Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera
Series Editor:
Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Institute for Italian Opera Studies, University of Iowa, USA
The Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series provides a centralized and prominent forum for the presentation of cutting-edge scholarship that draws on numerous disciplinary approaches to a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance, and reception of opera (and related genres) in various historical and social contexts. There is great need for a broader approach to scholarship about opera. In recent years, the course of study has developed significantly, going beyond traditional musicological approaches to reflect new perspectives from literary criticism and comparative literature, cultural history, philosophy, art history, theatre history, gender studies, film studies, political science, philology, psychoanalysis, and medicine. The new brands of scholarship have allowed a more comprehensive interrogation of the complex nexus of means of artistic expression operative in opera, one that has meaningfully challenged prevalent historicist and formalist musical approaches. This series continues to move this important trend forward by including essay collections and monographs that reflect the ever-increasing interest in opera in non-musical contexts. Books in the series are linked by their emphasis on the study of a single genre—opera—yet are distinguished by their i ndivid-ualized and novel approaches by scholars from various disciplines/fields of inquiry. The remit of the series welcomes studies of seventeenth-century to contemporary opera from all geographical locations, including non-Western topics.
Recent titles in the series:
The Business of Opera
Anastasia Belina-Johnson and Derek B. Scott
Gretry's Operas and the French Public
From the Old Regime to Restoration R.J. Arnold
Postopera
Reinventing the Voice-Body Jelena Novak
Musicality in Theatre
Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making David Roesner
Morality and Viennese Opera in the Age of Mozart and Beethoven
Martin Nedbal
R
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Croup LONDON AND NEW YORK
Contents
List of tables ix
List of music examples xi
Series editor's preface xiii
Preface xv
Introduction: Opera and didacticism in early-modern
German culture 1
1 Cultivating the court and the nation in Gluck's
La Rencontre imprěvue 21
2 Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the didactic
aesthetics of the National Singspiel 48
3 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte 84
4 Die Zauberflöte and subversive morality in suburban operas 123
5 The politics of morality at the court theater in the 1790s 155
6 How German is Fideliol Didacticism in Beethovenian operas 180
Epilogue 223
Bibliography 229
Index 241
20   Opera and didacticism in German culture
59 See also Krämer, Deutschsprachiges Miisiktheater, 29-33.
60 Kramer, Deutschsprachiges Musiktheater, Helen Geyer-Kiefi, Die heroisch-komische Oper, ca. 1770-1820 (Tutzing: Schneider, 1987); Thomas Bauman, North German Opera. This is also the case with Thomas Bauman's W. A. Mozart: Die Entführung aus dem Serail (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Peter Branscombe's W. A. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
61 Otto Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne (Vienna; Böhlau, 1970); Otto Erich Deutsch, Das Freihaus theater auf der Wieden, 1787-1801 (Vienna. Jugend und Volk, 1937).
62 For example, Rudolph Angemüller's recent book on Wenzel Müller discusses mainly the Leopoldstädter Theater, and Anke Sonnek's study of Emanuel Schikaneder focuses on Wiednertheater and Theater an der Wien. Rudolph Angermüller, Wenzel Müller und "sein" Leopoldstädter Theater (Vienna: Böhleu, 2010); Anke Sonnek, Emanuel Schikaneder: Thcaierprinzipal, Schauspieler und Stäcker.schreiber (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1999).
63 Otto Rommel, Die Alt-Wiener Volkskomödie (Vienna: Schroll, 1952); David Buch. Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
64 Paul Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Willy Hess, Das Fideho-Buch (Wintherthur. Amdeus, 1986).
65 Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theater in Vienna (New York: Clarendon Press, 1991); Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Bujfa in Mozart's Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
66 This was typical for all of German opera in the middle of the eighteenth century; Krämer claims that "in the realm of opera there existed no 'German' style." Krämer, Deutschsprachiges Miisiktheater, Q3.
67 For a short overview of operatic developments in Vienna prior to 1778, see John Warrack, German Opera, 125-128. For an extensive account see Zechmeister. A rare exception within the comedic traditions of Viennese vernacular musical theater was the opera Hypermnestra by Ignaz Holzbauer and Johann Leopold van GheJen commissioned for the Kärntnertortheater in 1741. See Lawrence Bennett, "Ignaz Holzbauer and the Origins of German Opera in Vienna," Eighteenth-Century Music 3, no. I (March 2006): 63-90. For the discussion of the lack of original musical-theater pieces in southern regions of the German-speaking lands and the reliance on translations of French and Italian works, see Krämer, Deutschsprachiges Musiktheater, 64-65,69.
68 The classic essay that propounds such views is Winton Dean's "Beethoven and Opera," reprinted in Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio, 22-50. Robinson's book on Fidelio confirms these views even further: the book contains eight chapters; two of these deal with Fidelia's connections to French opera (David Charlton's "The French Theatrical Origins of Fidelio" and Robinson's "Fidelio and the French Revolution"), but nowhere do the authors discuss in a more extensive manner the ways in which Fidelio (the German Singspiel par excellence) reflects German operatic traditions
1   Cultivating the court and the nation in Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue
Christoph Willibald Gluck's Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder DiePilgrime von Mecca ("The Unexpected Encounter, or The Pilgrims to Mecca") was not only one of the most popular works in the repertoire of the National Singspiel troupe, which operated in the Vienna Burgtheater between 1778 and 1783, it was also one of the most emphatically didactic ones.1 The plot of Gluck's opera revolves around the ideas of absolute fidelity and clemency: Prince Ali is in search of his beloved Princess Rezia, who was captured by pirates and sold into the harem of the sultan of Cairo. At the beginning of the opera, Rezia finds out that Ali has arrived in Cairo and tests his fidelity by sending three different female slaves (Dardane, Amine, and Balkis) to tempt him. When AH withstands the seduction attempts, Rezia decides to flee with Ali. The lovers' plans are betrayed by a mendicant dervish (called Calender), and the furious sultan wants to torture and execute them. Moved by the lovers' devotion to one another, the sultan eventually changes his mind, grants mercy to them, and decides to punish the dervish for his treachery. The lovers then plead for the dervish, and the sultan grants clemency to him as well amidst general rejoicing.
Gluck's opera was originally produced in the Burgtheater in 1764 as an opera-comique, titled La Rencontre imprevue ("The Unexpected Encounter"), but the text of the 1780 German version was in fact taken from Johann Heinrich Faber's German translation of the 1764 libretto.2 Faber's translation was used during the first German production of Gluck's opera in Frankfurt in 1771, and its text remained close to the French original (a chronological overview of the different version of the opera discussed in this chapter can be found in Table l:I).3The 1780 Vienna libretto, by contrast, brought a few significant changes to the 1771 text (and therefore also to Gluck's original libretto). Most importantly, the 1780 Vienna adapter revised several suggestive passages in Faber's text in an attempt to improve the opera's overall standard of decorum.4 One of the revisions occurred in Act I, scene 5, where Osmin describes how a group of pirates abducted Rezia and sold her to slavery. In both the 1764 and 1771 librettos, Osmin mentions that after the abduction Rezia had to "defend herself against the pirates ("die Prinz-essin welche sich auf dem hinterenTheile des Schiffe s wehrete").5 The 1780 libretto, by contrast, states that Rezia merely "stood" at the back of the ship ("die Prinzessin      welche sich auf dem hinteten Theile des. Shiffes befand").6 It is
22   Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue
Table 1.1 Four versions of Les Pelerins de la Mecque
Year and place ofpremiere performance
Librettist/adapter Composer
First published libretto associated with that performance
1726, Paris
1764, Vienna 1771, Frankfurt
1780, Vienna
Alain-Rene Lesage and D'Omeval
Louis Hurtaut Dancourt Christoph Willibald Gluck Johann Heinrich Faber Gluck
Based on Faber Gluck
Les Pelerins de la Mecque, in Le Theatre de la foire, ou L opera comique, vol. 7 (Amsterdam and Paris, 1731)
La Rencontre imprevue (Vienna: Ghelen, 1763)
Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (Frankfurt: Andreäische Schriften, 1772)
Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (Vienna: Logenmeister, 1780)
likely that the 1780 Viennese editors wanted to avoid the earlier translation's hint that Rezia was sexually attacked on the pirate ship.
Similar to the 1780 version of Gluck's work, most operas presented at the National Singspiel in the late 1770s and early 1780s could be performed only after a strict scrutiny for potential breaches of decorum that often resulted in revisions of even slightly suggestive remarks. This chapter traces the roots of this preoccupation with good morals at the National Singspiel. An examination of the 1764 version of Gluck's exotic opera shows that the concern with the suppression of morally suspect content and the strengthening of educational elements was an important aspect of Viennese court theater from at least the mid-eighteenth century onward. At the same time, the interest of Viennese authors and state officials in didactic opera grew particularly strong during the National Theater era and reflected aesthetic and political debates about the function of German musical theater as a means of courtly and national representation.
