Musical culture and the origins of the Enlightenment in Hamburg

Hamburg's German-language opera company, founded in 1678 and housed in the Theater am Gansemarkt, immediately dominated the city's secular culture and became the institution within and against which the cultural values of Hamburg's early Enlightenment took shape. Hamburg was a hub both of international commerce and of cultural interchange with north German and European princely courts. Its Goosemarket opera, which operated for sixty years under protection of the Rat, with the support of aristocratic patrons, and to paying, popular audiences, became the principal locus for the formation of Hamburg's hybrid bourgeois/aristocratic secular high culture on the eve of the Enlightenment. The individuals who initiated the Enlightenment movement in Hamburg in the 1720s and 1730s belonged to the generation that grew up in the shadow of the Goosemarket opera.;This study begins by reconstructing the salient features of Hamburg's high culture in the galant period--the period in which the opera was founded. In the musical and literary treatises published in Hamburg in the decade of the 1700s, the galant appears as a positive ideal of worldly wisdom, practical knowledge, good taste and inner cultivation. This ideal was transformed in the writings of Christian Friedrich Hunold, Johann Mattheson, Barthold Heinrich Brockes, and other early Aufklarer as they passed from youth to adulthood. In the Hamburg Patriot (1724-26), the most important moral weekly of the Fruhaufklarung, the "galant homme" is a negative ideal, the heuristic anti-type to the "good burgher," reflecting the critical distance of the Hamburg Aufklarer from their own galant youth. Yet galant social values were carried forward in the early Enlightenment in the ethos of intellectual cultivation and refinement and the galant aesthetic of simplicity and naturalness was carried forward in the moral cantatas of Reinhard Keiser, harbingers of the proto-classical vocal style of another Hamburg composer, Georg Philipp Telemann. The cantatas of Keiser and Telemann--brief, technically simple music, suitable for amateur performance, and embodying the ethical and didactic impulses of the German Enlightenment--set the standard for eighteenth-century vocal chamber music, replacing the operatic standard--complex, technically difficult music for the stage.