Karl Engel (musician)

Karl Dietrich Leonhard Engel (born February 21, 1824 in Oldenburg ; † beginning of February 1913 in Berlin-Adlershof ) was a German musician and, as a private scholar, an important connoisseur and collector of Faust literature.

Life

Karl Engel received training as a violinist and in 1843 came to the chapel of Prince Narischkin in the Ryazan governorate as a soloist and lead violinist . Four years later he became a member of the Imperial Russian Band in the capital Saint Petersburg .

After seeing the performance of a work about the Polish legendary figure Pan Twardowski , which was very similar to Faust, in Petersburg in 1856 , as well as a Faust puppet show and then in 1856/57 Klingemann's drama Faust in Russian, Engel became increasingly interested in the figure of Faust. After his retirement in 1860, Engel returned to Oldenburg with the title of Imperial Russian Concertmaster, where he lived with interruptions until 1869. In Oldenburg he then made connections with puppeteers, acquired or copied original playbooks. In 1865 and 1867 he organized staged performances of the Faust puppet show, in which members of the Oldenburg Artists' Association had to move in the manner of marionettes. At the end of 1869 Engel moved to Dresden. From 1904 until his death in early February 1913 he lived with his son Leopold in Berlin-Adlershof .

Between 1874 and 1879 and then again from 1890 to 1892 Engel published a series of twelve monographs on puppet theater under the series title German Puppet Comedies. In 1874 he published the first edition of his Bibliotheca Faustiana. The literature of the Faustsage from 1510 to the middle of 1873 , in which he systematically and chronologically collected all known and literary publications with the Faustsage. The second edition, published in 1885, continued this bibliography until 1884. In 1877 Engel published a reprint of Paul Weidmann's allegorical Faust drama from 1775, the first German art drama based on Faust . A reference to Lessing as the alleged author of this drama led to numerous, sometimes polemical, discussions, especially by the Heidelberg philosopher Kuno Fischer . In 1882 the second edition of the Volksschauspiel Doctor Johann Faust appeared with an introduction to the historical figure and a comprehensive history of the stage. In 1887, Engel published the first three-hundred-year book of Faust from 1587 to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the oldest Faust book . The centenary of the world premiere of Mozart's Don Juan in the same year led to a larger bibliographic work. In addition, Engel gave regular lectures in magazines about new publications on the Faust theme.

literature

• Gerhard Stumme: My Faust Collection. Edited by Hans Henning . Weimar 1957 (annual edition of the National Research and Memorial Centers for Classical German Literature in Weimar ), chap. Acquaintance with important Faust collectors , pp. 33–35.

Web links

• Works by and about Karl Dietrich Leonhard Engel in the catalog of the German National Library