera in Italy until 1911 and seasons at the S Carlos, Lisbon from 1901 to 1919–20. In 1905 he was at the Rio de Janeiro opera and in 1908 inaugurated the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, returning there in 1909, 1910 and 1913. He often conducted in Spain.

       Mancinelli was probably the most important Italian conductor of the generation between Faccio and Toscanini, of whom in many ways he was a forerunner: both were authoritarian, charismatic figures, put great emphasis on fidelity to the score, which they often conducted from memory, and had little patience with singers’ whims and conceits. In London and New York Mancinelli conducted a wide range of operas, seldom with adequate rehearsal. In Italy and Spain he was celebrated as a champion of Wagner and Beethoven, but in London and New York his authority in this area was not undisputed. Shaw wrote of his Lohengrin (1889) that his

Italian temperament came repeatedly into conflict with the German temperament of the composer. Where the music should have risen to its noblest and broadest sweep he burned on in the impetuous self-assertive Southern way that is less compatible than any other manner on earth with the grand calm of the ideal Germany.

Weingartner, on the other hand, found Mancinelli’s Meistersinger astonishingly good … I could never have thought that an Italian could so thoroughly master so German a score. He conducted with so much temperament and energy … and such subtle understanding of where the orchestra should dominate and where it should he subordinate, and yet without neurotics or the petty tricks of the fatal tempo rubato, that I could wish many a German conductor could take a lesson from him.

In his early years in London and New York Mancinelli conducted much Wagner, tailored to an Italian pattern (parts of the Trial and Prize Songs and the first part of ‘Wahn, wahn’, were cut for the 1889 Meistersinger). During his time, however, Wagner began to be sung in the original language, with Germans engaged to conduct it, and by 1900 Mancinelli was shut out of the German repertory.

       Mancinelli had been judged a composer of great promise on the basis of his early incidental music and his first opera. He was placed among the progressives of the young Italian school and suffered the usual critical assessment of Wagnerism, without justification in spite of occasional superficial reminiscences. He saw Wagner as an isolated genius and himself as following the true path for Italian opera marked out by Otello and Fal-staff. After becoming a busy international conductor in the late 1880s he composed little and sporadically. His promise was never realized, nor did his style develop significantly. The enthusiasm for his most important opera, Ero e Leandro, at its first performance in Madrid (1897) did not survive the work’s transference to Italian theatres (Turin, Venice, Rome, 1898), and it had a lukewarm reception in London and New York in spite of star casts. Paolo e Francesca had even less success in 1907. Mancinelli was embittered by this failure, which was probably caused partly by a dramatic temperament strongly at variance with the dominating currents in Italian opera at the time, as manifested in the verismo school and Puccini. Mancinelli tended in his choice of librettos towards the idealism and classicism of Boito, author of Ero e Leandro. This is evident also in his rather abstract treatment of his characters, a tendency emphasized by his lack of facility in creating memorable melodies. This failing was often pointed out by critics, who from the 1890s usually passed him off as a conductor who dabbled in composition and who, while admirable for his fastidious and elegant craftsmanship, especially his orchestration, lacked the essential gift of individuality. He was at his best in the creation of atmosphere and background. From this derived his success in incidental and descriptive music and the appropriateness of his late ventures into film music (Frate Sole, 1918, and Giuliano l’apostata, 1920). His operas are full of excellent passages of this sort, but they tend to overwhelm the dramatic core. His greatest success was the orchestral suite Scene veneziane (1888); Shaw called it ‘a very pretty piece of promenade music’, indicating how far Mancinelli’s achievements fell below his aspirations. His output also included sacred music and songs.


WORKS

 
Isora di Provenza (dramma romantico, 3, A. Zanardini, after V. Hugo: La légende des siècles), Bologna Comunale, 2 Oct 1884, vs (Milan, 1885) 
Ero e Leandro (tragedia lirica, 3, A. Boito), Norwich Festival, 8 Oct 1896 vs (London and New York, 1896) 
Paolo e Francesca (dramma lirico, 1, A. Colautti, after Dante: Commedia), Bologna, Comunale, 11 Nov 1907, vs (Milan, 1907) 
Sogno di una notte d’estate, 1915–17 (fantasia lirica, 3, F. Salvatori, after W. Shakespeare), excerpts, Rome, 1922, vs (Bologna, 1922) 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DBP (‘Mancinelli, Marino’) 
A. K. ‘Weingartner on Covent Garden and Bel Canto’, Musical Standard, lv (1898), 20 
L. Mancinelli: Ero e Leandro: Analysis by the composer (New York, n.d.) 
G. Orefice: Luigi Mancinelli (Rome, 1921) 
G. B. Shaw: Music in London 1890–94 (London, 1932) 
L. Silvestri: Luigi Mancinelli: direttore e compositore (Milan, 1966) 
V. Gui: ‘Ricordo di Luigi Mancinelli’, NRMI, v (1971), 242–8 
DENNIS LIBBY

-=-=-=-
Leoncavallo, Ruggero [Ruggiero]
(b Naples, 23 April 1857; d Montecatini, 9 Aug 1919).
Italian composer and librettist. The son of a well-to-do family in Naples – his father, Vincenzo, was a magistrate – he began his musical studies at the Conservatory in 1866. There he studied the piano with Beniamino Cesi and composition with Lauro Rossi, one of the best known opera composers of the day in the French tradition. He also studied composition under Serao until 1876. Formative in his development were the courses of the poet Giosuè Carducci, an enthusiastic Wagnerian, at Bologna University, which Leoncavallo followed from the autumn of 1876, breaking off, however, the following year without obtaining a degree. At the same time he was fired by the controversy over the art and aesthetic of Wort–Ton–Drama which led to the revival of the new version of Boito’s Mefistofele and the Italian premières of Rienzi (1876) and Der fliegende Holländer (as Vascello fantasma, 1877), conducted by Mancinelli. Influenced by Wagner and grand opera, Leoncavallo wrote both the libretto and the music of his first opera, Chatterton, at about that time, although it was not performed until much later.

       Encouraged by an uncle who was employed in the Italian Foreign Ministry, he then tried his fortune in Egypt, but on the outbreak of the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882 he made his way to Marseilles and thence to Paris, where he lived a bohemian life, earning his living by giving music lessons and playing the piano at café-concerts. Thanks to the support of the baritone Victor Maurel, he received a commission for an opera from the publisher Giulio Ricordi. Leoncavallo had already decided to write a trilogy, to be entitled Crepusculum, which would be the Italian answer to Wagner’s Ring cycle, as he claimed to have expounded to Wagner himself in 1876 when Rienzi received its first Italian performance in Bologna. His work on the project was erratic and he either could not or did not want to complete the task; the first opera, I Medici, took him a long time to write and caused serious difficulties with the publisher which continued until 1899. Meanwhile he made himself known in Paris with the performance of extracts from his symphonic poem La nuit de mai, after a poem by Alfred de Musset. After marrying the singer Berthe Rambaud he returned to Milan and became involved in the artistic life of the city, making a living by writing and occasional musical activity; he collaborated on the libretto for Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893).

       A decisive event for Leoncavallo’s musical future was the success of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in 1890. An acute analyst of market requirements, he recognized its significance and especially the potential of realism in opera as the quickest way to win popularity, but as with Mascagni, his fame was to rest on one opera into which he poured all his talent. Pagliacci was immediately successful with the Milanese audience at the Teatro Dal Verme in 1892 and paved the way for performances of his two earlier operas: I Medici was performed at the same theatre in the following year, and Chatterton, based on Alfred de Vigny’s poem, was performed at the Teatro Argentina in Rome in 1896.

