Performing Arts in Changing Societies

Opera, Dance, and Theatre in European and Nordic Countries around 1800

Randi Margrete Selvik, Svein Gladsø, Anne Margrete Fiskvik, Randi Margrete Selvik, Svein Gladsø, Anne Margrete Fiskvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000055665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

Performing Arts in Changing Societies is a detailed exploration of genre development within the fields of dance, theatre, and opera in selected European countries during the decades before and after 1800. An introductory chapter outlines the theoretical and ideological background of genre thinking in Europe, starting from antiquity. A further fourteen chapters cover the performing genres as they developed in England, France, Germany, and Austria, and follow the dissemination and adaptation of the corresponding genres in minor and major cities in the Nordic countries. With a strong emphasis on the role that pragmatic and contextual factors had in defining genres, the book examines such subjects as the dancing masters in Christiania (Oslo), circa 1800, the repertory and travels of an itinerant acrobat and his wife in Norway in the 1760s, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas on bourgeois drama in Denmark.

Including detailed analyses in the light of material, political, and social factors, this is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of musicology, opera studies, and theatre and performance studies.

1 Performative arts between rules and realities

The adaptive history of genre

Svein Gladsø and Randi Margrete Selvik

The history of the arts is a history of changes: changes of techniques and proficiencies involved in art production, changes of arenas for the display and reception of art, and changes relating to styles, forms, and genres.

This anthology is guided by a deep interest in the decades around 1800 and the changes that occurred within the fields of music, dance, and theatre at that time. Reflecting the point of departure for the anthology, the relationship between the Nordic countries and the European continent constitutes a unifying theme for several of the chapters. The limitation to music, dance, and theatre does not just represent a common interest in performing arts shared by the contributing authors; in our view, this represents a demarcation of a thematic field deserving special treatment. Our strong contention is that the performative arts, by virtue of their performativity, thematises the relationship between art and society in an exemplary way in a period when a new class, the bourgeoisie, rose to power and significance. The display and reception of dance, theatre, and music took place, and was important, on arenas contributing to the structuration of the relations between people (and groups) in the period. In new ways, and in new social settings, the performing arts constituted a distinctive context for collective and individual self-fashioning around 1800.

This was indeed a time of change. During this period of transition dance, theatre, and music entered into a series of contexts where the relationship between performers and audience became redefined. The age of dilettantes came to an end; self-fashioning through self-activity was replaced by more passive ways of consumption and reception. Private and domestic artistic activity did not disappear (as several chapters of this book aptly demonstrate), but this activity took place within a new cultural and institutional framework. Gradually, the possibility of being both actor and onlooker, both performer and listener, was reduced, resulting in a fundamental division between the artist and his/her audience and between professional and amateur. Supporting this more definite understanding of complementary roles, institutional frameworks for production, presentation, and reception/criticism evolved.

Even though, as indicated above, we are bringing attention to contextual matters, the common entry point for all contributions is artistic forms and/or genres. The artistic activity in the period – by virtue of its forms and its content – developed and refined the understanding of what it meant to display thoughts, feelings, and characters to (and in front of) an audience. In that sense, the artistic forms in question may constitute a ‘lens’ through which the self-fashioning and self-understanding of the ascending class, the bourgeoisie, can be observed. Surely, artistic practices are much more than genres; artistic practices encompass craftsmanship, social settings, artistic techniques, conventions, manifestos, etc. – but most of these factors are related to genres in some way or another. When we choose to use genres as the most important entry point to the study of artistic practices, it is exactly because important conditions and premises tend to coalesce around genres; genres are, simultaneously, accounts both of their determining conditions and their supposed effects.

