ABSTRACT
This sarcastic comment by the actor and theatre director Friedrich Ludwig Schmidt memorably characterizes the situation of theatre in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Germany. The theatre was the most exciting entertainment medium of the era, comparable in its significance only to present-day cinema. The theatre entertained a growing audience not just with plays, but also with ballet and opera. Literary scholars and music historians often ignore this circumstance when they appropriate drama and opera as artistic genres and thus destroy the historical unity of this performance complex by breaking it down into separate disciplines. This chapter will, nonetheless, focus on spoken theatre.
