Musicologica Austriaca - Journal for Austrian Music Studies
Musical Minhag: Negotiating Prayer Melodies in a Liberal Synagogue in Vienna
This article examines the negotiation of prayer melodies at Or Chadasch, a liberal Jewish synagogue in Vienna, exploring how these melodies represent the community’s balance between tradition and innovation within a progressive Jewish framework. As a “minority within a minority,” Or Chadasch operates on the periphery of Vienna’s Orthodox-dominated Jewish...
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Austria’s Memory Turn on Display: Music Exhibitions as Pathways out of Oblivion
In the 1980s and 1990s, Austria underwent a significant reevaluation of its historical, cultural, and identity consciousness. The interplay between political and public debates at the local level and scholarly shifts at the global level led to a memory turn. Concurrently, the “new museum” redefined its functions in and for...
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Sounding Out Municipal Housing in Vienna: Ethnographic Insights into Music and Sound in the Anton-Figl-Hof
Municipal housing in Vienna, called Wiener Gemeindebau, is gaining new significance in research and cultural work in the discourse on affordable housing in the city and the increasing heterogeneity of urban life. However, it has also been a field imbued with the ideological projections, desires, and anxieties of various political...
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Communicating Atonal Music: Alban Berg as Lecturer and Dialogue Partner
As a result of the new aesthetics and compositional techniques of musical modernism around and after 1900, the expectations of a concert and opera audience and the actual musical production of the musical avant-garde increasingly drifted apart. Scandal concerts multiplied and heated debates were carried out in the feuilleton. Musicians...
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“Baroque” in Early Musicology and Art History: Egon Welleszʼs Concept of an Austrian Tradition
In 1909 Egon Wellesz published the article “Renaissance und Barock” in which he applied the term “Baroque,” which originated in art history, to music. With this he introduced the name for this music-historical epoch to musicology at least ten years before Curt Sachs, whose essay “Barockmusik” (1919) is still commonly...
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The Sound of Museums: Music and Silence in Music Exhibitions
In this article, I discuss the role of sound in music exhibitions, especially as related to the display of musical instruments. On the basis of field research conducted in the Musée de la musique in Paris, the Musical Instruments Museum (MIM) in Brussels, and the Music Collection at the Munich...
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“This the Czechs Can Teach Us”: National Conflict, Transnational Opera, and Imperial Politics at the 1892 International Exhibition of Music and Drama
This article explores how national conflicts were defined, negotiated, and resolved (or not) during the 1892 Vienna International Exhibition of Music and Drama. Through a combination of archival research and reception history, I analyze the various approaches to the organization of the exhibition, which institutionalized political formations in the structure...
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Spatializing Music Histor(iograph)y: Exhibiting Guido Adler’s Musico-Historical Model at the International Exhibition of Music and Drama, Vienna 1892
The International Exhibition of Music and Drama, Vienna 1892 was the only World’s Fair that was dedicated to exhibiting the development of music and drama history. The event’s conception follows the typical framework of nineteenth-century International Exhibitions. However, to a certain extent, Vienna 1892 was unique because of its attempt...
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František Palacký’s (Musical) Life with the “Aristocrats”: Private and Semi-Private Musical Sociability in Prague during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Drawing on private and public sources surrounding Countess Elise von Schlik (1792–1855) and František Palacký (1798–1876), this article explores music-cultural connections between the nobility and intellectually engaged middle class in Prague during the 1830s and 1840s. A consideration of them both together in one study sheds light on cross-societal links...
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Sewing Frankenstein!! Instrumental Theatre in Austria between 1960 and 1980
This text analyzes the development of the choreographed instrumental theater of the two Austrian composers Otto M. Zykan and HK Gruber, taking into account the predecessor works of Mauricio Kagel. Zykan’s Singers Nähmaschine ist die beste: Oper oder Ode oder Opernode (Singer’s sewing machine is the best: Opera or ode...
