Caesar Max Heigel

Caesar Max Heigel (born July 25, 1783 in Munich , † after 1847) was a German actor , poet and librettist .

origin

Caesar Max Heigel came from a family of actors. His father was the court actor Joseph Franz Heigel (1752–1811), his mother the actress Caroline Reiner (1762–1804). His brothers Karl (1783 – after 1822) and Klemens August Heigel (1792–1849) were also known as actors, another brother was the painter Joseph Heigel (1780–1837).

Life

Caesar Max already acted as a child, received a higher education and, enthusiastic about the republican ideals, joined a French hussar regiment as a volunteer at the age of 16. He quickly made a military career and became an adjutant in the general staffs of Jean Joseph Paul Augustin Dessoles and Jean-Victor Moreau . With the arrest of Moreau, arranged by Napoleon Bonaparte in February 1804, years of flight and uncertainty began for Heigel, especially since he had attacked General Jacques-François Menou in a pamphlet . For some time he found refuge in a Benedictine monastery, possibly in the monastery of Sankt Blasien . There he is said to have drawn up a memorandum in favor of the preservation of the German imperial pencils. Nevertheless, he looked again to return to the French army, where he found officers protecting him - at times he took the name Jules de La Barse or Brasse - but he was arrested near Venice in January 1807 at the instigation of his intimate enemy Menou , taken to Milan and held in solitary confinement for 13 months. Pardoned by Napoleon, he was posted first to Africa and then to America, before returning to France in 1810 and finally to his hometown Munich.

After 1812 he worked as a theater director, director and dramaturge in Innsbruck, Karlsruhe, Basel, Munich, Vienna, Bamberg and most recently in Nuremberg. He wrote and staged numerous folk plays, antics and stunts . His staging of facial expressions, so-called plastic paintings, gymnastic scenes and moving images ( tableaux vivants ) was a specialty . He had great success in Switzerland with the play The Battle of St. Jacob (1822) and in Bavaria with the historical drama Max Emanuel or the Klause in Tirol (1828). He also wrote poems, small prose pieces, but above all several opera libretti that were set to music by contemporary composers. To celebrate the anniversary of Maximilian I Joseph's reign in 1824, he wrote a text entitled King Garibald to the music of Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito .

Around 1836 he settled in the political environment of Odilon Barrot as a newspaper correspondent in Paris. From 1847 onwards, his family who remained in Germany no longer received any signs of life from him. He was lost and possibly died in the turmoil of the 1848 revolution. His daughter Caesarine Kupfer-Gomansky , with whom he appeared together in 1838, became known as an actress. His last known work was the libretto for the opera Das Osterfest zu Paderborn, which premiered in Frankfurt in 1844 .

Works (selection)

• A premonition and certainty an analogous prelude to the recovery of Your Highness, Electress Friderike Karoline , Munich 1799
• This is how they were , drama, 1810 ( taken over from Die Zeitalter )
• Surrounded by courageous armies , poem set to music by Carl Maria von Weber , 1811
• Civil merit, a dramatic spring rehearsal in one elevator , EA Munich 1811
• The ages. Drey fleeting sketches on a chronological character , Vienna 1812 (revised, Nuremberg 1832). The drinking song Pour, Long Live the Wine by Albert Lortzing is said to be taken from it (LoWV 17), but this cannot be proven.
• Frau Hütt or the beautiful Bund , Innsbruck 1813 (Festival on the occasion of the alliance between Austria and Bavaria)
• The joke, or art and love problem , EA in Mainz 1815 (over decades often played, mimic disguise fluctuation)
• The fairy Amandalindasuwandaginabillotidara, or Harlequin's adventure, before and after his death , pantomime with ballet, EA (?) Strasbourg 1815 (later with the music of Karl David Seegmann)
• Fragments from the ruins of my life , Aarau 1820
• Dramatic bagatelles , Aarau 1821
• The Battle of St. Jacob , Schauspiel, Basel 1822
• Songs for Bavarian Warriors , Sulzbach 1823
• The Christmas present, or Staberl as Klaubauf , EA Munich 1824
• An Adventure in the Guadarama Mountains , libretto set to music by Philipp Jakob Röth (1825)
• Der Vampyr , libretto after John William Polidoris Der Vampyr , set to music by Peter Joseph von Lindpaintner , 1828
• Macbeth , translation of the libretto by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle after William Shakespeare for the German performance of the composition by Hippolyte Chelard (1828)
• Max Emanuel or the Klause in Tirol , historical drama, 1828
• The carnival in Munich in 1563 or the Schäfflertanz , Posse, 1828
• The butcher's jump in Munich , Posse, 1829
• Sketches from life in Nuremberg, Nuremberg 1832
• The Führer on the Schmausenbuck , Nuremberg 1832
• Max Emanuel's first weapon, or: The relief of Vienna in 1683 , Nuremberg 1833 (with the participation of 600 people on the occasion of the Nuremberg festival in August 1833)
• Greetings from Greece. Festival to celebrate the accession to the throne of Sr. Majesty Otto I, King of Greece , Nuremberg 1833
• Little Plutarch for the stage , Stuttgart 1836
• The Easter festival in Paderborn, great heroic opera in 3 sections , Frankfurt 1843 (libretto by Dr. Cäsar Max Heigel, music by Aloys Schmitt)
• Homesickness of a Swiss girl, poem that cannot be dated, set to music by Emilie Zumsteeg

literature

• Karl Theodor von Heigel :  Heigel, Franz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1880, pp. 308-310. (there about Caesar Max Heigel on p. 309)
• Karl Theodor von Heigel: The life of the actor and writer Caesar Max Heigel , in: Süddeutsche Monatshefte , Vol. 10, Volume 1, 1912, pp. 1-10; Pp. 183-193.
• Werner M. Kienle: From the history of the Karlsruhe theater. Cesar Max Heigel. World travelers and actors in Karlsruhe at the beginning of the 19th century , in: As far as the Turmberg greets. Supplement to Durlacher Tagblatt 4, 1952, No. 10, pp. 37-39
• Goedecke: floor plan . 2nd edition, Vol. 11, 1, 8th book, Akademie Verlag Berlin 2011, pp. 169-175 ( digitized version ).

Web links

Wikisource: Caesar Max Heigel  - Sources and full texts