Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University) and Austin Glatthorn (Royal Northern College of Music), editors of the forthcoming ‘Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century’, organized this workshop as an opportunity for the commissioned authors to share drafts of their chapters. We met in Český Krumlov, known to tourists for its large castle complex – second only to Prague’s – and to musicologists for its eighteenth-century theatre. Ladislav Vokatý, director of the Studijní centrum Český Krumlov, was our local host and arranged for our accommodation within the castle.

Glatthorn and Joubert opened the workshop with a brief history of Český Krumlov, noting that its castle had belonged to the Rosenberg, Habsburg, Eggenberg and Schwarzenberg families respectively from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. (Visitors can see traces of their influence in the coats of arms that adorn the façades of many buildings.) The current theatre was built in 1765–1766 under the rule of Prince Josef Adam von Schwarzenberg. After being in disuse for most of the twentieth century, the building underwent restorations in the late 1990s and now hosts around four opera performances every year.

The workshop’s first session addressed the interaction of early German opera, its audiences and its critics. While the first two presentations considered opera in the context of court and popular cultures, the latter two turned to the people who experienced these spectacles. Konstantin Hirschmann (Universität Wien) examined early German music drama as a form of courtly self-representation in Rudolstadt, Wolfenbüttel and Weissenfels. He showed that pieces such as Friedrich Christian Bressand’s Der Tempel der Tugend und Ehre (The Temple of Virtue and Honour; 1697) presented the local ruler as righteous through narratives that emphasized his virtues and noble ancestry. Helen Coffey (The Open University) shifted away from court culture to reassess the idea of a ‘civic’ or ‘public’ opera house. Focusing on theatres in Hamburg, Braunschweig and Leipzig, she demonstrated that although these theatres seemed to operate independently from aristocratic influence, they were part of a broader institutional network that shared composers, repertoire and personnel with court theatres. Martin Schneider (Universität Hamburg) spoke on the challenges of studying opera audiences. He drew on case studies spanning from Hamburg’s Oper am Gänsemarkt to Berlin’s Nationaltheater to argue that scholars can better understand audiences by investigating five complementary viewpoints: the social and demographic structure of a city, its economics, its media environment, the specific distribution of audiences within a theatre and the types of audience interaction. The panel concluded with Andrea Horz (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), who traced a history of opera criticism from Johannes Mattheson’s writings in the early eighteenth century to discussions of German identity in reviews of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821). Drawing on a wide range of sources, she argued that exchanges between writers, composers and critics shaped the development of German opera throughout the long eighteenth century.

After a lunch break and a brief walk through the branch of the Vltava that enfolds Český Krumlov, we met again for a session devoted to the performers of German opera and their craft. Presenters focused on matters of biography and performance practice that brought renewed focus to the people who make opera possible. In her discussion of theatre troupes, Adeline Mueller (Mount Holyoke College) moved beyond the conventional emphasis on impresarios, librettists and star singers. Instead, she uncovered the lesser-known histories of the theatrical rank and file by inspecting theatre regulations, pedagogical treatises, first-person accounts and metatheatrical parodies. Livio Marcaletti (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) complemented Mueller’s approach by highlighting the versatility of actor-singers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He counterpointed theoretical discussions of male falsettos, children’s singing and vocal education with brief case studies on singers who doubled as impresarios and composers, such as Margaretha Susanna Keyser (1690–1774) and Minna Brandes (1765–1788). Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University) offered a thorough study of melodrama, teasing out the specific features that characterized the genre’s declamatory style. The session concluded with Pascale LaFountain (Montclair State University), who examined gesture and acting from the perspective of some of German opera’s prominent theorists: Johann Christoph Gottsched, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In her wide-ranging study, LaFountain illuminated how debates over the expressive power of physical gesture evolved throughout the long eighteenth century.

Our vibrant discussions of theatrical practice were made tangible with a behind-the-scenes tour of the theatre. Zuza Pilna, a local stagehand, led us through the stage and its machinery. The side-wings and backdrop displayed the interior of a sumptuous palace, while at centre stage stood a magic mirror framed with flowers. These had been prepared for a performance of André Grétry’s Zémire et Azor (1771), which we would enjoy the following evening as part of the workshop’s closing event. As singers rehearsed the opera’s famous trio, Pilna ushered us under the stage. There, we marvelled at the intricate system of ropes and pulleys that made swift scenic transformations possible. Hoisting heavy blocks of cement, Zuza explained how counterweights facilitated the gliding of trapdoors. Later, she meticulously described the mechanism that conjures spectacular light effects by lowering and raising the proscenium candles. Our experience of the theatre’s machinery grounded the morning’s theoretical discussions and prepared us for the panels of the following day.

