Italian opera before the mid-nineteenth century is a cavalcade of great names, from Monteverdi to the young Verdi. France’s pre-1850 operatic tradition, less consistently impressive, still boasts a humbling succession of notables from Lully and Rameau to Berlioz and the young Gounod (whose Faust appeared in 1859, only just after our cutoff date). By contrast, Germanic-language music theater before Wagner’s advent resembles not an artistic canon but a lunar landscape, with a few mountains jutting forth from seas of all too forgettable tranquility. There are three awe-inspiring peaks (The Magic Flute, Fidelio, and Weber’s Der Freischütz); tallish markers elsewhere (Weber’s Euryanthe and Oberon; Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail). The rest, pretty much, is silence. (Don Giovanni, Così, and Figaro, of course, are in Italian.)

It somehow typifies early Teutonic theatrical underachievement that the first opera ever composed by a German—Dafne, by Heinrich Schütz—was hailed at its 1627 première but is irretrievably lost, its manuscript having perished in a 1760 fire. Imagine where a comparable disaster in, say, early English drama would have left mankind. Suppose fate, while revealing the name of Everyman’s playwright, had robbed us of the actual text.

We must therefore salute John Warrack, whose biographies of Weber and Tchaikovsky are laurels on which any scholar could rest with abundant pride, for artfully hammering out to over four-hundred pages a tale about which frankly the musical world does not give a damn and is unconvinced that it ever should. When a music lover contemplates in Warrack’s narrative such tenebrous names as Johann Caspar Kerll, Reinhard Keiser, Johann Adolf Hasse, Carl Graun, Johann Adam Hiller, Paul Wranitzky, and Heinrich Marschner, is he justified if his heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains his senses as if of New Grove he had drunk? Probably not: because CD catalogues—and the book’s own staff-notation extracts—suggest that while he might seldom have overlooked outright genius, the above list’s minor masters aimed at a higher mean level than comparably obscure Italian contemporaries, far more prolific than most of their transalpine equivalents, managed.

A handful mentioned above had about them nothing minor at all. Keiser (1674– 1739) exhibited rare business acumen: in early eighteenth-century Hamburg (devoid of aristocratic patronage), he administered that unbelievable thing, an opera house that for years stayed in the black. As to Keiser’s own musical creations, Handel several times paid him the compliment of plagiarizing therefrom. Keiser’s Croesus achieved in late 2000 the honor of a complete commercial recording from Harmonia Mundi; were it or some rival record label to take seriously the other twenty-odd Keiser operas that survive, we might pity our former selves for our total ignorance of Keiser’s accomplishments, much as we now pity our great- grandparents for their ignorance of L’incoronazione di Poppea and Les Troyens.

Even when the musical significance of Warrack’s subject matter looks elusive—as with the eighteenth century’s deliriously popular singspiel genre, which separated footling ditties by hours of allusive dialogue as untranslatable as Gilbert and Sullivan—there comes the modest but sharp pleasure from the realization that the big boys respected such stuff. Exhibit A in this context is Marschner (1795–1861), who attained fleeting European renown from two exercises in operatic horror: Der Vampyr and Hans Heiling (a variant of the Undine legend, except that this time he lures her). Both works have fitfully turned up on disc, neither providing in that medium many clues as to why they made early nineteenth-century audiences shudder and scream with fear. Yet audience members thus shuddering at the time included Wagner, who admitted his debt to Marschner’s limited but curiously hypnotic idiom. Without Marschner, then, we might never have had The Flying Dutchman, while Warrack shows that as late as Die Walküre Wagner indulged in decidedly Marschnerian turns of phrase.

When Warrack leaves the realm of small triumphs for the more populous domain of noble failures, he sheds special light on oddities like Jessonda (1821). Composed by the once-revered Ludwig Spohr (1784–1859), Jessonda might these days be too statuesque for staging in toto; nor would anybody relish explaining to the local PC thought-police that Spohr’s plot subverts the entire multicultural paradigm by deploring suttee. Still, Spohr’s original audiences considered this opera immortal, and its CD appearance has confirmed what Warrack calls “superb inventions” amidst much anemic busywork.

As will by now have become excruciatingly obvious, the present volume defies skimming. Warrack simply will not let your attention wander when even, or especially, his least eloquent dramatis personae soliloquize under the spotlight. If this book were a piece of music, its composer would be none of those whom it actually treats, but, rather, Richard Strauss: whose intellect Warrack’s own resembles, in its darting curiosity, contrapuntal elaboration, and urbanity tinged with mischief. Warrack’s is, in short, a thoroughly aristocratic mind. One could cite a dozen instances of its supple power, but the following—about a nonentity called Heinrich Esser—stands out, evoking as it does Max Beerbohm’s tribute to history’s greatest master of unintended stage farce, Savonarola Brown:  

Esser’s Die Zwei Prinzen (1845) is set in the time of the English Wars of the Roses, though also based on a French original. It is really the story of the love between Kätchen and Lambert Simnel, the pretender to the throne whom Richard Simon tries to promote as Graf Warwick. The ensembles never really find any dramatic momentum, and the music is simple and repetitive, with the best of it residing in naïve numbers such as a Romanze for Simnel in D flat, the increasingly popular key for Romantic intensity, Lebt wohl, des Lebens schönste Träume, and a cheerful Arie for Kätchen’s father, a cook and innkeeper named John Bred.

Such prose cannot issue from a consciousness rendered apoplectic by ideological fixations, by nescience posing as virtue, or by the terror of collegiate disapproval. Underneath Warrack’s elegant timbre can be heard that singularly beatific sursum corda: the sound of Theodor Adorno spinning in his grave.