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What is a musical drama?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Carl Dahlhaus
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Extract

‘Dramaturgy’ is one of those vogue words to which frequent use lends the appearance of being increasingly well understood, whereas the wear and tear to which it is subjected actually makes it ever harder to understand. When a word has lost almost all meaning through overuse, the simplest way to make it usable again is, of course, to try to restore its original meaning. It should be possible to agree that dramaturgy is the composition of dramas tout court, and there can be no serious objection if that basic definition is understood to include the theories and principles of dramatic composition (as Lessing did in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie). In that sense ‘dramaturgy’ is to drama what ‘poetics’ is to poetry: it denotes the essential nature of the categories that form the basis of a drama and can be reconstructed in a dramatic theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , July 1989 , pp. 95 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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