Musicians as a motif of musical theater
Oldenburg musicologist Anna Langenbruch has been accepted into the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG) to set up a junior research group on the subject of "Music History on Stage".
The five-year funding of 1.1 million euros will enable Langenbruch and her group to investigate how "the musical past is constructed in music theater - for example in operas, operettas and musicals".
Langenbruch explains that there are hundreds of plays that deal with historical musicians. They often appear as stage characters themselves. Music history itself thus becomes an aesthetic event. The researcher is interested in how this type of knowledge production works, i.e. how knowledge about music is created in the medium of music.
Photo: Scene from the opera "Palestrina" by Hans Pfitzner: Roberto Saccà as Palestrina, surrounded by the dead masters of the art of music in Act 1. Performance of the Hamburg State Opera 2011. photo: Jörg Landsberg, Bremen. Source: wikimedia commons
