Music and the stage in the the Age of Enlightenment. Studies on the basis of the Gotha playbills.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Irmgard Scheitler
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524535144

The project examines the role of music in German theatre 1759-1771. It is based on the Gotha playbill collection, which has not attracted attention for the last more than 100 years. The playbills represent the activity of several troupes (Koch, Ackermann, Seyler) as well as the Hamburg National Theatre. Present day knowledge of 18th-century incidental music before the Goethe period is extremely poor. Basically, only three works are known, all from the time of the Hamburg Entreprise. The project wants to get information about music by examining the repertoire, which is revealed by the theatre programmes. Insights can be gained through secondary texts (stage instructions) and song interludes. In rare cases, the playbills themselves also offer clues. Extremely helpful is the theatre library of the Hamburg Stadttheater kept in the Hamburg SUB. It contains play texts but also sheet music. It is my intention to consider all performances, i.e. not only the plays, but also the supplements, which have not been considered at all so far. This will open completely new perspectives, also for Hamburg's National Theatre. Up to now, Lessing's theoretical reflections on the effects of music and his description of a composition for a tragedy were the only facts to deal with. To know more about the music actually heard in all its diversity puts these reflections in a different light. It also reveals the great influence of the French stage with its vaudeville final and its opéra comique. The project also aims to shed light on the practical conditions: the actors' ability to sing, the casting, the conditions of the orchestra, the appearance of musicians from outside the company. Around the middle of the century, contemporaries (as still research does today) focused solely on the art of the word and its acting. Music, as sensual, fell into a lower category. The declared aim of the theatre reformers, however, was to raise morality. Thus, music becomes an indicator when comparing its importance in the period before the professionalization of acting with its role around 1750. However, this is true only for Germany, as the different conditions at Paris and Vienna prove. The project wants to emphasize this socio-historical aspect.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants