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Article Excerpt
SOMETIME IN I779, probably early in January, [Lars] Wennberg och Compagnie published Kongl. Svenska theaterns Almanach, for aret 1779. (1) Though no author's or editor's name appeared in it, the Almanach was certainly the work of Olof Kexel (1748-1796), who was, formally, the secretary to the directors of Kongl. Maj:ts Spectacler, of which the royal theaters were a central part, but who was, functionally, the manager of the whole theatrical enterprise. Only he had direct access to all the information it contains.
This was a particularly busy time for Kexel for, in addition to running the theater, he was also writing for the newspaper, Stockholms Posten, and organizing the thinking-and-drinking society, Par Bricole, among whose members were many of the period's leading cultural figures. (2) On several occasions in the early 1780s, be also spent time for debt and other civil sins in Hogwakten, a sort of upper-class jail in the palace, from which he was let out on days when there were performances in the royal theaters.
During the 1770s, a reasonably successful private theater company under the leadership of Petter Stenborg (1719-81) established its place in the popular entertainment market. This company came into the hands of Petter's son, Carl (1752-1813), in 1780. Carl Stenborg, the leading male actor/singer in the King's own theater companies, modernized and expanded the repertory of his troupe, which, as the decade progressed, was to mount a formidable economic challenge to the royal theaters. To meet this competition, the organization of the Royal Spectacles underwent considerable change during the decade, and much of this is reflected in the Almanach.
Since the formation of the King's company in 1773, it had been clear that it was intended to have a proper theater to work in, instead of the converted tennis court, Bollhuset, which bad served as a theater since the middle of the seventeenth century. The planning of the new playhouse was begun in 1774, took firm shape in the summer of 1775, and began to be built in 1777. Thus, about the time of the first number of the Almanach, work on the theater was well-advanced, even if no-one could yet predict its opening date. (3)
There are ten issues of the Almanach, dated 1779 and 1781-89. It is not clear why there is none dated 1780. As the calendar in 1779 is only for one year, it is unlikely that Kexel intended to issue them only biennially. Further, 1779 presents the repertory of Kungliga teatern as it was through 1778 (4) and the calendar for 1779, a pattern which continues to the end of the series. 1781, the second issue, carries the repertory through 1780 and publishes the calendar for 1781. What was not covered were changes in the stat, the personnel list of the theaters, between 1778 and 1780.
The Almanach was issued by five different publishers in its ten years: Lars Wennberg, 1779; Anders Jacobsson Nordstrom, 1781, 1784; Carl Stolpe, 1782-83; Johan Christofer Holmberg, 1785-88; and Kongl. Tryckeriet [Elsa Fougt], 1789. Most of these printers worked in changing partnerships with each other. The quality of the printing varied enormously over the decade and Holmberg even went through three different type-faces and layouts: some of Holmberg's issues have a frontispiece, some an engraved title-page. With one exception, each Almanach ran to at least 100 pages and probably cost, in 1779, around one skilling, the price of the official almanac. (5)
The order of each Almanach is as follows: each year begins with the customary name-calendar for the year of the title-page, after which comes the stat, the personnel list, (6) followed by the cumulative repertory of the royal theaters from 1773. This is followed by miscellanea--stories, essays, anecdotes, news of other theaters, fashion-plates, pages for notes, and, in three issues, musical pieces. There are, to be sure, minor variations in this format, but the general arrangement is consistent.
The calendar in the Almanach gives the names for each day as they had been standardized in 1749 by Kongl. Wetenskapsakademien. Curiously, even though Sweden had adopted "New Style" dating as of 1 March 1753, twenty-five years earlier, in the first two issues, the dates are given in both "New Style" [N.S.] and "Old Style" [G.S.], thereafter appearing only in "New Style" though always reminding the reader that this is the case. As it happens, the official calendar published by Wetenskapsakademien from 1749 on gave both the Old and New Style dates until the issue of 1792 (Levenstam 18-21, 60).
