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

58 Marianne Tråvén
1816 the singing master Carl August Stieler taught his students between
the hours of 9 and 11 or between 4 and 6 o’clock in the afternoon. He was
expected to give 60 lessons per year, each of them an hour long, and for this
he was recompensed with a yearly salary of 300 Riksdaler. From the 1840s
there are several protocols from the different classes listing the number
of students, the hours taught, the teachers and their salaries (KTA: F6A,
1843). Yet these documents do not tell us anything about the didactic materials
used or the teachers’ pedagogical principles.
Eighteenth-century didactics
Very little material from the Gustavian period of the Royal Swedish <strong>Opera</strong>
has been preserved, and what survives consists mostly of regulations. The
opera house was completely paid for with money supplied by the King, and
therefore there are no taxation or revenue papers that have come down to
us. Some of the directors, like Clewberg, took their correspondence along
with them when they left their post, with little thought to posterity. At best
we can search their personal papers and hope to learn something about the
machinations at the theatre from letters and diaries. Sometimes even these
kinds of personal papers are missing, leaving us only with sources consisting
of correspondence from other persons involved in the process, those
going to the opera, and of course, reviews in the press.
None of the singing masters hired at the opera during the eighteenth
century left any didactic material, so to get an overview of what was offered
the student, we have to look partly at the teaching manuals by those who
taught or inspired the singing masters and partly at which manuals were
available at the time.
The library of the Academy of Music
The Academy collected books and music related to its areas of responsibility.
For this it received a small grant from the king (40 to 50 riksdaler annually)
(Lundberg 2010, pp. 236–249). 11 In the Academy’s catalogue, under
the heading “donated books”, we find a collection of solfeggi published by
Jean Joseph Rodolphe in Paris in 1790, Solfeggio ou Nouvelle Méthode de
Musique, donated by the assessor Johan Pfeiffer. 12 An inventory dated 1783
11 There are no catalogues of the library’s holdings written before 1777.
12 Johan Pfeiffer (1731–1806) was from 1771 the editor of the newspaper Dagligt