Friedrich Halm

[2] As a boy he took a keen interest in the theater, and from 1833 enjoyed the friendship of his former teacher, the Benedictine Michael Leopold Enk von der Burg [de], who encouraged the poet to offer his drama Griseldis to the Hofburg theatre.

Münch-Bellinghausen became Regierungsrat (government councillor) in 1840 and Kustos (chief keeper) of the Court Library in 1844, a position that Franz Grillparzer had sought in vain.

Friedrich Halm's earliest full-length drama, Schwert, Hammer, Buch, completed in 1833 but not published in his lifetime, explores three various routes in quest of happiness: that of the warrior, that of the artisan, and that of the artist.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "[his plays] are distinguished by elegance of language, melodious versification and clever construction, and were for a time exceedingly popular.

Halm's numerous other dramas include the vivid and powerful Sampiero (1856, depicting the tragic loss of humanity attendant upon political fanaticism); Iphigenie in Delphi (1856); Begum Somru (1863); Wildfeuer (1864); a German version of Shakespeare's Cymbeline that appeared on the stage in 1842, and an extremely effective and humorous comedy entitled Verbot und Befehl ("Prohibition and Decree", 1856).

Halm's high reputation during his lifetime is indicated by the stone bust which was carved of him and which still sits on top of the famous Burgtheater in Vienna, alongside those of Schiller, Goethe and Grillparzer.

Dr. Tony Page writes on this: "In view of its daring delineations of human sexuality and repressed sexual urges, its potentially progressive view of same-sex love and general exploration of the human psyche in the grip of passion, Ein Abend zu L. constitutes a remarkable early 19th-century literary document, providing pre-echoes of psycho-analytical ideas that would take the Western world by storm less than a century later.

"[4] Halm's other short stories, or novellas, which tend to focus on spiritual issues and self-destructive monomaniacal characters, are far superior to most of his dramas and are striking and impressive in content, full of psychological insights—especially his earliest major story, Das Auge Gottes ("The Eye of God"), a lengthy novella written in 1826, about the supernatural reverberations of the blasphemous act of the desecration of a holy icon, and his final narrative masterpiece, Das Haus an der Veronabrücke ("The House on Verona Bridge"), centring on the inner collapse of a man given over to a morally repellent but overriding idée fixe (the enforced sexual coupling of his wife with another man).

His novella, The House at Verona Bridge (Das Haus an der Veronabruecke) alone stands as a milestone in 19th-century Austrian literature for its probing and insightful treatment of an obsessive mentality that inevitably leads its possessor into tragedy and death.