The Origin, Rediscovery and National Appropriation of Arminius until 1800

Before discussing the reception of Arminius/Hermann, it seems useful to introduce this historical figure, as well as the sources through which later generations came to know of his heroic deeds. Arminius was the leader of the Cheruskians, who, through his warrior qualities as well as his ability to unite inimical German tribes, managed to defeat the legion of the Roman general Varus at the Teutoburger Wald in the year 9 ce, thereby preventing Roman oppression above the Rhine. Arminius’s story was recorded by the Roman scholar Tacitus in his Germania (98 ce) and Annales (117 ce), in which the author presented the warrior as ‘doubtlessly the liberator of Germania’.Footnote ⁵ The Arminius legend lay dormant until Tacitus’s works were rediscovered after 1450. From this moment onwards, the Arminius story would prove to be a revenant, repeatedly showing up at moments of cultural and/or political crisis in the German-speaking world. Herfried Münkler discerns three inspirational elements that are, in varying configurations, at work in most renditions of the story: an appeal to battle for freedom against foreign invasion, an avowal of proud self-confidence and ultimately a plea for unity and internal political cohesion.Footnote ⁶ One can imagine that the last aspect was often uncongenial to many of the German post-1815 Restoration states, which partly explains why the Arminius myth was rarely embraced by political regimes during the first half of the nineteenth century.

One of the first instances where the legendary warrior Arminius was used as a figure of German self-identification was in 1520, when Ulrich von Hutten stylized him as the liberator of the Germans from the Roman yoke, while simultaneously drawing a parallel between him and Luther’s recent declaration of war against contemporary Roman Catholic practices.Footnote ⁷ But apart from this rather isolated occurrence, until 1750 Arminius generally appeared on the French dramatic and Italian operatic stage, as a welcome refreshment to the usual collection of antique heroes. Here, neither the German ethnic origin of Arminius nor the concrete battle was considered to be of dramatic interest, but rather his love of freedom, his virtues and the conflict of Arminius’s betrothed,Footnote ⁸ who must choose sides between her lover and her father Segestes, Arminius’s political opponent.Footnote ⁹ Klaus Kösters argues that the French Arminius plays of George de Scudéry (1642) and Jean Galbert de Campistron (1685) chiefly served to present aristocratic virtues and to voice a complaint against the absolutism and despotism of the French monarchy.Footnote ¹⁰ As a celebration of virtù and clemenza with a happy outcome, the subject also fitted the mould of Italian opera seria: Paola Barbon and Bodo Plachta count no fewer than 37 operas based on the Arminius story in the eighteenth century alone.Footnote ¹¹ Some of these were composed by German composers, such as Handel (Arminio, 1737) and Hasse (Arminio, 1745), but these Italian-language settings of the story do not appear to have been motivated by outspoken German patriotism.

Around 1750, Arminius was finally fully claimed by German artists. In line with a growing desire to emancipate German culture from Roman cultural influences, 1750 also signals the moment when most authors abandon the Latin variant Arminius for the more Teutonic-sounding Hermann. Suddenly, several plays based on Hermann’s battle against the Romans were created, including Johann Elias Schlegel’s Hermann (1743), Justus Möser’s Arminius (1749), Cornelius von Ayrenhoff’s Hermanns Tod (1768) and Klopstock’s Hermanns Schlacht (1769). On the one hand, these renditions obviously stood on the shoulders of their French predecessors,Footnote ¹² but on the other, the Hermann legend served to embody a desire for an emancipation of German culture, albeit without the militant, political overtones that the story would acquire in a later stage of German history. Heinrich Heine, who was highly sceptical of the patriotism of his contemporaries, aptly voiced this general attitude when he praised Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in Die romantische Schule (1836), as ‘the literary Arminius, who liberated our theatre from foreign oppression’.Footnote ¹³

Rolf Christian Zimmermann has displayed to what an extent this late eighteenth-century enthusiasm also incited a critical response among German thinkers, despite the still non-militant use of Hermann as a liberator in the cultural realm. Zimmermann argues that in the eyes of some, ‘the nostalgia for ancient Germanhood … threatened to point their contemporaries’ focus backwards to a phantasmagorical barbarian world rather than forward towards a rational Humanism’.Footnote ¹⁴ Klaus von See comes to a similar conclusion:

The self-identification with a tribal past was thus considered to frustrate the Enlightenment project, while complacently reinforcing the backwardness of German culture in comparison to other European nations.

