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 experiments should seek such musical extensions and decoration. It was natural, also, that an effort should ultimately be made to construct a play out of a chain of vocal numbers almost or quite without spoken dialogue. In this case the singspiel differed from the opera in the form of music adopted, which was not dramatic, but lyrical, often laid out upon the strict strophe-plan.

Song-plays of some sort are traceable in Germany as early as the 13th and 14th centuries, when they gradually detached themselves from the original church plays. In the 15th century they dropped into great vulgarity, from which in the 16th they were lifted again into dignity by the poets Paul Rebhun (d. 1546?), Hans Sachs the Meistersinger (d. 1576), and his follower Jacob Ayrer (d. 1605)—the last of whom is sometimes called the inventor of the singspiel.

In the 17th century the stimulus of the young Italian opera was early felt, and what are often styled the first German operas (Schütz' Dafne, 1627, and Staden's Seelewig, 1644) were really singspiele. From this time the singspiel becomes merged in the opera, though late in the 18th century came a notable effort to revive it as a distinct type (see sec. 158)—the result being analogous to the English ballad-opera, the French vaudeville and the modern operetta. Until this later development the singspiel exerted no important general influence, except to modify slightly the earlier German imitations of the Italian opera. For the most part the early story of German opera is simply that of the Italian type transplanted.

87. The Opera in Germany.—As in Italy, the early cultivation of dramatic music was wholly under the patronage of powerful princes as a court luxury. Among the establishments where the opera was thus taken up, that of the Emperor at Vienna was the most conspicuous, but other courts, like Dresden and Munich, were early important. About 1680 Hamburg became the chief centre in northern Europe for operatic music, a position of leadership which it retained until almost 1740.

Ere long the erection of theatres or opera-houses, more or less public, was undertaken—Munich, 1651, Vienna, 1659, Dresden, 1667, Nuremberg, 1668, Hamburg, 1678, Hanover, 1689, Brunswick, 1691, Leipsic, 1691, with Berlin not until 1742. Until about 1690 the works given were either those imported from Italy or those of the singspiel class.

The number of singspiele produced during the century was probably considerable, but nearly all of them have disappeared.

Heinrich Schütz of Dresden (d. 1672), altogether the strongest German composer of his age (see sec. 96), showed his sympathy with the new Italian dra