       He completed his version of Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, on which he had been working since 1892, and its first performance was carefully supervised by his new publisher Sonzogno in Venice in 1897. The long period of composition during which he sought to convey the realities of life in the Latin Quarter of Paris was preceded by fierce controversy with Puccini and the Ricordi publishing house. It was Leoncavallo who first had the idea of making it into an opera, but his Bohème, although it has pages full of vitality, is much more a social document of the period, and after the first years in which the two operas were performed almost side by side, it was Puccini’s version that survived in the repertory. Zazà, on the other hand, the favourite role of Emma Carelli, first performed at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1900, was another opera with a theatrical setting and was an international success. But Leoncavallo’s fortunes in Italy gradually declined, not least because being litigious by nature he frequently quarrelled with his publishers.

       Although it became difficult for Leoncavallo to have his works performed in Italy they were very successful in Germany, where audiences were favourably inclined to works of the Giovane scuola. After the success of Pagliacci (given in German as Der Bajazzo) and I Medici, Wilhelm II commissioned an opera from him to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty. The story chosen as subject, Der Roland von Berlin, had to be translated into Italian for Leoncavallo to dramatize it, and the result was then translated back into German, in which language it received great acclaim in 1904, with almost 40 performances.

       This favourable episode gave him fresh confidence. His awareness of public media led him to the recording companies as early as 1904, and to compose his celebrated Mattinata, which Caruso recorded for the G & T Company. This was soon followed by La jeunesse de Figaro, his first operetta, for the American market. He returned to opera in 1910 with Maià at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, based on a story by Paul de Choudens, who had written Amica for Mascagni (1905). This was followed by a return to the verismo of Pagliacci (as Mascagni was to do with Il piccolo Marat a few years later) with Zingari (1912, London).

       The final phase of his career was concerned mainly with operettas, whose titles indicate their superficiality, from Prestami tua moglie to A chi la giarrettiera?. His last finished opera, Goffredo Mameli (1916), was a grand patriotic work, based on outmoded forms of expression and of little musical interest. More seriously, Leoncavallo had accepted a commission from the artistic director of the Chicago Lyric Opera, Cleofonte Campanini. The task of adapting as operas the plays of Edipo re (to a libretto by the experienced dramatist Giovacchino Forzano) and Prometeo were the most ambitious projects of his career, but his death in 1919 prevented him from completing them. He also left unfinished an opera on a Sardinian subject, La tormenta, which he had begun in 1914. Edipo re was performed in Chicago the year after his death, with Titta Ruffo in the title role. D’Annunzio described Leoncavallo’s death as ‘an excellent finale for that prolific composer of melodramas and operettas whose name combined two noble beasts and who died suffocated by melodic adiposity’.

See also Boheme, la (ii); Medici, i; Pagliacci; and Zaza.

WORKS

 
all printed works published in Milan 
Chatterton, c1876 (melodramma, 4, Leoncavallo, after A. de Vigny), unperf.; rev. (dramma lirico, 3), Rome, Argentina, 10 March 1896, vs (1896) 

Pagliacci (dramma, prol., 2, Leoncavallo), Milan, Dal Verme, 21 May 1892 (1893) 

Crepusculum (poema epico in forma di trilogia storica, Leoncavallo): I Medici (azione storica, 4), Milan, Dal Verme, 9 Nov 1893 (1893); pts 2, 3 not comp. 

La bohème (commedia lirica, 4, Leoncavallo, after H. Murger), Venice, Fenice, 6 May 1897 (1897); rev. as Mimì Pinson (3), Palermo, Massimo, 14 April 1913, vs (1913) 

Zazà (commedia lirica, 4, Leoncavallo, after P. Berton and C. Simon), Milan, Lirico, 10 Nov 1900 (1900); rev. R. Bianchi (1947) 

Der Roland von Berlin (historisches Drama, 4, Leoncavallo, after W. Alexis; Ger. trans. G. Droescher), Berlin, Städtische Oper, 13 Dec 1904, vs (1904) 

La jeunesse de Figaro (ob, 3, after V. Sardou and M. Vaucaire: Les premières armes de Figaro), ? New York, Nov 1906 

Maià (dramma lirico, 3, A. Nessi, after P. de Choudens), Rome, Costanzi, 15 Jan 1910 (1908) 

Malbruk (fantasia comica medioevale, 3, A. Nessi, after Boccaccio), Rome, Nazionale, 19 Jan 1910, vs (1910) 

La reginetta delle rose (operetta, 3, Forzano), Rome, Costanzi, and Naples, Politeama Giacosa, 24 June 1912, vs (1912) 

Zingari (dramma lirico, 2, E. Cavicchioli and G. Emanuel, after A. S. Pushkin), London, Hippodrome, 16 Sept 1912, vs (1912) 

Are you There? (farce, 3, A. de Courville and E. Wallace), London, Prince of Wales, Nov 1913 

La candidata (operetta, 3, Forzano), Rome, Nazionale, and Turin, Politeama Chiarella, 6 Feb 1915 

Goffredo Mameli (azione storica, 2, Leoncavallo and G. Belvederi), Genoa, Carlo Felice, 27 April 1916 

Prestami tua moglie (operetta, 3, E. Corradi), Montecatini, Casino, 2 Sept 1916 

A chi la giarrettiera? (operetta, 3), Rome, Adriano, 16 Oct 1919 

Edipo re (grand op, 1, G. Forzano, after Sophocles), Chicago, Opera, 13 Dec 1920, completed by G. Pennacchio 

Il primo bacio (operetta, 1, L. Bonelli), Montecatini, Salone di Cura, 29 April 1923 

La maschera nuda (operetta, 3, L. Bonelli and F. Paolieri), Naples, Politeama, 26 June 1925, completed by S. 
Allegra 

Prometeo, unperf., unpubd 

Tormenta (3, Belvederi), not completed 

Librettos for other composers: Mario Wetter, A. Machado, 1898; Redenzione, G. Pennacchio, 1920 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

