René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt

René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt ( born January 22, 1773 in Nancy, Meurthe -et -Moselle, † July 27, 1844 ) was a French playwright and director. He was the founder of modern melodrama.

Life

Pixérécourts father was of lower nobility and involved his son after studying law in the French Revolution, where he had been fighting the age of 17 on the side of the royalists. Already during the war service, he writes plays. After years of effort, he succeeded in 1797 for the first time, a play at the Théâtre de l' Ambigu -Comique to bring to the performance. In the same year of major success Victor ou l' enfant de la forêt already followed (Victor or the child of the forest ), a piece that is by Jean- Jacques Rousseau's Pygmalion (1770 ) inspired. Cœlina (1800) was his most successful play. Then Pixérécourt dominated for 30 years, the great Parisian melodrama stages. In 1827 he spent a year as director of the Opéra -Comique. 1825 to 1835 he was director of the Théâtre de la Gaîté, until it was destroyed by a fire, which brought him to his fortune. He retired to Nancy and dealt with the edition of his works.

Melodrama

After the French Revolution, the aristocratic tragedy was not more interesting with its ancient materials. The tragedy should not be the preserve of high-ranking figures more. The majority of serious melodrama as genre that was intended for a mass audience, took its place. The contemporary historical shocks created a strong need for orientation. Right and wrong, morality and immorality should be distinguishable back of many people 's opinion.

As Alexis Pitou has shown, the melodrama continues the pantomime of the later 18th century in some respects. Pixérécourts pieces were played on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, mainly at the Théâtre de l' Ambigu -Comique, the Théâtre de la Porte Saint- Martin and the Theatre de la gaieté.

The crime stories that made up a substantial part of the repertoire, were the reason for the nickname of this boulevard as " Boulevard du crime " ( Boulevard of the crime ). Even the derogatory term boulevard theater communicates with Pixérécourts melodramas. His audience was from the lower middle class. Many could not read. The fascinating deciphering of characters since then is the stylistic devices of melodrama. Film genres such as the cloak-and -dagger movie, the adventure film, the thriller, the horror film appear in Pixérécourts melodramas pre-embossed.

Effect

Pixérécourt was despite numerous hostile one of the most influential playwright in the early 19th century and had a considerable influence on literature, art and drama to the next generation, such as Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Scribe or the opera composer Daniel François Esprit Auber, and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Many German -language authors such as August von Kotzebue or Ignaz Franz Castelli translated his plays or used them as a basis for their own works. Pixérécourts The dog of Aubry (1814 ), in which a dog identified the murderer of his master, was performed with a trained poodle and made worldwide sensation. Johann Wolfgang Goethe put 1817 down from his directorship at the Weimar court theater, as he could not prevent a performance. The Poodle ( " the gist of the matter " ) has been immortalized in Goethe 's Faust I.

Pixérécourts work as a director, who laid great emphasis on realistic features, had a considerable influence on the history of theater of the 19th century. The actor and writer Thomas Holcroft translated Pixérécourts melodramas for the London stage, where the melodrama unfolded own tradition.

In addition to its approximately 60 melodramas Pixérécourt wrote a number of comedies and lyrics for the musical theater genre comic opera, vaudeville and Feerie. He wrote two theoretical texts in which he justified his theater Genre: Guerre au melodrame! (1818 ) and Le melodrame (1832 ).