In this dissertation, I trace the complex negotiations of childhood play, display, power, propriety, and authenticity in the Singspiels and Lieder of the late eighteenth century. My central claim is that the musical culture of this period marked a brief moment of equilibrium between the parent-centered discourses of Bildung and the laudatory nostalgia that characterized the nineteenth-century cult of the child. Pedagogical reformers and men of letters sought a greater intimacy between young and old, and music had a singular role to play in the cultivation of that intimacy. Debates about the reform of Singspiel and Lieder in the early- and mid-eighteenth century had established German vocal music as an agent of moral instruction and social cohesion, reframing its relative simplicity as an ethical asset rather than an aesthetic shortcoming. At the same time, philosophers identified a more essential link between children and song, one based on the emotional immediacy imputed to both. The new national repertoires helped to construct an image of the young as thinking, feeling subjects and sources of certain kinds of wisdom, even grace.
Each of the chapters surveys a particular genre or repertoire, as well as focusing on a single aspect of that genre's engagement with the child. The Kindertruppen--novelty theatrical troupes in which children impersonated adults and performed adult repertoire--stage the child as an exotic figure of curiosity. Kinderoperetten and Kinderlieder, published for domestic performance, call upon children to portray lightly fictionalized versions of themselves, acting as powerful agents of a more intimately bonded family, as in the Kinderoperetten, or as idealized representatives of a stage of life remote from adulthood, while still cognizant of future responsibilities, as in the Kinderlieder. Finally, the magic Singspiels of Mozart, Schikaneder, and their contemporaries find the representational trajectory coming full circle, with adults portraying supernatural children who take on protective, even redemptive roles.
In each case, I discuss musical works that exhibit a degree of self-consciousness with respect to their representation of the child. Metafictional devices such as mise-en-abyme, self-referentiality, and embedded tableaus of music-making establish a kind of internal critical discourse regarding the ideologies of childhood, with song frequently serving as a unit of emotional currency. The more children were idealized, protected, and romanticized, the more distant they were felt to be--and, in a sense, the "authentic" child recedes entirely in subsequent decades. Thus the short-lived late-Enlightenment effort to meet children "on their own terms," with music as the source of common ground and the means of establishing affinity, stands as an intriguing anomaly in the history both of childhood and of music's role in its cultural construction.
