Bürger-Oper and Bourgeois Theatre: The Opera of Hamburg at the Gänsemarkt (1678–1738) as a Culmination of Theatrical Practices Between Courtly Representation and Popular Traditions

Abstract

The opera at the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg (1678–1738) was the first theatre in the German-speaking world to have a continuous cast, was run by a civic interest group, and was in principle open to everyone. Through the lens of theatre studies, in addition to a trans-regional cultural transfer, the present article focuses on theatre- and cultural-historical processes that have had a lasting effect and which can be also deduced from the eventful history of the opera house. As Hamburg’s Bürger Oper it is still rooted in the cultural memory, even though the Gänsemarkt-Oper, as far as its founding impulse and self-image was concerned, owed much to the demands and requirements of a courtly festive and theatrical culture. The repertoire of the opera reflects this: about one-sixth of the 300 operas performed were integrated into courtly aristocratic representations. Paradoxically, however, theoretical as well as practical interactions can be derived from these festive operas which – under the influence of a Protestant culture on the one hand, and in the interplay with popular theatre practices such as those of the Hamburg opéras comiques in the tradition of the Théâtre de la Foire on the other – foreshadowed in a remarkable manner the definition and fictional concept of the later bourgeois (straight) theatre of the Enlightenment.