scholarly journals Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni, Operatic Canon, and National Politics in Nineteenth-Century Prague

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-205
Author(s):  
Martin Nedbal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum ◽  
National Politics ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Don Giovanni ◽  
The World ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Historical Authenticity ◽  
Nozze Di Figaro ◽  
World Premiere

After the enormous success of Le nozze di Figaro at Prague's Nostitz Theater in 1786 and the world premiere of Don Giovanni there in 1787, Mozart's operas became canonic works in the Bohemian capital, with numerous performances every season throughout the nineteenth century. These nineteenth-century Prague Mozart productions are particularly well documented in the previously overlooked collection of theater posters from the Czech National Museum and the mid-nineteenth-century manuscript scores of Le nozze di Figaro. Much sooner than elsewhere in Europe, Prague's critics, audiences, and opera institutions aimed at historically informed, “authentic” productions of these operas. This article shows that the attempts to transform Mozart's operas into autonomous artworks, artworks that would faithfully reflect the unique vision of their creator and not succumb to changing audience tastes, were closely linked to national politics in nineteenth-century Prague. As the city's population became more and more divided into ethnic Czechs and Germans, both groups appropriated Mozart for their own narratives of cultural uniqueness and cultivation. The attempts at historic authenticity originated already in the 1820s, when Czech opera performers and critics wanted to perform Don Giovanni in a form that was as close as possible to that created by Mozart in 1787 but distorted in various German singspiel adaptations. Similar attempts at historical authenticity are also prominent in Bedřich Smetana's approach to Le nozze di Figaro, during his tenure as the music director of the Czech Provisional Theater in the late 1860s. German-speaking performers and critics used claims of historical authenticity in the 1830s and 40s to stress Prague's importance as a prominent center of German culture. During the celebrations of the 1887 Don Giovanni centennial, furthermore, both the Czech and German communities in Prague appropriated Mozart's operas into their intensely nationalistic debates.

scholarly journals Untying the “Musical Sphinx:” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in Nineteenth-Century Pest-Buda

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Pál Horváth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Symphonic Orchestra ◽  
The World ◽  
German School ◽  
World Premiere

It is well known that Beethoven’s Ninth was followed by a temporary crisis in the genre of the symphony: the next generation found it difficult to get away from the shadow of this monumental piece. The Ninth was first performed in Hungary in 1865, more than 40 years after the world-premiere. We should add, however, that during the first half of the nineteenth century, no professional symphonic orchestra and choir existed in Pest-Buda that would have coped with the task. Although the Hungarian public was able to hear some of Beethoven’s symphonies already by the 1830s – mainly thanks to the Musical Association of Pest-Buda – in many cases only fragments of symphonies were performed. The Orchestra of the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1853, was meant to compensate for the lack of symphonic concerts. This paper is about the performances of Beethoven’s symphonies in Pest-Buda in the nineteenth century, and it especially it focuses on the reception of Symphony No. 9 in the Hungarian press, which cannot be understood without taking into consideration the influence of the Neudeutsche Schule (New German School).

The Rise and Fall of the “Third Weimar”: Harry Graf Kessler and the Aesthetic State in Wilhelmian Germany, 1902–1906

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-532
Author(s):  
Laird Easton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
German Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Leipzig ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

In August 1891, shortly before his graduation from the University of Leipzig and his subsequent departure on a trip around the world, Harry Graf Kessler visited the city that had become an icon of German culture in the nineteenth century. Weimar, vegetating in the long twilight years of Carl Alexander's reign, made an unfavorable impression on the young aesthete. At the church cemetery, thinking no doubt of the way England and France honored their great writers, he remarked, “I do not find the idea that the coffins of our two greatest poets should serve as the antechamber for all the princely nullities of the house of Weimar especially worthy—it reminds one a little too strongly of the Geheimen Hofrat.”

scholarly journals STORKS AND OSTRICHES: AN EARLY PARODY OF STRAUSS'S ‘ARIADNE AUF NAXOS’

Tempo ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (232) ◽  
pp. 40-47
Author(s):  
Chris Walton
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
The World ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
World Premiere ◽  
Ariadne Auf Naxos

The name of the conductor Max Conrad is hardly one to conjure with. He admitted as much himself in the first paragraph of his memoirs, published in 1956: To be sure, I was born in Berlin, as was [Bruno Walter]; he attended the Askanische High School in Berlin – as did I; he left it without finishing his school leaving certificate – as did I; he studied music with teachers from the Stern Conservatory – as did I; and he soon became famous – and I … oh dear, now it becomes irregular, like a Greek verb …For more than 30 years, Conrad (1872–1963) played a major role in the operatic life of Zurich. In the greater scheme of things, this might perhaps be regarded as of little significance, for Zurich's was then but a theatre in the outer provinces of the German-speaking world. Nor did Conrad achieve recognition by conducting important premières there, as did other men (such as Robert F. Denzler, who conducted the world premières of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler and Berg's Lulu in the 1930s, or Hans Rosbaud, who conducted the staged première of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in 1957). Conrad did train the flower maidens for the first (legal) performance of Wagner's Parsifal outside Bayreuth, given in Zurich in 1913 – but the première itself was conducted by the chief kapellmeister, Lothar Kempter. To be sure, Conrad did conduct the world première of the revised version of Othmar Schoeck's fine expressionist opera Penthesilea in 1928; but that is hardly enough to ensure anyone posthumous fame.

Nationalism, Racial Difference, and “Egyptian” Meaning in Verdi’s Aida

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Gauthier ◽  
Jennifer Mcfarlane-Harris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
The World ◽  
Racial Dynamics ◽  
Opera House ◽  
World Premiere

This chapter examines the dynamics of race and race relations in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida in the context of nationalism in nineteenth-century Egypt. The world premiere of Aida took place at the Cairo Opera House on December 24, 1871. However, there seems to be little information available on the opera's Cairo production, particularly with regards to Egyptian reaction to this first performance. Focusing on its Cairo premiere, this chapter analyzes Aida's libretto and music in order to elucidate the workings of racial difference as it lies on the surface of the opera. It suggests that, for Egyptians, Aida may have spoken to a sense of emergent Egyptian identity. It also reveals Aida's racial dynamics by linking it to discourses of light-skinned Egyptian superiority and dark-skinned African inferiority. Furthermore, the relationships between characters in the opera highlight the specificities of Egypt's relations with its racial-national Others, implying a larger project of Egyptian identity formation through “racial fabrication.”

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

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