Welcome, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us here today in Leipzig and online.
My name is Barbara Babic, and it is my great pleasure to chair this book presentation.
Today we speak about music theatre and the Holy Roman Empire, the German musical stage
at the turn of the 19th century, published by Cambridge University Press in summer 2022.
And this panel discussion gathers together the author Dr. Osteen Redhorn and two distinguished
historians, Professor Eleanor Foster and Professor Axel Koerner.
In the next hour, we will celebrate and explore this wonderful book that makes the empire
not only more visible and on this nice book cover we seal it, but also more audible through
its many histories on and off stage.
We are very happy to engage today with this fascinating reading, which really reinforces
to us the sense of the empire being a theatre hub in Central Europe, whose cultural legacy
is still visible today.
I will now hand over to Eleanor Foster to present us her ideas, and I will ask our audiences
to keep questions for the Q&A session or just drop some comments in the chat.
Thank you.
First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to talk
about Osteen's book from the perspective of a historian.
So I really enjoyed reading it, as it also takes up recent trends in historical scholarship,
applying and developing them using the example of German music theatre.
So first of all, Osteen makes sure to properly position the context of his study, which is
the Holy Roman Empire.
And he's of course right, in fact, the historiographical view of the empire was negative for a very
long time, owing especially to the Prussian German historians of the 19th century.
So in an effort to support their own national interests at that time, namely unifying the
German territories and fashioning it into a national state, an empire with a completely
different constitution, like the Holy Roman Empire was, could not be viewed positively.
So different, as I said, and you always wrote different means, this is significant for the
context of the book.
Osteen always refers to that, that there was, for example, no central capital.
And instead of this, many cities were important.
And while there was an emperor, he did not have the same power of direct intervention
as was, for example, known from monarchic states, even though the authority of those
potentates was likewise overestimated for a long time.
So here we are talking about another narrative, he's talking against narratives all the time
through the book, in this case, the narrative is this of absolutism, the thought exclusive
rule of princes.
So in any case, the Holy Roman Empire was a loose structure with an interplay of power
between the emperor, the imperial estates, so the secular and the classical princes,
and the imperial cities, and of course, the imperial knights.
So the fact that it functioned nonetheless, and actually very good, was perceived by contemporaries
as a broader framework of belonging until its dissolution.
And this fact only began to be reflected more intensively in research around the time of
the 200 years anniversary of the end of the empire in 2006.
So you cited also examples from before, and of course there were some before, but so it
really the trend I think started in 2006.
And this upswing in research on the Holy Roman Empire and its significance initially led
to an overemphasis that has since slowly balanced out to a middle ground.
But of course, there is still a need for further research on the empire.
And this is now where Austen's book comes in.
He argues against the hitherto customary division of music theatre, which speaks for example
of different evolutions in the north and the south, or especially for Austrian lines of
development.
So in other words, a classification projected backwards from the more firmly established
states of the 19th and 20th century.
And this division as understood by your book is questionable even more because of another
reason as previous studies have only ever included selected individual cities.
And Austen now by contrast shows that these areas actually belonged to the same cultural
area.
He calls it Kulturkreis and works with this term, which while not limited to the Holy
Roman Empire, certainly had its core there.
Therefore, he argues the division accordingly to princely states should be abandoned and
the empire as a whole should be used as a framework.
And this actually, one has to say, corresponds much more closely to the perception of the
contemporaries who described themselves as German in the sense of the Holy Roman Empire.
So belonging, if we are talking about belonging, existed on several levels.
That of the narrow area of the respective city could be region or principality as well
as that of the empire.
Austen therefore seeks other criteria than the usual back projected princely states for
categorizing the developments and he finds them in the 10 Reichskreiße, imperial circles.
So these Reichskreiße had been established for administrative purposes in the 15th and
16th centuries, each or almost each combining multiple principalities, cities and imperial
knighthoods.
And one has to say the Reichskreiße were likewise long neglected in research, but they
now serve Austen as entities of examination, for example, for determining the frequency
of theatre performances.
The results, for example, which is probably no surprise, seem to show no relationship
between the size or population density of a Kreis and the frequency of theatres or performances.
But they still serve as a structural order.
And this is the point I would like to address in the discussion.
We had already a discussion in the morning, but I think it would be good if we sum up
the intercourse then again because these Reichskreiße are in structural order.
But I think one should ask if contemporaries really conceded and discussed the Kreis as
entities of affiliation or whether they were primarily just an administrative level.
So you gave in the morning very interesting examples of this possibility and the other.
So I think we should then put that together.
Because originally these Reichskreiße were established for organizing, for example, defense
or enforcing imperial decisions.
So they undoubtedly offer an interesting alternative to the small scale arrangement of the imperial
units of territories, imperial cities, and even imperial villages.
And there are also existed imperial courts, so-called Reichskreiße.
