The bride of Corinth

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Goethe in the Campagna , detail from the painting by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein , 1787

The poem The Bride of Corinth is a ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , which was written in Goethe's and Schiller'sBallad Year 1797 ”, ie after Goethe's Italian trip . It reflects even more than the ballad The God and the Bajadere the erotic permissiveness that Goethe had gained on this trip, especially during his long stay in Rome. Although it massively attacked Christian morality with its “damnation of the sexual”, it was published in Schiller's “ Musenalmanach ” for the year 1798, as was the ballad Der Gott und die Bajadere . The motif of the ballad comes from the book of miracles by the ancient writer Phlegon von Tralleis , which was written in the 2nd century AD. In the book he collects stories about freaks, hermaphrodites, ghost apparitions and other supernatural phenomena of his time, but also takes up older legends and sagas from popular belief.

In the so-called "good company" of Weimar , both were known, but frowned upon as "offensive".

The ballad The Bride of Corinth consists of 28 stanzas of seven lines each.

content

The son of an Athenian who still adheres to the old faith comes to Corinth at the house of a friend of his father's. This friendship went so far that they once promised to marry off their mutual children - the son from Athens and the daughter from Corinth. But in the meantime the friend from Corinth has switched to Christianity with the whole family.

The son from Athens, well received and entertained in Corinth, is tired after the trip and lies down to sleep in his clothes when a daughter of the house enters the room. She is seduced by her son into a hot night of love. But the mother of the house “caught” the young people.

It turns out that the girl is the same daughter that was promised to the young man. By converting to Christianity, the mother disregarded this and committed the daughter to a life of chastity, over which she died of grief. Now she has returned as a ghost with vampire features (" still loving the man who has already been lost and sucking his heart's blood "). The young man will not survive meeting her, and both will be united in death. The last verse of the ballad reads:

Hear mother, now the last request:
You lay a pyre,
Open my anxious little hut,
Bring lovers to rest in flames.
When the spark sprays,
When the ashes glow,
we rush to the old gods.

Verse structure and text

The poem has 28 stanzas. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is ABABCCB. The lines marked A and B are five-point trochaes , while lines C are three-point trochaes. Lines A end feminine , lines B and C end masculine .

reception

In January 2009, under the motto “... we rush to the old gods”, a cycle of lectures took place at the University of Frankfurt on the reception of the ballad over the past two hundred years, with the summary “contradicting”.

literature

  • Karl Otto Conrady : Ballads. Experiments with the narrative poem . In: Goethe, Leben und Werk, Patmos, Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-491-69136-2 , pp. 672–673.
  • Stephanie Schäfers: Vampirism, the metaphor of the female threat , [1] (Goethe's bride of Corinth and the Old Testament figure of Lilith are to be compared, instruction manuals)

Web links

Wikisource: The Bride of Corinth  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. Wikisource: Schiller's Musenalmanach for the year 1798, with our ballad on page 88
  2. ... let's hurry to the old gods A cycle of lectures at the University of Frankfurt on the history of the reception of Goethe's ballads.