Thoroughly cosmopolitan in subject, it is
nevertheless German in that its lofty earnestness of tone offers a
protest against all shallowness and sensationalism. The entire story of
the opera is told in tones in the overture.
The next German to write overtures with a deliberate purpose to
foreshadow what followed was Carl Maria von Weber, whose greatest opera,
"Der Freischuetz," appeared in 1821. The initial force of the German
romantic school, he founded his operas on romantic themes, and depicted
in tones the things of the weird, fantastic and elfish world that
kindled his imagination. He has been called the connecting link between
Mozart and Wagner, and in many of his theories he anticipated the
latter. National to the core, he embodied in his music the finest
qualities of the folk-song, and noble tone-painter that he was he
excelled his predecessors in his employment of the orchestra as a means
of dramatic characterization.
Richard Wagner was long regarded as the great iconoclast whose business
it was to destroy all that had gone before him in art, but no one ever
more profoundly reverenced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber than he.
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