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Opera in German is that of the German speaking countries, which include Germany, Austria, and the historic German states that pre date those countries. German language opera appeared remarkably quickly after the birth of opera itself in Italy. The first Italian opera was Jacopo Peri's Dafne of 1598. In 1627, Heinrich Schütz provided the music for a German translation of the same libretto. Yet during much of the 17th and 18th centuries German language opera would struggle to emerge from the shadow of its Italian language rival, with leading German born composers such as Handel and Gluck opting to work in foreign traditions such as opera seria. Some Baroque composers, such as Reinhard Keiser, did try to challenge Italian dominance, and the theatre principal Abel Seyler became an eager promoter of German opera in the 1770s, but it was only with the appearance of Mozart that a lasting tradition of serious German language opera was established. Mozart took the simple, popular genre of Singspiel and turned it into something far more sophisticated. Beethoven followed his example with the idealistic Fidelio; and with Der Freischütz of 1821, Weber established a uniquely German form of opera under the influence of Romanticism. Weber's innovations were eclipsed by those of Wagner, one of the most revolutionary and controversial figures in musical history. Wagner strove to achieve his ideal of opera as "music drama", eliminating all distinction between aria and recitative, employing a complex web of leitmotifs and vastly increasing the power and richness of the orchestra. Wagner also drew on Germanic mythology in his huge operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. After Wagner, opera could never be the same again, so great was his influence. The most successful of his followers was Richard Strauss. Opera flourished in German speaking lands in the early 20th century in the hands of figures such as Hindemith, Busoni and Weill until Adolf Hitler's seizure of power forced many composers into silence or exile. After World War II young opera writers were inspired by the example of Schoenberg and Berg who had pioneered modernist techniques such as atonality and serialism in the earlier decades of the century. Composers at work in the field of opera today include Hans Werner Henze. As the names of Mozart, Weber, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Berg indicate, Germany and Austria have one of the strongest operatic traditions in European culture. This is also evidenced by the large number of opera houses, particularly in Germany where almost every major city has its own theatre for staging such works, as well as internationally renowned operatic events such as the Salzburg Festival.

The world's first opera was Dafne by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German language opera. The music to Schütz's Dafne is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza Il pomo d'oro for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", Seelewig, which foreshadows the Singspiel, a genre of German language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. Seelewig was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.

Another important development was the founding of the Theater am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg in 1678, aimed at the local middle classes who preferred opera in their own language. The new opera house opened with a performance of Johann Theile's Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch, based on the story of Adam and Eve. The theatre, however, would come to be dominated by the works of Reinhard Keiser, an enormously prolific composer who wrote over a hundred operas, sixty of them for Hamburg. Initially, the works performed in Hamburg had all been on religious themes in an attempt to ward off criticisms by Pietist church authorities that the theatre was immoral, but Keiser and fellow composers such as Johann Mattheson broadened the range of subject matter to include the historical and the mythological. Keiser drew on foreign operatic traditions, for instance he included dances after the model of the French tradition of Lully. The recitative in his operas was always in German so the audience could follow the plot, but from Claudius in 1703 he began to include arias in Italian which allowed for florid vocal display. The hallmark of the Hamburg style was its eclecticism. Orpheus (1726) by Telemann contains arias in Italian setting texts taken from famous Handel operas as well as choruses in French to words originally set by Lully. Hamburg opera might also include comic characters (Keiser's Der Carneval von Venedig of 1707 has them speaking in the local Lower Saxon dialect), marking a great contrast to the elevated new style of opera seria as defined by Metastasio. Yet the immediate future belonged to Italian opera. The most famous German born opera composer of the era, Handel, wrote four operas for Hamburg at the beginning of his career but soon moved on to write opera seria in Italy and England. In 1738, the Theater am Gänsemarkt went bankrupt and the fortunes of serious opera in German went into decline for the next few decades. Other early opera houses in Germany included the Oper am Brühl in Leipzig and the Opernhaus vorm Salztor in Naumburg in 1701. Both played during the trade fairs in the towns, presenting both German and Italian opera, and a combination of both. While the house in Leipzig was financed by the town of Leipzig, the house in Naumburg was initiated and supported by the ruler, Moritz Wilhelm, Duke of Saxe Zeitz, but offered public performances.