Hermann and The Liberation Wars: Kotzebue’s Hermann und Thusnelde Libretto

Many of these objections against glorifying and instrumentalizing the Arminius legend to contemporary cultural-political aims were mitigated by the terror of the Napoleonic occupation. In this climate, Kleist wrote his militant Hermannsschlacht (1808) play. In an attempt to have it staged in Vienna in 1809, he wrote to Heinrich von Collin that the piece was ‘designed strictly and only for this moment’.Footnote ¹⁶ With this statement, he not only emphasized the necessity of a performance as soon as possible, but asserted that the piece’s tone was justified only by the atrocities of recent history. Moreover, it is questionable whether Kleist really contributed to the hagiography of Hermann as a war hero which we find, for example, during the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath up until World War Two, as the piece shows bestial behaviour in both camps.Footnote ¹⁷ Kleist’s desired-for performance in Vienna did not take place, as France defeated Austria in 1809. His grim story hardly fared better in the post-Waterloo Restoration climate; it appeared in print in 1821, but remained unperformed until 1860.

Another writer fuelling patriotism during the Liberation Wars by adapting the story of Hermann was August von Kotzebue in his Hermann und Thusnelde (1813), a libretto designed for a heroic opera in three acts. This is all the more intriguing when we consider that Kotzebue is generally considered to have been an opponent rather than a supporter of German nationalism in the years around 1815. Kotzebue had obtained a questionable standing among the German national movement, due to his satirizing remarks about German chauvinismFootnote ¹⁸ and his alleged spying activities for the Russian Tsar.Footnote ¹⁹ During the 1817 Wartburgfest − a gathering of chauvinist student societies (Burschenschaften) which soon derailed into a violent rite − his Geschichte des deutschen Reiches (1815) was one of the publications thrown into the bonfire. And two years later, the student Carl Ludwig Sand assassinated Kotzebue in Mannheim, while accusing the playwright of having been a ‘seducer of our young generation’, a ‘desecrator of our nation’s history’ and ‘a Russian spy of our fatherland’.Footnote ²⁰

According to Kati Röttger, Sand’s assault was in fact a real-life staging of the famous tyrannicide scenes in Schiller’s dramas, such as the title-hero’s assassination of Gessler in Wilhelm Tell (1804). Sand’s attitude was characteristic of a more widespread political appropriation and misunderstanding of Schiller’s works among the chauvinist student societies of that day. Sand transplanted Schiller’s elevated ideal of art as a place for moral trial onto the public sphere in the form of radical political violence. Among the Burschenschaften, the more light-versed, ironical Kotzebue was considered to be the antipode of Schiller’s morally elevated, tragic aesthetics.Footnote ²¹ This contemporary image of Kotzebue as immoral and fully unpatriotic is exaggerated, as George S. Williamson has pointed out. Williamson argues that the playwright’s ‘commitment to such “national” themes was rather circumscribed’, not, however, out of a betrayal to the national cause,Footnote ²² but rather because he detested the Schwärmerei and anti-French xenophobia of some of his most outspoken contemporaries, especially after Napoleon had been defeated and the occupation was over.Footnote ²³

The heroism, outspoken patriotism and serious nature of Kotzebue’s Hermann libretto is rare in his music-dramatic output, which is generally more light-verse, comical and satirical. More typical for his usual political stance and aesthetic attitude is Der Kyffhäuser Berg, a libretto he had included in his Opern-Almanach für das Jahr 1817 and which was set by six unestablished composers, among them a young Heinrich Marschner. In this domestic comedy with supernatural elements, Kotzebue ridicules the legend of Friedrich Barbarossa, the Hohenstaufen emperor who was claimed to have retreated into the Kyffhäuserberg and was believed to return one day to reinstate the perished German empire.Footnote ²⁴ Rather than an emperor, the man who has slept for 20 years inside the mountain and has grown a metre-long beard turns out to be Hans, the previous husband of Marcibille. During his absence, Marcibille and the house have fallen into the hands of Tobias. Rather than fighting out who is her legitimate husband, in the final scene Tobias and Hans each politely offer her to the other.Footnote ²⁵

