The essays in this volume use an interdisciplinary approach to explore the cantata's rise as a common musical model with a stable basic structure and highly variable areas of application in 18th century Germany. The cantata fostered and accelerated the societal, aesthetic, and cultural process of dynamization embodied in the idea of the early Enlightenment.

Autorentext

Wolfgang Hirschmann, Universität Halle-Wittenberg; Dirk Rose, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Zusammenfassung

When the University of Halle-Wittenberg founded the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies in 1993, it was following the destiny of its history as a centre of the early Enlightenment in Germany which affected the whole of Europe. Research foci of the Centre are at the moment aesthetics, discourses of history, cultures of learning and erudition, university history and not least the wide field of early Enlightenment as a field of experimentation and the foundation of cultural models for the Modern Age.

The results of this research have been published since Autumn 1995 in the Centres' research publications series entitled University of Halle Series on the European Enlightenment. In addition, there have been relevant works produced outside the Centre. Two to four volumes are published annually (monographs, collected volumes, commentaries on sources).