Semele (Schiller)

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Data
Title: Semele
Genus: play
Original language: German
Author: Friedrich Schiller
Publishing year: 1782
Premiere: November 10, 1900
Place of premiere: Schauspielhaus Berlin , Berlin
Place and time of the action: The setting is the palace of the Semele at Thebes
people
  • Juno
  • Zeus
  • Semele. Princess of Thebes
  • Mercury

Semele. A lyric operetta of two scenes. is a Singspiel by Friedrich Schiller . It was published in the Muses-Almanac anthology for the year 1782 . Based on a pirated print from 1800, Schiller edited the piece, but moved away from a new publication. After his death, the friend and patron published Christian Gottfried Körner the revised version in 1807 in the fifth volume of the series Theater of Schiller in Cotta-Verlag .

The template for the work is the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses . The jealous Juno , in the form of Nurse Beroe, persuades the Theban king's daughter Semele to meet her lover. After Zeus fulfills the wish of his beloved to see him, she is instantly destroyed by his shine.

content

1st scene

Juno wants revenge on Semele, the lover of her husband Zeus. For this she takes the form of the nurse Beroe. Semele is supposed to experience Zeus' true form in order to make sure that her lover is really the father of gods. Semele agrees and says that the god also mocks his wife's jealousy. Finally the princess makes fun of the apparently absent wife and presumes to mock the gods.

2nd scene

The amorous Zeus orders his son Hermes to thank the Greeks for their offerings with a rich harvest. When he meets Semele, she accuses him of cheating. Although Zeus conjures up a rainbow and accelerates the change from day to night, Semele remains unaffected. After she had elicited a wish from Zeus as well as its unconditional fulfillment; the god swore by the river Styx , she invites him to show himself. Zeus complies with the request.

reception

Schiller himself rejected the work in a letter to his future wife Charlotte von Schiller in 1789 : “That you mentioned Semele really frightened me. May I`s Apollo and his nine muses forgive me for having sinned so grossly against them! "Originally Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg should have set the piece to music. Johann Andreas Streicher wrote a memoir in his writing Schiller's Flight from Stuttgart to Mannheim and Stay in Mannheim from 1782-1785 , in which he regarded Schiller's Semele as unperformable because of the technical possibilities of the theater. In 1887 Franz Curti set the libretto to music.

The following authors partly adopted Schiller's negative assessment. Gustav Schwab assessed Schiller's refusal to include the operetta Semele in the edition of his dramas as a consequence of an aesthetic maturity. In his work Friedrich Schiller as a person, historian, thinker and poet , the journalist Karl Grün said: "The whole thing is definitely a freak, grown together from a Greek statue and a Schiller face, inedible and deterring." The biographer Peter- André Alt : “Even if the text is supported by a dramaturgically simple basic structure, it still has its artistic charm. Schiller succeeds in stamping his own signature on the mythical material. [...] With Semele , the young Schiller has presented his first literary masterpiece, which pushes the other works of the anthology into the background. ”Günter Oesterle sees Schiller's subsequent rejection as being based on his turn to classical music.

The premiere at the Königliches Schauspielhaus Berlin met with a good response. According to Richard von Kralik , however, it was only a respectable success.

literature

Text output

  • Friedrich Schiller: Theater by Schiller. Volume 5 . Cotta, 1807, pp. 389-420.
  • Friedrich Schiller: Semele . In: Schiller. Works in three volumes. Vol . 2 . Hanser, Munich 1966, pp. 1033-1052.

Secondary literature

  • Ludwig Finscher: What is a lyric operret? Notes on Schiller's "Semele" . In: (Ed.) Achim Aurnhammer: Schiller and the courtly world. Gruyter, Tübingen 1990, ISBN 3-484-10649-2 , pp. 152-155.
  • Ingo Müller: Dramatic intrigue and musical presence. On the question of the intermediality of Friedrich Schiller's "lyrical operetta" "Semele" . In: (Ed.) Wilfried Barner: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society. International organ for modern German literature. Volume 57. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1322-4 , pp. 75-104.
  • Günter Oesterle: Exaltations of nature. Friedrich Schiller's "Semele" as the poetics of deadly ecstasy. In: Georg Braungart (Hrsg.): Schiller's nature, life, thinking and literary work . Meiner, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-7873-1770-8 , pp. 209-220.
  • Karl Pestalozzi: Poetry as a hidden theology in the 18th century. Lavater's religious drama "Abraham and Isaak" and Schiller's operetta "Semele" . Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-029448-4 .

Web links

Wikisource: Semele  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. See Peter-André Alt: Schiller. A biography. In: CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58681-1 , p. 236.
  2. Schiller: Letters to Charlotte von Lengfeld, Weimar April 50, 1789 In: Heinrich Doering (Hrsg.) Friedrich von Schiller`s selected letters in the years 1781-1805 . Jena 1834, p. 117.
  3. Cf. Gustav Schwab: Schiller's life in three books . SG Liesching, Stuttgart 1840. p. 91.
  4. Karl Grün: Friedrich Schiller as a person, historian, thinker and poet . In: Brockhaus, Leipzig 1844, p. 497.
  5. ^ Peter-André Alt: Schiller. A biography. In: CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58681-1 , p. 238.
  6. See Günter Oesterle: Exaltations of Nature. Friedrich Schiller's "Semele" as the poetics of deadly ecstasy. In: Georg Braungart (Hrsg.): Schiller's nature, life, thinking and literary work . Meiner, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-7873-1770-8 , p. 220.
  7. See Peter-André Alt: Schiller. A biography. In: CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58681-1 , p. 237.