Spectacle piece
In the 19th century, “ spectacle play ” was the main term used to describe melodramas ( mélodrame à grand spectacle ) and pantomimes with a great deal of personnel and equipment, such as the “ horse comedy ”, which sometimes crossed the line to become a circus event . A center of the German-language spectacle was the Theater an der Wien due to its large stage and advanced technology. Many spectacle pieces at the beginning of the 19th century had subjects from the age of knights, such as the melodrama Die Zauberharfe (1820), which was preserved through Franz Schubert's incidental music . The spectacle play The Dog of Aubry (1814) was popular for a long time .
From a literary theater standpoint, the term had a derogatory sound. He referred to performances with elevators, fights, dances, fireworks, which were aimed at an audience with a low level of education. Models were the theaters on Paris' Boulevard du Temple as well as private London theaters such as the Drury Lane Theater . Most of the theatricalizations of the fist fabric were spectacle pieces, as was always New York's The Black Crook (1866). With the intention of wanting to upgrade “German” literary products, the defense against the spectacle in the German-speaking area was often mixed with a nationalistic attitude. According to Karl Herloßsohn's General Theater Lexicon (1846) , the spectacle piece was calculated on the basis of the “mass of the semi-educated audience”.
The expression was often used ironically, for example in the subtitle of Franz Graf von Poccis Blaubart (1845): "a terrible spectacle from the dark Middle Ages in three acts".
Individual evidence
- ↑ Karl Herloßsohn (ed.): General theater lexicon or encyclopedia of everything worth knowing for stage artists, amateurs and theater friends , Vol. 7, Altenburg and Leipzig 1846, p. 22.