[In the following essay, Ivask places Der arme Spielmann within the context of nineteenth-century fiction and assesses its impact on Austrian fiction.]

“ … For it is by perfection of form that poetry enters life, external life. True emotion can convey only what lies within. But it is the task of all art to exemplify the inner life by the outer surface.”¹

The Poor Fiddler, the story of a failure, is told with genuine sympathy and yet objective detachment. It could well have had as its author one of the great Russian novelists of the last century—Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev. The first-person narrator characterizes himself as a dramatist and a passionate lover of his fellow men, especially the common people. He also stresses his strong anthropological bent and psychological curiosity. Indeed, he believes that “In truth, no one can understand the lives of the famous unless he has entered into the feelings of the humble. An invisible but continuous thread connects the brawling of drunken market porters with the strife of the sons of gods, and Juliet, Dido or Medea exist in embryo within every young servant girl. … ” This rather astonishing credo of realism comes from a writer who was a contemporary of Goethe, writing at the height of idealism and romanticism in literature. The story was begun in 1831, completed some ten years later, but not published until 1847.

The author, Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), was born and died in Vienna. His father was a lawyer; his mother possessed great musical talent. Grillparzer studied law at the University of Vienna and was later employed as a civil servant in various positions, finally as director of the State Archives (1832-56). After his mother's suicide in a fit of religious madness, he set out on an Italian journey. A poem, “Die Ruinen von Campo Vaccino” [The Ruins of Campo Vaccino], written on this journey, was received with hostility in court circles. In this poem, Grillparzer expressed sympathy with the fact that ancient Rome had had to yield to Christianity. Because of this, he was suspected of anticlerical sentiments by the ever-suspicious secret police of Metternich's reactionary regime. From that time on, he was beset by difficulties with the censors. In 1821, Grillparzer met Katharian Fröhlich, and a lifelong relationship outside marriage ensued. He traveled in Germany (1826 and 1847), France (1836), and visited Constantinople and Athens (1843). He knew personally many of his great contemporaries such as Goethe, Beethoven, Heine, and Hebbel. When his comedy Weh dem, der lügt [Woe to Him Who Lies], written in 1838, failed at its première, Grillparzer decided to publish no more plays. In 1856, he was retired with the rank of Court Councillor (Hofrat) and in 1861 was made a member of the Herrenhaus (House of Lords). Yet these honors came far too late to assuage Grillparzer's bitter awareness that he was not really at home in his own country: a very Austrian fate.

Grillparzer is considered by most critics to be the greatest Austrian dramatist. This claim is based on his verse plays, in which he tried to fuse elements of the Spanish and Austrian baroque and the Viennese popular theater with the classical drama of Goethe and Schiller. Grillparzer's deepest artistic sympathies were certainly with the colorful and passionate Spanish baroque dramatists, Calderón, Lope de Vega, and Tirso da Molina (many of whose plays he minutely annotated in his diaries); yet his critical mind was almost equally attracted by the rationalism of Enlightenment, which in Austria took the form of “Josephinism.” Grillparzer's dramatic figures are often caught in the tragic dilemma of being compelled to act but hesitating to do so, because all action of necessity results in some guilt. His plays on Greek themes, such as Sappho (1819), or Das goldene Vließ [The Golden Fleece] (1822), are less successful than those that deal with Austrian and Slav history—for example, Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg [Family Strife in Hapsburg] (1873), perhaps his greatest dramatic achievement. The love story of Hero and Leander has found a poetically sensitive presentation in the play Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen [The Waves of the Sea and of Love] (1831); it reveals the dramatists's Austrian gift for creating psychologically believable, strong women characters. The English critic Ronald Peacock comments perceptively on Grillparzer's dramatic art: “In poetic power, in the creative use of language, he is inferior to the lyric poets of the great periods—Novalis, Hölderlin, George, Rilke; inferior even to a prose rhapsodist like Herder. But in his sense of reality he is unique, if we except the rather special case of Goethe. It may be that his Austrian nationality has something to do with it; for Austria, as the centre of power of the Holy Roman Empire and later the Austro-Hungarian, came nearer to political success than the modern German Reich has ever done.”² This unique sense of reality stood Grillparzer in good stead when he wrote The Poor Fiddler.

