Revolutionary Opéra-Comique in Scandinavia: Transfer and Repertoire

One of the most important means of expression of public opinion during the French Revolution, the opéra-comique genre contains spoken dialogue and arias. The EU-funded RevolutionaryOpScan project will examine the impact of the French revolutionary ideas through this repertoire in the case of the Scandinavian countries. Specifically, today’s Norway, Denmark and Sweden were never invaded by the French during the Napoleonic wars that followed the Revolution of 1789. With this in mind, the project includes the collection of historical performance evidence for opéra-comique in these three countries for the period between 1789 and 1815. Creating an open online database, the project will make this information accessible for statistical analysis by scholars for the first time. It will also use the information gathered in the database to establish where, when and how often revolutionary pieces were staged in Scandinavia.