The ominous magic crown
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| Title: | The ominous magic crown |
| Original title: | The ominous crown or king without kingdom, hero without courage, beauty without youth |
| Genus: | original tragic comic magic game in two acts |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Ferdinand Raimund |
| Music: | Joseph Drechsler |
| Publishing year: | 1829 |
| Premiere: | December 4, 1829 |
| Place of premiere: | Theater in the Leopoldstadt , Vienna |
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The ominous magic crown or king without empire, hero without courage, beauty without youth is an original tragic comic magic game in two acts by Ferdinand Raimund . The first performance took place on December 4, 1829 as a benefit event for the poet in the theater in the Leopoldstadt .
content
Phalarius refuses to accept the saying of the temple servants that it is not he, despite his war triumphs, but the peaceful Creon who will wear the crown of Agrigento. Hades appears and offers him a magic crown with which he can control everything. With their help, Phalarius wants to kill Creon and subjugate Agrigento. Lucina, the patron goddess of Agrigento, can save Creon, but cannot prevent Hades' plan of annihilation, which Phalarius only uses as a means to an end. Hades locks the furies that could stop him in her cave and does not want to release them until Lucina can bring the following three things: the crown of a king who has never owned a kingdom, the laurel wreath of a hero who despite cowardice has one Heroic deed and a tiara that an old woman received as a prize for her beauty.
- " Sacrifice them here, then those seals will melt
- The gate thunders open, its bolts are blown, […] ”(first act, seventh scene)
The debt-ridden and anxious tailor Simplicius Zitternadel argues about his subtenant, the poor poet Ewald, who owes him the rent:
- “ Is a blacksmith, a rhyming smith, is now even writing a play. In the end he brings me into a piece, because I hear, now you can't do a piece where you don't have something from a tailor, and he even, he writes one, that is, ' The separated brothers', that will amount to z'sam'nahn [ sewing together] . "(Act one, scene ninth)
These two are supposed to help Lucina meet the conditions of Hades. Ewald went to Massana on her behalf to save the terminally ill king and to receive the royal crown in return. Simplicius should support him, which astonishes him:
- “ Should I save a country? I can't imagine anything else but that the country has been torn apart by unrest, and I have to patch it up. "(First act, fifteenth scene)
Massana sinks into misery, but Simplicius continues to flirt with Arete, who proudly rejects him. Ewald releases King Heraclius from his torments with the help of his magic torch and receives the crown for it. But at that moment Massana's walls finally collapse and Ewald is now actually a king who has never owned an empire.
Lucina takes Ewald to Kallidalos, where the voting for the most beautiful girl takes place, and there he immediately falls in love with the beautiful Atritia. To win them for himself, he enchanted the audience, so Atritias ugly old aunt Aloe can win the beauty contest. In the meantime Simplicius has been led to a lake whose enchanted water makes you strong and fearless for a short time. Having become a hero after a sip of it, he can kill a wild boar that threatened the city:
- “ I hardly see him, so I get angry, I rush at him and stick him in on the wrong side and out again on the right. "(Second act, seventeenth scene)
Although he immediately becomes a coward again after his victory, he receives the laurel wreath of a hero who, despite cowardice, has performed a heroic deed. Since the old aloe won the diadem as a prize for its beauty in the competition, Lucina fulfilled all three conditions. Now she can ask for help from the three again free Furies, who immediately claim the crown of Hades back from Phalarius:
- “ Go away! Go away! Go away!
- The moon, the moon, it shone at the right hour
- You sinners tremble, vengeance goes on. "(Act two, scene twenty-ninth)
So Creon can regain the throne and bring peace to his country. Ewald marries Atritia and receives a high court office, Simplicius is rewarded by Kreon with a thousand gold pieces:
- “ Now I'm setting up a tailor's workshop and marrying the goddess, it will be a heavenly life. "(Act two, scene thirty-first)
Factory history
The ominous magic crown was Raimund's seventh dramatic work, which thematically related to Moisasur's magic curse . It was started on August 25th, 1829 in Weidling am Bache , continued on the ruins in Brühl and completed on October 2nd “at home in the hermitage” . The title of the first concept was the glowing beads . As an indication that there was no literary model for it, Raimund called the piece an "original" magic game.
This last attempt to create serious work failed particularly this time. The audience was unable to follow the highly intricate events surrounding the Hades-Lucina duel and understand the connection between the Phalarius tragedy and the Creon comedy. His curiosity about the fulfillment of the threefold conditions of Hades was disappointed, since Raimund himself was obviously overwhelmed with it and had to resort to quibbles to solve the tasks. The text unintentionally slipped into the comic whenever it intended to depict elegant pathos. Only the comical Hanswurst scenes - thought of as "Rüpelszenen" in Shakespeare's sense - around and with Simplizius trembling needle were successful with the audience, but ultimately they remained foreign bodies in the "classic" play.
