Beschreibung:
"Die Königin von Saba" by Carl Goldmark and Salomon Hermann Mosenthal was written at a time when a self-confident and liberal bourgeois society had been established in Vienna. Representing culture in an affirmative way was of great importance for that class, who were striving for dominance and expressively wanted to show their superiority, also via the arts. Opulent productions of oriental subjects were especially apt for showing off and for bourgeois self-representation. The achievements of ancient societies from the Maghreb to the Middle East were positively portrayed with the underlying aim of interpreting them as the roots of Western civilisation, which was thought to be reaching even higher cultural standards at that time. The Orient was regarded as a justification for European hegemony. At the same time orientalism served as a means to fantasize about Eastern eroticism, which stood in stark contrast to the strict moral rules and norms of the bourgeois society. It was a time when sensational finds of early archaeology in the orient fascinated the Western mind. Painters and poets, as well as composers, took up the subject. This overall interest in an exotic world also reached the opera, where it found a sensual expression on stage and sparked an intellectual discourse in newspaper reviews and musical history.