GAUDIGUAD

Opera Order

This included epics, sagas and glorious story and stories. In Germany, Richard Wagner's (1813 to 1883) first romantic operas, "Rienzi" (world premiere in Dresden 1842), "Der Fliegende Holländer" (world premiere in Dresden 1843), "Tannhäuser" (world premiere in Dresden 1845) and "Lohengrin" (world premiere in Weimar 1850) became exemplary for this German equivalent of the French opera genre Grand Opéra.

But the composers soon seemed to lose all measure and offer less excellent entertainment with their operas than want to bathe in a mighty sound, from which the musicians and singers often seemed to be driven like dinghies on the rough seas, although Richard Wagner managed to transform this opera, which at first skeptical impression appeared rather corpulent than opulent, into a musically and dramaturgically so to speak muscular type, the musical drama, which he was able to justify with theoretical writings such as "Oper und Drama" from 1851.

The rest of the indignant hustle and bustle was then given by a completely uncontrolled performance practice, which buried the opera under overloaded equipment with impressively sumptuous costumes, props and stage sets until the Grand Opéra finally degenerated into a so-called equipment opera, in which apparently it was only about to bring the genius and power of the impresarios to the fore in such a way that the opera did not detonate and the theater did not collapse over the money giving, for the theater vital and therefore holy audience.

After the Opéra-comique, as already mentioned, in accordance with its fundamentally positive to cheerful mood, not necessarily only treated comic, but finally also subjects with a moderate or sedate mood, the composer Jacques Offenbach (1819 to 1880), who was born in Cologne and emigrated to France, requested a revival of comic opera and created a new, cheerful genre: the Opéra bouffe. Just its name, which is based on the Italian name Opera buffa, reveals that the Italian Opera buffa, which was once regarded as incredibly cheeky and casual for the French opera situation at the time, was nevertheless groundbreaking for the French opera world after the Buffonist dispute and was established and stationed in France.