Although Phalarius' excessive ambition is the trigger of the action, the general himself steps back against the supernatural powers in the play, as does his opponent Creon, who is described in a review of the premiere: “He only appears in two appearances, and there only to go off again. ” So the two alleged main characters have been made secondary characters by the poet, in favor of allegories. In Raimund's work, Hades is only partially modeled on the ancient god, more than an “incarnation of contradicting forces” (after Otto Rommel ). In this sense, Phalarius is his human complementary figure, who in turn has an image in Simplizius' trembling needle, namely in the one scene where the tailor poses as a vulgar muscle man. The historical model of Phalerius is Phalaris von Akragas with his cruel rule over Agrigento, which, according to Aristotle, he had also won through the office of general.
The fulfillment of the complicated conditions, the real pivot of the piece, is solved in an improbable way, contradicting all logic, which is also presented with great seriousness and pathos. The poet strictly avoided a parody of the baroque formal language, and he justified the failure by saying that the actors had spoiled the serious and poetic scenes for him. Eduard von Bauernfeld (1802–1890) wrote that on the ground floor there were always quiet giggles during these scenes.
A theater ticket for the twelfth performance on January 14, 1830 has been preserved: Raimund played the Simplizius trembling needle, Franz Tomaselli the wine merchant Riegelsam, Elise Zöllner the aloe. The twenty year old Dlle. Zöllner in the role of a sixty-year-old was chosen deliberately and the very pretty actress was made old-fashioned in order to be able to show the transformation into a beauty that won the competition more convincingly.
In 1830 Josef Kilian Schickh wrote the less than successful parody Die Goldpapiere Zauberkrone or: Nothing is impossible on this piece for the Theater an der Wien .
Later interpretations
According to Rudolf Fürst , Raimund's last grab for the “wreath of the tragic” failed again through his own fault. Because this time the plan of the piece would have been even more confused, the symbolism even more obscure, the style even more missed. This last attempt by the poet to write in a stylized style had become an "ominous crown" for himself too . A mixture of "Viennese High German, the rat king of Knittel - and Streck verse , of incorrect accentuations and distorted word forms" was the play's undoing.
Kurt Kahl sees the greatest effect on the audience where it - “forgetting the improbable ghost mechanism behind it all” - could participate directly in the fate of the human figures. Despite his great success as a folk poet, Raimund wanted to break out of this template and emulate Calderón and Shakespeare, and therefore declaimed allegories in bad verse in this work. Let the piece be:
- “A multifaceted ideological drama, the tragedy of excessive ambition, itself designed too ambitiously and striving for literary reputation. [...] The far greater rest fluctuates between poetry and farce. "
Franz Hadamowsky thinks, like Fürst, that although the ominous magic crown is a splendid allegory of the struggle between good and evil, its structure is even more confused than Moisasur's magic curse . Not two, but three parallel running conditions would have to be fulfilled in order to solve the curse. Like Phalarius in his hubris, everything was drawn excessively, the overabundance of the plot confused the overwhelmed audience - the failure was therefore the greatest in Raimund's work.
In Hein / Mayer is determined the cause of the negative attitude of the public and contemporary criticism was the cliched, contrived language, lack of unity, not fit into the traditional Viennese popular theater and refused to the interests of his suburban Publkums.
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.
Web links
- Role directory, content and text on the website ferdinandraimund.at
Individual evidence
- ↑ for reasons of censorship changed from crown to the non-binding magic crown in order to prevent any allusion to the ruling house
- ↑ Tisiphone = Greek: retribution; Megära, Megaira = Greek: the raging anger; Alecto = Greek: the one who never stops
- ↑ riegelsam = Bavarian / Austrian: active, creative; Rigelsam is on the theater bill
- ↑ probably corrupted from Messina
- ↑ from καλλονή, Greek: beauty
- ↑ Astrahan is on the theater bill
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Second part. P. 17.
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Second part. P. 20.
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Second part. P. 25.
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Second part. P. 61.
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Second part. P. 76.
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. Second part. P. 78.
- ↑ It can no longer be said with certainty whether Raimund meant the hermitage near Mödling or wanted to describe his home in Vienna
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. First part. S. LXXIX.
- ^ Kahl: Ferdinand Raimund , p. 83.
- ↑ Facsimile of the theater slip in Hadamowsky: Ferdinand Raimund, Volume II, p. 306.
- ↑ Dlle. or Dem. is the abbreviation for Demoiselle (= Fräulein), the name used to describe the unmarried women of an ensemble; the married actresses were titled Mad. (Madame)
- ↑ Rattenkönig = in the figurative sense an inextricable conglomerate
- ^ Prince: Raimund's works. First part. S. LXXV, LXXIX.
- ^ Kahl: Ferdinand Raimund , pp. 22, 79-80.
- ^ Hadamowsky: Ferdinand Raimund. Volume I, pp. 102-103.
- ↑ Hein / Meyer: Ferdinand Raimund, the theater maker at the Vienna. Pp. 67-69.
