Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) is generally considered to be Austria's greatest playwright. His plays are well-written dramas of sentiment and psychological conflict, which often express a resigned attitude toward the problems of life.

At the beginning of the 19th century Austrian literature was not very far advanced in comparison with the literature of northern and western Germany. This may be attributed in part to the strictness of state censorship and a reluctance to support or encourage talented writers. Whatever the reasons, Austrian literature had remained largely unaffected by such developments as the Enlightenment or philosophical romanticism. The Austrian stage tended toward popular farces or old-fashioned bombastic tragedies. Although Franz Grillparzer was not without some talented predecessors in the Austrian drama, he was the first Austrian playwright fully to assimilate contemporaneous developments in German literature and to write plays equal to those being written in Germany itself.

Grillparzer was born in Vienna on Jan. 15, 1791. His father was an unsuccessful lawyer whose fortunes were ruined by Napoleon's invasion, and his mother came from the Viennese upper bourgeoisie. Franz studied law at the University of Vienna from 1807 to 1811. He became a government official in 1813 and eventually became imperial librarian. He was to remain in the state employment throughout his literary career, a fact which complicated his relationship to the government censors.

Grillparzer is said to have been generally unimpressive in personality and appearance. His quiet manner, however, served to conceal a number of inner conflicts, some of which were thought to originate in a disinclination to assert his will. His customary response to serious problems in life was generally an attitude of submission or resignation, rather than any decision to challenge the situation.

Career as a Dramatist

The theme of moral helplessness and the necessity for submission to fate can be noted in Grillparzer's first successful drama, Die Ahnfrau (1817; The Ancestress). He had earlier written a derivative tragedy, Blanka von Kastilien, which had never been staged, but the first performance of his Ahnfrau produced an immediate success. The "Ancestress" is a castle ghost who represents a curse on the Borotin family. Jaromir (who, unknown even to himself, is the son of old Count Borotin) returns to the family castle as an outlaw, kills his father, commits incest with his sister, and brings about her death and his own. In the end the curse is thus fulfilled, but it is also terminated with the extinction of the family, and the spirit of the Ancestress is permitted to rest at last. The dominant theme of the play is the helplessness of individuals before the evil forces of destiny. Although it was strongly influenced by the German Schicksalstragödie (fate-tragedy) of Zacharias Werner and his followers, the general effect of Grillparzer's play is one of freshness and originality.

Following his initial success, Grillparzer wrote Sappho (1818), which concerns the Greek poetess's renunciation of human love, and the ambitious trilogy, Das goldne Vliess (1820; The Golden Fleece). This trilogy retells the Greek story of Jason, who voyages to Colchis and returns with both the magical golden fleece and the barbarian queen, Medea. Medea proves socially unacceptable in Greece, however, and Jason is finally estranged from her. But Medea avenges herself by burning down the palace where she is staying and killing her children to spite their father. In the concluding scene she lectures Jason on the futility of human life. Like many of Grillparzer's works, this trilogy reflects the author's attitude of helplessness toward fate.

Grillparzer's success led to his appointment as court dramatist. His next play, however, which dealt with sensitive matters of Austrian history, created difficulties with the censors. König Ottokars Glück und Ende (King Ottokar's Fortune and End) was finally performed in 1825. Ottokar, the medieval king of Bohemia, had dreams of great conquests but was finally undone by destiny and Rudolf von Hapsburg, founder of the Austrian imperial dynasty. Ottokar is shown as a Napoleonic character whose pride is the ultimate cause of his fall.

In 1826 Grillparzer traveled to Germany, where he met the poet J. W. von Goethe in Weimar. On returning to Vienna he continued to write plays, of which the most important are Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831; The Waves of Love and the Sea), a retelling of the classical love story of Hero and Leander, and Der Traum ein Leben (1834, The Dream as a Life), inspired by the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón. An ambitious young man has a dream in which hollow success is followed by disaster, and this persuades him to stay at home. In the conclusion he declares: "There is only one happiness in this life, calm inner peace and a heart free of guilt. Greatness is dangerous, and fame is an empty play."

