Dramatic poet, born in Vienna, Austria. He studied at the University of Vienna, and worked in the imperial civil service (181356). He first attracted literary attention with a tragedy, Die Ahnfrau (1817, The Ancestress), and was appointed poet to the Hofburgtheater in 1818. He wrote 12 tragedies and one comedy, as well as lyric poetry and a novel. His plays are considered to be some of the best written for the Austrian stage.
Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer (January 15, 1791 – January 21, 1872) Austrian dramatic poet, was born in Vienna.
Early life
His father, severe, pedantic, a staunch upholder of the liberal traditions of the reign of Joseph II, was an advocate of some standing; After a desultory education, Grillparzer entered in 1807 the University of Vienna as a student of jurisprudence; Grillparzer had little capacity for an official career and regarded his office merely as a means of independence.
Early works up to Das goldene Vlies
In 1817 the first representation of his tragedy Die Ahnfrau made him famous, but before this he had written a long tragedy in iambics, Blanca von Castilien (1807-1809), which was obviously modelled on Schiller's Don Carlos; but Grillparzer's work is a play of real poetic beauties, and reveals an instinct for dramatic as opposed to merely theatrical effect, which distinguishes it from other fate-dramas of the day. in the classic spirit of Goethe's Tasso, Grillparzer unrolled the tragedy of poetic genius, the renunciation of earthly happiness imposed upon the poet by his higher mission. In 1821, Das goldene Vlies finally was finished, a trilogy which had been interrupted in 1819 by the death of the poet's mother, who, in a fit of depression, had taken her own life, and a subsequent visit to Italy. Opening with a powerful dramatic prelude in one act, Der Gastfreund, Grillparzer depicts in Die Argonauten Jason's adventures in his quest for the Fleece; it is again the tragedy of the hearts desire, the conflict of the simple happy life with that sinister power, be it genius or ambition, which upsets the equilibrium of life.
Historical tragedies
For his historical tragedy König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1823, but owing to difficulties with the censor, not performed until February 19, 1825), Grillparzer chose one of the most picturesque events in Austrian domestic history, the conflict of Otakar II of Bohemia with Rudolph of Habsburg.
With these historical tragedies began the darkest ten years in the poet's life. They brought him into conflict with the Austrian censor - a conflict which grated on Grillparzer's sensitive soul, and was aggravated by his own position as a servant of the state. but whether owing to a presentiment of mutual incompatibility, or merely owing to Grillparzer's conviction that life had no happiness in store for him, he shrank from marriage.
Slip into depression
Yet to these years we owe the completion of two of Grillparzer's greatest dramas, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831) and Der Traum, ein Leben (1834). In the former tragedy, a dramatization of the story of Hero and Leander, be returned to the Hellenic world of Sappho, and produced what is perhaps the finest of all German love-tragedies. the old Greek love-story of Musaeus is, moreover, endowed with something of that ineffable poetic grace which the poet had borrowed from the great Spanish poets, Lope de Vega and Calderón. ultimately Rustan awakens from his nightmare to realize the truth of Grillparzer's own pessimistic doctrine that all earthly ambitions and aspirations are vanity;
Der Traum, ein Leben was the first of Grillparzer's dramas which did not end tragically, and in 1838 he produced his only comedy, Weh dem, der lügt. But Weh dem, der lügt, in spite of its humour of situation, its sparkling dialogue and the originality of its idea - namely, that the hero gains his end by invariably telling the truth, where his enemies as invariably expect him to be lying - was too strange to meet with approval in its day.
Later life and final masterpieces
In 1836, Grillparzer paid a visit to Paris and London, in 1843 to Athens and Constantinople. Then came the Revolution which struck off the intellectual fetters under which Grillparzer and his contemporaries had groaned in Austria, but the liberation came too late for him. With the exception of a beautiful fragment, Esther (1861), Grillparzer published no more dramatic poetry after the fiasco of Weh dem, der lügt, but at his death three completed tragedies were found among his papers. Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg is a powerful historical tragedy and Libussa is perhaps the most mature, as it is certainly the deepest, of all Grillparzer's dramas; the latter two plays prove how much was lost by the poets divorce from the theatre.
Assessment
Although Grillparzer was essentially a dramatist, his lyric poetry is in the intensity of its personal note hardly inferior to Lenau's; As a prose writer, he has left one powerful short story, Der arme Spielmann (1848), and a volume of critical studies on the Spanish drama, which shows how completely he had succeeded in identifying himself with the Spanish point of view.
Grillparzer's brooding, unbalanced temperament, his lack of will-power, his pessimistic renunciation and the bitterness which his self-imposed martyrdom produced in him, made him peculiarly adapted to express the mood of Austria in the epoch of intellectual thraldom that lay between the Napoleonic wars and the Revolution of 1848; his poetry reflects exactly the spirit of his people under the Metternich regime, and there is a deep truth behind the description of Der Traum, ein Leben as the Austrian Faust. even in Austria a true understanding for his genius was late in coming, and not until the centenary of 1891 did the German-speaking world realize that it possessed in him a dramatic poet of the first rank; in other words, that Grillparzer was no mere Epigone of the classic period, but a poet who, by a rare assimilation of the strength of the Greeks, the imaginative depth of German classicism and the delicacy and grace of the Spaniards, had opened up new paths for the higher dramatic poetry of Europe.
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