Kotzebue’s partisanship for the national cause, as well as the grand, tragic dramaturgy of Hermann und Thusnelde, was therefore surprising, to say the least. Francien Markx, however, does show that during the Wars of Liberation, interest in grand operas and tragedies displaying patriotic love increased in Berlin.Footnote ²⁶ Even E.T.A. Hoffmann, who usually preferred fantastic and romantic stories, wrote the patriotic one-act Prologue Thassilo, performed at the National Theatre to commemorate the beginning, in 1415, of the reign of the House of Hohenzollern over the Margraviate of Brandenburg. This theatre piece was followed by a performance of three songs from Körner and Weber’s patriotic cycle Leyer und Schwerdt (1814). Markx points out that in the play, ‘Thassilo was praised as the hero who had liberated the fatherland, bringing enduring peace by forging ties with other German rulers’, thus serving a similar symbol function as Hermann.Footnote ²⁷ The contemporary fascination with liberation heroes explains why Kotzebue’s Hermann libretto struck a chord at the time of its creation, and was set by three composers during the apotheosis and aftermath of the Liberation Wars. In 1815, versions with music by Julius Miller (Königsberg) and Georg Valentin/VincentFootnote ²⁸ Röder (Würzburg) saw the light, followed by a piece by Bernhard Anselm Weber (Berlin) in 1819.Footnote ²⁹

A possible reason for the relatively late appearance of Weber’s setting may have been Friedrich Wilhelm III’s unwillingness to have it staged. At first sight, Hermann seemed a fitting allegory for the Prussian king himself, who in March 1813 – after some years of having been a kind of modern-day Segestes, collaborating with the French oppressors – had published a proclamation An Mein Volk!, in which he called his subjects to take up arms against Napoleon.Footnote ³⁰ But Kotzebue’s text contained a problematic aspect, one that the playwright himself had foreseen in a letter to Carl August Böttiger on 30 August 1814. There he stated that the opera – apparently already finished – might be turned down because Hermann’s despair about the death of his beloved Thusnelde could be painful to the king, who had lost his wife Luise in 1810.Footnote ³¹ On top of that, Friedrich Wilhelm appears to have had a general distaste for tragedies, expressed in his supposed statement that ‘life itself has more than enough tragedies’. Marieluise Hübscher argues that this aversion was partly motivated by the tragic loss of his beloved wife, but also related to a general Biedermeier impatience with anything that disturbed the recently regained state of peacefulness.Footnote ³² Friedrich Wilhelm III adored Kotzebue’s lighter plays and might not have understood this sudden change of atmosphere in the playwright’s output. Whatever the reason may have been, the postponement of the opera would have severe consequences for its success, as will be shown below.

In his libretto, Kotzebue expressed or appealed to an anti-French desire for independence spurred by the Napoleonic Wars. The opera concludes with a chorus on the words: ‘Laßt ein Triumphlied mächtiglich erschallen! / Es blieben Fürst und Volk sich treu / Der edlen Deutschen Viele sind gefallen / Doch unser Vaterland ist frey’ (let songs of victory sound powerfully / as prince and people remained loyal / many noble Germans fell / but our fatherland is free). An interesting invention by Kotzebue is the insertion of a Norn, who inspires Hermann and his men by sharing a vision of a later generation of Germans, who will successfully fight a foreign yoke:

Through this transgenerational perspective, Kotzebue highlighted the significance of the contemporary battle against Napoleonic oppression by changing the perspective; the current struggle was heroic to such an extent that, retrospectively, it could inspire Hermann’s battle against the Romans.Footnote ³⁴

By calling his Hermann und Thusnelde a heroic opera, Kotzebue must have aimed at a relatively grand design, which is also evident from the considerable size of the text. In line with this would be a predominance of sung over spoken dialogue.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, it appears that in some parts, music outweighed spoken sections in Kotzebue’s design: the first act opens with choruses and lines designed to be recited simultaneously, contains hyphenated passages in which the librettist calls for ‘a short martial music’Footnote ³⁶ and an extended pantomime, and culminates with the eventual outburst of the title hero after a series of maltreating trials by the Roman leader Varus, which seems perfectly suited for a musical realization. In the latter two acts, Kotzebue’s text now and then specifies when lines are planned to be a recitative, thus implying that a great share of the libretto was not intended to be sung. These acts do, however, contain many spectacular, melodramatic evocations of the supernatural, such as the appearance of Germania in the second act, with ‘celestial music sounding from afar’Footnote ³⁷ and a final tableau of Walhalla with the transfigured Thusnelde up in the clouds at the end of the third act. As Axel Schröter argues, these extreme scenic effects were dramatically unthinkable without music.Footnote ³⁸ In the end it seems that, by combining all-sung and spoken parts in his Hermann libretto, Von Kotzebue did not aim to add a comic, Singspiel-like layer to a serious/grand/heroic action, such as is the case in many semi-serious mixed operas genres in the decades around 1800, but rather to couple serious/grand/heroic genres of opera with similar ones from spoken theatre.

