Of Mountain Ghosts and Waltzing Spirits: Dancing in Louis Spohr’s Romantic Opera Der Berggeist (1824)

 As Alpine summits were progressively conquered, from the 1780s onwards, the Alpine region exerted an increasing fascination on the urban-bourgeois population living in the largely flat landscape of Central Europe. The cultural practices and mythical sagas of the Alpine inhabitants became the subject of travel reports, novels, and aesthetic treatises; the Ländler became a popular dance in urban ballrooms, fancied by famous composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven; and last but not least, the Alps, along with their human and mythical inhabitants, became the subject of ballet and opera productions. Among them was Der Berggeist (The Mountain Spirit) by Louis Spohr, a romantic opera that was first performed in Kassel in 1825. This paper examines the progression of a dance of the country folk – the Ländler – climbing down the mountains and up the social ladder. By illuminating the relationship between the Ländler and the waltz, the lecture will also shed new light on the dramaturgical use of these dances in opera, and specifically in Spohr’s Berggeist – including a surprise element. Hanna Walsdorf received her M.A. in Musicology from the University of Bonn (Germany) in 2006 and her Ph.D. in Musicology and Dance Studies from the University of Salzburg (Austria) in 2009. From 2009–2013, Hanna was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center 619 “Ritual Dynamics” at Heidelberg University (Germany). She was awarded the Tanzwissenschaftspreis NRW in 2011. From 2014 to 2020, she directed the Emmy Noether Research Group Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage: Constructions of Popular Culture in European Theatrical Dance (1650–1760), granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2020–2021, she was a guest lecturer at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, and at the University of Salzburg. In autumn 2021 she was appointed Assistant Professor for Musicology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) where she is now based