Performing Politics: Music and Theater in Berlin Around 1800 (New Material Histories of Music)

A new account of the emergence of modern cultural politics through a study of music and theater in Berlin around 1800. Berlin around 1800 has been seen--at the time and since--as somewhat behind other major European cities in terms of its musical culture, peripheral to the momentous developments attributed to the period. By contrast, early nineteenth-century Berlin has been exhaustively studied as the site of a nascent German-national movement and the Prussian Reforms. In Performing Politics, Katherine Hambridge examines the confluence of music and politics in Berlin around 1800, engaging directly with the themes of being behind/ahead, central/peripheral, in order to tell new stories about nineteenth-century German history, musical and otherwise. Performing Politics emphasizes events as much as repertoires, and non-canonical repertoires over the more familiar music of this period: dynastic birthday celebrations, the music of historical dramas, political song and communal singing, popular music theater.