Opera did not take long to cross the Alps, and early in the seventeenth century the works of Italian composers found a warm welcome at the courts of southern Germany.  But Germany was not as yet ripe for a national opera.  During the first half of the century there are records of one or two isolated attempts to found a school of German opera, but the iron heel of the Thirty Years’ War was on the neck of the country, and art struggled in vain against overwhelming odds.  The first German opera, strictly so called, was the ‘Dafne’ of Heinrich Schuetz, the words of which were a translation of the libretto already used by Peri.  Of this work, which was produced in 1627, all trace has been lost.  ‘Seelewig,’ by Sigmund Staden, which is described as a ’Gesangweis auf italienische Art gesetzet,’ was printed at Nuremberg in 1644, but there is no record of its ever having been performed.  To Hamburg belongs the honour of establishing German opera upon a permanent basis.  There, in 1678, some years before the production of Purcell’s ‘Dido and AEneas,’ an opera-house was opened with a performance of a Singspiel entitled ’Der erschaffene, gefallene und aufgerichtete Mensch,’ the music of which was composed by Johannn Theile.  Three other works, all of them secular, were produced in the same year.  The new form of entertainment speedily became popular among the rich burghers of the Free City, and composers were easily found to cater for their taste.

For many years Hamburg was the only German town where opera found a permanent home, but there the musical activity must have been remarkable.  Reinhard Keiser (1673-1739), the composer whose name stands for what was best in the school, is said alone to have produced no fewer than a hundred and sixteen operas.  Nearly all of these works have disappeared, and those that remain are for the most part disfigured by the barbarous mixture of Italian and German which was fashionable at Hamburg and in London too at that time.  The singers were possibly for the most part Italians, who insisted upon singing their airs in their native language, though they had no objection to using German for the recitatives, in which there was no opportunity for vocal display.  Keiser’s music lacks the suavity of the Italian school, but his recitatives are vigorous and powerful, and seem to foreshadow the triumphs which the German school was afterwards to win in declamatory music.  The earliest operas of Handel (1685-1759) were written for Hamburg, and in the one of them which Fate has preserved for us, ‘Almira’ (1704), we see the Hamburg school at its finest.  In spite of the ludicrous mixture of German and Italian there is a good deal of dramatic power in the music, and the airs show how early Handel’s wonderful gift of melody had developed.  The chorus has very little to do, but a delightful feature of the work is to be found in the series of beautiful dance-tunes lavishly scattered throughout it.  One of these, a Sarabande, was afterwards worked up