OPÉRA-COMIQUE, CULTURAL POLITICS AND IDENTITY IN SCANDINAVIA 1760–1800

Abstract

As a contribution to the history of public life and cultural practice, this article examines the political and social implications of the fondness for French comic opera in Scandinavia between 1760 and 1800. The urban elites’ interest in opéra-comique is examined as a part of the self-fashioning processes of mimetism and distinction, but also as a way to consolidate the community. Opéra-comique was promoted by the literary and diplomatic elites. It became important for the cultural politics of the Scandinavian monarchies as well as for intellectual milieus able to propose alternative models for life in society. The appropriation of opéra-comique by an expanding public transformed the nature of the supposedly aristocratic and cosmopolitan genre, which became an element in the defining of new bourgeois and patriotic identities. With a cross-disciplinary and transnational perspective on eighteenth-century Northern Europe, the article underscores the links between politics, patronage and literary sociability, and shows that opera and music, in eighteenth-century Scandinavia, were much more than artistic issues.