The German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had a profound influence on aesthetic ideals regarding vocal delivery and emergent genres for German commentators from Ludwig Tieck to Rellstab and Wagner. With a focus on contemporary biographical sources and reception, this chapter contextualises her reception within the German states as irreducibly hybrid, as a voice that dissolved aesthetic boundaries, most clearly between speech and song. The shifting role of bel canto vis-à-vis contemporary sopranos (Henrietta Sontag / Maria Malibran), and the emergence of new genres characterise her complex reception, all of which is set against Wagner’s own claims for her artistry, following her creation of the roles Adriano (Rienzi), Senta (Holländer), and Venus (Tannhäuser).

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s marriage to Clarice Orsini in June 1469 had created a precedent, for it was the first time that the Florentine mercantile and banking family had married out of Tuscany and into a family of long-established Roman aristocrats. The Milanese ambassador predicted at the time that it would give ‘the populace, as well as some of the leading citizens, plenty to talk about’, and so, too, did the lengthy wedding ceremonies.1 Only six months later, Lorenzo’s father Piero died, plunging the twenty-year-old Lorenzo into a political crisis, as he ‘hoisted his sails’ to secure his primacy in Florence, and all too soon – before the end of his first decade in power – he was at war with the pope and the king of Naples following his brother’s murder in 1478.2