Als Richard Wagner in Riga an seiner ersten großen Oper Rienzi arbeitete, war er der Ansicht, daß hier keine Möglichkeit bestehe, ein Bühnenwerk von solchen Anforderungen aufzuführen. Das Stadttheater, in dem von 1782 Opern- und Theatervorstellungen stattfanden, war seiner Meinung nach nicht geeignet, die "große tragische Oper", die zweifelsohne entscheidende Anklänge an die Große Oper Spontinis und Meyerbeers aufwies, aufzuführen. Lag es an der Räumlichkeit des Gebäudes oder spielten da andere Tatsachen ihre Rolle?

Operntheater und -truppen sind im Vergleich zu dramatischem Theater und Schauspieltruppen viel seltener: ich schätze die Proportion Opernhaus zu Theatereinrichtungen etwa 1:7. Auch in Lettland ist das so. Aber eine genauere Prüfung dieses Zustandes zeigt auch andere Möglichkeiten und Gesetzmäßigkeiten.

Wenn es sich also bei diesem dritten Jahrhundertviertel auch um keine abgeschlossene Epoche handelt, so verspricht seine Betrachtung doch Aufschluß über die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen einer entscheidenden musikgeschichtlichen Weichenstellung: Gab es vor 1750 noch kein einziges musikalisches Bühnenwerk in russischer Sprache, so bringt das folgende Vierteljahrhundert nicht nur den ersten russischen Operntypus überhaupt – die russifizierte \"opera seria\" –, sondern auch seine Überwindung zugunsten der russischen komischen Oper, die die Produktion der folgenden Jahrzehnte dominiert und im 19. Jahrhundert zur russischen Nationaloper führt.

Der vorliegende Beitrag ist eine Skizze, die das bereits in der knappen Zeitspanne von 1881 bis etwa 1900 mehrfach wechselnde Verhältnis zwischen russischen und italienischen Operntruppen in Petersburg zu umreißen versucht.

According to John Lukacs, German people's views on Hitler and Nazism once got examined right after the fall the Third Reich in the 1950s but this subject has lost its appeal since then. How do Germans nowadays, specifically those young ones raised in the "New Germany" after the fall of the Berlin Wall, think of Hitler and their country's Nazi legacy? This dissertation is to explore how six young Germans growing up in the new "unified Germany" interpret two films' representations of Hitler and Nazism.

This paper proposes an audience selection framework for online brand advertising based on user activities on social media platforms. It is one of the first studies to our knowledge that develops and analyzes implicit brand-brand networks for online brand advertising. This paper makes several contributions. We first extract and analyze implicit weighted brand-brand networks, representing interactions among users and brands, from a large dataset. We examine network properties and community structures and propose a framework combining text and network analyses to find target audiences. As a part of this framework, we develop a hierarchical community detection algorithm to identify a set of brands that are closely related to a specific brand. This latter brand is referred to as the "focal brand." We also develop a global ranking algorithm to calculate brand influence and select influential brands from this set of closely related brands. This is then combined with sentiment analysis to identify target users from these selected brands. To process large-scale datasets and networks, we implement several MapReduce-based algorithms. Finally, we design a novel evaluation technique to test the effectiveness of our targeting framework. Experiments conducted with Facebook data show that our framework provides significant performance improvements in identifying target audiences for focal brands.

This dissertation project provides a methodological contribution to the field of critical rhetoric by positioning narrative theory as a powerful yet underutilized tool for examining the power dynamic between producer and consumer in a participatory media context. Drawing on theories of author and audience from rhetorical narratology, this study shows how producers of media texts provide rhetorical cues to audiences that allow them to reassert their power in the form of creative authority vis-à-vis consumers. The genre of professional wrestling serves as an ideal text for examining such power dynamics, as WWE has adapted to changing fan participatory behaviors throughout its sixty-year history. Focusing on pivotal moments in which WWE altered its narrative address to its audience in order to reassert its control over the production process, this study demonstrates the utility of narrative theory for understanding how creative authority shows power at work in media texts. Further, this study situates rhetorical narratology in conversation with theories of rhetorical persona, scholarship on subcultures, and the discursive construction of the “people.” In so doing, I show how a nuanced understanding of author and audience augments critical rhetorical scholarship’s focus on power. Finally, by applying narrative theory as a method for both close textual analysis of single texts as well as a tool for piecing together a critical text from narrative fragments, I also address questions of the role of the text in rhetorical criticism and the role of authorship in an era when audiences exert influence on media texts as they are produced.

Lifestyle blogging has become a vast and profitable domain, with visitors engaging with new content in a variety of ways. The communities that begin to form around these blogs has rarely been analyzed, due to a lack of metrics and a complex definition of virtual communities. Relying on Henry Jenkins work on virtual communities, a set of metrics were used to analyze the depth and breadth of three communities: A Cup of Jo, Wit & Delight, and Cupcakes and Cashmere. The three areas these metrics worked to measure were: awareness, membership, and belonging. Through this audience reception study the clear marker of a community was the direct and systematic blogger engagement with the readership. Many other factors are influential in building a virtual community on a blog, however, what set the three blogs apart was the ways in which Joanna Goddard (A Cup of Jo) and Kate Arends (Wit & Delight) reached out and built relationships with their readers, strengthening their community and allowing it to thrive.

The problem of this study was an audience analysis of Dallas' weekly underground newspaper Iconoclast. A readership survey was mailed to 200 randomly selected subscribers to Iconoclast. Data were taken from the ninety useable questionnaires of those returned. The study is organized into four chapters. Chapter I discusses problems, procedures, introductory material and recent and related studies. Chapter II is a history of Iconoclast. Chapter III is an analysis of data. Chapter IV presents summary, conclusions, and recommendations. The data revealed the typical subscriber as having a mean age of 28.7, some college education, and higher than $10,000 yearly income. He obtains both exclusive and supplementary information from Iconoclast, and considers it an important but biased news source.

Die hier durchgeführte Analyse des Repertoires der Schlesischen Staatsoper dürfte es demnach ermöglichen, weitreichende Schlüsse in Bezug auf das Fungieren dieser Institution in ihrem Milieu zu ziehen.