Talk:Theater am Kärntnertor

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Contents 1 Etymology 2 A matter of prestige 3 Was Wetman doing original research? 4 Italian operas as elite entertainment

[edit] Etymology

I am guessing that the name of this theater is formed on the following basis:

• "Kärnten" = the German word for Carinthia, a province of Austria
• "Kärntner" = adjective, "pertaining to Carinthia" (an unaccented vowel is dropped, much as in "Zürcher", "pertaining to Zürich")
• "Kärntnertor" = "Kärntner gate" (i.e., in the old Vienna city wall). Perhaps the road running through this gate led towards Carinthia?

But I'm way too uncertain to put this in. Can anyone help? Opus33 16:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I think I can answer my own question: "Carinthian gate" appears repeatedly on the web as an English-language version, particular for older sources. Opus33 19:19, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

If you have the date when the Tor was demolished and a reference, it would make a good footnote. --Wetman 20:27, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A matter of prestige

• "most prestigious" was deleted by someone with the edit summary "Hmm, let's just get rid of "most prestigious" for now. If someone finds a source for this surprising claim, it can go back in." Hardly a surprising claim; I think we can just assume that the Kaiserliches und Königliches Hoftheater zu Wien was "the most prestigious theatre in Vienna," until we have an alternative candidate. It would surely be an uphill climb to prove that a court theatre in any eighteenth-nineteenth century Central European city was not the most prestigious. --Wetman 06:27, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

There is a lot of information available on this theatre - it is linked to many other WP articles or will be - and it will not be a problem to clarify it's importance. There were other theatres in Vienna but we can probably confirm that this was the largest one. If I have time I will try to contribute some info later. -- Kleinzach 08:43, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

That will be great. This is presently little more than a stub: there are many premieres and debuts at the Kärntnertortheater besides Martha. --Wetman 09:03, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Hello Wetman, Sorry if that was rude. But I think that factually we're on thin ice here. You've nominated the Kärntnertortheater as most important solely on the basis of its bearing the title "Kaiserliches und Königliches Theater". But it seems that more than one Viennese theater bore this title. One reads at http://iir-hp.wu-wien.ac.at/seminar/fallbsp.html the opinion that it was the Burgtheater that was most important, and that the sign above the entrance indicated that it, too, was a "Imperial and Royal" theater:

"Die Burg", wie sie die Wiener nennen, ist die traditionsreichste, einst auch die bedeutenste, deutsche Sprechbühne. Die Bühne wurde 1776 durch Kaiser Joseph II. als "Hoftheater" gegründet, doch mit der Anweisung, ein "deutsches National-Theater" zu sein. Später nannte sie sich "Hof- und Nationaltheater", über dem Eingang steht "Kaiserlich-königliches Hofburgtheater" [translation on request]

This in fact was why I thought it was "surprising" when you nominated the Kärntnertortheater as most prestigious--my natural guess would have been the Burgtheater.

So my judgment is that unless you find a reference source that says that the Kärntnertortheater was generally regarded as the most important in Vienna, we shouldn't be saying it. Yours truly, Opus33 15:37, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Your description and link to the Burgtheater, which supplemented the older Kärntnertortheater as Joseph II's all-German Hoftheater, will certainly broaden the article's context. Usually more information gives me a more balanced picture, rather than less, so I'll be particularly grateful. --Wetman 00:43, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Hello, Wetman. I'm sorry, but I don't think you got my point. You're doing original research, which is verboten on Wikipedia, so I'm reverting. Sorry to quarrel with you, but the rules are the rules... Opus33 17:34, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Was Wetman doing original research?

Come now! None of us are doing original research here. What we should be doing is getting at the real facts - by using proper reference books. -- Kleinzach 04:10, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

What I had in mind is WP:SYN, which is part of the No Original Research policy page. Wetman inferred that the Theater am Kärntnertor was the most important in Vienna, simply because it had an imperial license. That's against the rules.

To go further, I personally feel that WP:SYN is a very good policy. We should only include inferences made by experts in a field, because only the experts know all the evidence and can weigh it properly. So, in the present case, someone like H. C. Robbins Landon or James Webster would know a great deal about all of theaters of Vienna, and could offer a really informed opinion. Random Wikipedia editors, such as Wetman, you, or me, are just guessing. Opus33 15:46, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

If you want to contribute to historical articles like this one I suggest using Grove or Oxford not ephemeral amateur websites. As for mounting campaigns against wrong inferences in WP articles - of which there must be hundreds of thousands of examples - please don't let us slow you down quoting the same old capitalised gibberish - go for it! -- Kleinzach 00:42, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Italian operas as elite entertainment

Wetman, you write in your edit summary: "Italian operas were indeed "a more elite form of entertainment" is a familiar element of European social history". What evidence is there for Italian being preferred by social elites in Vienna? Wasn't Italian one of the languages of the Austrian Empire? -- Kleinzach 12:21, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Hello, since this is controversial, I did a bit of checking.

