Folk piece
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The Volksstück is a theater piece aimed at a wide audience (originally the "common people " of the 18th century). It is an alternative to the comedies in the baroque court theater and a counterpart to the bourgeois tragedy .
The prerequisite for the folk play is the literarization of the folk theater as a replacement for the impromptu play . All actors had to be able to read in order to learn their roles. This had been the case since around 1700 (see Deutsche Wanderbühne ). The old Viennese folk piece was created at the beginning of the 18th century in suburban theaters in Vienna ; there were other characteristic forms in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin since the beginning of the 19th century.
genus
The Volksstück is a genre of theater pieces for non-courtly, mostly private-sector theaters such as the Vienna suburb theaters and later the Königsstädtische Theater Berlin. His action is mostly taken from petty bourgeois everyday life. It contains music, song, dance and impressive technical effects.
Since the Paris fair theater , the folk play has tended to be rebellious or socially critical because it had to assert itself against the theater privileges of the court stages in order to offer education and entertainment to those who had no access there. The demand for justice and the rebellion against injustice was one of the areas of tension in which the members of the Third Estate (and later the "little man") moved and which they made from the originally ridiculous figure to the comic or tragicomic hero of the popular play (see Funny person ).
The folk play is not improvised like the impromptu comedy , but fixed literarily. It is usually kept in dialect and provided with local allusions.
The folk play is mostly delimited from the peasant theater (folk drama or village comedy and peasant vacillations ) in the style of the later 19th century. In literary and theater studies, the term “folk play” tends to mean the non-court, private theater productions between around 1780 and 1850 and their reminiscences in the subsidized drama of the 20th century.
history
Origins
The German-language folk piece begins with the main and state actions that have been set in writing since the end of the 17th century.
Originally, the folk piece includes all theater pieces that could not be assigned to tragedy in the sense of French classical music , serious opera ( opera seria , tragédie lyrique ) or court ballet , i.e. in which no aristocratic figures appear in leading roles. Thus, the repertoire is divided into the coarser comedies, which were called antics , the pantomimes as a danced form of the commedia dell'arte and the serious, often moralizing and ostensibly religious morality or reforms . The metropolitan melodramas were added around 1800 . The crude parodies and travesties of courtly plays also belong to the folk plays. At the center of the earlier folk plays are often comical characters such as the Hanswurst .
In the German-speaking cities, of which Vienna was the largest, the theater, which did not take place in the courtyards , began to move from the markets and stalls to permanent theater buildings in the course of the 18th century . This was in the interest of the censorship , which was able to observe the cultural events better. Josef Anton Stranitzky played for example the Kärntnertortheater . The theater genre known today as the “ Old Viennese People's Theater ” emerged, for example with the works of Philipp Hafner .
Old Viennese Volkstheater
In the course of the Josephine reforms , licenses for three private suburban theaters in Vienna have been granted since the 1770s : the Theater in Freihaus auf der Wieden , the Theater in der Josefstadt and the Theater in Leopoldstadt under Karl von Marinelli . The Austrian tradition of “reform from above” tried to avert the threats posed by the French Revolution by making the aristocracy look after the “people” and providing them with entertainment. So that there was no improvisation, which would have given the political agitation space, the plays had to be submitted in writing for review before the premiere.
The productions there were called "Alt-Wiener Volkskomödie" by the theater scholar Otto Rommel . Due to the official censorship, the social criticism on the stage was always tight, and the fun comedy or the naive magic game prevailed. According to Rommel, with the authors Karl Meisl , Adolf Bäuerle and Josef Alois, this form of theater reached a climax right after the wars of liberation at the beginning of the 19th century and, with Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy, reached an end in the middle of the century. The texts of these pieces spread throughout the German-speaking area, which had no center comparable to Paris . In Berlin emerged from 1824 with the royal theater , for which Louis Angely or Karl von Holtei wrote popular plays, a parallel tradition.
Melodrama
The serious folk plays with crime, horror and adventure material ( melodramas ), which were extremely popular, were rather kept secret by literary studies . Most of them came from the Parisian Boulevard du Temple and spread across Europe like The Dog of Aubry . German translations or new creations were, for example, Zacharias Werner's The Twenty-Fourth February , Karl von Holteis Lenore , the life pictures of Friedrich Kaiser or Ernst Raupach's show piece The Miller and his Child .