And then, of course, it's very small scaled.
And of course, the imperial knights.
But the question still stands always, but what concrete insights can they offer?
This is one point.
So whether applied to the Reichskreiße or ultimately to cities or territories, the investigation
by Austen has a very broad focus.
It connects the German music theater performed in a multitude of cities.
And in doing so, employs a different approach than has previously been applied.
It does not start out, as I said, from a selection of cities, but instead looks at the studied
sources.
And this is above all the theater calendar as well as letters with information and musical
pieces, Musikstücke is my translation, that were sent back and forth.
The theater calendar provides a great deal of information about these musical pieces
and their titles and assignments to authors.
From the perspective of historiography, this offers the exciting possibility, which also
Austen had in mind, to think in terms of movements and networks.
Since this is then where current approaches also in history, employing entangled history
and spatial constructions come into play.
So Austen begins the book very elegantly with letters emphasizing the networking in the
Holy Roman Empire by way of the Imperial Postal Service of Turin and Taxis.
This postal service enabled information exchange in terms of both the correspondence sending
reports to the journal and the distribution of the journal itself.
It also serve people interested in exchanging information about music theater and sending
each other these pieces of music directly.
And at the same time, the letters and the journal reveal which music troupes appeared
in which cities.
In other words, how they moved from point to point.
The lines thus drawn constitute the space in which German musical theater took place
and this is very much into construction of space.
The many figures in the book also illustrate very well how intertwined the individual locations
in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond were.
Now emphasizing entangled history.
This approach is often applied in the context of global history which of course does not
always have to be done.
But entanglements beyond the territory of the empire are of course addressed in the
book as well.
They mostly lead the reader to other predominantly German speaking areas even if not within the
empire and at the same time they are also recurring links to, for example, Italy and
France very often.
And only in the morning you were talking about other destinations because this is something
I wanted to ask you.
Because in view of the question of German language music theater in the Holy Roman Empire,
you could say this is enough, this is sufficient only to have this area.
But I think nevertheless it could seem interesting to look a little further at how long the lines
are going and ask whether the theater calendar also increasingly reported, for example, performances
in New York or other emigration destinations or whether there were influences from elsewhere
besides Italy and France.
So the question if you kind of cut off these lines or if you look how far the lines are
leading.
And this brings me to a final point.
Austen's book reads so well, not least because he consistently argues against the old narratives.
And a key theme in this context is of course the question to what extent the rise of German
music theater can be linked to early German nationalism.
Austen rightly refuses to accept this theory that is a very early nationalism and convincingly
shows that many plays addressing the problems of the empire from the 1770s onwards were
not harbingers of a German nation state.
Rather by referring to the empire's own history, they sought to preserve, support, or reform
its constitution in such a way that it could be maintained.
So these examples you bring in the concluding chapter staging the empire are very coherent
and persuasive.
But recourse to history also occurred in the individual territories of the empire during
the period, especially of the French and Napoleonic Wars.
However, I would say that its purpose here was to provide orientation during these many
changes of rule and constitution to reassure oneself of one's own roots.
So my question is, could this be reflected in music theater as well?
As you remind us several times, fatherland or fatherland and patriotism were ambiguous
terms.
On the one hand, they could be applied to the empire, but on the other, like the word
national too, they were primarily used in the context of the narrow sphere of rule.
So here too, I would not speak of early nationalism, but nevertheless ask whether there were attempts
in German music theater to incorporate historical topics from specific territories.
Or would that have been impossible since it would have contradicted the logics because
such works perhaps could not have been performed everywhere?
So your thesis is going in this common repertoire and not a special repertoire.
And now the final question I want to raise is this, in the epilogue Echoes of an Empire,
you talk about traces of the German music theater of the empire extending into the 19th
century.
So for example, the fact that the composers and performers had been socialized in the
empire and therefore perpetuated these logics, but could one also postulate that thinking
in imperial context itself was maintained by at least one generation, this generation
at that time, because after all the break between the empire's dissolution in 1806 and
the beginning of the German Confederation in 1815 was perhaps not so momentous to a
large share of the affected people and areas.
So perhaps not the Austrian monarchy and not Prussia, but the Confederation of the Rhine,
which united many of the former imperial territories between 1806 and 1813 is very often forgotten.
So it could also be seen as a smooth transition.
So the actual question is, when did people stop thinking in empire terms?
Thank you so much, Eleanor, for casting light on the many layers of space and belonging
that resonate out of Osteen's book.
I will now hand over to Axel Koerner and the floor is yours.
Thank you, Barbara.
Thank you for organizing this and also thank you for the introduction.
Eleanor and I did a division of labor.
Eleanor is the specialist of polities around 1800 that are not nation states, polities
such as the Habsburg Monarchy or indeed the Holy Roman Empire.
