The Ballad, the Voice, and the Echoes of War

Abstract

Abstract In the course of the nineteenth century, the ballad increasingly became a literature associated with objects: endlessly anthologized, reproduced in schoolbooks, periodicals, and musical scores. From the beginning, however, the form was also thought uniquely suited to public declamation. This association had its origins in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic invasion and nationalist resistance to it politicized the German language, and in particular its public enunciation. This political impetus coincided with a broadening audience for such performances—several generations of authors and actors had labored to establish the legitimacy of evenings of poetry recitation, a press had grown up around the events to critique them, and the performers themselves had begun offering guides to proper declamation for laypeople. In the course of the nineteenth century the public Declamatorium ceded much of its popularity to other forms of public performance, but the guides for laypeople endured. And while ballads had constituted one important part of the canon for the professional declamators of the early century, the declamation guides published at mid-century accorded the ballad absolute centrality. This chapter investigates the thinking about the canon, about education, and about affect control that seem to have guided the path the Declamatorium took from the stage into the bourgeois living room.