7 - Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city

Summary

In 1798 there appeared in Weimar an elegantly produced magazine, eight issues a year, entitled London und Paris. Its title tells the story: it offered reports about social, cultural, and political trends in the capital cities of England and France. The magazine was rather like a Sunday magazine in a high-tone newspaper today, offering engaging color pictures alongside smoothly written stories about what life was like there among the rich and powerful, the beau monde or the bon ton. This was fantasy and jealousy time, one might say. Through its columns readers were able to keep informed about the fashions and the pleasures in the two key cities – dress, promenading, horse equipage, prostitutes, politics, theatre, and of course opera. A whole host of similar periodicals of fashion, culture, and politics, most notably the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, sprang up in this period, linking opera intimately with London and Paris, the capital cities that had come to define cosmopolitan taste and social practices.

Attitudes of those culturally subordinate to empowered groups or institutions tell us the most about what is going on in a social context. German commentary shows us how central the two capitals, and their operas specifically, had become to cultural and social life in Europe and America. Historians tend to take the roles played by the two cities for granted; they have not inquired into when and how London and Paris took on an authority they had not held in the seventeenth century.