Ferdinand Raimund

• Born: June 1, 1790
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: November 5, 1836
• Place of death: Potenstein, Austria

Other Literary Forms

Ferdinand Raimund is known only for his plays. There exist a few poems from his hand, notably an ode to Friedrich Schiller and a poem “An die Dunkelheit” (to darkness). His letters have been collected, and later editors have compiled separate editions of the most famous couplets (songs) from his plays.

Achievements

Ferdinand Raimund has been called “the first great humoristic dramatist of the Germans in the nineteenth century.” He freed the Viennese Popular Theater from coarseness and bawdiness and elevated it to the level of literary acceptability. This Popular Theater, which had its roots in the Baroque and its first significant representative in the famous J. A. Stranitzky at the beginning of the eighteenth century, achieved its fulfillment with the plays of Ferdinand Raimund between 1823 and 1834, and reached its conclusion with Raimund’s sardonic rival Johann Nestroy, who died in 1862. Both Raimund and Nestroy were actors initially, and both began writing plays because they were dissatisfied with the comedies in which they acted. Although the younger Nestroy embraced the new age of heightened realism, which ridiculed idealism and the dreamy fairyland of a waning Romantic age, Raimund clung to this idealism and made the dreamworld an integral and often overwhelming part of his plays. Raimund’s comedies are marked by a sensitivity that sometimes descends to sentimentality; Nestroy was incapable of either, and his plays were frequently criticized because of his return to the somewhat bawdier robustness of a former era.

Raimund, the idealist, also attempted to free the Popular Theater from another tradition inherited from the Italian commedia dell’arte, that of excessive improvisation, which related the plays all too closely to the affairs of the day. Raimund thus was searching for eternal truth and beauty beyond the moment; he sometimes overshot his goal with too much pathos. Nestroy, on the other hand, returned the Viennese posse (comic play) to the realm of improvisation, abandoning the carefully constructed play in favor of the incidental comical situation or word.

Measured against the volume of more than eighty plays that Nestroy wrote during his lifetime, Raimund’s achievement seems rather small. In little more than ten years, he wrote all of his eight finished plays and perhaps worked on but abandoned a ninth one; its title is said to have been “Eine Nacht auf dem Himalaja” (a night in the Himalayas). He did not labor on his plays for long periods of time; most of them were written within a span of two to three months. Raimund’s extreme sensitivity, his rather fragile and hypochondriac nature, seem to have required rather lengthy periods of rest and reflection, when he also devoted himself entirely to his acting again. Doubt of his own ability apparently forced him to withhold a finished play from the stage for as much as a year and a half, as was the case with Die gefesselte Phantasie (phantasy in chains), which had been finished in the fall of 1826, but did not reach the stage until January of 1828.

Such self-doubt can perhaps be attributed to Raimund’s lack of formal education. The author compensated for this perceived lack through high aspirations and ideals, through many allusions to names and themes of classical antiquity, and through his often lofty language. His veneration of Friedrich Schiller in the poem “To Schiller’s Posthumous Fame” (“Who wrote, as you did, for the German nation?”) must be seen in this light, as Schiller also succeeded in the face of adversity. Throughout his life, Raimund seemed intent on overcoming obstacles, whether real or imagined. He failed his first audition as an actor, because he could not produce the rolled r sound required for the German-speaking stage. Relentlessly, he practiced until he could make the required sound. He wrote his first play because the playwright Karl Meisl, to whom he had given the material, was too slow and incompetent. He lamented that the playwrights of his age proved to be “more and more miserable, they practice their craft only to make money, not to receive laurels.”

Once he had found his own dramatic style in The Maid from Fairyland, Raimund strove to improve on it by treating more elevated themes, for example, the tale of Orpheus mixed with the fable of Alcestia in Die gefesselte Phantasie. He failed but had success with critics and audience alike in Mountain King and Misanthrope. He tried to break away a second time with Die unheilbringende Krone (the fateful crown) and failed even more dismally. His earnest attempt at being a comic actor and playwright led Constant von Wurzbach to observe that “for other comedians comedy is comical, for him it was serious.” Comedy for Raimund was supposed to be more than mere entertainment; it was to teach a lesson, as well as have high moral standards.