First of all, Italian was a language of the Empire, but only because the Empire had acquired provinces in Italy. Ordinary Viennese people probably couldn't speak Italian--that's why the popular theater was in German.

Things were different for aristocrats. They were often taught Italian as children, and they also often went on the Grand tour to Italy in young adulthood (for an example, see House of Esterházy, discussing Nikolaus II). As a result, when they went to an opera in Italian, they had a good chance of understanding a fair amount of the words. It is this advantage that makes it reasonable to say that Italian operas were an elite form of entertainment.

One source for these claims is http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JMH/journal/issues/v76n2/760201/760201.web.pdf, an excellent social history article. See p. 274 for an example of Italian being taught to children of the elite, and pp. 263-272 (well worth mining further for this article) for the popular character of performances at the Kärntnertortheater. Cheers, Opus33 16:07, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Good research - though I couldn't get the pdf. Is the address correct? However the popularity and otherwise of Italian opera was also a matter of fashion. This is clear in both London and Paris where the public vaccilated in its support of vernacular as opposed to Italian opera, (see for example the way Londoners turned against Handel's Italian operas or the Querelle des Bouffons in Paris). It's also complicated because we are dealing with at least two main forms of Italian opera which must have appealed differently. That why I would prefer to see the word 'elite' out - it implies a simplistic explanation which I think we should avoid. -- Kleinzach 08:31, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, whatever. I do think that we should remember that our encyclopedia must be read by quite a few precocious children--curious and smart, but not yet equipped with a lot of world knowledge. Putting in little clues like "elite" helps this important subset of our audience.

Re. that link that wouldn't work: I suspect it's a pay site for which my ISP is ponying up the money; sorry it didn't work for you. Here are a couple passages from the article, for what they're worth:

"The first Viennese salon, that of Charlotte von Greiner (ne´e Hieronymous, 1739–1815), was in fact the direct offspring of the Theresian court. Charlotte was born in Hungary, the daughter of an officer in the Habsburg army. Her mother died soon after giving birth to her, and in 1744 she became an orphan when her father, whose regiment had just been transferred to Vienna, died of tuberculosis. Maria Theresia subsequently learned of the orphaned girl’s plight from a chambermaid and arranged to have Charlotte brought to court, where she was entrusted to a governess of the imperial family and given an excellent education that included French, Italian, and Latin. At the age of thirteen she became a personal attendant of the empress, and after 1762 her chief responsibility was to read aloud to Maria Theresia in the evenings.

"But what helped fashion a particularly close relationship between stage and audience in the burlesques of Kurz and Prehauser was their extemporaneity, a distinctive feature of the Ka¨rtnertor stage up to 1770. Louis XIV’s government had banned the use of extemporized dialogue in performances on Paris’s two leading stages, the Come´die Franc¸aise and the Come´die Italienne. The Licensing Act of 1737 had done the same for the London stage by requiring theater managers at Drury Lane and Covent Garden to submit the text of a performance in advance to a censor. In Kurz’s and Prehauser’s performances at the Ka¨rtnertor, much of the comedy was improvised, although the music and arias were written down. Off-the-cuff allusions to recent events, the use of vulgar gestures and sexual innuendo to spice up routines, bantering back and forth with the audience—such improvisation was standard at the Ka¨rtnertor. One easily imagines a packed house, in an almost Dionysian frenzy, urging Hanswurst or Bernardon on to ever greater verbal or gesticular excesses (recall Lady Montague’s description of Hanswurst mooning his public), which was another reason theater reformers were so hostile to the comedies of Kurz and Prehauser. “The more depraved the characters,” wrote one critic, “the more applause they win.” An improvised performance, unlike one based on a written text, was immune to censorship, which was why the official campaign against Kurz and Prehauser focused its efforts on ensuring that all performances at the Ka¨rtnertor conformed to a written text submitted in advance to a theater censor."

One might add that Kurz's godson Emanuel Schikaneder was a later exponent of this kind of theater; and so Papageno was a sort of descendent of Hanswurst... Opus33 16:21, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Sorry but I am unconvinced. The second quotation above relates to the popular burlesque-style spoken theatre not opera. (I'm sure we can agree that opera was a more refined, expensive, elite pastime than burlesque.) On the other hand German opera i.e. Singspiele addressed different audiences, just as Italian opera could be both classical drama and farce. At the 'high' end of German opera we have Johann Wolfgang Goethe himself, theatre administrator in Weimar, writing a series of German-language libretti (there is an article on him in relation to opera in Grove) and people like Johann Friedrich Reichardt who composed the music for them. (Of course, Goethe also liked Italian opera, just as he liked Italian culture in general.) Representing Italian/German as the high/low levels of opera doesn't work IMO. -- Kleinzach 03:58, 14 July 2007 (UTC)