Catching Up and Getting Ahead: The Opera House as Temple of Art in Berlin c. 1800

Hambridge, Katherine

Abstract

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.”

Citation

Hambridge, K. (2020). Catching Up and Getting Ahead: The Opera House as Temple of Art in Berlin c. 1800. In C. Newark, & W. Weber (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190224202.013.4

• Online Publication Date: Sep 30, 2020
• Publication Date: 2020-09
• Deposit Date: Apr 20, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 30, 2022
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Series Title: Oxford Handbooks
• Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190224202.013.4
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1672322
• Contract Date: Aug 5, 2015