The dramatist Johann Nestroy was during his time the most popular man in Vienna, famous as an outstanding comedian who wrote his own plays. Nestroy died in 1862 and with him his burlesques disappeared, the opinion being one couldn't play Nestroy without Nestroy. His reappraisal by intellectuals was largely the work of Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist and philosopher of language, who presented Nestroy evenings from 1912 onwards and who was responsible for the rediscovery of this shrewd and sarcastic master of language.

There followed a gradual renaissance of Nestroy the dramatist, that culminated in the fifties and sixties of this century in a veritable Nestroy "explosion". Despite the colloquialisms of Viennese dialect that he exploited in his works Nestroy is now played in all German speaking countries, indeed in the whole of Central Europe.¹ Together with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and with Georg Büchner - here Wozzeck springs immediately to mind - he belongs to the great rediscoveries of the twentieth century in German literature.

A vast amount of secondary literature has since been written about him and a new complete edition of his works, done by scholars between Germany and Australia, is being supervised by an English colleague.² By the way, Nestroy might be familiar to English-speaking audiences through the musical Hello Dolly which is based on Thornton Wilder's adaptation of Nestroy's burlesque Einen Jux will er sich machen that was written in 1841. ³

The Austrian Theatre Museum possesses a valuable collection of Nestroy memorabilia, which could be enlarged by a number of important items that were found after I began to search systematically through the museum's inventory in 1980.⁴

I would like to begin by concentrating on iconography. You now see before you a water-colour by an artist who belonged to the circle of the theatre painters Franz and Gustav Gaul. It probably shows a scene from Franz Castelli's play Roderich and Kunigunde, which was frequently performed at the time.

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Nestroy often played the role of Sakripandos between 1833 and 1862: he is the second figure from the right.

An art album that contains a variety of water-colours by Viennese Biedermeier artists has a figurine, that has not been verified yet, but on account of its features and posture undoubted portrays Nestroy. The lay out of the picture points to the work of Johann Matthias Ranftl, who was widely known as a painter of animals and was called the "dog Raffael" of Vienna.

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And now for some new acquisitions. In the eighties three veritable Nestroy pictures - they are water-colours by Christian Schöller for Bäuerle's famous Theaterzeiting that were presumed lost since the 1920's - were bought on the New York art market. I would like to begin by showing you a scene from the play, Hutmacher und Strumpfwirker. We see here the famous comedians Wenzel Scholz and Johann Nestroy.

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The next water-colour shows Nestroy in two of his most popular roles.

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This is followed by a tableau from the burlesque Der Talisman. Nestroy is standing in the middle.

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It is interesting to note in passing that we could buy these sheets for a very reasonable price, because the New York auctioneers identified Nestroy as a French actor!

We were recently able to acquire the next water-colour, which I discovered in the storeroom of a Viennese costumier. You see before you a typical commedia dell'arte scene and the figurine on the right, which is a Pierrot, is - as the caption says - theatre director Nestroy. The picture was painted when Nestroy was director of the Carltheater in Vienna (1854-1860), probably for the quodlibet Theatralischer Unsinn (Theatrical Nonsense).

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It is evidence of the preference the ageing actor had for easily performed short plays, "dramatic piecemeal" as he called them,⁵ instead of a full evening programme. At this period of his life Nestroy was less disciplined - even careless - in every day matters. He would appear in society without realising that he had no jacket on underneath his coat, or he would fail to tell his friends the times of his departures from the city and would feel hurt when no one turned up to see him off at the station.

A good example of his diminishing self-control which came to the fore among other documents (such as a list of salaries for the Carltheater dating from 1842) is a 1860 passport for a "Herr Johann Nestroy, Theatre director, stature: tall, face: oval, hair/eyes: brown, mouth/nose: regular, distinguishing marks: none". Nestroy used this document for his well-known journey to Helgoland. However it is very revealing that he undersigned the document with a false date of birth: 1802. This is all the more remarkable because he was always very punctilious in all his dealings with the authorities.

I would now like to present our most important discovery, the manuscripts. Along with contemporary role books and scenarios of Die verhängnisvolle Faschingsnacht, Talisman and Tritsch Tratsch two complete transcriptions of an unknown and of a hitherto missing Nestroy play came to light.

Let us take a look at the Manuscript M 8776, Nestroy's first work for the stage, the gothic drama Prinz Friedrich von Corsica which was probably written in 1825. Our manuscript had been missing since 1937 and so the drama has only been known in a rather careless newspaper text. This reference formed nolens volens the basis for the first volume of the new Nestroy edition in 1979. It is a tantamount to academic mockery, but my discovery arrived two years too late.

Prinz Friedrich displays of the characteristics of Nestroy's art in nucleus. It follows a trivial source, that is only superficially dramatised. He is unable to create a serious hero nor to portray military courage, and there are already signs of a predilection for verbal innuendo that was to be so characteristics of his later works.

The play remained in Nestroy's desk until 1841 when it was presented to the public at a charity performance for Louis Grois and even netted Nestroy's friend the hoped - for dividends.