Introducing Viennese morals into Les Pelerins de la Mecque
The 1780 moralistic revision of the text for Gluck's opera was in fact not as extensive as the revision involved in preparing the libretto for the 1764 production. The 1764 opera was based on an earlier work by Alain-Rene Lesage and Jacques-Philippe D'Orneval first performed in 1726 at the Parisian fair of St. Laurent under the title Les Pelerins de la Mecque ('The Pilgrims to Mecca") and published in 1731 in volume 6 of the collection Theatre de la foire. In 1763, Count Giacomo Durazzo, the director of the Vienna court theater between 1754 and 1764, commissioned the actor Louis Hurtaut Dancourt to adapt the 1726 text for Gluck. The 1726 work therefore originated in the traditions of Parisian fairground popular culture, but in 1763 Dancourt needed to make it presentable at a prestigious court
Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue 23
institution frequented and supported by the royal family. As part of his revision, Dancourt both intensified the didactic message of the opera and greatly reduced suggestive elements of the original libretto.7
The sharpened didacticism becomes especially apparent at the end of the 1764 opera, where the Sultan grants mercy to the lovers and the treacherous dervish. The 1726 Paris Sultan says that it was Rezia and Ali's love for one another and their noble birth that calmed his anger ("Votre amour et votre naissance, / viennent de calmer mon courroux'").8 The 1764 Vienna Sultan claims, by contrast, that he was swayed towards mercy not by the tender feelings of Rezia and Ali but by their readiness to remain faithful even when faced with torture and separation: "Love can have no influence over my heart at the expense of justice. Your constancy and the heroism of your feelings have disarmed my anger."9 Whereas the Paris Sultan responds to the lovers' sentiments and their social status, the Viennese adaptation presents him as more concerned with good behavior and high moral values, especially constancy. The 1764 work also subdues elements of political satire in the Parisian opera's conclusion. In 1726, the Sultan reflects on his merciful decision in a maxim drawn from the tragedy Pyrrhus by Prosper Jolyot Crebillon (premiered in the same year as Les Pelerins) and adapted for the circumstances of the opera's plot:10
Puisqu'un remords suffit pour appaisser
les Dieux, Un Sultan auroit tort d'en exiger plus
qu'eux.
Since remorse is sufficient to appease
the gods, A sultan would be wrong to require
more than them.
This potentially didactic moment is subverted when Ali's servant Arlequin "looks at the Sultan with insolence and puts his hand on the Sultan's forehead" ("Arlequin ... s'approche du Sultan, le regarde sous le nez, et lui met la main sur le front") - Arlequin is checking whether the Sultan is delirious. Although he is dragged away by the guards, Arlequin here clearly ridicules the Sultan's maxim, and perhaps also the whole genre of serious tragedy from which the maxim is drawn. The Viennese adaptation replaces Arlequin's irreverent lazzo with a moralistic observation by Ali: "Wherever a just and generous sovereign reigns, there, too, happiness can be found" ("Partout ou regne un souverain genereux et equitable, on trouve la ftlicite").11 Also reduced in the 1764 opera were Arlequin's and Amine's protests against the pardoning of the Calender.12 The Viennese version imbues the moment of clemency with seriousness and Universality, strengthens the prominence and validity of the Sultan's decisions, and thus transforms a satirical plot of fairground entertainment into a celebration of absolutism and morality
• 13
typical for courtly spectacles of ancien regime, such as Metastasian opera seria.
Throughout his revision, Dancourt also diluted sexually suggestive content and strengthened the theme of Ali's faithfulness to Rezia. Most prominently, the libretto published for the 1764 production suppressed several scenes in the third act (scenes 2, 3, and 7) where Arlequin dresses as a female pilgrim and flirts both with Amine and the Calender. Also cut was a scene in which the Calender flirts
24   Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue
Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue 25
with Amine. The 1726 Arlequin, moreover, is more openly appreciative about the physical charms of the three women who try to seduce Ali. Similarly, the 1726 Ali shows interest in one of the female slaves sent by Rezia to test his fidelity. When Rezia's confidante Amine sings a seductive aria in Act 2, scene 3 of the 1726 opera (no. 13, "Je cherche a vous faire"), Ali is described as watching her tenderly and sighing, which prompts Arlequin to encourage Amine to continue her song: "He sighs! Courage, Madame, he softens."14 In the 1764 Vienna version, Ali squarely rejects all love propositions from Rezia's female companions and does not show any sign of giving in to the seduction, although he does not know whether he will ever be reunited with Rezia again.'5
Rezia's story, too, w:as transformed in Vienna to avoid explicit references to the Sultan's sexual interest in her. The 1764 Rezia simply states the following about her encounters with the Sultan:
Rassurez vous, Ali; 1'amour qu'il a pour moi, l'a si fort subjugue qu'i.1 est plütöt mon Esclave que mon Maitre: il ne refuse rien ä mes caprices, & j'espere trouver 1'instant de profiter de sa complaisance, pour me soustraitre ä sa pursuitte. N'en parlons plus: mon coeur ne veut s'occuper maintenant que du plaisir de vous avoir retrouve toujour fidele.
Be assured Ali; the feelings that [the sultan] has for me have subjugated him so strongly that he is more a slave than a master to me: he can refuse nothing to my whims, & I hope to find the right moment to take advantage of his compliance so that be does not follow me. Let's not speak of it: all my heart wishes now is to indulge in the pleasure of having found you again, ever faithful.
In 1726, however, Rezia discusses her encounters with the Sultan in much greater detail. She says, for example, that at first the Sultan was quite "impatient in his desire" and even threw her a handkerchief ("Et plein d'impatience, / II me jetta ... [Je fremis, quand j'y pense;] / Me jetta le mouchoir").16 The image of a sultan throwing a handkerchief to the concubine he has selected for the night was a common trope in Western accounts of Eastern harems.17 But apparently the trope was considered too explicit for Vienna - not only was it cut in the 1764 La Rencontre imprevue, but it also created a scandal of sorts in 1770 when a Viennese adapter failed to excise it from a German translation of Favart's Soliman second performed at the Karntnertortheater (see below).
Both Durazzo and Dancourt commented on the moralistic changes executed in the 1764 opera and connected them to specifically Viennese conditions. In the preface to the 1765 Brussels edition of the Viennese libretto, Dancourt points to the empress Maria Theresa as the person who called for the textual changes because she wanted to excise what she perceived as indecent content:
An obstacle prevented the execution of the project. Her Majesty the Empress, had made out of the French Theater a school of morals in Vienna, and she did not allow any piece to be performed in which the subject or the style could carry the slightest offense to prudishness. ... I was contracted to
rework the piece into a shape in which it could be presented to the Empress, it was certainly not an easy commission since I had to conserve some amusing moments while getting rid of all the indecencies.18
As Bruce Alan Brown and others have shown, the empress and other members of the court (especially the Princess Trautson) indeed had a lot of influence on the content of the works presented by the French troupe at the Vienna court theater in the 1750s and 1760s.19 The empress and her associates believed it was necessary to allow only performances of "proper" plays and operas not only because high-minded theater would best impress foreign diplomats and visitors, but also because they were becoming familiar with the aesthetics of theater reform initiated by Gottsched and other north German and later Viennese intellectuals.20 The moral rigor of the 1764 La Rencontre imprevue therefore to some extent reflected the work's association with the imperial court.
Similar ideas emerge in the letters that Durazzo wrote to the playwright Charles-Simon Favart, his musical deputy in Paris. But whereas some letters still make it clear that the heightened moralistic consciousness was enforced by the court authorities, others suggest that it reflected a general Viennese attitude towards theater and its social and political functions. In a letter to Favart dated November 19, 1763, Durazzo takes up the process of adapting La Rencontre imprevue, in addition to creating the Viennese version of Sedaine and Monsigny's Le Roi et lefermier, and describes the moralistic preferences of the audiences at the Vienna court theater (boldface is mine):
We have just given the tenth performance of Le Roi et le fermier, never before has an opera comique had a greater success in this country. ... And I can easily guess the reason for this success; it is because here we don't like operas that are too sentimental, too much centered on love, stories, and even less those that are too vulgar. Le Roi et le fermier was exactly in between the too-sentimental and the too-\nlgar sorts, the audience has eagerly seized upon the maxims that the opera has presented here and there; and its simple, yet somewhat elevated style was very effective. ... That's why I would like to find something similar to amuse our Sovereigns. I have just had Les Pellerins de la Mecque by Mr. Lesage arranged, for example; in it 1 had all licentiousness suppressed, and I did not allow anything but the elevated elements and only suitable comic ones to stay in the piece; and I do not doubt that the poem, once arranged to reflect the present taste of the nation, will be effective, especially in connection with the music by Mr. Gluck.21
Durazzo makes it seems as if the lessening of "vulgar" and "licentious" overtones in Le Roi and in Les Pelerins were a response to the general taste of the Viennese audience, or perhaps to that of the whole nation (it is unclear whether he means the Viennese, the Austrian, or the German nation). This creates the impression that the theatergoers who frequented the court-supported performances in Vienna
26   Gluck? La Rencontre imprevue
had a more refined moral sense than those in Paris where the operas-comiques were originally performed. Durazzo's implication that moral taste was superior in Vienna might therefore be viewed as an instance of national propaganda similar to that in other writings on theater in Germany and Austria discussed in the introductory chapter. Brown refers to such ideas of the Germans' mora! and national superiority as "a new idea of nationalism (soon dominant in Vienna) that called into question a more cosmopolitan, French-inspired view of culture."22
The patronizing attitude with which the Viennese cultural elites approached the French works performed in their city crystallized even more prominently in the writings of German-speaking critics. The introduction of the French troupe into the Burgtheater in 1752 called forth particularly venomous anti-French statements that took up as a prominent theme (or sometimes as an unspoken given) the notion of German moral superiority. A 1752 issue of the Leipzig-based journal Das Neueste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit contained the article "Nachricht von der neuen französischen Schaubühne zu Wien" ("Report on the new French theater in Vienna"), written possibly by Franz Christoph Scheyb, one of the staunchest Viennese Gottschcdians. Scheyb expresses the hope that the German comedy (performed in the Kämtnertortheater) will eventually triumph over the new and temporarily fashionable French spectacles and concludes with a critique of the French female performers: "I have to add that the [French] actresses mostly just bend their spine like cats, make prurient gestures, sigh and wail ... [They often] bend forwards to show off their shelf of flesh."23 Like Gottsched, Scheyb relates the salacious performance style of the French actresses to the inherent characteristics of the French people: "I think that in Paris, which has been the seat of voluptuousness for many years, such displays of [physical] beauties must be enormously appreciated. However, I feel, that a German mind possesses much more humanity, and, consequently, more seriousness than all French women put together and distilled into their essence."24 Thus in spite of the court's attempts to present French works only after the Parisian fairground humor had been purged, these works were still met with nationalist criticism by German-speaking critics in Vienna.
