Research Catalog

Title

Morality and Viennese opera in the age of Mozart and Beethoven / Martin Nedbal.

Author

Nedbal, Martin,

Publication

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY ; Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2017.
©2017

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	ML1723.8.V6 N4 2017	Off-site

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Details

Description

xvi, 243 pages : music; 24 cm.

Summary

This book explores how the Enlightenment aesthetics of theater as a moral institution influenced cultural politics and operatic developments in Vienna between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moralistic viewpoints were particularly important in eighteenth-century debates about German national theater. In Vienna, the idea that vernacular theater should cultivate the moral sensibilities of its German-speaking audiences became prominent during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, when advocates of German plays and operas attempted to deflect the imperial government from supporting exclusively French and Italian theatrical performances. Morality continued to be a dominant aspect of Viennese operatic culture in the following decades, as critics, state officials, librettists, and composers (including Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven) attempted to establish and define German national opera. Viennese concepts of operatic didacticism and national identity in theater further transformed in response to the crisis of Emperor Joseph II's reform movement, the revolutionary ideas spreading from France, and the war efforts in facing Napoleonic aggression. The imperial government promoted good morals in theatrical performances through the institution of theater censorship, and German-opera authors cultivated intensely didactic works (such as Die Zauberflöte and Fidelio) that eventually became the cornerstones for later developments of German culture [Publisher description]

Series Statement

Ashgate interdisciplinary studies in opera

Uniform Title

Ashgate interdisciplinary studies in opera

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-239).

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Cultivating the court and the nation in Gluck's La rencontre imprévue -- Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the didactic aesthetics of the national Singspiel -- Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte -- Die Zauberflöte and subversive morality in suburban operas -- The politics of morality at the court theater in the late 1790s -- How German is Fidelio? Didacticism in Beethovenian operas.

ISBN

9781472476579
1472476573
9781315596082 (canceled/invalid)
1315596083 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2016005214

OCLC

940342234

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library