The coffee house

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Data
Title: The coffee house
Original title: La bottega del caffè
Genus: Comedy in three acts
Original language: Italian
Author: Carlo Goldoni
Publishing year: 1750
Premiere: May 2, 1750
Place of premiere: Mantua
Place and time of the action: Venice , 18th century
people
  • Eugenio , merchant
  • Vittoria , his wife
  • Count Leandro / Flaminio , impostor and cardsharp
  • Lisaura , dancer and Flaminio's lover
  • Placida , Flaminio's wife
  • Pandolfo , casino owner
  • Don Marzio , nobleman from Naples
  • Ridolfo , coffee house owner
  • Trappola , friend of Ridolfo

The coffee house (original title: La bottega del caffè ) is a prose comedy in three acts by Carlo Goldoni , which was written in April 1750 and premiered on May 2, 1750 in Mantua .

action

The action takes place in a small square, a piazzetta in Venice , where there is a casino , an inn and a coffee house , which is run by the righteous Ridolfo, a former servant who went into business for himself with the help of his old employer.

The play revolves around him and his customers: the young businessman Eugenio, the son of Ridolfo's former employer, who gambled away his fortune and neglected his young wife Vittoria. Therefore, he is at odds with her. He is constantly betrayed by Flaminio from Turin , who appears as Count Leandro and takes the money from the inexperienced Eugenio while gambling. The dancer Lisaura, to whom the fake Count Leandro has promised marriage, although he is married to Placida, represents the next character. Other actors are the greedy gambling den owner Pandolfo and finally the pushy, talkative Don Marzio, a Neapolitan nobleman who introduces himself Slander does not shrink back.

After a night of partying while playing, Eugenio comes into the coffee house in a bad mood. Once again he has lost everything, and he even has to pay gambling debts. In an emergency, the good coffee house owner Ridolfo steps in, but reproaches Eugenio for his dissolute lifestyle. The unfortunate Placida appears, disguised as a pilgrim, suspecting her runaway husband Flaminio to be in Venice .

Contemporary coffeehouse scene of the 18th century

Eugenio offers her his help and places her in the hostel. In the meantime, Vittoria has also started looking for her Eugenio under the protection of a masked costume. She sees with horror that he has pawned her earrings to Don Marzio, who is now showing them around everywhere. The arriving Eugenio does not recognize his masked wife and wants to invite her, whereupon she reveals herself and threatens to leave him and reclaim her dowry. Eugenio is far from cured of his vice and will soon be forced to beg for money again.

This time too, the faithful Ridolfo turns out to be the savior in times of need, although this only causes the incorrigible one to return to the gaming table again. When he now wins a small sum, he generously invites everyone present to eat. But the general joy in the round table is disturbed by the appearance of Placida, who recognized the voice of her faithless Flaminio from outside. The desperate Vittoria also reappears on the scene and courageously defies her husband when he tries to get violent against her.

In the general confusion, it is good Ridolfo again who brings peace and reconciles the quarreling couples. In the meantime, the gambling den owner Pandolfo is suspected of fraudulent activities and, thanks to Don Marzio's loquacity, can be convicted. Pandolfo ends up in prison ; but the general displeasure is not directed against him, but against the informer who, now denounced as a "spy", has to leave the city under disgrace and disgrace.

Significance in Goldoni's complete works

Carlo Goldoni (portrait of Alessandro Longhi )

Goldoni was primarily concerned with presenting the colorful and lively milieu of a primarily bourgeois society. His next goal was after the moderate success of the previous piece (in the 18th century translation Die Vengeiger Weiber , but this is probably meant ladies gossip , I pettegolezzi delle donne ) to preserve the "unity of the place", although he continues to be successful doubted:

“This time the relentless art judges will have to be satisfied with me; but will they be the same with the unity of actions? Will they not find that the subject matter of the play is put together and the interest is divided? ”He saw himself as happy because he had succeeded in combining several actions in one place with one essential connection.

Johannes Hösle classified Carlo Goldoni in this context as follows: "The Venetian seldom, like the great French enlighteners, took a polemical and committed position on the social issues and conflicts of his time, but like few others he implemented them in stage action." Hermann Wiegmann also saw Goldoni with this comedy "as a theater man through and through."

Palazzo Centani, Goldoni's birthplace in Venice

Thus Goldoni is not yet a modern stage poet in the true sense of the word, but he is always critical of the social climate of his native Venice, which is still eminently characterized by aristocratic arrogance.