Didacticism in Viennese discourse on German theater prior to 1776
During the same period, this moralistic nationalism also became prominent in the debates about the German theater of Vienna. In the mid-1700s, German spoken and musical plays were performed in a number of venues throughout the city, but the most important center of the German repertoire was the Kämtnertortheater. Since its founding in 1709, this institution specialized in improvised comedies and historical pieces (the so-called "Haupt- und Staatsaktionen"), featuring numerous stock characters, especially the Viennese Hanswurst. These works abounded in spectacular effects, and the comic stock characters provided a constant supply of scatological and sexual jokes that sometimes offended the foreign visitors of Vienna. Lady Mary Wortley Montague of London visited the Kämtnertortheater
Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue 27
in 1716 and was shocked at the numerous obscenities, especially when one of the actors mooned the audience 25
The repertoire started to change in 1747 when the Karntnertortheater troupe produced the play Vitichab und Dankwart, die allemanischen Briider ("Vitichab and Dankwart, the Germanic Brothers") by B. E. Kriiger, a piece that was performed solely according to a written text and thus represented the first "proper" or literate drama in the history of the institution 26 For the next several decades the literate dramas continued to appear at the Karntnertortheater, though improvised comedy remained the main fare there.27 In an anonymous letter about Viennese culture dated April 19, 1759 and published in the May 1760 issue of the Journal etranger, a French-speaking resident of Vienna complains about German comedy:28
The German Comedy is ,.. infected with bad taste, at least in Vienna. To put it even more boldly, the court and the nobility blush at the barriers that ignorance puts in the path of the progress of arts and urbanity. However the common people and some members of the nobility run to the [German] spectacles; they are driven to go there by the avidity to see, which idleness strengthens in idle souls, & what do they see there? Tyrants who slaughter in cold blood and who hang themselves on stage out of despair; an old villain who by mistake takes the poison he has prepared for his son, & who thereafter dies in convulsions the most hideous of which elicit the most laughter. One can see in those plays a Venus disguised as a Gypsy ... [and] as a courtesan. This Venus is followed by five or six Amours to whom she has given birth. Those Amours will hide behind a fearsome Pallas; & while she urges to wisdom some extravagant prince or other, a few malignant children hit the goddess with five or six arrows, in the manner of daggers, which give her some distraction, and make her sneeze and wince; then she picks up the threads of her harangue, until the dagger strokes intensify, & then she falls in love with the Prince. You judge correctly, gentlemen, based on these traits scattered in a few German plays, that there is not a single one of them that merits your attention, & that I have too much respect for this otherwise very sensible nation to expose it to your mockery. What will without doubt redeem the German nation in your eyes is the wisdom it shows in making other peoples contribute to its pleasures. Which peoples? Those who dispute their leadership in the art of pleasing and enchanting, the Italians and the French.
The report suggests that in the 1750s and 60s, German theater mainly represented a ribald and crude counterpart to French operas and plays.29 Only the "common" people and dissolute members of the nobility were interested in German comedy, according to the reviewer. Numerous plays were filled with spectacular effects, coarse humor, and risque elements. The account of an exhortation by a goddess to a prince interrupted by a bout of sneezing and wincing suggests, moreover, that didacticism was often a matter of ridicule - this irreverent attitude parallels
28   Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue
somewhat the fairground humor of the 1726 Les Pelerins, especially the scene where Arlequin makes fun of the Sultan's maxim.30 As Zechmeister has explained, the moral conclusions one can draw from these plays are often in complete opposition to the affirmative ideals of Enlightenment rationalism.31
Numerous Viennese intellectuals of the mid-eighteenth century called for an improvement of the moral standards in German theater. Many of the reformers modeled their ideas on Gottsched, and some even kept up an active correspondence with him throughout the 1740s and 1750s. The surviving letters sent to Gottsched from Vienna show that the veteran reformer hoped to transform Austria into a bastion from which his theories of literature and theater would spread and become dominant all over the German-speaking world.32 The Viennese supporters of theatrical reform published numerous statements that stressed the importance of the theater as a place of "moral" instruction. In his preface to the fifth volume (1755) of "Die deutsche Schaubühne zu Wienn [sic]" ("The German Theater in Vienna"), a series of editions of literary plays performed on the Viennese stages after 1747, Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, one of the most prominent Gottschedi-ans, claims that "proper" plays are much more effective than religious writings or serious treatises on morality. Most audiences and readers want to be entertained, not preached to, according to Weiskern, and that is why amusing plays with didactic plots represent the most effective means of moral education; didactic plays can in fact be seen as "a sugary medicine for the soul" ("verzuckerte Arzney der Seele").33
Apart from the German intellectual circles, ideas about the reform of German theater struck a sympathetic chord at the Viennese court. In a letter to Gottsched from February of 1748, Weiskern reports about empress Maria Theresa's interest in Gottsched's famous play Der sterbende Cato (i.e., about the death of the Roman politician and philosopher Cato the Younger): "The drama was supposed to be performed today; however, her Majesty the Empress desired to see the piece, and the performance therefore had to be delayed until tomorrow."34 A 1749 review from a Zurich journal suggests, moreover, that the imperial support for literary German theater started to affect the improvised repertoire: "The Viennese theater... has in the past year acquired a completely different form. ... Many 'proper' theater plays are performed there; and since both imperial majesties [Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Stephan von Lothringen] often honor the performances of these plays with their presence, it is no longer possible to perform the [improvised] historical plays that feature Hanns Wurst farces."35
Morality and nationality in Sonnenfels's Briefe über die Wienerische Schaubühne
The Viennese intellectuals continued to admire Gottsched in spite of the fact that in North Germany the Leipzig theoretician came under increasingly intense attacks in the 1750s by a younger generation of aestheticians, most notably Friedrich Nicolai in Berlin. Gottsched's views on morality and didacticism in theater were among those elements of his aesthetic theories that received intense criticism;
duck's La Rencontre impreMie 29
Nicolai, for example, understood didacticism as a secondary aspect of theater.36 Gottschedian ideas about didactic theater, however, remained highly influential in Vienna, as exemplified in the most widespread Viennese theatrical treatise of the second half of the eighteenth century: Joseph von Sonnenfels's Briefe über die Wienerische Schaubühne ("Letters on the Viennese Theater"), published in installments between 1767 and 1769. Throughout the weekly reviews that make up the treatise, Sonnenfels never explicitly acknowledged his ideological indebtedness to Gottsched.37 Yet, as Roland Krebs points out, the strict moralism of Gottsched represents the core of Sonnenfels's aesthetics.38 Sonnenfels devotes most of his work to critiquing the text, music, and performances of Italian opere buffe, French spoken plays, and French operas-comiques performed in the theaters of Vienna in the late 1760s. Many of his critical points about foreign works have a strong didactic and national component and foreshadow the issues that playwrights, aestheticians, and composers would still be debating after the foundation of Joseph II's National Theater in 1776.
Conspicuously, Sonnenfels's most extensive discussion of the didactic purpose of theater appears in the four chapters (Letters) devoted to the explication of the term "Nationalschaubühne" ("National Stage/Theater"). In these passages, Sonnenfels argues that the distinctiveness of national theater traditions does not depend on the subjects that a nation's dramatists choose for their works, but on the ability of these works to both develop and reflect the audience's moral standards. His claims grow out of his observations about the French play he Joueur ("The Gambler") by Regnard and the Viennese German adaptation of Edward Moore's The Gamester?9 The main characters of both plays develop an uncontrollable desire for gambling, but, as Sonnenfels points out, the two dramatists use different methods "through which they attempt to impart abhorrence at gambling in their fellow countrymen."40 Sonnenfels finds the ending of Regnard's play disappointing because the French gambler, Valer, does not seem to be particularly crushed by the misfortunes gambling has brought upon him. Valer merely loses the affections of his beloved - not a terrible outcome, Sonnenfels explains, especially when viewed by the French, "whose sensibilities have been spoiled by the constant exposure to the most bitter sarcasms against the institution of life-long commitment.'"'1 In The Gamester, the gambler Beverley impoverishes his whole family and commits suicide at the end of the play, and Sonnenfels endorses the more frightful and therefore more educational ending wholeheartedly.42
Sonnenfels also dislikes that the French play does not feature a generalized maxim at its end. He complains that it lacks a "[stinging] thorn that would, with the help of a short sententious closing speech drawn from the preceding action, pierce our souls with a strong, irresistible force, and that we would then take away from the theater with us, and that would stay for a long time in our minds even against our will."43 He finds the ending of the English play much more to his liking because the English author has one of the characters utter a generalized observation; Sonnenfels is so enchanted that he quotes the entire closing passage 44 Sonnenfels's promotion of short sententious statements - these "thorns" that are supposed to pierce the audience's hearts and command their attention - possibly
30   Gluck 's La Rencontre irapre\ ue
Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue   31
contributed to their prominence in works, including musical ones, written for the Viennese "Nationalschaubtihne" in the final decades of the eighteenth century (see Chapter 2).