Composers handled Kotzebue’s text in different ways. Concerning the formal structure of Röder’s version, I have not found any source evidence, but both Miller and Weber shaped Kotzebue’s text into a spoken drama with some musical numbers, specifically choruses and marches. Weber extended the musical part with those dialogues explicitly designated to be set as recitative.Footnote ³⁹ An Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung reporter stated that Miller’s music was pleasant, but lacked the necessary differentiation of character.Footnote ⁴⁰

Bernhard Anselm Weber, arguably a composer of higher standing,Footnote ⁴¹ hardly fared better when his Hermann was premiered in Berlin in 1819.Footnote ⁴² The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (AMZ) reported the following:

Regardless of the quality of the work,Footnote ⁴⁴ two reasons may explain the failure of Hermann und Thusnelde. First of all, the straightforward, militant patriotism of the verses was, like Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht, suited ‘strictly and only’ for those years when the Battle of Nations took place.Footnote ⁴⁵ Secondly, the content of the play did not fit the dominant image of Kotzebue’s ideological inclination. Therefore, in the post-Napoleonic political climate of 1819, the piece was simply ill-fitting. The usual Kotzebue audience arguably expected light comedy, and not an exalted patriotic tragedy, whereas adherents to the national cause perceived Kotzebue’s Hermann drama as an insincere, opportunistic piece by an unpatriotic, treacherous playwright. The problematic ideological status of the piece was increased even further by the coincidence that the Berlin premiere of Hermann und Thusnelde took place one day after the news of Kotzebue’s assassination had reached the Prussian capital. The AMZ reviewer pointed out that ‘because one day before we had heard of Kotzebue’s assassination in Mannheim, his Hermann to a certain extent turned into an obsequy for the productive poet’.Footnote ⁴⁶ But this funeral service for an undesirable artist could result in nothing else but indifference.Footnote ⁴⁷

It is significant that Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz could actually thrive in the same city two years later. What made this work more appealing than Kotzebue’s Hermann? First of all, it expressed the now more relevant general sentiment of building up when war is over, a desire for peace rather than the spirit of armed battle. And secondly, for the more patriotically inclined, its premiere exactly six years after Waterloo was a more favourable memorial than that of Kotzebue’s death.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, the male choral society aesthetic of the famous Jägerchor, regardless of the rather idyllic nature of the verses, subversively expressed the fervour of the chauvinist Burschenschaften, which had been prohibited after Kotzebue’s assassination in the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees.

Hippolyte Chélard and Carl Weichselbaumer’s Die Hermannsschlacht

The vicissitudes of Kotzebue’s Hermann und Thusnelde libretto display how brittle the basis for a Hermann opera was during the first half of the nineteenth century. Not only did the moment of performance have to converge with an actual situation in which such a militant chauvinism was indeed called for, the political beliefs of the composer and/or librettist also had to be convincing. And stylistically, regarding the tone of the tragic subject concerned, the composer had to be capable of writing an all-sung opera in a grand, heroic manner, something in which German composers were generally relatively inexperienced. At least up until the 1820s, all-sung German opera, particularly in a grand, heroic manner – think of Spohr’s Jessonda and Weber’s Euryanthe (both 1823) – was a relatively problematic experiment, soon abandoned by most composers.

A possible reason for the rare occurrence of all-sung opera forms in German-language opera up until 1830 may have been that this genre entailed an adoption of foreign stylistic models at the cost of an individual, national music-theatrical character. More than in Italy and France, where dialogue opera was rare or co-existed with more prestigious all-sung forms, the Singspiel had obtained quite a national imprint in Germany. The most successful works (Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio and Der Freischütz) had been written in this style, and its alternation of sung and spoken parts perfectly suited the dramaturgical antagonism of the otherworldly and the earthly that had defined German Romantic opera from writings such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Dichter und der Komponist (published in the AMZ in 1813) onwards. Moreover, the Singspiel structure was an ideal container for ‘the very heterogeneity of genre and style’ that, according to Michael C. Tusa, defined German opera in comparison to its formally more regular Italian and French sisters.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the case of Kotzebue’s libretto, only German composers deemed second-rank by their contemporaries took up the challenge to set it to music, without fully realizing the grand operatic potential that this serious, tragic drama arguably had. Apparently, more capable German colleagues recoiled from this subject, perhaps because its explicit militant tone was deemed to be irreconcilable with the more transcendent orientation of Romantic musical aesthetics.Footnote ⁵⁰ But then again, if this task was taken up by a foreigner more competent at writing grand, heroic opera, would not the ideological credibility of the story have been mitigated even further?

