Johan Ludvig Heiberg

• Born: December 14, 1791
• Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark
• Died: August 25, 1860
• Place of death: Bonderup, Denmark

Other Literary Forms

Johan Ludvig Heiberg wrote prolifically in all the various literary forms. He wrote nonfiction both as a journalist and as a scholar. His journalism spans the spectrum from politics to theatrical criticism. His scientific works reflect his multitude of interests. Heiberg wrote on Nordic mythology, on philosophy, and on linguistics; he also published both poetry and short stories.

Achievements

Johan Ludvig Heiberg managed, in his own lifetime, to go from being considered an inferior dramatist whose works were in bad taste, empty, and silly to being the arbiter of taste and his country’s most highly regarded and popular dramatist. He single-handedly introduced the vaudeville as a dramatic form in Denmark, by way of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. After finishing his doctoral dissertation, Heiberg spent several years in France, where he first saw vaudeville on the stage. The French vaudeville can be described as lighthearted comedy spiced with popular tunes. He was enchanted, and when he returned to Copenhagen, he began to write his own vaudevilles. At first they were met with a dual response, unadulterated enthusiasm from the audience—Copenhagen saw its first ticket scalpers as a result of the popularity of Heiberg’s vaudevilles—and icy contempt from critics and the intelligentsia.

Heiberg met his critics head-on. After repeatedly having read how empty and distasteful his plays were, how they were a menace to the tastes of unsuspecting and intellectually unsophisticated audiences, he answered in the form of a long article, “Om vaudevillen,” in which he declared his program and denounced his critics as amateurs. The article was so well argued and convincing that the criticism virtually stopped. Heiberg had won.

Soon after Heiberg’s first vaudevilles had appeared, and after he had successfully argued the merits of the vaudeville as a national dramatic form, vaudeville writers emerged from everywhere. In 1832, the highly regarded critic Christian Molbech wrote about Heiberg that he had created a theatrical form that was original, national, and the best in comic dramatic literature since the works of the great Ludvig Holberg. Heiberg had created a national comedy.

Heiberg went from honor to major honor. He was asked, in 1828, to write a play to be presented on the occasion of the marriage of Princess Vilhelmine, the daughter of King Frederik VI, to her cousin Prince Frederik. The result was Elverhøj. In 1829, Heiberg was named house poet at the Royal Theatre. In 1849, he was appointed director of the Royal Theatre.

Heiberg was influenced by such great European spirits of his day as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose work was the subject of Heiberg’s doctoral dissertation, and the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Heiberg was a formalist who believed that what one says is not as important as how one says it. He was also a Romantic in the sense that he was concerned less with expressing his ideas clearly than with expressing them adorned with symbolism. The form was to be a hazy aesthetic mist through which the content was suggested rather than actually perceived.

After Heiberg’s death in 1860, the great critic Georg Brandes wrote that when he, Brandes, grew up, Heiberg was the most influential person in the spiritual and artistic life of Copenhagen (and therefore Denmark). His Hegelian aesthetics were so dominant that he influenced not only how and what writers and other artists wrote and produced but also how members of the bourgeoisie—at least those who wanted to be considered au courant—decorated their homes. The final, and possibly strongest, measure of Heiberg’s importance is that at the height of his stature in Danish intellectual life, an anti-Heiberg movement arose which vociferously expressed dissent from his reigning tastes and opinions.

Biography

That Johan Ludvig Heiberg became a writer whose major concerns were with artistic form rather than with content may have been the result of an event that occurred when he was only nine years old. In 1800, Peter Andreas Heiberg, Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s father, was sent into exile by royal decree. The elder Heiberg was a passionate opponent of the Danish absolute monarchy and a caustic wit who used the relative freedom of expression to vent his republican views. In response to the elder Heiberg’s writings, King Frederik VI introduced tight censorship and exiled the writer. When the elder Heiberg left Denmark to live the remainder of his life in Paris, he left his wife and young Johan Ludvig behind. One can assume that this had a profound impact on the young boy’s outlook on the world.

