The German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had a profound influence on aesthetic ideals regarding vocal delivery and emergent genres for German commentators from Ludwig Tieck to Rellstab and Wagner. With a focus on contemporary biographical sources and reception, this chapter contextualises her reception within the German states as irreducibly hybrid, as a voice that dissolved aesthetic boundaries, most clearly between speech and song. The shifting role of bel canto vis-à-vis contemporary sopranos (Henrietta Sontag / Maria Malibran), and the emergence of new genres characterise her complex reception, all of which is set against Wagner’s own claims for her artistry, following her creation of the roles Adriano (Rienzi), Senta (Holländer), and Venus (Tannhäuser).

The final chapter explores music theatre as a cultural expression of the Empire. Dramatists and composers responded to current events by creating works of varying genres for the Empire's stages. Focusing on Günther von Schwarzburg (Mannheim, 1777; German serious opera) by Ignaz Holzbauer (1711–83), Oberon, König der Elfen (Vienna, 1789; Singspiel) by Paul Wranitzky (1756–1808), Heinrich der Löwe (Frankfurt am Main, 1792; Singspiel) by Carl David Stegmann (1751–1826), Die Feier des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1794; melodrama) by Siegfried Schmiedt (1756–99), the anonymous Der Retter Deutschlands (Vienna, 1797; melodrama), and Achille (Vienna, 1801; opera seria) by Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839), this chapter argues that music theatre portraying the Reich called for cooperation in uncertain times by appealing to a sense of belonging to both local Estate and the Empire. Studies of these works tend to view them as expressions of an emerging German nationalism. This chapter challenges such perceptions, arguing that although the Reich was not a nation-state, composers nevertheless portrayed it as a complex nation and state, placing its past, present, and future centre stage.

The Introduction places the book into its historical and historiographic contexts. German-language music theatre often plays a supporting role in musical histories of Central Europe circa 1800, as does the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was home to over 300 territories that were linked by politics and culture. Physically networking the Empire was Europe's first systematic postal system, which served as a precondition for the operation of the hundreds of theatre companies that performed within its territories . By first considering the contemporary and scholarly distinctions between German-language theatre and the 'Nationaltheater', this introduction draws on recent historiography to provide a musicological audience with the key features of, and concepts surrounding, the Holy Roman Empire. It then traces this long misunderstood polity's place in music historiography and ultimately posits it as an ideal framework to investigate the world of German music and theatre in the decades leading up to the turn of the nineteenth century.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.

This essay examines how World War I brought into sharp relief the ever-evolving identity crisis German music underwent both domestically and further afield amidst the conflict. Caught between the strains of a nationalist-conservative aesthetic and the continuing development of a more pluralist modernism, both creativity and creative endeavor reflected the increasingly-militaristic bent of wartime cultural discourse as hubris steadily gave way to disavowal, resignation, and, finally, retrenchment. It assays both the rise in popularity of lighter forms of music as war-weariness set in on a German public tired of its strict diet of nationalist, militaristic propaganda and the proselytizing tours undertaken by orchestras at home and abroad as anti-German sentiment took hold. In the end, it seeks to situate music in the wider conflict of culture experienced by the national psyche, accelerated by the War and its consequences that characterized the decades that followed.