And my task is this afternoon to read Osteen's book as an opera scholar, someone interested
in the history of music.
And these two topics along which we divided our task, they're actually closely related
because so much music history and history of opera in particular is still written in
terms of nation states and ideas of national belonging.
And I think what really unites our ESC project on Opera in the Habsburg Monarchy with Osteen's
project is that we want to think about music beyond ideas of national belonging.
And I think it is really this focus that obliges us to rethink music history.
And Osteen makes a wonderful contribution that I think with this panel, we should really
celebrate here because this is a book that stands out from conventional scholarship on
music theater exactly because it is situated at the edge of what we often refer to as an
age of nationalism, but he has the courage and the skill to escape this logic of thinking
back about music in terms of nationality.
And this is really an extraordinary achievement.
I have not read so far a book that makes it so clear that music in the decades leading
up to 1800, leading up to the Napoleonic Wars, has to be understood, has to be read, has
to be heard, has to be looked at from a perspective that is different from national histories
of music.
His topic is really music for the German language stage.
And you might then think that this contradicts already to some extent what I said at the
beginning.
But the interesting thing is he makes this argument that there was a specific German
music for the German language stage, but it still escapes this logic of thinking about
music in national terminology.
And the reason for that is really that he connects this musical genre to the imperial
system, to the political setup, the constitutional setup of the Holy Roman Empire that decided
to support a theater industry as a kind of imperial institution.
And the reason why this is a topic in music history that we haven't thought about is simply
because the Holy Roman Empire, as Eleanor said earlier, has had such an incredible bad
press in historiography since the 19th century.
And I dare to say that actually the way how Barroso German historiography has presented
the empire, if you think about the tradition going back to Treitschke, all the way into
the 20th and the 21st century, if you think about the quite extraordinary way in which
contemporary colleagues today still deal with the Holy Roman Empire, if you think about
the long way to the West, if you think about the way how most representatives of the Bielefeld
school and so on have dealt with the Holy Roman Empire, it's actually really extraordinary.
The, yes, I dare to say arrogance with which they looked at a polity that was incredibly
meaningful not only as a culture, but also as this political symbol and as a political
day-to-day reality for people living through that.
And we only have to look back at works like Goethe's Dichterung und Warheit to see how
incredibly relevant really the institutions, the symbolism, the ceremonies linked to the
Holy Roman Empire, to the situations, to situations like coronations, elections of emperors, how
relevant this really was for the day-to-day political imagination of people.
And this makes it actually highly problematic that we still tend to apply this teleological
view where we look at polities such as the Holy Roman Empire, but also the Ottoman Empire,
or indeed the Habsburg monarchy back from the perspective of nation states, yes, that
at some point in history emerged, but that don't allow us to really pass judgment on
the value of these political institutions.
And I think there is a very important argument to be made in favor of these polities that
were not nation states, but it also will change the way how we think about European culture.
And music in this context plays a very important role.
Austen's focus is on music for the German language stage, but he reminds us, and it's
important also for us when we try to contextualize his research, that it always happens also
within the imperial system in a context where court theaters also performed French and Italian
music theater.
So what he does here in this book is that he actually recovers the role of German language
theater within the context of other language theaters that also marked polities such as
the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire.
Italian opera had in these polities this particular function that it tries to fuse theater with
politics, representing particular ideas of states, virtues linked to rulers, and so on.
Opera Syria was, especially for that reason, adopted by the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg
monarchy.
And the book asks these questions to what extent actually Zinspiel and German language
theater could contribute to this political role that theater could have in the context
of these polities.
One of the reasons why German theater became important, Austen tells us, is that German
theater was, in many respects, cheaper to stage compared to Italian opera, although
I think there's a moment of change also that also these German music theater versions became
more complex and therefore also more expensive to stage.
On the whole, he shows us how German music theater since the late 1760s became more and
more important, linked to some extent to the foundation of the Hamburger Nationale Theater.
And he leads this story on into the first years, the first decade of the 19th century
until 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire was basically abandoned.
This whole context is important for the way how we think about German music, because German
music was teleologically invented.
Looking back, that music that didn't have kind of a national character at the time was
later written into a German music history, where then suddenly a figure like Beethoven
appears as a German composer without considering his roots in the electorate of Cologne and
in the Holy Roman Empire, which makes actually the step from Bonn to Vienna for Beethoven
much more easy to follow than if you think about him as a German composer.
And we have then, looking back at this period around 1800, teleologically reconstructed
national categories of music.
And it's exactly that what Austin shows us.
This doesn't work if you think about the institutional support that the Holy Roman Empire gave to
the theater industry at this time.
His book brings about a lot of facts that are surprising that we wouldn't know about.
His approach is very much working on networks of theaters.
There are hundreds of theaters that are relevant.
We wouldn't have thought that there are so many theaters that one could take into consideration.