Actually, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who was born in Copenhagen on December 14, 1791, lived to see both the most stringent censorship that Denmark has had in its history and the total abolition of censorship when Denmark changed from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in 1849. Yet he never became involved in the political tempest that raged during most of his productive years. Never identified with any particular political or social point of view, he stuck to his Hegelian aesthetics and a Romantic concern with the national heritage. If a political interest emerges from Heiberg’s writings at all, it is a Hegelian one that focuses on the individual rather than on classes or social groups.

The young Heiberg was not much interested in school, probably because his childhood after his father’s departure for Paris became a constant pilgrimage from home to home. His mother divorced his father and was remarried. The father was awarded the boy and placed him with various friends and relatives. Finally, at the age of twelve, the boy ran away from his adoptive parents to live with his mother. He seems, despite his initial lack of interest, to have gotten a sound education and passed his artium with flying colors.

After his exam came a period when Heiberg had to decide what his future should be. His main interests were writing and the theater, and, after two or three false starts involving law and medicine, he finally wrote his doctoral dissertation on aesthetics, specifically, the Spanish national drama, especially the dramatist Calderón de la Barca.

Heiberg traveled, as was customary, to the centers of European civilization. He was especially taken with Paris, where he lived for two years with his father. It was during this stay that he came to appreciate the vaudeville, which was extremely popular in the Parisian theaters featuring lighter fare. The vaudeville that he saw in Paris, and that he was to adapt into his own Danish national vaudeville, mixed the various performing arts: Comedies were interspersed with music and dance. The music usually took the form of popular arias or other popular music for which new lyrics were written.

Heiberg experienced financial difficulties throughout most of his life. His lack of funds forced him to leave Paris. He then tried desperately to get a professorship at the University of Copenhagen but had to settle for a position at the university in Kiel, Germany, where there was a large contingent of Danes. During his stay in Kiel, Heiberg traveled to Berlin, where he met and became friendly with Hegel. This was an important event in terms of Heiberg’s intellectual outlook. He became a devout Hegelian, and indeed, everything he subsequently wrote was infused with the Hegelian dialectic.

Eventually Heiberg left Kiel and moved back to Copenhagen, where he began to write vaudevilles. These were produced by the Royal Theatre as fast as he could finish them. From 1825, when his first vaudeville, Kong Salomon og Jørgen Hattemager, was written and produced, Heiberg averaged one or two vaudevilles a year, and they invariably were produced immediately.

Heiberg wrote prolifically, not only for the theater but also as a scientist and, for many years, as the editor of the weekly paper Flyvende Post, on anything and everything. He managed, as already mentioned, to become first the royally appointed resident dramatist of the Royal Theatre, and, in 1849, the director of that institution. He died at the age of sixty-eight, on August 23, 1860.

Analysis

Johan Ludvig Heiberg has come to be represented almost exclusively by Elverhøj, which is a weak and boring play, but even his best efforts, such as Recensenten og dyret or A Soul After Death, are neither weighty nor universal enough to have anything but historical value. Heiberg was a major figure in his own time who created a national Danish Romantic drama and was an important intellectual force, but he has not been able to penetrate the time barrier and reach modern audiences as more than a voice from the past, a voice locked in the past.

Heiberg was a writer with a program. He wanted to create a Danish national comic drama; he wanted this drama to embody his ideas about the nature and function of art; and he wanted to infuse this drama with his Romantic vision of the world. The central themes in Heiberg’s work are his ideas about the Romantic movement and his Hegelian convictions. For Heiberg, Romanticism meant, first and foremost, a focus on the national. He believed that each nation has its own unique “spirit” and that this spirit is a force, a raw energy. The spirit is expressed in such ancient sources as myths and folklore, and the task of the Romantic artist is to take the raw energy locked into the myth or folktale and give it an artistic/moral form. Heiberg perceived myths and folklore as embodiments of nature, but nature with a national imprint. The Romantic artist must transform nature into art, or rather, weave a thread intertwining nature and artistic form.