Raimund’s life and art were full of such contradictions. This comic actor with the serious disposition, a playwright in spite of himself, was filled with a desire for public renown and an ardent longing for the solitude of nature. He praised the institution of marriage in one of his plays while he was forced to live with his beloved Toni Wagner in a common-law relationship for most of his life. He was the foremost representative of the lower-class Viennese folk play, yet he favored elevated themes, classical allusions, and lofty language. In his plays, real and imaginary worlds were always set against one another, and his main characters, like the playwright himself, seemed to want to escape the ambience of Vienna simply to be able to long for it. Viennese charm permeated his plays. His upper-class characters spoke High-German, but the servants, whose essence he captured masterfully, used the Viennese dialect. His language, Hugo von Hofmannsthal observed, was a “mixture of higher and lower elements, half grandiose style, half the language of the Viennese Hanswurst” (a character similar to the English Punch). The use of the couplet—the typical Viennese song—was another of his trademarks.

The Viennese baroque tradition of grandiosity was evident not only in his characters but also in the stage settings which he required. The machinery necessary for the production of Raimund’s works was simply overwhelming. Spectacular alpine landscapes, enchanted forests, and ornate palaces abounded. Magical open scene changes dazzled the eyes of the spectators. It should be noted how often the word Zauber (magic) appears in the titles of his plays. Visitors from abroad flocked to Vienna to see these performances. Lord Stanhope, who saw Raimund in Mountain King and Misanthrope, was so impressed that he supposedly translated the story into English and gave it to the playwright John Baldwin Buckstone to fashion a theatrical adaptation. Buckstone’s King of the Alps and Misanthrope played to full houses at the Adelphi Theatre in London for three months in the spring of 1831. Acting editions were published in that year and again in 1852. Buckstone’s translation, however, hinted at the limitation that Raimund would encounter outside Vienna: The English version omitted several of the supernatural scenes involving the King of the Alps because they were considered unappealing to English audiences. A melodramatic subplot was substituted instead. Not many other foreign-language productions or adaptations of Raimund’s plays have been attempted. The German stage of St. Louis apparently gave some thirty-four performances of The Spendthrift in the original language between 1842 and 1911. The German theater in San Francisco is also recorded as having performed the play several times in the 1860’s. The Spendthrift appeared again in English translation in New York in 1949. Aside from these few exceptions, Raimund’s plays have been confined to the Austrian and German stages, and on the latter, they are considered a typically Viennese phenomenon.

Biography

Ferdinand Raimund’s father, Jakob Raimann (for whom Raimund was named at birth), was a turner with little means to provide his son with a good education. Raimund was sent to the school of St. Anna in Vienna, where he acquired not only rudimentary skills but also learned drawing, the violin, and some French. He became an orphan when he was fifteen, and his older sister was put in charge of his upbringing. Unable to provide for the boy, she apprenticed him to a confectioner. This confectioner supplied cake and candy to Josephstädter Theater for sale during intermissions, and Raimund became a so-called Nummero (vendor) at the theater. He had to attend performances almost daily, and he quickly grew to love the stage.

After three years, Raimund quit his apprenticeship virtually overnight, attaching a note to some nuts he was to prepare that read, “Diese vierzig Nuss sind meine letzte Buss” (“These forty nuts are my last penance”). He went to the town of Meidling near the castle of Schönbrunn, where a traveling theater company performed at the time. Its director, Kralitschek, let the young boy try out but found him so unsuitable because of his unassuming looks and the inability to pronounce the German stage-r that he sent him away immediately. Undaunted, Raimund continued on to Pressburg, where he was given a second chance. Again he failed, but this time at least during his first performance. He wandered farther away from Vienna and deeper into the Hungarian provinces to the town of Steinamanger, where he finally got his first contract, which forced him to play all kinds of parts, including even the “Pierot in the pantomime” (Wurzbach). After this theater disbanded, Raimund found a new engagement with the director Kunz, and played under dismal conditions for four consecutive years on the stages of Raab and Oedenburg. Villains and comical old men were his most frequent roles. In this period, Raimund wrote a few coarse prologues in verse.

