The Court in the City? Aristocratic and Burgher Culture in Hamburg in the 17th and Early 18th Centuries

Abstract

In 17th and early 18th century Hamburg – the leading trading, transport and communication centre in Northern Germany and for the whole Baltic region – there were no insurmountable barriers and demarcation lines between court and urban society. The city’s “hybrid bourgeois/aristocratic secular high culture” (Ann Catherine Le Bar 1993) is characterized by an intense communication and transfer of cultural knowledge and behaviour among different kinds of nobility: aristocrats, patricians, diplomats and other functional elites. As banquets and concerts demonstrate, music was used as a kind of status symbol, with the aim of gaining esteem and ingratiating oneself with people. Such cultural acting was typical of the upper classes, but to a certain degree also of the wider urban middle classes. Re-evaluating Hamburg’s famous Collegium musicum, founded in 1660, within this social framework, it does not appear any longer as an “urban-bourgeois model institute in the sense of a counter model to court chapels” (Arnfried Edler 2003), but more as a noble society in the broadest sense, choosing its repertory from artistic centres in Italy as well as from leading German courts for the purpose of pleasure, cultural distinction and education.