He makes an argument that this new institution of Nationaltheater, Nationaltheater pops up
in different places of the Holy Roman Empire is precisely the fruit of the decentralization.
The polycentricity of the Holy Roman Empire that is at the root of the birth of Nationaltheater,
this is exactly the opposite of what many historians of these institutions have written
about before.
They thought that because Germany is growing together into a nation state that Nationaltheater
came up.
He shows us that it's exactly the opposite because of the polycentric structure of the
Holy Roman Empire, we then have Nationaltheater that tries to connect repertoire, that connects
people, that connects people that are passionate about music.
He goes so far to argue that German music around 1800 is to a large extent conditioned
by the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire.
This gives us a very different perspective on what German music actually was all about.
He writes about a genre of music that is not any longer well known to us.
Of course, anybody who has looked at music in that period will have come across Dittus
von Dittusdorf as a double bass player and composer.
We know also that he wrote opera and so on.
But what he shows us is that works such as The Apothecary and The Doctor were actually
frequently much better known than the same works that we still listen to today from that
period.
And he makes a very credible argument that there's a whole range of theater, of musical
genres that matter to people at the time that we no longer understand.
But the fact that these works of music didn't make it in history doesn't necessarily mean
that they were not important.
Because the large proportion of the repertoire in the 19th century, in the late 18th century
and at the beginning of the 19th century, our works that were extremely popular at the
time were restaged within these huge, extensive networks of theaters were produced by traveling
groups over and over again.
And these are works that determined the musical imagination at the time.
These are works that influenced also the composers we still listen today.
And in this sense, recovering this repertoire of which we know only a very, very small fraction
today, I see this kind of work in the context of other recent research that tries to recover
music.
We have largely forgotten in music history.
I think about the works of Katherine Hambridge on music in the Napoleonic period, Alessandra
Pallida's work on the music that was performed in the Napoleonic period and around 1800 in
Upper Italy.
But I also think about research like Barbara Babbage's very important work on melodrama.
That is something that we can't really imagine how it worked for people at the time.
Austin shows us that also at the time, there were philosophers who had doubts about this
genre.
But nevertheless, that is a music that we don't know anything about.
That is music that we don't easily understand today.
But it is the music that marked the musical imagination and the theatrical imagination
and also the political imaginations of hundreds of thousands of people at the time.
And I think this alone is reason enough to recover these works and try to understand
them and work about them.
One could think about this book as a work that is very much focused on something German.
He must like somehow the German language.
He must like German music, because otherwise you can't write such a substantial book on
this topic.
But he is eager to always point out that composers writing German music theater also composed
theater in other languages.
And this is also a tradition we sometimes have forgotten.
Just think about the tradition, I don't know, of Jahemo Maierbe, who made, of course, his
career originally through Italian opera.
And then, as the Prussian drew, wrote mostly French grandes au caret.
And this seems to have been much more common at the time that people actually move between
genres.
It becomes, of course, also logical if you think about the Italian Mozart and the Mozart
of Zingspiele.
But he gives us also other very interesting examples for this development also with regard
to the translation of these very particular German works.
He gives the example of Bender's hugely popular Ariadne of Naxos that was translated into
French, into Danish, into Hungarian, into Russian, into Polish, into Czech, and into
Italian and Swedish.
So you might think about this as a really bizarre German thing to do these melodramas.
But if they were translated into so many different languages, then we understand music as a far
more cosmopolitan and transnational phenomenon.
We think about it much more in terms of cultural transfer.
And again, this is actually an argument to move away from trying to frame music composers,
the repertoire, the institution of theaters in a national framework.
And this is, of course, something that we very much share here in our project where,
as Barbara said at the beginning, we try to think about music and music theater around
1800 and in the 19th century in particular in terms of bringing people together in repertoires,
the music composers, the entire music industries that were shared among crownlands, among nationalities,
among different people, rather than thinking about them only in terms of political nationalism.
So what he demonstrates in his book is that there existed around 1800 a shared musical
theatrical culture that to a large extent has been lost to us.
He does that, if I try to summarize the book just with focus on its musical and operatic
thematic, he does this by looking at networks to what extent actually opera and music theater
was not the product of some kind of static institutions, but evolving all the time out
of the mobility of repertoires, the mobility of musicians, the mobility of theater companies.
Very interesting in this context, the role of women, how many female directors of troupes,
he quotes to us.
We have started thinking about the role of female singers in the opera industries.
He shows us what wonderful managers and directors these women were running, huge transnational
international companies performing all over Europe and beyond and running these complicated
structures of troupes.
He does that through the repertoire, obviously reconstructing a repertoire where most composers
that were hugely successful at the time, we no longer know, where the libretti they composed
we no longer know.
So chapter two mostly recovers all this work.
And he thinks about communication.