It may well be one of the greater ironies within German opera history that the most ambitious and successful early nineteenth-century Hermann opera was in fact created by a Frenchman, Hippolyte-André-Baptiste Chélard. His Hermannsschlacht enjoyed its premiere in Munich in September 1835. Chélard’s career is peculiar, and arguably characterized most aptly by Robert Schumann, who called him ‘an inverse [umgekehrter] Meyerbeer’ in 1840.Footnote ⁵¹ After winning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1811, he was nevertheless forced to work as an orchestral violinist and teacher in Paris. Finally, at the age of 38, Chélard started his operatic career with Macbeth, premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1827. This work, on a libretto by Rouget de Lisle,Footnote ⁵² continued the post-Gluckian line of monumental tragédie lyrique while simultaneously incorporating elements of Romantic music theatre, such as melodrama, Gothic elementsFootnote ⁵³ and a Shakespeare subject.Footnote ⁵⁴

Macbeth failed to achieve a marked success at its Paris premiere, although in his review for the Revue musicale, Fétis did recognize some merits in Chélard’s music.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the most startling aspect of Chélard’s music, according to Fétis, was his excessively scientific harmony,Footnote ⁵⁶ a quality that would probably make Chélard appear as a German rather than French composer in the eyes of most Parisians.Footnote ⁵⁷ Another aspect that disturbed many French critics was the blurring of high and low genres in Macbeth, for example through the integration of melodramaticFootnote ⁵⁸ scenes into a tragédie lyrique.Footnote ⁵⁹ As previously mentioned, Tusa argues that in German opera, this eclectic use of forms for the sake of dramatic veracity was accepted more easily and in fact even a defining stylistic trait. Therefore, moving to Germany may have been an attractive prospect for Chélard.Footnote ⁶⁰

The questionable success of Macbeth’s Paris premiere did not hinder Johann Nepomuk Freiherr von Poißl, intendant of the Bavarian court opera, from inviting Chélard to Munich for a performance in German translation.Footnote ⁶¹ Poißl had a keen interest in all-sung French opera and had already tried his luck with this ‘grand’ genre in his operas Athalia (1814) and Der Wettkampf zu Olympia (1815). The Munich premiere of Chélard’s opera in 1828 turned out to be far more successful than the previous one in Paris, and for quite some years Macbeth kept the stage in the Bavarian capital.Footnote ⁶² In an extensive review, the Münchener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung concluded the following:

The most concrete expression of Chélard’s success in Munich was the title of royal Bavarian court Kapellmeister, free of duties, granted to the composer by King Ludwig I.Footnote ⁶⁴ This public and royal acclaim stimulated Chélard to settle permanently in Munich in 1831. Here he managed to stage two new works, Mitternacht (1831) and Der Student (1832), which, though not as successful as Macbeth, were nonetheless gently received.Footnote ⁶⁵ Macbeth itself enjoyed many revivals in Munich up until 1848,Footnote ⁶⁶ and was performed in no fewer than seven German cities.Footnote ⁶⁷

In Munich, Chélard found fertile soil for artistic endeavours. Ludwig I’s reign was generally supportive of the arts,Footnote ⁶⁸ and particularly of German-language opera in the Bavarian capital. Shortly after his coronation in 1825, Ludwig terminated the Italian court opera company in favour of a strictly German-language organization. This did not imply that operas by Italian or French composers were banned from the repertoire, however; operatic developments in Paris were particularly closely followed.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nonetheless, Ludwig I displayed a genuine German cultural enthusiasm quite unprecedented for a Bavarian monarch, arguably reflecting a phenomenon that Joep Leerssen describes as ‘a transition from the familial, dynastic consciousness of ruling families towards a national-collective one’ that took place in many European kingdoms during the Restoration.Footnote ⁷⁰ To Ludwig, support for the German cause in the cultural realm was fully reconcilable with pursuing the political interests of Bavaria.Footnote ⁷¹

According to contemporary sources, such as the memoirs of theatre director Karl Theodor von Küstner, Ludwig believed that the theatre should serve the elevation of German spirit. Küstner writes, for example, that the king voiced his contempt for a proposed Munich performance of the French play La Berline de l’émigré (1835, Mélesville/Hestienne), in which Germans were defeated by the French.Footnote ⁷² In order to cultivate a German sensibility, Ludwig stimulated the performance of national dramas. His predilection for the Nibelungen myth, which shows from his commission to Julius Schnorr von CarolsfeldFootnote ⁷³ to create a Nibelungensaal in the newly built Königsbau, also influenced the court theatre’s repertoire, for example with the staging of Ernst Raupach’s grand tragedy Der Nibelungen Hort Footnote ⁷⁴ in 1833.Footnote ⁷⁵ The vast financial and artistic means of the Bavarian court theatre made it possible to create a similarly grand spectacle in the opera domain.