R. Giani and A. Engelfried: ‘“I Medici”’, RMI, i (1894), 86–116 
E. Hanslick: ‘Der Bajazzo von Leoncavallo’, Der modernen Oper, vii: Fünf Jahre Musik (1891–1895): Kritiken (Berlin, 1896, 3/1911), 96–104 
E. Hanslick: ‘“Die Bohème”’, Der modernen Oper, viii: Am Ende des Jahrhunderts (1895–1899): musikalische Kritiken und Schilderungen (Berlin, 1899, 3/1911), 123–32 
N. Tabanelli: ‘La causa Ricordi–Leoncavallo’, RMI, vi (1899), 833–54 
W. Pastor: ‘Leoncavallos “Roland von Berlin”: Uraufführung im Berliner Opernhaus’, Die Musik, xiv/2 (1904–5), 45–6 
J. Korngold: ‘Ruggiero Leoncavallo: “Zazà”, 1909’, Die romanische Oper der Gegenwart (Vienna, 1922), 103–06 
A. de Angelis: ‘Il capolavoro inespresso di Leoncavallo? “Tormenta”, opera di soggetto sardo’, RMI, xxx (1923), 563–76 
G. Fauré: ‘Leoncavallo’, Opinions musicales (Paris, 1930), 64–7 
M. Rinaldi: Musica e verismo (Rome, 1932) 
G. Adami: G. Ricordi e i suoi musicisti (Milan, 1933) 
R. de Rensis: Per Umberto Giordano e Ruggiero Leoncavallo (Siena, 1949) 
A. Holde: ‘A Little-Known Letter by Berlioz and Unpublished Letters by Cherubini, Leoncavallo, and Hugo Wolf’, MQ, xxxvii (1951), 340–53 
J. W. Klein: ‘Ruggero Leoncavallo (1858–1919)’, Opera, ix (1958), 158–62, 232–6 
J. W. Klein: ‘The Other “Bohème”’, MT, cxi (1970), 497–9 
T. Lerario: ‘Ruggero Leoncavallo e il soggetto dei “Pagliacci”’, Chigiana, xxvi–xxvii (1971), 115–22 
R. Mariani: Verismo in musica (Florence, 1976) 
J. R. Nicolaisen: Italian Opera in Transition, 1871–1893 (Ann Arbor, 1977) 
L’avant-scène opéra, no.50 (1983) [Pagliacci issue] 
D. Rubboli: Ridi Pagliaccio: Ruggero Leoncavallo, un musicista raccontato per la prima volta (Lucca, 1985) 
A. Csampai and D. Holland, eds.: Pietro Mascagni, Cavalleria rusticana/R. Leoncavallo, Der Bajazzo: Texte, Materialen, Kommentare (Reinbek, 1987) 
J. Maehder: ‘Il libretto patriottico nell’Italia della fine del secolo e la raffigurazione dell’Antichità e del Rinascimento nel libretto prefascista italiano’, IMSCR, xiv Bologna 1987, iii, 451–66 
J. Maehder: ‘Paris-Bilder: zur Transformation von Henry Murgers Roman in den Bohème-Opern Puccinis und Leoncavallos’, JbO, ii (1987), 109–76; It. trans., NRMI, xxiv (1990), 402–55 
J. Maehder: ‘“Questa è Mimì, gaia fioraia”: zur Transformation der Gestalt Mimìs in Puccinis und Leoncavallos Bohème-Opern’, Opern und Opernfiguren: Festschrift für Joachim Herz (Anif, 1989), 301–19 
J. Maehder: ‘“Musik über Musik”: Meyerbeer, Rossini e Wagner nella “Bohème” di Ruggero Leoncavallo’, Dentro e fuori il melodramma: Venice 1989 
M. Sansone: ‘The “verismo” of Ruggero Leoncavallo: a source study of “Pagliacci”’, ML, lxx (1989), 342–62 
A. M. Volpi: ‘La Bohème’ di Ruggero Leoncavallo (diss., U. of Milan, 1990) 
Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo: Locarno 1991 
MICHELE GIRARDI

-=-=-=-
Alfano, Franco
(b Posillipo, nr Naples, 8 March 1875; d Sanremo, 27 Oct 1954).
Italian composer. After studying at the Conservatorio S Pietro a Majella in Naples, he moved in 1895 to Leipzig in order to continue his studies with Jadassohn. From 1899 until 1905 he lived in Paris, writing ballet music and travelling in northern Europe as far as Russia. After the success of Risurrezione (1904) Alfano moved back to Italy, first to Milan, then in 1914 to Sanremo where he continued to live until his death. From 1916 he taught composition at the Liceo Musicale of Bologna, becoming its director in 1918; in 1921 his opera La leggenda di Sakùntala was successfully given in Bologna. From 1923 until 1939 he acted as director of the Turin Conservatory. Alfano’s close association with Italian fascism from 1925, when he collaborated on the ‘Manifesto degli intellettuali del fascismo’, led to personal contact with Mussolini. However, Alfano refused to sign the manifesto of 1932, which included a condemnation of all modernist tendencies in Italian music. Having retired from his position in Turin he was director of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo (1940–42) and then directed the Liceo Musicale in Pesaro from 1947 to 1950. As the full score of La leggenda di Sakùntala had been destroyed during the war, Alfano devoted the following years to its reconstruction; the new version received its première as Sakùntala (1952, Rome).

       Alfano’s early operas reflect the transition of musical style at the turn of the century. Influences from Naples, Leipzig and Paris all left their mark on his output. The première of Risurrezione, a traditional Italian opera in a somewhat crude verismo style devoid of Puccini’s subtleties of orchestration, profoundly changed the composer’s career and established his fame. The gradual refinement of Alfano’s style during the following years is most obvious in his settings of poems by Tagore in 1918; these prepared the ground for La leggenda di Sakùntala (1921) for which the composer himself wrote the libretto. This work, one of the first Italian operas written on a prose libretto, is without doubt his major artistic achievement; it may best be characterized as a very personal adaptation of Debussy’s and Ravel’s innovations in orchestration and musical declamation, sometimes combined with a curious lack of sense of harmonic coherence. Alfano’s choice of Kalidasa’s drama for the opera betrays the influence of fin de siècle exoticism, and his transformation of dramatic conflicts into lyrical, almost pastoral dialogues yields an astonishing example of a thoroughly French influence on Italian music well after the fin de siècle period.

       After Puccini’s death in 1924, Alfano was asked by the Ricordi company on Toscanini’s recommendation to decipher Puccini’s sketches for the second part of Act 3 of Turandot, to orchestrate those passages for which Puccini had provided music in piano-vocal score and to compose new music for those passages of the libretto for which no sketches by Puccini existed. Alfano resolved this difficult task with considerable musical craftsmanship, using some material from his own Sakùntala, but failed to familiarize himself thoroughly with Puccini’s full score of the first two and a half acts of the opera. The resulting music, already far from being an adequate finale for Puccini’s work, was heavily cut on Toscanini’s demand and was not performed in its original version until 1982.

       Between 1921 and 1927 Alfano’s style changed radically again, showing a general decline in harmonic complexity as well as in richness of orchestral texture. The composer had obviously adopted the official simple neo-classical style of Italian fascist music in his later scores, and his habitual lack of harmonic coherence appears now undisguised by full-bodied orchestral textures. With the exception of the reconstruction of Sakùntala his operas after Madonna Imperia (1927) have been largely forgotten.

See also Cyrano de bergerac; Sakuntala; and Risurrezione.