Prinz Friedrich von Corsica is not merely of interest as a great comedy writer's failed attempt at high drama.

It is an important piece of theatre history and contains all the paraphernalia of a trivial gothic romance. In this way Nestroy allows us a glimpse of the literary background he lampooned in his later plays. Or nearly all of them, as there is another serious play in our archives. The dramatic text M 8777 is a manuscript that must have found its way into our collection in or around 1930. The title of the romantic drama is Der wilde Knabe, oder die Kraft der Natur. It is an amended prompt book from the Schweigertheater in Munich, which performed the play - according to my research into the matter - in 1855. The production was arranged for a guest appearance of the mimic Eduard Klischnigg. Klischnigg, who was born in London, was one of the most famous acrobats of the 19th century. His career began in Vienna, where he entered the office of the theatre director Carl in 1836 and asked for permission to present guest performances. "What do you want to play?" asked Carl. "Apes" replied the stranger. "Oh, we've enough of them in Vienna!" returned Carl and wanted to end the conversation.

Klischnigg took the door handle in his hand and scratched himself at the same time behind the ear with his foot, which had an extraordinary effect. Permission for a guest performance was granted and Nestroy was obliged to write his play "The Ape and the Bridge groom" for the purpose, in which he performed over and over again alongside Klischnigg.⁶

We have seen in the case of Prinz Friedrich von Corsica, which I mentioned earlier, that Nestroy fished a youthful transgression from the drawer of his desk for the benefit of a deserving colleague and gave it to Friedrich Grois for a charity performance. This must have also applied to Der wilde Knabe. Klischnigg was allowed to use the play, that offered a relatively easy part for an ageing gymnast, for a tour. Der wilde Knabe is also a compendium of typical features of contemporary gothic romance in the theatre.

But in contrast to Prinz Friedrich music plays an important role in our "drama with dance and song" and unfortunately has been lost. An element of folksy joviality becomes much more prominent in this play. For that reason it seems appropriate to assume that our play was written after Prinz Friedrich von Corsica but before Verbannung aus dem Zauberreich, written in 1828, which caricatures the romantic and sentimental drama for the first time. It seems probable that Der wilde Knabe dates from 1825 and 1826, when Nestroy was performing in Brno.

At this time he played a wide range of serious roles that all belonged to the genre of romantic historical drama. And, furthermore, Der wilde Knabe is characterised by its pronounced bohemian and Slavic atmosphere.

Our new find is of interest not just because it is a previously unknown play by Vienna's Aristophanes. Together with Prinz Friedrich von Corsica it shows that Nestroy originally intended to write serious dramas which he then made fun of his later plays. ⁷

A final point: only two days before I left for Antwerp I found a manuscript from 1859 with Nestroy's Austrian adaptation of Orpheus in the Underworld by Offenbach. It is a missing link in theatre history between Paris and Vienna, important because with this adaptation and performance of 1859/60 Nestroy paved the way for the operetta in Vienna. But this would be another story.

I come to the end: our new Nestroy finds and acquisitions are relevant to the theme of this congress for two reasons:

On the one hand they show that a historical dimension of collecting still fulfils a practical purpose that need not be at odds with focusing on contemporary theatre. Both points of view of course, are in danger of literally overreaching their objectives. I would like to quote Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, the head of the Austrian Literary Archives, who writes: "There are about 1200 living authors in the new "Book of Austrian Literature" (Literaturbuch). I would hazard a guess that that would mean that by 2020 the estates of each of these writers would contain some 5.000 pages with 35 lines and 60 characters per line. That would amount to about 6 million sheets of paper in 2020 for scholars to tackle. If one also took into account the increase in secondary literature and strove to collect phonographic material and devote a memorial room to each of them, one would have to gradually begin to retrain tram conductors and computer programmers to adequately administer this national heritage."⁸

Therefore secondly the magic formula for professional collectors is selection and Nestroy is a perfect example: Concentration on a topic narrow but important. In our case this is an outstanding artist who offered a good approach from both the pictorial and literary side - and above all - I had extraordinary luck.

Today selection goes hand in hand with economic management and will be the keyword of the 21st century.⁹

It also encourages trends towards areal specialisation. To give an example: No Austrian institution will collect systematically Swiss "Art du Spectacle" because we can safely leave it to the Swiss Theatre Museum in Berne.

I think here SIBMAS offers the opportunity of effecting further rationalisation. Uncritical and passive collecting merely avoids the traditional cultural treatment and belies the social perspective of recollecting and thus negates the very idea of heritage. It corresponds to the phenomenon that the now derided philosopher Karl Marx described in Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte: "The tradition of past generations weighs on the minds of the living like a nightmare."

¹ See Franz H. Mautner. Nestroy. Heidelberg, 1974 (Poesie und Wissenschaft 3) p. 355ff. (back)

⁹ Comp. Friedrich Waidacher. Handbuch der Allgemeinen Museologie. (Mimundus 3) Vienna-Cologne, Weimar, 1993. passim. (back)