Stirring piece
The Rührstück is a play that is supposed to move the audience to tears.
Historical environment
Since the death of the Sun King in 1715, there has been a counter-movement to the rationalist state order of absolutism , which saw its salvation in pure feeling instead of superficial, calculating reason ( sensitivity ). The severity of the baroque era gave way to the emotionally stressed Rococo . An important theoretician of this trend was Jean-Baptiste Dubos . One generation later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau became a kind of media figure of the 18th century with his educational novel Emile or through education . This zeitgeist gave rise to the stirring piece as a "semi-serious" genre between tragedy and comedy .
The so-called class clause kept the tragedy in 17./18. Century before the aristocrats . The citizens could only be funny characters . This was a nuisance in the course of bourgeois emancipation in the second half of the 18th century. Ways were therefore sought to allow bourgeois protagonists to appear in serious plays and to take their fate seriously. This led to the rococo custom of crying together in the theater, which was intended to bridge the class boundaries within the audience.
theory
The French philosopher Denis Diderot developed a theory of the stirring piece, but he was unable to assert himself with his own plays. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing took up his suggestions and tried to create a bourgeois version of the tragedy (e.g. Emilia Galotti , 1772). The decisive factor for the stirring piece is that the destructive nature of all passions should not be denounced or laughed at in the old sense (see Vanitas ), but the constructive nature of certain passions, especially sensual love and the striving for social emancipation . So the stirring piece could either lead in the direction of a Christian ethic of compassion , which masked its appreciation of the sensual, or emotionally glorify the political-social solidarity .
Examples
The popular stirring piece, which is sometimes distinguished from an upscale " touching comedy ", has always been viewed with a certain disdain. Probably the most famous, once despised and popular stirring piece is August von Kotzebue's hatred and remorse (1789). In the German-speaking area, along with many other authors, August Wilhelm Iffland and later Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer or Karl von Holtei became known for stirring pieces.
Singing or melodramatic music play an important role in many stirring pieces . The opera comique and other rather sentimental genres of popular theater are related to the stirring play, such as the reformatory play , which experienced a final climax in the dramas by Ferdinand Raimund (for example, Der Verschwender , 1834). The Viennese operetta also continues the traditions of the stirring piece (for example, Der Zarewitsch , 1927).
A modern variant of the stirring piece is the melodrama that has developed since the French Revolution (for example The Orphan and the Murderer , 1816). - Since the 20th century there has been a need, especially in the cinema, to cry over fictional fates.
literature
- Birgit Pargner: Between tears and commerce. The stirring theater Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffers (1800-1868) in its artistic and commercial exploitation . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 1999. ISBN 3-89528-222-7
- Volker Corsten: Of hot tears and great feelings. Functions of the melodrama in the "cleaned" theater of the 18th century. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999. ISBN 3-631-34974-2
- Lothar Fietz: On the genesis of the English melodrama from the stirring piece and the bourgeois tragedy: Lillo, Schröder, Kotzebue, Sheridan, Thompson, Jerrold . In: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 65, 1991, pp. 99–116