The conference continued early the next morning with a session on the technologies of German opera and its representation of other cultures. I (Miguel Arango Calle, Indiana University) opened the panel by illustrating how directors, composers and audiences negotiated the material constraints of opera production. Using examples spanning from Johannes Mattheson’s Der edelmüthige Porsenna (The Noble Porsenna; 1702) to Ferdinand Kauer’s Das Donauweibchen (The Maiden of the Danube, part 1; 1798), I argued that an opera’s genre could determine its type of visual display and explored how composers responded to visual effects throughout the eighteenth century. Taking a postcolonial standpoint, Jen-yen Chen (National Taiwan University) considered how German opera has represented China and its inhabitants. Chen reviewed the German reception of The Orphan of Chao, a thirteenth-century play by Ji Junxiang on which Metastasio based his libretto L’eroe cinese (1752). He then discussed German ambivalence towards Chinese culture in Peter Ritter’s Der Mandarin, oder die gefoppten Chinesen (The Mandarin, or the Chinese Who Were Taken for a Ride; 1821). Martin Nedbal (Kansas University) spoke on puppet theatre, offering a wide range of examples, including fascinating finds unearthed from the Stadtarchiv Ulm. In Nedbal’s account, puppet theatre was not a childish entertainment but a crucial cultural link between popular and elite cultures. Adem Merter Birson (New York University Steinhardt) concluded the panel by reappraising cross-cultural encounters between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Birson began by juxtaposing accounts by writers within one empire describing musics from the other during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He then examined how composers such as Mozart, Gluck and Carl David Stegmann (1751–1826) adapted Ottoman mehter music for their operas.

The final panel explored operatic genres and the cultural forces that shaped them. The first three papers highlighted opera’s versatility and the anxieties caused by its malleability. The last paper returned to the origins of German opera and situated it in the context of its Italian influences. Barbara Babić (Universität Leipzig) delved into different kinds of parodies – from melodramas based on previously written works to singspiels that mocked famous singers – and stressed parody’s ability to traverse serious and comic boundaries while breaking the fourth wall. Katherine Hambridge (Durham University) followed Babić’s thread, highlighting the German apprehensions about opera as a hybrid genre. In a detailed examination of Berlin operatic criticism of the early nineteenth century, Hambridge teased out how critics wrestled with the perceived sensuality of opera. In a presentation that moved beyond the opera house, Wiebke Thormählen (Royal Northern College of Music) analysed sources from the local Schwarzenberg archive in order to explore the dissemination of German opera. Rather than thinking of opera arrangements from a localized perspective, she invited us to regard them as parts of larger networks that helped delineate a corpus of German opera. Alex Fischer (University of British Columbia) brought the workshop to a close with a discussion of two of the earliest examples of German musical drama: Heinrich Schütz’s Dafne (1627) and Sigmund Theophil Staden’s Seelewig (Eternal Soul; 1644). Fischer probed into the Italian pastoral traditions that shaped these pieces and elucidated the influence that these works had on subsequent German operas, such as the Hamburg output of Lucas von Bostel (1649–1716).

After the final panel, the conference organizers kindly arranged for us to attend Český Krumlov’s Baroque Night, a festival celebrating the town’s cultural heritage. The evening began with a fanfare that summoned attendees to the castle gates, where a long-haired man in a three-piece suit – the evening’s master of ceremonies – greeted us. He first led us across the castle’s moat, the home of the bears Marie Terezie, Vilém and Polyxena. As we wandered further into the courtyards, puppeteers greeted us with marionettes, arlecchini taunted us playfully and a recorder consort charmed us with delicate melodies. Inside the castle, a lavish banquet awaited in the Hall of Mirrors, while dancers, accompanied by a small orchestra, performed a ballet in the Masquerade Hall. Eventually, the master of ceremonies summoned us to the opera, steering us through a series of labyrinthine corridors that flowed into the theatre. There, Robert Hugo conducted an abridged performance of Zémire et Azor that featured spectacular scenic transformations, surprising trapdoor disappearances and a delightful scene with the magic mirror. After the opera, we were guided into the castle gardens, where a display of eighteenth-century fireworks marked the end of an unforgettable evening.

In Anglo-American scholarship, German opera has received less attention than its Italian and French counterparts. This workshop, along with the chapters that will appear in the forthcoming ‘Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century’, demonstrate the growing interest in the history of the genre. The volume, expected next year, promises to open new perspectives on a rich operatic tradition.