The Vienna Burgtheater, which today stands as an imposing architectural monument on the Ringstrasse, was originally located near the Hofburg on the Michaelerplatz, and closely involved with the Habsburg court. The “Burg” refers to the Hofburg, and its full designation in the nineteenth century was the “Kaiserlich-Königlich Hoftheater nächst [next to] der Burg,” and the Habsburg emperor was an important presiding figure: from the exceptional involvement of Joseph II who envisioned it as the “German National Theater” in 1776 to Franz Joseph who took one of the leading company actresses, Katharina Schratt, as his very intimate companion for some three decades. Martin Wagner’s new study, A Stage for Debate: The Political Significance of Vienna’s Burgtheater, 1814–1867, focuses on the era of post-Napoleonic Habsburg absolutism initiated under Emperor Franz, the so-called Metternich era, and (after the revolutionary interlude of 1848–49), concluding with the creation of modern constitutional Austria-Hungary in 1867, already under Franz Joseph. While state censorship and conservative values were certainly dominant during this period, Wagner argues that the Burgtheater repertory reflected a range of political perspectives and therefore functioned as a “stage for debate” within the somewhat constrained limits of Habsburg absolutism.

One important role of the nineteenth-century Burgtheater was the canonization of the eighteenth-century classics, which thus guaranteed that the Enlightenment values of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing were present in the repertory—though Schiller’s Wallenstein plays, considering the generalissimo’s antagonism toward the Habsburg emperor, had to wait for the Revolution of 1848. The most important Austrian dramatist of the nineteenth century Franz Grillparzer was frequently performed at the Burgtheater, though he had some liberal sympathies; he was regarded with due suspicion by Emperor Franz, and Grillparzer’s famous Habsburg historical dramas were rarely given. As with the Wallenstein plays, Habsburg history was a very delicate subject for the Burgtheater.

Wagner, however, focuses not on the classics, but on the vast repertory of “middlebrow” entertainment dramas, now almost entirely forgotten, totaling more than a hundred plays every year, and more than a thousand new plays between 1814 and 1867. Wagner’s methodological strategy involves interpreting the repertory as a whole (as experienced by audiences who would have experienced many plays in succession over the course of a season), such that “plays whose social and political content may appear relatively unremarkable when read in isolation, become through their divergence from other plays in the repertoire, meaningful as contributors to ongoing debates in Viennese and Austrian society.” In the context of “repertoire polyphony,” even subtle differences in perspective could have been understood as politically notable. Wagner emphasizes “not only—and not primarily—the extent to which an individual dramatic work (or theater production) departs from the cultural consensus, but the extent to which the diversity of positions across different plays undermines the very notion of such a consensus and shows the possibility for debate.” This diversity, Wagner argues, also reflected the financial basis of the Burgtheater, which, as a court theater, received half its funding from the government, but had to raise the other half from ticket sales, and therefore had to give satisfaction to a relatively diverse public. To some extent, Wagner’s research is seriously quantitative, counting the number of plays given in each season, tallying the number of performances for each play across seasons, even graphing the dominance of comedy and drama over tragedy in the relative proportion of genres within the repertory as a whole.

At the same time, Wagner supports his argument about the significance of repertory diversity by reading and interpreting small clusters of related plays that express somewhat different perspectives on issues of uxorial and filial obedience, of women’s roles in society, and of the importance of German nationalism for an Austrian public. For instance, he considers the breakdown of obedience in King Lear (for Shakespeare was fundamental among the classics at the Burgtheater), interpreted as the “mourning” of a world of obedience lost. He looks to the contemporary repertory for a range of diverse perspectives: the potentially destructive aspects of obedience in Grillparzer’s Ein Treuer Diener (1828); the resistance to tutelage in Grossjährig (Age of Majority, 1846), by the somewhat more liberal Eduard von Bauernfeld; and the dramatization of the excesses of wifely obedience by the somewhat more conservative Friedrich Halm in his Griseldis (1835), an update of Bocaccio’s and Petrarch’s Griselda tale. Discussing women’s issues, Wagner presents the little-known work of Princess Amalie von Sachsen whose Majoratserbe (Entail Inheritance, 1845) considers a young woman’s marital preferences; Johanna Franul von Weissenthurn who, in Das letze Mittel (The Last Resort, 1820), presents a young widow who provocatively believes that a woman may love one man while enjoying being admired by a hundred men; and Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer who adapted Georges Sand’s novel Fanchon as Die Grille (The Cricket, 1857) and explored issues of transgressive gender identities. Wagner counts seventy-four plays by women between 1814 and 1867, constituting 7 percent of the repertory.

Wagner’s work is immensely interesting as it offers a sampling of the once-celebrated, now-unknown, dramas of “Biedermeier” Vienna—a word that Wagner studiously avoids, perhaps because he is trying to avoid conventional summations. The book, however, might have benefited from some attempt to integrate drama with other aspects of contemporary Viennese culture, and, considering that the book does specifically address “political significance,” one might look for more direct reference to the shifting political context of the period. Neither the Metternich policy agenda following the Congress of Vienna or, at the other end of the period, the incipient constitutionalism of the October Diploma and Schmerling Patent of the 1860s are brought into the discussion of drama. And though a few notable productions of 1848 are discussed—including the Wallenstein plays, but also a landmark production in Viennese dialect by Alexander Baumann—the actually political life of the revolution is largely passed over. One chapter focuses on political plays, especially concerning German nationalism, with attention to Halm’s play about Arminius (1854) on German resistance to the ancient Romans, and Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein’s play about Hans Sachs (1839), an intriguing dramatic precursor to (Richard) Wagner’s Die Meistersinger; (Martin) Wagner notes that Habsburg censorship would permit no reference to Luther and Lutheranism in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, while the central theme of Hans Sachs, as in the later opera, concerned the celebration of German art.

Baumann’s dialect comedy of 1848 concerns a Prussian visitor to the Austrian Alps, alienated and baffled by the dialect but ultimately reconciled to the mountaineers, in a spirit of broader national unity. Wagner notes the subtle perspective of the urban Viennese audience which had to understand the Austrian dialect better than the Prussian character on stage in order to appreciate the comedy of his misunderstandings. In its varied repertory the Burgtheater played a part in fostering German nationalism both by reviving the German classics, and performing contemporary non-Austrian German playwrights; Schiller in the former category and Kotzebue in the latter were the most performed authors of the period. Yet, the Burgtheater was also deeply committed to foreign classics, Shakespeare of course, but also French drama, and notably the plays of Eugène Scribe. One of the protagonists of Wagner’s book is Heinrich Laube, who resigned from the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament to become director of the Burgtheater in 1849 and presided until the coming of constitutional Austria-Hungary in 1867. Himself the author of a play about the young Friedrich Schiller, Laube prided himself on presenting the German classics, Shakespeare, and “everything from the Romance people that can be assimilated to our way of thinking.” He presented, however, nothing from Czech or Hungarian drama, which were apparently not quite assimilable. Wagner’s study of the Burgtheater, with its broad range of dramatic expression but also its limits and constraints, offers fascinating and important new perspectives for thinking about culture and politics in Vienna and the Habsburg monarchy.