Conference Agenda

Antonio Gualandi (active 1703–38), the German-born castrato known as “Campioli,” built his career traveling the network of ensembles that structured musical life in German princely courts. Like many singers of his time, he moved between posts, performing in Stuttgart, Berlin, and Braunschweig before securing a position at Darmstadt in 1710. His next move was more unusual. In 1719, he arrived at Hamburg’s Oper am Gänsemarkt (est. 1678), a commercial theater in one of northern Europe’s busiest ports. As a vital junction in trade networks spanning the Elbe River, the North Sea, Baltic, and Atlantic, Hamburg was shaped by constant flows of goods, capital, and people.

Histories of music-making in early eighteenth-century Hamburg often emphasize its identity as a German, orthodox Lutheran city. Yet Gualandi’s experience there tells a different story. The first castrato to sing on the Gänsemarkt’s stage, he found in Hamburg a culture of opera and an audience decidedly less German than those of the princely courts he had previously served. His time at the Gänsemarkt was shaped not by a fixed local identity, but by the city’s deep ties to other maritime centers.

This paper examines how Hamburg’s operatic culture took shape in relation to the city’s status as a port during Gualandi’s tenure (1719–27), focusing on three key areas: its informal singerly networks, repertoire from abroad, and performance practices drawn from transregional traditions. To do so, it draws on printed libretti, newspaper advertisements, and administrative records tied to Gualandi’s time in Hamburg, and reads these sources through the fundamentally outward-looking perspective of the Gänsemarkt’s spectators. Building on scholarship on port cities as sites of musical exchange and on opera’s role in shaping urban identities, this study proposes an alternative early modern operatic geography—one shaped by movement, commerce, and cross-cultural exchange rather than fixed territorial boundaries. By doing so, it offers a novel framework for understanding early modern opera’s relation to commercial and maritime mobility.

In the early nineteenth century, Austrian Count Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz sponsored numerous operatic performances at his Moravian castle in Náměšť (Namiest). For these performances, Haugwitz created his own German adaptations of operatic works by composers he admired. Among his favorites was Antonio Salieri, with whom he was personally acquainted. Haugwitz was particularly drawn to Salieri’s Tarare, with a libretto by Beaumarchais, which premiered in Paris in 1787, and its 1788 Viennese Italian adaptation Axur, re d’Ormus, with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte.

Archival records at the Moravian Museum and Archive show that Haugwitz repeatedly returned to this work over several decades. He purchased his first manuscript scores of Axur in 1806, soon after attending a performance at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. In 1810, he created his first German adaptation of Axur, followed in 1813 by a German rendering of the prologue to Tarare—a section that Da Ponte had omitted from Axur. In 1831–32, he compiled a new German adaptation that mixed Italian and French portions of the opera. Haugwitz discussed these adaptations and their musical qualities in previously overlooked introductory essays and in his correspondence with Ignaz von Mosel, Salieri’s first biographer.

This paper argues that Haugwitz’s adaptations sought to preserve Salieri’s music within Beaumarchais’s original dramaturgical framework while stripping the work of any political and social views associated with French enlightenment liberalism—ideologies that had initially rendered the opera controversial and had become taboo in post-Napoleonic Habsburg Europe. This ideological neutralization is particularly evident in his 1813 revision of Tarare’s prologue and his 1831–32 mixed adaptation, where he systematically omitted passages critical of monarchy and the church, as well as those advocating greater social equality. By continually reviving Salieri’s eighteenth-century operas—many of which had largely disappeared from early nineteenth-century operatic stages—and by emphasizing their musical qualities, Haugwitz became an early contributor to the construction of the musical canon. His efforts to reframe Tarare/Axur as a work of timeless aesthetic beauty, rather than one with provocative ideological content, anticipate later processes in Western music canon formation, which often prioritized abstract musical values over politically charged themes.

In the mid-18^th century, Carlo Goldoni’s dramma giocoso, a genre featuring “comic material… interwoven with tragic” (preface to La scuola moderna), reformed comic theater. Prioritizing realistic representations of modern society and psychologically complex characters, dramma giocoso represented a marked transition away from the commedia dell’arte inspired characters, situational comedies, and intense, conflict-driven tragedies that were popular at the time. When replicated in opera libretti of the period, Goldoni’s new agenda for comic theater was set to musical conventions and styles that remained virtually indistinguishable from those of the opera buffa tradition. The designation dramma giocoso was thus confined to the literary realm and, subsequently, has received only passing reference in opera histories that tend to privilege musical considerations over those of text. Today, the term dramma giocoso is recognized primarily for its application to operas (such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte) whose dramatic intensity, moral ambiguity, and intermingling of tragedy and comedy that result in rather disconcerting conclusions fall outside of typical opera buffa conventions.

Seventeenth-century operas posing literary and dramatic challenges similar to those in eighteenth-century drammi giocosi do not have the benefit of a genre designation that mitigates their more unsettling elements. Instead, operatic works like Cavalli’s La Didone (1641) and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642) that contain characters who do not behave as they should; comedy that experiments with moral, sexual, and political themes; mixed-genre plots that explore the human condition; and troubling conclusions are deemed “problematic.” This paper flips the script by viewing such operas’ more troublesome elements as progressive. Consideration of King Iarbas’ mad scene, Arnalta and Nutrice’s advice, and each opera’s conclusion demonstrates how Giovanni Francesco Busenello, the librettist for both, effectively interwove the comic with the tragic to create complex characters and scenes that permitted a relatively safe space for exploring fundamental social, philosophical, and moral concerns of the day. In so doing, it provides a new context for understanding the comic reforms of the eighteenth-century.