WORKS

 
Miranda, 1896 (Alfano, after A. Fogazzaro), unperf. 
La fonte di Enschir (L. Illica), Breslau, 8 Nov 1898 
Risurrezione (dramma, 4, C. Hanau, after L. N. Tolstoy), Turin, Vittorio Emanuele, 30 Nov 1904 
Il principe Zilah (dramma lirico, 2, Illica, after J. Claretie), Genoa, Carlo Felice, 3 Feb 1909 
I cavalieri e la bella, 1910 (G. Adami and T. Monicelli), inc. 
L’ombra di Don Giovanni (dramma lirico, 3, E. Moschino), Milan, Scala, 2 April 1914; rev. as Don Juan de Manara, Florence, 28 May 1941 
La leggenda di Sakùntala (3, Alfano, after Kalidasa), Bologna, Comunale, 10 Dec 1921; reconstructed as Sakùntala, Rome, Reale, 9 Jan 1952 
Madonna Imperia (commedia lirica, 1, A. Rossato, after H. de Balzac), Turin, Torino, 5 May 1927 
L’ultimo lord (os, 3, M. Falena and Rossato, after U. Falena), Naples, S Carlo, 19 April 1930 
Cyrano de Bergerac (commedia eroica, 4, H. Cain, after E. Rostand), Rome, Reale, 22 Jan 1936 
Il dottor Antonio (op lirica, 3, M. Ghisalberti, after G. Ruffini), Rome, 30 April 1949 
Completion of Puccini: Turandot, Milan, Scala, 26 April 1926 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ES; LoewenbergA 
G. M. Gatti: ‘Franco Alfano’, Musicisti moderni d’Italia e di fuori (Bologna, 1920, 2/1925), 9; Eng. trans., as ‘Some Italian Composers of Today, ii: Franco Alfano’, MT, lxii (1921), 158–61 
G. Cesari: ‘ La leggenda di Sakùntala di Franco Alfano’, RMI, xxviii (1921), 666–76 
A. Veretti: ‘La leggenda di Sakùntala di Franco Alfano’, Pensiero musicale, i (Bologna, 1921), 30 
M. Castelnuovo-Tedesco: ‘Sakùntala di Franco Alfano’, Lo spettatore, i/1 (Rome, 1922), 78 
G. M. Gatti: ‘Franco Alfano’, MQ, ix (1923), 556–77 
G. Pannain: La leggenda di Sakùntala di F. Alfano (Milan, 1923) 
G. Rossi-Doria: ‘Franco Alfano’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, vii (1925), 402–5 
F. Brusa: ‘ Madonna Imperia di Franco Alfano’, RMI, xxxiv (1927), 248–56 
L. Perrachio: ‘Madonna Imperia di Franco Alfano’, Musica d’oggi, 1st ser., ix (Milan, 1927), 149–51 
G. M. Gatti: ‘Madonna Imperia von Franco Alfano’, Melos, vii (1928), 534–7 
A. Della Corte: Ritratto di Franco Alfano (Turin, 1935) 
F. Mompellio: ‘Franco Alfano: biografia minima’, Ricordiana [Milan], new ser., i (1955), 2 
J. C. G. Waterhouse: ‘Franco Alfano’, Ricordiana [London], xi/4 (1966), 1–3 
J. C. G. Waterhouse: The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (up to 1940) (diss., U. of Oxford, 1968) 
G. Vigolo: ‘Sakùntala: tramonto in uno specchio’, Mille e una sera all’opera e al concerto (Florence, 1971), 139 
M. Bruni: ‘Franco Alfano e la cerchia della “ generazione dell’80”’, Musica Italiana del primo Novecento: “ La generazione dell’80”, ed. F. Nicolodi (Florence, 1981), 97–109 
J. Maehder: ‘Puccini’s “Turandot”: A Fragment – Studies in Franco Alfano’s Completion of the Score’, Turandot, ed. N. John, ENO Opera Guide, xxvii (London, 1984), 35–53 
J. Maehder: ‘Studien zum Fragmentcharakter von Giacomo Puccinis “Turandot”’, AnM, xxii (1984), 297–379 
F. Nicolodi: Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole, 1984) 
J. Maehder, ed.: Esotismo e colore locale nell’opera di Puccini (Pisa, 1985) 
K.-M. Lo: Turandot auf der Opernbühne (diss., U. of Heidelberg, 1988) 
W. Ashbrook and H. Powers: Puccini’s ‘Turandot’: the End of the Great Tradition (Princeton, 1991) 
JÜRGEN MAEHDER
-=-=-
Marschner, Heinrich August
(b Zittau, 16 Aug 1795; d Hanover, 14 Dec 1861).
German composer. He was the most important exponent of German Romantic opera in the generation between Weber and Wagner.


1. Life and works.

Marschner’s father was a master craftsman, working with horn and ivory. Although both parents possessed musical talent, Marschner’s father encouraged him to pursue music only as an amateur and to choose a more stable career. From 1804 to 1813, therefore, the boy undertook courses in liberal studies at the gymnasium in Zittau and in nearby Bautzen. Some musical instruction was permitted, however, and his teachers included Karl Gottlieb Hering, August Bergt and Friedrich Schneider. His first stage work, Die stolze Bäuerin, was a ballet performed successfully in Zittau in 1810.

       In spring 1813, Marschner left Zittau for Prague, where he met Tomá'ek. From there he went on to Leipzig to study law, but his interests seemed to centre less on legal studies than on his evening association with such men as the publisher Friedrich Hofmeister, the music critic J. A. Wendt and Friedrich Rochlitz, founder of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. It was at this time that he began to develop an interest in opera and tried his hand at setting Caterino Mazzolà’s adaptation of Metastasio’s La clemenza di Tito, which he obtained from a copy of Mozart’s version. Although he completed the work, it was never staged and apart from a few bars of one aria it is lost. In 1815 Marschner visited Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), where he spent much time in the company of the pianist Count Thaddeus Amadé de Varkony of Vienna (later a patron of Liszt). Varkony took him to Vienna, where he secured him an audience with Beethoven, and then to Hungary; there he met Count Johann Nepomuk Zichy, who employed him as domestic music teacher.

       Soon after settling at Zichy’s estate in Pressburg (now Bratislava), Marschner composed Der Kiffhaeuser Berg (1816). Based on Thuringian legends set in the Harz Mountains, near Goslar, this work, really a typical Viennese Singspiel, is a bourgeois comedy that centres on the efforts of two young peasants to obtain permission to marry, the girl’s father having disappeared 20 years before as the victim of a dwarf’s potion. Although the work is engaging and contains a clever sextet for pipe smokers (‘Krik! krik! krik!’), it suffers from many supernatural digressions that contribute nothing to the plot. For this reason, it never caught on. The same can be said of Marschner’s next Singspiel, Saidar und Zulima (1818), now lost. In his autobiography of 1818, Marschner mentions beginning work on Das stille Volk, a Zauberspiel by August Gottlieb Hornbostel, a physician and not insignificant amateur playwright, but no sketches have survived. After these disappointments, Marschner abandoned the Singspiel in favour of the historically based ‘rescue opera’, then popular in Vienna. Heinrich IV und D’Aubigné, whose libretto Hornbostel based rather loosely on the exploits of Henry IV of France (a Catholic) and his Huguenot equerry, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, at least gave Marschner some exposure in the musical mainstream, for Weber had the work performed in Dresden in 1820. Yet it lacked significant dramatic events and bored its audiences. Marschner was married twice during this period, first to Emilie von Cerva (1817), who died only six months later, then to Eugenie Franziska Jaeggi (1820). This marriage produced one son, Alfred, who emigrated to America in 1848.

       Dissatisfied with the anonymity that cultural life in Pressburg appeared to promise him, Marschner moved in 1821 to Dresden, where Heinrich von Könneritz, director of the Saxon Hoftheater, introduced him to court circles and secured him a commission to compose incidental music to Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, a historical drama surrounding the Battle of Fehrbellin (1675) with characters motivated by emotion rather than the rationalism popularized by the German dramatist Gotthold Lessing. The première with Marschner’s music (1821, Dresden) was reviewed favourably by Ludwig Tieck and the play was given with limited success in other cities. Late in 1822 Marschner began a collaboration with Friedrich Kind, a leading literary figure in Dresden after the Berlin success of Weber’s Der Freischütz, for which Kind had provided the libretto. First Marschner wrote incidental music for Kind’s Schön Ella (1823, Dresden), a romantic tragedy based on G. A. Bürger’s ballad Lenore, which, like Der Freischütz, makes use of supernatural intervention to drive home a moral. Unlike Der Freischütz, however, Schön Ella is severely flawed in its drama. An even greater fiasco was Carl Gottfried Theodor Winkler’s play Ali Baba, oder die 40 Räuber, for which Marschner also provided incidental music (1823, Dresden).