Goldoni himself was impressed by the success of his piece: “This comedy received brilliant applause: the union and the contrast of the characters could not fail to have an effect. The character of the defender was interpreted in terms of several well-known people. ”One of these people would have been particularly indignant towards him and even threatened him with a duel . However, since one was rather curious about the 16 pieces in one year that Goldoni had promised, the supposedly offended one "magnanimously" gave him his life.

The background to this statement Goldoni was his “tour de force” when he contractually agreed to staging 16 new pieces at the Teatro Sant'Angelo with his impresario Medebach in the 1750/51 season - including some of his best works, next to the aforementioned La bottega del caffè also Il bugiardo ( The Liar ).

reception

Already Gotthold Ephraim Lessing felt that Voltaire in his piece The coffee house or Schottländerin have made significant loans from Goldoni said Don Marzio was the "archetype of Frelon". However, if Marzio were merely a “malicious guy”, Frélon was “also a miserable scribe”, which Voltaire derived from a journalist similar to his own hated name. In the modern social analysis of Don Marzio's role , however, one can also conclude that the “expropriation of language” turns him into the “primarily destructive engine of action”, without which the play would not experience its dissolution.

Hans Otto, GDR postage stamp, 1975

Dino Buzzati made a conscious appreciation in his novel Un amore (1964) La bottega del cafe : When Antonio wanted to visit Laide in her apartment, he did not meet her. To pass the time, he flips through a Topolino comic and watches the said piece on television.

Antonella Wittschier then sees the parallels between the two works. "The Venice of the Settecento and the metropolis of Milan of the Novecento also lie on a (...) Northern Italian axis of dominance, progressiveness and the future." By choosing the form of representation of popular television for his protagonist Antonio Dorigo, Buzzati is also using it literary signal for modernity.

German-speaking actors who had particular success with the roles of the play were, for example, Hans Otto in the mid-1920s as Eugenio at the Kammerspiele in Hamburg , the character actor Erich Fiedler as Count Leandro during the 1930s in the ensemble of the Komische Oper in Berlin or Margit Carstensen 1969 in the role of Vittoria . Other actors who explicitly refer to their roles in their vita are Michael Dangl , Nicolaus-Johannes Heyse , Winfried Hübner and Uwe-Karsten Koch .

In 1970, the piece inspired Frieder Grindler in photography and poster art for the Tübingen Zimmer Theater , based on the imagery developed by John Heartfield , to create a drastic photographic real montage in which the dripping spout of a coffee pot protruded from a close-up of a female mouth . At an exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen in May 2011, this picture was highlighted as part of an exhibition on the poster art of Frieder Grindler and Volker Pfüllers .

Adaptations

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

A first television adaptation was made in German-speaking countries in 1964 by Hermann Leitner , in the Christian Wolff to Eugenio embodied, Monika Whip the Vittoria and Hans Clarin , the supporting role of Trappolo .

As a result of his anti- theater conceptions, Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted the piece for both the stage and television. In the modernized production of Fassbinder and Peer Raben in September 1969 at the Schauspielhaus Bremen with actors from Bremen and the anti- theater group, the play was particularly reinterpreted as the role of Don Marzio , who became more of a melancholy figure in the style of Arthur Schnitzler . The piece formed the basis for the television production, which was recorded on video in a WDR studio in Cologne in February 1970. It was Fassbinder's sixth feature film. Contributors to the television productions were Margit Carstensen ( Vittoria ), Ingrid Caven ( Placida ), Hanna Schygulla ( Lisaura ), Kurt Raab ( Don Marzio ), Harry Baer ( Eugenio ), Günther Kaufmann ( Leander ), Peter Moland ( Pandolfo ) and Peer Raben ( Ridolfo ). The production was broadcast for the first time on May 18, 1970 on WDR 3 (further broadcasts on Hessischer Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk followed) and sold to Italy, Poland, France and the United States.

Fassbinder's theater adaptation was re-staged in the run-up to Goldoni's 300th birthday in 2006 as part of the 38th Biennale di Teatro in Venice in the Teatro delle Tese Vergini by Ferdinando Bruni and Elio de Capitani .

