Józef Elsner, the Viennese grosse heroisch-komische Oper, and the Origins of the Polish “Grand Opera”

Abstract

The article explores operas composed by Joseph (later Józef) Elsner in the beginnings of his involvement in the Polish theater, highlighting their significance as a transnational phenomenon due to their being not only, as within the musicology discourse so far, one of the repertoire groups crucial for establishing the Polish-language music theater, but also a part of the operatic landscape of the Habsburg monarchy. The first two of these operas originated within theater environment of peripheral Austrian stage in Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg, where Elsner, hitherto a south-German musician formed in Breslau and Vienna, started his collaboration with Wojciech Bogusławski (in 1796–1798 the director of both Polish and German troupes) and opened his career as a Polish opera composer. The works under discussion were intended to match, at least in scope, the most popular repertoire items such as Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, or Salieri’s Axur, and their novelty within Polish original output was acknowledged by both Bogusławski and Elsner with the term “grand opera” (resp. in Polish and German), employed as suggesting links with Vienesse Schikanederian singspiel as well as subgenres of opera buffa in the type of dramma eroicomico.

            The primary aim of this paper is to present the historical background alongside a theoretical framework that, when considered together, justifies the interpretation of discussed output as a part of broadly defined Viennese operatic culture. The central idea revolves around the concept of “grosse heroisch-komische Oper” treated as transnational genre-like category that reflects some aspects of coexistence of above-mentioned German and (adapted) Italian repertoire within Austrian opera theaters, but simultaneously can be employed toward describing the dissemination of these works in Polish-language theaters as well as the outcomes of overlapping of Austrian and Polish theater cultures. The second objective is to give an concise account of four Elsner operas, with a focus on the first of them. Emphasis will be placed on tracing their roots in dramatico-musical conventions and devices specific for Viennese “grosse” singspiels and Italian “mixed” offshoots of opera buffa.

            The article’s significance is twofold. It sheds some light on so far mostly unexplored (and almost unknown to non-Polish musicology) works by setting them in the proper repertoire context. Simultaneously, it contributes to a transnational approach in research of the European operatic landscape at the turn of the nineteenth century, highlighting the case where strict adherence to language—or nation—based genre demarcation lines can be misleading.