Heiberg regarded the drama as the ideal medium for his artistic creation, a conviction based on a rather unwieldy argument. Drama, he contended, is the most complete of the verbal arts; in turn, by intricate Hegelian dialectic, he argued that the verbal arts are the most sophisticated of all the arts. That lyric drama is the pinnacle of dramatic forms is established by another set of dialectic equations. Poetry, the most sophisticated of the verbal arts, has two primary modes, lyric and epic. Drama is both lyric and epic—that is, it embodies both poetic form, which is timeless, and a story, which is located in time. Heiberg’s insistence on dialectic equations is both amusing and pathetic.

From a more practical point of view, Heiberg wanted to create a new dramatic art form, the Danish vaudeville, which he wanted to be different both from classical drama and from its contemporary forebears, French Opéra Comique (or song plays) and German plays with songs. Heiberg castigated both of the above as hodgepodges of drama, music, and dance in which the three performing arts are thrown together without taste or artistic merit. The songs and the dance in these theatrical forms were, Heiberg said, unmotivated interruptions of the action, and the action an unwelcome activity to be endured between musical numbers. He proposed to create a drama in which the three forms united to compose a synthetic whole. Most important, the music was to be incorporated into the action, growing naturally from it. In addition to this strong emphasis on form, his drama would be distinguished by a preoccupation with the Danish national character.

Recensenten og dyret

When one reads Heiberg’s plays, especially the best ones such as Recensenten og dyret, his program comes to life. To be sure, Recensenten og dyret is light fare, but it is witty, well constructed, and closely follows Heiberg’s specifications for what a good vaudeville should be.

Recensenten og dyret is, like all of Heiberg’s vaudevilles, a play about young love. Keiser and Viva love each other, but as Keiser is a young and penniless student, and Viva’s father is in financial trouble caused by his vain ambitions to be a serious publisher, Pryssing, the father, refuses to let the young lovers marry. He has decided that he wants a son-in-law with money, one who can help him out of his economic distress.

The setting for the play is the Copenhagen amusement park, Bakken. For a paper he publishes, Pryssing has hired Torp, a sixty-year-old law student, to write reviews of everything from the circus to streetsingers. Pryssing thinks that his paper will succeed if it has reviews. He and Viva come to Bakken, Pryssing to check on Torp, Viva to meet Keiser secretly.

Torp, because his pay from Pryssing is not merely low but also overdue, has devised the scheme of presenting an act of his own in a tent at Bakken. He wants to display an unusual animal that he has happened on and captured (thus the title, the critic and the animal). Pryssing is somewhat upset because this will mean an artistic event that will not be reviewed in his paper, but he is put at ease when Torp assures him that he will review his own act, too. Two other characters show up, Klatterup and Lederman. One is a writer (he writes social criticism for newspapers) and the other is a publisher. They are at Bakken because Pryssing owes them money, and they have heard that he is going to be there.

As the intrigue develops, young Keiser uses his quick wits to save Pryssing from his angry creditors. He has Torp give Pryssing the animal, which Pryssing, in turn, gives to Klatterup and Lederman in payment of his debt. In the end, when Pryssing has already given Keiser and Viva his consent, it is disclosed that the “unique” animal is merely an insect that has lost one of its legs. The audience who has gathered to see the animal is justifiably furious, and the representatives of greed, bourgeois stupidity, and self-righteousness, Pryssing, Torp, Lederman, and Klatterup, are the butt of the public’s anger.

