Reiseberichte aus dem 19. und 20. Jahrhundert als Quellen für die historische Chorforschung und den Diskurs über Typologien reisender Musiker und Sänger

Abstract

A comprehensive interdisciplinary, historical-critical and systematic processing of documents relating to the networking of choral singing associations through travel – and thus involving the important fields of mobility and migration research, transnationality and interculturality – is a desideratum of historical choral sociology research. This study is intended as a contribution to the subject of “amateur choir singing and cultural transfer” and as an impulse to continue the discourse on the typologies of travelling musicians (Konrad 2009). The multitude and heterogeneity of the sources requires an exemplary approach, whereby the selected case studies are interpreted against the background of decades of the author’s research in the fields of music biography, musical social history and the historiography of musical education. Particular attention is given to information on travel topics in autobiographies and association chronicles as well as printed documentations of Sängerreisen and Sängerfahrten by Karl Pfaff (Swabia), Carl Gollmick (Switzerland), Julius Melchert (diary of the singers’ journey of the Schleswig-Holstein singers to the Erstes allgemeines deutsches Sängerfest 1845 in Würzburg and through Southern Germany), August Schmidt (Wiener Männergesang-Verein in the Vormärz), Otto Elben (Deutsch-Vlaemisches Sängerfest 1846 in Cologne) and Henry Führer Deutschlandfahrt des Arion von Brooklyn im Sommer 1908).