Karl Haffner

In Pest he wrote tragedies like The robbery shooters, The curl of the decapitated, Blocks of the grave, Schwarzenberg and Palffy and Batorys Tod, which received the stormy applause of the audience.

Haffner achieved his first major success with the romantic-comical folk tale Das Marmor-Herz, which won a second prize in 1841 and was premiered on 21 April that year at the Theater an der Wien.

[1] Permanently his three-act genre picture Therese Krones has been preserved, in which he brought the Raimund circle onto the stage.

Together with Richard Genée he wrote the libretto of the Operetta Die Fledermaus (music: Johann Strauss II) Critics have treated Haffner with little encouragement and leniency, although humour and skilful character drawing cannot be denied in his plays.

Haffner, during his last years of life incapable of working due to illness and pensioner of the Presseclub Concordia [de],[2] left a large family in misery and distress;[3] he was buried in the Wiener Zentralfriedhof (3-4-41) in a dedicated grave of the city of Vienna.