The themes of Recensenten og dyret are young love, greed, and literary and critical dilettantism. The major conflict is the typically Romantic one between nature and culture. Keiser and Viva, who are young and in love, embody nature as an invincible force. They also represent, because they symbolize nature, Danishness: If one is Danish, one should act Danish and not try to imitate foreigners. The older characters represent a dying social system based on unnaturalness, on greed, and on misunderstood and naïve artistic pretensions. Un-Danishness is represented by various characters who perform at Bakken. They are Italian, German, and French (important cultural influences in Denmark at the time). The older characters succumb to the charms of the Italian equestrienne; the other foreigners have equally “elevated” artistic pursuits. Clearly, the moral is that the two young people, representing nature and Danishness, have the moral right over the older generation, which finds its ideals in foreign dilettantes. There is a logic in nature (young love) that invariably overcomes all cultural constraints.

The form is light but witty and linguistically sophisticated. Heiberg shows great skill in the construction of his play. The songs are textbook examples of his theory on how to use music in vaudeville: They never intrude, but fit neatly and naturally into the action and often have the character of dialogues and dramatic encounters. The more straightforward songs effectively set the mood, which is an important aspect of Heiberg’s theory concerning the use of music in vaudeville. He deliberately uses light tunes that are already known to the audience, so that the tunes can help to set a mood without themselves becoming intrusive. Recensenten og dyret is probably Heiberg’s most successful vaudeville in terms of his program for the creation of a Danish national vaudeville. Its principal drawback is that it seems to have been written, in part, as a polemic against particular individuals in his own day.

The April Fools

All the other vaudevilles that Heiberg wrote are variations on the same theme: A boy and girl are in love, and their parents or guardians oppose their love because of greed and because they are part of an old and dying system. In the end, romance and young, unbridled nature win out, and everybody is happy. The April Fools is no exception. It follows the pattern in every way. It is interesting, however, because it clearly exemplifies Heiberg’s rather heavy-handed use of symbolism.

The April Fools is set in a girls’ boarding school and depicts the love affair of Sigfried Møller and Constance, who are young adults, and the love affair of Hans Mortensen and Trine Rar, who are twelve-year-olds. The principal villains are Miss Bittermandel, the headmistress of the school and Constance’s aunt and guardian, and Mr. Zierlich, one of the teachers in the school. He is an older man, to whom Miss Bittermandel has promised Constance in marriage.

The story is, in brief, that Miss Bittermandel is giving a party because it is her birthday, the first of April. Traditionally, the first of April is a day for playing practical jokes on people, and that is exactly what the young lovers do. Miss Bittermandel is desperately trying to keep Sigfried and Hans away from Constance and Trine, respectively. Her way of doing this is to keep them out of the school. On this particular first of April, they both manage to get into the school anyway. Sigfried gets in disguised as a giant basket of wine from a fictitious wine grocer; for his part, Hans throws a stone through a window, and when the servants come out to see who did it, he sneaks in behind them.

Through a series of mishaps, some orchestrated by Sigfried and Hans, and some not, the party ends as a total disaster, with Miss Bittermandel having to send all the parents and their daughters back home. Sigfried, however, manages to get his Constance, and Hans and Trine enjoy some time together. The final song contends that life is a school and that life is where real learning takes place.

The text of the last song refers to the play’s central theme: That girls’ schools are places where young ladies are taught a lot of silly nonsense and where snobbery for things foreign is taken beyond the absurd. As social criticism, The April Fools is less than convincing, but as good, sparkling, innocent fun, it is everything one could desire.

Heiberg’s other usual themes—nature versus culture, Danishness versus foreignness, youth versus age, and the new order versus the old order—are also present. Nature is symbolized, as always in Heiberg, by the young lovers, by the quintessentially natural Mrs. Rar (Trine’s mother), who owns a meat-and-game shop, by Sigfried’s profession as a carpenter, and by Constance’s love for nature and distaste for the city. The unnatural is symbolized by Miss Bittermandel’s greed, by her desire to marry off a young girl such as Constance to the elderly Zierlich, and by the various foppish foreigners who teach at the school or offer their services as entertainers at the party. The most obvious symbols of unnaturalness are the silly things that the girls at the school are taught, such as dancing, piano playing, and sewing.

