Dennis Roth, Krieg in der Oper (Rombach Wissenschaften. Litterae 228), Freiburg i.Br.; Berlin; Wien 2017.

In his monograph Krieg in der Oper, Dennis Roth discusses the occurrence of war-related topics and motifs in opera. For the purpose of contextualisation, he relates the different images of war to the respective social and political conditions. Further analytical aspects include the musical representation of war and its significance in the context of a narrative. Regarding the methodological approach, Roth relies on theoretical instruments from musicology, literary studies, librettology, and intermedial narrative theory.

Starting with Giovanni Francesco Busenello and Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone, Roth introduces the example of an opera from the earlier Venetian context while also referring to Claudio Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in a short digression. Focusing on spectacle as a means for affirmation, Roth moves on to the Venetian dramma per musica and analyses aspects such as the use of fanfare tunes, the appearance of rulers and triumph, battle music, and the depiction of war motifs, which leads to a comparison of the image of war in Venetian baroque opera and the one conveyed in La Didone. Whereas a rich visual spectacle and thus an affirmative attitude towards war prevails in Venetian opera, this earlier example sheds negative light on battle and conflict. The remaining chapters range from 18th century opera compositions based on Metastasio’s libretti including the tragédie lyrique and other Italian and French tragic and comic genres to the grand opéra, Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens, and the modern example of Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus.

With this publication, Roth fills an important research gap and thus draws attention to the necessity of further investigations in this field. The wide time frame of about 300 years with a focus on the 17th and 19th century that covers both Italian and French opera forms a good basis for an extensive analysis, which is especially useful for the question of the depiction of war in different contexts and its function in the respective historical concepts. However, given the size of the book, this impedes the incorporation of more in-depth analytical examples. With this problem in mind, the highly fascinating aspect of stage music as an element of Venetian opera already occurring in the 17th century could have been specified more precisely with the support of more concrete references. It goes without saying, however, that the lack of sources is a key problem regarding this form of instrumental music. While Roth mentions divergences between libretto and score – not all written directions intending stage music were necessarily put into musical practice – and the possibility of improvisation, the question of different authorship of such potentially lost insertions is not discussed.

As the volume also addresses the different facets of content-related references to war, it is not exclusively worth reading for musicologists, but may also be of interest to a more interdisciplinary audience, especially to historians. Its scope is not limited to analytical work on the source level, but also takes more general issues such as the transfer of structural elements of war, e.g. the different motifs associated with a battle, and the stylisation of those components for the transmission to the opera stage into account, which makes it accessible to a wider readership.