The spendthrift
| Data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The spendthrift |
| Original title: | Pictures from the life of a spendthrift |
| Genus: | drama |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Ferdinand Raimund |
| Music: | Conradin Kreutzer |
| Publishing year: | 1834 |
| Premiere: | February 20, 1834 |
| Place of premiere: | Theater in der Josefstadt , Vienna |
| Place and time of the action: | the plot of the second act takes place three years later than the first, that of the third act twenty years later than the second |
| people | |
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of the first elevator:
of the second act:
of the third act:
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The spendthrift is an original magical tale in three acts by Ferdinand Raimund . The first performance took place on February 20, 1834 in the Theater in der Josefstadt . The piece - Raimund last - is known among other things for the planed song .
content
Although the fairy Cheristane is supposed to do good on earth with the pearls of her crown, she gives almost all of them to Julius Flottwell, whom she loves. When she has to return to the fairy kingdom, she shows himself to him for the first time in her true form and asks him to give her a year of his life as a farewell.
Shamelessly exploited by his valet Wolf, whom he considers a good man, Flottwell is only loyal to his simple-minded servant Valentin. Three years later, Flottwell lives in booze, Wolf is stalking Rosa to Valentin's annoyance, and a mysterious beggar who keeps appearing unexpectedly always wants a rich gift from Flottwell. Flottwell wants to marry Amalie, the daughter of the President von Klugheim, but her father is against it because he rejects the lavish lifestyle of her lover. Flottwell even threw the expensive bridal jewelry for Amalie out of the window because he didn't like it. The beggar also collects this, but in revenge Wolf suspects Rosa of being the thief. Rosa and Valentin leave their service indignantly. Julius wounds Baron Flitterstein, Amalia's intended groom, in a duel and flees to England with his lover. Wolf refuses to accompany him out of self-interest and scoffs at the man who is leaving. Only after twenty years does Flottwell return, impoverished and alone, having lost his wife and child in a shipwreck. When he sees his previous property, he learns that his former valet Wolf, who always cheated Flottwell out of large sums, has bought it. But he has grown old and sick, but he cynically shows his former master the door. Only loyal Valentin, now again a master carpenter, happily welcomes him, but Frau Rosa throws him out again at once. When Flottwell, who no longer sees any meaning in his life, wants to commit suicide, the beggar appears, in truth Azure, Cheristane's servant spirit. Since he has faithfully kept all of Flottwell's gifts - including the jewelry that was thrown away - he can return part of his fortune to him. In the meantime, Valentin has forced Rosa to give in by threatening to leave her with the children. But Flottwell is now able to support Valentin and his family out of gratitude for their loyalty. Cheristane appears for the last time and promises to see her loved one again.
Factory history
Raimund began writing the piece on October 17, 1833 and completed it on December 2. The premiere was on February 20, 1834. The subject of the spendthrift who throws his money out the window with his hands full met with great public interest. In the first decades of the 19th century, many existences in Vienna rose to dizzying heights - as Rudolf Fürst writes ambiguously - only to crash again just as quickly after carefree enjoyment of life. Already in the farmer as a millionaire , the poet described such a “career” with his fortune suddenly gaining wealth. Other contemporaries also wrote plays on this topic, such as Adolf Bäuerle ( The Natural Magic, The Friend in Need, Modern Economy ), Karl Meisl ( A Day in Vienna, The Story of a Real Scarf, The Ghost on the Bastion - on the latter Incidentally, Raimund wrote some additions), as well as Josef Alois Gleich , who, however, described quite cozy types who also gave something to other people ( The servants in Vienna, Ydor, the wanderer from the water kingdom, The Liederlich brothers ). They are all modeled on the piece Le dissipateur (The Spodder) by Philippe Néricault Destouches (1680–1754).
Raimund called his work an "original magic game" to point out that there was no literary model, but that the subject was his very own invention. Four years after the ominous magic crown , he left the style trodden in it and returned to his local theater home after the unsuccessful excursion into "high drama, the world of antiquity, Shakespeare's empire and the baroque allegory theater". The prodigal is still in the magic game tradition, but almost at the end of it. Johann Nestroy had predicted this development a year earlier with his play Der böse Geist Lumpacivagabundus, thus moving away from romantic idealism and towards critical realism. Raimund followed the competitor here, even if he was always aware of the distance to Nestroy. The spendthrift became his third big stage hit.
