About the work
A comic opera in three acts; Lortzing wrote both text and music. It premiered on 20 February 1837 at the Stadttheater Leipzig, where Lortzing was engaged as a singer and actor and himself took the comic role of Peter at the premiere. It was his first major stage success and confirmed his resolve to keep writing for musical theatre.
Plot
After a brawl between two soldiers returning home, their identification papers are swapped, so that Wilhelm Stark is taken for Gustav Busch and vice versa. In a small south German town around 1830, the mix-up causes confusion in both men's love lives until, in the end, the misunderstandings are cleared up and the right couples find each other.
Cultural significance
The premiere's success was surpassed that same year by Lortzing's next work, "Zar und Zimmermann," with which he achieved his breakthrough as Germany's leading composer of comic opera.