The faithful maid
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| Title: |
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| Genus: | comedy |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Bruno Frank |
| Premiere: | November 5, 1916 |
| Place of premiere: | Dresden and Leipzig |
| Place and time of the action: | Elegantly furnished room at Sohnreys |
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The faithful maid. Comedy in three acts is a play by Bruno Frank from 1916. It was Bruno Frank's first play. The premiere took place during the First World War on November 5, 1916 in Dresden and Leipzig, further performances in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and at the Vienna Burgtheater.
The print edition of the piece was published in 1916 by Drei Masken-Verlag in Berlin / Munich with the dedication “Emmy Remolt, the woman and the actress”. According to Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner, the piece brought the hoped-for economic success, while it failed the criticism.
Overview
Mathilde's relationship with Hermann Sohnrey broke up 25 years ago. After his marriage, she took on the job of housekeeper for him. As the children's confidante, she helps the daughter Ruth find the longed-for husband and protects the son Günther from a scandal over an unjustifiably issued bill of exchange.
action
Location: Elegantly furnished room at Sohnreys.
The timber merchant Hermann Sohnrey, city councilor and respected citizen, celebrates his 25th business anniversary. The relationship with his wife Lilly is characterized by indifference. He married her because she was rich and "somewhat of a family". Lilly is an emotionless woman and all of her pursuit is directed towards outward appearance. She wants the 20-year-old daughter Ruth to become engaged to the 43-year-old Baron Planitz. Ruth, however, loves the 34-year-old writer Dr. Albrecht Hildebrand, who only has a small income and in the eyes of the parents would be a mesalliance.
The 23-year-old son Günther works in his father's business. He gets into bad company and falls into debt to satisfy his gambling addiction. Ironically, on the anniversary day of his father, a catastrophe is looming. The money lender Georg Laturner wants to present Hermann Sohnrey a bill of exchange that Günther signed without authorization on behalf of the company.
Mathilde is the real main character of the play, the "faithful maid". She is the housekeeper for the Sohnreys. A quarter of a century ago, Sohnrey and Laturner were friends and joint managers of the timber dealership. They lived together in a hut in the vineyards, and Mathilde ran the household for them. Both men were drawn to Mathilde, but Mathilde's heart beat for Sonrey.
When Laturner embezzled a lesser sum of money, his friend, driven by a fanatical love of honesty, betrayed him to the boss of the company. Although Mathilde stood up for Laturner, he was fired. Sonrey actually wanted to take Mathilde as his wife, but considered her advocacy for Laturner a moral weakness and decided on another. Mathilde stayed with him as housekeeper, so that she could be near the man she loved. Sonrey will later say to her: "You walk around the house on your quiet feet, like the epitome of all missed happiness."
The betrayal of his friend made Laturner a despiser. As a hard-hearted moneylender, he repaid the breach of trust of one individual to everyone. On the anniversary day, he wants to take revenge on his former friend by presenting the son's change and exposing the son to the father. Mathilde, who has developed a close relationship with Sohnrey's children, mediates between children and parents. On her intercession, Ruth is allowed to meet her beloved Dr. Connect Hildebrand. Laturner persuades them to forego his revenge. Sohnrey and Laturner leave halfway reconciled.
background
Bruno Frank knew the effects of gambling addiction from painful personal experience. At least in the first half of his twenties he succumbed to gambling addiction again and again. He made several expensive trips to the south of France, where he indulged his passion in the Monte Carlo Casino. To maintain his lavish lifestyle and to satisfy his gambling addiction, he repeatedly plunged into debt, especially with his school friend Eberhard Ackerknecht , his publisher Otto Winter and his father's friend Thomas Mann .
The print edition of the piece was dedicated to "Emmy Remolt, the woman and the actress". Bruno Frank had been friends with the widowed theater actress Emmy Remolt, who was almost 11 years his senior, since 1914. He had made her acquaintance during one of his stays in his native Stuttgart and learned to appreciate her acting skills. It is likely that Emmy Remolt had in mind the role model for Mathilde, the main character in the play: “Mathilde's being is a kind, quiet superiority. She's in her forties, but she can look younger and feminine. ”In 1916, Emmy Remolt was 40 years old, an age at which actresses were no longer cast for the role of teenage heroines, but for mother roles. Frank's debut was not performed at the court theater in Stuttgart, so that Emmy Remolt was unable to interpret the role of Mathilde.
reception
- The theater critic Christian Gaehde ruled on the occasion of the premiere in Dresden in 1916:
- I'm sorry for Bruno Frank. He has shown in a few short stories and volumes of poetry that he has taste, yes, culture. Not more! But now he descends into the lowlands, where money jumps into the box for empty words. The eternally banal, spruced up with sentimentality and bourgeoisie paid in fine gold, is supposed to simulate a part of existence, mind you, existence seen with humor. The Marlitt already had the illusory feeling, and women and virgins cheered her. Now the "humor", or rather a clever irony, which makes the Philistine down in the dance floor the judge of his own inadequacy, is added in fine doses, the men are also happy. That's how far we've come. No, this “loyal maid”, who lovingly stands aside for 25 years in the house of the Lord, the hearts of the children of the good and honorable merchant who made a goose their mother, of course conquered all trials and tribulations with a good soul and more capable Cleverness leads to a happy ending, no matter how pleasant it is about it, it is nothing more than "old Mamsell". And if she hadn't had tears at the end of a lost happiness, if she hadn't giggled a witty punchline about her suffering, if everything didn't dissolve in such a tasteless, upright pleasure, she would be the cold Mamsell who has been dead and in our literature for 30 years and more should be buried.
