Staging imperial identity: music theatre, the Holy Roman Empire, and the French revolutionary wars

The Holy Roman Empire’s final decades were plagued with conflict. While the war of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79) destabilized from within, the Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) posed a threat from abroad. Scholars have long considered the Empire’s kaleidoscopic constitution among its greatest weaknesses, for it could not possess the perceived power of a centralized nation-state and thus (allegedly) made its dissolution in 1806 all but inevitable. But by examining such works as Günther von Schwarzburg (1777), Heinrich der Löwe (1792), Der Retter Deutschlands (1797), and Achille (1801), I posit that there was nothing inevitable about the Empire’s fate in times of conflict leading up to and throughout the Coalition Wars against Revolutionary and Republican France. This paper ultimately argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the Empire understood itself as a complex nation that placed its collective past and present centre stage so as to help ensure its future