3. - Schlösser-Magazin

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V. Report on the Music Historical Importance: Dr. Bärbel Pelker
the next two decades in the form of works
by Johann Christian Bach, Egidio Romoaldo
Duni, Florian Leopold Gassmann, Giuseppe
Gazzaniga, Christoph Willibald Gluck, François-
Joseph Gossec, André Ernest Modeste Grétry,
Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi, Johann Adolf
Hasse, Niccolò Jommelli, Giovanni Paisiello,
Niccolò Piccinni and Antonio. Another unique
feature in European musical history is the
continuity of the active interest in comic opera
of Italian and French origin, as it used to be
staged in Schwetzingen between 1753 and the
court’s move to Munich in 1778, and which
was intensified even further in 1771, once the
troupe of French actors had left. Starting in
summer 1772, for example, up to four different
operas were performed several times over in
Schwetzingen 27 .
In choosing which Italian comic operas to
perform (which were predominantly works by
the composers Galuppi, Piccinni and Sacchini,
who were amongst the most famous and
most successful in Europe) the Schwetzingen
programme is, however, a unique reflection of
the taste of the time in its mixture of works
in French and German. In the early years, the
French operas were translated into German. The
first of these, in summer 1774, was Duni’s “La
laitière et les deux chasseurs” (Das Milchmädgen
und die beiden Jäger). In his official statement of
opinion, Carl Theodor thus began by expressing
his predilection for the German language, which
he brought onto the opera stage with the help of
these translations, with the intention of having
the “genuine” German operas follow them later.
That happened in 1775 with a performance
in Schwetzingen palace theatre of the opera
“Alceste” composed by Anton Schweitzer (with
the libretto by Christoph Martin Wieland) on 13
August, two years after its premiere in Weimar.
With this large-scale opera performance, Carl
Theodor made it unmistakably clear that he
wanted to make the German language acceptable
at court as a language of theatre – if necessary,
27 Detailed records of performances including documentary
evidence of the librettos and music scores are to be found in:
Hofoper in Schwetzingen, pp. 87–154 and 391–405.
even against the will of his wife, Elisabeth
Augusta. There is evidence of initial sympathies
for German as a language of theatre as early as
1767, and on 25 June 1768 the Prince Elector had
a German play staged at his summer residence
for the first time. The end of this development,
and at the same time its climax, can be seen
as Ignaz Holzbauer’s opera “Günther von
Schwarzburg”, with the libretto by Anton Klein.
For the first time, this took an episode from
German history as its theme. The composer
completed this work in 1776, once again in
Schwetzingen, upon the personal command of
the Prince Elector. With this opera, the electoral
court established the definitive profile for itself
as the cradle of reformed German opera, which
had begun on the court’s experimental stage
in Schwetzingen. It was to be a position that
was only short-lived, on account of the court’s
transfer to Munich in 1778.
Both the last two operas, “La festa della rosa”
and “Zemira e Azor”, were Italian translations
of French operas by Grétry and were performed
in Schwetzingen in 1776. They once again
confirmed the unique variety of the opera
repertoire and also Carl Theodor’s interest in
focussing on European opera traditions and then
melting them together as if under a magnifying
glass.
The legacy of the music at the court of the Prince
Elector
In presenting an inventory of the visible
evidence of this important epoch in the history
of European music, a good place to start is with
the compositions of the musicians at the electoral
court in the Electoral Palatinate, which are to
be found today in nearly all the leading music
libraries (there are comprehensive collections,
for instance, in Paris, London, Brussels, Berlin,
Munich and Washington). The world’s largest
collection, however, with more than 6000
compositions is to be found at the Heidelberg
Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the
research unit concerned with Court Orchestras in