In this stimulating interdisciplinary conference held at Magdalen College Oxford, scholars researching history, musicology, language and politics collectively examined the movement of music and theatre across cultural, linguistic and national boundaries, with an emphasis on the role of war as a catalyst for exchange. ‘Theatre on the Move in Times of Conflict’ was the opening element of a larger ongoing research project organized by Annelies Andries (University of Oxford) and Clare Siviter (University of Bristol) that explores the impact of war on theatrical cultures; further events include a series of academic workshops and a public concert-lecture in Bristol showcasing songs of migration. (More details can be found on project's website https://theatreonthemove.wordpress.com.)
Alessandra Palidda (Oxford Brookes University) opened the conference by examining musical life in Milan during the Napoleonic occupation of 1796–1799, documenting the penetration of French Revolutionary songs into the city's operatic repertory. She argued that authorities considered musical theatre a ‘paramount vehicle of propaganda’ and employed opera as a means of inculcating republican values among the public. Palidda also highlighted the impact of the armed forces on Milan's musical scene: invading French troops brought with them patriotic tunes such as ‘La Marseillaise’, ‘Ça ira’ and ‘La Carmagnole’, while military bandsmen were able to provide instrumental accompaniment at opera productions and public festivals alike. Several fascinating papers explored the importance of wartime theatre and music as vehicles for political indoctrination or resistance, or for both. Lotte Jensen (Radboud Universiteit) discussed the role of the Dutch theatre in challenging French occupation between 1806 and 1813, contending that the concept of ‘resistance literature’, originating in studies of the Second World War, can be fruitfully applied to an early nineteenth-century context. Works depicting the downfall of tyrannical rulers, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, had obvious Napoleonic parallels, while other plays implicitly criticized French expansion through the dramatization of historical events and heroes, notably by celebrating the sixteenth-century Dutch struggle against Spanish overlordship. Jensen argued that the theatre, as an important forum for expressing anti-French and patriotic sentiments, helped encourage a growing sense of Dutch national identity.
In a similar vein, Martin Skamletz (Hochschule der Künste Bern) drew attention to the Viennese opera as a locus of political defiance and propaganda, highlighting symbolic acts of on-stage resistance to Napoleonic occupation and analysing a French work (L'Intrigue aux fenêtres of 1805, discussed below) that had been adapted to pay homage to the homecoming Austrian emperor. Eric Schneeman (University of Texas San Antonio) explored the staging of Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Aulide in German translation for the Prussian King Frederick William III's return to Berlin in 1809, viewing this as a moment of ‘political theatre’ orchestrated to instil patriotism and erase the stigma of Prussia's recent humiliation at the hands of Napoleon. Kate Astbury (University of Warwick) presented a compelling counterpoint to these discussions by highlighting the thespian zeal of French prisoners of war interned in Britain in the early nineteenth century. While subjugated Europeans took to the stage to challenge Napoleonic hegemony, French prisoners performed theatrical resistance of their own in confinement. Astbury suggested that by mounting French-language performances with Gallic-themed music, décor and backdrops, the prisoners sought to create a ‘miniature France’ before the footlights, reaffirming their French identity despite their captivity and nurturing a nostalgia for home.
Austin Glatthorn (Durham University) delivered a thought-provoking paper on the political resonances of musical theatre in the twilight years of the Holy Roman Empire. For example, he described an opera composed for Francis II's 1792 coronation which dramatized a medieval imperial crusade against paganism, arguing that the on-stage heathens were understood by contemporaries as being analogous to the iconoclastic revolutionary French. Many works of wartime musical theatre ‘championed imperial unity’, urging audiences both explicitly and through dramatic metaphor to set aside domestic differences and join the collective struggle against Gallic expansionism. The Holy Roman Empire, Glatthorn concluded, ‘staged its past and present to help ensure its future’ during a tempestuous time of military and ideological conflict. Looking further into the nineteenth century, Mark Everist (University of Southampton) perceptively commented on the importance of French opera as an aid to diplomacy during the 1855 state visit of Queen Victoria to Paris and in subsequent negotiations to end the Crimean War. Parisian theatrical culture, Everist contended, deserves consideration as a form of French ‘soft power’; it was mobilized to welcome allied diplomats, promote rapport among national leaders and celebrate homecoming soldiers and success on the battlefield.
The conference offered manifold insights into the complex relationship between conflict and cultural production. As a number of speakers memorably demonstrated, hostility to French political hegemony during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras often coincided with the continued appropriation of Gallic cultural products. For example, Barbara Babić (Universität Wien) examined the adaptation of French melodramas eulogizing Napoleonic victories for performance in the Austrian capital; she argued that their celebratory depictions of war were ‘reshaped and reworked’ into more pessimistic portrayals for Viennese audiences. Charlotte Vrielink (Universiteit van Amsterdam) highlighted the popularity of French and German works in Amsterdam among early nineteenth-century elite audiences, complicating assumptions that a groundswell of nationalist sentiment and resentment of foreign rule generated overwhelming demand for a distinctly Dutch national theatre. Discussing the ONSTAGE digital database of repertories, performances and ticket sales (http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/onstage/), Vrielink noted that quantitative analysis promises further insight into ‘the predominantly international character’ of Amsterdam's theatrical life.