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Carlo Ferdinando Lickl: The Life of a Nineteenth-Century Triestine Composer; a Case Study on Music History Construction in a Border Region of the Habsburg Empire
Focusing on Carlo Ferdinando Lickl (1803–64), a Viennese-born composer who shaped the musical life of Trieste as a pianist, educator, and composer from the 1830s until his death, this article develops four distinct perspectives on his life, each developed on a different model of historical construction. Comparing two national perspectives,...
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Confronting the Past through Popular Musical Theatre: The Effects of Austrian Postwar Cultural Policies on the Reception History of Musicals
Exploring the effects of Austrian postwar cultural policies on the reception history of popular musical theatre, I analyze the role of the Opfermythos narrative and Kulturnation concept in the critical response to Broadway musicals after World War II. Because of their fictional portrayal of National Socialism, I focus on the...
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The Sound of Austria in Films about the Shoah and National Socialism
In the following article, I will show that Austrian music plays a very particular role in international film and television productions, as well as in Austrian TV productions, that explicitly address the Holocaust and National Socialism, especially when National Socialist violence and perpetrators are represented. On the basis of this...
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“Atlas der gesamten Musik und aller angrenzenden Gebiete”: Austrian Stereotypes, Music, and Material Agency as a Relational Model in Georg Nussbaumer’s Concert Installations
This article discusses references to Austrian clichés in specifically chosen concert installations by the composer Georg Nussbaumer (b. 1964). Nussbaumer, as one of the outstanding contemporary artists in Austria, has worked with this musical performance format since the 1980s. Therefore, the article begins by explaining the characteristics of this newly...
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“Austrian Popular Music Studies”: A Critical Assessment
This article aims to provide an overview of the research field of Austrian popular music studies. It outlines the main topics, perspectives, and concepts in regard to popular music from and in Austria and reflects on blind spots and starting points for further research. The discussion incorporates an overview of...
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Gottfried von Einem, Bertolt Brecht, and Franz Kafka: New Perspectives on Musico-Literary Collaboration from the Einem Archive
Once both globally renowned and tightly enmeshed in Austrian musical culture, Gottfried von Einem has faded into obscurity in the some thirty years since his death. However, his Nachlass (estate), left in its entirety to the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna, paints...
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Fine-Tuning Ferdinand Rebay’s Second Sonata in E major for Guitar
Composed in 1941 and dedicated to his guitarist niece, Gerta Hammerschmid, Ferdinand Rebay’s Second Sonata in E major for Guitar remained unperformed during his life, only gaining its premiere recording after my performance film was released in 2022. One of the reasons for this deferral is that the piece needed...
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Viennese Style in Viennese Waltzes: An Empirical Study of Timing in the Recordings of The Blue Danube
It is widely assumed that Viennese orchestras, especially the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (VPO), possess distinctive qualities in their performance of Viennese waltzes. This article sets out to provide empirical evidence of this hypothesis. Focusing on the parameter of timing, it analyzes the rhythm and tempo in 34 recordings of Johann...
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The Musikpädagogische Zeitschrift and its Supplement Modernes Musikleben (1912–20): Early Publication and Advertising Strategies of the Music Publisher Universal-Edition
Music journals serve multiple purposes and parties. The Musikpädagogische Zeitschrift (Music Pedagogical Journal; 1911–27) was the official organ of the “Österreichischer Musikpädagogischer Verband” (Austrian Music Pedagogical Association) and is an important source book on Austrian and Viennese musical life, concert life, and, in particular, teaching and association life. This article...
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In Search of a Lost Composition by Beethoven: The Equale in A-LId-49
It is well known that in 1812 Ludwig van Beethoven composed the Three Equali for Four Trombones (WoO 30) for the Linz Cathedral Kapellmeister Franz Xaver Glöggl. A letter from Glöggl to Robert Schumann, however, suggests that the composer originally composed four pieces. An examination of the autograph score of...
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The Dialectics of Gerd Kühr’s Corona-Meditation: An Analytical Essay
Gerd Kühr’s Corona-Meditation premiered on April 30, 2020, in a transnational online performance with more than 50 musicians, hosted by the Graz-based music festival Styriarte. The piece, written for a variable and unlimited number of pianists, is a creative response by Kühr to the social and cultural consequences of the...
