Grand palaces of culture, opera theaters marked the center of
European cities like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. As opera
cast its spell, almost every European city and society aspired to
have its own opera house, and dozens of new theaters were
constructed in the course of the "long" nineteenth century. At the
time of the French Revolution in 1789, only a few, mostly royal,
opera theaters, existed in Europe. However, by the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly every large town
possessed a theater in which operas were performed, especially in
Central Europe, the region upon which this book concentrates.
This volume, a revised and extended version of two well-reviewed
books published in German and Czech, explores the social and
political background to this "opera mania" in nineteenth century
Central Europe. After tracing the major trends in the opera history
of the period, including the emergence of national genres of opera
and its various social functions and cultural meanings, the author
contrasts the histories of the major houses in Dresden (a court
theater), Lemberg (a theater built and sponsored by aristocrats),
and Prague (a civic institution). Beyond the operatic institutions
and their key stage productions, composers such as Carl Maria von
Weber, Richard Wagner, Bedrich Smetana, Stanislaw Moniuszko,
Antonin Dvorak, and Richard Strauss are put in their social and
political contexts. The concluding chapter, bringing together the
different leitmotifs of social and cultural history explored in the
rest of the book, explains the specificities of opera life in
Central Europe within a wider European and global framework.
General
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