Marschner, Heinrich (EN)

Marschner Heinrich August, *16 August 1795 Zittau, †14 December 1861 Hanover, German composer. He came from a family of Czech immigrants who were craftsmen. His parents initially wanted him to become a lawyer. Marschner’s musical talent became apparent during his time in the school choir. In 1811, having already composed several songs and the ballet Die stolze Bäuerin, Marschner began studying composition with K. Hering, music director at the seminary in Zittau. After graduating from secondary school in 1813, he began studying law in Leipzig; at the same time, he became interested in the theoretical writings of J.P. Kirnberger and D.G. Türk, as well as the compositions of V. Righini and Beethoven, and decided to devote himself to music. In 1815, he met Beethoven in person in Vienna. In 1816, he was employed in Pressburg (Bratislava) by Count Zichy as a teacher, pianist, and composer, as well as Kapellmeister to Prince Krasatkowitz. In 1817, he married Emilia von Cerva (†1818), and later, he married the pianist Franziska Jaeggi. In 1825, he was widowed again. In Pressburg, Marschner composed an overture based on Hungarian melodies and numerous stage works, including the opera Heinrich IV und d’Aubigné. This work was staged at the German Opera in Dresden, which was directed by Weber at that time. In 1821, Marschner moved to Dresden, where he completed several commissions for music for plays, and while staying in the circle centered around L. Tieck and F. Kind, he was introduced to the notion of creating a German national opera. In this spirit he composed a singspiel to Kind’s libretto Der Holzdieb. In Dresden, Marschner gained the support of the court minister Count D. von Einsiedel and in 1824 he took over the position of director of the Italian Opera from F. Morlacchi, however, he was unable to obtain the post of director of the German Opera, which had become vacant after Weber’s death (1826). After his third marriage to the outstanding singer M. Wohlbrück, he went to Berlin, where he met F. Mendelssohn; he then visited Wrocław, Gdańsk, Königsberg, Düsseldorf, and Aachen. In 1827, he was hired as a Kapellmeister at the Stadttheater in Leipzig; his productions of the operas Der Vampyr and Der Templer und die Jüdin brought him fame and recognition. From 1830 to 1859, he was the Kapellmeister of the Hoftheater in Hanover. It was there that his best opera, Hans Heiling, was staged, which – alongside numerous songs, choral works, and chamber music – cemented Marschner’s position as the leading German composer of the 1830s, as evidenced by his being awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1834. By participating in music festivals in Rostock, Lüneburg (1843) and Lübeck (1847), he also became famous as a conductor. Over the years, Marschner’s strong advocacy for the cultivation of German music (Mozart, Weber) and Gluck, and his opposition to foreign influences, especially Italian music, which was preferred at the court in Hanover, put him at odds with highly regarded composers of the time, such as G. Spontini (who was active in Berlin at the time) and G. Meyerbeer. The works composed in the 1840s and 1850s did not bring Marschner success, and his efforts in 1861 to stage Sangeskönig Hiarne in Paris – despite Rossini’s positive opinion – came to nothing. In the last years of his life, Marschner was almost forgotten, overshadowed by Wagner’s growing fame. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to the efforts of H. Pfitzner, Marschner’s works briefly returned to the opera, but today they appear only occasionally.

Marschner cultivated various musical genres, but he went down in music history primarily as an outstanding representative of German Romantic opera and thanks to certain types of solo songs, although his piano and choral works were also popular in the 19th century. Marschner’s songs are less ambitious than the vocal lyricism of Schubert or Schumann. Only his ballads go beyond the simplicity of popular songs and are placed alongside those of C. Loewe. However, while Loewe emphasized the epic element in this type of song, Marschner composed ballads of a dramatic nature.

In his early stage works, Marschner eagerly drew on the tradition of German singspiel, but from 1818 onwards, following in the footsteps of E.T.A. Hoffmann, he adopted the idea of creating an opera in which music would be an inevitable consequence of dramatic poetry, and the composer’s goal would be to integrate all theatrical elements. Marschner collaborated with talented and respected librettists such as F. Kind, W.A. Wohlbrück (related to Marschner), E. Devrient, who drew their ideas from then-fashionable English novelistic literature (Byron, Scott) or from German works (writers of the Sturm und Drang movement and early Romanticism). They liked to draw on themes from the world of folk fantasy, stories woven from uncanny, ghostly, and mysterious events, marked by horror and suggesting the intervention of supernatural forces in human life. They did not shy away from depicting drastic, gruesome, or brutal scenes. In several operas, Marschner took up the theme of a character with a split personality, an incarnate demon (Der Vampyr, Der Templer und die Jüdin, Hans Heiling), drawing partly on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, as well as on the ideas of German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann (Die Elixiere des Teufels) and L. Tieck.

As a result, a new type of operatic role, a demonic and seductive one, developed in his works. It was intended for singers with a dark voice (bass or dramatic baritone), but also capable of performing delicate phrases. Likely under the influence of the aforementioned writers, Marschner also tended to include comic scenes in his operas, often infused with folk elements, placed directly alongside scenes of horror and the uncanny. They served to sharpen contrasts and as means of characterization. In terms of architecture, Marschner’s works are number operas with elaborate introductions, ensemble scenes, and finales. However, individual “numbers” often deviate from traditional formal patterns towards recomposed structures resulting from the needs of the dramatic text and the stage situation (e.g., Malwina’s aria from Act I, Ruthven and Aubry’s dialogue from Act II of the Der Vampyr opera). This phenomenon intensifies in Marschner’s subsequent operas, reaching its peak in his last opera, Sangeskönig Hiarne (1857–58). For this reason, music historians consider Marschner’s work to be a bridge between Weber’s operas and Wagner’s early works (The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser). The prologue to the opera Hans Heiling is a clear foreshadowing of Wagner’s musical drama. Associations may be evoked both by the setting (a fairy-tale-like, legendary underground kingdom) and by the suspenseful dialogue, which excludes more elaborate forms with a regular and musically rounded structure, as well as by the symphonic treatment of the orchestral part.

Marschner treated traditional forms of opera singing (including the da capo aria) with a certain flexibility, i.e. bending them to the needs of the stage situation, e.g. in Heiling’s aria from Act I, the rest of the action takes place during the reprise and coda. In some particularly dramatic scenes, Marschner abandoned traditional opera singing in favor of melodrama, i.e., the recitation of text against an orchestral background. Melodrama also facilitated the transfer of symphonic transformation techniques to opera, which increased the effectiveness of orchestral accompaniment as a means of dramatic expression, especially in scenes with a dark and mysterious mood, e.g., in Act II of the opera Hans Heiling, Gertrude expresses her concern for her daughter’s fate by alternately speaking, humming, and singing. The atmosphere of this scene, set on a stormy, dark night, is emphasized by excellent orchestration, highlighting the clarinets, horns, and bassoons in the lower registers, and muted violas and cellos. Scenes of horror and demonic characters also prompted Marschner to expand his harmonic language (chromatic passages and figurations, accumulation of dissonant chords, shortened modulation processes) and to make frequent use of tremolos and dynamic contrasts. Marschner was undoubtedly the most outstanding representative of melodrama in the first half of the 19th century after Weber. In the second half of the century, E. Humperdinck returned to this technique, and at the beginning of the 20th century, M. Schillings and A. Schönberg also employed it.

Literature: Marschnererinnerungen, ed. G. Fischer, Hanover 1918 (includes Marschner’s writings and autobiography); Aus Eduard Devrient’s Nachlaß: Briefe von Heinrich Marschner an Eduard Devrient, Berlin 1879, repr. as e-book Berlin 2015.

W. Neumann Heinrich Marschner, Kassel 1854; H. Borges Heinrich Marschners Oper „Hiarne”, “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” LXXIX, 1883; E. Danzig Heinrich Marschnerin seinen minderbekannten Opern und Liedern, Leipzig 1890; P. Spitta Marschners „Hans Heiling”, “Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft” VIII, 1892; M. E. Wittmann Heinrich Marschner, Leipzig 1897; G. Münzer Heinrich Marschner, Berlin 1901, repr. London 2017, 2022; L. Hirschberg Heinrich Marschners Balladen, “Die Musik” XI, 1911/12 and Marschners Chöre, “Neue Musikzeitung” XXXIII, 1912; H. Gaartz Die Opern Heinrich Marschners, Leipzig 1912, repr. Whitefish (Montana) 2010, London 2017; H. Pfitzner Marschners „Vampyr”, “Neue Musikzeitung” XLV, 1924; G. Hausswald Heinrich Marschner. Ein Meister der deutschen Oper, Dresden 1938; G. Abraham Marschner and Wagner, in: Slavonic and Romantic Music, London 1968; V. Köhler Rezitativ, Szene und Melodram in Heinrich Marschners Opern, Bonn 1970; A. Dean PalmerHeinrich August Marschner, 1795-1861, his life and stage works, Ann Arbor (Michigan) 1980; T. Lippert Die Klavierlieder Heinrich Marschners, «Neue musikgeschichtliche Forschungen» XV, Wiesbaden 1989; B. Weber Heinrich Marschner, königlicher Hofkapellmeister in Hannover, Hanover 1995; T. Gerrit Waidelich Von der „Lucretia” zum „Vampyr”, neue Quellen zur Marschner, Tutzing 1996; D. Hughes ‘Wie die Hans Heilings’: Weber, Marschner, and Thomas Mann’s „Doktor Faustus”, “Cambridge Opera Journal” X no. 2 (1998), pp. 179-204; Heinrich August Marschner. Bericht űber das Zittauer Marschner-Symposium, ed. M. Th. Vogt, Leipzig 1998; S. Meyer Marschner’s Villains, Monomania, and the Fantasy of Deviance, “Cambridge Opera Journal” XII no. 2 (2000), pp. 109–134; G. Katzenberger “Unser Hof ist ein sehr starker Gott ….” Hannovers Oper um 1850 im Spannungsfeld zwischen Künstlern, König und Hofbeamten, mit zahlreichen unveröffentlichten Dokumenten und Briefen von Heinrich Marschner und anderen, Hanover 2008; M. T. Fahrholz „Ein unglückselig Doppelwesen.” Heinrich August Marschners “Hans Heiling” in der Debatte zur deutschen Oper, “Studia Musicologica” LII (Budapest 2011) nos. 1–4, proceedings from the Opera and Nation conference, pp. 323–339; M. T. Fahrholz Heinrich August Marschners “Der Templer und die Jüdin”: Eine Studie zum konzeptionellen Entwurf der romantischen Oper, Kassel 2017, e-book 2018.