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His Voice and Something More: Francesco Borosini’s Cantata Quando miro o stella o fiore for Anton Ulrich, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen
Eighteenth-century opera singers often engaged in activities that far exceeded their role as mere performers. Not only could they have a decisive impact on a composer’s musical choices; they often functioned as “cultural middlemen,” cultivating contacts to various noblemen. We can observe a prime example for a singer’s “networking abilities”...
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“An die Hoffnung”: A Musical Footnote to Ali Smith’s Spring
In her novel Spring (2019), the third instalment in her seasonal quartet, the Scottish author, Ali Smith weaves Beethoven into the narrative as just one strand in a richly intertextual fabric that she then positions around the critical edges of the global refugee crisis. These novels, which are recognized as...
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“Sundays at Salka’s”—Salka Viertel’s Los Angeles Salon as a Space of (Music-)Cultural Translation
The salon of Austrian-Polish actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel (1889–1978) at 165 Mabery Road in Los Angeles was from the 1930s to the 1950s a central place for networking, an artistic experimental laboratory and catalyst for creative processes, a “haven for the homeless” (“Hafen der Heimatlosen,” according to Berthold Viertel),...
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Marketing Orchestral Music in the Domestic Sphere in Early Nineteenth-Century Vienna: The Beethoven Arrangements Published by Sigmund Anton Steiner
In 1816, Beethoven and Steiner agreed on a publishing contract that was at the time unique in the history of music publication. They decided to issue three of Beethoven’s newest orchestral works—Wellington’s Victory, and the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, opp. 91–93—in arrangements for various combinations of chamber group, simultaneously, and...
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From Historical Concerts to Monumental Editions: The Early Music Revivals at the Viennese International Exhibition of Music and Theater (1892)
This article investigates the genesis, programming patterns, and transnational impact of the series of early music concerts (Historische Concerte) performed on the occasion of the Viennese International Exhibition of Music and Theater of 1892. Guido Adler was the co-organizer of those concerts, and this article will focus on the impact...
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Celebrating the Habsburgs in the Hungarian National Theater, 1837–67
The musical theater had a central intermediary role in the propagation of national consciousness throughout East-Central Europe in the nineteenth century, and so too in Hungary. The Pesti Magyar Színház (Pest Hungarian Theater), which was renamed after 1840 to Magyar Nemzeti Színház (Hungarian National Theater), had an identical repertoire to...
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Demythologizing the Genesis of the Hungarian National Anthem
Hungary’s state anthem is the musical setting of Ferenc Kölcsey’s 1823 poem Hymnus …, composed by Ferenc Erkel for a competition announced by the National Theater of Pest in 1844. With Erkel’s award-winning melody, the already well-known poem soon became a national prayer, sung throughout the country. Based on recently...
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The Hrvatski glazbeni zavod (Croatian Music Institute) in the 1920s: Jutarnji koncerti (Morning Concerts) and Intimne muzičke večeri (Intimate Musical Evenings)
Jutarnji koncerti (Morning Concerts) and Intimne muzičke večeri (Intimate Musical Evenings) were concert series of the Hrvatski glazbeni zavod (Croatian Music Institute) in Zagreb, organized by the institute's secretary, art historian, and music amateur Artur Schneider in the 1920s. From 1921 to 1928 there were 148 concerts, with works by...
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The Institutionalization of the Choral Movement in Nineteenth-Century Hungary
Male choirs established in a number of European countries following the German model transcended the framework of simple, self-organized singing in a relatively short period of time and grew into serious musical institutions. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the choral movement began to develop in Hungary as well,...
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The Construction of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Serbia: The Case of the Musician Josif Schlesinger
This article explores the status of Josif Schlesinger (1794–1870), the first Serbian composer and professional musician in the court of Prince Miloš Obrenović (1780–1860), in the complex process of constructing Jewish identity in the web of Jewish legislation at the crossroads of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Schlesinger was singled...
