THREE ‘POPULAR THEATRES’

The Vienna of the Biedermeier period was by modern standards a compact city, though it was begining to grow fast (the population increased from about 230,000 in 1800 to just over 400,000 in the mid-1840s). Musical and theatrical circles overlapped (both Schubert and Beethoven were friends of Grillparzer), and there were also many connections on a personal level between playwrights and actors from the Burgtheater and those connected with the commercial theatres. Indeed one of the distinctive features of this period was the interplay of court and commercial theatres — a parallel amid the political stagnation of Metternich's Austria to the interplay between ‘private’ and ‘public’ theatres in what had in other respects been the very different cultural climate of Elizabethan London.

The commercial theatres were regularly referred to as ‘popular’ theatres (Volkstkeater), that is, theatres for ordinary people, as opposed to the court. The Viennese shared with their contemporaries both in Paris — the public of the Boulevard du Temple — and in Victorian London a liking for melodrama and for spectacle, which especially the Theater an der Wien catered for throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. But at the heart of the repertory was comedy of various kinds, in Viennese dialect. How far the commercial theatres functioned either as theatres for the lower classes or (at least until Nestroy's time) as ‘oppositional’ theatres, offering a subversive counter to the norms of the court theatres, is doubtful. Social and political conformism was enforced by the censor.