Crikey, the Germans love opera

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

According to these stats:

http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en#opera

The first table implies that Germany is not only staging the greatest number of opera performances each year, it's staging as many as the next five countries put together.

Also, it has 7 of the 20 cities in the world with the greatest numbers of opera performances.

I suspect that the figures for orchestral and other classical music performances might show a similar trend. A bit big in the classical music world, those Germans.

Edit: it'd be an interesting question to try out on people, I reckon. I mean, symphonies and what-not, people would probably guess Germany because they had so many of the giants of classical composition. But opera, I bet people's first guess would be "Italy".

[G-Man]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

I don't know. It's an Italian innovation and the trinity of Verdi, Rossini and Puccini is rather overwhelming.

But there were plenty Germanic operas, by Wagner, of course, and Mozart, von Weber, Beethoven, Marschner, Lortzing, Handel (if you consider him Germanic and disregard that he lived in Italy during his formative composing years). Even Haydn tried his hand at it.

So opera was also very much part of the Germanic culture.

[Alderman Barnes]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

Opera is also massively subsidised in Germany. Even relatively small towns have publicly funded opera houses, and Berlin has three. Apparently the reason there are so many is that it's a relic of the time when Germany was made up of hundreds of principalities and dukedoms, all with their own court operas and theatres, which then became state theatres after unification.

[Bruno]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

Germany has also been at the forefront of experimental stagings of/directorial approaches to opera (Regietheater as it's known). As AB says, it's all about the state funding.

Can't really call Handel Germanic as far as opera goes; he was an international composer (as you said) and his operas, like those of other Germans of the time, are thoroughly Italianate (and written in large part for an English audience). Germanic opera grows out of the Singspiel and melodrama traditions, the latter of which is usually traced to France (in particular Rousseau's Pygmalion). Haydn's operas are all Italian; Gluck's are all either Italian or French (though at least one was translated into German). Mozart was the first major composer to do German ones, though The Magic Flute and Abduction from the Seraglio are more properly referred to as Singspiele.

[Bruno]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

In fact, they're more properly referred to by their German names, but let's not get too technical.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

Well, certainly. On the other hand, I've never heard anybody refer to the Prokoviev opera I saw a few years ago as "Igrok", so perhaps one ought to be consistently monoglot.

Just looking at those Operabase stats again, I see it's really the Austrians who seem to be most crazy about opera: Germany is only 4th in terms of per-capita performance numbers, behind Austria (leader by miles), Switzerland and Estonia.

That reminds me of my stay in Salzburg 25 years ago, after a week's walking in the Austrian Alps. True story this, I swear. My friend and I really wanted to see an opera, but the opera houses (plural!) all seemed to be fully booked for the time of our stay. Finally, though, we found one which not only had spare tickets, but was much cheaper than the others. Wondering what the catch was, we bought our tickets and duly turned up and took our seats in the evening. A few seconds after the curtain went up, we realised that we should have paid more attention to the name of the venue: Marionettentheater. Well, really. Stupid word, just looks like a contraction of "Marie-Antoinette". If they had a more sensible, more puppety kind of word for puppet we'd have twigged earlier.

[G-Man]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

But was it a good show?

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Crikey, the Germans love opera

Funnily enough, it was! It was "Die Zauberfloete", which is particularly well-suited to the medium. The magic flute can give a much more effective impression of working magic on animals if the animals are controlled by strings.