The story of the introduction of opera into German is sufficiently amusing to form part of an operetta plot. There was no opera of native origin, but the fame of the Italian product having reached the ears of the Elector John George I., of Saxony, he determined to have one of these new lyric dramas performed as the festival play at the marriage of his daughter. Heinrich Schütz, whom we have already met as the composer of the "Seven Last Words of Christ," was the elector's court-director of music, and he was accordingly commissioned to procure from Florence a copy of "Daphne," the pastoral of Peri and Rinuccini. The copy having been obtained, Martin Opitz, a poet, was ordered to translate it into German. He did his work with poetic feeling, but without musical knowledge, and when his text was completed it could not be sung to the music of Peri. Consequently Schütz was directed to write new music, and thus the first German opera came into existence. It was performed on April 13, 1627. The work has been lost and there is no account of its reception. It is quite probable that its music imitated the Italian monodic style, with which Schütz had previously become acquainted while visiting Italy. After his second journey to Italy Schütz wrote an opera called "Orpheus," which was produced in Dresden, Nov. 20, 1638. This work is also lost, but it was probably an imitation of Monteverde's "Orfeo." Meanwhile all attempts at establishing a national German opera were overthrown by the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. When that had ended, Schütz, who had seemed likely to do something for the lyric drama in his country, devoted himself, except in the case of the work already mentioned, to sacred composition. Italian opera had made its way into Germany, where it became the fashionable amusement of the aristocracy of Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, and Munich. It had no connection with the art life of the German people, but maintained its purely exotic condition. Only in Hamburg was there anything that seemed to proceed from native impulse. It was a free city; it had grown enormously wealthy by its commerce; and it was far away from the centre of activity in the war.