Although Sonnenfels focuses on French and English identity and culture at first, he eventually brings the Germans into consideration as well, mainly to point out their moral superiority. Not surprisingly, he claims that the French are superficial, and that they "are definitely not the models that the German dramatists should follow; the endless monotony of their love intrigues ... the whiny tone of their heroes, and the gallant tone of their tyrants seem shallow and frigid to us [Germans], who experience them according to our truthful inner feeling - not that [superficial] feeling, which [the French] acquire by habit."45 The Viennese critic here propounds ideas similar to those that Gottsched and others expressed earlier in the century concerning the moral inferiority of the French and the fact that art reflects such inherent national traits. Yet, at the same time, the passage distances Sonnenfels from Gottsched's aesthetics - particularly the older critic's demand that German art should model itself on French neoclassical art. The national character of the English fares much better with Sonnenfels; he claims that it closely resembles the German character. Both nations are "thorough (as long as they do not try to imitate Paris and its manners, the exposure to which usually pushes their character more toward carelessness), profound, forceful, slow in making decisions, thoughtful but steadily working towards the set goal."46 The main difference between the two nations has to do with the political systems under which they live. The English system accords its subjects more freedom than the governments of various German states. Consequently the Germans are not as "stubborn and freethinking" as the English and unable "to impress upon their expression [i.e., the way of speaking and writing] a similar amount of genuineness and boldness."4"1 These differences between the English and German national characters contribute to a special quality of German dramatic poetry. English art reflects the character of the British in that it portrays shattering, passionate plots, filled, as Sonnenfels's discussion of The Gamester has shown, with profound, effective moral tales. In their need to impress their freethinking audiences, however, the British dramatists, most importantly Shakespeare, often go so far that they "sink deeply into the mire of nonsense and indecency."48 And this is where the path of German art deviates. German dramatists who truly want to reflect the national temperament of their people will write pieces, Sonnenfels proposes, that combine French "politesse" and English "ruggedness." Thus in their moral qualities the Germans certainly surpass the French and more or less equal the English, but in their ability to imitate and synthesize they are second to no other nation.
The same national biases inform Sonnenfels's evaluation of contemporary Viennese opera. In Letters I-IV he focuses on Alceste, the second of Gluck's so-called reform operas, composed for Vienna and first performed there in 1767, and interprets it as a distinctly German response to the problematic traditions of Italian opera. The non-Italian, German nature of the opera has to do partially with its libretto, paradoxically written by the Italian poet Raniero de'
Calzabigi - Sonnenfels never refers to Calzabigi by name and calls him merely "the poet."49 Sonnenfels praises the libretto mainly because in it Calzabigi managed to abandon "the teeming style, ... the capricious niceties,'... and the mindless ideas of his fellow national poets."so The few problems he does find in Calzabigi's libretto, Sonnenfels defines in national or even racial terms: at times Calzabigi's language is too flowery and thus resembles "the indigenous beauties of the Italian language that the Italians are used to, similar to the Indians [of North America] who admire various nasal adornments on their beloveds because they have been seeing them from a very young age."51 Sonnenfels also stresses that the deforming, stilted, and voluptuous poetic decorations in Calzabigi's libretto have nothing to do with Viennese tastes but respond to audience tastes in Italy.52 In his discussion ofAlceste's music, Sonnenfels heralds Gluck as a composer who restored to music the power to move listeners thanks to his Germanic genius. He blames Italian composers for what he sees as the emotional, moral, and physical decay of contemporary German audiences:
That we no longer have the ability to understand and experience the amazing [ethical] effects of music results from the fact that our sensibilities, as well as our bodies, have degenerated into weaklings, that Italy has forced its emasculated singers and its powerless music upon us, and that we only have music for the ear, not for the heart53
The lack of vocal ornamentation and repetition of single syllables in Gluck's arias, according to Sonnenfels, allow listeners to identify with the onstage plot and sympathize with the characters. In becoming sympathetic, the spectators go through a moral catharsis, whereas in the earlier Italian opera they were just wasting their time with the "sensual voluptuousness of hearing for the sake of hearing."54
Sonnenfels and Gluck's Iphigenie
Sonnenfels continued to expose his nationalist ideas about operatic didacticism during the National Singspiel era, as seen in his 1782 review of the Viennese production of another famous Gluck opera, Iphigenie en Tauride. The opera, in German translation by Johann Baptist von Alxinger (titled Iphigenia in Tauris), was performed by the National Singspiel company in 178), and Sonnenfels's review was published the following year in the journal Deutsches Museum. As in the 1760s, Sonnenfels praises Gluck's music, but this time he finds the opera's libretto problematic, partially because of the way in which it depicts the moral characters of its protagonists. He focuses his criticism on Act III, scene 4, where Orestes justifies his desire to be sacrificed instead of Pylades with his weariness of life and despair ("Überdruß zu leben" and "Verzweiflung") - Sonnenfels feels that Orestes should instead explain his sacrifice in terms of his friendship for Pylades, because such an explanation would make the audience sympathize with him more.55 Sonnenfels also dislikes the lack of manly valor in the actions of Orestes and Pylades as depicted by the French libretto: he notes with displeasure
32   Glucks La Rencontre imprevue
that Orestes and Pylades (in Act IV, scene 5) embrace tenderly and "coo" sweet phrases of friendship to each other ("girren sich Süssigkeiten der Freundschaft zu") instead of joining the other Greeks in their fight against the Scythians.56 Sonnenfels connects the distinction between what he perceives as superior music and morally lacking libretto to the nationalities of the opera's authors when he calls the work "a monument celebrating the victory of the German Amphion over the Gallic narcissism" ("Siegesdenkmal des deutschen Amphion über den gallischen Narzissismus"),57
Instituting theater censorship
Whereas in his aesthetic essays, Sonnenfels theorized about how authors could make their works more didactic and less morally subversive, in his economical and political treatises he proposed specific ways in which state authorities could force theatrical works and performances to conform to the aesthetics of didactic theater. Sonnenfels's ideas about governmental supervision of theatrical morals first appeared in his immensely influential Sätze aus der Poüzey-, Handlungs-, und Finanzwissenschaft ("Statements on the Matters of Police, Trade, and Economics") of 1765.58 As Hilde Haider-Prägler has shown, Sonnenfels derived most of his points on theater from works by earlier German and French political theorists, especially Jacob Friedrich Bielfeld and Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi.59 Like his predecessors, Sonnenfels claimed that the state needed to support theater as a means of improving the morals of its citizens. Both Justi and Sonnenfels called for a greater go\ ernmental support and control specifically of vernacular forms of theater, because they were accessible to large segments of population.60 Whereas Justi envisioned that a state official to whom he referred as an "Aufseher" (overseer) would both manage the state-supported theaters and control the moral content of the performances, Sonnenfels called for the institution of theater censorship.61
Sonnenfels's ideas about censorship can also be traced back to Gottsched. In the "Preface" to his collection of reformed German plays, called Deutsche Schaubühne, Gottsched proposes that an "upright censor" should be watching over the moral issues in theater pieces.62 His views trickled into the treatises of Viennese Gottschedians, such as the 1760 pamphlet by Joseph Heinrich von Engelschall, a professor of rhetoric at the Savoy Noble Academy in Vienna, who demanded that "not one word should be spoken on the stage which cannot also be found in the text submitted to the censor."63 Both Sonnenfels and Engelschall were aiming their calls for censorship particularly against the traditions of Viennese vernacular improvised comedy. An especially prominent example of the growing distinction between the "reformed" theater movement and popular traditions in Vienna is the handwritten "Allerunterthänigstes Promemoria" from December 1769 submitted to Maria Theresa, in the name of his colleagues, by Christian Gottlob Stephanie (the Elder), the actor and playwright of the court-supported German company operating at the Kärntnertortheater. 4 In reaction to an attempt of the court theater directors to reintroduce
Glucks La Rencontre imprevue 33
improvised comedy into the repertoire of the Kärntnertortheater, the "Promemoria" requested stronger state support but also control over the German-language works performed in the court theater, which would ensure that German works presented at the Kärntnertortheater would never contain anything that offends "morals," "taste," and "the honor of the nation."65 The push for state control over German theater therefore grew from the attempts to ensure governmental support for vernacular traditions, elevate their status vis-ä-vis cosmopolitan forms of courtly theater (French plays and Italian opera), and, at the same time, distinguish the "reformed" and literate German theater from popular and improvised traditions.
For a brief period, Sonnenfels was able to put his moralistic principles into practice when Joseph II, by then the co-regent of Maria Theresa, named him the censor of the German theater repertoire in Vienna in March 1770. In his position as a censor, Sonnenfels not only enforced his moralistic views of German theater, but also retained his biases against the theatrical works of other nations, especially the French and the Italians; as well as against popular traditions of vernacular theater. In a note to Count Spork from September 27, 1770, Sonnenfels summed up his experience with censoring pieces of French origin:
I have to be especially cautious with the pieces that are translated from French, and that were earlier performed [in French] on the stage of the Burgtheater and now also appear in the German version. Your Excellency knows, just like me, that if one judged the French comedies according to the same measures as the German comedies, less than ten of them would be accepted for performance. It is not new that one sees people kissing on the stage in them: all their [French] pieces depict love in the most seductive ways; and some of these plays present not just morally ambiguous moments, but moments that, through the actors' performance style, become clear depictions of immorality.
