Singspiel as Practice: Italian Opera in German Translation 1783-1800

Abstract

This thesis examines the circulation and reception of Italian operas in German translation in the late eighteenth century (c.1783-1800) and investigates their role in the development of German opera in the early nineteenth century. To this end, I frame my narrative within the concept of cultural transfer to highlight how mediators and agents across the German-speaking lands enabled a gradual diffusion of boundaries between the North German and Viennese Singspiel by the turn of the century.

In the first chapter, I use a hub-and-spoke model of transmission centred on Vienna to substantiate the role played by Vienna in the circulation of Italian opera in the late eighteenth century and frame these trajectories as ‘operatic conversations’ between Vienna and Pressburg to its east as well as Bonn and Hamburg to its north. In the second chapter, I focus on Vienna, investigating German translations of popular Italian operas in the background of the rivalry between the Nationaltheater and suburban theatres. I then explore the institution of Adelstheater using the example of the Erdődy theatre in Pressburg (1785-1789) and the links between its repertory of German-language works and Vienna. I further investigate this connection in the fourth chapter using two libretti from the Erdődy theatre and show the impact of printed scores in the establishment of an accepted version of a work using the example of Sarti’s Giulio Sabino. In the case of Salieri’s Axur, Re d’Ormus, I establish that the Pressburg translation, hitherto not known to have been circulated beyond Pressburg and Pest, was integrated into the 1797 Vienna production alongside the more well-established North German translation by Heinrich Gottlieb Schmieder. In the fifth and final chapter, I summarise the role of Viennese repertories in the Bonn and Hamburg Spielpläne and illustrate how the growing popularity of piano reduction scores of Italian operas with bilingual text helped establish an accepted translation and aided widespread domestic consumption of these works. In summary, my thesis contributes to scholarship on late eighteenth-century Italian opera and Singspiel by examining the circulation of Italian operas in German translation, highlighting various networks of transmission and establishing their role in the development of early nineteenth-century German opera.

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