Staging Singing in the Theater of War (Berlin, 1805)

Abstract

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.

New Perspectives on Imagology

“…They have been seen as powerful tools in particular to achieve the formation of collective identities. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the use of national categories in literature was closely linked to a political striving for national unity (Corbineau-Hoffmann 2013;Jensen 2016;Rutten and Van Kalmthout 2018), and the (literary) genre of song was considered a useful instrument to strengthen the formation of (national) identities (Hambridge 2015;van der Haven 2016). Songwriters engaged with this idea in their use of national categories in their work, which was closely linked to a political pursuit of national unity.…”

Performative Musicology and HIP as Rhetoric and Pedagogy for the Past in Present and Future

“…The literature in the above journal survey, as well as additional music-related work cited elsewhere in the present chapter, bases an understanding of Butler's performativity on her earlier 1990s work, that is, if they refer to her at all. In fact, only two of the 46 survey journal articles using the terminology (i.e., only 4%) cite the work of Judith Butler in their lists of references at all (see Cole, 2018;Hambridge, 2015). To this, we can add a few other articles included in the present chapter (Franko, 2003), which also only refer to the 1990s publications.…”

Theatrical Encounters During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

“…From the articles, it appears that these theatrical encounters often disclose the effects of wartime-induced moments of self-reflection and alter processes of identity formation. It is perhaps unsurprising that the latter is a recurring theme; scholars have long contended that the eighteenth-century developments of 'nation' and 'nationhood' gained momentum during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and theatre tends to be discussed as a prominent tool in contemporary practices in nation-building (Hambridge, 2015;Andries, 2019). Still, the articles complicate the existing narratives by highlighting the fluidity of what 'nation' meant around 1800 as it intersected with other markers of identity.…”