Ideal and reality around 1850
The expression “Volksstück” appears frequently in theater reviews after the March Revolution of 1848 and describes something that has gone down, something that has been sorely missed, that is, more of an ideal than historical reality. In the course of urbanization after the middle of the century, theater life changed significantly. The three Viennese suburban theaters had become noble houses, the entrance fees of which were no longer affordable for the "people", so that it switched to newer theaters such as the Fürst-Theater in the Vienna Prater , where not the ancient folk play, but the modern music hall - like attractions were offered.
Otto Rommel's view was still strongly shaped by a transfigured image of popular theater that the International Exhibition of Music and Theater had drawn in the Vienna Rotunda in 1892 and which in many ways did not correspond to historical reality, but had a considerable influence. The author Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn had drawn an ideal type of “folk” theater with great media impact, which was explicitly directed against current tendencies, namely against operettas , against Czech influences and against cultural Jewish emancipation ( Vienna was a theater city, 1880). The success of his militant conservatism led to the establishment of new theaters such as the Raimundtheater and the Kaiserjubiläums-Stadttheater (today's Volksoper ), in which the popular play was to be cultivated again.
Today's popular theater research deals with this complex ideological context, which had its parallels in other German-speaking cities. The commercial character of the early folk play, for example, has often been concealed in order to enhance it. The fact that the alleged naivety was related to the demands of the censorship was also cloaked. In addition, the originality and literary value of the folk piece were overemphasized, although it often focused on musical, dance or stage-related attractions and it was often translated from French models without significant changes. In addition, it is a task of research to reveal the rivalries between the nobility and the bourgeoisie that were covered up after 1848.
Ludwig Anzengruber
Ludwig Anzengruber's (1839–1889) realistic folk piece emerged more from melodrama than from farce. At the end of the 19th century it presented both a rural environment and its social problems. At a time when the Viennese folk play was adapting to newer forms of theater such as operetta and vaudeville and new event settings such as the Singspielhallen , Anzengruber was portrayed as the innovator of a “serious” folk play. He is considered the creator and master of realistic Austrian folk plays in a rural setting.
Anzengruber's stage poems differ from those of Raimund and Nestroy through the deeper emotional conflict, through the precise depiction of social and historical circumstances, and through realistic features in the design of his characters. He also gives the popular play a tragic end and thus violates the class clause . He is the accuser of social injustices and a champion of freedom, advocates true morality, true piety, true humanity and tolerance. With the drama The Fourth Commandment Anzengruber had reached the climax of his work. The following year he received the Schiller Prize (1878), but the real recognition of his dramatic works only came when he was seen as a pioneer of naturalism .
20th century
While the Bavarian folk play ( Ludwig Thoma ) leans more towards the peasant genre , Karl Schönherr's psychological peasant play can only be described in the broadest sense as a folk play. The modern boulevard play is hardly considered a popular play either .
Bertolt Brecht and Ödön von Horváth , but also Marieluise Fleißer and Carl Zuckmayer , later about Franz Xaver Kroetz, tried to revive the folk piece with new focuses in the 20th century. The social and political changes after the First World War required a new way of dealing with the term “people”.
These authors turned their attention increasingly to topics such as social alienation or the lack of communication and speech among citizens. In doing so, they fought against a more popular type of folk piece (as represented by Karl Schönherr, for example) that used the stylistic devices of naturalism to mythise the countryside with archaic folk figures, which was in keeping with the blood-and-soil ideology of the 1930s .
Quotes
“The folk play is usually crude and undemanding theater (...) There are rough jokes mixed with sentimentality, there is outrageous morality and cheap sexuality. The wicked are punished and the good are married, the hardworking inherit, and the lazy are left behind. The technique of the playwrights is pretty international (...) To play in the plays, you just have to be able to speak unnaturally and behave on stage with simple vanity. "
“In the meantime, the folk play has grown new forces (...) The folk play turns into an anti-folk play. (...) The old folk play figures, the juicy splendid guy, the stupid daughter, the hypocritical honors can be recognized as in a fearful dream. (...) The new security that is presented there explodes and reveals itself as a small hell. The ideal world, about which ideology rattles, with the wrought-iron figurehead of the White Lamb and the gable roof made of fairy tale illustrations, is that of complete calamity, the national community is the struggle of all against all. "
literature
- Otto Rommel: The old Viennese folk comedy: its story from the baroque world theater to Nestroy's death , Vienna: Schroll 1952.
- Hugo Aust, Peter Haida, Jürgen Hein: Volksstück. From Hanswurstspiel to contemporary social drama , Munich: Beck 1996. ISBN 3-406-33606-X