ABSTRACT

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770–1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades.

This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschläger, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen’s staged theatre repertory and early dramas.

By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770–1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.

chapter 1|21 pages

The (pre)history of canons

chapter 2|21 pages

Meeting the masters

Repertory choices for young ladies

chapter 4|21 pages

On the other side of the canon

August von Kotzebue as a popular playwright and controversial public persona

chapter 5|15 pages

Traces of dance and social life

A dance book and its context

chapter 6|26 pages

Outside canon

Anonymous music and informal cultural activities in Trondheim around 1800

chapter 7|28 pages

A private playlist?

Repertory in Norwegian eighteenth-century musical clocks

chapter 9|13 pages

The hybrid child

The preconditions, dissemination, and enduring popularity of equestrian drama

chapter 10|18 pages

Vittorio Alfieri’s tramelogedia Abéle

A physiognomic reading of a marginalised play by a canonical author

chapter 11|21 pages

Oehlenschläger’s Freyas Altar

A rejected Singspiel performed

chapter 12|24 pages

Forgotten music

Early Norwegian composers and Oehlenschläger’s Freyas Altar

chapter 13|20 pages

Questioning the canons of Ibsen’s theatre

Re-searching the relevance of Ibsen’s theatre repertory, 1852–1862