Preface

Proserpina is the most purely and starkly tragic of all Goethe’s dramatic writings. The date and occasion of its composition are not certainly known, but it was probably written between June and December 1777, in a period of exceptional emotional turbulence for Goethe after the death of his twenty-six year-old sister Cornelia on 8 June. In its setting by Siegmund von Seckendorff it had one independent performance by Weimar’s recently acquired professional singer, Corona Schröter, in the theatre of the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia at Ettersburg on 10 June 1779. It had however already been premiered by Corona Schröter as an insertion into the satirical farce Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, which was put on by the court amateurs on 30 January 1778, the birthday of Duchess Luise, the wife of the reigning Duke, and was repeated on 10 February of the same year. Goethe much later expressed regret at the incorporation of Proserpina into this alien context, an act of vandalism which, by making his deeply-felt monodrama the target of coarse mockery, had deprived it of all its effect. Why should he have felt compelled to mutilate his own creation? Evidently he realized that he had exposed to public view something especially personal and disquieting.

In the monodrama, as in the myth on which it is based, Proserpina has been snatched out of a world of light and flowers and condemned to marriage to an unloved husband - like Cornelia, and like other taboo women who fascinated Goethe at the time, such as Frau von Stein and Duchess Luise. Alone in a desolate and mournful subterranean landscape Proserpina calls for aid to Jupiter, her loving father, as she thinks. A pomegranate tree seems sent to offer her refreshment and a sign of hope that her prayer has been heard, but when she eats the fruit she is seized by the terrible certainty that this act has cursed her and she can never now be released from her torment. The drama ends in despair, and with no hint of the consoling resolution offered by the myth – that Proserpina will at least be allowed by Jupiter to return to the upper world every six months.

Proserpina has been betrayed by her own notion of hope and trust in a loving divinity - as in Goethe’s ode ‘Prometheus’ of 1773, God is either non-existent or malevolent. But Prometheus can boast of all that his ‘sacred and burning’ heart has achieved, by contrast with the silent and impotent god whom he scorns. Proserpina has nothing to point to that her heart has done for her. On the contrary, the shipwreck of her life seems to have been brought about precisely by a trust that her heart could not ultimately mislead her. Is then the love and beauty and perfection which is our heart’s desire an illusion? The very act by which Proserpina expresses her faith that it is not an illusion, her eating the fruit that seems an answer to her prayer, condemns her. She is left to an eternity not merely of unfulfilment, but of punishment for allowing herself to hope she might be fulfilled. How reliable are our needs as a guide to the order of things outside ourselves? Are these yearnings an inexplicable and self-imposed torment? Or is the heart sufficient unto itself, requiring neither validation nor satisfaction of its needs from an external power? Goethe had been agitated by these questions since the crisis of the Sentimentalist movement that he had represented in his novel Werther, the story of a feeling heart that destroys itself. Like Werther, Proserpina in her deepest need puts her trust in her heart and is betrayed. By 1777 Goethe knew that in his own life he had to put behind him the possibility of such a tragedy of ‘innocent guilt’, or like Cornelia, and many other contemporaries less close to him, he would be eaten up by unproductive absorption in the inadequacy of the world to his emotions. Though he had given bitter and unsparing expression to Proserpina’s fate, he had to shake off his sympathy with it in order to survive. Her tragedy was therefore incorporated into the brutal parody of Sentimentalism in Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit and lost to view for a generation.

Early in 1814 Goethe’s favourite actor, Pius Alexander Wolff, suggested to the local composer Carl Eberwein that he should write a new score for the forgotten monodrama, probably with a view to creating an opportunity for his wife Amalie, née Malcolmi. (It is possible that Goethe put the idea into Wolff’s mind, but there is no evidence.) On Whitsunday 1814 Eberwein played his composition to Goethe on the piano, while Goethe’s secretary Riemer declaimed the text and Goethe found himself deeply moved. At some later date Goethe and Eberwein went through the work privately together. A production was set in train at the end of the year, and the new Proserpina was first performed on 4 February 1815, to mark the birthday of Weimar’s heir apparent, the thirty-two year-old Carl Friedrich, with Amalie Wolff, also thirty-two, in the title-role. The performance was such a success that it was repeated a further three times, and enquiries came in from other theatres interested in putting the work on themselves. For their benefit, Goethe published in Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände on 8 June 1815 an account of his intentions, only partly realized in the Weimar production.

The stage set, which in Weimar had to be purely schematic, should, Goethe thought, show the underworld as a sombre Poussinesque landscape of ruined castles, aqueducts and bridges. All the achievements of civilization should be shown returning to a state of nature, since for the ancients – as Goethe had already argued in an essay on the wall-paintings of Delphi in 1804 – the worst punishments in the after-life were those that revealed the pointlessness of human activity. The ruin of a villa, with its garden now a wilderness, would also help explain the presence of the pomegranate tree. Proserpina should enter weighed down with the splendid robes, veils and diadem that signified her hateful condition as Pluto’s queen, but should cast these off in order to emerge as the flower-crowned nymph who first roused the god’s desire in the vale of Enna. One garment should be retained however which she could use to enhance her gestures in the manner of Emma Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’ (poses, sometimes in a specially constructed picture frame, representing a character from literature or art), to which Goethe had been introduced when he visited Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador in Naples, in 1787. (Goethe may also have known that Lady Hamilton had died in wretched circumstances only a month before this production.) Both the ‘attitudes’ and the tableaux vivants which developed out of them – the imitation by living but stationary actors of well-known paintings – had proved popular in Germany, and Goethe laid emphasis in his essay on the elaborate tableau with which the Weimar production concluded. During the final choruses the set opened to reveal Pluto on his throne, with the three Fates in a cave beneath him and beside him an empty throne awaiting Proserpina. To his left, Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus were shown in semi-darkness suffering in solitude the pains of endless and fruitless exertion, while to his right the blessed were rewarded in light with the social joys of love and family life. (The graded illumination from left to right permitted the scene painter to include the full range of colours which in Goethe’s theory are created by the mingling of light and darkness.) By contrast with the elaborate movements of the singer-dancer-actress the motionless tableau showed ‘the kingdom of shades ... frozen into a picture, and the queen too freezing into a part of the image’. In a final coup-de-théâtre the curtain fell and after a few moments rose again during the last bars of the piece to show the same scene, but with Proserpina now enthroned and at last perfectly still, her gaze averted from the spouse to whom she is bound in eternity.

By 1815 Goethe had developed a new practice of tragedy, and was well on his way to developing a new theory of it. By concluding his monodrama with a Hamiltonian tableau he was able to achieve an aesthetic distancing which muted its emotional impact, and made it possible to enjoy a work the theme of which was an extremity of despair. He had already had recourse to similar tableaux at or near the end of other tragedies, such as Egmont and Torquato Tasso. By inserting Proserpina into The Triumph of Sensibility he had also sought to detach himself and his audience from the terrible implications of the story he had told, but he had now found a way of doing so without compromising the tragedy of Proserpina’s end, and without destroying the deep seriousness of the play.

Goethe already intended his collaboration with Eberwein on Proserpina to issue in what the age of Wagner came to know as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of all the arts. All friends of Goethe can be grateful to Dr Lorraine Byrne Bodley for recovering and making available this profound little masterpiece. Let us hope that theatres around the world will now discover in it a means of giving their audiences the pleasures of a Gesamtkunstwerk without requiring them to sit still in Bayreuth for fifteen hours.

Nicholas Boyle