Grand palaces of culture, opera theaters marked the center of European
cities like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. As opera cast its spell,
almost every European city and society aspired to have its own opera
house, and dozens of new theaters were constructed in the course of the
"long" nineteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution in 1789,
only a few, mostly royal, opera theaters, existed in Europe. However, by
the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nearly every large
town possessed a theater in which operas were performed, especially in
Central Europe, the region upon which this book concentrates. This
volume, a revised and extended version of two well-reviewed books
published in German and Czech, explores the social and political
background to this "opera mania" in nineteenth century Central Europe.
After tracing the major trends in the opera history of the period,
including the emergence of national genres of opera and its various
social functions and cultural meanings, the author contrasts the
histories of the major houses in Dresden (a court theater), Lemberg (a
theater built and sponsored by aristocrats), and Prague (a civic
institution). Beyond the operatic institutions and their key stage
productions, composers such as Carl Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner,
Bedřich Smetana, Stanislaw Moniuszko, Antonín Dvořák, and Richard
Strauss are put in their social and political contexts. The concluding
chapter, bringing together the different leitmotifs of social and
cultural history explored in the rest of the book, explains the
specificities of opera life in Central Europe within a wider European
and global framework.