The personnel entries which come after the calendar allow us to follow the theatrical careers for the years of issue of almost everyone who bad a job paid for directly by the management [Directionen] of the Royal Spectacles. (7) As the theater was a division of the royal household the King had a vested interest in its success, a matter of some importance as the decade wore on. From these rosters, we can extract considerable information, statistical and personal, about the size of the company in any of those years, as far as performers and managers go.
The rosters are organized by category: the upper management comes first, followed by the actor/singers in the order in which they were hired and by rank. Thereafter come the dancers, also in hiring order and rank, followed by the orchestra, listed by instrument, and the technical staff, grouped under the loose heading Ofriga betjaning [other services]. From 1782, the French troupe also appears in the stat, usually placed after the orchestra, and in 1787 and 1788, the names of twenty vaktmastare [watchmen or attendants] are also given. In 1789, the roster of the newly-formed Svenska dramatiska theatern also appears.
The constituency of the management of the royal theaters was stable throughout the decade, never exceeding more than three or four people and seems, in its practical execution, to have centered around Olof Kexel and the King's principal conductor and composer, Francesco Antonio Uttini (1723-96). (8) Uttini's responsibilities were complemented in 1781 by the appointment of Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-92) as Capell-Mastare and, in 1786, by Georg Vogler (1749-1814) as Directeur af Musiquen. To be sure, these all worked officially under a Director and Vice-Director (sometimes called Second Director), who were formally charged with the policies and procedures of the Royal Spectacles. (9) We can probably assume that the management had some scribes, tellers, and other office workers available to it, but their names are never given.
A clear tendency which can be discerned in the rosters throughout the decade is that there was a slow growth in the numbers of theater personnel known to have been paid out of the royal household budget through 1783, and a rapid expansion thereafter. On the stat for 1778 159 people are listed. In subsequent years, this number included the students [elever], and it is likely there would have been yet others who are not registered, a number of vaktmastare, for example, of the kind who appear in the rosters for 1786-87. (10) By 1781, there were only 190 on the roster, which is odd, considering that the proposed opening opera for the new house, Kellgren's and Kraus's AEneas i Carthago would have taken more than 200 people to get on stage. (11) For 1785, by contrast, there are 268 listed, surely in preparation for the huge numbers needed for the production of Gustaf Wasa in 1786. That number swells to 280 in 1788, and to 300 if we include the twenty vaktmastare likely to have been present though not listed in 1789. It is easy to imagine, therefore, that in a city of 75,000, the wages paid by the Royal Spectacles. directly and indirectly, amounted to a considerable slice of the community's income.
Of the principal members of the company, Elisabeth Olin (1740-1828) and Carl Stenborg, the King's first principal singers, remained at the head of the lists of performers for the entire decade, though Olin had essentially quietly retired in 1784. (12) Stenborg's main rival, Christopher Karsten (1756-1827), Diedrich Tellerstedt (1751-93), Francisca Stading (1763?-1837?), and Marie Louise Baptiste Marcadet (ante-1760-1804) were joined during the decade by Caroline Muller (1755-1826), thought to have been the finest singing actress in Scandinavia. Three lesser principals are, perhaps, of some passing interest. Anders Norden (1742-91) was, perhaps, the eldest of the company. He had sung as a nine-year-old alto at the funeral of King Fredrik I in 1751 and, subsequently, as a tenor or baritone, at that of King Adolph Fredrik in 1771 and at the coronation of Gustaf III in 1772. Charles Uttini (1753-1808), though born in Italy, came with his parents to Stockholm in 1754 and spent his entire life in the royal theaters, as a dancer and as an actor (occasionally also as a singer). Perhaps the most spectacular, if brief, principal career was that of Johan Samuel Lalin (1769-96), whose debut as a soprano in Gustaf Wasa (1786) demanded a particularly difficult bravura aria whose execution was favourably commented upon at the time. Remarkably, according to 1786, he was already a Hov-sangare [Court Singer] by 1785.
