New Approaches to German Opera: Embodiment, Sounds, and Global Mobilities, c 1650–1830

of Music), editors of the forthcoming 'Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century' , organized this workshop as an opportunity for the commissioned authors to share drafts of their chapters.We met in esk Krumlov, known to tourists for its large castle complex -second only to Prague's -and to musicologists for its eighteenth-century theatre.Ladislav Vokat, director of the Studijn centrum esk Krumlov, was our local host and arranged for our accommodation within the castle.Glatthorn and Joubert opened the workshop with a brief history of esk Krumlov, noting that its castle had belonged to the Rosenberg, Habsburg, Eggenberg and Schwarzenberg families respectively from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries.(Visitors can see traces of their influence in the coats of arms that adorn the faades of many buildings.)The current theatre was built in 1765-1766 under the rule of Prince Josef Adam von Schwarzenberg.After being in disuse for most of the twentieth century, the building underwent restorations in the late 1990s and now hosts around four opera performances every year.The workshop's first session addressed the interaction of early German opera, its audiences and its critics.While the first two presentations considered opera in the context of court and popular cultures, the latter two turned to the people who experienced these spectacles.Konstantin Hirschmann (Universitt Wien) examined early German music drama as a form of courtly self-representation in Rudolstadt, Wolfenbttel and Weissenfels.He showed that pieces such as Friedrich Christian Bressand's Der Tempel der Tugend und Ehre (The Temple of Virtue and Honour; 1697) presented the local ruler as righteous through narratives that emphasized his virtues and noble ancestry.Helen Coffey (The Open University) shifted away from court culture to reassess the idea of a 'civic' or 'public' opera house.Focusing on theatres in Hamburg, Braunschweig and Leipzig, she demonstrated that although these theatres seemed to operate independently from aristocratic influence, they were part of a broader institutional network that shared composers, repertoire and personnel with court theatres.Martin Schneider (Universitt Hamburg) spoke on the challenges of studying opera audiences.He drew on case studies spanning from Hamburg's Oper am Gnsemarkt to Berlin's Nationaltheater to argue that scholars can better understand audiences by investigating five complementary viewpoints: the social and demographic structure of a city, its economics, its media environment, the specific distribution of audiences within a theatre and the types of audience interaction.