       Towards the end of 1823 Weber began to suffer from tuberculosis, and both of his assistants had been ill as well, so he petitioned the court for additional help. Through the machinations of Könneritz, Marschner was appointed over Weber’s objections, and he ended up directing both the Italian and the German companies. During the next two years he was so busy that he had time to compose only one opera and incidental music for two plays. To a libretto by Kind, he wrote Der Holzdieb (1823), a rustic, countrified Singspiel in one act, devoid of supernatural elements and conceived in a style reminiscent of Schenk’s Der Dorfbarbier and Weigl’s Die Schweizerfamilie. Its well-integrated action demands that most of the six characters be on stage throughout the work, providing Marschner with an opportunity to develop the techniques of ensemble writing that were to characterize his mature works. Considerable mystery, however, surrounds the incidental music that Marschner wrote at this time. Fresh from successes in Berlin, Carl Eduard von Holtei, a distinguished journalist and actor, brought to the Dresden stage in 1825 his Liederspiel Die Wiener in Berlin, a dialogue farce (Mundartsoper) in the Viennese style of Adolf Bäuerle and Meyer von Schauensee. Much of the music derives from pre-existing sources, but additional songs were provided by Marschner and others. In 1826 Dresden audiences also saw Alexander und Darius by Friedrich von Uechtritz, a five-act historical drama in the style of Schiller. Alexander’s Feast, which Handel wrote for Dryden’s Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, accompanied the first three acts, and since the narrative of Dryden’s poem overlapped approximately the same portion of Uechtritz’s drama, it was necessary for Marschner to write additional music only for the remaining two acts. Notable is the melodrama in which Alexander and the slave girl Thaïs use firebrands to burn the palace of Darius at Persepolis (Act 5 scene viii).

       The year 1826 saw the death of Weber, and since Könneritz’s successor, Wolf von Lüttichau, had no interest in hiring Marschner to replace him, Marschner was forced to travel, hoping to make a living by freelance appearances with his third wife, the singer Marianne Wohlbrück, whom he had married (1826) shortly after the death of Eugenie in 1825. After stops in Berlin and Breslau (now Wroc&aw) the couple arrived in Danzig (now Gda+sk), where they obtained a six-month contract with Marschner as music director and Marianne as leading soprano. Here Marschner completed and produced his first through-composed opera, Lucretia (1820–26), based on Sextus Tarquinius’s supposed rape in 509 bc of Lucretia Collatinus and her subsequent suicide. A weak attempt to emulate Spontini, Lucretia slipped into oblivion after only three performances.

       When their contract expired in Danzig, the couple travelled to Magdeburg, where Marschner became acquainted with his brother-in-law Wilhelm August Wohlbrück, a popular actor. The two seized upon the idea of collaborating on an opera involving vampires. Such a topic fitted into the short-lived literary movement in Germany called the ‘Schauerromantik’, then at its peak of popularity. The first of Marschner’s three famous operas, Der Vampyr (composed in 1827) focusses on the efforts of the vampire to secure another year of life on earth in exchange for the murder of three virgins. Wohlbrück constructed an effective libretto from multiple literary sources and the work has held the interest of the opera-going public ever since the resounding success of its Leipzig première in 1828. Called a romantic opera, it is in many respects similar in musical construction to Weber’s Der Freischütz.

       Wohlbrück and Marschner decided next to write an opera based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott after Marschner attended a performance in Leipzig of Joseph von Auffenberg’s Löwe von Kurdistan, based on Scott’s The Talisman. The result was a setting of the Ivanhoe story, Der Templer und die Jüdin (1829). Wohlbrück adapted his libretto from Johann Reinhold Lenz’s Das Gericht der Templer, which in turn was based on one or more of the many plays that appeared in England after the publication of Scott’s novel. The original story seemed to be eminently stageworthy, and Wohlbrück’s libretto follows it rather closely. This time Marschner’s model was Weber’s Euryanthe, and many numbers from Der Templer, notably ‘Wer ist der Ritter hochgeehrt’, were later sung as concert pieces. Following phenomenal success in Leipzig, the opera was performed throughout Europe but is rarely revived owing to the cost of the sets and properties.

       By 1830 Marschner was in demand throughout Europe, but his interests centred on the Königstädtisches Theater in Berlin, whose director, Karl Friedrich Cerf, had invited him to write a comic opera. The result, Des Falkners Braut (1832), an italianate piece in the style of Rossini, failed, mainly because Wohlbrück had tried to create a comic libretto from a tragic model (A. J. K. Spindler’s short story of the same name). Worse, there is clearly not enough material for three acts and the plot, lacking any compelling humour, is sterile; when the work was revived in England in 1838, the libretto was replaced by one about Robin Hood.

       Despite international recognition, the Marschners were forced to support themselves in Leipzig through Marianne’s singing engagements and his occasional conducting contracts and royalties. At the end of 1830, however, Marschner obtained the permanent position of Hofkapellmeister in Hanover and moved his family there the following year. Shortly thereafter, he received a libretto entitled Hans Heiling from the famous actor, playwright and theatre historian Eduard Devrient, who had developed it from several legends surrounding the Hans Heiling Cliffs. Hewn from the mountains by the River Eger (now Oh0e) in Bohemia, these formations were popularly thought to have been created when Hans Heiling, king of the earth spirits, turned an entire wedding procession to stone. For the first time, Marschner was dealing with a librettist who really understood the exigencies of drama. Though they were separated geographically, an exchange of letters between the two indicates a constant flow of adjustments between music and text until both were satisfied that a theatrically functional work had been constructed. The resulting romantic opera was an overwhelming success.

       Although Marschner lived for nearly 30 years after the première of Hans Heiling (1833), it represented the zenith of his creative powers, and not one stage work that he produced after it enjoyed any popularity. The first of these, a romantic opera entitled Das Schloss am Aetna (1836) and set to a libretto by August von Klingemann, Generaldirektor of the Brunswick Hoftheater, was a confused rehash of the dramatic themes present in Der Freischütz. It was followed by the comic opera Der Bübu (1838; bäbu means ‘nobleman’ in parts of India). An oriental spoof reminiscent of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Wohlbrück’s rambling libretto is cluttered with disparate elements that simply fail to hang together. Nonetheless, the opera contains some beautiful melodies, and parts of it have been broadcast by German radio. In Kaiser Adolph von Nassau (1845) and Austin (1852), Marschner returned to the realm of the historical narrative in an apparent attempt to emulate French grand opera. Heribert Rau based his libretto for Kaiser Adolph on the life of Adolph of Nassau (?1250–1298), King of Frankfurt, who amassed so many territories through conquest, purchase and political intrigue that the Electors deposed him in favour of Albert I, who killed him in battle and defeated his armies. With the exception of some memorable choruses, the music is banal, and Wagner, who conducted the première in Dresden, claimed to have brought a stillborn child into the world. Marianne Wohlbrück-Marschner’s libretto to Austin concerns the events surrounding Ferdinand the Catholic’s annexation in 1512 of Navarre, a strategically important buffer state between France and Spain. To acquire the territory, Ferdinand poisoned the young Navarrese king, Francisco I (nicknamed ‘Austin’), bringing to the throne Francisco’s sister and, through marriage to her, his own son.

       In 1854 Marianne died, but Marschner soon fell in love with a singer 31 years his junior, Theresa Janda. After their marriage (1855), he turned again to dramatic composition. Considerably more successful than his previous few operas was his incidental music for Julius Rodenberg’s rustic comedy Waldmüllers Margret (1855, Hanover) and for Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Der Goldschmied von Ulm (1856, Dresden), a folk legend with supernatural overtones similar to those he had treated so successfully in Hans Heiling. His last opera, Sangeskönig Hiarne, oder Das Tyrsingschwert (composed in 1857–8), was not a success. It is based on a libretto which Wilhelm Grothe adapted from Esaias Tegnér’s poetical version of the medieval saga of Fridthjof, a Viking who longs to marry Ingeborg but fails to do so because he is a mere vassal to her father, Bele, while Bele’s ancestry derives from the god Odin. In this final effort, Marschner attempted to emulate Wagner, but the libretto suffers for want of a well-defined hero. Attempts to have the work performed in Germany during Marschner’s lifetime were unsuccessful, and although he interpolated ballets to ‘qualify’ it for production at the Paris Opéra during the time Tannhäuser was being performed there, nothing came of this either. Thanks, however, to the invention of an electrical sword for special effects, several performances took place towards the end of the century. In 1859 the Hanoverian court chose to retire Marschner, rather against his wishes, and he died two years later.