What through the letters, the correspondence between companies, correspondence in the theater
journals in the theater calendar and so on, what kind of information was exchanged.
So in this theater industry emerged really through communication.
And we learn a lot about the material culture of production, things like custom stage sets
and so on that very often shape the repertoire itself.
So we would, in today's perspective, think that the music shapes what we see on stage
because there are certain things you need to perform a particular work.
But he shows that it was often the other way around, that it was actually that you had
a particular set of costumes or sets that you use then to produce a particular work.
So our idea of what theater actually is changes completely as a consequence of that.
There's the important chapter on melodrama.
I mentioned that already, but having here another person in the room who knows everything
about it, I won't say too much about that.
The point that I find most interestingly also from my Habsburg perspective is actually chapter
five, where he speaks about how music theater contributed to the communication of political
identities, how actually a complex polity like the Holy Roman Empire, this is different
princely entities that we, from the perspective of the 20th and 21st century, can hardly understand
what it meant to people, how this was filled with semantic content through theater.
So theater played a very particular role in communicating what actually the politics of
this empire were about, what the constitutional identity of this polity was about.
And this is, for me personally, the most interesting aspect of his work in looking at the role
of theater in communicating political entities.
I think his focus on the Holy Roman Empire emphasizes once more the difference to the
Habsburg monarchy, despite the fact that the two obviously overlap.
But our argument in our project for the huge importance of Italian opera is really because
it operates on a more abstract level, this idea of Italian opera seria as a reference
to the Renaissance, to humanism, and so on.
That's the reason why since the 16th, 17th century, it became so hugely important for
the political communication of the Habsburg monarchy that understood itself not only as
a multinational but also as a supranational entity.
It becomes quite understandable why in the Holy Roman Empire then the emphasis had to
be more on the musical stage.
So I think this is something that I would like to discuss with you, maybe also further
thinking about the very different political function of Italian opera in the Holy Roman
Empire as opposed to the Habsburg monarchy.
So I think this is something that we have to think about further.
There is this interesting polycentric structure where theater took place, but he integrates
this in the bigger Kulturkreise.
We spoke already about the Reichskreise.
The Reichskreise is a constitutional entity that Eleanor already asked you about.
I would ask you about this Kulturkreise because that's in a way an analytical category that
you in a way invent if you say that there was a shared culture that went beyond the
borders of the Reich.
How useful is that?
Can we so easily invent such a category, that's something that one could still discuss.
Another point that I would like to mention briefly, and Barbara you have to stop me if
I talk for too long, is the interesting reconfiguration between the theaters, the troops, and the
public.
He makes a very credible argument that actually the public played a very active role in shaping
the repertoire and having an impact on what was put on stage.
This happens there all the time in his book, that the public wanted to see particular works,
so we actually get to a history of music theater that is somehow a grassroots movement and
not something that comes from above, where an imperial institution or a princely institution
can command what happens in the theater.
So we see there also a democratization of a historical process for which our more conventional
focus on the Huftheater, on court theaters, actually they couldn't see that because they
just approached it from a different perspective.
Maybe the last point I still would like to mention is what we can really learn about
how the polity, this structure of state, this constitutional structure of the Holy Roman
Empire was made meaningful to people through the symbolism, the rituals, the political
life that people experienced through events such as the election of an emperor.
Just think about how incredibly modern this institution really was.
If you think about how important really the election of the monarch still was, even if
there was an hereditary element, this was a monarchy that was more modern than what
we have seen over the last two weeks happening in London.
This is an elected monarch, and the election of the monarch was hugely important.
It was staged.
It was staged also through music.
But then also the coronation itself.
I was so glad that I read your book shortly before my sons with their English passport
were watching on telly the coronation of King Charles III because a lot of the things happening
there, despite being a keen reader of Barbara Stolberg-Rilling, I wouldn't have been able
to explain to them why he suddenly stripped naked and anointed and then dressed again
differently behind the screen and so what is all that is happening.
All this was linked to music, and the music was incredibly meaningful.
But it's music that, to a large extent, we no longer know.
Of course, you quote the important examples of Salieri, of Mozart, and so on, the failure
in a way of Mozart in Frankfurt there, or the lack of success we should rather say.
But then there was all the other music around the coronation of Joseph, the coronation of
Leopold II, the coronation of Franz II, these works that were meant to be historical, set
in the 12th century, but at the same time communicating something about the empire at
this very moment when the French Revolution destroys everything that people knew about
Europe, everything that they loved about their princes, everything that they loved about
their constitution, a constitution that was so interesting to the wider world that Benjamin
Franklin had to travel to Gottingen to learn how to set up federalism in the United States.
And still there are historians today who say that the Holy Roman Empire was doomed to disappear.
How shortsighted is this theological view on these polities that still completely dominates
the kind of history we see on television almost every week?
If I sum up what I had to say about this book, I think there are five points that should
convince you to read the book.
