Zwischen kosmopolitischer Ästhetik und nationaler Verpflichtung: Giacomo Meyerbeer und seine Preußenoper Ein Feldlager in Schlesien

Abstract

The chief representative of cosmopolitan grand opéra as the composer of an opera for Prussia — this uncomfortable phenomenon owes its origin to an unusual historical situation. Giacomo Meyerbeer was invited to succeed Gaspare Spontini as the chief director of music in Berlin, the city of his birth, and he could not evade the honour of being commissioned to compose a festive opera for the re-opening of the Berlin Opera after its destruction in a fire, even though he considered Paris, now as before, to be his artistic home and the future headquarters of his work as a composer for the theatre. Together with his friend Alexander von Humboldt, who had very close ties to the Prussian royal house, in particular to the young King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Meyerbeer sought and found a diplomatic solution which made it possible for him to fulfil his commission without too great an artistic compromise. He asked the skilled Parisian librettist Eugène Scribe to write a prose text in French, but to remain anonymous while the official librettist was advertized as Ludwig Rellstab, who translated the French into German, and put the words of the sung items into verse. Since Scribe here also worked strictly to the dramaturgical prescriptions of the composer, the resulting “Lebensbilder aus der Zeit Friedrichs des Großen” (“Pictures from the time of Frederick the Great”, the subtitle of the work) pays homage to the king of Prussia as the patron of peace and the arts. Given this interpretation, which was inspired by contemporary literary and pictorial portraits of Frederick II (by Franz Kugler and Adolph von Menzel), the confrontation with authority found in Meyerbeer’s grand historical operas was here given new life in an unusual context, one which made the concept of the nation relative to a generalized ideal of humanity.