full responsibility for their own destruction.

For each of the principal characters, perception of basic conflicts and the resulting destructive reactions are different. The premise of the story is that the ghost of an adulterous ancestress appears in times of crisis to warn later generations of impending doom. Her last known descendant, Count Borotin, accepts the woman’s legendary curse at face value. Because he believes that fate is determined to destroy his line, he cannot act effectively to avert the coming catastrophe. The robber Jaromir, Borotin’s missing son, who is patterned somewhat after Schiller’s character Karl Moor from his play Die Räuber (pb. 1781; The Robbers, 1792), unwittingly slays his father when the latter joins in a foray against the outlaws. Jaromir’s own death occurs in the arms of his ghostly forebear. His heart fails him when he must face up to the fact of his patricide and acknowledge that Bertha, with whom he is in love, is his sister. Bertha, on the other hand, whose resemblance to the ancestress intensifies the incest theme of the play, commits suicide in the face of the events that reveal her lover first as a robber, then as her brother, and finally as the murderer of her father.

The effectiveness of The Ancestress on the stage is a reflection of Grillparzer’s certain instinct for successful theater. More substantial than the fate motif in the drama’s structure, for example, is the mythical opposition of father and son, which creates the real inner tension of the work. The rapid, sometimes dreamlike action is enhanced by the quick flow of the four-foot Spanish trochaic verse pattern. Pathos saturates the substance and gives it nobility, while the directness and clarity of the lines provide an appropriate vehicle for the revelation of the agitated spiritual lives of the characters in powerful illumination of the psychology of evil.

Sappho

In an effort to draw closer to the dramatic ideals fostered by Weimar classicism, Grillparzer turned to material from ancient Greek tradition for the plays that immediately succeeded The Ancestress. Of special importance for his presentation of archetypal human problems in Sappho and The Golden Fleece is the combination of objective revelation of individual motives for action with the processing of myth as symbolic representation of mortal reality. The tragedy of the aging priestess-poetess Sappho’s unrequited love for the young Phaon provides a vehicle for a theme that was of great personal significance to Grillparzer: the inability to reconcile life and art. In softly subtle, gracefully dignified lines that tenderly expose the entire spectrum of mature feminine feeling, the dramatic poet sought to blend the noble moderation of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (pr. 1779; Iphigenie in Tauris, 1793) with the unhappy artistic dilemma of Torquato Tasso (pb. 1790; English translation, 1827). The result was a distinctive work that underlines Grillparzer’s ability to create and magnify effects that lay bare subconscious drives through peculiarly unsettling natural utterance, sound, gesture, and reflex motion, all of which communicate poetically the essence of the nature of humankind.

The Golden Fleece

With The Golden Fleece, Grillparzer gave voice to a new type of tragic sensitivity in the renewal of material that had been dramatized earlier by Euripides, Seneca, Pierre Corneille, and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. Internal intensification of the mythical object is carried to extremes through the externalization of the dramatic action in a manner that reinforces and heightens the exposure of Medea’s monstrousness. The destructive circumstances of her unhappy alliance with Jason and its aftermath provide the framework for what some critics regard as Grillparzer’s most powerful statement concerning subjection to a fate that has its genesis within the individual spirit. In that respect, the trilogy exhibits a kinship with traditional Austrian Jesuit drama in its depiction of unhappiness as a tragic consequence of weakness in the face of divine order.

The most consistently pessimistic of Grillparzer’s dramatic creations, The Golden Fleece consists of Der Gastfreund (one act, The Guest), Die Argonauten (four acts, The Argonauts), and Medea (five acts). Despite the apparent distance from intimate reality that is inherent in the mythological substance, The Golden Fleece was for its author a deeply personal confessional work. The play’s fearful vision of the impossibility of happy marriage, depicted in the painful relationship between Jason and Medea, was an outgrowth of Grillparzer’s own failure to find fulfillment in his encounters with women. A primary focus of the entire trilogy is the ultimate isolation of man from woman.

