In the saddle period of the late 18th century, German-speaking music theater, in its various forms, constituted the most successful component of theatrical practice. Music theater, as a particularly effective means of public engagement and discourse consolidation, thus provides a particularly good insight into the media crisis and the anthropological change of the late 18th century. The physical production and sensory reception of music theater, in the interplay of various forms of optical and acoustic sensory perceptions, endow this genre with a paradigmatic function for contemporaries in understanding human subjectivity, sensuality, and emotionality. As an early mass media form, music theater reveals a process of mutual assimilation of bourgeois and courtly value systems and discourses.