Implied in such an understanding is a belief in forms and genres as being more than passive reflections of social and political circumstances; more than mere representations and manifestations of processes going on elsewhere in society. This is inspired by recent genre theory claiming that genres both reflect and reshape social situations. Such a ‘constructivist’ view of genres gained ground within literary studies from the 1980s, reflecting that the study and teaching of reading and writing needed a more convincing platform. This implied the acknowledgment that genres are not only ‘containers’ of content matter but contribute actively to the formation of meaning. The reconceptualisation of genre in a more constructivist direction and on a more general basis was led and described by scholars within literary criticism, rhetoric, and communication studies such as those by Anis S. Bawarshi (2000), John Frow (2006), Anis S. Bawarshi & Mary J. Reiff (2010), and Anne Freadman (2012). Ultimately, the outcome of the new discourse was a concept of genre in which the functional aspects were strongly emphasised. As Anis S. Bawarshi puts it, a contemporary view holds that genres are ‘rhetorical environments within which we recognise, enact, and consequently reproduce various situations, practices, relations, and identities’.¹ Obviously, this pertains not only to contemporary studies within literary education (where the new perspective first gained ground). Applied to historical studies (like the ones in this volume), this would mean studying historical genres as contributing factors in the shaping of the environments surrounding artistic practices, identifying relations between aesthetic norms and social and political life. Environments in this context would encompass material and institutional factors as well as mentalities, presuppositions, expectations, and conventions.

In many ways, this position represents a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of genre. However, as Bawarshi relates in his ‘The Genre Function’, the new concept of genre does not, necessarily, replace an older one, but it is promising as a ‘method of inquiry’ guiding enquiries about ‘how and why texts as cultural artefacts are produced; how they in turn reflect and help enact social actions; and how, finally, they can serve as sites for cultural critique and change’.²

In the present anthology, the implementation of such an approach is seen in the way genres are treated as dynamic entities, downplaying the traditional taxonomic and systematic aspects in favour of functional and pragmatic ones. A common denominator for nearly all chapters is ‘adaptation’: how genres and styles were adapted to market demands, to changing public taste on private and public arenas, and to different national and political framings. The chapters do not, in general, trace changes in the comprehension of specific genres; rather, they show how the reciprocal exchange of genres with different environments results in the development of variants, hybrids, and local versions of genres that were in circulation.

It may be apt, at this point, to mention the lack of consensus over basic terminology in the field, both in historical documents and in modern scholarship. Style is used both at an overall level, referring to ‘high’ or ‘middle’ style, and also at a sublevel pointing to specific styles. In the same vein, genre is used both at a rather aggregate level, as a synonym of style, but also (and more commonly) for manifest musical and theatrical forms like quartet, symphony, and comedy. One often has to take the context into account to understand the actual meaning of the terms in question.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the systematic ambition in genre thinking belongs to, and stems from, the movement of Classicism.³ In all its complexities, Classicism constitutes the backdrop against which every position in this field may be projected. Surely, the concept of classicism is an ambiguous one, even when restricted to genre thinking; it contains much more than adherence to symmetry and traditional forms, and to the well-known triad of lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry. As this specific triad primarily relates to literary forms, it also has limited relevance for the performative arts (with the obvious exception of theatre, with its close relation to dramatic literature). Classicism manifests itself in discipline-specific ways but still represents a common backdrop for all development of genres in the period. As Bawarshi & Reiff point out, the key characteristic of all classicism is the application of a priori, trans-historical categories (such as the triad) to produce taxonomies.⁴ At the same time, the most trans-historical taxonomic efforts within the tradition bear the mark of material and social conditions, and a sort of context sensibility. A functional and pragmatic approach is thus intrinsic in the classical tradition itself. Still, the manifest core of classicist genre theory is the belief in art as imitation, demonstrated most eloquently, and pertaining to all art forms, in Charles Batteux’s Les Beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1764). Here we find the full-fledged classical theory claiming that the imitation of nature is the sole law of fine art, establishing the groundwork for trans-historical and archetypical genre theory.

The classicist edifice is built on factors dating back to Aristotle and Plato, emphasising the dependence of genres on 1) the objects involved, and 2) the situation of enunciation. Here we find the fundamental criteria for classification, but, paradoxically, also the material and contextual preconditions for the genre systems. Intrinsic in the focus on objects in classical genre theory was the division between high, middle, and low; i.e. between ‘human action, or more precisely of human beings in action’ being superior, equal, or inferior to us (to ordinary people).⁵ It is informative to see how this high/low distinction occurs in several aesthetic systems, and how it is mixed with other factors. Genre theories were a mixture of old and new; of Antique ideas, functional deliberations, and criteria reflecting contemporary technical and aesthetic practices. All these elements enter into the systematic ambitions of classicism, making it an area of tension rather than a coherent structure. In this introductory chapter, our aim is to illustrate this point, starting with the field of music and its accompanying theory.