In 1830 and 1833, Auber’s La Muette de Portici and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell – both imported from Paris – had made a huge impact in Munich, although not inciting the political upheaval that these grand liberation-from-oppression operas had stirred elsewhere in Europe.Footnote ⁷⁶ This theme also fascinated Ludwig, who during the 1820s had been a staunch supporter of the Greek independence war against the Ottomans,Footnote ⁷⁷ in which he recognized the virtue of the previous Liberation Wars in Germany against Napoleon.Footnote ⁷⁸ In a similar vein, Ludwig I cultivated the Hermann myth during the Restoration years, when elsewhere in the German-speaking world, national chauvinism and the accompanying exaltation of freedom were increasingly subjected to censorship.Footnote ⁷⁹ One of the ways in which Ludwig I monumentalized Hermann was by giving the patriarch of the German nation a central place in his Walhalla at Donaustauf, built between 1831 and 1842.Footnote ⁸⁰ The other way was through his patronage of a grand liberation-from-oppression opera around this legendary hero.

Although it is clear that Ludwig I did not commission Chélard to write an opera on the story of Hermann, he was nonetheless involved in the project from the outset. As early as August 1831, Chélard wrote a letter to Ludwig from Weimar, mentioning his attendance of Goethe’s birthday celebration and the elderly poet’s approval of his proposed Hermann project.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, the task of writing the libretto fell to Carl Weichselbaumer, a secret secretary of Ludwig’s cabinet who was also active as a poet and dramatist.Footnote ⁸² Chélard never explicitly voiced his original impetus to write a German-language opera about Hermann. Wolfram Schwinger argues that the ‘unusual situation in which a Frenchman selects a grand national-German theme’ was chiefly related to Chélard’s desire to ‘display his own artistic quality’ and his hope to be accepted as a genuinely German master. Schwinger points out that ‘it was clear to him that studying German music and incorporating its style into his works would not be enough for an operatic success’, but that ‘he hoped that using a German subject would be’.Footnote ⁸³ Due to his limited sensitivity to the complex self-identification issues of German thinkers, Chélard was probably not at all aware of the problematic status of the Hermann figure, let alone the ideological consequences of his authorship. But at the same time, he must have realized that he held a trump card in comparison to most of his German colleagues, as he was far more experienced in writing in a grand, all-sung, French style, the one that a grand liberation opera arguably requires.

Reviews of the premiere in September 1835 suggest that Chélard aptly turned Weichselbaumer’s text into something impressive. Two months after the performance, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik published a review by Munich reporter Carl Riefstahl,Footnote ⁸⁴ who had troubles with Weichselbaumer’s ‘lack of theatre-practical know-how’ and his ‘inability to write brief and light verses’, but praised the ‘genius with which Chélard had set the text to music’.Footnote ⁸⁵ After a detailed discussion of individual parts of the work, Riefstal went on to conclude that ‘we endorse this opera as one of the most excellent of recent times. May it be performed everywhere, and rightfully spread the fame of a gifted and modest artist’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1837, a belated anonymous review of the 1835 performance in the AMZ was equally appreciative:

Fragments of Die Hermannsschlacht did return in a concert conducted by Chélard in 1837 in Augsburg;Footnote ⁸⁸ the concert was reviewed by Stephan Heller,Footnote ⁸⁹ who was equally impressed. Whereas he dismissed a duet from Mitternacht as a ‘Franco-German mishmash of ideas, full of squiggles’, his expectations were surpassed when parts from Die Hermannsschlacht were given: ‘the listeners were rightly filled with awe when Die Hermannsschlacht appeared. If disseminated further, the piece will certainly be epoch-making, and put Chélard at the pantheon of most excellent composers’.Footnote ⁹⁰

It is remarkable that all three critics present Chélard’s Hermannsschlacht as an opera of the first order. Apart from Heller’s side remark about ‘Franco-German mishmash’ concerning Mitternacht, Chélard’s nationality appears not to have been a decisive category in the evaluation of Die Hermannsschlacht. It is noteworthy, however, that other German opera houses did not programme the praised and highly successful work, as had happened in the case of Macbeth. Although performing Die Hermannsschlacht was obviously a demanding and costly enterprise, it is unlikely that this was the main cause for its lack of dissemination. It is possible that theatre administrations, especially in cities with a less cosmopolitan and harmonious climate than Munich, foresaw ideological problems with this operatic rendition of a German-national story by a French composer.

