Domesticating Magic: Ferdinand Raimund and musical theatre in early nineteenth-century Vienna
King, Patrick.
2019
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This dissertation studies the popularity of magical musical
spectacles in Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century in the genre
commonly known as the Zauberstück, or magic piece. In these effect-driven
comedies, drawn from international performance traditions and source material,
supernatural beings and magical journeys around the globe were interwoven with
hyperlocal Viennese ... read morereference comedy. Using the central figure of Ferdinand
Raimund as an entry into the genre writ large, I examine how this mélange of the
local and the transnational became a forum through which the Viennese could
explore ideas, longings, and anxieties that could not be expressed in less
fantastical media. I draw on Peter Bailey's notions of "knowingness" to delineate
the genre's double nature, which both reinforced the conservative values of the
Austrian police state and offered audiences a titillating glimpse of freedoms of
class, travel, and thought that were officially forbidden. In the years preceding
the explosion of scientific positivism and the possibilities of political change
represented in the revolutions of 1848, the Zauberstück provided Viennese
audiences a means of wish fulfillment and escapism whose magical and fantastical
nature lent it a sense of plausible deniability.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2019.
Submitted to the Dept. of Drama.
Advisor: Laurence Senelick.
Committee: Barbara Grossman, Laura MacDonald, and Alessandra Campana.
Keywords: Theater, Theater history, and Music history.read less - ID:
- rf55zn12d
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