Johan Ludvig Heiberg (poet)

This was followed by Christmas Jokes and New Years Tricks (1816), The Initiation of Psyche (1817), and The Prophecy of Tycho Brahe, a satire on the eccentricities of the Romantic writers, especially on the sentimentality of Ingemann.

These works attracted attention at a time when Baggesen, Oehlenschläger and Ingemann possessed the popular ear, and were understood at once to be the opening of a great career.

In 1822 he published his drama Nina and was made professor of the Danish language at the University of Kiel, where he delivered a course of lectures, comparing the Scandinavian mythology as found in the Edda with the poems of Oehlenschläger.

He composed a great number of these vaudevilles, of which the best known are King Solomon and George the Hatmaker (1825); April Fools (1826); A Story in Rosenborg Garden (1827); Kjøge Huskors (1831); The Danes in Paris (1833); No (1836); and Yes (1839).

He took his models from the French theatre, but showed extraordinary skill in blending the words and the music; but the subjects and the humour were essentially Danish and even topical.

[4] Heiberg's scathing satires, however, made him very unpopular; and this antagonism reached its height when, in 1845, he published his malicious little drama of The Nut Crackers.

[4] First of all he created a Danish critical tradition based upon firm and consequent principles of aesthetics breaking with the often extremely subjective and occasional value judgements of his predecessors.

In return he has not avoided being regarded a conservative formalist and elitist by posterity and the reaction against his line was already started by Georg Brandes who was, however, affected by his school too.