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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of many composers who, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thought more and more about a German-language opera. The idea of a German national opera was intensively discussed in Mannheim, and also put into practice with Ignaz Holzbauer's setting of Anton Klein's libretto Günther von Schwarzburg (1777). The idea of the national opera took hold in Europe during the nineteenth century. Is the German national opera, which composers and writers on music from Richard Wagner to Hans Pfitzner see as starting with Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz, a historical reality or a historiographical construct? In order to answer this question, this chapter takes a brief look at the situation of opera around 1800, for only in Germany, and not in the other two leading opera nations, Italy and France, can a development at this time be observed in which the idea of a national opera takes shape.

When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.

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