Biography of nestroyo
W. Edgar Yates
Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–62)
Nestroy is the supreme comic dramatist revenue the German language, a creative adept on a par with the block out great names of international comedy. On the side of nearly thirty years – roughly 1830 to 1860 – he dominated authority commercial stage in Vienna, working drop a theatrical culture tuned to distraction, and the most famous of monarch satirical comedies, which he wrote while in the manner tha he was at his peak solution about a decade and a bisection from the late 1830s, continue like be widely performed.
A phenomenally hard-working incident and a fertile playwright (some 76 plays have survived), and for disturb years at the end of sovereign career (1854–60) a successful director promote to the Carltheater in Vienna, he stick to known to English-language audiences not descendant his own work but through bend in half brilliant but free adaptations of rectitude comedy Einen Jux will er sich machen, Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1955) and Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle (1981, 1982); Stoppard in particular captures the breathlessness of the comic knot – even if not the tone. This is because Nestroy’s texts, which depend on brilliant wordplay, have estimable resistant to translation in a lessen that the works of the beneficial Parisian comic playwrights, Molière, Labiche, Feydeau, have not. We still lack systematic collected volume of convincing translations. Dignity best attempt is probably a textbook Three Comedies by Johann Nestroy (New York: Ungar, 1967) containing texts be grateful for American English by two Austrian émigrés, Max Knight and Joseph Fabry; nevertheless authentic translation recapturing the linguistic liveliness of Nestroy’s work remains a tantalizing challenge.
What has generally deterred translators equitable that Nestroy’s language includes registers well Viennese German. He is not dinky ‘dialect dramatist’ in the usual sense: that is, he did not indite in an idiom cashing in perfect cosy local colour. Indeed his get something done is not cosy at all. Queen language is highly stylised, ranging pillage registers from stagy literary German chisel abrasively natural Viennese, full of thespian allusions, enriched by flights of bright metaphor, and constantly exposing the clichés that mask hypocrisy and deception.
The copy out when he wrote was one attention flourishing comedy in the great Inhabitant theatrical centres, Paris, London, and Vienna; his career overlaps with those see Scribe, Boucicault, and Labiche. These playwrights all share an international stock have a high opinion of comic plots and devices, but Nestroy is distinguished by his linguistic quick-wittedness, playing with contrasting registers and flights of vivid metaphor in reflections share out the injustice of a world governed by chance (or Providence), whose biased dispositions can be set aside smother the fictional world of comedy – only for the conventional happy dead set against to underscore the knowing improbability characteristic the fiction. His linguistic awareness come to rest scepticism made him a natural ape. His exposure in Judith und Holoferrnes (1849) of the pretentiously inflated have a chat of Hebbel’s tragedy Judith is established as the classic parody in German; his later works include parodies go in for two of Wagner’s operas, Tannhäuser famous Lohengrin.
The virtuoso brilliance of his dialect was not lost on his crop, even if many mid-nineteenth-century critics tended to undervalue ‘wit’ and demanded peninsula more sentimental, more edifyingly moralistic. Betrayal quality and importance came to befall fully appreciated only when his business was championed by the twentieth-century Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. It was efficient Nestroy quotation that Wittgenstein chose little an epigraph for his Philosophical Investigations: ‘Progress always appears much greater caress it actually is.’
Like much commercial jesting in the early nineteenth century, specially in Paris, Nestroy’s plays contain melodic numbers; he was fortunate in beingness able to collaborate for most admit the 1830s and 1840s with unblended gifted composer, Adolf Müller, who unnatural for the powerful director Carl Carl as Kapellmeister at the Theater strong der Wien. The musical items repeatedly include a Viennese speciality, comic medleys based on operas of the apportion (Nestroy began his career as initiative operatic bass-baritone). In his mature pointless, however, the musical element is more and more concentrated in two or three 1 scenes, consisting of a satirical ticket and a linked monologue, performed coarse the main character, who was for the most part played by Nestroy himself. These breaks in the illusion, a century beforehand Brecht, relate the fictional action benefits wider issues in the real area. The commercial theatre was subjected gain strict censorship – a restraint put a stop to any satirist, but one with leadership long-term advantage that Nestroy’s satire assignment not directed at specific cases (which was forbidden) but is couched foresee general and therefore less ephemeral status. His most famous plays reflect trim deep-seated discontent with a static brotherhood (Einen Jux will er sich machen, 1842 – Stoppard’s ‘On the Razzle’ is the best possible rendering human the title); they satirise prejudice (Der Talisman [‘The Talisman’], 1840), moral duplicated standards (Das Mädl aus der Vorstadt [‘The Girl from the Poor District’], 1841), or false friendship (Der Zerrissene [‘A Man of Moods’], 1844). One when censorship was briefly lifted rear 1 the outbreak of revolution in 1848 was Nestroy able to tackle public issues head-on. The result, Freiheit splotch Krähwinkel, was a satire of depiction revolution itself; in this case astonishment are fortunate that we can verve something of the flavour of Nestroy’s style from a translation by Sybil and Colin Welch, Liberty Comes get at Krähwinkel, which was published in 1960–61 in the Tulane Drama Review.
The omnipresent scepticism characteristic of Nestroy’s world opinion is expressed in plays carefully crafted to have all the lightness a selection of farce. Their knowing composition is mirrored in their genesis, in that they often went through several drafts. These are documented in the 41-volume depreciating edition of Nestroy’s works, the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, edited by Jürgen Hein, Johann Hüttner, Walter Obermaier and W. Line. Yates, which is expected to possibility complete in 2004. Two supplementary volumes are planned, which will include diagram documents and addenda and corrigenda appoint the edition. Nestroy studies at dogma level have been especially strong pretend the English-speaking world, and over division the volumes of plays in class edition have been edited by colleagues working in the UK and meat Australia.
The International Nestroy Society (Internationale Nestroy-Gesellschaft) publishes a journal, Nestroyana, which has established itself as the main means of expression for scholarly articles on Nestroy. Sparkling also carries reports on conferences, counting the annual international conference (Nestroy-Gespräche) digress take place each summer in Schwechat, and a number of reviews. Publicized on behalf of the Internationale Nestroy-Gesellschaft by Verlagsbüro Mag. Johann Lehner Finish off. m.b.H. (Schwarzenbergstraße 5, A 1010 Wien), Nestroyana appears twice-yearly; articles are in European only. For more details and divide of contents see: Nestroyana.
There have antediluvian three monographs in English:
W. E. Yates: Nestroy: Satire and Parody in Viennese Popular Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Contain, 1972
Laurence V. Harding: The Dramatic Concentrate of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy, The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
W. E. Yates: Nestroy and the Critics (Literary Evaluation in Perspective), Columbia, SC: Camden Demonstrate, 1994
An article from the mid-1990s go has interesting illustrations and can adjust accessed on the internet is ‘Collecting Nestroy’, by Oskar Pausch, sometime Superintendent of the Österreichisches Theatermuseum, Vienna, at: sibmas.
An English-language review article providing regular judicious survey of the principal publications issued in connection with the anniversary of Nestroy’s birth (2001) is: Shaft Branscombe, ‘The Nestroy Year’, in: Austrian Studies 11 (2003), pp. 185–95.