Court opera

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In contrast to the Richard Wagner Festival Hall, the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth was a place of court opera.

Courtly opera is a type of opera that took place in the premises of noble courts and in front of a majority of aristocratic audiences, sometimes as part of the court ceremony . It is often seen as the opposite of bourgeois opera, which developed since the 18th century and overcame court opera after 1800.

Demarcation

Temporally

In terms of time, “courtly opera” is used from the 17th century to the end of the 18th century, essentially during the Baroque era . Courtly opera begins with the splendor of absolutism following the academic beginnings of the Renaissance opera, which had taken place on a rather small scale, and ends with the French Revolution , in which the power of the nobility was denounced.

In the 19th century there were still institutions called the court opera because they were under the management of the court like the Viennese court opera, but opera served the entertainment of a wealthy bourgeoisie, which only parts of the court society joined. 19th century courtly operas such as Giacomo Meyerbeer's Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (1844), in which Frederick the Great was glorified in the presence of the Berlin court society, no longer had lasting success.

Contentwise

Court opera is not a genre , but rather a social framework, even if the genres of the Italian opera seria and the French tragedy lyrique were closely linked to the court and its self-portrayal and mostly also contained political symbolism. Court opera is also often associated with ballroom dancing, which was very important at court, for example in comédie ballet .

Economically

Court opera took place in the context of the court theater , which often had an exclusive right to perform serious operas. It was subsidized by the court and was therefore exposed to competition from private opera houses, such as the Teatro San Cassiano Venice or the Opera at the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg, which had to have economic success. The opera performances of the commercial and bourgeois Parisian fairground theaters regularly struggled with the Parisian Opera , which insisted on its courtly privilege so as not to lose its audience. In the 18th century, the courtly opera became a symbol of aristocratic privileges and their endangerment by the bourgeois free economy, as the history of the opéra-comique with conflicts such as the Buffonist dispute shows.

reception

Court operas were held in low esteem until early music was rediscovered in the 1920s, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's late court operas such as La clemenza di Tito (1791) were also regarded as inferior. Since the development of historically informed performance practice in the last quarter of the 20th century, numerous court operas have been reassessed and performed again.

literature