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Inventing the Italian Violin Making “Tradition”: Franjo / Franz / Francesco Kresnik, a Physician and Violin Maker, as Its Key Figure in a Fascist Environment
This article investigates the role played by the physician and violin maker Franz / Franjo / Francesco Kresnik in the discourse on violin making in the first half of the twentieth century. It also considers the effect of his presence at the Bicentenario stradivariano, the 200th anniversary of the death...
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Espérance, or: New Insights into the Origins of the Chansonnier de Bayeux
This essay tries to shed new light on the origins and the early cultural milieu of the Manuscrit de Bayeux (ParisBNF 9346), one of two monophonic chansonniers compiled around 1500. It begins with a careful assessment of new or newly appraised documentary and codicological evidence and a discussion of critical...
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Listening to Noise and Listening to Oneself: An Analysis of Peter Ablinger’s Orgel und Rauschen
Peter Ablinger’s innovative use of noise has provided a unique contribution to new music. In his composition, static noise (Rauschen) is not explored for the sake of expanding the sound palette but for its provocative potential as a “screen” onto which listeners project their imaginations. In order to show how...
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“The Foremost and Unrivalled Music Engraving Business in Austro-Hungary”: Josef Eberle (1845–1921), Printer, Publisher, and Manufacturer of Manuscript Paper
By the 1870s music printing and publishing in Austro-Hungary was under considerable competitive pressure from major firms based in Leipzig and elsewhere in Germany. Using more recent printing techniques (most notably printing from engraved plates by transfer lithography) and often a more integrated system of production, firms such as Breitkopf...
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Borrowing, Reworking, and Composing: The Making of the Viennese Pasticci of 1750
The dramma per musica Andromeda liberata, the favola pastorale Euridice, and the azione teatrale Armida placata, all performed for the first time in Vienna at the Theater nächst der Burg in 1750, are, as pasticci, quite exceptional for the Viennese opera repertory of the Theresian Age. Their singularity resides not...
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“The Hand that Writes”: The Scriptorial Unfinishedness of the First Movement of Mahler’s Tenth
Since Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Roman” (“Novel”), in his book Mahler: Eine Musikalische Physiognomik (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy), it has become commonplace for scholars to study the narrativity of Gustav Mahler’s music. However, insufficient attention has been given to the analysis of narrativity within the compositional process, in light of...
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Italian Opera in Vienna in the 1770s: Repertoire and Reception – Data and Facts
Up to now in the research on Vienna’s theater and opera life in the 1770s the subject of the Italian repertoire and its reception remained rather underexposed, among other reasons for lack of outstanding artistic events, but also for the particular attention devoted to the institution-historical developments of this decade,...
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From the People to the People: The Reception of Hanns Eisler’s Critical Theory of Music in Spain through the Writings of Otto Mayer-Serra
Although virtually ignored by music historiography so far, the Berlin-born musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra (1904–68) holds a unique position in the intellectual landscape of twentieth-century Spain. He was the first musicologist to develop a critical theory of music in Spain based on Marxist philosophy and greatly influenced by the positions on...
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“A soul, rubbing the sleep from its eyes in the next world”: Dramaturgical Aspects of Metaphysical Temporality in the Libretti of Alban Berg’s Operas
Temporality, as a narrative device, was a central element in Alban Berg’s operas both textually and musically. The systematic form of creating circular structures with palindromes via large-scale retrogrades was meant to turn narrative time back onto itself as an expression of fatalistic negation. This conceptualization held metaphysical implications for...
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Heinrich Schenker’s Identities as a German and a Jew
During his lifetime the music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) was confronted with a variety of different cultures. After attending a Polish school in the eastern province of Galicia, he moved to Vienna, where he faced a cultural environment dominated by Catholicism, opening up for him, as a Jew, different options...
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Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Text, Contexts, and their Developmental Dimensions; towards a Dynamic View of Hanslick’s Aesthetics
This article deals with Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetic classic Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful”), or VMS, regarding both the text itself and its most important contexts. We first give an overview of the history of relevant scholarship and relevant research perspectives and then sketch what we believe are the main...
