Abstract
The historiography of the German Romantic opera is a largely ignored topic today. However, its elucidation of the multifold intellectual debates on the relationships between German music and German national identity among international academicians makes it worthy of investigation. The discourse of German Romantic opera within the German-speaking community reveals how those debates are shaped and addressed. In this essay, the author analyzes the writings of pre- and post-World War II works by Siegfried Goslich (1937, 1975), Carl Dahlhaus (1983, 1984), Sabine Henze-Döhring and Sieghart Döhring (1997), which are representative not only of their individual narrative methods but also of their sequential “problem-solution” exposition. Through the lens of these German-speaking musicologists, this paper explicates how the conceptions of German Romantic opera narratives break through a nationalistic framework by veering toward the “history of ideas” in composition technique, and then achieve a historiography of transnational fluidity and connectivity over the course of the twentieth century.