Superficially, the three plays follow the pattern of action established in earlier dramatizations of the classical sources. The Guest, which serves as a prologue to the Medea plot, describes the destruction of the young Greek Phrixus, who is slain by the barbarian, King Aeetes. In violation of the sacred law of hospitality, the savage monarch kills Phrixus for the golden fleece that he wears, thereby calling down a curse on himself and his family. In The Argonauts, Jason, who has come to reclaim the fleece, wins the love of Medea, enlists her aid against her father and brother, thereby causing their deaths, and removes her from her raw, natural surroundings to the civilization of his homeland. The action reaches its climax in Medea, in which the title figure fails to bridge the abyss that separates her inner being and savage origins from the cultivated life of Jason’s world. Her inability to cope with Jason’s betrayal and adapt herself to the demands of the foreign culture causes her to slay both her female rival for Jason’s affections and her own children.

Much of the theatrical strength of The Golden Fleece derives from the dramatist’s use of innovative devices to heighten internal contrasts and increase the inner tension of the presentation. One obvious example is the clear differentiation between barbarians and Greeks in the poetic form of their spoken lines: The cultured Greeks speak in regular blank verse, while Medea and the other barbarians express themselves in excited, choppy free rhythms. Language determines the dramatic color of the scenes, intensifying harsh moods, underscoring personality, and fully conveying the darkness of human anguish.

In sharp deviation from the original legend, in which the golden fleece serves as an external focus for tragedy by virtue of its nature as a demoniac and destructive talisman, Grillparzer’s trilogy unfolds its tragic conflicts from within the characters themselves. The fleece moves into the background, and its fateful power is replaced by the confrontation of mortal passions, the internal polarities of individual characters, and the conflict between the individual and the social environment. In this extraordinary work, Grillparzer created settings for lyric, even operatic monologues that have since become recognized as high points in classical German drama.

Hero and Leander

Hero and Leander, Grillparzer’s most poignant adaptation of classical source material, can be seen as refining and perfecting techniques that were established in The Golden Fleece. Keen psychological insight directs the portrayal of the two lovers in the welding together of classical, romantic, and baroque elements in a beautiful harmony of content and form.

Grillparzer’s historical and political plays reflect a concerted attempt to achieve the directness of Shakespeare’s dramatic portraits of powerful rulers. A primary focus is the grand tragedy of the soul that is guilty and doomed by reason of its very nature. The works in this group offer a fresh view of history that mixes a sensitive though often sentimental patriotism with an acute awareness of communality in the weaving together of individual, state, and people. These plays also reveal Grillparzer’s vision of an Austrian tradition distinguished by its humanistic liberalism.

King Otakar’s Rise and Fall

In King Otakar’s Rise and Fall, realistic characterization and motivation give special force to the tension that exists between the static picture of Emperor Rudolf I of Habsburg, symbol of the good and noble ruler, and the dynamic rendering of the falling monarch Otakar. A calculated glorification of the Habsburg dynasty, this play emerged not out of belief in the crown itself but out of a much broader faith in the divinely ordained mission of Austria in the world. Intended as a bridge between Baroque and classical theater, King Otakar’s Rise and Fall is a model of carefully executed form and painstaking technical detail.

In 1823, when Grillparzer began to concern himself with the problem of the general, typical, exemplary element of human action that affects the course of history, he focused his attention on Napoleon Bonaparte. The combination of his interest in the French emperor and a newly awakened consciousness of Austria’s historic destiny stimulated the creation of King Otakar’s Rise and Fall, the most successful of his political plays. Grillparzer consciously compared the Bohemian king to Napoleon, identifying in both lives a key turning point in the separation of a first marriage and the entering of a second. Beginning from this intimate point of departure, he formulated within the drama a human personality that is psychologically developed in finest detail.

Grillparzer’s primary purpose was to portray in the fall of Otakar the birth of the Habsburg dynasty. Essential to his dramatic conception of the situation is the juxtaposition of the great but ruthless tyrant, who tumbles from power as a victim of his own hubris, with the monumentality of the rising Emperor Rudolf I. Otakar, a law unto himself, who in his greed for land has lost any sense of restraint, parts from his wife Margareta, whom he had married only for her property. He then weds the Hungarian heiress Kunegunde, for whom he is too old. His betrayal of Margareta establishes the inner basis for his fall. Political and military successes that follow the new marriage lead him to believe that he is moving toward his goal, when, in fact, his willful rejection of the demands of justice causes him to lose position. Beginning in the second act, when he receives the imperial crown, Rudolf of Habsburg appears in counterpoint to Otakar as an example of the just ruler who governs in moderation. He increases in glory in direct proportion to Otakar’s decline. Only in the final tragic recognition of the impropriety of his actions does Otakar regain personal dignity.