       In addition to operas and incidental music, Marschner wrote three operatic Gelegenheitgedichte (pageants) entitled Festspiel zur Feier der Vermählung des Kronprinzen von Hannover und der Prinzessin Marie von Altenburg (1843), Der Zauberspiegel (1850) and Natur und Kunst (1852). All were intended for private performance at the Hanoverian court. Outside opera, he is best known for his choral music, particularly the Männergesänge he wrote in the 1820s.


2. Style.

Marschner was a great eclectic, for he systematically worked through all major genres of opera from Mozart onwards. Much of the time the result was an unequivocal failure, but this was not the case with his German Romantic operas. With the Singspiel and Weber as points of departure, he broke new ground that was eventually exploited by Wagner, first evident in Der fliegende Holländer. His most important contribution was formal expansion. In the 18th century the typical Singspiel had been a series of fairly short, numbered songs in predictable forms connected by spoken dialogue. This changed little in the early 19th century, even when the Singspiel developed into Romantic opera on the one hand and the post-Mozartian comic opera of the Biedermeier group on the other, despite some through-composed exceptions. Marschner enlarged the individual forms of Singspiel and combined them into what may be termed ‘ensemble complexes’, containing multiple numbered subsections and nearly always one or more ensembles. Weber had done this in a few places (such as the Wolf’s Glen Scene in Der Freischütz), but with Marschner it became the rule. The ensemble complex helped to organize the action through musical and formal means into dramatically complete and self-contained subsections – which could be described as through-composed ‘sub-operas’. Some became so large that one might reasonably ask why Marschner did not simply write out his operas entirely in through-composed form. Certainly there were precedents for this, not only in Spohr’s Faust and Hoffmann’s Undine (both landmarks of 1816) but also in his own Lucretia. The reason is that structurally these works were based on Italian and French models, and Marschner, having inveighed vehemently and frequently against the encroachment of foreign styles upon German opera, was attempting to retain the essentially German formal character of serious Romantic opera, which required spoken dialogue to connect musical sections. Consequently, when in Der fliegende Holländer Wagner eliminated the last vestiges of speech, he created a work that was transitional between Romantic opera and his later music dramas, rather than a pure example of the former. Of course, Wagner’s efforts to impose a second level of organization on Der fliegende Holländer by creating a symmetrical formal scheme around Senta’s ballad, in order to frame it as the psychological apex of the drama, exceeded any of Marschner’s attempts at formal innovation, but Marschner’s ensemble complexes had provided Wagner with the building blocks.

       Marschner developed the psychological aspects of Romantic opera and thus added a new dimension to its dramatic organization. Whenever the supernatural was present in Singspiel, its function was typically to facilitate plot development: divine intervention could be invoked to make almost anything happen without need of explanation. Supernatural characters in Zauberspiel might even approach mortal characters in number and possess similar foibles and weaknesses. In Der Freischütz, this changed. Here both good and bad supernatural characters had power transcending that of mortals, and they used it to try to swing the tide of the drama towards their own objectives. Except for Max, whose moral weakness made him vulnerable to manipulation, each main character, mortal or supernatural, statically represented either good or evil. But Marschner placed the attributes of Weber’s separate good and evil personages inside a single, centrally significant character. This device allowed Marschner’s dramas to become all the more complex, since the psychological conflict within one character could be worked out in the larger dimensions and external action of the drama as a whole. Because this kind of character is closely related to the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it is not surprising that Marschner made him invariably a dramatic baritone, but it is notable that he can be either supernatural or mortal. Cast as the vampire Ruthven in Der Vampyr, the Templar Bois-Guilbert in Der Templer und die Jüdin and Heiling himself in Hans Heiling, this complex figure with built-in foil migrated through Marschner’s operas directly into the title role in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer.

       Marschner employed additional dramatic techniques to support the generally sombre ambience of his romantic operas. One was melodrama. Ever since the experimental days of Rousseau and Benda, speaking or acting against orchestral accompaniment had proved an effective means of heightening dramatic tension. Mozart, Beethoven and Weber had all used it, and in Marschner it became particularly important. Instances include the passage in which the light of the moon revives the murdered vampire in Der Vampyr and the scene in Hans Heiling where Gertrude must weather a summer storm in her hut. On the other hand, comic relief is necessary to keep operas of this sort from becoming overwhelming. Particularly successful examples of this in Der Vampyr are the drinking-song and the antics of Suse Blunt, who jumps on to a table to castigate her husband and his cronies for drunkenness.

       In general, Marschner worked within the common-practice musical style of his contemporaries, but he excelled in some techniques that were advanced for his day. First, he increased the scope of the opera orchestra, adding particularly to the low brass. Where Weber would have favoured horns, Marschner liked the texture of three trombones, whose effect, perhaps indebted to the temple scene in Die Zauberflöte, can be considerably more sombre than that which horns would have provided. Second, while Weber stuck primarily to the conventional harmonies of German folksong, Marschner extended the bounds of tonality with chromatic lines in both melody and bass – sometimes to accomplish a rapid modulation to a remote key, sometimes (like Wagner) to avoid a cadence altogether, and occasionally just to convey a mood of foreboding. In general, his music is considerably more difficult to divorce from the drama than Weber’s, since he intended to write music that would bind intimately with the drama. As a result, he is accused of being a poor melodist, and the closed forms in his operas do not possess the accessible, folklike charm of Weber’s. In consequence, there will probably never be a thoroughgoing resurgence of interest in Marschner’s operas, although several revivals of Hans Heiling and Der Vampyr have taken place from the 1970s onwards in Germany, Great Britain and America.

See also Hans heiling; Holzdieb, der; Templer und die judin der; and Vampyr, der (i).

