Machine comedy

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The machine comedy is a historical variant of the folk play or folk theater . It is a generic term that was mostly used socially or ironically and refers to the special meaning of the stage machinery in the performances.

term

The machine comedy is in the 17./18. Century the non-courtly counterpart to the baroque opera by using its highly developed stage technology for easily understandable, from a more modern point of view, circus-like content. In machine comedy, practical performance elements of baroque opera survived until the beginning of the 19th century. There were machine comedies as pantomimes , singing games or antics . The word component comedy does not necessarily refer to a comic content, but to its non- aristocratic character (see class clause ). The word means something like "entertainment theater for the common people with impressive machines".

Components

This form of theater goes to great lengths with stage machinery, stage technology , costumes and props and tries to constantly amaze. Often it has an exotic or fantastic theme. The machines illustrate the rule of higher powers such as the appearance of the Deus ex machina or they realize magic tricks. Often in machine comedy, there are transformations in an open scene , such as a hut that becomes a castle. There are also duplications or mix-ups such as a “right” and a “wrong” Harlequin . - Mozart's Magic Flute is in some ways a machine comedy as well as early pieces of the old Viennese folk theater .

Social background

The machine comedy, like the illusionistic baroque theater in general , has an ideological-religious background in that it depicts the world as mere appearance ( vanitas ): In it, the human being is a plaything. In the 19th century, when this ideology is more and more forgotten and the domination of the irrational by machines, as can be seen behind the scenes , is moving into general awareness, machine comedy passes over into the modern piece of equipment or the holiday .

literature

  • Otto Rommel: The machine comedy: Kurz, Hafner, Perinet, Schikaneder . Reclam-Verlag, Leipzig 1935; Reprint: Wissenschaftliche Buchges., Darmstadt 1974, ISBN 3534029089 .