Articles by tag "Vienna"

Paisiello’s La Frascatana: Dramaturgical Transformations on Its Journey Through Central Europe

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Italian opera buffa successfully spread all over Europe. The works were often adapted to suit not only the new performers but also the respective cultural context. This is also true of one of the most popular comic operas of the period,...
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Music of Minorities—“The Others from Within”? On Terminology and the History of Research in Austria

This article looks into the history of the disciplines folk music research and ethnomusicology (comparative musicology) using the Viennese case as a rather representative example for both disciplines. It includes a personal account as the author has been an eye witness of the developments during the last 40 years. It...
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A. W. Ambros and F. P. G. Laurencin: Two Antiformalistic Views on the Viennese Musical Life of the 1870s?

In the 1870s, both August Wilhelm Ambros and Ferdinand Peter Graf Laurencin worked as reviewers of music in Vienna: Ambros had regularly been writing for the Wiener Zeitung since 1872, and Laurencin was, among other things, a Viennese correspondent for the newly established music journal Dalibor in Prague. The reviews...
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Courtly Representation Play, Singspiel, Opéra Comique: On the Reception of Antonio Sacchini’s Lisola damore

Up to now, scholars have treated ”opera as a form of courtly representation,” a topic of great significance for cultural history, primarily with regard to opera seria as well as festa teatrale. By contrast, opera buffa has been neglected, often being given the label ”bourgeois,” although the works of this...
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Der junge Webern


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William Kinderman: Utopische Visionen und visionäre Kunst


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Italian Opera in Vienna in the 1770s: Repertoire and Reception – Data and Facts

Up to now in the research on Vienna’s theater and opera life in the 1770s the subject of the Italian repertoire and its reception remained rather underexposed, among other reasons for lack of outstanding artistic events, but also for the particular attention devoted to the institution-historical developments of this decade,...
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Exhibiting Beethoven in 2020


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Borrowing, Reworking, and Composing: The Making of the Viennese Pasticci of 1750

The dramma per musica Andromeda liberata, the favola pastorale Euridice, and the azione teatrale Armida placata, all performed for the first time in Vienna at the Theater nächst der Burg in 1750, are, as pasticci, quite exceptional for the Viennese opera repertory of the Theresian Age. Their singularity resides not...
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“The Foremost and Unrivalled Music Engraving Business in Austro-Hungary”: Josef Eberle (1845–1921), Printer, Publisher, and Manufacturer of Manuscript Paper

By the 1870s music printing and publishing in Austro-Hungary was under considerable competitive pressure from major firms based in Leipzig and elsewhere in Germany. Using more recent printing techniques (most notably printing from engraved plates by transfer lithography) and often a more integrated system of production, firms such as Breitkopf...
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Marketing Orchestral Music in the Domestic Sphere in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna: The Beethoven Arrangements Published by Sigmund Anton Steiner

In 1816, Beethoven and Steiner agreed on a publishing contract that was at the time unique in the history of music publication. They decided to issue three of Beethoven’s newest orchestral works—Wellington’s Victory, and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, opp. 91–93—in arrangements for various combinations of chamber group, simultaneously, and...
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His Voice and Something More: Francesco Borosini’s Cantata Quando miro o stella o fiore for Anton Ulrich, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen

Eighteenth-century opera singers often engaged in activities that far exceeded their role as mere performers. Not only could they have a decisive impact on a composer’s musical choices; they often functioned as “cultural middlemen,” cultivating contacts to various noblemen. We can observe a prime example for a singer’s “networking abilities”...
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“This the Czechs Can Teach Us”: National Conflict, Transnational Opera, and Imperial Politics at the 1892 International Exhibition of Music and Drama

This article explores how national conflicts were defined, negotiated, and resolved (or not) during the 1892 Vienna International Exhibition of Music and Drama. Through a combination of archival research and reception history, I analyze the various approaches to the organization of the exhibition, which institutionalized political formations in the structure...
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“This the Czechs Can Teach Us”: National Conflict, Transnational Opera, and Imperial Politics at the 1892 International Exhibition of Music and Drama

This article explores how national conflicts were defined, negotiated, and resolved (or not) during the 1892 Vienna International Exhibition of Music and Drama. Through a combination of archival research and reception history, I analyze the various approaches to the organization of the exhibition, which institutionalized political formations in the structure...
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Sounding Out Municipal Housing in Vienna: Ethnographic Insights into Music and Sound in the Anton-Figl-Hof

Municipal housing in Vienna, called Wiener Gemeindebau, is gaining new significance in research and cultural work in the discourse on affordable housing in the city and the increasing heterogeneity of urban life. However, it has also been a field imbued with the ideological projections, desires, and anxieties of various political...
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