Albert Lortzing
Born in Berlin to parents who both were actors, at the age of 19 Lortzing began to play the role of youthful lover (Jugendlicher Liebhaber) at the theatres of Düsseldorf and Aachen, sometimes also singing in small tenor or baritone parts.
His first opera, Ali Pascha von Janina, appeared in 1824, but his fame as a musician rests chiefly upon the two operas Der Wildschütz (1842) and Zar und Zimmermann (1837). The latter, although now regarded as one of the masterpieces of German comic opera, was received with little enthusiasm by the public of Leipzig. Subsequent performance in Berlin, however, provoked such a tempest of applause that the opera was soon placed on all the stages of Germany. It was translated into English, French, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Bohemian, Hungarian and Russian. Der Wildschütz was based on a comedy by August von Kotzebue, and was a satire on the unintelligent and exaggerated admiration for the highest beauty in art expressed by the bourgeois gentilhomme.
Of his other operas it is only necessary to note Der Pole und sein Kind, produced shortly after the Polish insurrection of 1831, and Undine (1845).
Lortzing died in Berlin.
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