literature

  • 5 pieces from Goldoni . Translated from the Italian by HC Artmann. With an afterword by Franz Schuh. Residenz Verlag, Salzburg 2001.
  • Richard Bletschacher: Carlo Goldoni. On the 300th anniversary of his birthday on February 25, 1707. In: Ders .: Excursions. Twenty-one essays on history, literature and the visual arts. Böhlau, Vienna 2010, p. 174ff.
  • Elettra Ercolino: Carlo Goldoni, La bottega del caffè. Rizzoli 2003.
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder : Antitheater: Five pieces after pieces. (after Goethe: Iphigenie auf Tauris; after Sophocles: Ajax; after Gay: Die Bettleroper; after Goldoni: the coffee house; after Lope de Vega: The Burning House), Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
  • Johannes Hösle: Carlo Goldoni. His life, his work, his time. Piper, Munich 1993.
  • Roberto Alonge: Goldoni. Dalla commedia dell'arte al dramma borghese . Garzanti, Milan 2004.
  • Robert Fajen: The transformation of the city. Venice and literature in the 18th century. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German by Herbert Meier. www.vvb.de ( Memento of the original from July 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vvb.de
  2. ↑ www.felix-bloch-orben.de - another German version by Lola Lorme
  3. ↑ Classici italiani (PDF; 23 kB)
  4. ↑ Carlo Goldoni: Goldoni about himself and the history of his theater , 2nd part, translated from the French and provided with some comments by Georg Schaz, Verlag der Dykische Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1788, p. 64.
  5. ^ Johannes Hösle: Carlo Goldoni. His life, his work, his time. Piper, Munich 1993, p. 11.
  6. ^ Hermann Wiegmann: Occidental Literature History. The literature of Western Europe from ancient Greek and Roman poetry to modern English, French, Spanish, Italian and German literature. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, p. 367.
  7. ^ Carlo Goldoni: Goldoni about himself and the history of his theater. Part 2, translated from French and provided with some comments by Georg Schaz, Verlag der Dykische Buchhandlung, Leipzig 1788, p. 66.
  8. ↑ Johannes Hösle: Small history of Italian literature . CH Beck, Munich 1995, p. 121.
  9. ^ Ekkehard Eickhoff: Venice, late fireworks: Splendor and fall of the republic, 1700-1797 . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2006, p. 165.
  10. ^ Lessing's works. Edited by Georg Witkowski. Critically reviewed and explained edition. 4th volume, = Laocon or beyond the borders of Mahlerey and poetry. Hamburg Dramaturgy , Part 1, Voss, Berlin, 1766; Bibliographical Institute, Leipzig / Vienna 1911, p. 391f.
  11. ↑ Iris Hafner: Aesthetic and social role. Studies on identity problems in the Carlo Goldonis theater . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1994, p. 140.
  12. ^ Antonella Wittschier: New ways to Dino Buzzati . Peter Lang Verlag , Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2010, p. 69.
  13. ^ Antonella Wittschier: New ways to Dino Buzzati . Peter Lang Verlag , Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2010, p. 70.
  14. ↑ Ulrich Liebe: Adored, persecuted, forgotten. Actor as a Nazi victim . With audio CD, Beltz, Weinheim 2005, p. 169.
  15. ↑ Horst O. Hermanni: From Dorothy Dandridge to Willy Fritsch: Das Film ABC . Norderstedt 2009, p. 305.
  16. ↑ http://www.steffi-line.de/archiv_text/nost_buehne/03c_carstensen.htm
  17. ^ Achim Lettmann: Theater posters by Grindler and Pfüller in the Museum Folkwang Essen. In: Westfälischer Anzeiger . May 2, 2011. Retrieved March 3, 2012.
  18. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1281848/fullcredits#cast
  19. ^ David Barnett: Rainer Werner Fassbinder And the German Theater. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York 2005, p. 130.
  20. ↑ http://www.deutsches-filmhaus.de/bio_reg/f_bio_regiss/fassbinder_leben.htm
  21. ↑ http://www.deutsches-filmhaus.de/filme_einzeln/f_einzeln/fassbinder/fassbinder_k-l/kaffeehaus_das.htm
  22. ↑ [1]  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.fassbinderfoundation.de  
  23. ^ Wallace Steadman Watson: Understanding Rainer Werner Fassbinder: film as private and public art. The University of South California Press, Columbia 1996, p. 55.
  24. ^ Brigitte Peucker: A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2012, p. 521.
  25. ↑ Jane Shattuc: Television, tabloids, and tears: Fassbinder and popular culture. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1994, p. 77.
  26. ^ Peter W. Jansen , Wolfram Schütte : Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Fischer Cinema; 11318). 5th edition. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / M. 1992.
  27. ^ Herbert Spaich: Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Life and work . Beltz Verlag, Weinheim 1992
  28. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065930/fullcredits#cast
  29. ↑ Susanne Lettenbauer: The coffee house. The 38th Biennale di Teatro in Venice brings Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of Goldoni onto the stage. In: Deutschlandradio , July 28, 2006. Retrieved March 3, 2012.
  30. ↑ Review: “The felt midday bell”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 25, 2002, No. 248, p. 36. Accessed March 2, 2012.