Eighteenth-Century Germany

The term "popular music" is as mysterious as it is common. Should we define it according to stylistic hallmarks? Should we define it in terms of audience demographics? Or the goals of its creators? The problem becomes particularly acute when we attempt to come up with a definition that incorporates music of the distant past.


From a commercial standpoint, the most successful collection of music published in Leipzig during Johann Sebastian Bach's long tenure in that city was Johann Sigismund Scholze's _Sperontes Singende Muse an der Pleiße_ ("Sperontes' Singing Muse on the Pleiße [River]"). The first installment of 100 songs with figured bass appeared in 1736 and its immediate success inspired the production of three sequels of 50 songs each. The collection was imitated by many other composers and frequently reprinted over the next two decades. Individual songs survived in cultural memory well into the nineteenth century.


A few of the most widely circulated songs from the _Singende Muse_ are strikingly misogynistic. Though its preface is addressed to "friends of my art, of both genders," the overwhelming majority of its songs imply a male speaker, who often opines on the insatiable sexual appetites and other alleged foibles of women. Some of the songs celebrate prostitution while others explicitly mock women who wished to enter the university or even earn doctoral degrees. The few songs featuring a female speaker were apparently intended to be delivered by a man in drag, ventriloquizing a woman's voice and attempting to illustrate the faults asserted to be characteristically feminine. 


The _Singende Muse_ has often been described as "popular music" of Bach's time and place but this characterization has never really been considered closely. My presentation will reexamine this collection in light of a hitherto unknown source: the primary author's manuscript estate catalog, prepared upon his death in 1750. Beyond offering a rare glimpse into the life of an extraordinarily successful eighteenth-century songwriter, this 100-page archival document offers insight into the identities of those with whom he collaborated, including students who helped J. S. Bach perform his sacred vocal music on Sunday mornings. The recognition that these young men (and no doubt others like them) performed passions, cantatas, and other large-scale vocal works in public and sang misogynistic songs in their free time invites us to reconsider the complex relationships between popular and elite musics. Bach's sacred vocal works functioned as the musical voice of church and state, speaking ostensibly for the majority in his community and thereby affirming values of solidarity, obedience to authority, respect for fellow Christians, and a view of women as idealized, fragile creatures requiring protection. The _Singende Muse_, by contrast, aimed to fulfill the fantasies of a subgroup, offering male university students an opportunity to share private desires that few were willing to publicly espouse. The equation of anti-social values and popularity here is worth considering as we seek to define the term "popular music."

Drug consumption has been linked with music making in Euro-American popular consciousness since the psychedelic '60s, but the interdependence of these activities has been in evidence well before this pivotal moment. Despite the relative dearth of scholarship on the matter, Western art music's history and aesthetics are inseparable from the cosmological, legal, and philosophical problems raised by drugs and their consumption. Embracing the mutability of the concept of a "drug," this paper seeks to open a space for what might be called a narcomusicology.
Building on the work of drug historians such as David Courtwright and the decolonial theories of Sylvia Wynter, I draw on methodologies from the history of medicine and consciousness studies to explore the interdependence between late eighteenth century German musical aesthetics and contemporaneous coffee culture. Alternately hailed as a medicinal panacea and vilified as a dangerous drug, coffee exhibits all of the indeterminacy of a _pharmakon_-an ancient Greek word that means, among other things, both "medicine" and "poison." By the time Johann Georg Sulzer published his widely-read _Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_ in 1771, coffee drinking had spread to all classes of German society, even as its ethical and medicinal value continued to be debated. In his 1781 treatise on coffee entitled _Abhandlung vom Kaffee_ the German physician Franz Joseph Hofer articulates the representative concerns of his profession regarding the widespread consumption of the drug. 
This paper offers a comparative reading of Sulzer's _Theorie_ and Hofer's _Abhandlung_. I show how Sulzer's theorization of music's effects on mind, body, and spirit is virtually identical to Hofer's characterization of coffee's psychosomatic powers. Both texts present their respective objects of study as volatile _pharmakae_ in need of careful regulation: music, like coffee, is described as a nerve stimulant with the potential to incite both ethical behavior and moral degeneration. I ultimately argue that both Sulzer's _Theorie_ and Hofer's _Abhandlung_ leverage the discourses of sensibility and lifestyle medicine to enact what Wynter calls "the overrepresentation of Man," i.e. the naturalization of middle-class, male standards of behavior such that they come to represent human nature in general. 

All roads lead to Vienna. Or at least that is the impression conveyed in many studies of late eighteenth–century German music theater, as the operas created for the city have long been the benchmark for evaluating such works. But when, in 1786, the Mannheim concertmaster Ignaz Fränzl (1736–1811) arrived in the city having traveled those very roads to see "every theater in Germany," he "considered Vienna's...among the worst." If Fränzl is to be believed, his journey was no small feat, for the Holy Roman Empire was too diverse for a single _Nationaltheater_ and instead contained hundreds of theaters. His contemporaries made sense of their kaleidoscopic operatic world in periodicals, such as the _Theater–Kalender_ (1775–1800), in which theaters shared their activities and the latest operatic developments. Scholars have more recently confronted this issue by positioning Vienna as _the_ center of late eighteenth–century German opera. Yet in so doing, not only are they at odds with Fränzl's estimation, but they also fail to account for the underlying theatrical network to which he alluded in his letter and against which he measured Vienna's theaters.


This paper reconstructs and investigates the realm of German–language music theater during the late eighteenth century. Through an examination of archival documents and periodicals, and aided by digital tools, I reveal that around 330 German–language companies performed in 266 locations throughout Central Europe in the decades leading up to 1800. I argue that this complex theatrical system spread evenly across a vast polity. Facilitated by an efficient postal network, many companies traveled to perform for both court and public audiences, informing one another of their activities in the process. Thus, my investigation not only forces reconsideration of traditional sites of eighteenth–century German opera, but also calls into question supposed divisions between elite and popular cultures. Given this vast and transcendent operatic space, it seems unlikely that Fränzl could have seen _every_ German theater. But he also did not need to: by considering the circulation of theatrical knowledge through missives and periodicals, he–like us–would be able to understand more fully the interconnected operatic world of late eighteenth–century Central Europe.