This chapter explores how Bohemians, Czechs, and German Bohemians projected their views of Bohemia’s relationship to the Habsburg dynasty onto La clemenza di Tito between 1791 and 1891. The opera initially expressed the Bohemians’ allegiance to Habsburg emperors and was used to commemorate various Habsburg anniversaries. In 1873, this pro-Habsburg symbolism aligned with the political interests of German Bohemians, when Tito was performed in the German Theater to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph’s rule and the defeat of the 1871 Fundamental Articles, in which the emperor promised to acknowledge Bohemian autonomy to Czech leaders. At the same time, already by the 1790s, some Bohemian commentators associated the opera with anti-Habsburg sentiments. This symbolic meaning became particularly prominent in 1891, when the Czech National Theater’s centennial production of La clemenza di Tito was canceled because of fears that it would incite anti-German and anti-dynastic passions.

This chapter explores the slow and uneven property reform path ushered in by the short-lived liberal reformers that gathered around Baron von Stein. After Stein’s resignation, the discourse of property modernization was shortlived and the reconcpetualization of property was carried on by two leading,moderately conservative Roman law scholars who had been close to Stein’s cicle: Barthold Georg Niehbur and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Animated by sincere scholarly devotion, and yet not shy to use Roman law and agrarian history to support their political agenda, Neihbur built a powerful narrative equating the liberation of the German peasantry to the struggle of the dispossessed Roman free peasant. Simultaneously, Savigny outlined a new Romanist architecture for the law of property designed to enable and protect the full mastery of the owner’s will over a physical thing.