WORKS

 
grosse romantische Opern unless otherwise stated 
La clemenza di Tito, 1816 (os, 3, C. Mazzolà, after P. Metastasio), unperf., lost 
Der Kiffhaeuser Berg, 1816 (romantische Oper, 1, A. von Kotzebue), Zittau, 2 Jan 1822, D-Bds*, vs as op.89 (Hamburg, ?1834) 
Heinach IV und D’Aubigné, 1817–18 (grosse Oper, 3, Alberti [A. G. Hornbostel]), Dresden, Hof, 19 July 1820, Dlb* 
Saidar und Zulima, oder Liebe und Grossmut (3, Hornbostel), Press-burg, Schauspielhaus, 26 Nov 1818, lost 
Das stille Volk (Zauberspiel, Hornbostel), planned 1818 but abandoned 
Lucretia, 1820–26 (Oper, 2, J. A. Eckschlager), Danzig, Danziger, 17 Jan 1827, Bds* (Act 1 only), ov. as op.67 (Leipzig, ?1834), excerpts (Hanover, n.d.), ballet as op.51[a] (Halberstadt, n.d.) and in Mühling’s Museum, iii/9, no.36 
Der Holzdieb, 1823 (Spl, l, J. F. Kind), Dresden, Hof, 22 Feb 1825, US-Wc, vs in Polyhymia, ein Taschenbuch (Dresden, 1825); rev. as Geborgt, Berlin, 21 April 1853, vs (Berlin, 1853) 
Die Wiener in Berlin (Liederspiel, 1, C. E. von Holtei), Dresden, am Linckeschen Bade, 24 Aug 1825, pasticcio, items by Marschner in D-ZI* 
Der Vampyr (2, W. A. Wohlbrück, after C. Nodier, P. F. A. Carmouche and A. de Jouffroy; J. R. Planché; and H. L. Ritter), Leipzig, Stadt, 29 March 1828, B-Bc, D-Dlb, LEm, DK-Kk, US-Wc, vs as op.42 (Leipzig, 1828); rev. H. Pfitzner, Stuttgart, 28 May 1924, vs (Berlin, 1925) 
Der Templer und die Jüdin (Wohlbrück, after W. Scott: Ivanhoe, via J. R. Lenz and others), Leipzig, Stadt, 22 Dec 1829, B-Bc, D-Dlb, HVs* (Act 2 only), LEm, DK-Kk, F-Pc, S-St, US-Wc, vs as op.60 (Leipzig, ?1830); rev. R. Kleinmichel, vs (Leipzig, 1896); rev. H. Pfitzner, vs (Leipzig, 1912) 
Das Schloss am Aetna, 1830–35 (3, E. A. F. Klingemann), Leipzig, Stadt, 29 Jan 1836, DK-Kk, US-Bp, vs as op.95 (Leipzig, 1836) 
Des Falkners Braut (komische Oper, 3, Wohlbrück, after A. J. K. Spindler), Leipzig, Stadt, 10 March 1832, D-Ds, Mbs, vs as op.65 (Leipzig, ?1832); also pubd as La sposa promessa del falconiére 
Hans Heiling (prol., 3, E. Devrient), Berlin, Hofoper, 24 May 1833, HVs, DK-Kk, S-St, vs as op.80 (Leipzig, ?1833); rev. G. Kogel, D-HVs, full score (Leipzig, 1892) 
Der Bäbu (komische Oper, 3, Wohlbrück), Hanover, Hof, 19 Feb 1838, Bds*, vs as op.98 (Leipzig, 1837) 
Kaiser Adolph von Nassau (grosse Oper, 4, K. Golmick [H. Rau]), Dresden, Kgl Sächsisches Hof, 5 Jan 1845, Dlb*, vs as op.130 (Hanover, 1845) 
Austin (4, M. Wohlbrück-Marschner), Hanover, Hof, 25 Jan 1852, Dlb*, F-Pc, Krönungsmarsch (Hanover, 1891) 
[Der] Sangeskönig [Sängerkönig] Hiarne, oder Das Tyrsingschwert, 1857–8 (4, W. Grothe, after E. Tegnér), Frankfurt, National, 13 Sept 1863, D-Mbs*, LEm, US-Wc 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Marschners neue Oper Austin’, Signale für die musikalische Welt, x (1852), 65–7 
E. Genast: Aus dem Tagebuche eines alten Schauspielers (Leipzig, 2/1862) 
H. Borges: ‘Heinrich Marschner’s Oper Hiarne’, NZM, lxxix (1883), 165–7, 173–4, 197–9 
E. Danzig: ‘Heinrich Marschner in seinen minder bekannten Opern und Liedern’, NZM, lxxxvi (1890), 369–71 
J. Rodenberg: ‘Erinnerungen aus der Jugendzeit: Heinrich Marschner’, Deutsche Rundschau, xxii (1895), 257–72, 418–33 
M. E. Wittmann: Marschner (Leipzig, 1897) 
G. Münzer: Heinrich Marschner (Berlin, 1901) 
E. Istel: ‘Aus Heinrich Marschners produktivster Zeit: Briefe des Komponisten und seines Dichters Eduard Devirent’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, vii (1910), 774–820 
C. Preiss: Templar und Jüdin (Graz, 1911) 
H. Gaartz: Die Opern Heinrich Marschners (Leipzig, 1912) 
G. Fischer: Marschner-Erinnerungen (Hanover, 1918) 
G. Becker: ‘Eine Erzgebirgssage als romantische Oper, Marschners Hans Heiling’, Sächsische Heimat, v (1922–3), 289–91 
H. Pfitzner: ‘Zu meiner Heiling -Inszenirung am Dresdner Staatstheater im März 1923’, Die Scene, xiii (1923), 65–71 
H. Pfitzner: ‘Marschners Vampyr’, Neue Musik-Zeitung, xlv (1924), 133–9 
J. F. A. Bickel: Heinrich Marschner in seinen Opern (diss., U. of Erlangen, 1929) 
A. Gnirs: Alte Sagen aus dem Elbogener Ländchen (Karlsbad, 1930) 
A. Gnirs: Hans Heiling: die Sagen und die Geschichte der Felsen im Elbogener Egertale bei Karlsbad (Karlsbad, 1930) 
A. Saft: ‘Des Zauberbuch in Hans Heiling’, Bühnentechnische Rundschau (1930), no.3, pp.15–16 
G. Abraham: ‘Marschner and Wagner’, MMR, lxx (1940), 99–104 
V. Köhler: ‘Heinrich Marschners Bühnenwerke (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1956) 
Z. H[rabussay]: ‘Heinrich Marschner (1795–1861) a Bratislava’, SH, v (1961), 551 
K. Günzel: ‘Heinrich Marschner – ein Zittauer Musiker’, Sächsische Heimatblätter, viii (1962), 65–70 
V. Köhler: ‘Heinrich Marschner [gestorben] 14.12.1861: Festrede zur Marschner-Ehrung 1961’, Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter, new ser., xvi (1962), 229–42 
I. Killmann: Heinrich Marschner: eine Personalbibliographie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bühnenwerke und seiner Instrumentalmusik (thesis, Bibliothekarschule der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, 1963) 
A. S. Garlington, jr: The Concept of the Marvelous in French and German Opera, 1770–1840: a Chapter in the History of Opera Esthetics (diss., U. of Illinois, 1965) 
I. E. Reid: Some Epic and Demonic Baritone Rôles in the Operas of Weber and Marschner (diss., U. of Boston, 1968) 
V. Köhler: ‘Rezitativ, Szene und Melodram in Heinrich Marschners Opern’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 461–4 
R. Kloiber: Handbuch der Oper (Kassel, 1973), esp. i, 281–5 [on Hans Helling] 
J. Mitchell: The Walter Scott Operas (Birmingham, al, 1977), esp. 156–66 [on Der Templer] 
A. D. Palmer: Heinnch August Marschner, 1795–1861: his Life and Stage Works (Ann Arbor, 1980) 
J. Moriarty: ‘Exhuming a Vampire’, Opera Journal, xiv/4 (1981), 4–12 
H. A. Neunzig: Lebensläufe der deutschen Romantik: Komponisten (Munich, 1984), esp. 48–73 
P. C. White: ‘Two Vampires of 1828’, OQ, v/1 (1987), 22–57 
A. DEAN PALMER

Templer und die Jüdin, Der
(‘The Templar and the Jewess’).
Grosse romantische Oper in three acts by heinrich august Marschner to a libretto by Wilhelm August Wohlbrück after various plays, themselves based on walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe; Leipzig, Stadttheater, 22 December 1829.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Maurice de Bracy }
}
 Norman knights 
 tenor 
Brian de Bois–Guilbert baritone 
Rowena of Hargottstandstede ward of Cedric of Rotherwood soprano 
Cedric of Rotherwood Saxon knight bass 
Wamba a fool in Cedric’s service tenor 
Friar Tuck the Hermit of Copmanhurst bass 
The Black Knight (King Richard I, ‘the Lionheart’) bass 
Rebecca daughter of Isaac of York soprano 
Wilfred of Ivanhoe son of Cedric tenor 
Locksley captain of a band of outlaws baritone 
Lucas de Beaumanoir Grand Master of the Knights Templars bass 
choral roles 
Conrad a squire of Malvoisin choral roles 
Oswald a steward in Cedric’s service 
Elgitha Rowena’s maid 
Isaac of York a Jew 
Walter }
}
 outlaws 
 
Willibald 
Albert Malvoisin Norman knight and Precept of Templestowe 
Robert }
}
 squires of Bois–Guilbert 
 
Philip 
Normans, Saxons, outlaws, townspeople, Knights Templars 
Setting English forests and countryside in the neighbourhood of the castle of Torquilstone and the Templars’ Preceptory at Templestowe in 1194 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

       After reviewing a performance of J. F. von Auffenberg’s play Der Löwe von Kurdistan, based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman, Marschner decided – with his librettist Wohlbrück – to write an opera based on one of Scott’s novels. They chose Ivanhoe. By eliminating non-essential characters and simplifying the plot, Wohlbrück developed the libretto from J. R. Lenz’s play Das Gericht der Templer (Breslau, 7 May 1824), which Lenz had based on one or more of several English plays, particularly W. T. Moncrieff’s Ivanhoe! or, The Jewess (London, 24 January 1820), that were performed in England after the publication of Scott’s book.