In 1779, the principals were only titled acteurer and actricer, but it is clear that these terms covered both sung and spoken acting. (13) We see this in 1781, when the poet and critic, Johan Henric Kellgren (1751-95), remarked of the debut of Caroline Muller in Gluck's Alceste that,
I gar gret jag 12 hela timmar pa Operan, da Alceste for forsta gangen spelades: Fru Muller debuterade. Man kan saga art man forut hvarken sett nagot spectakel eller nagon Actrice i Sverige. (Kellgren 6:103) (Yesterday, I cried for two whole hours at the Opera, when Alceste was performed for the first time: Mrs. Muller made her debut. One may say that one has never before seen such a spectacle or such an Actress in Sweden.)
It is, in fact, rare anywhere in this period to have singers described by a formal voice category. We infer that Stenborg and Karsten were probably tenors, for instance, from the tessiture of the parts they sang. Curiously, then, in 1779-83, the chorus was listed according to part as Tenor, Bass, Discant, and Alt, from which information, it would seem that Magnus Bonne (1759-98) switched from tenor to bass from 1780 on. (14)
The King was as passionate about dance as he was about opera and plays: it was all part of the same enterprise. It is, therefore, not surprising that the creation of a theater company carried with it the creation of a ballet troupe. We can see from the rosters that the size of the ballet was about two-thirds that of the actor/singers in 1779 (45 dancers/65 singers) and grew only slightly in proportion by 1789 (84/113), and that, as with the chorus, there were about as many men as women. While even as late as 1778 the leading dancers were foreign-born, we can see that Swedes, especially among the women, began to make their presence felt in the upper ranks of the corps during the 1780s. Dancers such as Gustafva Slottberg (1761-1800), Magdalena Lundblad (fl. 1773-86), Susanna Wetterberg (1756-post-1801), and, later in the decade, Ulrica Aberg (1771-1852) clearly established themselves as important members of the company. It is in this decade, too, that Charles Didelot the younger (1767-1837), later to make a great name for himself outside Sweden as a choreographer, was ordered back from Paris for his last years in his native country. Of curious interest is that, in 1781, many of the unmarried women in the ballet started titling themselves Fru [Mrs.], most reverting the following year, however, to M:lle.
As might have been expected, the orchestra, Hovkapellet [court orchestra], grew in size, too, increasing from thirty-two permanent members apart from the conductor in 1778 to fifty in 1788. (15) Its expansion was particularly noticeable in 1782, in preparation for the opening of the new opera house, when it had forty-six members, and it reached a high point in 1785, when fifty-four players appeared on the roster, probably in preparation for the production of Gustaf Wasa. It is from this year too, that the nine Hov-trompetare and one or two Hov-pukslagare [-timpanists] are also reckoned to the theater's stat instead of being filed elsewhere in the court's budget. (16)
During the whole decade, the string core of the orchestra was remarkably stable: relatively few players left, though one shifted from violin to viola. Of the thirteen violins in 1778, for instance, only four had left by 1785, but they had been joined by eight new players. The violas and double basses had even fewer changes. The 'cellos, however, had only one player who appeared in all the rosters. Filling the wind chairs, on the other hand, seems to have been considerably more problematic: indeed, in 1781, there were no bassoonists at all and, in the same year, but one flautist and one oboist. (17) On the other hand, there were always at least two clarinetists and two horn players available and, in 1785 and 1786, there were no less than six hornists! The general picture is clearly that of a growing musical establishment, in which the last three years of the decade covered by the Almanach saw all the chairs fully manned. As was the case generally with orchestras of the time, Hovkapellet of this decade had no trombones among its permanent members, though three were needed for Gluck's Alceste, which opened in Stockholm on 26 February 1781. The King's brother, Duke Carl, had a harmonie, a wind band--which often played at Carl Stenborg's theater--and this group may have had trombones which could have been borrowed as occasion demanded: alternatively, they may have been borrowed from the band of whatever regiment was in town at the time.