The opposition between Danish and foreign cultures is symbolized in the characters’ names. This is generally true in Heiberg’s plays, but it is especially obvious in The April Fools. All the good—that is, natural or Danish—characters have good Danish names that highlight a particular characteristic. Constance is constant and faithful, Sigfried is, as he explains to Constance, lest she or the audience miss the symbolism, a man who is a match for his name: He will “sieg,” which means “win,” and he will create “fried,” or “peace,” having convinced everybody of the righteousness of his cause. Hans Mortensen is also a good Danish name, reeking of country and fertile farmland. Trine is his female equivalent, and Rar, as Trine and her mother are called and are, means “nice.”

The other characters also are characterized by their names. Bittermandel means “bitter almond,” while Zierlich means “finicky.” There is a Swedish dancemaster, Tenneman (the symbolism lies in the fact that this, to Danes, is an obviously Swedish name), and there is Simon, who is a German-Jewish avanturier, which can be translated as “con man.” The internal symbolic structure of the play is an intricate reticulum, evoking sympathy for the people and actions that symbolize romance, Danishness, naturalness, and the new Romantic social order, while ridiculing the representatives of the old order and of foreign affectation.

No

One of Heiberg’s very last vaudevilles, No, is but a piece of frothy literary fluff. The story is the usual, young lovers who are kept from each other because of economic considerations that have nothing to do with them. This vaudeville was clearly influenced by the play Nein (1825), by the German dramatist Gustav Friedrich W. von Barneckow. The interesting twist on the usual theme is that the girl, Sophie, is forced, first by her lover, Hammer, and then by her guardian, Gamstrup, to answer “no,” in Danish, “nei,” to everything that is said to her.

Her guardian has decided that Sophie is to marry an old friend of his, the sacristan Link. Link is an older man, and Sophie is in love with Hammer, which is the source of the play’s central conflict. Hammer, when told that a suitor is expected, tells Sophie that she must say “no” to whatever the suitor says. She manages so deftly that Link can say to Hammer that she is a brilliant conversationalist. She also manages to turn Link’s proposal down. When Gamstrup finds out that his friend was met with a barrage of noes, he forces Sophie to repeat the success with Hammer. She does, in more ways than one. Not only does she answer no to everything he says without his noticing, but also she manages to make the sum of her negative answers a positive one: In saying no, she says yes. All ends well. Hammer suddenly comes into money, Link is happy to leave Copenhagen behind, and Gamstrup makes peace with Hammer.

No has even less substance than the other vaudevilles. It is simply a tour de force, a demonstration of its author’s mastery of the form. Yet it is an empty shell. Where the early vaudevilles had some kind of moral and ideational content, No is pure form without content.

A Soul After Death

In 1841, which was an exceptionally productive year for Heiberg, he published a book of dramatic poems entitled Nye digte. One of these, A Soul After Death, has been praised as Heiberg’s masterpiece of poetic elegance and acerbic wit. As the title suggests, this play is about the adventures of a dead man’s soul. The soul in question was, on Earth, not the soul of simply any man, but that of a solid bourgeois citizen of Heiberg’s Copenhagen. One is dealing here with tongue-in-cheek social criticism.

The drama is written in elegant and energetic verse. It follows the soul on his quest for a place in which he can spend eternity. His immediate inspiration is to head for Heaven, but there are complications. It turns out that having been a good, solid citizen who claims to be a Christian is not enough for the vigilant and inquisitive Saint Peter, who doles out the entry passes at Heaven’s gate. Saint Peter wants proof that the soul really, profoundly believed in Jesus as humankind’s savior. The soul falls seriously short of that ideal, as he has subscribed to the idea that God is beyond human understanding and that humans therefore do not have to waste time thinking about him. The soul is turned down and heads down the road to Elysium, where Aristophanes stands guard (the play has as one of its models Aristophanes’ Nephelai, 423 b.c.e.; The Clouds, 1708). Again, the soul from Copenhagen is weighed and found too much of a solid citizen and too little of a sparkling spirit to spend eternity with the likes of Socrates. Aristophanes ends their conversation with the words, “Soul, go to Hell!”