Sonnenfels had similar objections to one of the most famous Italian comic operas of the mid-eighteenth century, Pergolesi's La serva padrona. In the spring of 1770 he banned a Kärntnertortheater production of Pergolesi's work in a modified German adaptation by the popular comedian Joseph Felix von Kurz (called Bernardon), which featured four mismatched, trickery-contrived marriages instead of just one.67 In an explanatory note, Sonnenfels claimed that already the premise of the original Italian version was unacceptable, since in it the maid Serpina manipulates her master Uberto into marriage despite their unequal rank; and since Uberto's quick capitulation to Serpina's snares suggests that the maid must have had an intimate relationship with the master even before she put her marriage plan into action.68 In his view, showing a plot like that to Vienna's youth ("die Jugend") would increase their already strong leanings towards "mischief ("Ausschweifungen") and set them on paths of indecency ("Wege der Unanständigkeit") that lead against the directives of parents and moralists.69 The original Italian version of La serva padrona had been performed in Vienna previously,
34   Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue
but did not particularly bother Sonnenfels, presumably since the "common" people ("der gemeine Mann") could not understand it.70 The episode suggests that starting in the early 1770s, German pieces were subject to stricter criteria than non-German ones.71 This double standard might have partially initiated the cuts and revisions in the already sanitized La Rencontre imprevue before its presentation as a Singspiel in 1780. Another reason for the strictness was the need to distinguish the "reformed" German repertoire from the improvised popular traditions that Sonnenfels heavily criticizes in the note as well; he takes particular umbrage at the obscenities that Bernardon added into his adaptation as well as the double entendres into which the members of Bernardon's troupe would supposedly turn many innocent sounding sentences through facial expressions and gestures.72
By the time Joseph II established the National Theater in 1776, Sonnenfels no longer directly participated in Viennese theatrical life. In October of 1770, Maria Theresa revoked, for reasons that scholars have not conclusively explained, Sonnenfels's appointment as a theater censor and called upon Franz Karl Hägelin to assume the office, in which he would serve for the next 35 years.73 The censorial responsibilities of Hägelin gradually widened, especially when he assumed control of supervising theatrical works all over the Habsburg lands in 1782. To what extent Hägelin was able to execute his official responsibilities outside of Vienna remains questionable; within the imperial city itself Hägelin read, commented upon, and approved the majority of, if not every single German-language piece that was to be produced in the court theaters, and later also an increasing number of those produced in the suburban theaters, including the libretti of German operas (possibly also such famous works as Mozart's Die Entführimg and Die Zauberflöte). Many texts that Hägelin reviewed and that still contain his markings survive in Viennese libraries, and so do his explicit justifications for his censorial decisions.74 Most of these documents, however, originate from the latter part of his career, and one might therefore gain an understanding of Hägelin's extensive involvement in the theatrical life of Vienna in the 1770s and early 1780s from the materials concerning the more thoroughly documented career of Sonnenfels.
According to the note issued by Joseph II in March 1770 appointing Sonnenfels into his office, the text of every German-language piece to be performed in Viennese theaters was to be sent to the censor at least 14 days prior to its publication and performance, and the altered and approved text was the only version that could be presented to the audience; actors and directors who would attempt to improvise or add inappropriate meanings to the approved texts through the tone of the voice and body language would be punished by imprisonment.75 Sonnenfels, Hägelin, or possibly their assistants were therefore not only expected to make revisions (often substantial) to the texts of the performed pieces but also to be present in the theater; certain sources report that Sonnenfels would indeed attend rehearsals and performances and give advice to actors.76 Joseph II's note also prescribed that frequently produced pieces although previously performed and approved had to be re-censored, a requirement that produced multiple
Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue 35
versions of single works that provide insights into how the approaches of censors changed over time. Although illuminating, the description found in the 1770 royal note certainly cannot provide an exact overview of Viennese censorship practice throughout the National Theater era. It is unclear at what stage the censors reviewed the texts, or if the two-week review requirement before the performance and publication of a play was enforced. Furthermore, although there are indications that Sonnenfels attended rehearsals of certain operas, it is impossible to ascertain how widespread that practice was. Most importantly, it is difficult to determine the extent to which censorship affected a theatrical work's moral content.
Complex revisions
This uncertainty becomes particularly apparent in one passage from Hägelin's most often-cited and informative document, his 1795 "Guidelines on the Matters of Theater Censorship," which summarize the censorial principles and provides numerous examples from actual theatrical pieces.77 Hägelin mentions and critiques several operas in his notes, among them the 1779 Die pücefarbnen Schuhe, oder Die schöne Schusterin ("The Puce-colored Shoes, or The Beautiful Cobbler's Wife") by Stephanie the Younger and Ignaz Umlauf.78 The censor complained about the musical setting of the second-act aria, "Die drolligste Geschichte," for one of the opera's main characters, the shoemaker Sock (the husband of the eponymous Schusterin). In the aria's second stanza, Sock describes his earlier encounter with the military officer Baron von Pikourt and a woman whom he supposes to be the Baron's mistress, whose feet he had to measure by sight for a pair of new shoes:79
Da schleicht sich eine Bürgerin Früh heimlich zu Soldaten hin, Und läßt sich - wie vermessen! Verborgen Schuh anmessen.
A town lady sneaks in
Early in the morning to the soldier's quarters, And she lets him - how impudent! Measure her feet while in hiding.
Hägelin thought that Umlaufs original musical setting was suspicious, since the singer was asked to repeat the phrase "sie läßt sich" several times, thus creating a double entendre about sexual activity between the soldier and the measured woman.80 From the opera's manuscript score (Austrian National Library, A-Wn, Mus.Hs. 16481), however, it is unclear what exactly Hägelin was objecting against, since in it the aria appears without any repetition of the problematic phrase. This would suggest that Hägelin might have heard a performance of an earlier version, was outraged, and demanded a cut in the music. Yet, no revisions appear in the original manuscript score.
Another possibility could be that Hägelin forgot the exact nature of the musical setting and was not referring to the phrase's repetition, but to other musical elements. Lisa de Alwis in fact suggests that Hägelin's note referred to Umlaufs
36   Glucks La Rencontre imprévue
setting of the words "vermessen" and "anmessen" - these contain what she calls a "rather cheeky sixteenth-note figure" and fortepiano markings.81 De Ahvis's reading would indicate, nevertheless, that the passage continued to be performed although the censor detected suggestive musical elements in them, since they are left unrevised in the manuscript score. Also the fact that the "cheeky" sixteenth-note figures appear on the phrase that expresses moral outrage ("wie vermessen!") does not necessarily make it an unusually explicit double entendre. It is also likely, as De Alwis acknowledges, that the supposedly inappropriate second meaning became obvious only during performance, possibly because of certain inadvertent gestures and exchanges between the impersonators of Sock and Lehne (Franz Reiner and Marianne Weiß)82 The reason why the singer's gestures that might have aroused Hägelin's ire must have been inadvertently suggestive has to do with the fact that, as shown in the following pages, most of the people involved with the National Singspiel, including the directors, playwrights, and actors were extremely anxious about good morals, and it is therefore unlikely that an actor/singer would inject sexual innuendo into an otherwise straightforward aria. The practice of suggestive gestures was typical for earlier Viennese improvised comedy and for the suburban repertoire of the 1790s (see Chapter 4), but it was to be scrupulously avoided at the post-1776 court-supported German performances, at least according to the treatises and critiques by the advocates of the National Theater. Thus Hägelin's note is ultimately more puzzling than revealing, and it remains unclear what exactly disturbed the censor and how, when, and by whom the problematic content was fixed. No matter what prompted Hägelin's objections against Umlaufs aria, his 1795 note illustrates the intensity with which the text and music of National Theater Singspiels were scrutinized for potential breaches of decorum, as well as the fact that the standards of decorum and the rules about what constituted double entendres were adjustable and ever evolving.
Self-censorship and beyond
The process of adjusting the content of Dieschönc Schusterin to Viennese sensibilities also shows that censorship was only one, and possibly not even the most significant one, out of many instances that influenced the moral and didactic aspects of the produced works. Just like La Rencontre imprevue, Die schöne Schusterin was based on a pre-existing Parisian opera - the 1776 opera lyrique Les Souiiers mors-dores, ou La Cordonnier allemande ("The Golden Brown Shoes, or The German Cobbler's Wife") by Alexandre de Baligande, baron de Ferneres, adapted for the Viennese stage by Stephanie the Younger. As in the case of the various versions of Gluck's opera, the 1779 Die schöne Schusterin was much more careful in its approach to potentially risque passages than the 1776 Les Souiiers mors-dores. In his firsr aria, for example, the French shoemaker describes his encounters with the actresses of a local theater company, for whom he often manufactures shoes, in a suggestive manner:83
Dans une humble posture,
Au moment que je prends mesure,
Je murmure tout bas
Qu'on porte les souiiers trop bas;
Je täte, je compasse,
Ce piě délicat & charmant.
Je passe, je repasse
Si doucement, si joliment ...
Et si par foit j'hésite,
En compassant de pié divin,
D'un sourite on m'excite:
"Finissez done, petit badin,
Eh! Dépéchez done vite."
Le moyen qu'un coeur ne palpite!
Ah! Dans un tel moment,
Seroit-il dont si surprenant
Que la main la plus sure
Perdit quelquefois la mesure.
Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue 37 As I kneel down,
In the moment when I take measure, I protest quietly
That women wear shoes that are too low.
I touch, I fondle,
The delicate, pretty foot.
I stroke, I touch again,
How sweet, how beautiful ...
And if sometimes I pause
In admiring the divine foot,
With a smile someone prompts me:
"Finish up, you little fool,
Hey! Hurry up."
How can I stop my heart trembling! Ah! In such a moment, Would it be too surprising That even the surest of hands Cannot measure properly?
The Viennese adaptation omits the risque elements and imbues Sock's confession with an aura of righteousness:84
Ich bin oft voll Verdruß wenn mancher schöne Fuß beym Meßen sich so sanft bewegt
und Verwirrung mir erregt
so, daß ich fast vergesse,
wenn ich da knie und messe
was mir mein Amt auflegt:
Betrachte
ganz sachte,
die Länge, die Weite,
die Höhe, die Breite.