From 1781, the stat included a new entity, Kongl. Fransyska Trouppen. These actors, led by Jacques-Marie Boutet (1745-1812), called Monvel, began arriving in Stockholm in the summer of 1781. They were probably performing before the court in August and were certainly to be seen publicly by November. They remained a part of the Royal Spectacles until mid-April, 1792, shortly after the King's assassination and death. Including a prompter, the company generally bad about eighteen members, though five of those listed in the first two years, including the ubiquitous and useful Charles Uttini, were already resident in Sweden and working in the Royal Spectacles.
In 1789, an additional list appeared in the Almanach of the personnel and repertory for the newly-formed Svenska Dramatiska Theatern, known today as Dramaten. This company, which used some of the members of the royal theaters, had been founded with abundant enthusiasm and inadequate funding in 1787 by Adolph Fredrik Ristell (1744-1829), a royal librarian and erstwhile playwright. After its bankruptcy in its initial season, it was bought by the King in 1788 and added to the household stat as a company intended to produce Svenska Originale Tragedier och Comedier. (18) Indeed, this section of the Almanach opens with a more or less direct citation from the King's statutes for the company of the conditions of payment for "original" plays. Clearly, this was meant to encourage new writers, as was the perquisite of free entrance to everything played at the theater for from one year to a lifetime, depending upon the length and type of play(s) accepted for performance. Of considerable interest from our modern perspective is the notice, also derived from the statutes, that the author of a play had the right to select the performers. (19)
Ten of the twenty-five names on the list for Dramaten were new to the stat, but they were not all new to the Stockholm theater public. Carl Gabriel Schylander (1751-1811), for instance, played for Stenborg's company as well as for the new royal dramatic enterprise, and Charles Uttini was also assigned to this company as an actor. Uttini and, for that matter, Stenborg are reminders to us of how versatile at a high professional level theater performers in earlier times were expected to be. (20)
Missing from the stat are others who must have worked in the theaters. Those twenty vaktmastare mentioned only in 1787 and 1788 are just a sample. For instance, we know from later accounts that there were a number of stage-hands who may also have doubled as carpenters and the like. (21) Though the stat in 1787 (which is one of the most complete) tells us there was a Klad Kammare [costume department] with an accountant, a Controlleur, and a bookkeeper, as well as a "master tailor" and a "principal women's seamstress," it is unrealistic to imagine that these two tailors made all the exotic costumes needed or that they needed three people to account for them. It is also surprising that there is no-one named as a librarian, for the theaters had hundreds of scores and plays and all their separate parts which needed to be kept in good order and distributed and collected at the right time. According to the statutes, this work came under Kexel's supervision, but there must have been at least one or two scriveners or assistants to deal with the library and the paper-work. Thus, either there were people whose work went unnoticed in the stat or these jobs were contracted out, as with the wigs.
Added to the stat in the issues for 1787 and 1788 are the home addresses of 143 of the people in the list, about half of all those named. These include the management, the actor/singer soloists, the solo dancers, the orchestra, the technical staff, and the French troupe, but not the chorus, the figuranter/-skor (the non-soloists) of the ballet, or those twenty vaktmastare. These addresses yield some surprises. While it is reasonable to note that in a town of 75,000 almost everyone lived within walking distance of everything, the members of the theater, to judge by these addresses, lived exceptionally close to their place of work. What is surprising, however, is the clustering of addresses.
For instance, it might, perhaps, be expected that, for linguistic and, maybe, cultural reasons, members of the French troupe would live with or near one another, and this turns out to be the case. Many often shared digs or, perhaps, rented rooms in the same building and many of them lived in Gamla Stan [the Old Town]. For instance, Henri De la Tour, Elise du Belloi, and Sophie Hus all shared rooms at Stora Nygatan 128. Often, a woman and a man would share the same address and this may simply have been for practical reasons of safety when walking home from the theater at night. Gamla Stan was portrayed in at least one play of the time as somewhat unruly. (22) The attraction of...
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