Almost fifty years after the original event, Willibald Alexis’s historical novel Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht (1852) commemorated a musical performance that had taken place on October 16, 1805, at Berlin’s Nationaltheater. According to both Alexis’s reimagining and contemporary reports, after the closing “Reiterlied” of Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager a new war song was sung by audience and actors. The sensation this caused—in a city awaiting its troops’ departure for war against Napoleon—established Schiller’s play as a privileged site for political singing in Berlin and across German lands for the next decade. In this article, I account for this first occasion, its unusual press reception, and its influence by contextualizing it within a growing early nineteenth-century discourse on public communal singing, arguing that Berliners were self-consciously enacting French patriotic behaviors. As well as indicating longer-term continuities, I distinguish the political role attributed to war songs in this period from the more familiar Bildung-orientated discourse on choral singing and folk song. In contrast to established accounts that locate the emergence of popular political song in the volunteer movements of the Wars of Liberation and the national politics of the Burschenschaften and male-voice choirs, I suggest that these early performances show the official imposition of public political singing—as a kind of “defensive modernization”—in response to the Napoleonic threat. I thus revise our understanding of the establishment of singing as a modern political tool in German lands, and of the role of singing in the development of political agency and national sentiment more broadly.
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Call to mind the most familiar tendencies of Romantic aesthetics-the breaking of aesthetic conventions, nostalgia for the past, the highlighting of individual subjectivity, idolisation of wild nature-and you would be hard-pressed to extrapolate from them a characteristically Romantic political position. The pursuit of the ineffable, or the prizing of the unconscious, meanwhile, seems to shortcut this possibility altogether by suggesting a deliberate disavowal of the political world-and that is before you add music into the equation. Drawing parallels between aesthetics and politics is always a risky business, and with music and Romanticism particularly tricky. The themes of this chapter are thus best teased out by questioning their possible intersections. How did the political beliefs of Romantic musicians affect their creative endeavours? Can we speak of styles having political tendencies-and if so, what is/was the politics of 'Romantic' music? Which political tendencies contributed to Romanticism in music? Which Romantic political positions influenced musical life? Which Romantic elements of musical life influenced political life? What are the political implications of Romantic theories about music?
This conference, a collaboration between the two projects ‘French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era’ at Warwick University and ‘Music in London, 1800–1851’ at King's College London, was intended to foster interdisciplinary dialogue about early melodrama. In particular, the aim was to investigate the relationship between melodramatic techniques (spoken word over or alternated with instrumental music), melodramatic aesthetics (such as strong contrasts between good and evil and extremes of emotion) and the generic category of melodrama (given to various concert and theatrical forms). While discussion necessarily engaged with phenomena either side of the thirty years specified by the title, participants focused on the period in which melodrama came to prominence as a stage genre, a period in which several of the key European traditions coincided.
This chapter charts the changing status in Berlin of operatic repertoire associated with Friedrich II (Frederick the Great), from the gradual disappearance of opera seria by Carl Heinrich Graun and Johann Adolph Hasse to the survival of Benda’s melodramas and Singspiele, not least as throwbacks to the time of the honored Prussian monarch. Berlin’s critical commentators in this period are remarkable for their historical self-consciousness, and it’s possible to detect an emerging—and precocious—canonical discourse in the years around 1800, manifested both in the promotion of the lately arrived Gluck as a classic of the German stage, and in the proposals to create an operatic museum, intended to preserve respected theater pieces as standards of known worth. This chapter is paired with John Mangum’s “The repertory of the Italian Court Opera in Berlin, 1740–1786.”
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