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

252 Kristel Pappel
The theatre system in the German-dominated Baltic governments – Estonia
(capital Reval/Tallinn), Livonia (Riga) and Courland (Mitau/Jelgava) 2 –
was modelled on the German city theatre (Stadttheater), which had evolved
in Germany at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when
travelling companies became settled in one place and the social status of
actors improved. The theatre building in which dramas and operas were
staged belonged to the city or a theatre society (a corporation of theatregoing
citizens), at first involving one theatre company with two or three acceptable
singers before companies specialising in drama or opera evolved. 3
Unlike the court theatres in which Italian opera companies and French dramatic
actors performed, the city theatres served a German audience, and
all performances of Italian, French and Russian operas, for example, were
in the dominant local language, which was German.
This kind of theatre system emerged in German-dominated Estonia
at the end of the eighteenth century, at first with combined theatre companies.
4 It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the
Tallinn City Theatre (Revaler Stadttheater), functioning as a multi-genre institution,
hired an opera company.
Theatre conditions in Tallinn in the nineteenth century
The theatre built in the classic style at the beginning of one of the city’s
arterial streets (called Lai – Broad) near the aristocratic Toompea (Cathedral
Hill) opened in 1809 and was in use until the Great Fire of 1902. Even
though it almost burned down in 1855, it was restored and modernised, and
re-opened opened in 1860. 5 It was now possible to heat the auditorium, for
2 During the nineteenth century, present-day Estonia and Latvia were divided among
these three governments or provinces. Present-day Estonia includes both nineteenthcentury
Estonia and the northern part of Livonia, and Latvia includes Courland and the
southern part of Livonia.
3 The most heavily subsided theatres in the Russian Empire were the court operas in
St Petersburg and Moscow (the Bolshoi), and there was a strong separation between
opera and drama (Pappel 2009, pp. 127-128). Here it is worth noting that it became
a tradition in nineteenth-century Europe (except in the court theatres) to perform
operas in the locally dominant language: German for Verdi’s operas in Germany and
Italian for Wagner’s operas in Italy, for example.
4 For more on this see Pappel, Kristel 1998: Von der Wandertruppe zum ständigen
Theater. Schwierigkeiten des Übergangs im Tallinner (Revaler) Musiktheater 1795–
1809, in: Loos, Helmut & Möller, Eberhard (eds), Musikgeschichte in Mittel- und
Osteuropa. Mitteilungen der internationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft an der Technischen
Universität Chemnitz, Heft 3, Chemnitz: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, pp. 3–13.