This chapter offers an account of the circumstances surrounding the creation of The Magic Flute and its earliest performances. Through an examination of the latest research and documentary evidence, alongside established accounts and early iconography, this essay considers how audiences may have experienced the opera in 1791. “The Magic Flute in 1791” thus contextualizes the genesis and earliest stagings of the work not as Mozart’s final opera, but rather as the product of a particular historical moment.

Turning to the genre that was included in the repertoire of nearly every company, this chapter explores melodrama. Featuring only a select few performers, melodramas were showpieces for the finest dramatic actors and vehicles for their fame. The genre spread rapidly throughout the Empire, and although some recognized the role of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) in melodrama's inception, it was eventually labelled ‘Germany’s daughter’. The success of Ariadne auf Naxos (Gotha, 1775) by Georg Benda (1722–95) led to an intense period of melodramatic reform. This chapter traces this reform movement through such pieces as Sophonisbe (Leipzig, 1776) by Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748–98), Benda’s Philon und Theone (Vienna, 1779), and Zelmor und Ermide (Vienna, c.1779) by Anton Zimmermann (1741–81). Arguing that such pieces as these pushed melodrama's generic boundaries to the verge of opera and imparted instrumental music with new aesthetic powers, this chapter offers new insight into music-text relations, generic hybridity, and melodrama's aesthetic entanglements with opera and symphonic music.

Based on a distant reading of key periodicals, this chapter investigates the music and musicians that received the most contemporary attention – and how recognition developed – throughout the era. It demonstrates in the first instance that the Reich had its own practical repertoire that transcended any one area, national tradition, or group of composers. Contemporaries often referenced musical titles without identifying a composer despite the fact that works could circulate in multiple versions by a single musician, in various settings by different composers, and as adapted texts by dramatists and musicians. But evidence suggests that the years around 1785 marked a moment of increasing normalization during which topics already set to music would be generally avoided and pieces circulating in multiple settings were increasingly linked to the work of just one composer. Establishing which music and musicians received the most attention, their relative importance to one another, and how associations between them altered in time, this chapter demonstrates that the Reich cultivated a shared repertoire that was formed and informed by networks of information and communication.

This epilogue considers the afterlife of music theatre and the Holy Roman Empire as well as its relevance today.

The final chapter explores music theatre as a cultural expression of the Empire. Dramatists and composers responded to current events by creating works of varying genres for the Empire's stages. Focusing on Günther von Schwarzburg (Mannheim, 1777; German serious opera) by Ignaz Holzbauer (1711–83), Oberon, König der Elfen (Vienna, 1789; Singspiel) by Paul Wranitzky (1756–1808), Heinrich der Löwe (Frankfurt am Main, 1792; Singspiel) by Carl David Stegmann (1751–1826), Die Feier des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1794; melodrama) by Siegfried Schmiedt (1756–99), the anonymous Der Retter Deutschlands (Vienna, 1797; melodrama), and Achille (Vienna, 1801; opera seria) by Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839), this chapter argues that music theatre portraying the Reich called for cooperation in uncertain times by appealing to a sense of belonging to both local Estate and the Empire. Studies of these works tend to view them as expressions of an emerging German nationalism. This chapter challenges such perceptions, arguing that although the Reich was not a nation-state, composers nevertheless portrayed it as a complex nation and state, placing its past, present, and future centre stage.

This central chapter turns to written communication to explore its part in regulating and networking theatres and repertoire. It begins with an exploration of the types of information shared between troupes and how discursive networks supported their performances. Although theatres are commonly portrayed as having to compete to survive, this chapter reveals that they also regularly cooperated. By illustrating the equal importance of discursive networks and material exchange among the Großmann (touring), Mainz (ecclesiastical court-affiliated), and Schwerin theatres (secular court-affiliated), it reveals that theatre companies were designed with both court and public audiences in mind, and in practice cultivated a shared repertoire. Programming choices were made to some degree based on location, the status of audiences, tastes of patrons, and access to performance materials. But this chapter argues that such decisions were usually owing to the intense communication of theatrical information and recommendations between theatre directors and enthusiasts – and, ultimately, on the expectations to which a collective imperial culture gave rise.

This chapter maps the vast web of German-language theatres that connected Central European audiences around the year 1800. Using periodicals and missives written by those active at these institutions, it investigates how the network functioned in practice as well as how it was imagined across vast distances. It explores the mobility of theatre companies to at once redraw the theatrical map of late eighteenth-century Central Europe and challenge perceptions of oppositional court and public music cultures. The Reich's theatrical network simultaneously existed in the imaginary thanks to print culture and a reading public. While touring companies made the journey from one performance location to the next, readers could be transported to theatres scattered across the Empire with the turn of a page. This rendered the network as much a political and theatrical reality as an imaginary realm, where the bandwidth of data was as important as the institutions, personnel, repertoires, and developments the information conveyed. The Empire’s musico-theatrical complex – both physical and imaginary – was the foundation upon which a shared imperial repertoire could be cultivated.

The Introduction places the book into its historical and historiographic contexts. German-language music theatre often plays a supporting role in musical histories of Central Europe circa 1800, as does the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was home to over 300 territories that were linked by politics and culture. Physically networking the Empire was Europe's first systematic postal system, which served as a precondition for the operation of the hundreds of theatre companies that performed within its territories . By first considering the contemporary and scholarly distinctions between German-language theatre and the 'Nationaltheater', this introduction draws on recent historiography to provide a musicological audience with the key features of, and concepts surrounding, the Holy Roman Empire. It then traces this long misunderstood polity's place in music historiography and ultimately posits it as an ideal framework to investigate the world of German music and theatre in the decades leading up to the turn of the nineteenth century.