Und merke sie an.
Dann lächelt man und spricht:
"Hannsnarr vergeßt euch nicht.
Und macht einmal ein Ende ihr seid nicht sehr behende." Kein Wunder wenn man da vergißt, nicht ganz nach allen Regeln mißt und leistet was man sonst wohl kann.
I am often filled with displeasure when some pretty female foot moves too gently during the
measurement and thus it distracts me so that I nearly forget, as I kneel down and measure, what my duties are: Examine with composure, the length, the width, the height, the breadth. And write them down. Then people laugh at me and say: "You silly fellow don't forget what you
are supposed to do. And finish finally, you are so clumsy." No wonder that one forgets, does not measure properly, and does not do the best job that one
otherwise is capable of.
38   Glucks La Rencontre imprevue
The Viennese Sock no longer craves for women to wear higher shoes so that he could molest their upper body; Stephanie also deletes Sock's interjection ("Ah!") and his description of palpitating heart in the latter part of the aria, thus getting rid of sensual imagery that borders on orgasmic sensations.
It is unclear whether Stephanie rewrote the aria because he himself found it too suggestive, or because (in a measure of what is often referred to as "self-censorship") he feared that the original would be unacceptable for the censor. Stephanie and Umlauf, moreover, do not simply get rid of sensuality and double entendres but introduce an element of intense censoriousness that goes beyond mere prudishness and signals a strong didactic intent on the part of the Viennese adapters. Stephanie's use of the words "Verdruß" and "Verwirrung" at the aria's opening transforms Sock's experience at the sight of the actresses' feet from one of exciting arousal into one of disturbing confusion, perhaps even mixed with bad conscience. Stephanie's text also has an exhortative quality to it, especially when emphasizing the necessity to follow one's duties. The onlookers who comment on Sock's disturbed manner, moreover, are not as roguishly sympathetic as in the Paris version. Instead of smiling at Sock, they admonish and criticize him. This newly introduced uprightness, furthermore, is made prominent through Umlaufs music. In the opening measures, Umlauf repeats the word "Verwirrung" several times (mm. 15-17) - precisely the word that signifies Sock's mixed feelings and possibly also guilt about his voyeuristic desires (see Example 1.1).
\viw:i;i)i:m'
CONSKOl kyi
Example 1.1 Umlauf, Die schöne Schusterin, Act I, no. 7, opening of Sock's aria.
In the next section, Sock sings lines 5 and 6 only once but repeats several times a portion of line 7 ("was mir mein Amt auflegt"). Umlauf also set the phrase to longer rhythmic values and wider melodic leaps. The resulting declamatory style sets in relief Sock's diligence and his respect for professional duties (see Example 1.2, mm. 25-34).
Line 5
Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue 39
Lilie 6
10	rri			
So /	clat  Hi laa_ pf	wt - gn ■ *«■ *em —p        *< ~	iili   ill kit*_ Pf	_ lllld IIKS-Sl, iir-    r =f
		FT"    1 -		T   r 7
Example 1.2 Umlauf, Die schbne Schusterin, Act I, no. 7, lines 5-7 of Sock's aria.
The amount of textual and musical features that Stephanie and Umlauf devoted to incorporating a sense of righteousness into the aria suggests that the purge of the French opera was not merely enforced by the Viennese authorities but coincided with the dramaturgical interests of National Singspiel authors.
There are also numerous indications that various persons other than the censor and the adapters were involved in evaluating and transforming the moral content of pieces that eventually appeared on the stage of the National Theater. In addition to the censors, the emperor himself was an important arbiter of the moral qualities in the National-Theater repertoire. Joseph IPs moralistic views often influenced both the selection and adaptation of works presented at the National Theater, as well as the fate of works already in the repertoire. In January 1777, for example, Joseph II prohibited further performances of Maximillian Klinger's storm-and-stress drama Die Zwillinge because it supposedly contained too much material that contradicted the teachings of the Bible.85 In his letter to the Berlin aesthetician Friedrich Nicolai from July 2, 1777, the Austrian chancellor Tobias Philipp von Gebler explained this ban as part of Joseph IPs dislike for the "horrifying, un-German, and nonsensical Shakespearean imitations" ("gräßliche, undeutsche; und unsinnvolle Schäkespearische Nachäffungen").86 The documents connected to the operation of the National Theater in the late 1770s and early 1780s contain numerous references to Joseph IPs negative views of licentious and gruesome subjects and occurrences - Teuber explained that the directors of the National Theater wanted to prevent any possible objection the emperor might have had about a theatrical performance, even before that objection was made.87 On July 3,1777, for example, the National Theater directorship decided to temporarily exclude Shakespeare's Romeo und Julie from the repertoire, because the emperor was opposed to pieces that contained "funerals, graveyards, burial vaults and other sad scenes."88
40   Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue
Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue 41
Many moralistic changes and viewpoints also originated with the directorship of the court theater. Joseph IFs original constitution of the National Theater allowed its actors to have a say in the choice of the repertoire through gatherings in which they expressed opinions about the pieces submitted for performance.89 The process proved so convoluted that the constitution was later changed, and the general assembly of the company's members was replaced by a board of directors comprised of selected actors who expressed opinions about whether a piece was to be accepted or rejected.90 The opinions of the directors (preserved in their minutes, called protocols) about individual pieces show a strong influence of the aesthetic debates about a literate, didactic, and national German theater of which censorship was a by-product. The protocols show an increased sensitivity on the side of the directors toward any subject that could potentially offend the strictly didactic and affirmative purpose of the National Theater. The directors' approach to moralistic concerns also became stricter in the National Theater era than in the previous decade. This intensification sometimes led to self-criticism, as one can see in a note from 1778 by Stephanie the Younger, one of the directors at the time, about his own adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (premiered in November of 1772 at the Karntnertortheater). Stephanie claims that the adaptation does not meet the moral standards of the National Theater, because it contains too many spectacular effects and gruesome occurrences, instead of "pure and applicable morality" ("lautere und anwendbare Moral").91
The protocols contain mostly disquisitions on spoken plays, but a few opera libretti are evaluated as well. The discussion of the libretto for Antonio Salieri's contribution to the National Singspiel, the opera Der Rauchfangkehrer ("The Chimney Sweep"), demonstrates that the directors judged according to the same moralistic principles as those expressed in the writings of Hagelin and Sonnenfels:
The Chimney Sweep, or the indispensable Betrayers of Their Lordships, musical comedy in three acts. Herr Miller reports: ... a highly unnatural farce that does not deserve to be accepted for the national theater. Eternal pity, that the composer got hold of such a miserable piece. Every lover of purified theater, will regard this nonsense with indignation, even if, as I do not doubt, the music is excellent. No real plan, no natural connection of scenes, no chaste language, the most everyday characters, miserable versification in the songs, lots of vulgar humor, a number of rude and dirty expressions, ... I cannot advise its acceptance. ... All the other members [of the committee] have read the piece and expressed the same opinion. Stephanie the Elder, Stephanie the Younger, Brockmann, Lange.92
The note suggests that the National Theater directors watched over the moral qualities of pieces even before they were submitted to Hagelin. The note also reveals the complexity of the approval process: although the directors voted against the production of Salieri's opera, it did appear on the stage of the National Theater in the spring of 1781, and was repeated numerous times. Conspicuously, the 1781
libretto does not contain any easily perceivable instances of vulgar humor, unchaste language, or rude and dirty expressions, so the revisions that must have occurred between the verdict by the directorial board in March of 1779 and the libretto's publication in early 1781 responded to at least some of the concerns raised by the court theater personnel.93 Although it is impossible to find out what exactly the directors read and how the original submission differed from the printed libretto, the whole episode indicates that the process of sizing up a work's moral outlook did not entail a direct chain of command; opinions were flexible and contradictory, changes were often made and unmade, and there were numerous contributors to the final shape of an opera's content, including the original authors, Viennese adapters, theater directors, composers, the censor, and the emperor.
Although convoluted and contradictory, the multilevel system of controlling the content of theater pieces produced by the National Singspiel might partially account for the intensification of moralistic concerns in the 1780 revision of Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue. Already the 1764 Viennese opera was in fact affected by several different parties whose concerns and suggestions prefigured those of later German-theater censors - besides Durazzo and his associates, the process of sanitizing the Parisian opera for the Viennese stage also involved various court officials, including the empress. The standards of decorum, moreover, could change suddenly and arbitrarily; in the fall of 1763, the libretto had to be revised to take into account the death of Joseph IPs wife Isabella of Parma -Brown's comparison of the two editions of the libretto published in 1763 has shown that all references to Rezia's death were removed from the opera after Isabella's demise.94 In 1780, the process of reviewing and controlling theatrical content was equally complicated and as a result quite invasive; the German translation of the libretto for Gluck's opera was most likely reviewed both by the directors of the National Theater and by the censor Hagelin, all of whom needed to be sensitive to possible objections by the emperor.
The National Theater repertoire of the late 1770s and early 1780s, however, had a different status from the French pieces of the 1760s. Whereas the French repertoire mainly functioned as a means of courtly representation and entertainment, the German repertoire was also supposed to appeal to and educate wide levels of the Viennese society, including the "common people" viewed by theorists such as Sonnenfels and Justi as the most important recipients of vernacular forms of theater. Moreover, throughout the 1760s and 1770s Viennese intellectuals, critics, and bureaucrats started to perceive German theater as a site of national representation. The purified La Rencontre imprevue of 1780 and the purged Die schöne Schusterin therefore also expressed the new prestige of the German theater in Vienna. German works no longer represented the risque and vulgar counterpart to the French and Italian operas and plays performed at the court theater; instead they were now supposed to surpass the cosmopolitan culture in ways that both confirmed the status of its German-speaking audience as a cultivated and culturally advanced national group, and at the same time further cultivated and educated that audience.
