Voltaire on the evening of his apotheosis

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Voltaire on the evening of his apotheosis is a play in one act by Heinrich Leopold Wagner . Using a satirically exaggerated representation of Voltaire , Wagner presents his critical attitude towards the Enlightenment and the French theater tradition, which is typical of the movement of the Sturm und Drang .

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Voltaire , who had spent many years of his life in exile, returned to Paris in February 1778 to attend the premiere of his drama Irène . The action begins the evening after the premiere in Voltaire's bedroom: Voltaire enters with a laurel wreath and is happy about the many honors and tributes that have been paid to him. He believes that he can now die in peace. His servant, who is 15 years older than him and was his wet nurse as a child , can hardly tear him out of his daydreams. Speaking to the audience, she expresses her annoyance at Voltaire's lust for fame and vanity, then she has to listen to his detailed account of the great success of the performance and the eulogies given to him.

Voltaire wishes he could travel into the next century for a moment to enjoy the magnitude of his fame among those born after. The nurse then decides to grant him this wish and conjures up a spirit: the genius of the nineteenth century. Voltaire is frightened at first, but then dares to ask the ghost about his fame. The spirit gives him an encyclopedia of 18th century French literature that will appear in 1875 (about a century later). Voltaire is only allowed to read the article about himself and learns how disparaging posterity judges him: he is a “prolific writer” who considers himself a “well-informed”, but who has not made it far in either philosophy or history have. Only his Traité sur la tolérance (treatise on tolerance) is of some value. In the theater, too, he was only successful, “as long as one looked more at delicately twisted melodious verses than at the plan, plot and purpose”. For his criticism of great poets such as Corneille , Rousseau and Shakespeare "he had to atone even in his lifetime". Then the article describes the day that Voltaire has just experienced and presents the honorary testimonies as "jugglery" and "palpable satires" with which the "childish" poet and his "lustful lust for fame" were mocked. With a premonition of death on his lips, the book falls from his hands.

Publication history

The piece was published in 1778 with the fake title addition from the French , but is actually not a translation, but an original poem by Wagner. In 1881 the GJ Göschen'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung published a new edition, edited by Bernhard Seuffert in his series German Literature Monuments of the 18th Century .

reception

In his foreword to the 1881 edition, Seuffert placed the play in the context of contemporary German reception of Voltaire: While Lessing and Wieland, for example, made more differentiated judgments about him, all authors of the Sturm-und-Drang generation flatly rejected Voltaire, including Wagner: “Of course, Wagner overshot the mark; he was as blindly unfair as his close friends. ”Wagner was also influenced by the other strikers and pushers in the use of the dramatic form for the satire; Seuffert mentions Goethe's annual fair at Plundersweilern as an example .

The Germanist Erich Schmidt judges in his Wagner monograph that he does not want to "deny the farce, despite its bad prophecy and some cynicisms, an aristophanic , but nevertheless truly funny, structure and implementation , as eulogists want ."

And in a biographical article on Wagner he adds:

“Tactless, but not unreasonable, W. last had Voltaire's last stay in Paris in 1778, the portrayal of“ Irene ”, the tearing apart of his fame by the genius of the nineteenth century and his death in long monologues and in comic scenes between whom all young German geniuses hated Old man and his nurse hitched: "Voltaire on the evening of his apotheosis". "

- General German biography, 1896

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This and all of the following quotations from: Heinrich Leopold Wagner: Voltaire on the evening of his apotheosis. In: Comedies and satires of Sturm und Drang. Ed. V. Wolfgang Stellmacher. Leipzig: Reclam 1976, pp. 401-417.
  2. ^ Foreword in: Heinrich Leopold Wagner: Voltaire on the evening of his apotheosis. Edited by Bernhard Seuffert. Stuttgart: Göschen 1881, p. VIII. Digitized at yumpu.com
  3. ↑ Erich Schmidt: Heinrich Leopold Wagner. Goethe's youth comrade. Second completely redesigned. Jena: Frommann 1879, p. 115. Digital copy from HAAB Weimar
  4. ↑ Article "Wagner, Heinrich Leopold" by Erich Schmidt in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, published by the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Volume 40 (1896), pp. 502-506, digital full-text edition in Wikisource