Finally, in 1814, Raimund returned to Vienna, which had been his ambition all along. He received a contract at the Josephstädter Theater and had moderate success in a comedy by August von Kotzebue and as Karl Moor in Schiller’s Die Räuber (pb. 1781; The Robbers, 1792). He was given both serious and comic roles and had a chance to improve his acting from mere imitation of the greats of the Viennese stage to his own individualized style. His pathos in the serious roles was much exaggerated. According to reports of the time, the critic Eduard von Bauernfeld called his Karl Moor “simply disgusting.” Nevertheless, it must have taken a long time to quell Raimund’s ambition to become a tragedian at the much renowned Burgtheater. The same critic Bauernfeld quotes a later tongue-in-cheek confession by Raimund, “I was born a tragedian, and I lack nothing for it, except the figure and the voice.”

In 1815, Raimund had his first major success as the jealous musician Adam Kratzerl in the comedy Die Musikanten am hohen Markt (1815; the musicians at high market) by Josef Alois Gleich. Five continuations had to be written to satisfy audiences. In the same year, he was invited to give a first guest-performance at the Leopoldstädter Theater, which he knew well from his cake-selling days, and in 1817, he transferred there altogether. His opening role at the Leopoldstädter Theater was again in a play by Gleich, who also assumed importance for him on a more private level: In 1820, Raimund reluctantly married Gleich’s daughter Luise on a second try, after failing to show up on the original wedding date. The marriage was dissolved in 1822, and a child from it died in infancy. Altogether, his relationships with women seem to have been more stormy than felicitous. Bauernfeld claims that Raimund, during his days at the theater in Raab, was so shaken by the unfaithfulness of a beloved girl that he threw himself into the river, where he was barely saved from drowning. In 1818, his insane jealousy even led to an entry in the Vienna police blotter. He persuaded his young fellow-actress Therese Grünthal to move in with him, but she left him after a week because of his “irascible, coarse character.” Raimund was insulted, chased after her, and caught her with a new beau in the foyer of the theater. When she refused to return to him, he reviled and threatened her and finally beat her up on the steps toward the box seats. The police intervened, and Raimund went to prison for three days.

Instead of jumping into the river as in former times, Raimund jumped at his next best opportunity and married Luise Gleich, but not before he had met Toni Wagner, the daughter of a prominent Viennese restaurant owner who had rudely rebuffed this unstable suitor of his daughter. During his marriage, Raimund began to pursue Toni again, and after his divorce, she became his constant companion until his death (a second marriage was not possible under Austrian law). Toni seems to have had a somewhat calming effect on him, because for the next decade, Raimund was able to devote himself to his stage career, and he began writing his plays in 1823. Starting in 1824, however, the hypochondria that had plagued him in earlier years took on more serious and ominous forms, and he had to withdraw from the stage for some time. He did not reappear until the fall of 1825.

From then on, Raimund’s plays appeared with regularity until the end of the decade, when his contract with the Leopoldstädter Theater ran out. He chose not to renew it. Instead, he accepted invitations for guest performances within Vienna and went on tour to Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Berlin during the next two years. He was successful everywhere, mostly appearing in his own plays. In the meantime, he had bought a villa in the country outside Vienna and withdrew to it with increasing frequency, appearing only occasionally in the city for guest performances between 1832 and 1834. In 1834, his last and perhaps greatest play, The Spendthrift, was completed, and Raimund gave forty-five performances in it at the Josephstädter Theater. In 1835 and 1836, he went on tour again. It is perhaps symbolic that Raimund’s last stage appearance was in Hamburg—as far away as he had ever ventured from Vienna—on May 11, 1836.