The conference's first day concluded with a keynote address by Ben Walton (University of Cambridge) exploring the relationship between opera and war. Walton discussed the scholarship of Mary A. Favret, who traced the almost ubiquitous and inescapable impacts of conflict in the early nineteenth century, reflecting on how scholars should interpret the influence of war on art and music. He outlined the opportunities afforded by armed conflict for travel and cross-cultural encounter, noting that Stendhal, who later wrote a biography of Rossini, was first inspired by opera while serving with Napoleon's army in Italy. Walton also highlighted the striking tendency of nineteenth-century commentators to compare Rossini to the erstwhile French emperor; he cited forthcoming work by Emanuele Senici that considers Rossini's operas to have been part of the Italian response to the trauma of the Napoleonic epoch. Exploring examples of the impact of war on cultural developments, Walton suggested that the triumph of Rossini's music in South America in the 1820s was ultimately linked to Napoleon, noting that the French invasion of the Iberian peninsula indirectly led to the emergence of new Latin American nations eager to burnish their cultural credentials by importing the most successful European music of the age. Arguing that the artistic legacies of conflict often transcended the chronological boundaries of formal hostilities, Walton encouraged current researchers to develop an expanded understanding of wartime cultural production encompassing years of nominal peace, a view supported and critiqued by Katherine Hambridge (Durham University) in a perceptive response.
Tying in neatly with this theme, several conference presenters explored artistic representations of wartime events, many created long after the guns fell silent. Damien Mahiet (Brown University) examined Donizetti's popular opéra comique La Fille du Régiment (1840), demonstrating the enduring purchase of the Napoleonic legend, while Kelly Lynn Christensen (Stanford University) discussed the remorseful depiction of the War in the Vendée (a French counter-revolution of 1793) in an 1830 opera, contemplating its contemporary impact at another moment of profound change in French history. Scrutinizing an earlier period, Filippo Bruschi (Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia) interrogated evolving conceptions of war by comparing translations of Goldoni's La Guerra (1760) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Julia Prest (University of St Andrews) delivered a fascinating second keynote address on theatre culture in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the late eighteenth century, which she characterized as a ‘primary vehicle for the circulation of revolutionary ideas’. Prest contended that colonial theatre can no longer be dismissed as an inferior imitation of metropolitan models, emphasizing that transatlantic theatrical transmission resulted in the transformation and creolization of French works. She highlighted the artistic repercussions of war and political turmoil, charting the breakdown in cultural communication between France and its Caribbean colonies caused by the French and Haitian Revolutions while arguing that upheaval on Saint-Domingue precipitated the migration of the island's established Franco-Creole theatrical tradition to other places, most notably New Orleans. In a thoughtful response, Charlotte Bentley (University of Cambridge) endorsed Prest's depiction of theatre as an agent of transmission for revolutionary knowledge while stressing the need fully to incorporate the musical element of stage productions into analyses of colonial theatre.
A number of papers at ‘Theatre on the Move in Times of Conflict’ highlighted the military dimensions of contemporary theatrical performances, which often featured martial themes, music and language. Glatthorn, for example, noted the presence of Austrian military music – including a prolonged reveille – in Paer's 1801 Achille, while Prest discussed the 1789 play La Répétition Interrompue, which incorporated martial exercises performed by grenadiers of the Port-au-Prince garrison and a patriotic musical number played by military bandsmen. Skamletz's exploration of the 1805 opera L'Intrigue aux fenêtres (text by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and Emmanuel Dupaty, music by Nicolò Isouard) stressed the saturation of martial metaphors in this otherwise conventional love story, characterizing the work as a parody of militarism and perhaps a reflection of contemporary war fatigue.
The conference also considered performances within the armed forces, with my own paper (Eamonn O'Keeffe, University of Oxford) arguing that Napoleonic-era mass mobilization expanded opportunities for ordinary Britons to learn, play and listen to music. Drawing on an array of manuscript music books compiled by fifers and bandsmen, I demonstrated the diversity of martial musical repertories, which ran the gamut from regimental marches and patriotic ditties to waltzes, hornpipes and oratorios. I considered the potential for musical exchange and transmission afforded by the global circulation of British military manpower, suggesting that martial musicians routinely poached melodies from other regiments, armies and cultures.
In sum, ‘Theatre on the Move in Times of Conflict’ showcased diverse range of scholarship exploring the relations between war and the performance cultures of music and drama. Attendees considered how composers, performers and audiences made sense of momentous and traumatic events within the cultural context of the theatre and its genres or used their artforms as vehicles for political subversion and indoctrination. Presenters probed the multifarious cultural legacies of invasion, war and occupation, recognizing the role of conflict and the armed forces in shaping and enriching musical life. Overall, the papers sought to integrate war and politics more fully into the analysis of music and theatre, demonstrating how the close scrutiny of cultural production can advance historical understandings of conflict, identity and transnational exchange.