The soul does go to Hell. What is more, he does not initially realize where he is and rather likes it. He likes it because it reminds him of the Copenhagen he has recently left. This is Heiberg’s witty point: Those who are punished by going to Hell are condemned to live exactly the life they left on Earth. Or, inversely, life in nineteenth century Copenhagen is Hell. In Hell, the soul meets Mephistopheles, who shows him around and points out all the nice features that will make the soul feel right at home.

Hell is a continuation of humdrum bourgeois emptiness on Earth. As Mephistopheles points out, “people yawn a lot in this country.” This, however, is no problem for the soul; he is used to being bored. There is a minor crisis when the soul inquires what the name of the country is. He cannot understand why he, who was such a good and solid citizen, should be punished by going to Hell. Mephistopheles assuages his fears by saying that Hell is the right place for him and his likes, who were not good enough to go to Heaven and not bad enough to go to the lower regions of Hell, where souls are roasted over a slow fire and tormented in other inventive ways. In the end, the soul is content, convinced that he has indeed found the right place.

A Soul After Death gives Heiberg a chance to impale verbally certain types of people whom he detests. In Hell, the soul meets, among others, a poet who personally was bad, but whose work was good. The poet ended up in Hell, while his work went to Heaven. The soul also meets an actor who is so devoid of a personality or a conviction of his own that he sways with the dramatic breeze, back and forth between being good or bad depending on the character he currently is playing. It also gives Heiberg a chance to show the Copenhagen middle class in all its stolid, empty-headed complacency.

A Soul After Death is probably Heiberg’s best piece of work in any genre. It displays technical virtuosity, genuine wit, and some well-argued social criticism. Yet it must be added that even this, the best of Heiberg’s works, falls short of greatness. It is not quite amusing enough, not quite serious enough in its social criticism, not dazzling enough in its manipulation of ideas and literary forms to warrant permanent escape from oblivion. It has interest as a good example of ironic literature from its time and as a record of the intellectual and social currents of nineteenth century Copenhagen but not enough stature to stand on its own as a work of art.

Elverhøj

This last assessment is even more true of Elverhøj, the play that Heiberg wrote for the wedding of Prince Frederik and Princess Vilhelmine. This drama (as opposed to the vaudevilles), is in five long acts. It shares with the vaudevilles the themes of young lovers who cannot unite and the celebration of nature and national pride, but it adds to this layer of events in the “real” world a layer of events in the world of the elves (the title translates “hill of the elves”). Elverhøj features one of the great Danish kings, Christian IV, and his counterpart, the king of the elves. The latter does not appear, but the audience hears about him. The story is a repetition of all the stories in Heiberg’s plays, with one major twist. An old saying in Denmark, so the characters in Elverhøj claim, states that no Danish king has dared cross the brook of Tryggevælde in the southeastern part of the island of Sjælland, because beyond the brook the kingdom of the elves begins. Christian IV, in the play, proves the myth wrong. He crosses the brook without incident and brings the despondent young lovers together by royal decree.

Elverhøj is not a very good play, but it is, surprisingly, the only one of Heiberg’s plays that even today has a permanent place in the repertoire of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. This has less to do with the play’s merits, however, than with ritual. It has become customary to perform Elverhøj (or at least one act of it) every time the Danish royal family makes an official visit to the Royal Theatre.

Bibliography

Fenger, Henning. The Heibergs. New York: Twayne, 1971. The story of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and his family, covering the younger Heiberg’s life and works. Bibliography.

Mitchell, P. M. A History of Danish Literature. 2d ed. New York: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1971. An analysis of literature in Denmark, covering Heiberg and many other Danish writers. Bibliography.

Rossel, Sven H., ed. A History of Danish Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. An overview of Danish literature that covers the development of drama. Bibliography and index.