| The project is a cultural-historical investigation of nineteenth-century concepts of na-tional opera and national music. It brings under close scrutiny the genre of national opera as a cultural institution and as a multimedia art form. The main goal is to define the ideas of national music and national opera in the broader context of nineteenth-century na-tionalistic political and philosophical discourses. Opera histories have difficulties with accounting for national operas. The New Grove Dic-tionary of Music and Musicians includes the definition of national opera in the chapter about Slavonic and National Opera (13:599-603), claiming that national operas satisfied the hunger for national heritage with folk music and libretti based on national history, myth, legend, history and peasant life. The 2001 edition of The New Grove reduces the treatment to a half-a-page on National Traditions and no longer suggests a strong connection between national operas and Slavonic cultures. The plan here proposed adopts this defi-nition, but argues that the appropriation of Romantic concepts of art and philosophy and their political projections were crucial, not the use of folk music. This project argues that the nationalistic aspects of nineteenth-century artistic theories and works of arts were not only entailments of the contemporary political discourses, but that these theories actually provided intellectual material and inducement for politics. Thus nationalism, or rather the idea of the manifestations of the national (spirit, art, politics, etc.) in the nineteenth century was on the one hand a social-political issue, and on the other a rhetorical trope which can be found in most of the nineteenth century dis-courses, some of which still shape our vision of certain works of arts and philosophies. National operas emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century and were very closely linked to the national awakenings of this period. These awakenings were also be-hind the re-institutionalization of the opera, which resulted in building new opera houses in many cities, creating national companies, and writing national operas in vernacular. I wish to consider nineteenth-century Hungarian and Romanian operas as cultural phe-nomena that do not only reflect or express their own times, but are themselves active agents in shaping their social and cultural world. National awakenings gave the impetus and the ideology for institutionalizing literature and music; but there is a two-way traffic within this process, since the ideology is like a chiastic rhetorical figure: on the one hand it is an inherent characteristic of the language, on the other hand it is a construction. It creates and at the same time itself is a creation. That is why is so important to examine the language use itself when talking about national ideologies, national literature and mu-sic. |