If these sentiments were still only latently present in 1835, they clearly came to the surface at the time when Chélard moved from Bavaria to Weimar. In 1839, Chélard performed some of his key works in Weimar, and he became the new Kapellmeister in 1840. According to Wolfram Huschke, Chélard’s appointment was merely a stop-gap, as the post had been vacant after the death of Johann Nepomuk Hummel in 1837 and the desired-for candidate − preferably another piano virtuoso − could not be hired.Footnote ⁹¹

But this was not the only reason the French newcomer was treated with relative hostility. First of all, the Rhine Crisis of 1840, in which France threatened to occupy parts of the Rheinland, intensified anti-French sentiments in the German-speaking world. This sentiment had already manifested itself in the aesthetic realm in the late 1830s. In the years between the first and second performance series of Die Hermannsschlacht (1835–1841), Meyerbeer’s tumultuous success with Les Huguenots (1836) had made this German composer of French grand operas a scapegoat for an influential movement of young German composers, led by Schumann. This group, who chiefly used the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik as their platform, promoted ‘serious’ music over the commercial success and the abundant spectacle of grand opera. In that sense, a French aesthetic orientation was increasingly considered to be erroneous. From that point of view, Schumann’s 1840 characterization of Chélard as ‘an inverse Meyerbeer’ can be read in two ways. One the one hand, it simply pointed to the fact that Chélard’s movement was geographically in the opposite direction of Meyerbeer’s, while emphasizing that he and Meyerbeer created similar, grand operas.Footnote ⁹² On the other, it could also imply a positive aesthetic development; a laudable move from ‘French’ excess and frivolity to ‘German’ discipline and seriousness.Footnote ⁹³

The latter attitude is discernible in an 1839 review of a Weimar performance of Chélard’s Mitternacht (in a revised version) by Carl Montag,Footnote ⁹⁴ published in Schumann’s journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik:

If critics such as Montag praised Chélard’s move away from the abundant grandiosity of contemporary French opera, could they still be appreciative of his Hermannsschlacht, which had been written in that despised style? The 1841 Weimar premiere of the piece, given at the birthday of the Grand Duchess, first laid bare some of the aesthetic and ideological objections to Chélard’s attempt at German national opera. An anonymous AMZ reporter mainly criticized the exuberant grandiosity and bizarre musical language of the work:

Here we are no longer dealing with a ‘inverse Meyerbeer’, but rather recognize all the tropes of the German anti-Meyerbeerian faction.

From this aesthetic critique, it was just a small step towards questioning Chélard’s capability as a French composer to set a quintessentially German-national story to music. This step was taken by Carl Montag, who two years previously had vindicated the ‘German’ qualities of Mitternacht, but now ferociously attacked Chélard’s Hermannsschlacht in an extensive review:

This dismissal is hard to reconcile with Montag’s previously quoted appraisal of Chélard’s turn from French grandiosity to German intimacy in Mitternacht, but Montag continues with a detailed example to explain what he is aiming at:

Considering Chélard’s evocation of this Romantic scene, it is noteworthy that he did not use a music-dramatic style inspired by Weber’s Wolf’s Glen Scene, the one that had served him well in the witches’ scene of Macbeth. Perhaps Chélard felt that this melodramatic sensationalism was not fitting in such a solemn, grand work as Die Hermannsschlacht, and chose a serious musical idiom instead, thereby fully missing the mark in Montag’s eyes. Montag repeatedly relates Chélard’s unfortunate choices to a lack of genuine sympathy for the German party, and concludes with an emphatically xenophobic statement about his French colleague’s residence in Germany:

In the end, Montag thus stylizes Chélard as a modern-day Varus himself, and revisits the trope of liberation from foreign reign on the aesthetic plane one encounters so often in nineteenth-century discourse on German opera.Footnote ¹⁰² Chélard’s well-intended attempt at operatic naturalization and acceptance, which had brought him fortune in Munich, now resulted in apathy in a region where and at a time when music-aesthetic issues were fought with daggers drawn, and where grand opera encountered increasing hostility. He remained in Weimar in his function of Kapellmeister until 1852, but he was soon outshone by another musician previously stationed in Paris, now coming to Weimar and posing as a genuinely German artist: Franz Liszt.Footnote ¹⁰³

