Improvement piece

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The Besserungsstück is a genre of the old Viennese folk piece . It experienced its heyday at the beginning of the 19th century with over 30,000 performances in Vienna's suburban theaters alone .

characterization

At the center of the action is a person who, out of stupidity, dissatisfaction or presumption, does not submit to the social or divine order. His improvement comes through trials and blows of fate. Often, supernatural beings such as fairies and wizards intervene, which is supposed to provide both greater visualization and entertainment. The improvement always has a happy ending : the integration into middle-class circumstances. The improvement of the main character should be transferred through identification to the audience, which mostly comes from the lower social classes.

The piece of improvement is still strongly anchored in the religious feeling of the baroque . It has precursors in late medieval morality or the Jesuit school drama . The more modern theatrical melodrama , in which a protagonist merely improves himself, on the other hand, has a strictly rational plot in which the improvement occurs through proof of guilt based on detective-like combinations and the insight into a legal system .

Climax

Outstanding representatives of the improvement play are Josef Alois Gleich , Carl Meisl and Adolf Bäuerle , representatives of the Alt-Wiener Volkstheater . Ferdinand Raimund brings the reformed play to a final climax ( Der Verschwender , 1834) by reducing the comedic moments in favor of the pathetic ones.

In his farce, Der böse Geist Lumpacivagabundus or the liederliche Kleeblatt (1833), Johann Nestroy exposes the intended improvement of people as illusory and artificial, thus making the morality of the improvement piece outdated.

Echoes in the 20th century

Ferenc Molnár's Liliom (1909) was a successful renewal of the improvement piece in the 20th century . Improvement plays with a biblical background such as Sodom and Gomorrah (1922) by Michael Curtiz are also popular in silent films in the first quarter of the 20th century .

In his folk play, Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931), Ödön von Horváth denies the possibility of improvement, since it is prevented by the stagnation of the protagonists. In Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928) an incorrigible hero is miraculously saved, as in the piece of improvement.

literature

  • Walter Dietze: Tradition and originality in the reform plays of the Vienna Volkstheater . In: Weimar Contributions 12, 1966.
  • Otto Rommel : The old Viennese folk comedy. Vienna: Schroll 1952
  • Otto Rommel: Baroque tradition in the Austrian-Bavarian folk theater. Improvement pieces. 2 vols., Leipzig: Reclam 1937/38