Fiesco (play)

It is a republican tragedy based on the historical conspiracy of Giovanni Luigi Fieschi against Andrea Doria in Genoa in 1547.

Schiller began it after the 1782 premiere of his first play, The Robbers, and dedicated it to his teacher Jakob Friedrich von Abel.

The play was the basis for the 1921 German silent film The Conspiracy in Genoa directed by Paul Leni.

When Schiller fled from Stuttgart to Mannheim on 22 September 1782, he took with him the almost completed manuscript of a play which he asserted he was striving to bring to a state of perfection never before seen on the German stage.

On 27 September the author recited his play to the players of the Mannheim Theater at the home of Wilhelm Christian Meyer, its director.

Andreas Streicher, who had fled with Schiller, gave an account of the afternoon: The reaction of the listeners was devastating.

"Because Fiesco is the worst piece I have ever heard in my life, and because it is impossible that the same Schiller who wrote The Robbers would have produced anything so coarse and dreadful".

Streicher left the manuscript with him, and after reading it that night, Meyer completely reversed his previous opinion.

What he had found so disagreeable about the piece was due to the author's strong Swabian accent and the "terrible way he declaimed everything", a style of presentation Schiller himself esteemed highly.

This commercial center had gained its independence from France as well as a new prince through the actions of Andrea Doria 19 years previously.

He woos the disreputable sister of the schemer Gianettino and behaves in general as an unprincipled playboy without any political ambition.

In a secret scene in the forest, he shares his thoughts with his future son-in-law Bourgognino; he is quite sure: "When Genoa is free, Fiesco dies".

So Schiller spins in his tragedy a threefold conspiracy: Gianettino is preparing a putsch to dethrone Andreas Doria and destroy all the remaining republicans.

Under the pretext of equipping a number of galleys for an expedition against the Turks, Fiesco gathers support in the form of several hundred mercenaries and smuggles them into the city.

– I will arrange such a memorial service for this unhappy princess that lovers of life will be envious, and decay and decomposition will be radiant as a bride – Now follow your duke.

"True greatness of heart", wrote Schiller in 1788 in the eleventh of his twelve letters about Don Carlos, "leads no less often to a violation of the freedom of others than does egoism and a thirst for power, because it acts for the sake of the deed and not the individual subject".

He is described in the historical tradition as strong, handsome, crafty, popular with women, from a proud noble family, and filled with unrestrained political ambition.

In a postscript to the Mannheim stage version he writes, Fiesco, a mighty, fearsome person who, under the deceptive camouflage of an effeminate, epicurean idler, in quiet, noiseless darkness, like an engendering spirit hovering above chaos, alone and unobserved, giving birth to a new world while wearing the empty, smiling expression of a good-for-nothing, while enormous plans and raging wishes ferment in his fiery breast – Fiesco, long enough misunderstood, finally emerges like a god to present his mature and masterly work to an amazed public, and then finds himself a relaxed observer when the wheels of the great machine unavoidably run counter to the desired goal.

In his hero, Schiller wanted to put someone on the stage who is incomprehensible, a person of overwhelming impenetrability, who is so free that he incorporates both possibilities, a tyrant and a liberator from tyranny.

The concern about the appropriateness for the stage of a "cold, sterile affair of state" is expressed by the author himself in his preface: "If it is true that only emotions can give rise to emotions, then, it seems to me, a political hero is no subject for the stage to the extent to which he has to disregard people in order to become a political hero".

This view can also be sensed in Schiller's poem Lied von der Glocke (Song of the Bell): "The master can break open the form / with a careful hand at the proper time / But beware, if in flaming streams /the glowing metal frees itself!"

Fiesco's problem is also that he would perhaps rather be the "fox" than the "lion" (the "masterly" and thus legitimate ruler in the fable), in other words, he asks himself whether he is really "better" than the "large, fierce dog".

He is a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense to the extent that he also has shortcomings, and in the play's original conclusion these actually bring about his downfall (he is murdered).

Nam id facinus inprimis ego memorabile existimo sceleris atque periculi novitate.

Schiller makes this view very clear in his postscript to the stage version, and it is also the reason why he presents a very free interpretation of the conspiracy and Fiesco's death.

I expect to soon come to grips with the history, since I am not his (Fiesco’s) chronicler, and as far as I am concerned, a single, great surge in the breasts of my audience caused by my daring fabrication makes up for any rigidly historical precision.

(A. Francke), Tübingen, Basel 2005 (in German) Rüdiger Safranski: Friedrich Schiller oder Die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus.