.
Native dramatic tastes, once fostered by minnesingers and strolling
players, were kept alive by the "singspiel," or song-play, composed of
spoken dialogue and popular song, which furnished the actual beginnings
of German national music drama. The threshold of this was reached, the
sanctuary of its treasures unlocked, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who,
without thought of being a reformer, unconsciously infused German spirit
into Italian forms. It was during the last five years of his brief life,
from 1786 to 1791, that he produced his operatic masterpieces, "The
Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "The Magic Flute." His
marvelous musical and poetic genius, supported by profound scholarship,
led him into hitherto untried regions of expression, and to him it was
given to bring humanity on the stage, splendidly depicting the inner
being of each character in tones. Wagner said of him that he had
instinctively found dramatic truth and had cast brilliant light on the
relations of musician and poet.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the great tone-poet, guided by his profound
comprehension of the deep things of life and his active sympathies to
absolute truthfulness in delineating human passions, made the next
advance in his one opera, "Fidelio," written in 1805. Ranked, though it
is, rather as a symphony for voice and orchestra than as the musical
complement of a dramatic poem, there is nevertheless infused into some
of its chief numbers more potent dramatic expression than is found in
any previous opera. Thoroughly cosmopolitan in subject, it is
nevertheless German in that its lofty earnestness of tone offers a
protest against all shallowness and sensationalism. The entire story of
the opera is told in tones in the overture.

The next German to write overtures with a deliberate purpose to
foreshadow what followed was Carl Maria von Weber, whose greatest opera,
"Der Freischuetz," appeared in 1821. The initial force of the German
romantic school, he founded his operas on romantic themes, and depicted
in tones the things of the weird, fantastic and elfish world that
kindled his imagination. He has been called the connecting link between
Mozart and Wagner, and in many of his theories he anticipated the
latter. National to the core, he embodied in his music the finest
qualities of the folk-song, and noble tone-painter that he was he
excelled his predecessors in his employment of the orchestra as a means
of dramatic characterization.