Raimund returned to his villa at Gutenstein for the summer months, and on August 25 was bitten by his own dog, whom he immediately presumed to be rabid. After some hesitation, he attempted to reach Vienna for medical help. As if his life and his theater had come together for a grand finale, a severe thunderstorm prevented him from traveling on. He was forced to spend the night at the inn in Potenstein. Toni accompanied him. Outside, thunder and lightning raged; inside, his soul was racked with fear of painful death. During the night, he asked Toni to get him a glass of water. While she was absent, he shot himself in the mouth with the small handgun that he always carried. He wrestled with death for another five days and died on September 5, 1836.

Analysis

Ferdinand Raimund entered the theater as an actor, and he became a playwright almost unintentionally. His plays must be seen as an attempt to synthesize the Viennese Popular Theater with the classical German drama of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. John Michalski (Ferdinand Raimund, 1968) observes that Raimund

obtained his effects by means of a picturesque, sometimes melancholy idiom, which combines the delightfully musical Viennese dialect with standard High German. Allegorical figures and characters from the Viennese milieu speak and act in a manner that suggests no division between the worlds of reality and imagination. The action . . . is frequently treated from the vantage point of a naïve, almost child-like human being.

It has been suggested that Raimund’s suicide in 1836 was not only brought on by his hypochondria, but that it was also prompted by a change in theatrical taste, which threatened to take him out of the limelight very soon. Ever since the success of Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus (the evil spirit Lumpazivagabundus) in 1833, the star of Johann Nestroy had risen brighter and brighter on the theatrical skies of Vienna. Raimund’s ability—and willingness—to adapt, to accommodate changing tastes, was in question. Raimund was disturbed by what he saw happening on the stage, and when he went to see Nestroy’s play, he was horrified. The title alone had offended him with its suggestions of low life, drunkenness, and slovenliness. In a letter to Toni Wagner, Raimund observed that Viennese audiences had been led astray by charlatans. Honest talent was being subverted through “the cabals of these theatrical bushrangers.” He ended by stating that “my physical and moral life is inseparable from my honor.”

Raimund’s plays were the product of a political age of innocence; his success as an actor and a playwright fell into a time when the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Congress of Vienna had brought peace to the troubled city. Prince Metternich attempted to maintain peace and prosperity by means of espionage, censorship, and the repression of liberal ideas, and the populace sought distraction in the theater. Here one could catch concealed allusions to the real political conditions interwoven with fantastic fairy tales or harmless farces. Nevertheless, the moral of most plays was that, however exciting other places around the world might be, Vienna was still the most delightful abode.

The Barometer-Maker on the Magic Island

This is exactly the sentiment expressed in Raimund’s first play, The Barometer-Maker on the Magic Island. Raimund’s authorship was disputed at first, forcing him to state publicly that he had indeed written the play. The music was composed by Wenzel Müller, with whom Raimund collaborated on several of his later plays, notably Mountain King and Misanthrope. Raimund played the lead of Bartholomäus Quecksilber in the premier performance at the Leopoldstädter Theater on December 18, 1823.

The Barometer-Maker on the Magic Island depicts the conflict between the Viennese wit and trickster Bartholomäus Quecksilber and the cunning princess Zoraide of the enchanted isle. Bartholomäus has obtained three magical gifts from the fairy Rosalinde, who must dispense them once every one hundred years. One by one, Zoraide succeeds in stealing these gifts from him, but she is forced to return them in the end when Bartholomäus appears at her court with figs that produce enormous noses on everyone who eats them, and for which only he holds the antidote. The fig magic was nothing new; it had appeared in a number of baroque court operas and also was a well-known motif in fairy tales. Zoraide’s father, King Tutu, seems to be a soul mate of Georg Büchner’s famous King Peter in his Leonce und Lena (wr. 1836, pb. 1850; Leonce and Lena, 1927), and critics did not fail to notice his resemblance to the ruling Austrian emperor, Francis I. In all events, the play contained little to distinguish it from the usual comedy fare of the time.