42   Glucks La Rencontre imprevue Notes
1 Gluck's opera strongly influenced Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the other hit produced by the National Singspiel. For a discussion of the interactions (personal and musical) between Mozart and Gluck in Vienna in the early 1780s see Gerhard Croll. "Der 'alte Gluck' und Mozart in Wien," in Gluck Schriften; Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Vorträge 1967-2002, ed. Irene Brandenburg, Elisabeth Richter, and Renate Croll (New York: Bärenreiter, 2003), 185-194.
2 The translation was published in 1772: Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (Frankfurt. Andreäisehe Schriften, 1772).
3 See Josef-Horst Lederer, "Zu Genesis und Quellen der Pilgrime von Mekka," in Gluck auf dem Theater, ed. Daniel Brandenburg and Martina Hochreiter (New York: Bärenreiter, 2008), 261-280.
4 As Lederer points out, another important difference between the 1771 translation and the 1780 Vienna edition is that the Vienna production cut the ballet and the aria "Venez. venez troupe brillante" (for Balkis), either because the National Singspiel did not incorporate a ballet troupe or because Joseph II did not enjoy ballet very much. Lederer, 266.
5 Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, 1772, 26. This line is quite close to the original French: "Nous vimes encore la Princesse qui se debattoit sur la poupe." La Rencontre imprevue (Vienna: Ghelen, 1763), 21.
6 Die unvermuthete Zusammenkunft, oder Die Pilgrime von Mecca (Vienna: Logen-meister, 1780), 17.
7 The product of this 1763 revision was eventually produced in 1764. However, already in 1763 Gluck's opera went through a pre-production revision in response to the death of Isabella of Parma, the wife of Joseph II. The earlier version of Gluck's opera appropriated the Parisian plot in which Ali believes Rezia has died, whereas in (he final libretto of 1764 Ali knows that Rezia has been abducted by pirates. Thus there are in fact two versions of Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue, one of which was suppressed; this chapter discusses the later of the two. On the 1763 pre-production revision of La Rencontre imprevue see Bruce Alan Brown, "Gluck's Rencontre Imprevue and Its Revisions," Journal of the American Musicological Society 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 498-510.
8 Les Pelerins de la Mecque in Le Theatre de la foire, ou L'opera comique, vol. 7 (Amsterdam and Paris, 1731), 222.
9 La Rencontre imprevue, 82. "L'amour ne peut rien sur mon coeur aux depens de l'equite. Votre Constance et Pheroi'sme de vos sentiments debarment mon courroux."
10 Les Pelerins. 225. The original maxim appeared in Oeuvres de Crebillon, vol. 3 (Paris: Didot, 1802), 72.
11 La Rencontre imprevue, 85. Thomas Betzwieser interpreted the excision of satirical aspects associated with Arlequin in the 1726 version from the 1764 Vienna version as connected to the desire to reduce social criticism. See Thomas Betzwieser, "Die Europäer in der Fremde: Die Figurenkonstellazion der Entführung alte dem Serail und ihre Tradition," in Mozarts Opernfiguren: Grosse Herren, rasende Weiher, gefährliche Liebschaften, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Vienna: Haupt, 1992), 38-39.
12 Les Pelerins, 224.
13 For a brief overview of the satirical aspects in early eighteenth-century ope'ra-comique, see Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Centwy Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 222. For the Viennese interest in incorporating absolutist perspectives into pre-existing works, see Kramer, 405,
14 Les Pelerins, 176.
15 Ali's devotion to Rezia is even more exemplary in the earlier version of Gluck's libretto, suppressed after the death of Joseph IPs wife, in which Ali believes Rezia has perished. See Brown, "Gluck's Rencontre Imprevue and Its Revisions."
Gluck's La Rencontre imprtvue 43
16 Les Pelerins, 188.
17 It is unclear whether this custom was actually practiced; sec Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale; University Press, 2000), 14-15.
18 Cited in Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 408.
19 Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 94—95.
20 See Zechmeister, 47-52.
21 Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 408.
22 Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 8.
23 Cited in Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 474, note 149.
24 Cited in Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 474, note 149.
25 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, ed. R. Halsband (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:264.
26 1 translate the commonly encountered adjective "regelmässig" as "proper"; the word has a variety of other shades of meaning, e.g. consistent, well organized, or simply "regular" (as opposed to irregular, in the sense of freely improvised and perhaps shapeless and erratic).
27 Music was an important part of the improvised comedies, but the only known, surviving, completely written-down, and original opera prior to 1778 is Johann Leopold Ghelen and Ignaz Holzbauer's Hypermnestra, commissioned for and produced at the Kamtnertortheater in 1741. See Bennett, 63-90.
28 Journal etranger; Mai 1760 (Paris: Lambert, 1760), 92-94. Partially cited in Brown, Gluck and the French Theater, 37. "[92] La Comedie Allemande est la Satyre de la Nation; mais le mauvais gout l'infecte encore, du moins ä Vienne. Je le dit d'autant plus hardiment, que le Cour & la Noblesse rougissent des [93] entraves que 1'ignor-ence met aux progres des Arts & de l'urbanite'. Cependent le Peuple & quelquefois les Nobles courent ä ce Spectacle; ils y vontpussees par cette avidite dc voir que l'oisivete fortific dans les ames vuides, & que voyent-ils? des Tyrants qui egorgent de sang-froid, & qui se pendent de desespoir sur le Theatre; un vieux scelerat qui prend par meprise le poison qu'il avoit prepare pour son fils, & meurt ensuite dans des convulsions, dont les plus hideuses font toujour rire davantage. On voit dans ces Piece une Venus qui se deguise en Bohemienne, en Maltre de Chapelle, en Courtisane. Cette Venus traine ä sa suite cinq ou six Amours don't elle a successivement accouche. Ces Amours vont se cacher derriere une terrible Pallas; & tandis qu'elle exhorte, on ne fcair quel Prince extravagant, ä la Sagesse, des Enfans matins frappent la [94] Deese de cinq ou six coups de fieche, en facon de poignard, qui lui donnent quelque distraction, & la font erernuer & grimacer; puis elle reprend le fil de sa harangue, jusqu'ä ce qu'on redouble les coups de stilet, & voilä qu'elle devient amoureuse du Prince. Vous jugez hien, Messieurs, par ces traits epar dans plusieurs Pieces de Theatre Allemand, qu'il n'en est guere qui meritent votre attention, & que je respecte trop une Nation d'ailleurs tres-sensee, pur l'exposer ä vos railleries. Mais ce qui relevera [la Nation Allemande] sans doute ä vos yeux, e'est la sagesse qu'elle a de faire contribuer d'autre Peuples ä ses plaisirs. Et quells Peuples? Ceux qui se disputent Part de plaire & d'enchanter, Litauen & le Francois."
29 Similar opinions appear in the anonymous article "Auszug eines Briefes von Wien" published in the north German periodical Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und derfreyen Künste, vol. 9 (Leipzig: Dyck, 1763): 326-330.
30 Another account of how moralistic pronouncements were ridiculed at the German performances in the Kamtnertortheater appears in the critique of a play by Weiskem, in Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Dyck, 1763): 162-169.
31 Zechmeister, 105.
32 Haider-Pregler mentions that more than 200 letters by Gottshed's Viennese correspondents survive in the manuscript department of University of Leipzig. See Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 214, 455, notes 15 and 16.
44   Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue
Gluck 's La Rencontre imprevue 45
33 Cited in Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 472, note 144.
34 Quoted in Zechmeister, 31.
35 Freymüthige Nachrichten Von neuen Büchern, Und andern zur Gelehrtheit gehörigen Sachen, 63. Stück (Zürich, 1749), 342; quoted in Zechmeister, 30.
36 For an overview of the development of eighteenth-century German theories of theater didacticism, see WSlfel.
37 He, in fact, makes several contradictory, often even disrespectful comments about Gottsched, See Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 481, note 185.
38 Krebs, L'Idee de "theatre national," 479.
39 Jean-Francois Rcgnard's Le Joucur, was first produced in Paris in 1696, and was performed by the French troupe in Vienna in 1752, and later between 1768 and 1772, it was also performed in German translation starting in 1766. Edward Moore's The Gamester was first performed in London in 1753 and appeared in Vienna throughout the 1760s and 70s in various adaptations and translations.
40 Joseph von Sonnenfels, Briefe über die Wienerische Schaubühne, ed. Hilde Haider-Pregler (Graz: Akademischer Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1988), 156.
41 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 156.
42 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 156.
43 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 156.
44 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 159.
45 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 173.
46 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 174.
47 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 174.
48 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 176.
49 Daniel Heartz picks up on Sonnenfels's tendency to de-emphasize Calzabigi's Italian origin and goes as far as to claim that "one would never learn from his long review that the opera was in Italian, not German." Daniel Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740-1780 (New York: Norton, 1995), 229. Sonnenfels, nevertheless, docs mention the original language of the opera as well as his own German translation of the libretto.
50 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 11-12.
51 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 12.
52 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 12.
53 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 17.
54 Sonnenfels, Briefe, 19. Sonnenfels recalls this distinction between spiritual (German) absorption and sensual (non-German) entertainment in other critiques. See, for example, Sonnenfels, Briefe, 33.
55 Joseph von Sonnenfels, "Nach der zweiten Vorstellung der Iphigenie in Tauris," Deutsches Museum, vol. 1 (January-June, 1782), 403.
