Musiktheater in Raum und Zeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Theaterpraxis in Mitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.

Abstract

Most of the essays in this collection go back to a symposium held in Bratislava in 2009 on central European music theatre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For ‘central Europe’ think ‘Habsburg’ and although the end dates of some of the essays go beyond the 1918 collapse of the Habsburg Empire, there is evidence (for instance in Pieter M. Judson’s The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, Mass., 2016)) that much of the organizational apparatus and attitudes established during the empire lingered on in the successor states. Most of the eleven chapters in the collection favour Transleithania, i.e. the territory controlled after the 1867 Ausgleich by the Hungarians, rather than Austrian Cisleithania, with particular emphasis—five out of the eleven—on what is now the Slovak capital, Bratislava. The Bratislava coverage is headed by a detailed historical account by Jana Laslavíková (‘Das Städtische Theatre in Pressburg 1886–1920’) with sections devoted to pre-1884, the building of the Stadtheater in 1886, repertory and direction 1886–1920, and important visiting artists. There are further articles on women’s roles in the same period by Jana Lengová, and on the beginnings and many paradoxes of the Slovak National Theatre by Ladislav Lajcha, the editor of an important collection of documents pertaining to the theatre’s history until 1945. Nad’a Földváriová contributes a detailed account of one of the theatre’s main luminaries, Oskar Nedbal, well known before 1918 as a conductor, as the violist in the Bohemian Quartet, and as the composer of several successful Viennese operettas and ballets. Here, however, the focus is on Nedbal’s dramaturgy as chief conductor of the Slovak National Theatre (1923–30) and on finding reflections in it of the repertory choices of earlier Czech operatic conductors such as Karel Kovařovic in Prague (1900–20) and, rather more surprisingly, with those in the small theatre in Olomouc, which seemed to have served as trial station for Bratislava (p. 181).