Grillparzer, Franz

(1791–1872)

   One of German literature’s greatest poetic dramatists, Grillparzer was born in Vienna, where he also died. His family was close to influential theatrical and government circles in the Habsburg capital. In 1813, following philological and legal studies at the University of Vienna and a brief turn as a private tutor in a noble household, Grillparzer began training to draft documents for the imperial court library. After 1823, he did this on a full-time salaried basis for the court treasury. From 1832 until his retirement in 1856, he served as director of the treasury archives. He was among the founding members of the Austrian Academy of Arts and Science in 1847, and from 1861 until his death a member of the upper house of various legislative bodies established in Franz Joseph’s experiments with constitutionalism. His career as an author and dramatist developed even as he toiled somewhat resentfully as a bureaucrat. In 1816, the young man’s translation of Life Is a Dream by the 17th-century Spanish playwright Calderone de la Barca favorably impressed the dramaturg of the imperial court theater, Joseph Schreyvogel (1768–1832). With the latter’s encouragement, Grillparzer turned his hand to writing for the stage. His first success came with Sappho in 1819; it won him a five-year contract as court theater poet.

   Grillparzer quickly abandoned this post, choosing to travel throughout a good part of Europe between 1821 and 1826, years in which he produced much of the dramatic writing that made his reputation. Inspired by classical and historical themes, these plays are intense probes of the inner lives of people torn apart by the conflict between duty and personal, often erotic, inclination. The great trilogy The Golden Fleece (Das Goldene Vließ) was finished in 1822; the tragedy King Ottokar’s Fortune and End (König Ottakars Glück und Ende), based on the 13th-century conflict between the ruler of Bohemia and Rudolf I of Habsburg over control of the Austrian lands, was completed in 1825.

   Other successes followed, but there were failures as well. A crucial disappointment was Woe unto the Liar (Weh dem der Lügt, 1838), a comedy in which Grillparzer had invested much hope. The negative public reaction persuaded the hypersensitive dramatist to stop writing for the stage altogether. Unpleasant experiences with government censorship and a general ambivalence toward authority also shaped his decision. He was bitingly critical of the Metternich regime between 1815 and the Revolutions of 1848. Nevertheless, he celebrated the Habsburg suppression of these upheavals in one of his most famous poems “To Radetzky,” a paean to the field marshal who put down national upheavals in the dynasty’s Italian lands. Three plays that Grillparzer wrote between 1847 and 1851, including the political drama A Conflict among Brothers in the House of Habsburg (Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg), one of his most complex and important works, were performed only after his death. Indeed, he ordered in his will that they never be produced.