       Universally considered during the 19th century as Marschner’s most popular opera, Der Templer und die Jüdin was performed more than any of the others – over 200 times in Germany alone. Additional performances took place in Denmark, Holland, Russia, England, the USA, and Hungary. Towards the end of the century, both Mottl and Kleinmichel simplified the libretto, eliminating several minor roles; the latter published a new edition of the vocal score in 1896. In 1912, Pfitzner overhauled the work again and published an even newer edition. A few performances using it were given, including those in Lübeck (1912), Strasbourg (1912), and Cologne (1913). Since that era, however, escalating costs and censorship have combined to discourage further productions, although a significant revival was heard at the Wexford Festival in 1989.

       The cast at the Leipzig première included W. Pögner (Cedric), Ubrich (Ivanhoe), S. Löwe (Rowena), Hammermeister (Bois-Guilbert), Schütz (Black Knight), A. Wiedemann (Wamba), F. Fischer (Tuck) and F. Franchetti-Walzel (Rebecca).

       Act 1.i A wild, romantic glen in the forest De Bracy and his Norman knights emerge from cover to ambush Bois-Guilbert’s party of Templars, but shortly after the fight starts Bois-Guilbert calls a halt to it. Each leader confesses that he intends to win a particular woman. Bois-Guilbert names the lovely Jewess Rebecca and De Bracy, relieved that Bois-Guilbert has no interest in Cedric’s ward, agrees to help the Templar capture her. As they leave, Cedric and Rowena enter with Saxon knights. Cedric curses the tournament at Ashby from which he has just come because his disinherited son Ivanhoe was the victor there; Rowena, who is in love with Ivanhoe, chides him for his harshness. Cedric hates the idea of Ivanhoe marrying Rowena, but Wamba urges him in the lied ‘’S wird besser geh’n’, nevertheless, to leave the lovers alone. Oswald rushes in to report that Isaac, Rebecca and Ivanhoe have been captured; the Saxons march off to avenge the wrong, singing their battle song ‘Wer Kraft und Muth in freier Brust’. Wamba’s lied, not at all the rustic folksong its title suggests, has the compound time, guitar-like accompaniment, and melodic contour characteristic of the Italian bel canto style popular at that time. But the opening and closing sections of the scene each feature a different chorus of knights singing in the more triadic and tonally conservative German style.

       1.ii Inside Friar Tuck’s hut in the forest Tuck serves wine to a mysterious guest, known as the Black Knight, while singing the drinking song, ‘Der barfüssler Mönch seine Zelle verliess, Ora pro nobis!’ (in performance, the piece was often censored because of the juxtaposition of texts devoted to drinking and prayer). The style here is completely German and in the final verses Tuck’s refrain, ‘Ora pro nobis!’, is set first against a laughing counterpoint provided by the Black Knight and is then taken up by a band of outlaws who have wandered in to listen. Their leader, Locksley, recognizes the Black Knight and asks if he will help rescue an unidentified Englishman and his niece. The Black Knight readily agrees.

       1.iii An apartment in a castle turret Locked inside the turret, Rebecca prays. Bois-Guilbert enters and claims her as his property because he won her in battle, but she wrenches herself free when Saxon soldiers attack the castle. Bois-Guilbert rushes off to join the fight and Rebecca escapes to the bedside of the wounded Ivanhoe, who convinces her that she must flee. As she leaves, the Black Knight dashes in to help Ivanhoe escape. Unlike previous scenes, this one is cast almost entirely as a series of small ensemble sections that permit maximum simultaneous interaction among characters and propel the drama forward at the frenetic pace its content demands. (This kind of musical construction enabled Marschner to break away from such of his contemporaries as Lortzing, who continued to pursue in their number operas the older and simpler style of Singspiel. Later, in Hans Heiling, Marschner used this new design to enhance the psychological development of characters, thereby paving the way for Wagner.)

       1.iv A courtyard inside the castle Frenziedly seeking an escape route, Rebecca stumbles into Bois-Guilbert, who is staggering from wounds. When she refuses to elope with him, he carries her off. The fight reaches the stage and the Saxons win.

       Act 2.i A forest clearing The morning after the battle, Tuck, the Black Knight and a band of outlaws praise the great outdoors in a rousing Germanic hunting chorus calculated to relieve some of the tension built up in the previous act. Having discovered their merrymaking, Ivanhoe enters with the Black Knight, who reveals himself to be King Richard the Lionheart, back from the Crusades.

       2.ii The hall of justice at Templestowe The Templars enter, Beaumanoir presiding, followed by Bois-Guilbert, the victim of Rebecca’s supposed powers of witchcraft. Ordered to stand trial by ordeal, Rebecca must name a champion to face a representative of the Templars. When Bois-Guilbert offers to fight on her behalf, the knights pick him as their representative. He sinks to the ground in despair.

       Act 3.i Richard’s throne room The king listens as Ivanhoe extends his praise for Richard to all of England in the stirring patriotic Romanze ‘Wer ist der Ritter hochgeehrt’ (a piece that became so popular that audiences would join in at the anthem-like refrain, ‘Du stolzes England, freue dich’, as they do in Iolanthe). Wamba provides a facetious commentary on their seriousness in his equally famous lied ‘Es ist doch gar köstlich, ein König zu sein’.

       3.ii A dungeon in Templestowe In a fervent prayer (preghiera) with ethereal harp-like accompaniment, ‘Herr, aus tiefen Jammersnöthen’, Rebecca begs for deliverance from an unjust fate. Bois-Guilbert knocks on the door and offers to undergo the scourging of a dishonoured knight if she will only love him, but she refuses as guards take her away.

       3.iii The tournament grounds The Templars march in to join Rebecca, who stands in chains. Bois-Guilbert begs her to escape with him, but she prefers the stake. Ivanhoe appears unexpectedly as her champion, and the duel begins. Initially, Bois-Guilbert seems to be winning, but as he is about to deal Ivanhoe a crushing blow, he drops dead. The king enters and asserts his authority over the land as the Templars bear off Bois-Guilbert’s body.

       As a Schilleresque historical drama, Der Templer und die Jüdin is close in structure to Weber’s Euryanthe (as opposed to Der Freischütz, the model for Der Vampyr, which is more a Gothic romance) and embodies a mixture of German and Italian elements. There are extended sections of secco recitative; but there are also sections of choral writing that draw on the traditions of the German choral society (to one of which Marschner belonged), with its direct, diatonic writing. More forward-looking are the flexibly constructed scenes, some of them using ensemble sections that permit maximum interaction between characters and help to propel the drama forward.

A. DEAN PALMER