56 Sonnenfels, Deutches Museum, 413-414. Sonnenfels is reacting to the following exchange between Orestes and Py lades as it appears in Alxinger's translation: "Orestes: O Pilades [sic]', o du mein Schutzgott! Pilades (in Orestens Armen): Mein Freund! mein Einziger!" Iphigenia in Tauris (Vienna: Logenmeister, 1781), 43. Paradoxically, Pylades' line and the stage direction about the two men embracing each other do not appear in early editions of the French libretto or the score, and Sonnenfels is therefore likely criticizing as a product of French depravity a creation of a fellow Viennese.
57 Sonnenfels, Deutches Museum, 401.
58 Joseph von Sonnenfels, Sätze aus der Polizey-, Handlungs-, und Finanzwissenschaft (Vienna: Trattner, 1765).
59 Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 59.
60 See Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 53 and 63.
61 Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 55 and 61.
62 Johann Christoph Gottsched, Die Deutsche Schaubühne nach den Regeln der alten Griechen und Römer eingerichtet, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1741), 25. As with
many of his reform ideas, Gottsched censorship proposal has a French root. In the "Preface," Gottsched talks about Louis XI V's order that all theater pieces be censored by the general director of the police. Gottsched also cannot resist a jibe: the Parisian censorship would be a most welcome institution if the police directors "understood good moral teaching" and were "no lovers of obscenities," but that has often not been the case.
63 Joseph Heinrich von Engelschall, Zufällige Gedanken über die deutsche Schaubühne zu Wien von einem Verehrer des guten Geschmacks und guter Sitten (Wien: Trattner, 1760), 47.
64 This document is transcribed in Oscar Teuber, Das k. k. Bmgtheater seit seiner Begründung, vol. 1 of Die Theater Wiens (Vienna: Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1896), VII, note 19. Hilde Haider-Pregler has shown that this note in fact was written by Sonnenfels and only nominally assigned to Stephanie. See Haider-Pregler, Des sittlichen Bürgers Abendschule, 495, note 239. Sonnenfels's authorship further demonstrates the interconnection between the practitioners of German theater and those intellectuals and bureaucrats who theorized about its social, political and economical significance.
65 Teuber, vol. 1,VII.
66 Cited in Günter Brosche, "Joseph von Sonnenfels und das Wiener Theater" (Doctoral diss., Universität Wien, 1962), 131-132.
67 Bemardon's adaptation, called Die vier ungleichen Heürathen, was produced at the Kämtnertortheater in the spring of 1770, during a brief period when the directorship of the court theater disregarded the 1769 calls against reintroducing improvised comedy (see above). At one point Felix Kurz even became the director of the Kärtnertortheater. See Hilde Haider-Pregler, "Wien probiert seine Nationalschaubühne: Das Theater am Kärntnertor in der Spielzeit 1769/70," Maske und Kothurn 20, no. 3^1 (December 1974): 297-300.
68 Sonnenfels submitted the note to Joseph II sometime in April 1770 in response to an earlier note by the director of the Kämtnertortheater, Giuseppe d'Afflisio, complaining about the ban. The whole note is printed in Zechmeister, 57-62.
69 Zechmeister, 60.
70 Zechmeister, 61.
71 The materials documenting censorship of non-German works after the instituting of the German theater censor in 1770 are sparse. A special censor was responsible for the French plays and Italian operas but little is known about his activities. At first, the Office was held by Johann Theodor von Gontier, who replaced by August von Wöber in October of 1770. See Zechmeister, 50 and Brosche, 132.
72 Zechmeister, 60.
73 Lessing's friend and future wife Eva König reported from Vienna that Sonnenfels lost his appointment because he did a poor job censoring Favart's play Soliman second. Certain people around the empress supposedly brought it to her attention that Sonnen-fels allowed the word "Schnupftuch" (handkerchief) to be used in an ambiguous manner and did not push for a more thorough transformation of the character Roxellane so that she offended the strict moral codes of Vienna. It seems therefore that Sonnenfels's own strictness ultimately turned against him, possibly at the instigation by some faction at the imperial court that sought to diminish his growing personal influence. See Zech-meister, Die Wiener Theater, 25 and 50, and Briefwechsel zwischen Lessing und Eva König, ed. E. Dörffel (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1892), 47. Günther Brosche, basing his ideas on arguments by a certain R. Bavarus (possibly a pseudonym for Rudolf Payer von Thurn), offers an explanation that has to do with another problematic play, Christian Felix Weiße's Die Matrone von Ephesus. Sonnenfels altered numerous passages, but the whole premise of the play—a young widow falls in love with a soldier and saves his life by having her dead husband's body hanged from the gallows—was interpreted as ridiculing the empress (a widow of five years). See Brosche, 129^132.
46   Gluck's La Rencontre imprevue
Glucks La Rencontre imprevue 47
81
82
74 Carl Glossy, "Zur Geschichte der Wiener Theaterzensur I.," Jahrbuch der Grillparzer Gesellschaft! (1897): 38.
75 Quoted in Brosche, 112-113.
76 Brosche, 122. See also Joseph Lange, Biographie des Joseph Lange, k. k. Hofschaus-pieler (Vienna: Rehm, 1808), chapter 11, 72-76; and Glossy, "Zur Geschichte der Wiener Theaterzensur," 282.
77 Portions of this document were published in Glossy in "Zur Geschichte der Wiener Theaterzensur 1.," 298-340. The original was then destroyed in a fire. Recently, the musicologist Lisa de Alwis discovered several handwritten copies of the document and her edition is forthcoming. See also Lisa de Alwis, "Censorship and Magical Opera in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna" (Ph.D. diss. University of Southern California, 2012), 24-73.
78 Stephanie and Umlaufs opera became one of the greatest hits of the 1779-80 season, with numerous performances in the following years and several revivals during the decades to come. As Michtner suggests, Die schöne Schusterin might be the only opera from the National Singspiel era besides Mozart's Die Entführung that could be successful revived on modem stages. Michtner, 68.
79 Diepücefarbnen Schuhe, oder Die schöne Schusterin (Vienna: Logenmeister, 1779), 46.
80 This portion of Hägelin's guidelines was suppressed from the Glossy's edition of the document and re-discovered only recently by De Alwis. See De Alwis, diss., 49. De Alwis, diss., 49.
Another reason behind Hägelin's outrage in 1779 might have been the scandal in which the singer Marianne Weiß was imolved in the years leading to the production of Die schöne Schusterin. The singer's good looks led a certain Count Palm to pay so much attention to her that in 1771 Empress Maria Theresa asked her police minister to investigate into the relationship and into the rumor that Palm wanted to buy sexual favors from Weiß. See Michtner, 66-67, and Alfred Ritter von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, vol. 9 (Vienna- Braumüller, 1879), 401. The reviewer of Die schöne Schusterin for the journal Deutsche.', Museum, moreover, claimed that Weiß was chosen for the role of Lehne due to her physical charms, which further increases the possibility that the way Weiß interpreted the role had a sexual allure for certain members of the audience. Deutsches Museum 1, no. 12 (March 31, 1781), 528.
83 Les Souliers mors-dores. ou La Cordonniere allemande (Paris: Vente, 1776), 35-36.
84 Die pücefarbnen Schuhe, 25-26.
85 Oscar Teuber, Das k. k. Burgtheater seit seiner Begründung, vol. 2, part 2.1 of Die Theater Wiens (Vienna: Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1903). 39. Aus dem Josephinischcn Wien: Geblers und Nikolais Briefwechsel während der Jahre 1772-1786, ed. Richard Maria Werner (Berlin: Herz, 1888), 86. Teuber, vol. 2, 39^10.
Cited in Teuber, vol. 2, 39. See also Glossy, "Zur Geschichte der Wiener Theaterzensur," 283.
See Glossy, "Zur Geschichte der Wiener Theaterzensur 1," 42 ff. The self-governance was in direct imitation of the seventeenth-century Comedie francaise, which ihe National Theater ideologues considered their most important model. Sec Franz Had-amowsky, Wien: Theatergeschichte—Von den Anfügen bis I9IS (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1988), 260. Teuber, vol. 2, 14. Cited in Teuber, vol. 2, 39.
Protokol der Referate über die eingeschickten Stücke beym keyserl. königl. National-Theater [the first entry dates from March 2, 1779], HHStA, GIdHTh SR 3, 115. "Der Rauchfangkehrer, oder die unentberlichen Verräther ihrer Herrschaften, ein Musikalisches Lustspiel in dreyen Aufzügen. Herr Miller referirte: eine ... höchst unnatürliche Farce, die wirklich der Annahme für die Nationalschaubühne unwürdig ist. Ewig Schade, daß der Herr Compositor ein so erbärmliches höchstelendes
86
87
89
90
91
92
Stück gerathen ist. Jeder Liebhaber der gereinigten Bühne, wird wann, wovon ich nicht zweifle, die Musik noch so vortrefflich ist, mit Unwiderwillen dieses Unding ansehen. Kein richtiger Plan, keine natürliche Verbindung der Scenen, keine reine Sprache, höchställtägliche Characktere, eine erbärmliche Versifikation in den Gesängen, viel Pöbelwitz, eine Menge grober und schmutziger Ausdrücke. ... Ich kann nicht zur Annahme rathen. ... Sämtliche Glieder ... hatten dieses Stück gelesen und waren eben dieser Meinung. Stephanie der Ältere, Stephanie der Jüngere, Brockmann, Lange."
93 Der Rauchfangkehrer, oder Die unentbehrlichen Verräther ihrer Herrschaften aus Eigennutz (Vienna: Logenmeister, 1781).
94 Brown, "Gluck's Rencontre Imprevue and Its Revisions," 506-515. As Brown shows, Gluck did not have time to adjust the musical settings to the new texts, which resulted in a curious mismatch between the music and the words in the revised anas.