One is he writes about forgotten musical genres that we should know about if you want to understand
the history of music because also what came later and also what survived in the repertoire
was shaped by the music we no longer know.
He makes a fantastic example for the spatial turn in the study of music.
I've always tried to promote through Tosca and so on in the transnational turn in music
scholarship and in opera studies in particular, but it's a little bit like when the Bielefeld
School called for Den vergleich als Königswerk der Geschichte.
People talked about it, but it didn't really happen.
I think this is one of the early examples of a spatial turn in music scholarship, and
I think this makes it a model for future scholars.
His emphasis on the polycentric instead of a static history of music theater, that theater
has actually only worked as a consequence of mobility.
This is what you learned through this very particular study.
It's an argument against any kind of national teleologies and the way how we think about
music, open any CD booklet, open any theater program, but also open any work of scholarship.
Teleology is still everywhere, and you argue against it.
And then also the way how you analyze, how you read, how you think about the semantic
content of politics in opera when you analyze such things as the music for the coronation
of an emperor.
What you do there goes so much beyond most of the scholarship you can read today when
historians of the 20th and 21st century fantasize about the political meaning.
They tell us what these works mean for them, how they read this libretti.
But this is methodologically wrong what they do there.
You show us that we have to actually read this musical and theatrical and operatic symbolism
with the eyes of a person living around 1800 and not an American, a German, an Italian
scholar of the 21st century reading something into a libretto that simply isn't there.
So also from this point of view, I find your methodology really path-breaking and important
quite apart from the fact that you are a scholar in the digital humanities, that you know how
to operate an IT technology in a way that I could only dream of.
So thank you very much for writing this book.
This is wonderful.
Thank you, Axel, for connecting so nicely the theatrical stage with the political stage.
And now I think, Austin, you have enough irons in the fire to start your paper and your reply
to these wonderful papers.
Absolutely.
I've got almost three pages of notes here.
First of all, thank you for the invitation to join you here.
And I'm flattered.
It's always such a delight to have such esteemed colleagues read so closely your work.
Yeah, it's a good feeling.
So thank you for that and engaging so closely with it.
It's wonderful.
So there's no really good place to start other than, I suppose, at the beginning.
And I've just sort of started some of the big questions that came up that I'd like to
respond to.
And I guess at first, Eleanor, you pointed out this division of North German traditions
and South German traditions and perhaps even Austrian traditions and abandoning it.
And I think part of this book, what I wanted to do is not so much abandon these distinctions,
but recognize that there's another side to them.
Of course, there's local difference.
And I think I make this clear throughout the book that there are differences in how music
theater was realized on a local level.
Now, what local means differed.
It's not always the same.
It could be-- well, we'll come to that actually with the cries of the question.
But yeah, it's about seeing that there's another side to this that isn't really discussed much.
But also, you're absolutely right to call it into question.
Yes, there are pieces from Vienna being performed in North Germany.
Yes, with alterations, there's also pieces from the Rheinland being performed in Northeast,
what is today Northwest Poland, for instance.
So it's about seeing that this repertoire moved, but also that boundaries, both within
and actually without the empire-- and we'll come back to this-- were far more porous than
we saw, or than perhaps that we thought.
So again, it's not necessarily to question this earlier scholarship or anything like
that, but rather to deepen the dialogue and the conversation, perhaps make it slightly
more complicated at times, perhaps not.
Yeah, OK, so the Kreise, why there?
And as you said, we talked about this a little bit earlier.
So that part of chapter one is trying to re-establish this landscape of early modern music theater
in Germany, or the Holy Roman Empire.
And to do that, I mined the Tätterkallende, because it's a consistent source.
It was published throughout this entire period, so I could track and trace the movement throughout
time.
And there were methodological problems looking at each individual entity, legal entity within
the Holy Roman Empire, of which at this point there are about 1,000.
With representation in the Reichstag, there were about 320.
And what I wanted to do is-- I could have simply said, here they all are.
But what I wanted to do was look at the data a little bit more closely.
And so the Kreise offered an intermediary level that would offer a little bit more than
the empire as a whole.
So we could at least see in some regions that were, in some cases, quite diverse and diffuse
in a practical way that looking at each individual territory just wouldn't allow.
Also, it's about making-- it offered a way of looking at it consistently.
So 10 entities instead of 320 or over 1,000.
But also, again, it's that consistency, because the way theaters were reporting where they
were performing sometimes were those locations, sometimes as much as a court in a certain
place, sometimes as large as Hungary.
So it was important to try to find a middle ground that would offer a consistent view
of exploring this data, not necessarily as contemporaries then would have seen it, but
to offer the reader a little bit more than just the map shows.
So that's really why I went with the Kreise.
And I think also, in terms of contemporary readers of the Theatekanten in the 18th century
and early 19th century, what they would have realized or the role that the Kreise played
in their everyday lives probably would have differed from person to person.