Looking for parallels in German literature, we find a similar early rebellion against the canons of idealism and romanticism in Georg Büchner's story Lenz (written around 1835). “I demand of art,” we read, “that it be life and the possibility that it might exist—nothing else matters; we then have no need to ask whether it is beautiful or ugly. The sense that what has been created has life stands above the other two precepts and is the only criterion in art. … Idealism is the most humiliating of insults to human nature. Let them try just once to immerse themselves in the life of the humble people and then reproduce this again in all its movements, its implications, in its subtle, scarcely discernible play of expression. … ”³

Georg Büchner seemed to have the makings of a German Dostoevsky, but he died prematurely in 1837 at the age of twenty-four, and was duly discovered only much later by the naturalists and expressionists. So-called German “poetic realism,” which dominated German literature from about Büchner's death until the final decades of the past century, had little of his bite and sheer creative energy, even less of his profound social concern. Büchner remained a lonely pioneer without establishing a German “great tradition” of the realistic novel that might be placed alongside the classics of the Russian, French, and English writers of the age. The German novel and novella of the later nineteenth century basically owed more to idealism and a lingering romanticism than to realism in the sense given it by the great European novelists.

Dostoevsky is supposed to have remarked once that “We all came out of Gogol's ‘Overcoat.’” The same could be said in relation to the Austrian novelists after Grillparzer's truly seminal story The Poor Fiddler. More often than not the protagonists of Austrian stories have been variations on the theme first played by the poor fiddler on his cracked violin. A veritable procession of complex-ridden, indecisive anti-heroes, “superfluous men” (well-known to readers of the Russian novel), failures in practical life but pure of heart, people the Austrian novel and stage to this very day. They are usually presented with warm understanding and a psychological insight such that even those works conceived well before Freud may strike one as being positively “Freudian.” To name just a few random examples of this Austrian “great tradition”: the misunderstood, miserly country parson in Adalbert Stifter's story, Kalkstein [Limestone], the first version of which was written in 1848, perhaps in competition with Grillparzer's story (which was hailed by Stifter as a masterpiece); Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's Dorf-und Schloßgeschichten [Village and Castle Stories] (1883) contains a whole gallery of related types; Ferdinand von Saar's subtle analysis of the make-believe world of Lieutenant Burda (1889); Arthur Schnitzler's Lieutenant Gustl (1900) and his early, effective use of interior monologue to render the inner turmoil of an average fellow caught in an insoluble dilemma that involves his honor or dishonor, life or death; Robert Musil's first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Young Törless) (1906), about the psychological and physiological confusions of adolescence; Rilke's hypersensitive poet, Malte, the subject of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), in Paris, and Albert Ehrenstein's helpless Tubutsch in Vienna (both published in 1910); the host of frustrated and guilt-ridden bachelors in Kafka's stories and novels; Musil's paradoxical Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) (1931-33); the pathetic Lieutenant Trotta in Joseph Roth's novel, Radetzkymarsch (1932); Heimito von Doderer's widowed civil servant turned voyeur, Julius Zihal, in Die erleuchteten Fenster [The Illuminated Windows], and his Lieutenant Melzer whose separation from reality is gradually overcome in Die Strudlhofstiege [The Strudlhof Stairs], both published in 1951; and, in conclusion, Herbert Eisenreich's long story, Der Urgroßvater [The Great-grandfather] (1964), in which the rather ordinary protagonist becomes so pre-occupied with his origins that he loses touch with reality. More than a century of a fascinatingly and closely interrelated narrative tradition!⁴

