Operatic history is riddled with reform. Although at the discursive level all operatic reforms share similar motivations, their execution in practice yields extremely different results, each indicative of the time and place in which they occur. Despite their claims to pan-historical aesthetic truth and timeless ideals, operatic reforms are highly specific indicators of their generation's individual needs, desires, and fears. My dissertation explores what the mid-eighteenth-century reform, pioneered most famously by Gluck and Calzabigi, can tell us about opera and its composers, audiences and performers in Habsburg Vienna. I interpret both reformed and unreformed Italian opera seria in 1760s Vienna through four different but intersecting conceptual lenses: luxury and economics, political representation, theories of body and communication, and a performer's voice. Opera played an important role in a widespread debate over luxury that pervaded Western Europe, an issue that comprised not only changing economics but paradigmatic shifts in social behavior. In the field of medicine, new scientific observation began to transform the ways that people viewed emotion and communication, and the ways these were expressed in opera. The nature of sovereignty itself was slowly shifting from absolutist models, requiring both new modes of government and new operatic representation. Yet individual singer's voices, such as that of Gaetano Guadagni, still played a vital role in shaping composition and aesthetics. Vienna in the 1760s experienced a flowering of diverse approaches to the problem of opera by a network of performers and composers who blurred the lines between tradition and progress and make us rethink the meanings of reform.

The bloody epoch of the Thirty Years' War and the wide spread decline of German culture and social life is the major topic in Simplicissimus, the first High German novel written by Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen in 1668. The purpose of this thesis is to summarize the development of this novel and to find Grimmelshausen's intention in writing his book which was immensely popular upon its publication, but disappeared into obscurity during the German classical period. Since its rediscovery in the middle of the 19th century, scholars have puzzled over the satirical meaning of Simplicissimus as well as the identity of its author. By concentrating on the sources available to Grimmelshausen, researchers have proposed a variety of interpretations of the text. Some see the book as Germany's best example of the Spanish picaresque novel, others include it in the genre of "Bildungsroman", whose classic example is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Many readers marvel over the satirical and witty language of the novel, while others admire its sophisticated structures. It is evident that scholars have yet to reach a consensus on a comprehensive interpretation of Simplicissimus. Valuable insight could be gained from discovering Grimmelshausen's intentions. By searching the text carefully for statements made by the author about his opinion on social customs, war, family, religion etc., a composite picture of Grimmelshausen's world view was constructed. By combining these assumed attitudes and opinions with his personal development and the social and historical influences of his time, the conclusion emerged that the author wrote his novel out of an ethical didactic urge to confront his readers with the ills of their time. The economic, political and religious changes of the 17th century uprooted the established medieval structures of European life, causing millions of deaths and devastation in large parts of Germany. Grimmelshausen saw the deterioration of life directly related to the changes in the beliefs and behaviors of his contemporaries and felt compelled to alarm his fellow men. A second motivational force for his literary endeavors was the necessity to supplement his small income as tavern owner, although he certainly could not have anticipated the astonishing success of his book. The confusing array of literary forms in Simplicissimus is the result of the author's concern with his message which subordinated the adherence to a specific genre, but nevertheless produced a masterpiece of German literature.

This dissertation is a comparative study which traces the development of a distinctive aesthetics in the late twentieth century novels of the Austrian writer, Christoph Ransmayr. The three novels, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Die letzte Welt and Morbus Kitahara, while quite different in terms of spatial and temporal orientation, share several key features which contribute to the operation of what I define and examine as the aesthetics of humility in the texts. These recurrent thematic, structural and symbolic elements in the three novels relate to the texts??? critique of scientific modernity, their privileging of myth (both thematically and stylistically), the representation of nature and the texts??? readings of apocalypse and transformation. The theory of myth developed by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos provides an interpretative framework to explain the re-emergence of myth as a contemporary response to the ???absolutism of reality??? which the systems and technologies of scientific modernity have produced in the twentieth century. The first part of this thesis examines the representation in individual novels of the collapse and breakdown of selected metanarratives of modernity. The second part consists of an examination of three core myths which function to restructure the narrative of human existence in each novel. This thesis determines that the development of the aesthetics of humility in Ransmayr???s novels is dependent on the reader???s recognition of the changed perspective and the changed perception which characters in each novel experience. To different extents the characters in each novel abandon a rational perception of reality. The aesthetics of reality acknowledges a textual consciousness and privileging of the projected Other of reason; nature, myth, fantasy, irrationality and barbarity. The human subject no longer occupies the privileged central position in humanist cosmology. Displaced from the centre to the periphery of civilization, the human subject is also represented as having lost control of its physical and psychical environment. Human pretensions to power and influence over itself and its environment are negated in the texts??? revelation of the transience of life. This loss of status and place is related on a seemingly moral level to the novels??? representation of the human potential for brutality and cruelty. The ultimate disappearance of the human subject in each novel is related to the subject???s gradual objectification in the text and the final dissolution of its identity.

1795 erschien in Erfurt das „Journal der Tonkunst“ des Rudolstädter Hofmusikers und Musiktheoretikers Heinrich Christoph Koch. Koch bestückte das Journal großenteils mit eigenen Texten. Insbesondere kreisen sie um das Konzept von Mode in der Musik, die Koch als Gefahr für die Kultur seiner Zeit betrachtet. Darüber hinaus gibt der Text einen Überblick über Facetten des Musikdiskurses im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert, die von ästhetischen über praktische Erwägungen bis zu lexikalischen Daten reichen.

Zürich, Univ., Phil. Fak. I, Diss. von 1976. / Vollst. Ausg.: Europäische Hochschulschriften; Reihe XVIII. 9.

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This dissertation is a comparative study which traces the development of a distinctive aesthetics in the late twentieth century novels of the Austrian writer, Christoph Ransmayr. The three novels, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Die letzte Welt and Morbus Kitahara, while quite different in terms of spatial and temporal orientation, share several key features which contribute to the operation of what I define and examine as the aesthetics of humility in the texts. These recurrent thematic, structural and symbolic elements in the three novels relate to the texts??? critique of scientific modernity, their privileging of myth (both thematically and stylistically), the representation of nature and the texts??? readings of apocalypse and transformation. The theory of myth developed by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos provides an interpretative framework to explain the re-emergence of myth as a contemporary response to the ???absolutism of reality??? which the systems and technologies of scientific modernity have produced in the twentieth century. The first part of this thesis examines the representation in individual novels of the collapse and breakdown of selected metanarratives of modernity. The second part consists of an examination of three core myths which function to restructure the narrative of human existence in each novel. This thesis determines that the development of the aesthetics of humility in Ransmayr???s novels is dependent on the reader???s recognition of the changed perspective and the changed perception which characters in each novel experience. To different extents the characters in each novel abandon a rational perception of reality. The aesthetics of reality acknowledges a textual consciousness and privileging of the projected Other of reason; nature, myth, fantasy, irrationality and barbarity. The human subject no longer occupies the privileged central position in humanist cosmology. Displaced from the centre to the periphery of civilization, the human subject is also represented as having lost control of its physical and psychical environment. Human pretensions to power and influence over itself and its environment are negated in the texts??? revelation of the transience of life. This loss of status and place is related on a seemingly moral level to the novels??? representation of the human potential for brutality and cruelty. The ultimate disappearance of the human subject in each novel is related to the subject???s gradual objectification in the text and the final dissolution of its identity.

Zugl.: Jena, Univ., Habil.-Schr.

Zugl.: Saarbrücken, Univ., Diss., 2007

Inaug.-Diss.--Münster, 1969. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 195-206. Also issued in print.