If you were a judge or something like that, it would have been more important.
If you were a farmer, perhaps less important.
But yeah, well, that's why I went with the Kreise in the end in that part of the chapter.
But that is not to deny that it would look very differently if we looked at only cities
or other regions, however they're defined.
Of course, the data will show different things depending on how you look at it in any number
of ways that you can look at it.
The entanglement, and you brought up this excellent point about entanglement and global
history and how do we look beyond the Holy Roman Empire with some of this particular
data.
That was a very, very tricky question because as the book hopefully shows, this network
extended well beyond the Holy Roman Empire.
So German language theater did not just happen in the Holy Roman Empire.
And you were bringing up questions even about this music theater in places like New York
or what's happening in New York reflecting upon perhaps what readers would know.
Part of the reason for me selecting the Holy Roman Empire were my own boundaries, and I'll
come back to this in a question that Axel posed about imperial boundaries and how we
manage them as historians.
But for me, it offered a way to look mainly at German language theaters, because in other
territories outside where clearly German language theaters were happening, there were also national
theaters performing in their own national languages or local languages.
And so it offered a way for me to compartmentalize this a little bit and make it more manageable
and draw a boundary.
But those boundaries are very, very difficult to show graphically and also in prose.
So everything that I was doing, I hope to say that it's not limited to the empire itself.
But when we look at the data where the German language theaters are performing, it's absolutely
clear that well over the 50%-- I think it's 70%, a little north of that, and 75%-- are
operating within the territories of the empire.
But importantly, many are going beyond that.
But it's clear that the minority is happening in places where, although German was spoken,
they belong to a different polity, like Poland's Lithuania or something like that.
And the epilogue-- yeah, that's another great question.
When did people stop thinking in imperial terms about the Holy Roman Empire and going
on?
I guess in a way, in one sense, we haven't.
I mean, we're here talking about it today.
But again, I think it depends on where and when.
So you were saying in the beginning of your talk about 2006 and the biennial anniversary
of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.
And so in a way, I suppose, for places like Regensburg, that memory of the important institution
it hosted there since 1663, the perpetual diet, or the Reichstag, never left.
In places like Wetzlar, their imperial institution is still memorialized with a museum.
So in a way, that legacy is still here.
I know that's not exactly what you were asking.
But again, I suspect it depends at the time who you asked, their memory of it, or if they
didn't experience it firsthand, what they learned about it and were told about it, either
from their family or older friends and their experiences.
So I think it very much is experiential.
So I'm afraid I don't really have an answer to that question.
But that's usually the mark of a good question, that there is no simple answer.
I'll come back to some of these things, I think, as I respond to Axel.
OK, where to begin here?
All right, melodrama.
So I was led to melodrama through the reports of these theaters.
So the book, what it tries to do is it uses a distant reading in the first couple chapters,
chapters one and two, to try to then guide where I looked more closely and more traditional
close readings.
And one thing that was clear was that melodrama played a very important part, not just within
the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, but also in this larger cultural sphere that extended
well beyond it into neighboring polities.
And I didn't really know much about melodrama, and as Axel said, not many people do.
So it became very interesting, and I think I started looking more and more what people
were saying about it at the time.
And this narrative emerged from many different theater journals, at very different times
as well, within this period, where it was established in France with Pygmalion, and
then it was sort of abandoned, the French didn't want it, the Italians hadn't really
figured it out yet.
So it became this abandoned idea that the Germans, who didn't have such a strong tradition
of music theater, or as tightly controlled as say France did, or the tradition that Italy
had, it became this location of experimentation where they thought, let's look at something
that maybe we could make our own.
And it's interesting, because at first, it starts with how melodrama is typically defined,
I would say, in secondary scholarship, an alternation between spoken text and instrumental
music.
And people thought this was great, because recitative is boring, and this allows you
to actually understand what people are saying on stage, and give music still a voice to
express the emotions.
So separating these two things, giving them equal opportunity.
But then people started commenting on how boring that was.
And so it became this, how do we take the best aspects of all the music theater we have,
Richard Chetive, arias, simple songs, just vocal music in general, and also this melodramatic
technique is what we call it today, this alternation.
And you see people experimenting with this.
And it's at the same time that melodrama as a genre is sort of co-opted by opera to be
used in places in the drama that were extraordinary.
So it's this entangled history of music theater, but melodrama just really isn't discussed.
But it's clear that at the time, people were really talking about it for both in positive
terms and also quite negative terms.
And it's important to understand that and recognize, again, both sides of that sort
of coin.
And yeah, so I think actually one point you said towards the end that I want to come back
to is we have to look at this, or we should perhaps as historians look at this repertoire
and this period of music theater as they perhaps would be looking at it.
And that's why I relied quite heavily on period sources.