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Hanslick, Kant, and the Origins of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen
Recent scholarship on musical aesthetics, notably in analytical philosophy of music, commonly identifies the main ideas of Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful”, 1854) with Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (“Critique of the Power of Judgment”, 1790), due to an ostensibly equivalent concept of ‘strict’ aesthetic formalism. Hanslick’s aesthetics...
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Multivalent Form in Gustav Mahlerʼs Lied von der Erde from the Perspective of Its Performance History
The challenge of reconstructing Gustav Mahlerʼs aesthetics and style of performance, which incorporated expressive and structuralist principles, as well as problematic implications of a post-Mahlerian structuralist performance style (most prominently developed by the Schoenberg School) are taken in this article as the background for a discussion of the performance history...
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“A Nomad of Sound”: The Austrian-Born Composer, Interpreter, and Performer Pia Palme
This paper is an introductory study of the works by the Viennese-born composer Pia Palme, who characterised the community of Austrian female artists as a productive and particularly innovative one. Palme herself is part of this productive and lively scene, but her role in it is twofold, for she is...
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“Frisch, Fromm, Fröhlich, Frei”: The Deutscher Turnerbund and the Berg Violin Concerto
Although Berg himself made public the nature of the extra-musical stimulus behind the composition of the Violin Concerto, through both his dedication “Dem Andenken eines Engels” and the article published by his biographer Willi Reich, the sketches for the work show that he originally planned to base the work on...
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Paisiello’s La Frascatana: Dramaturgical Transformations on Its Journey Through Central Europe
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Italian opera buffa successfully spread all over Europe. The works were often adapted to suit not only the new performers but also the respective cultural context. This is also true of one of the most popular comic operas of the period,...
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The Other Marxism: Georg Knepler and the Anthropology of Music
The Viennese-born musicologist Georg Knepler (1906-2003) was one of the most important music scholars of the twentieth-century. Being both Jewish and a Communist, he emigrated to London in 1934 and returned to continental Europe after World War II. He was active for many years as a pianist and conductor, and,...
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Otto M. Zykan’s Peculiar Speech: Music and the Question of Its Reenactment
The article treats phenomena involved in the vocal interpretation of a composer’s own works, taking the example of the Vienna artist Otto M. Zykan (1935–2006) and making reference to the performance artist Marina Abramović, who is several generations younger. What I am interested in is (a) aesthetic implications, (b) challenges...
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A. W. Ambros and F. P. G. Laurencin: Two Antiformalistic Views on the Viennese Musical Life of the 1870s?
In the 1870s, both August Wilhelm Ambros and Ferdinand Peter Graf Laurencin worked as reviewers of music in Vienna: Ambros had regularly been writing for the Wiener Zeitung since 1872, and Laurencin was, among other things, a Viennese correspondent for the newly established music journal Dalibor in Prague. The reviews...
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Music of Minorities—“The Others from Within”? On Terminology and the History of Research in Austria
This article looks into the history of the disciplines folk music research and ethnomusicology (comparative musicology) using the Viennese case as a rather representative example for both disciplines. It includes a personal account as the author has been an eye witness of the developments during the last 40 years. It...
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Folk Music Research in Austria and Germany: Notes on Terminology, Interdisciplinarity and the Early History of Volksmusikforschung and Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft
Discussing controversial issues of Volksmusikforschung in Austria and Germany, the article focuses on European folk music research, with its theory, method, and terminology, in a historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing basically on scholarly traditions of the German-speaking countries and Russia, it shows that key issues of comparative musicology and ethnomusicology...
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Courtly Representation Play, Singspiel, Opéra Comique: On the Reception of Antonio Sacchini’s L’isola d’amore
Up to now, scholars have treated ”opera as a form of courtly representation,” a topic of great significance for cultural history, primarily with regard to opera seria as well as festa teatrale. By contrast, opera buffa has been neglected, often being given the label ”bourgeois,” although the works of this...
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Call for Papers
We invite scholars from all music-related disciplines to contribute papers to Musicologica Austriaca.
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