Lortzing, Albert

Lortzing, Albert

Der Waffenschmied (Vocal Score with German libretto)

For more information on the piece:
Gustav Albert Lortzing grew up in a middle-class family of theater enthusiasts. His parents had met during rehearsals at the Urania, an amateur theater in Berlin. Among their friends were musicians such as Karl Friedrich Rungenhagen, head of the Berlin Singakademie, who gave young Albert his first lessons in music theory and urged his parents to let the boy study the piano, violin, and cello. When Lortzing’s father was forced to abandon his leather goods shop, his parents took the plunge and became professional actors. In 1811-12 they received an engagement that took them to Breslau, where Albert gave his stage début in a child role at the age of ten. Breslau was followed by difficult years as itinerant actors. The family traveled from town to town – Coburg, Bamberg, Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau – before joining the A-B-C Theater in 1817. This theater, under the aegis of the impresario Derossi, took its name from its venues in Aachen, Bonn, and Cologne. Still a minor, Lortzing worked as a copyist and received instruction from orchestral musicians, though in the theoretical disciplines he was mainly self-taught. In this way he learned the workings of the theater inside and out; in the course of his career he performed as an actor, a baritone or tenor (he did not have a distinguished voice but always sang with musicality and stage-presence), a cellist, conductor, stage director, librettist, and composer. Before marrying the actress Rosina Regina Ahles at the age of twenty-five, he was constantly on tour with his parents. Later he recounted: «In Freiburg im Breisgau I waged my first public attempt at composition and wrote a chorus and dance for the play Der Schutzgeist, in which I myself played the title role…. In 1824 I composed a one-act opera, Ali, Pascha von Janina, which was received with applause in my subsequent engagements at the court theater in Detmold and in the neighboring towns of Münster and Osnabrück.» In 1826 he moved to Detmold, where he wrote his next two works, which might more properly be called singspiels: Der Pole und sein Kind and Szenen aus Mozarts Leben. In 1833 he was retained as buffo tenor at the Town Theater in Leipzig, where after ten years he advanced to the position of conductor. All in all, he spent twelve relatively happy years at this theater. It was here that he created most of his operas, in which he also appeared in singing roles. In 1837 he even wrote two operas: Die beiden Schützen, and the most successful of all his works, Zar und Zimmermann. At the première of the latter, he sang the part of Ivanov while his mother took the role of Widow Browe. In 1845 the Leipzig Opera gave him notice – «out of concern for his health,» as they put it. A year had to pass before he was appointed conductor at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. Here, however, he was only moderately successful, and in 1848 the turmoil of the revolution caused him once again to take to the road. It was not until 1850 that he found his final appointment as a conductor at the Friedrich Wilhelmstadt Theater in Berlin. Deeply dissatisfied with this unspectacular final station in his career, which also represented his financial nadir, he died of a stroke at the age of forty-nine. His death occurred the morning after the first performance of his final opera, a one-acter entitled Die Opernprobe, premièred in faraway Frankfurt am Main.

read preface to full score /  Vorwort zur Partitur lesen > HERE