There is a playlist of the eleventh performance on March 6, 1834, in the opening credits of which Ferdinand Raimund is named "as a guest" , he played his favorite role, Valentin.
Several couplets that have remained known to this day appear in the piece . The most famous is probably the planed song sung by Valentin ( “The people are arguing about” ; third act, tenth scene), as is the hunting song ( “In short, in all seriousness, there's nothing more stupid than the hunt” ; first Elevator, fourteenth scene) is still often interpreted.
people
Flottwell's figure is initially depicted as an immoderate and, for better or for better, thoughtless spendthrift, who only after decades and falling into poverty and loneliness is able to come to terms with what he did before. The conciliatory conclusion for him, which Raimund finds and in which he himself cannot fully believe, is more due to the moral attitude of the poet, who cannot and will not leave earlier generosity and late virtue unrewarded. A possible role model for Flottwell could have been Moritz von Fries (1777–1826), who was tracked down by Egon Komorzynski (1878–1963) in the Viennese local chronicle , whose life comes astonishingly close to the spendthrift.
The likeable Valentin can be seen as a further development of the equally loyal servant Florian Waschblau from The Diamond of the Ghost King . In a conscious break with tradition, Raimund created a small servant and a craftsman, who was always ridiculed by his fellow authors at the time, as his ideal of gratitude. Not for nothing does his impoverished master say of him:
- "O servant loyal, you are like the moon, we will only see you when our sun goes down." (Third elevator, eighth scene)
His partner Rosa is - at least in the first two acts - the Colombina next to the Harlequin , snippy, solid and Viennese chic. In the third, she by no means develops into the traditional bad woman, the “Bissgurn” of the Alt-Wiener Volkstheater , she is a good housewife and mother, loyal, thrifty, a little strict with husband and children, but unlike Valentin, one objective realist who values the present more than the past. However, according to Hans Weigel, Rosa in her reawakened anger at Flottwell can almost be seen as the female version of the misanthrope Rappelkopf; less the Colombina, but an almost Strindbergian figure.
The counterpart to Valentin is the valet Wolf, a lying, corrupt and thieving flatterer who, without hesitation, lets his master fall; its forerunner is Lorenz from the farmer as a millionaire . Ultimately, he has none of his villainy, because as a landowner he is plagued by pain and remorse, despised by those around him, a "victim" of just fate.
Cheristane is on the one hand a representative of the spirit realm, but at the same time it is also further evidence of Raimund's approach of the spirit level to the human world since his first play. Quite earthly she is a Flottwell-loving Biedermeier girl, and therefore no pompous action is necessary in the spirit realm to explain this connection. Just as the King of the Alps has paternal traits, Cheristane has those of beloved and motherliness at the same time. Raimund's growing distance from the traditional magic game can also be seen in the fact that, thanks to the loyalty of Valentins Flottwell, even without the intervention of the fairy, he would not have had to suffer bitter hardship.
Later interpretations
Rudolf Fürst states that Raimund wrote a lot of his own, personal and hidden things into it , as in the Alpine King and Misanthrope. How much he felt this himself is shown by a letter dated December 20, 1835 to Friedrich Ludwig Schmidt , the director of the Hamburg City Theater , in which he defended the luck that Flottwell considered “too tight” :
- “It was not my intention to have the spendthrift Flottwell rewarded for his noble but too wildly passionate heart at the end of his failed career. Actually, it should go under! I only wanted him to be protected from undeserved shame, from people's outrageous ingratitude. "
Fürst sees this as a clear indication of Raimund's mistrust and almost paranoid opinion of his contemporaries.
Kurt Kahl deals with Raimund's relationship to Nestroy and quotes as a partisan view made in the discussion about it at the time, the Nestroy admirer Karl Johann Braun von Braunthal (1802–1866), who mockingly criticized:
- “This product is a standstill in its work, consequently a step backwards. The 'spendthrift' is his 'farmer as a millionaire' en fraque, nothing else. "
Kahl doesn't see the difference between the ambitious, self-overestimating Phalarius of the Malevolent Magic Crown and the rampantly wasteful Flottwell as not that great. A more interesting comparison is the one between the Fortunatus root of the farmer as a millionaire and Flottwell: While the former becomes the main character from the secondary character, Flottwell is initially the focus of the plot and is then pushed into the supporting role by Valentin. Especially in the scenes in the carpenter's workshop (reminiscent of his father's job), Raimund effortlessly hit the tune of this little world, they resemble “heart-warming genre images ” .