The Diamond of the Spirit King

In his second play, The Diamond of the Spirit King, Raimund succeeded in the creation of a servant role (Florian) that hinted at the author’s superior talent in drawing believable characters for the stage. He played Florian in the opening performance at the Leopoldstädter Theater on December 17, 1824. The music was written by the theater’s resident composer, Josef Drechsler. Florian’s counterpart, the servant maid Mariandel, was portrayed by Therese Krones, one of the leading actresses of the period. Both of these servants deviated from the norm because they were not only cunning but also faithful servants of their master. Again, the plot is simple in its synthesis of the real and the imaginary world. Master Eduard, the son of a deceased magician, has inherited six valuable magic statues from his father and must obtain the seventh, the most valuable, from the Fairy King Longimanus. This seventh statue has been fashioned from a rose-colored diamond. Longimanus is willing to part with it if Eduard in turn can find him a girl who has never lied in her life. She is finally found: She is the English girl Amine, on the Island of Truth, who is just about to be cast out to sea because she does not pay lip service to its king, Veritatius. The Island of Truth and its king resemble some venerable traditions in Metternich’s Austria that could not bear too much scrutiny. In the end, Eduard has recognized that love is more important than wealth, and he is willing to give up the statue for his beloved Amine. The play ends with the double betrothal of Eduard and Amine and of their servants Florian and Mariandel. In the character of Eduard, Raimund seems to have summed up his philosophy of life when he has him declare that “true virtuousness is not a matter of outward form, it lives innermost in the heart.”

The Maid from Fairyland

On November 10, 1826, Raimund appeared as Fortunatus Wurzel in the premiere of his third play, The Maid from Fairyland. The title role was suited to his talent, especially as he was able to show off his versatility in changing from a middle-aged man to an old man, from pride to remorse, from millionaire to ashman. Two songs from the play became popular folk songs virtually overnight: “Brüderlein fein” (my fine little brother) and Wurzel’s famous “Aschenlied” (ash song). The plot concerns the fairy Lacrimosa and her baby girl from a marriage with a mortal man. According to her mother’s wish, this “Girl from the Land of the Fairies” should marry the Prince of the Fairies. The Queen of the Fairies, outraged by this presumption, has deprived Lacrimosa of all her magic powers and has also decreed that Lottchen must marry a virtuous mortal before she turns eighteen. The peasant Fortunatus Wurzel, her guardian, is instructed to marry her off as required. Lottchen, educated in the virtues of honesty and simplicity, has been promised to the fisherman Karl Schilf. Meanwhile, the allegorical figure of Envy has showered Wurzel with an immense fortune and thereby corrupted him, and he vows to find a wealthy husband for his ward. Lacrimosa’s cousin, the magician Ajaxerle, who has been sent by the desperate mother to change Wurzel’s mind, is told by the haughty Wurzel that he would have to turn old and weak before he would permit Lottchen’s marriage to Karl. In the scene that follows immediately—and which some critics consider the best the age has to offer—the allegorical figure of youth leaves Wurzel, singing “Brüderlein fein . . . ,” and Old Age arrives. Lottchen and Karl can marry, Lacrimosa has regained her powers, and Wurzel has recognized that wealth has only corrupted him. He returns to his peasant state and will be happy without wealth from now on. The Maid from Fairyland was a great success. Raimund had finally perfected his formula of synthesizing the real and the imaginary world, and he had created, in Fortunatus Wurzel, a character who had no equal in the Popular Theater at that time.

The two plays that followed, Moisasurs Zauberfluch (Moisasur’s magic curse) and Die gefesselte Phantasie, were much less successful. The happy balance between the two worlds that Raimund had struck in The Maid from Fairyland became unbalanced in favor of the imaginary one, and the real world was shortchanged. The fusing of the two spheres was also imperfect, leaving the reader to wonder about the compelling necessity of their connection. Die gefesselte Phantasie has been considered “the fragment of an autobiography” in which Raimund set out to prove that he, a man without education, could write plays in the Shakespearean vein. The plays had some redeeming qualities, however, and one critic of the time remarked that he considered the avaricious peasant Gluthahn in Moisasurs Zauberfluch among Raimund’s greatest accomplishments.