- WH for the performance in Munich, Munich-Augsburger Abendzeitung, November 27, 1916:
- The somewhat novel-like, partially constructed and not entirely probable story seems pretty average.
- Leopold Jacobson on the performance in the Vienna Burgtheater, Neues Wiener Journal, December 31, 1916:
- “Bruno Frank has baked a dramatic cake, which he sprinkled with a few almonds and raisins here and there. You look for them carefully because the name of the comedy writer calls for a bit of attention after all. The batter is bad, but the ingredients are sometimes irritating. [...] Bruno Frank has nothing to say and therefore talks a lot. Pieces like this [...] are like a legacy of family theater and show a relapse into that Burgtheater mentality that was thought to have been lost and lost. "
- Leo Feld on the performance in the Vienna Burgtheater, Die Zeit (Vienna), December 31, 1916:
- “The faithful maid” has nothing to do with literature. But the play has the eloquence of the stage, which is not very common, and it has a cultivated spirituality. [...] That is really not a little.
- The writer and critic Alfred Polgar judged the performance in the Vienna Burgtheater in 1917:
- This is a nice, quiet, warm-hearted, honest piece that never causes annoyance or boredom to listen to. It doesn't want much, but it can do what it wants. Comedy has narrow intellectual and dramatic boundaries. That is their weakness and their strength. Because she never takes over, but remains tactfully within her possibilities, which she strides calmly and confidently. There is nothing raw, nothing mean, nothing mendacious in these three all too kind acts, but there are many fine and clever things. In addition, they show an exemplary dialogue, which, so to speak, does justice to the demands of the stage for elevation, reinforcement, excess purity, the Sunday dress of the language, but remains entirely possible and human. I don't know of any Viennese theater writer whose dialogue between style and naturalness would find such a happy balance. The sympathetic, simple, but unfortunately often soft and soft piece is played to perfection at the Burgtheater. In the main roles of Heine , whose fundamentally clever, distinctive acting forms a highly lively figure from wide, sharp-edged surfaces, and of Miss Maria Mayer. She gives an old girl who has been betrayed of her happiness in life. One that used to be a juicy grape, was unfortunately not eaten and is now a rather shriveled raisin, full of concentrated candy. It is enchantingly fine how Fraulein Mayer lets this sweetness, the goodness, seep through the bowl of renunciation and knowledge in which the heart of the "faithful maid" has encapsulated herself only in the finest droplets.
- Bruno Frank's biographer Sascha Kirchner wrote in 2009:
- One must measure Frank's plays by different literary standards than his prose. Because he calculated his stage works precisely, and in no way did he regard them as “great literature”. Some time later he named "The faithful maid", his "comedy of goodness", "overly harmless" and "only half successful". ...
- The "Comedy in Three Acts" is certainly conventional, the conflict portrayed does not go beyond the boundaries of the bourgeois world, and in the end, although melancholy, everything comes out too smoothly. Against the expressionist outcry that was being heard on the German stages at the same time in view of the reality of the war and the generation conflict between fathers and sons, “The Faithful Maid” had to appear decent.
Print output
- The faithful maid. Comedy in three acts. Berlin / Munich: Three masks, 1916, pdf .
literature
- Christian Gaehde: Dresden. The faithful maid. In: The literary echo, Volume 19, December 15, 1916, column 352.
- Frank, Bruno. In: Renate Heuer (editor): Lexicon of German-Jewish authors. Archive Bibliographia Judaica, Volume 7: Feis – Frey, Munich 1999, Pages 250–268, here: 256.
- Sascha Kirchner: The citizen as an artist. Bruno Frank (1887–1945) - life and work. Düsseldorf: Grupello, 2009, pages 85-87, 90.
- Alfred Polgar: Burgtheater. In: Die Schaubühne, Volume 13, January 11, 1917, pages 36–37.
Web links
- Literature by and about Die Treue Magd in the catalog of the German National Library
Footnotes
- ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 85.
- ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 86.
- ↑ #Gaehde 1916 .
- ↑ # This year 1999 , page 256.
- ↑ # This year 1999 , page 256.
- ↑ # This year 1999 , page 256.
- ↑ #Polgar 1917 , page 37.
- ↑ #Kirchner 2009 , page 85, 86.