According to Franz Hadamowsky , the great success that Raimund had in his guest roles in the Josefstädter Theater was decisive for writing a new work for this very stage. The surreptitious trade in theater tickets for the prodigal would have become so excessive because of the great public interest that the theater management finally had to intervene to stop it or at least to limit it. For some marqueurs, tavern servants, box closers and others, the profit was almost greater than for the theater director Stöger .
In Hein / Mayer it can be read that the work is close to a character comedy. The event is shifted to the human level, supernatural questions are not dominant, but the lack of earthly virtues. Raimund wanted to show that greatness, talent, a wealth of imagination, i.e. characteristics that enable people to penetrate into a higher ideal sphere and to leave bourgeois limits, can also cause their downfall. Only through resignation and renunciation - so the conclusion of the pessimistic poet - could this be prevented. That would be seen as an expression of Biedermeier satisfaction and renunciation, and thus as a critical corrective of an immoderate and deceitful society.
theatre
Some of the most famous Austrian theater actors who played the role of Valentin were Ferdinand Raimund, Alexander Girardi , Paul Hörbiger , Attila Hörbiger , Josef Meinrad and Otto Schenk .
Film adaptations
There are numerous film versions of the material. The first dates from 1913 and was released in cinemas under the title The Millionaire Uncle. In 1917 a two-part silent film was made under the direction of the married couple Jakob and Luise Fleck . Probably the most famous film adaptation comes from 1953, in which Attila Hörbiger plays Herr von Flottwell. In 1964 his daughter Christiane Hörbiger played the fairy Cheristane in a remake, as well as with Josef Meinrad under the direction of Kurt Meisel . An ORF TV production from 1984 directed by the then artistic director Ernst Wolfram Marboe , with only children playing the familiar roles . Georg Friedrich played Valentin .
literature
- Rudolf Fürst (Ed.): Raimund's works. First and third part. German publishing house Bong & Co., Berlin / Leipzig / Vienna / Stuttgart 1908.
- Franz Hadamowsky (Ed.): Ferdinand Raimund. Works in two volumes, volumes I and II, Verlag Das Bergland Buch, Salzburg 1984, ISBN 3-7023-0159-3 .
- Jürgen Hein / Claudia Meyer: Ferdinand Raimund, the theater maker at Vienna. In: Jürgen Hein, Walter Obermaier , W. Edgar Yates , Volume 7, publication by the International Nestroy Society, Mag. Johann Lehner Ges.mbH, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-901749-38-1 .
- Kurt Kahl: Ferdinand Raimund . Friedrich-Verlag, Velber near Hanover 1967.
- Günter Holz, Ferdinand Raimund - the beloved hypochondriac, his life, his work. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2002; 280 pp., ISBN 3-631-39162-5
References
- Role directory, content and text on ferdinandraimund.at/stuecke/verschwender
Individual evidence
- ↑ Azure is considered the color of loyalty
- ↑ Kilian was originally intended as the name
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Third part. S. LXXXIII-LXXXIV.
- ↑ Hadamowsky: Ferdinand Raimund, Volume I, pp. 103-105.
- ↑ Since September 10, 1830, Raimund was no longer tied to the theater in the Leopoldstadt as director and has since played as a guest on stages in Austria and Germany
- ↑ Facsimile of the theater slip in Hadamowsky: Ferdinand Raimund, Volume II, p. 96.
- ^ Kahl: Ferdinand Raimund , pp. 92–93.
- ↑ Bissgurn, formerly Bißgurn = Viennese for quarrelsome woman, derived from biting Gurre (old, unfit horse), transferred to "biting" (contentious) woman Bissgurn in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Third part. S. LXXXV-LXXXVI.
- ↑ en fraque = French: in tails
- ↑ Kahl: Ferdinand Raimund , pp. 87-91.
- ↑ Marqueur = Austrian waiter, pay waiter; see Dein Dialekt - your dictionary , dictionary German-Austrian
- ↑ Hadamowsky: Ferdinand Raimund, Volume I, pp. 80-81.
- ↑ Hein / Meyer: Ferdinand Raimund, the theater maker at the Vienna. Pp. 78-81.
- ↑ Paul Hörbiger as "Valentin" in "Der Verschwender" by Ferdinand Raimund, Volksbühne ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The millionaire uncle in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Spatter (1953) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Spatter (1964) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Prodigal (1984)