Mountain King and Misanthrope

A rich and misanthropic peasant was the focal character of Raimund’s next play, Mountain King and Misanthrope. Raimund himself, with his distrust for his environment and his friends, was the model for Rappelkopf, whom he portrayed at the opening performance at the Leopoldstädter Theater on October 27, 1828. Herr von Rappelkopf has gone into seclusion from the world and from other human beings, whom he hates and mistrusts. His fourth and current wife has to endure his moods and unjustified suspicions, which have apparently killed the three wives before her. Rappelkopf’s only daughter, Malchen, must keep her love for the young painter August Dorn hidden from her father, who would not approve of such a worthless suitor. Rappelkopf’s paranoia, which extends to everything and everyone, makes him also suspect his servant Habakuk, who happens to enter the room on a kitchen errand with a knife in his hand. Rappelkopf surmises that his wife has sent the servant to assassinate him. After breaking all the furniture, he runs from the house out into the forest, where he encounters the family of the poor charcoal-burner Christian Glüwurm. He, his wife, their four children, and a grandmother live in a dilapidated hut that appeals to Rappelkopf because of its solitude. He buys it from them for a good price and rudely drives them from their abode. At this hut high up in the mountains, he encounters the King of the Alps, Astralagus, who tells him that he has only himself to blame for his misanthropy. To prove it, Astralagus transforms himself into Rappelkopf and Rappelkopf into his own brother-in-law, so that Rappelkopf may observe his behavior toward his family as an outsider. Once Rappelkopf recognizes that his suspicions are unfounded, he puts an end to Astralagus’s torture of his family in his own guise. A reformed misanthrope, he gives his blessing to his daughter’s marriage and holds his wife and servant in high esteem. Peace and tranquillity have finally entered his house.

The play exceeded all Raimund’s previous successes to that point. Franz Grillparzer called the scene in the charcoal-burner’s hut a portrayal “unsurpassed in all of Dutch genre-painting.” A literary debate ensued immediately as to Raimund’s sources. Was he indebted to Molière, to William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (pr. c. 1607-1608), or to Schiller’s fragment “Der Menschenfeind” (the misanthrope)? In the end, it was Raimund’s own shaping of the material that produced one of his two greatest plays. Raimund had again found the perfect expression for his formula of fusing together the worlds of fantasy and reality.

Die unheilbringende Krone

This great success was followed by Raimund’s greatest failure, Die unheilbringende Krone. The author even failed initially in his attempt to title the play, having to change “Crown” to “Magic Crown” in order to avoid a seeming allusion to the Austrian Imperial Crown. The plot was confusing and dull, fraught with too many characters and subplots. The audience objected to Raimund’s departure from a simple comical story line, which it had come to expect in his work. Instead, Raimund had indulged in his passion to create a theater that was to measure up to Shakespeare’s historical tragedies or perhaps Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, pb. 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1828). The critics found the play marred by bombast and false pathos. In his disappointment, Raimund did not produce another play for four years.

