The repertoire of the Hamburg Theater in the letters of Friedrich Ludwig Schröder to Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter

As a playwright, Gotter essentially representated French taste: one of Gotter’s most famous compositions: the tragedy Orest und Elektra of 1774, was openly inspired by Voltaire, for whom Gotter had unstinting adoration.So one wonders why Schröder, at the very moment when he was engaged in making a fundamental change in his activity at the Hamburg Theater, which he wanted to be guided by an innovative and reformist impulse, went out of his way to win Gotter over to his own theater, as demonstrated by the frequent correspondence. It is likely that Schröder, aware of the difficulty of imposing a repertoire centred solely on “novelties”, felt it wise to construct a Spielplan that would strike, in pre-Romantic times, a happy medium between the need for renewal and dueful respect for French taste.