Research project Performing Premodernity
Performing Premodernity is a five-year research project based at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at the University of Stockholm.
Performing Premodernity is one of eight Premodernity projects funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences). Concentrating on repertoire from the years 1760-1815 and through both academic and artistic research the project aims to contribute to the revitalizing of historically informed performance today.
During five years, the research project Performing Premodernity has executed academic and artistic research concerning theatre and opera ideals, practices and discourses in the later half of the eighteenth century. Through historiographical praxeology and historically informed workshops the research group of six persons has, on the one hand, developed a new methodology for research on historical stage art (see the coming publication Performing Premodernity: Practical approaches to eighteenth century theatre), and has on the other hand produced new knowledge about various works, authors and stages from the era of Enlightenment (see for example Rousseau on Stage: Playwright, Musician, Spectator, eds. Maria Gullstam and Michael O’Dea (Oxford, 2017), and The Theatre of Drottningholm – Then and Now, by Willmar Sauter and David Wiles (Stockholm, 2015) etc.) During the project, the members have also developed research-based performances, which have gotten a lot of positive feedback from the research world, as well as the public. The research group would now like to spread and demonstrate the obtained results to a wider audience, by means of a lecture series by the project members, in combination with a series of performances of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s melodrama Pygmalion (1762/1770) together with his opera Le Devin du Village (1752), which both have been central study objects during the research project.
Project description
The aims of the project, couched in terms of a developing manifesto
- We aim to reassess the aesthetics and performance ideals of the Late Enlightenment (the period c.1750-1815) as they impact – and may impact – the reception of the period as well as performances today.
- We question the validity of such stylistic concepts as ‘baroque’, ‘rococo’, ‘classical’, ‘pre-romantic’, ‘romantic’, etc., as labels used to describe artistic products and historical periods. Instead, we propose a historiographical approach centring on ideological currents.
- Our approach to theatrical events and works of art takes as its starting point the interrelation of ideological/philosophical, aesthetic/hermeneutical and artistic/technical dimensions.
- We regard all work-concepts as ideological constructs. In accordance with the emerging work-concept of the Late Enlightenment, the basis of our approach is the interpretation of the libretto and the score as one work of art in its own right, to which poet and composer expected interpreters to ‘stay true’. Within opera, this work-concept was formulated in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s preface to Alceste (1767).
- The non-dualistic concept of ‘aesthetics’, coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, is derived from Greek αισθητικός (“sensitive, perceptive”), from αισθανεσθαι (“to perceive (by the senses or by the mind), to feel”), and is closely related to the concept of ‘sensibility’. We aim to explore and revive in performance the aesthetics fundamental to individual works from the period.
- We understand ‘theatricality’ as the dynamic relationship between audience, performers and dramatic illusion, which may be characteristic of a period, implied by a work, or unique to a performance. We aim to understand all of these, and to revive in performance especially the theatricality implied by individual works.
- We regard prescriptive sources (e.g. books on acting and singing, or books on classical rhetoric) and descriptive sources (e.g. pictures or accounts of concrete performances) as equally central to a broad understanding of the theatrical aesthetics of a period or a production, including the implicit acting ideals. We draw on both types of sources when studying the theatre from the period or when reviving its repertoire.
- We regard the command of historical techniques of playing, singing and acting as crucial to a historically informed revival of the repertoire from this period. However, we do not regard the adherence to a certain period or national style as an aim in itself; if the command of such a style serves any purpose, it is to realize the work’s aesthetic potentials in performance, and hence the specific always takes precedence over the general.
Project members
Members
Meike Wagner
Professor
Willmar Sauter
Professor emeritus
Magnus Tessing Schneider
Researcher, associate professor
Petra Dotlacilová
Researcher
Publications
News
More about this project
Research profiles and projects
- Willmar Sauter’s research projects:
Premodernity as a concept of the not-yet-modern: A Slow Train Coming
Although modernity was not yet an issue during the late enlightenment of the 18th century, today’s view is undoubtedly contaminated by modernity’s ideas as manifest in in the 20th century. Therefore it is mandatory to investigate the similarities and differences between the mentalities and practices that are divided by a gap of a quarter millennium. The problem is to find a theoretical model that is capable of demonstrating the changes between the aristocracy of the late18th century and the bourgeois modernity more than 100 years later. How can these changes in society, politics, aesthetics and practices be demonstrated, what categories are relevant and how do these affect the “melting of horizons” (H.-G. Gadamer) between Then and Now?
