Proserpina Redux: From Sentimental Interlude to Pan-Aesthetic Tragedy

PROSERPINA, GOETHE's SOLILOQUY dramatizing the plight of Jupiter and Ceres's daughter after her violent abduction to Pluto's Underworld, first appeared as an insert into the satire Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (Triumph of Sentimentality), which premiered in the Weimar Courtly Amateur Theater on January 30, 1778. Soon after, the monologue was published and then, on June 10, 1779, performed as a separate melodrama over a musical score by Sigmund von Seckendorff, with soloist-actress Corona Schröter in the title role. With its single female protagonist, its passionate display of intense suffering, and its rhetorically charged declamation, the theatrical-musical hybrid was a typical representative of the age of sentimentalism, along with Rousseau's Pygmalion, Christian Brandes's Ariadne, and Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter's Medea. The dual use of the interlude as satire and tragedy reflected the mixed reception of the Rape of Proserpina myth in Western art, music, and literature and the function of the Triumph burlesque as an antidote to the emotional intensity of the monologue, which Nicholas Boyle has rightfully recognized to be the most starkly tragic of Goethe's dramatic works. Later on, in his Tag- und Jahreshefte (Annals), the author expressed regret at his insertion of his tragedy into a farcical context, calling it a “criminal” act that robbed it of its dramatic effect by making it the target of a satire of sentimentality (Goethe, Tag- und Jahreshefte bis 1780, FA 1.17:13).

Such self-criticism channeled the purpose of his newer Proserpina adaptation, almost forty years after its original composition, which was realized in close collaboration with the musician Carl Eberwein, student of Carl Friedrich Zelter and director of Goethe's “house choir,” who also produced numerous other musical settings for Goethe's poems. In full recognition of the role of music in capturing and maintaining the affectivity of lyrical poetry, both artists cooperated to produce a score that would enhance the emotional power of the monodrama. Conceived and executed by its director as an enticing multimedia experience, the new production was also the result of a long and intense working partnership with the gifted Weimar actress Anna Amalia Wolff.