Music Research and Composition Works
Title
A "Don Juanized" Macbeth on Austria's enlightened stage: Its genesis, its critical fortunes
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2012
Journal
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume
45
Issue
2
First Page
237
Last Page
254
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1353/ecs.2012.0014
Abstract
In 1772, a leading Viennese playright wrote an adaptation of Macbeth to replace a banned Don Juan scenario that had run for decades during the Octave of All Souls. If Macbeth and Don Juan strike the modern mind as an odd pairing, such was also the case in Enlightened Vienna: the playwright himself wrote a lengthly apologia, invoking the authority of Aristotle, Marmontel, and Moses Mendelssohn, to rationalize the moral monstrosity of his tragic protagonist. The Viennese Macbeth and its commentary generated considerable controversy, and from this conflict arise the first sustained attempts to articulate a poetics of Don Juan theater, a repertory that the critical community had hitherto largely passed over in silence.
