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Dissertation Information for John Richard Mangum

NAME:
- John Richard Mangum

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- David Warren Sabean

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Peter H. Reill
- Susan McClary

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Apollo and the German muses: Opera and the articulation of class, politics, and society in Prussia, 1740--1806

Abstract: This dissertation examines opera in Brandenburg-Prussia between 1740 and 1806 as a measure of social, political, and cultural change. Beginning in 1740, the monarchy subsidized an Italian opera company that performed primarily in the newly-constructed Royal Opera House on Berlin's main boulevard, Unter den Linden. Friedrich II chose the mid eighteenth-century Italian dramma per musica to represent monarchic power and prestige, and its performance reflected a rigorously articulated social and political ideal, both on the stage in the subjects selected for operatic treatment and in the theater through a carefully theorized arrangement of the audience to mirror social hierarchy determined according to rank. Performances after 1786 offered a different ideal, influenced by the emergence of a bureaucratic middle class in Berlin, by the appearance of a literary public sphere in conjunction with new printed discussions of music after 1750, and by a reorientation of opera that took market forces into account beginning in the 1760s.

This project uses methodology developed by social historians over the past two decades as well as approaches drawn from historical musicology and art history. I rely on a collection of texts generated by Berlin's operatic institutions during the period under consideration. These include both archival and printed documents in the form of correspondence (private, administrative, and diplomatic), financial records, newspapers, journals, memoirs, published and unpublished musical scores, stage and costume designs, treatises, and biographies.

These sources offer evidence of a dialectic between the monarchy and the musical public in Berlin during the period. The monarchy, its musical institutions, and the operas it financed were challenged by a series of privately-run theaters that reflected the tastes and critiques of Berlin's musical public. The transformation of the monarchy's operatic institutions, embodied in the foundation of the Royal National Theater in 1786 and the changes to the Royal Opera after it reopened in 1788, took these criticisms into account. Both theaters also reflected the new social and political realities in Prussia, where the influence of the bureaucracy and of market forces increased significantly during the last years of the eighteenth century.

MPACT Scores for John Richard Mangum

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calculated 2008-08-13 15:40:15

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Students under John Richard Mangum

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None