Obviously the Austrian Franz Grillparzer has been more fortunate than his German contemporary Georg Büchner. The Poor Fiddler did become the fountainhead of a rich prose tradition in which the “Insulted and Injured” (to use an apt formula by Dostoevsky), the surprising transformations of the poor fiddler, Jacob, have reappeared again and again. There are many reasons for this occurring in Austrian and not in German literature. The scope of this introduction permits to list only a few, and even these merely in passing. First of all, the Austrians are conservative par excellence and therefore great supporters of tradition (to the frequent grief of Austrian innovators and revolutionaries); secondly, Protestant idealism never had great appeal in Catholic Austria; and, thirdly, the baroque world view and style, oddly surviving well into the nineteenth century and beyond, immunized the Austrian writers against the lure of German romanticism. It could be formulated—boldly and paradoxically—that Austrian literature has been attracted time and time again to a kind of baroque realism, characterized by a constant tension between illusion and reality, being and doing. It is an existential tension that is to be borne, if not in faith, then at least with stoical equanimity, and it does not annihilate reality itself. After all, the Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius died in Vienna and it was on Austrian soil that he wrote the following remarks: “In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors. … ”⁵ The emperor is still fondly remembered by the Viennese. Heimito von Doderer claimed only recently that it is “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, with whose modern as well as profound notes Viennese literary history begins a few years before a.d. 180.”⁶ Indeed, the proverbial gaiety of the Viennese is not a diagnosis but a therapy for a fundamentally melancholy, self-analytical people at the crossroads of several nations (to refer to an enlightening formula by Hans Weigel). Austrian literature is by and large more deeply embedded in the country's landscape, filled with more affection for its capital and its society, evokes more lovingly a whole “way of life” than we are accustomed to in the literature of Germany. There is no doubt that Grillparzer is a truly representative son of his people.

Grillparzer was oversensitive, moody, hypochondriac, easily depressed, irritable, melancholy, self-tormenting; in short, an extremely complex man. (When traveling, he wanted nothing so much as to be home again; back in Vienna, however, he felt stifled and longed for freedom abroad.) His autobiography, abundant literary criticism, and dramatic works bear witness to this complexity. Yet nowhere does he present himself with as much clairvoyance and mature detachment as in his story about the poor fiddler. It seems truly to be an objective correlative of his own life and doubts, a self-contained work of art in no need of supporting biographical explanation to be fully appreciated and understood. Nevertheless, it constitutes an additional attraction for anyone acquainted with Grillparzer's biography to observe how the author's own taciturnity and his stiffly correct behavior (occasionally animated by plain human curiosity) are so well reflected in the outline portrait of the first-person narrator of the story. Although the fate of the poor fiddler occupies undisputedly the center of the stage, the story certainly gains in poignancy from the constant subtle counterpoint with the narrator's character and the framework that it adds to the story of the very much more unhappy and confused man—the fiddler.

But the attentive reader may be left wondering in the end whether Jacob has not lived more intensely and deeply amidst all his tribulations than the narrator ever has or will. Thus Grillparzer challenges through his art our very concept of what constitutes meaningful reality and healthy normalcy. We may ask further if Grillparzer is not only reflected in the courteous first-person narrator of the tale but, perhaps, in Jacob as well. Does not Jacob's highly questionable “art” mirror some of the Austrian dramatist's own self-lacerating doubts concerning the ultimate quality of his art when compared with the celebrated achievements of Goethe and Schiller? In Jacob, we find Grillparzer's own love of music, sense of measure, love of truth, enthusiasm, and penchant for pedantry, developed by the drudgery of office work that left only the evenings for creative activity. But then the effort of Jacob's life and art is consummated on an altogether different plane from that of the author, namely that of self-sacrifice and religious meaning. Jacob dies from the after-effects of having braved the cold waters of the Danube to save some children from the floods. The fact that the enlightened rationalist, Grillparzer, tries to mask his embarrassment at this religious turn of events in his own story—by making Jacob brave the floodwaters yet another time, merely to salvage the tax books of a gardener—in no way devalues the tears that the woman, whom Jacob never was able to win, sheds for him. In the end, his cracked violin shares pride of place on her living-room wall with the crucifix. Grillparzer intimates here a solution for poor Jacob that was no longer open to himself. Thus Jacob, too, is and is not the author. The perplexing tension and mystery of great art remain intact.

It was around 1847-48 or a little later that Grillparzer replied to a question as to how he had found the real-life inspiration for his story:

Quite by accident! For many years, I had been taking my meals at the restaurant “Zum Jägerhorn” in the Spiegelgasse. Often a poor fiddler came there to play. He attracted attention by the remarkable cleanliness of his shabby clothing, and his clumsy movements were touchingly comical. This old man always expressed gratitude for a gift with a short Latin phrase, which indicated an education and better days in the past. Suddenly he stopped coming and stayed away for a long time. Then the great flood of 1830 came. The Brigittenau, where a popular Saint's day is celebrated each year with a folk festival and much merrymaking, was striken hardest of all. I knew that the poor fiddler lived there, and as he did not come to play any more, I assumed that he had died as one of the many flood victims. I was asked to write a story for a pocket-almanac, and so I attempted one in which my poor good friend plays the main part.⁷

