Why was Carl-Maria von Weber unhappy with “Oberon?
It was not a true opera, as Planche acknowledged. It was more of a “Singspiel,” a musical comic play. Planche alleged that he gave the English public what it would best appreciate. At that time, and even earlier, true opera in French, Italian, and German had been performed in England, but relatively little had been done in English. The English, indeed, had tended to dismiss opera as foreign and rather silly (as in The Critic by James Sheridan), for much of the eighteenth and very early nineteenth century. It was primarily class snobbery which made the upper classes flock to opera in Planche’s time, as the working classes flooded into the traditional theaters. This suggests that taste and appreciation for opera as an art form was rather slow awakening in London, as Planche asserts. Good singing was readily admired, and so was singing in character for musical plays, although the English wanted the song to be followed with spoken dialog, rather than from one musical performance to follow
