Starting point Hôtel de Musique
Part essay collection, part reference work, this book sheds light on aspects of the music and theater scene far beyond Bern.
It was thanks to the initiative of the Grande Société de Bern that a lively theatrical life was able to develop in this city from 1800 onwards. The activities at the Hôtel de Musique laid the foundations for the Stadttheater, which opened in 1903. The 250th anniversary of the Grande Société prompted Bernese musicology and theater studies to "take a closer look at the role of the house and the history of music and theater in Bern and Switzerland", as Klaus Pietschmann and Fabian Kolb write in the foreword to the book Music and theater in 19th century Switzerland write.
The volume in the series Bern publications on music research summarizes the most important results on 396 pages. It contains both specialist essays on the subject and comprehensive documentary lists. The latter category includes Florence Sidler's list of theater activities at the Hôtel de Musique in Bern from 1798 to 1900, which she compiled by evaluating sources such as the diary of Bernese citizen Samuel Rudolf Walthard, the estate of Peter Stadler and the Intelligenzblatt Bern A rich fund for science.
Irène Minder-Jeanneret provides comparable information in Opera practice in French-speaking Switzerland between 1750 and 1850. Gabriela Freiburghaus offers an exciting comparative study in her essay Leasehold theater around 1850where she writes: "While the conditions and circumstances of the founding of the two stock corporations in Berne and Zurich were completely different, the difficulties of maintaining the theater operations under lease proved to be similar."
In other essays, Edith Keller, for example, devotes herself to Louis Spohr's stays in Switzerland, while Samuel Weibel traces Bern's music and singing festivals. Finally, Manfred Veraguth's insightful essay on the theatrical landscape of the city of Bern at the end of the 19th century should be mentioned.
Overall, this publication is somewhere between a collection of essays on exciting individual aspects and a helpful reference work.
Music and theater in 19th century Switzerland. The Bernese Hôtel de Musique and its surroundings, ed. by Fabian Kolb and Klaus Pietschmann, (=Berner Veröffentlichungen zur Musikforschung, vol. 5), 396 p., Fr. 102.00, Peter Lang, Bern et al. 2016, ISBN 978-3-0343-2061-0