Despite the particular strength that the play obtains from Grillparzer’s masterful handling of a fullness of private, intimately suggestive psychological characteristics in the projection of his central figures, the work does exhibit visible weaknesses. Specifically, artificial constructs carry greater weight than poetic elements, and the action and characterization often go in different directions. In the light of the dramatist’s intention to create a patriotic celebration of the House of Habsburg, the portrayal of Rudolf is somewhat disappointing. His moral superiority is presented in such a fashion that he comes across as a schoolmaster rather than an enlightened monarch.

A Faithful Servant of His Master

An intense presentation of individual struggle within the context of social involvement is given in A Faithful Servant of His Master, perhaps the most painfully gripping of Grillparzer’s histories. It explores the heroic ideal of loyalty to duty in an almost clinical study of human interrelationships. The notion that life is fatefully determined by qualities of the inner person is dramatized in this story of the moral defeat of a violently assertive, passionate power-figure who destroys the young wife of a retainer while the latter faithfully conducts the king’s affairs in his absence.

A Dream Is Life

Moral considerations also form the basis for the two nontragic dramatic fairy tales that Grillparzer produced in the 1830’s. A Dream Is Life and Thou Shalt Not Lie!, the last plays that he himself published, employ the devices of Viennese folk theater in the presentation of cleverly framed learning experiences. Both plays share with Grillparzer’s tragedies a richness of suggestively formed, inwardly motivated characters, carefully maintained dramatic tension, harmony of dialogue and gesture, and masterfully structured stage effect. A Dream Is Life, adapted from a play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and a story by Voltaire, portrays the purifying effect of a dream in which the central figure encounters the destructive results of the ambition that has led him to a criminal career. When he awakens, he repents and resumes a life of quiet contentment.

Thou Shalt Not Lie!

In an effort to employ an ethical focus in raising the literary level of the German comedy beyond that which had been achieved by the folk theater of Ferdinand Raimund, Grillparzer wrote the hilarious dramatic fairy tale Thou Shalt Not Lie! Unlike the tragedies, this play is an extremely light-hearted work, free of sexual confusion and weighty problems of guilt and atonement. Framed against a background of historical reality taken from a French chronicle account, Thou Shalt Not Lie! explores the question of whether absolute truth is a reasonable expectation, given human frailty and the complexity of life. The ambiguity of language plays a special role in conveying the piece’s message. The presentation moves between drastic comic effect and smiling wisdom in a convincing in-depth revelation of humankind’s essential nature.

The central character of the comedy is the kitchen boy Leon, who is given the task of obtaining the freedom of Atalus, nephew of the Bishop Gregor von Chalon. Atalus is being held hostage by the heathen Count Kattwald. Under an oath never to lie while engaged in the undertaking, Leon succeeds in his quest by telling the truth. In one instance, his progress depends on the fact that others do not believe him when he reveals his actual intentions; in another, his open truthfulness wins him an unexpected ally. Although truth is victorious, the victory is not pure, and the play ends with a modification of Chalon’s demand in recognition of the mitigating circumstances of the human condition.

The dramatic tension of the play arises from the confrontation between Chalon’s defense of absolute truth as a principle of God’s law and the colorful disorder of mortal reality; each new situation emphasizes from a fresh perspective the complexity of the issue. In the key encounter between Leon and the ferryman, the former leaves deceptive ambiguities behind and embraces genuine truthfulness through the exercise of trust in God. The comical elements in situations, characters, and language are thus used effectively to reveal the world’s weaknesses while affirming existence from the higher perspective of faith in the divine order of being. Although its subtleties were not appreciated by Grillparzer’s contemporaries, Thou Shalt Not Lie! is one of the few truly great German comedies.

Later Works

The works that remained unpublished at Grillparzer’s death represent a synthesis of his inner and outer worlds. In loosely composed political tragedies that are remarkable for their beauty of vision, their musical, imagistic language, and their insight into the powerful interplay of conscious and subconscious experience, he issued a deeply pessimistic warning about the dissolution of the old humane Europe. More than anything else, the literary creations of his old age are an accounting of the writer with himself as the lonely defender of a traditional world order against a subjectively oriented materialistic civilization.