So simple and humble was the initial germ of our story. The final work was the result of more than ten years of writing and rewriting. In the story—now for the first time in an English translation that does it full justice—Grillparzer places against the background of a popular Viennese holiday the encounter between two men, one a somewhat sullen, sober dramatist, the other a naïve but serene beggar who makes a living with his fiddle. Both are very lonely and—in differing degrees—artists. Yet the one is at least sure of his social status and superior education, while the other reveals in his poverty flashes of better days, even a certain nobility in his demeanor. The narrator is fascinated by “people” in general, while the beggar is flattered by the gentleman's attention. What attracts the gentleman's curiosity in the first place, and thus triggers the action of the whole story, is that the seventy-year-old beggar plays the violin, following a score, and concludes the performance with a Latin phrase. The gentleman is struck by the incongruity of the caterwauling music and the surprising presence of a score, the very obvious distance between intent and realization. This discrepancy turns out to be the main theme of the story. It is repeated later in other symbolic gestures. The old man shares his room with some journeymen, but with chalk draws a line of demarcation to separate his cleaner living area from theirs; when he dares to return the kiss of the woman he loves, he does so through a glass door.

In the case of the poor fiddler, reality is so hostile and unattainable that he has no other escape than into the ideal. One of the most penetrating analyses of the story was written by J. P. Stern:

The annihilating conclusion towards which this quiet, unadorned story takes us is no less than the intimation of a deep and consistent distrust of the substantial world, which appears as a place radically incapable of yielding form and substance to the good will. The pure heart, in this vision, remains disembodied. The value of every thing in the world, of art even—its “objective value”—is as nothing to the purity and goodness and devotion that resides in the heart, mutely, unexpressed, perhaps inexpressible. The rift between being and doing, the severing of intention from realization, of spirit from matter—even the all but tangible “matter” of music—is complete.⁸

Reality has been everything but kind to Jacob in a life that seems to have consisted of nothing but a series of defeats or failures, depending on the vantage point of the judging reader. Born into a rich and influential family of a court councillor, with brothers who easily surpassed him in school by “jumping like chamois from peak to peak,” Jacob would have been happy as a craftsman. “I would have liked nothing better than to become a turner or a compositor,” he admits in awareness of his natural limitations. Yet such a solution would have been a disgrace for his family, and so the father inflicts upon his son one punishment after another, without the son in his meek obedience ever daring to challenge this cruel and unjust authority. Early in his life, Jacob loses his mother. When he learns of the death of his father, he faints from emotion, regretting that he did not have the opportunity to ask for his father's forgiveness. Devotion and submission could hardly be carried to more intolerable lengths. One is reminded of Kafka's stories The Judgment and Metamorphosis, with their nightmarish themes of inferiority complexes before paternal authority. (Heinz Politzer has explored the fascination and repulsion felt by the modern Austrian writer toward Grillparzer's story.)⁹

Jacob's job as a humble copyclerk is selected for him by his father. He is kept under constant surveillance, as if he were an irresponsible child. When Jacob finds sudden solace in a simple song that he hears from the neighboring grocer's daughter, Barbara, and visits her in order to get the score for the song, he is expelled from his parental home. But this song, nevertheless, marks a turning point in the life of Jacob, for he takes up the violin again, which he had forgotten since the days of his first instruction. Others may play Bach or Mozart, but no one plays “den lieben Gott.” It is this that the poor fiddler strives for in his improvisations every evening, until he is reprimanded by his weary neighbors. And they are absolutely right by all normal standards, because the cacophony seems heavenly only to the musician's own ear and, Grillparzer seems to imply, perhaps to God.

