Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

Performative elements and sources
however, incorporating audience reaction. Gundula Kreuzer and Clemens
Risi summarise the current research situation:
The practical stage realization itself could be analyzed in terms of multiple
transitions. As a culturally and technologically contingent performance,
it relates opera to changing contexts and audiences; as an event,
it partakes in the staged opera’s passing through time by linking past
and future performances; as a corporeal manifestation of materiality, it
mediates between the intended concept of a production and its individual
concretizations (which always embrace nonintentional, spontaneous elements),
as well as between performers and spectators, stage and auditorium.
Both the process of operatic staging and its history could therefore
be described as complex chains of ephemeral transitions.
(Kreuzer, Risi 2012, 150)
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However, when it is a question of conducting research on opera staging in
the past, how could one make the transition from the present so as to be
able to see through “the eyes of the past”? It is clear that one cannot escape
subjectivity or the load of the intervening periods that the comprehension
horizons of the past and present fuse together, 1 and that nothing remains
untouched by this. It is impossible to reconstruct past opera performance.
Nevertheless, it is possible to re-construct certain elements on the basis
of the context, the mental climate at the time and the sources – “and thus
not lose the balance between microscopia and generalisation”, as Stephan
Mösch puts it in his book about the reception of Wagner’s Parsifal (2009,
p.11).
Although we have acquired “an increasingly detailed understanding of
historical performance practices and of the social conditions in which opera
has been performed” (Levin 2007, 6) since the mid-1990s, this can now
be combined with observing the performative elements and the reception.
Obviously the existence of the appropriate sources is a prerequisite.
If one were to examine nineteenth-century opera performance outside
of centres such as Paris (which was particularly influential during the first
half of the century), Munich and Bayreuth (during the second half), what
would one see in city theatres within the German cultural area, for example,
and in particular in peripheral regions such as the Baltic provinces of
the Russian Empire?
1 According to Gadamer, part of real understanding “is that we regain the concepts of
a historical past in such a way that they also include our own comprehension of them”
(Gadamer 1996, p.374).