Later Years

Grillparzer's last play to be performed was the comedy Weh dem, der lügt (1838; Woe to Him Who Lies). Although now recognized as a good play, it was then a complete failure. Embittered, the author withdrew from the scene as an active playwright. In his remaining years he wrote only three plays, which were not published until after his death. One of these, Libussa, was a mythical drama about the founding of Prague. Other literary works of his later life are two short stories and essays in dramatic theory and criticism, especially on the Spanish theater. Throughout his life Grillparzer also composed several volumes of lyric poetry.

The final years of Grillparzer's life remained outwardly uneventful. Although long engaged, he never married. He traveled to Greece in 1843 and revisited Germany in 1847. He remained a librarian until 1856, when he was retired on a pension. Toward the end of his life he gained some measure of recognition as a major dramatist. He died in Vienna on Jan. 21, 1872.

Further Reading

The best general study of Grillparzer is Douglas Yates, Franz Grillparzer: A Critical Biography (1946). Edward John Williamson, Grillparzer's Attitude towards Romanticism (1910), places him in the context of intellectual history, while Gustav Pollak, Franz Grillparzer and the Austrian Drama (1907), views him against the background of his national literary traditions. A more specialized study, concentrating on Libussa, is Gisela Stein, The Inspiration Motif in the Works of Franz Grillparzer (1955). An interesting experiment in comparative literature is Norbert Fuerst, The Victorian Age of German Literature: Eight Essays (1966), which compares Grillparzer's period with the English literature of his time.

Additional Sources

Fink, Humbert, Franz Grillparzer, Innsbruck: Pinguin, 1990.

For more information on Franz Grillparzer, visit Britannica.com.

Grillparzer, Franz (Vienna, 1791-1872, Vienna), the son of a lawyer, studied law at Vienna University, graduating with distinction in 1811. His father's death in 1809 imposed family responsibilities, which he faithfully performed. He is thought to have derived his literary gift from his mother's side, the Sonnleithner family (see Sonnleithner, J.). For a time he held an unpaid post in the Court (now National) Library (see Libraries). In 1814 he began a career in the civil service, becoming greatly indebted to the sympathetic support of Count Stadion who, as finance minister, promoted him in 1823 to a post (Ministerialkonzipist) which made Grillparzer virtually his personal assistant and enabled him to look after Grillparzer's interest more effectively. This happy relationship, emphatically acknowledged by Grillparzer in his autobiography, ended with Stadion's death in the following year. In 1832 Grillparzer became director of the Hofkammerarchiv, but his heart was never in his work. He would have preferred a library appointment, which he failed to obtain in 1834 at the University Library, and in 1844 at the Court Library, when F. Halm was the successful candidate. Grillparzer resigned in 1856. In spite of some patriotic verse and poetic compliments to the imperial family, Grillparzer's relationship with the court was always uneasy. A poem written in Italy, Die Ruinen des Campo vaccino in Rom (1819), was judged by the Emperor Franz (see Franz II) to be an offence against the Catholic Church. Grillparzer, however, owed the production of his first historical play to the intervention of Franz's consort, the Empress Caroline Augusta. He never abandoned his devotion to the House of Habsburg or his belief in the divine sanction of monarchy. He expressed it in the year of crisis (see Revolutionen 1848-9) by composing a fervent patriotic poem, Feldmarschall Radetzky, but he nevertheless held liberal views. In 1861 he became a member of the new Herrenhaus (Upper House), and voted in 1868 against the Concordat with Rome.

