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

Performative elements and sources
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Summary
269
Research on music theatre has evolved rapidly in recent decades and the
performative side of an opera production has come into the limelight, enabling
operatic staging to be analysed as an independent artefact. A complicated
network of relations is built between the score, in other words the
music, the texts, and the remarks – and the staged realisation. It is the latter
that has been the focus of recent research based on performance analysis.
Stage realisation, however, must be analysed in a concrete context. It
is impossible to reconstruct a past opera performance, but it is possible to
re-construct it and the various elements on the basis of the context, the attitudes
of the time, and sources.
The research object investigated in this article comprises opera performances
at the Tallinn/Reval City Theatre of the nineteenth century, focusing
on interpretations of both Wagner’s and Verdi’s operas in the period
between 1853 (since the first production of a Wagner opera) until the fire
at the theatre in 1902. The theatre system in German-dominated Baltic
governments was modelled on the German city theatre (Stadttheater). The
music theatre in Tallinn was part of the European (German-speaking) theatre
network.