The city of Berlin was formative for the musical development of the young Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. Although in the early decades of the nineteenth century the city suffered from a degree of cultural insecurity compared to some of its peer capitals in Europe, Berlin’s historicist tendencies, burgeoning musical life, and strong participatory culture of choral music gave the city a unique profile. This chapter traces the Mendelssohns’ interactions with musical historicism, trends in operatic and concert life in Berlin (including leaders in those areas, such as Gaspare Spontini and Carl Möser), other important local music figures in performance and journalism, and – last but not least – with their teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, head of the Singakademie zu Berlin. It shows how the Mendelssohns’ often historicist musical values formed in this special environment, even as both artists would grow beyond these roots as they matured.

Wagner’s attitude towards the Paris-centred tradition of grand opéra and its German-language cousin, große Oper, was equivocal. On the one hand, he mercilessly dissects the shortcomings of the genres in his Zurich writings; on the other hand, borrowings are rife and a notable exemplar exists in Rienzi. After disentangling and contextualising that contradiction in relation to Wagner’s early works and writings, this chapter considers the tensions between municipal and international resources in staging ‘grand’ works, the shifting associations of German genre such as Singspiel, große romantische Oper, and große Oper, and the witness born to this by Wagner’s prose drafts for incomplete works such as Die Sarazenin and Friedrich I.