Analyses of performance in historical theatres
Historically preserved theatre spaces are continuously used for contemporary performances – with or without regard to the historicity of the aesthetics of these venues. Among the historical sites can be mentioned first of all the Drottningholm Theatre as well as Confidensen at Ulriksdal, Gripsholm Theatre and the performance spaces at Vadstena in Sweden, but also comparable theatres in Cesky Krumlov, Versailles, the Court Theatre at Copenhagen, Bayreuth, etc. The analyses concern performances seen live in these locations as well as recorded documentations. The basic questions of these analyses are the choice of repertoire, the productions’ relations to ‘historically informed performances’, the staging practices, and the endeavour to renew or preserve stylistic features of the past. These analyses of these performances suggest continuous confrontations with the basic questions of the project, however from the perspective of the spectator/researcher rather than from the artistic production point of view. This analytical approach continues the positions envisaged in the book “The Theatre of Drottningholm – Then and Now. Performance between the 18th and 21st centuries (2014, with David Wiles). For more information see here.
- Magnus Tessing Schneider’s research projects and papers:
Mozart, Luigi Bassi and Don Giovanni
Magnus is currently working on a biography of the singer Luigi Bassi (1766-1825), the creator of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), which is scheduled to appear with the Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag in 2016. The book, which will include a number of hitherto unpublished sources to Bassi’s portrayal of his famous creator’s role, represents an attempt partly to give an all-round image of this Mozart performer as a singer-actor, partly to trace Don Giovanni’s early reception and performance history through the lens of Bassi’s career, and partly to offer a historically informed reinterpretation of the opera on the basis of his well-documented portrayal.
Apart from in his PhD thesis (The Charmer and the Monument: Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Light of Its Original Production, Aarhus University, 2008), aspects of this research has previously been published in the Danish Yearbook of Musicology (Vol. 37, 2009), in PUFF (September 2009, in Danish), and in the proceedings from the conference Mozart in Prague in 2009 (forthcoming).
On the basis of research conducted in preparation for the book, we plan within Performing Premodernity to organize a recital of arias written for Luigi Bassi in the course of his long career, by composers Pietro Morandi, Gaetano Monti, Angelo Tarchi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Peter von Winter, Ferdinando Paer, Francesco Morlacchi and Carl Maria von Weber.
The Theatre of Gian Francesco Busenello
An ongoing book project centres on the four librettos by the Venetian poet Gian Francesco Busenello (1598-1659) for which music survives: Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne (1640, music by Pier Francesco Cavalli), La Didone (1641, music by Cavalli), L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643, music by Claudio Monteverdi) and La Statira, principessa di Persia (1656, music by Cavalli). These dramas for the musical stage, which in regard to sheer allegorical complexity may be regarded as the highpoint of seventeenth-century Italian drama, are analysed as works for the stage in the light of their original productions in Venice. The key to the dramas, which is explored within this research, is the theatrical practice of virtuoso and allegorical role doubling: these operas, some of which feature around thirty characters, were apparently written to be performed by between eight and eleven singers, and the doubling arguably served specific dramaturgical purposes.
Research into the doubling plan for Poppea has been published in Cambridge Opera Journal (24/3, 2012), while conference papers on Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne, La Statira and Poppea appear in the published proceedings from conferences in Copenhagen (see the relevant issue on this homepage), Venice and at the University of Pennsylvania.
Apart from conducting academic research into these operas, Magnus has written Danish singing translations of L’incoronazione di Poppea and Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne. His productions of these two operas in Copenhagen (at Københavns Musikteater in 2011, and at Teatermuseet i Hofteatret in 2014) were the first modern productions to employ his reconstructed doubling plans.
The Theatre of Ranieri de’ Calzabigi
This research product centres on the ten mature opera librettos by the Italian poet and theatrical reformer Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714-95) as well as on their musical settings and original productions: Orfeo ed Euridice (1762, music by Christoph Willibald Gluck), Alceste (1767, music by Gluck), L’opera seria (1769, music by Florian Gassmann), Paride e Elena (1770, music by Gluck), Amiti e Ontario o I selvaggi (1772, lost music by Giuseppe Scarlatti), Comala (1774/1780, music by Pietro Morandi), Ipermestra o Le Danaidi (1784, music by Giuseppe Millico), Cook o sia Gl’inglesi in Othaiti (1785, pasticcio by Giovanni Paisiello and Giuseppe Sarti), Elfrida (1792, music by Paisiello) and Elvira (1794, music by Paisiello).
Calzabigi is studied as a radical artist who strove to reform practically all aspects of theatre-making in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Late Enlightenment, including the construction of plot and character, the dramatic use of dance, music and theatrical space in opera, as well as the arts of singing, acting and dancing. Closely related to these formal innovations is a thematic focus on the various differences between Christian civilization and the ethnic or cultural ‘other’, as represented by ancient Greeks, Native Americans, pagan Scots, contemporary Tahitians or Spanish Moors.
Within the project we aim to experiment with the challenges posed by Calzabigi’s theatrical aesthetics, and hope to stage historically informed productions of especially the three Calzabigi/Gluck operas, Comala, Ipermestra and/or Cook, just as we hope to have set Amiti e Ontario to new music.