PROJECT OUTLINE:

Music theatre, defined here as the overarching rubric for all forms of musical and theatrical interaction from traditional opera to experimental, scenic performances, has always been constituted by a particular tension between textuality and performativity. We aim to investigate this tension from a historical and systematic perspective to determine to what extent it allows us to analyze - among other aspects - processes of dynamization and stabilization that indicate and mirror cultural change (including the paradoxes inherent to these processes). Taking a comparative approach, we will focus on performances of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century.

It is our objective to shed more light on the tension between textuality and performativity, as it manifests itself in the various historical phases of music theatre, by identifying such dynamizing and stabilizing tendencies. Dynamizing processes here refer to the preference for a potential openness in generating a performance, while stabilizing processes denote the need to counter the elusiveness of performance with a stabilizing force. At first glance, stabilizing processes seem to emphasize textualization, whereas dynamizing processes appear to privilege performativity. Yet, a closer look renders such distinct classifications untenable. For one, a strict adherence to conventions of performance practices can similarly lead to a tendency towards stabilization. Moreover, textual precision can have a dynamizing effect on the rigid practices of performative conventions. It is our key objective to identify such contradictory dimensions within seemingly distinct classifications and determine dominant trends in the history of music theatre that speak to this cross-fertilization, mark certain preferences, and mirror cultural dynamics. The music theatre of the nineteenth century and tendencies in current music theatre pieces are particularly well-suited to examine these diverse constellations and hierarchies, as the relationship between textuality and performativity here by no means reflects the ostensible opposition of stabilizing and dynamizing tendencies. We must therefore closely examine what factors determine and accompany the shifts between stabilization and dynamization. Factors specific to the genre of music theatre will play a pivotal role in our approach. The transformation of existing material, necessary for all performative processes, will serve as an example here, including the notion that an existing text or score must be metaphorically and even literally "destroyed" in order to create something new and bring forth a new order or form (that of the performance).

The project is divided into three sub-projects. Sub-projects 1 (Giuseppe Verdi and the music theatre of his times: Strategies of controlling the performance) and 2 (Music theatre today: Performances as paradoxes of rigidity and methodological challenges in musicology) will focus on the dynamizing and stabilizing processes of nineteenth-century and today's music theatre; the expected results of the case studies in sub-projects 1 and 2 will significantly shape the reflections in the aesthetic-theoretical sub-project 3 on the current relevance of the historical and aesthetical concept of a (the) musical work.

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