The Spendthrift

After this self-imposed silence, Raimund created his last and perhaps greatest play of all, The Spendthrift, which again reduced the emphasis on fantasy elements and pathos in favor of a plot placed squarely in the center of Raimund’s beloved Vienna. In more ways than one, Raimund’s career seemed to have come full circle, because the author had again written a servant role for himself, as in his early plays. The Spendthrift opened at the Josephstädter Theater on February 20, 1834, with Raimund in the role of the servant Valentin. For the first time, Raimund divided his play into three acts rather than the customary two. In the first act, the audience hears about the wealthy nobleman Julius von Flottwell through his servants and his secretary Wolf. Flottwell is careless with his money, indulging his every whim and leaving all decisions to Wolf. Wolf, the incarnation of evil, interviews two competing architects who are bidding for a contract to build Flottwell’s new castle, and the secretary intends to give the contract to the one who will pay him the higher bribe. Into this web of corruption enters the honest servant Valentin, with his dependent, the chambermaid Rosa. Both of them are happy to be in the service of such a kind and generous master, but they despise the shallow and coarse friends whose company Flottwell keeps. Eventually, Flottwell himself and his companions appear, ready to engage in their favorite pastime, hunting. Toward the end of the act, it becomes evident that Flottwell not only associates with mortals but also has a protective spirit, Cheristane, who had provided Flottwell’s father with all his wealth because she felt a deep fondness for young Flottwell. Now, however, she recognizes that wealth is an impediment to Flottwell’s maturity. She dispatches her assistant, Azur, disguised as a beggar, to give Flottwell a taste of things to come unless he reforms his reckless life, but Flottwell does not recognize the impending doom.

In the second act, which takes place three years later, Flottwell is wooing Amalia, the daughter of President Klugheim, who refuses to give his daughter’s hand to such a spendthrift. Meanwhile, Valentin and Rosa are dismissed from the household by Wolf on a trumped-up charge of theft. In reality, Rosa has incurred Wolf’s ire by refusing his advances. At the end of the act, Flottwell has fled with Amalia to England; he squanders much of his fortune there and eventually loses his wife Amalia and a child on a voyage to South America.

In the third act, twenty years later, Flottwell returns home a beggar, while his secretary is now the ailing master of the castle. Valentin, now a carpenter, has married Rosa, and they have several children. In one of Raimund’s most famous songs, the so-called “Hobellied” (“Carpenter’s Song”), Valentin expresses his philosophy that all people will end up in the same condition eventually. He has remained loyal to Flottwell, who had always been kind to him and had given him many a ducat in good times. Together with Valentin and his family, Flottwell can spend the remainder of his life in modest comfort on the income from the gifts he had once carelessly bestowed on Azur.

With The Spendthrift, Raimund created the classical play of the Viennese Popular Theater, unsurpassed to this day. The realms of the real and the imaginary world appear side by side, as if this were the most normal state of affairs, but their juxtaposition no longer serves to hint at a doddering Austrian emperor or the empire’s despicable lip service to truth—or, more gravely, at the paranoia that had pervaded everything during that age of political repression. Rather, Raimund returned to his contention, from The Maid from Fairyland, that wealth corrupts. It is moderation which Flottwell must learn; he has lived too “flott” (sumptuously) in every sense of the word.

Raimund’s praise of moderation may also be interpreted as showing his affinity with the Biedermeier movement, which represented a withdrawal from the political and public scene to the privacy of home and hearth. Raimund had proved, however, that he was sensitive to the problems of his age, and perhaps his last play should be seen rather as a warning against the consequences of an unchecked materialism, which was on the rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

Bibliography

Harding, Laurence V. The Dramatic Art of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1974. Harding compares and contrasts the works of Raimund and Nestroy. Bibliography and index.

James, Dorothy. Raimund and Vienna: A Critical Study of Raimund’s Plays in Their Viennese Setting. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970. A study of Raimund’s dramatic works and their setting in Vienna. Bibliography.

Kimbell, Edmund. Introduction to TheBarometer-maker on the Magic Island and The Diamond of the Spirit King, by Ferdinand Raimund. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. In his introduction to his translation of two of Raimund’s plays, Kimbell provides critical analysis and useful insights. Bibliography.

Michalski, John. Ferdinand Raimund. New York: Twayne, 1968. A basic biography of Raimund that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Yates, W. E., and John R. P. McKenzie, eds. Viennese Popular Theatre: A Symposium. Exeter, England: University of Exeter, 1985. This group of essays on the Viennese popular theater examines Raimund as well as Johann Nestroy and the theater of Austria. Bibliography.