Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770?1860: Questioning Canons

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770–1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades.

This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschläger, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen’s staged theatre repertory and early dramas.

By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770–1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.

Randi Margrete Selvik is Professor Emeritus in musicology at the Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. Her primary research interests include music history from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, with French baroque opera, Nordic Singspiel, and musical dilettantism in Norway as important focus areas.

Svein Gladsø is Professor Emeritus in theatre studies at the Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. His main research interests include theatre history, dramaturgy, theatre politics, and theatre theory. He has been chair of the Association of Nordic Theatre Scholars and the editor of Nordic Theatre Studies.

Annabella Skagen is Senior Curator at Ringve Music Museum in Trondheim, Norway. She holds a PhD in theatre studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim (2015). Her main research interests include theatre and music history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, centring around performative practices within the contexts of politics, sociability, and identity.