The tragedies in his family and the complex story of his relations with women intensified Grillparzer's hypochondria and prolonged periods of depression. In 1819 his mother, to whom he was devoted, committed suicide. His brother Adolf drowned himself at the age of 17, and his brother Karl gave himself up to the police for a murder he had not committed. From his youth, Grillparzer was torn between fulfilment in love and an all-absorbing devotion to his creative impulses. His first love was for Lotte Pichler in 1817. For some years he loved Charlotte von Paumgartten, who had married his cousin, a high-ranking civil servant, in 1818. In 1822 he discovered that he had been the object of the passionate love of Marie von Piquot (1798-1822). The enigmatic beauty and youth of Marie von Smolenitz kindled another passion which persisted after her marriage to M. M. Daffinger. His relationship with Katharina (Kathi) Fröhlich (1800-79), one of a quartet of musical sisters, whom he had first met in the winter of 1820-1, resulted in an engagement. But he was too certain of her devotion, of the likeness of their temperaments, and of his own vocation, to bring himself to the point of marriage. From 1826 he lived, except for the years 1830-49, in a house in the Spiegelgasse in which the Fröhlich sisters had their home. Kathi, the ewige Braut, as she is often called, cared for him until his death and was his literary executor.

Grillparzer owed his first success on the Viennese stage to J. Schreyvogel, who was in charge of the Burgtheater; persuaded by his friend J. L. Deinhardstein, he had published a sample of Calderón's La vida es sueño in German trochaic verse. Schreyvogel, who read it, recognized his unusual talent, and gave him encouragement. The one-act comedy Die Schreibfeder was completed in 1808-9, and a similar play, Wer ist schuldig?, in 1811. In 1810 Blanka von Kastilien, a tragedy influenced by Schiller's Don Carlos, was rejected for performance, but Die Ahnfrau (1817) was an immediate fashionable success. He was resolved, however, not to write another fate-tragedy (see Schicksalstragödie). The influence on his next play was Goethe's Torquato Tasso. Notwithstanding his personal identification with Tasso, Grillparzer succeeded in giving Sappho (1819) his own, distinct signature. The play earned him the status of Theaterdichter of the Burgtheater. He wrote two more classical tragedies, the trilogy Das goldene Vließ (performed in 1821 and published in 1822), and Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (completed in 1829 and published in 1840), a treatment of the tale of Hero and Leander. The dedication to the trilogy, Zueignung an Desdemona, refers to Charlotte von Paumgartten, who died in 1827. Both plays proved too demanding for the Viennese public; in both, Grillparzer demonstrated his reaction against Weimar classicism. He detected in himself a kinship with Schopenhauer long before the latter's influence upon men of letters became clearly discernible. Grillparzer's presentation of the destructive dualism within man was a firmly established feature of his portrayal of character. It is balanced by variations on the Greek concept of fate, and of gods who represent an absolute ideal of justice tempered by neither love nor hatred. This, his own observation, explains his critical response to Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris. His idea of writing a second part to Goethe's Faust I, first contemplated c.1811, materialized only in a brief scene (1813, Waldgegend). The ideas went into other plays as diverse as Sappho and Der Traum ein Leben (completed in 1831-2 and published in 1839).

Grillparzer turned to patriotic drama in König Ottokars Glück und Ende (written in 1823, performed and published in 1825). The shift of emphasis from hubris towards human fallibility, and from ruler to servant, is a distinguishing feature of the tragedy Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn (completed in 1826 and published in 1830), which shows the influence of Lope de Vega (1562-1635); Grillparzer sought to reconcile the conflicting forces of body and mind. His fragment Hannibal und Scipio (published in Album under the title Hannibal in 1838, performed in 1869) was in part provoked by his dislike of Grabbe's tragedy Hannibal. In the late 1840s and the early 1850s he completed Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg, Libussa, and Die Jüdin von Toledo, but withheld them from publication. Among other historical projects Esther stands out. The fragment was published in Dichteralbum (ed. E. Kuh) in 1862 and performed in 1868.

Like most Viennese, Grillparzer had a great interest in the Viennese Volksstück as well as the Singspiel. Seelenmusik was his own description of Mozart's opera Figaros Hochzeit. The idea of writing for opera had begun with Sappho, and in 1823 he wrote Melusina as a libretto for Beethoven. He was not discouraged when it was not set to music; the contact with the admired composer sufficed, and his sense of affinity with Beethoven's individuality grew almost to the point of self-identification. He last met Beethoven in 1826, more than twenty years after their first acquaintance. Der Traum ein Leben was Grillparzer's closest approach to the Volksstück. His comedy Weh dem, der lügt! (1838) failed signally at its first performance on 6 March 1838. For Grillparzer, who, though proof against malicious attacks in the press, was sensitive to the judgement of the theatre-going public, this failure was decisive, and he turned his back on the theatre. Thirteen years later H. Laube reintroduced Grillparzer's plays to the Burgtheater.

