Scan 188
The American history and encyclopedia of music .., 1908
8 lines. Read by computer on 11 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1will, for all time, occupy a position peculiarly his own. He may truly be termed the greatest tone-poet who has ever lived, inasmuch as the hearing of his music has the power of creating a mood in the listener similar to that which must have been felt by the composer at the time of its conception.
3The influence of these master-musicians was more cosmopolitan than national, and though they were the creators of modern German national art music, to them also is the world indebted for music as it now exists everywhere. For influences more purely national we must turn to Spohr (1784-1859) and Weber (1786-1826). These two men were the leaders of the Romantic Movement of the early part of the Nineteenth Century, a movement which discarded old classical themes and turned to subjects from national life and lore, especially to the supernatural in folk-lore. Spohr's "Jessonda" and Weber's "Euryanthe" were the first true German operas since the time of Keiser. It was Weber who banished spoken dialogue and interwove the scena or dramatic accompanied recitative, with the aria. Spohr has gained lasting fame through his work for the violin and may be regarded as the founder of a school for that instrument.
5Well-known composers of German opera, or perhaps we might better say, well-known German composers of opera, of the Nineteenth Century were:
7Marschner (1796-1861), with his "Hans Heiling" and "Der Templer und die Jüdin;" Kreutzer (1780-1849), whose fame rests on "Das Nachtlager in Granada;" and Lortzing (1803-1851), known for his "Czar und Zimmermann." All of these men made pleasing but by no means startling incursions into the operatic field. It remained for Wagner, the mighty innovator, to revolutionize German music-drama art. Previous to his time, German composers of opera had been more or less under Italian and French influence, and had striven to produce works whose chief object was to form an agreeable entertainment appealing to the senses rather than to the intellect.
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