Music

The style system of music theorist Johann Mattheson may serve as an example of the above-mentioned lack of coherence, being a ‘system’ encompassing several style divisions of different type and character. Mattheson built on a tripartite style division which musicologist Claude V. Palisca traces back to Claudio Monteverdi, at least for the theatre and chamber styles.⁶ Monteverdi also included other classifications (technical and expressive ones), which led to discussions of the hierarchy of stylistic categories that would last throughout the Age of Enlightenment. The leading music theoretician Athanasius Kircher – in his influential Musurgia universalis (1650) – operated with as many as nine different style categories based on a combination of inherent musical and external functional criteria, with church and theatre style as main functional categories.⁷ A year before, the Italian Marco Scacchi – in his Breve discorso sopra la musica moderna (1649) – had distinguished between church, chamber, and theatre styles, the two first with several subdivisions.⁸ Thus around 1650 this triad of styles was established in music theory, and it became normal in the Baroque era.⁹ Into this mix, Mattheson added a range of new substyles (partly inherited from Kircher), but also turned to a classification with genuine Antique roots; the above-mentioned division between high and low.¹⁰ In Mattheson’s case, this was done on the basis of the philosopher and theatre reformer Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Ständeklausel. According to this rule, tragedy was populated with men of rank, capable of inducing sympathy, while people worthy of aversion inhabited comedy. Mattheson’s style system, then, encompassed several style divisions of different type and character; the old high/low (or high/middle/low) spectrum, which betrayed the rhetorical origins of his system, the church/theatre/chamber triad recounting a functional and sociological narrative, and the inclusion of Kircher’s multiple catalogues of styles reflecting contemporary artistic practices. It may seem that this threefold background, with all three influences bearing a ‘pragmatic’ orientation, produced a certain dynamism in the system as such, in fact reducing its systematic and universal character. In Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), Mattheson’s last revision of his system, he described a stylistic differentiation that was almost infinite, as different instruments might demand their ‘own’ genre: ‘Just as now each instrument has its own nature, this style divides itself in as many side genres [or species], as there are instruments’.¹¹ The modern term ‘genre’ (German Gattung) as a musical theoretical concept may be traced back to Der vollkommene Capellmeister, and Mattheson’s use of the concept was closely connected with his theory of style as a tool to systematise melodies.

Musicologist Claude V. Palisca summarises his treatment of the genesis of Mattheson’s system in this manner: ‘Mattheson’s is not a rational system … the chapter on style [in Der vollkommene Capellmeister] is not systematic; it is exploratory, pragmatic, and garrulous’.¹² Palisca sees Mattheson’s writing on style as ‘eclectic and composite’, and confounding, because four different style levels were at work:

Scacchi’s sociologically or functionally determined tripartite division, Kircher’s nine categories of stylus expressus, Gottsched’s rhetorical levels, and the gebunden – ungebunden dichotomy in compositional technique … Not altogether compatible sets of criteria – functional, expressive, rhetorical and technical – thus converge and compete, scattering the focus, tangling lines of demarcation.¹³

To Mattheson, the result was a mingling of styles, where all styles might be used in the three main spheres. Function, occasion, level, technique, and expression were parameters that would decide the stylistic choices being made. In other words, one allowed a pragmatic approach where the musical context would decide the style or genre at work, and changes and variations in context would invariably lead to stylistic or generic changes. This rather ‘relaxed’ approach was in the following decades supplemented by the aesthetic shift from a work belonging to a ‘pure’ and appropriate genre to an original, autonomous artwork produced by an artistic genius, transgressing genre and style borders – i.e. the core ideals of Romanticism. Genre became more an abstract idea and a point of departure from which a piece of music could start and then surpass, or perhaps ignore, to become original.

For our pu...