Philipp Ther's title is his answer to the unnamed persons, mentioned in passing, who expressed surprise that he should be writing a book about opera of all things, surely the expression of culture in its highest, most elite, and unrepresentative form, surely (by implication) not something a historian who has written extensively about such gritty subjects as ethnic cleansings and feuding regionalisms could find relevant or compelling. As he shows beyond need of further proof in this splendid and complex work, opera in central Europe in the nineteenth century held a central place in national, provincial, and urban societies. The investigation of its institutions provides a way to illuminate such key issues as the nationalizing of culture and society and the shifting relations of power and influence among bourgeoisie and aristocracy, city and court, empire and province. Ther's is truly a work of central European history. He manages a many-sided comparison among the operatic institutions, performances, and politics of Dresden, Prague, and Lemberg, which is at the same time a comparison of the typical cultural institutions of court, aristocracy, and urban middle class (Hoftheater, Adelstheater, bürgerliches Theater) over the course of a long and eventful century of social, political, and, not least, musical developments. This is a lot to cover. Ther himself suggests that the story of the Czech National Theater might be the basis for a decent libretto, probably in the mode of Grand Opera with its highly stylized crowd scenes (the ceremonial laying of the foundation stones in 1868), nifty displays of new technologies (special trains bringing Czechs in from the countryside to attend the performances), as well as a conflagration or two. Combined with the stories of Dresden and Lemberg, the book as a whole might be said to resemble a three-ring circus more than an opera. Yet Ther's control of his rich and unwieldy material is complete, and his ability to identify cross-currents of influence, reaction, and response is nothing short of masterful.

Ther's investigations shed new light on a number of assumptions—some old, some of more recent vintage—about the place of music in European society. First, he devotes considerable attention to the problem of determining the social valence of these cultural forms. Once one puts away the adolescent desire to shift paradigms, it becomes clear that it is better to revise or rename than to replace most reigning ones, and such is the case with that of Verbürgerlichung, which Ther suggests we consider instead as really a matter of Enthofnung (not than any single word, even a German one, could encompass the complexity of the change over time that he depicts). The problem is not so much that the German bourgeoisie failed to take over formerly aristocratic and/or court-based cultural institutions, as that it makes little sense to bind together social and cultural formations so tightly that all aspects of the latter must, perforce, reflect the characteristics of the former (whatever they might be). Evidence of increasing participation of non-titled people in the shaping and running of urban operatic institutions abounds but with important differences in terms of time, place, and consequence. Dresden is Ther's entry in the category of Hoftheater, and there the continuing importance of the Saxon court as a source of funding and even leadership created “a theater emancipated from the public,” which by the end of the century meant a theater less bound to public taste and more committed to artistic autonomy (p. 178). In Lemberg, Ther finds the aristocracy downstage, their power and influence there for all to see, but behind the scenes, an ongoing and significant role for the intelligentsia. Prague is perhaps the one place where a straightforward shift of cultural momentum from the aristocracy to the middle classes happened, but at the same time much of the work of creating a cultural space for a viable Czech national theater had been achieved by aristocratic cultural patrons before 1848. Ther argues persuasively for the “functional equivalence” of aristocracy and bourgeoisie in the shaping of nineteenth-century operatic culture. Both social groups, in all their internal variety, shared, ultimately, “a European ideal of civilization” (p. 342).

The question of Europe raises the question of nations. And insightful and skillful as are his forays into the murky ground of socio-cultural analysis, Ther makes his most important contributions to debates about the role of nations and nationalism in musical culture. The tension between the internationalism and nationalism of operatic culture in all of these cities is his central concern, and all of the many times he addresses this theme enlarge our understanding. Ther beautifully explores the impossibility of sustaining operatic institutions as a purely national undertaking. Nowhere in central Europe, even Germany, were there enough operas, singers, or even nationally single-minded members of the audience, to sustain a program that was all national, all the time. Each of the cities he considers went through phases of more or less total devotion to a national cause, in each case differently flavored, but everywhere Ther finds a convergence—or reconvergence?—at the end of the century on an essentially European model of operatic performance and repertoire. It is hard not to conclude, though even this thought is corrupted by the very nineteenth-century nationalizing impulses it seemingly rejects, that there is something about music that hates a nation.