De perfecte verleiding: Muzikale scènes op het Amsterdams toneel in de 17e eeuw

In the seventeenth century, almost every stage performance was accompanied by music. Music was not only played between the companies, but also in the play itself. Music served as a background and decoration and was functionally integrated in the act of drama. The accounts of the Amsterdamse Schouwburg show that they employed professional musicians; in addition, the actors sang and danced. Following on from foreign stage music studies, this book focuses extensively on seventeenth-century theater music in the Netherlands for the first time. The centerpiece is the stage poet Jan Harmensz Krul, who skillfully interweaved music into his plays and who founded the Amsterdam Musyck room in 1634 – a foundation devoted entirely to the combination of poetry and music on stage. On the basis of five characteristic musical scenes from his work (the watchman scene, prison scene, serenade, sacrificial scene and sleep scene), an image is sketched of the Amsterdam theater music practice at the time. Such musical scenes were also loved by other stage poets, at home and abroad. They had a signaling function for the audience: they were immediately recognizable situations, benchmarks in the drama, which were associated with music by default. Poets varied to their heart’s content. For the playwright and spectator, those stereotypical musical scenes were what music was for the characters in the plays: an effective means of manipulation – a perfect seduction, of eye, ear and heart.