But also, I didn't want to correct mistakes.
Of course, I pointed them out, like misattributions and stuff like that, because these people
are encountering these things for the first time.
And if somebody transmitted incorrect information, it's quite important to know, because that
would shape meaning, their meaning.
And it's unclear when or how they would ever correct that.
So that was something else I wanted to do, was to look at what this meant for the people
at the time, during the time, as the time changed.
And that's also something that the data aspect is trying to accomplish, is that it's tracking
through time almost trends of how and what things are being talked about.
And then that would guide the closer reading, again, which brings me back to melodrama.
But melodrama was part of a larger tradition of music theater.
I think one question, I think it came up in both discussions or responses to the book,
but what people performed, and when, and how that might have reflected a local authority,
whether it's a court or a monastery, whatever.
And the public, the public shaping this, there are examples where you have the court theater.
I think one of the ones I use in the book is that the Duke in Weimar wants a Dittersdorf
opera performed.
And they had just been in the area performing it elsewhere like five or six times in a row,
because the public kept wanting it.
And then for the Duke's birthday, he requested the troupe return to Weimar to perform it
for his birthday.
So in some cases, it's that.
Maybe he was-- I couldn't find any more documentary evidence to suggest why he wanted that.
Perhaps he realized it was popular with people, and he wanted to hear it.
Perhaps he liked it.
In other cases, you see more traditional things, where perhaps an Italian opera is commissioned
for a special occasion.
And they would perform that as a special one-off sort of event.
In other cases, they would perform spoken theater, honoring a piece perhaps composed
or written specifically to honor the monarch on a special day, a special event, and then
go back to their regular performance schedule.
But so much of that performance schedule was informed by not only local tastes, but also
the tastes of other theater directors and other theatrical experience around the Holy
Roman Empire.
And that's hopefully clear in the third chapter, where a collection of letters stored sort
of right behind me in that building where most of them came from are talking about this.
They talk about anything and everything, but mostly repertory.
And it's clear that theater directors were open to having the experiences of other theater
directors shape what they programmed, when they programmed it, and even what music they
looked forward to adopting into their own spielplan, for instance.
So yes, of course, there was this constant repertory that was changing, and it would
change perhaps in some cases, depending on where they were, but certainly when.
And also there were occasional pieces written for special occasions, like the coronation.
But that wouldn't stop theater directors from trying to adapt this for other times and other
places.
Heinrich de Löwe is a case in point, where yes, it was created for the coronation of
Franz II in 1792, but it was designed from the very beginning with both the theater poet
and the composer to be able to be used elsewhere and at other times for other celebrations.
So there was this forethought in making occasional work transcend the occasion.
And I think Eleanor had asked, building on this, a question about could something written
in one place that was specific to a history of one place be performed elsewhere?
The answer is yes, but it often wasn't successful.
And there was a piece, actually around the same time, where it was written, I think it
was written somewhere in Saxony, I don't remember the exact place.
And it was performed later in Bonn.
And the response to it was, yeah, it was good, but there was too much that was Saxon to be
of any relevance here.
And I think it was only performed that one time.
And so there was an impetus and a desire to make music theater adaptable throughout the
empire.
So this is what, hopefully what I was trying to show is it works on multiple levels.
Just because somebody might have identified with one territory didn't preclude the ability
to feel a sense of belonging to another place.
And I think that's something that in our more modernist headspace and thinking that sometimes
we forget is that, yeah, it's not a zero sums game or they're not mutually exclusive.
You can identify with multiple things in multiple ways.
And I think that's quite important and one of the things I tried to address.
Yeah, I'm sort of going through my notes here.
I think I touched on the main things I wanted to touch on.
But I guess the repertory itself, yeah, I hope it was a bit surprising because it wasn't
what I was expecting to find necessarily.
I didn't really know what I was expecting.
I just sort of opened the box and saw what was in there and tried to make sense of it.
But I think it really is important and hopefully some of these pieces might gain attention
in some way that they're staged again.
And I am happy to say that this has happened with the melodrama that I worked with.
And there's so much about it we don't know.
And I don't mean the contextual history of the piece itself, but of the genre, how it
worked practically on stage.
And so it offers these performance-led research opportunities, which I guess is sort of the
buzzword, that I think are really, really important to understanding this period and
the diversity.
I think ultimately what I wanted to show is there was nothing particularly static about
this music theater, the music theater of this place and time.
It was constantly changing.
It was constantly shifting.
Yes, composers would write German-language works, but they would also for other occasions
write Italian works or mass for the election of the Holy Roman Emperor or something like
that.
Thank you so much for such productive discussion.
And I think these debates will go on.
And at least today at our Basquele as an homage to the last chapter of this book, thanks to
everyone for engaging in this discussion and could I please ask you to join me in thanking
our speakers.
Thank you so much.
[applause]
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