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