ABSTRACT
In a country without political, social, religious or cultural unity such as Germany at the end of the seventeenth century, it could not be expected that the arts should display a unified style, least of all an art so inescapably social as that of the theatre. There was as yet no accepted type of German drama, as there was a French tragedy and comedy, still less was there an accepted tradition in the production and acting of plays. The first operatic performance on German soil of which we hear was at Salzburg in 1618, at the court of the Archbishop and in the presence of an Austrian archduke. The only purely trading towns to establish independent operas of their own in the seventeenth century were the two largest, Hamburg and Leipzig. Hamburg’s first theatre was built in 1677 by a number of citizens, mostly patricians of the town and consuls of foreign states, along with the exiled Duke of Holstein.
