The domestication of vocal music in enlightenment hamburg

Abstract

“Domesticity” is a familiar concept in eighteenth‐century cultural studies, whether understood positively as the privileging of homely virtues, family, and the private sphere, or negatively as the physical confinement and downward revaluation of middle‐class women. This article argues that eighteenth‐century domestic values and behaviors emerged from a broader, less well‐examined, “domesticating process,” defined as the appropriating transformation of something alien into a thing both familiar and useful within the paternally‐dominated domus. And it suggests that the baroque era's vigorous international commerce in musical genres—above all, extravagantly foreign opera—meant that they too were subject to domestication. In Hamburg, home to the longest‐lived commercial opera enterprise of the German baroque, secular vocal music's form, function, and meaning were remade in three distinct phases as opera composers and their audiences negotiated the limits of the “naturalizable.” Begun by Reinhard Keiser and concluded by G. P. Telemann, this domesticating process resulted in the Hamburg Opera's wildly popular, controversial experiments with comic and low‐German material. It also transformed the solo secular cantata from a virtuosic, operatic genre to one tailored to amateur performance at home. But the most profound impact of musical domestication in Hamburg was the revival of Lied composition and the framing of the Enlightenment vocal aesthetic: natural, singable, melody‐dominated, accomodated to amateur voices, and descended (however imaginatively) from venerable, national prototypes. The domestication of vocal music in Hamburg prefigured the broader domestication of culture that occurred there and elsewhere in the German Enlightenment