Grillparzer wrote two Novellen, Das Kloster bei Sendomir (published in Aglaja in 1828) and Der arme Spielmann (published in Iris in 1848). The element of irony which this work contains was already evident in 1808 in a fragment called Das Narrennest.

Grillparzer's poetry covers a wide range. He had a gift for graceful occasional poetry and for the formulation of epigrams. Abschied von Gastein (1818) and Entsagung (written in Paris in 1836) open a selection of the 1840s. The cycle Tristia ex Ponto, containing 17 poems, was published in Vesta in 1835. In Die Schwestern (1836) Grillparzer laments the deterioration of German literary style, the two sisters being ‘Prosa’ and ‘Poesie’.

Grillparzer wrote extensively on his travels to Italy (1819), and France and England (1836), and to Greece and Turkey (1843). His diary complements his essays on aesthetics. His Selbstbiographie, written in 1853-4, covers his life up to 1836. His poem An die Sammlung (1833) expresses the need for prolonged periods of complete seclusion communing with the creations of his imagination. He had contacts with many Viennese writers, musicians, and artists, among them Bauernfeld, F. Schubert, who set to music Grillparzer's ‘Berthas Lied in der Nacht’ (1819), Raimund, the singer J. N. Vogl, and M. von Schwind. Grillparzer's tour of Germany in 1826 culminated in three meetings with Goethe in Weimar, at the end of September and on 1 and 2 October. The last of these was terminated abruptly as a result of Grillparzer's inborn shyness. Grillparzer was a founder member of the Austrian Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1847, and from 1856 bore the honorary title Hofrat in recognition of his services. Five years after the separation of Austria from Germany, the Empress Augusta of the new German Empire honoured him on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

In 1872 H. Laube and J. Weilen edited Grillparzer's collected works; Laube also wrote a biography, Franz Grillparzers Lebensgeschichte (1884). (See also Paoli, Betty.) Sämtliche Werke, historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by A. Sauer and R. Backmann, 42 vols., was published between 1909 and 1948. Werke (4 vols.), ed. P. Frank and K. Pörnbacher, appeared 1960-5. Grillparzer is the subject of a Novelle, Grillparzers letzter Ausgang (in Unsterbliche, 1919), and of the play Gewitter im Vormärz (1943), both by R. Hohlbaum, and of novels by J. A. Lux, Grillparzers Liebesroman. Die Schwestern Fröhlich, and F. Schreyvogl, Sein Leben ein Traum (1937, the new title of Grillparzer, a novel published in 1935).

(fränts grĭl'pärtsər) , 1791–1872, Austrian dramatist. His work combines German classicism and exuberant lyricism. Considered Austria's greatest playwright, he wrote Der Traum: ein Leben (1817–34, tr. A Dream is Life, 1946), which influenced Hauptmann and Maeterlinck; a trilogy, Das goldene Vliess (1822, tr. The Guest-Friend, The Argonauts, Medea, 1942); the historical tragedy König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825, tr. King Ottocar, His Rise and Fall, 1938); the lyric tragedy Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831, tr. Hero and Leander, 1938); Libussa (1844, tr. 1941); and Die Jüdin von Toledo (1855, tr. The Jewess of Toledo, 1953). Grillparzer was also a master of lyric poetry and prose. His finely wrought novella, Der arme Spielmann (1844, tr. The Poor Minstrel, 1915) contains autobiographical elements.

Bibliography

See studies by F. E. Coenen (1951), G. A. Wells (1969), and W. E. Yates (1972).

Quotes:

"The cradle of the future is the grave of the past."

"Oh that wisdom was half as zealous for converts as ridicule."

"As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present."

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