ABSTRACT
‘Marvellous changes – changes within the marvellous: Carl Maria von Weber’s Oberon as transfer between cultural tendencies and historical discourse’ by T. Sofie Taubert is an analysis of this opera as a hybrid genre with a variety of elements, also belonging to popular entertainment. Written for the Royal Theatre of Covent Garden in 1826, Weber tried to adapt Oberon to the English taste and opera market. This is apparent both in its theme, structure, and constituent elements. He combined techniques from various sources to characterize the different spheres of the libretto: the English melodrama, pantomime, specific scoring, instrumentation, and Erinnerungsmotive. With spoken dialogue the opera is technically a Singspiel, but the musical numbers have greater weight than normal for this genre.
Taubert describes Oberon as a ‘fairy-tale opera’, functioning as a ‘seismograph’ and a ‘pioneer’, adapting to its context and in dialogue with various aesthetic principles. It had much emphasis on scenography and machinery. The marvellous is a key concept to the understanding of the opera’s topic, aesthetics, and musical means, developed as a central idea of Romanticism. She also sees some of the techniques used to create illusion as pointing forwards to modern visual media such as diorama and panorama.