The other leading German composers of the time tended to follow Handel's example. This was because the courts of the various German states favoured opera in Italian. In 1730 the chief proponent of opera seria, the Italian librettist Metastasio, took up residence as the imperial poet in Vienna. Johann Adolph Hasse wrote operas in Italian for the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden. Hasse also wrote operas for the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin, as did Carl Heinrich Graun. The king himself supplied the libretto for Graun's Montezuma, first performed in 1755. Deprived of aristocratic patronage until the mid 1770s, opera in German was forced to look to the general public to survive. This meant theatrical companies had to tour from town to town. The Singspiel became the most popular form of German opera, especially in the hands of the composer Johann Adam Hiller. Hiller's 1766 reworking of the Singspiel Die verwandelten Weiber was a landmark in the history of the genre, although his most famous work would be Die Jagd (1770). These Singspiele were comedies mixing spoken dialogue and singing, influenced by the similar genres of the ballad opera in England and the opéra comique in France. Often having sentimental plots and extremely simple music, Singspiele were no match for contemporary opera serias in artistic sophistication. The 1770s marked an important decade in the history of German language opera. The theatre company of Abel Seyler pioneered serious German language opera, and Seyler commissioned operas by Hiller, Georg Benda, Anton Schweitzer and other composers. A milestone of German opera was Anton Schweitzer's Alceste, with a libretto by Wieland and commissioned by Seyler, which premiered in 1773 in Weimar. Alceste was called "a model for German opera" by Ernst Christoph Dressler and has been described as the first serious German opera. It was also in the 1770s that composers, like Georg Benda, began experimenting with melodrama, a type of music theatre which some commentators saw as a viable alternative to opera. Early melodramas that proved popular with theatre troupes throughout German speaking Europe included Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea (both premiered in 1775). Other important contributions to a growing repertoire of German operas appeared shortly after. This includes Günther von Schwarzburg, a through composed opera noted then as now for its topic taken from German history, by composer Ignaz Holzbauer and librettist Anton Klein which premiered in 1777. An increasing amount of operas originally set to Italian and French texts by composers like André Ernest Modeste Grétry were translated and adopted for performance in German. By the end of the decade, German opera could be heard throughout Central Europe owing in part to travelling theatres and German states that began supporting Nationaltheater that further developed the repertoire, such as those founded in Mannheim and Vienna. Alongside those already mentioned above, notable composers of German language opera from the 1770s and 1780s include Johann André, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Christian Gottlob Neefe, Ignaz Umlauf, and Ernst Wilhelm Wolf. With successful works that appeared on stages across Germany, like Der Doktor und Apotheker, Ditters was a particularly successful composer of German opera between the mid 1780s and mid 1790s.

At the end of the 18th century a composer who would permanently change the German operatic tradition would emerge: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The great figure of the early Classical period was Christoph Willibald Gluck but his pioneering reforms were directed at Italian and French opera, not the German repertoire. In 1778, Emperor Joseph II attempted to change this state of affairs by establishing a German language opera troupe, the National Singspiel, at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The experiment was short lived and the troupe was dissolved in 1783, yet the previous year it had produced one undoubted success with Die Entführung aus dem Serail by the young Mozart. Goethe immediately recognised the quality of the piece, declaring "it knocked us all sideways". In the following years commercial theatres sprang up in Vienna offering German language opera. The impresario Emanuel Schikaneder had particular success with his Theater auf der Wieden on the outskirts of the city. In 1791, Mozart set one of his libretti, The Magic Flute. Although it appeared in the context of other popular Viennese magic operas (Zauberopern), like Wenzel Müller's de, Mozart's proved to be no ordinary Singspiel. Though the traditional farcical elements remained, Mozart added a new seriousness, particularly in the music for Sarastro and his priests. Even more than Die Entführung, the Magic Flute pointed the way forward for future German opera, especially according to later commentators.