In many respects, Chélard’s situation in the nineteenth-century German opera world is comparable to that of another Varus figure: the Berlin court opera intendant Gasparo Spontini. Unlike Chélard, however, Spontini was already world famous and known as Napoleon’s favourite composer at the moment he set foot on German soil in 1820, and he was therefore from the start regarded as antagonistic to the national cause in opera. Between 1827 and 1837, Spontini made three attempts at a grand historical opera about the Hohenstaufen dynasty. With Agnes von Hohenstaufen, he and his librettist Ernst Raupach hoped to contribute to Friedrich Wilhelm III’s glorification of the Prussian past, while simultaneously feeding the general hunger for German history in nationalist circles.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is likely that Spontini hoped to gain acceptance by writing a historical opera on a German subject.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But apart from some sympathetic reviews,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Agnes von Hohenstaufen was generally received with either hostility or plain indifference.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Chélard’s mixed success with Die Hermannsschlacht presents an illustrative conclusion of Hermann’s operatic career before 1848. In 1845, a new Hermannsschlacht was performed in Mainz with music by Carl Amand Mangold. Gotthold Logau, author of the text, introduced a new genre name for it, that of a Pagäan, a new mix form of opera and oratorio bringing together the best of both worlds while avoiding their problematic aspects.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This chiefly entailed that the dramatic action was presented through melodrama; in narrations accompanied by orchestral music. While on the one hand, an oratorio-like setting was perhaps more appropriate for a work wishing to express and mobilize national sentiments,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ on the other, Logau must have foreseen how complex it was to have Hermann succeed as an opera character. Hermann Küster (Hermann der Deutsche, 1850) and Max Bruch (Arminius, 1877) also preferred the oratorio as a genre. In the virulently patriotic years following the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in the years 1870–1871, Hermann was finally brought to the operatic stage once again. This resulted in two works, Heinrich Hoffmann’s Armin (1877) and Carl Gramman’s Thusnelda (1881), which were successful in the years after their appearance, but soon vanished from the German stage as well.Footnote ¹¹⁰

As a subject for the German operatic stage, the story of Arminius’s liberation of Germany has remained at least as problematic as it was inspiring. Particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century, it therefore could not gain a foothold in the repertoire. From the vicissitudes of Hermann operas discussed above, a few explanations for their failure can be provided. First of all, it seems that the militant warrior did not correspond to the idyllic self-identification of the Germans as being an apolitical, peaceful nation of Dichter und Denker, a stereotype from which most leading German composers were only cursorily willing to diverge at times of intense political struggle. Due to this, Hermann could initially only be mobilized at moments of great national distress, such as the Napoleonic Wars. The example of Kotzebue and Weber’s Hermann und Thusnelde (1819) revealed that soon after the defeat of Napoleon, the militant chauvinist tone of the work was already being perceived as outdated and inappropriate. Of course, this was also a consequence of Kotzebue’s anti-chauvinist reputation, which made his work appear peculiar or even insincere to many spectators.

The same problem of credibility arose with Chélard’s attempt to write a Hermann opera, at least by the time he performed it in Weimar, when he was deemed incapable by definition of writing a German national work due to his French origin. The fact that the most ambitious early nineteenth-century Hermann opera was indeed composed by a Frenchman points to a stylistic problem with ideological implications. Grand liberation opera was strongly associated with French opera, which arguably made the appropriate style for the Hermann subject irreconcilable with the quest for a genuinely German compositional style, deviating from French models, which to many contemporaries was crucial for the creation of a German national work. In that sense, the untypical story of Hermann touches upon the main dilemma of German opera in the early nineteenth century, the question of how to create a distinct, national style in a genre that was thoroughly cosmopolitan.

Considering all these factors, it may not come as a surprise that the two works most commonly regarded as German national operas – both at their appearance and still today – are Weber’s Freischütz and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (1868). In the former, the context is idyllic rather than militant, expressing a peace-time desire to pick up the pieces after the devastating Thirty Years War (1618–1648); a close analogy to the post-1815 years. In the latter, the anti-French quest for German independence is fought out in the realm of art and, as in Der Freischütz, within the confines of a relatively homogenous society. In both cases, however, the apparently innocent plot could and can be read in a militantly chauvinist way, in line with the political context of these works’ respective premieres. This subtle, allegorical nationalism was eventually more effective, acceptable and durable than the outspoken and one-dimensional battle tone of a Hermann opera.

Tracing the forgotten history of these Hermann operas ultimately helps to understand processes of canon formation and to see more clearly why other German operas fared better; it increases our awareness of what it took for a German opera to achieve a national significance in the long run. Moreover, it enables us to understand what was problematic about the Hermann figure, and what made him arguably even more problematic as an opera hero. In the end, it therefore hardly surprises that Hermann, this monolithic German hero, lives on in the form of a pompous monumental statue, and not as a celebrated opera character.