Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer
The walk to the iron hammer is a ballad by Friedrich Schiller. He wrote in the autumn of ballads year 1797. It was first published in the book edited by Schiller Musenalmanach for the year 1798.
Content
The servant ( servant) Fridolin is his mistress Cunegonde, but also his master, Count of Saverne, loyal. However, the envious hunter Robert indicated against the Count to a love affair of the Countess's pages. The enraged Count commands then the working in an iron hammer servants to throw the supposed rival in the oven. But because Fridolin there helping out on the road as an altar boy at a trade show, there is a confusion; instead of his servants take the slanderer Robert, who receives his just punishment so. The deeply moving Graf brings Fridolin Countess with the words back:
"This child, no angel is so pure / Laßts your favor Being recommended / How bad we were deliberate, / With God and his troops. "
Formation
In September 1797 Charlotte sent by Stone to the wife of the poet Friedrich Schiller, a French anthology, which also contains the underlying material of the gear after the iron hammer. Schiller took up this subject at once, at this time he worked intensively with the literary form of the ballad. While his friend Christian Gottfried Körner a " peculiar charm by the sound of the Christian - Catholic - Old German piety " felt ( letter of 26 March 1798) and " somewhat Warm " by the idea of divine providence, Goethe was convinced that Schiller wanted to know ballad understood as a fine comic replica to in those years still cultivated genre of moral parable. Goethe wrote to him after reading on October 30, 1797 "They have hardly done anything with so happy humor and retardirende fair is the best Effect. "
Public premiere, reception history and musical settings
Schiller's publication of the ballad as part of an anthology, a dainty Musenalmanach for the year 1798 seems to have been originally intended as a silent reading material. But at that time poems and ballads were not primarily intended for reading individual reader. Rather, they were intended for presentation to smaller private and larger public auditoriums, and they were often enough not only read, but declaimed by heart, raising his voice. The practice of higher and middle-class circles to consume framed literary products to the sounds of instruments or by prelude on the piano, helped to imagine the dramatic content of what was read and the feelings of their protagonists.
Shortly after the Berlin premiere of Franz Ignaz von Holbein spectacle Fridolin - listed on November 30, 1807 with a musical contribution Bernhard Anselm Weber - had this, apparently ordered or at least initiated by his theater director August Wilhelm Iffland, also the presentation of the acting subjects, Schiller's ballad, set to music as a melodrama with choir and orchestral accompaniment. The generally very high esteem for his composition can be seen in many contemporary discussions, the later adaptation of his work (1829 ) by Carl Loewe can be regarded as a measure of its popularity. The piece was performed in public for the first time in Berlin musikal on February 25, 1808 by Iffland as part of a ". Academy in the theater hall " of the playhouse on the Gendarmenmarkt, " which was one of the most interesting conversations this winter. "
From the ballad, there were 1831-1907 in all genres ( music - ) dramatic adaptations of the composer Charles Schoenfeld, Franz Mejo, Paolo Fabrizi, Conradin Kreutzer, Frank Romer, Otto Claudius, Carl Gustav Kupsch, Leonard Terry, Heinrich Schulz- Bytom Johann Baptist Klerr, Adolphe Edouard and Marie Deslandres and Adolf Wallnoefer (Franz Stieger Opera Encyclopedia, Tutzing 1975). At the already mentioned above spoken theater version of Holbein and the operatic version Kreutzer (Vienna 1838) can be seen clearly that the action at that time was read without ironic twist as a serious subject ( see, for example Johann Anton Friedrich Reil's libretto The transition to the Iron Hammer, Vienna 1838 ).
It is only recently as a foregone fact that Schiller's poetry was meant, as Goethe she read and how Iffland seems to have interpreted it.
Karl Kraus's disrespectful remark about Schiller's iron hammer ballad ( in the torch in 1927 in his essay on rhymes in German literature ) is based possibly on the unspoken assumption that the noble Schiller was humorless per se. That Kraus in his assessment of the poet Schiller's sense of humor is not taken into account, such as the illustrations to the " Avanturen of new Telemachus ," probably is obvious. Therefore, Kraus's remark about the ballad only partly true: " in the" third period yet "is Fridolin - in one of the most painful poems, whose glory ever found its rhyme in the philistinism - » result of the mistress ' "(cf. Karl Kraus. writings Edited by Christian Wagenknecht. Vol 7 the language, Frankfurt 1987, p 335) Reading Kraus ' harsh comment, the ballad can hardly unlike Johann Nestroy declaims and Loewe's musical version about the most in an ironic parody Artists Georg Kreisler imagine.