Jacob's hopeless naïveté and clumsiness alienated him from his father and his brothers, later from the other clerks in the office where he is employed, and, finally, makes him lose the grocer's daughter to a butcher (which may remind some readers of the way Kafka's “hunger artist” is replaced by a strapping panther). After his father's death, Jacob is even swindled out of his meager inheritance. He dies from exerting his last strength to save a gardener's tax books and a bit of money. In short, Grillparzer has presented to us the tale of a total failure in practical life. A failure because his proud father could not accept that one of his sons would become a mere craftsman? Is Jacob crushed by an overwhelming father complex—somewhat like Georg Bendemann in Kafka's The Judgment? This question certainly cannot and should not be answered unequivocally. Jacob's character is not merely the sum total of his environment. He has had, after all, the remarkable resilience of spirit to turn music into a religious escape, which has helped him to maintain a basic dignity, to achieve a stoic fortitude, and has given him the serenity, even a childlike gaiety, admired by the narrator. Art as a sublimation, a redemption from life's miseries—a familiar theme. Yet Grillparzer's story does not end there, for the “art” of Jacob is that of a deluded amateur, hence art proper cannot be called his salvation. If there is any salvation at all, it is strictly outside reality, a religious act of grace.

After the poor fiddler's tragic death, the narrator visits the butcher's family. He sees Jacob's fiddle on the wall “arranged symmetrically” opposite the crucifix. His idea is to buy the fiddle as a remembrance of the queer old fellow. Grillparzer could have added such a transaction as the last ironic twist to his story. Yet at this point, after the self-sacrifice of Jacob, hard practical reality is touched by the world of the spirit, and Barbara refuses to sell the violin, bursting into tears. What is she weeping about? Simply that the world is as it is, that Jacob deserved better treatment from her, or that his death was unnecessary? The story opens on a note of tumultuous gaiety among the holiday crowd; it ends with the tears of one woman, mutely witnessed by the narrator, “a passionate lover of his fellow men.” The reader may ask whether the narrator was changed by the experience or was it merely another anecdote, another psychological “case” for him. And what is the reader's judgment and conclusion? Grillparzer's realism is a complex one, a baroque realism in which we still sense the tension between illusion and reality, heaven and hell. Although they are more subdued in the Austria of the nineteenth century, the metaphysical categories are still there, subtly implied by the Austrian writer in the narrative fabric of psychological realism. Grillparzer compares, at the beginning, the holiday crowd to a surging flood: “ … And at last two rivers flow on triumphantly over and under each other—the Danube Canal follows its old river bed, the more swollen stream of people bursts forth from the narrows of the bridge in an all-submerging flood, to form a wide, turbulent lake.” In the end it is the Danube, flooded in actuality, that claims the life of Jacob. It is against this background of billowing anonymous masses and raging forces of nature that Grillparzer has chosen to place the spiritual dignity of an individual fate, however ridiculous and insignificant it may appear in the eyes of the world, like a calm ship bound for other shores.

Notes

1. “… Denn die vollendete Form ist es, wodurch die Poesie ins Leben tritt, ins äuβere Leben. Die Wahrheit der Empfindung gibt nur das Innere; es ist aber Aufgabe aller Kunst, ein Inneres durch ein Außeres darzustellen.”—Franz Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, eds. Peter Frank and Karl Pörnbacher (Munich, 1964), 111, 286

2. Ronald Peacock, The Poet in the Theatre (New York, 1960), p. 62 [my ital.-I.I]. For the reception of Grillparzer's drama in the English-speaking world, see Arthur Burkhard, Franz Grillparzer in England and America (Vienna, 1961).

3. Georg Büchner, Complete Plays and Prose, trans. Carl Richard Mueller (New York, 1963), p. 151

4. The Austrian theater is no exception to this psychological curiosity: in his play, Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind [The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope] (1828), Ferdinand Raimund created one of the first presentations of a split personality in world literature; Johann Nestroy entitled a play, Der Zerrissene (A Man Full of Nothing) (1844); Hugo von Hofmannsthal's most famous comedy is called Der Schwierige [The Difficult Man] (1921), about a man who is afraid to act and so terribly complicated that in the end the marriage proposal has to be made by the bride-to-be herself. These are but three examples; many more could be cited.

5. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (Baltimore, 1964), p. 51.

6. Heimito von Doderer, “Einleitung,” in Toni Schneider's Österreich (Zürich, 1958), p. 22.

7. Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke (Munich, 1964), III, 1229

8. J. P. Stern, Re-interpretations (London, 1964), p. 74.

9. “Die Verwandlung des armen Spielmanns,” in Forum (Vienna, October 1958), pp. 372-75