1st Edition

Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven

By Martin Nedbal Copyright 2017
276 Pages
by Routledge

260 Pages
by Routledge

260 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

List of Music Examples List of Tables Preface Introduction. Opera and Didacticism in Early-Modern German Culture Chapter 1. Cultivating the Court and the Nation in Gluck’s La rencontre imprévue Chapter 2. Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the Didactic Aesthetics of the National Singspiel Chapter 3. Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte Chapter 4. Die Zauberflöte and Subversive Morality in Suburban Operas Chapter 5.The Politics of Morality at the Court Theater in the Late 1790s Chapter 6. How German is Fidelio? Didacticism in Beethovenian Operas Epilogue Bibliography

Biography

Martin Nedbal is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of  Kansas. He has published numerous articles on Central European opera, particularly the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Smetana, and Dvořák. His research has been supported by grants from the American Musicological Society and the Austrian Scholarship Foundation.