Przedstawienia teatralno-muzyczne na dworach magnaterii litewskiej w połowie XVIII wieku
ENLithuanian magnates were leading really royal life in their latifundia. Their social standing forced them to compete each other in splendour, and the models to emulate were royal courts in Dresden and Warsaw, imperial court in Vienna and tsar’s court in Sankt Petersburg. Important was musical setting of both everyday life and Church and family ceremonies. Many Lithuanian families had musical bands, but only some of them could have afforded theatre and opera scenes (the RadziwiHs’ Nieśwież with Olyka and Żółkiew, Stuck and Biała Podlaska, Białystok of Jan Klemens Branicki, Slonim and Siedlce of Michał Kazimierz Ogiński, Grodno of Antoni Tyzenhauz, Puławy of Izabela Czartoryska). Full of flourish musical and opera centres were short-lived (15 years at the most) and had no sucessor-benefactors. There was a fashionable European repertoire staged (mostly Italian comic operas and simple ballets such as divertissement, or occasionally drammiper musica, sporadically quite mediocre productions of local authors) performed by fetched from abroad foreign specialists, often of top-class. [From the publication]
