Stella is a tragedy in five acts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A Sultan's daughter fell in love with him, gave him his freedom and fled with him to Thuringia.

He solved the problem of wanting to have his savior at his side in addition to his wife by successfully requesting legitimation from the Holy See.

[2] Despite their completely different social status, there are analogies between the figure of Stella and Gretchen from Goethe's Faust.

Before their first meeting with Stella, the two ladies learn a lot about the Baroness from the talkative postmistress.

Stella leads Cecilia and Lucie into her study because she wants to show the visitor the portrait of the child's father.

Lucie has sought employment from her father's lover, of all people, with the help of her mother.

Stella blames herself for having robbed Lucie of her father and Cecilia of her husband, but then admits that she was innocent.

Cecilia's tries to solve the problem but Lucie tells her mother that Stella has probably taken poison.

When Fernando sees Stella's appearance and hears her "I am finished", he retreats and shoots himself.

In the later play, Stella and Fernando die a love death, not together but individually, with poison and with a handgun respectively.

In the first version, Goethe ended suggesting allowed himself a future life in polygamy, which did not please the morally strict audience.

Cecilia had the idea of emulating Count Ernst von Gleichen, who had a bigamous marriage with papal approval.

When the curtain falls, Stella, Cecilia and Fernando want to stay together with Lucie according to the motto "one apartment, one bed and one grave".

The happy ending of the first version of the drama, in which Fernando is rewarded instead of punished, led to incomprehension among most contemporaries.

The play was judged exclusively according to the social and moral criteria of the time.

Like “Werther,” it contradicted the Enlightenment concept of education through literature, which only allowed emotional arousal through aesthetic sensuality as a didactic means of moralizing actions.

One of the critics of the first version was the Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze, who was well known for his dispute with Lessing over the fragments and who was aware of the danger of imitating the actors' actions: "According to his (Goethe's) morality, what the right calls malitiosam desertationem ('malicious abandonment'), and what the Holy Scripture condemns under the name of fornication and adultery, is probably part of the noble freedom of man, and lovers can, if they know how to do it right, use it as a means of raising the sweet enjoyment of the joys of this life to a very high level.

In the context of the age of sensitivity, a reception attitude had developed that no longer expected art to primarily provide moral instruction, but above all to arouse feelings.

[4] Charlotte von Stein commented on the second version of the play: “His old Stella was performed recently; he turned the drama into a tragedy.

It would have been better if he had [only] let Stella die; but he took it very badly when I criticized this.” – Charlotte von Stein 1806 Aesthetes accuse the play of formal weaknesses, and moralists repeatedly bring up moral arguments against the play.

Wilhelm Wilmanns compares two characters - Stella with Belinde from Georges de Scudéry's La Morale du monde ou Conversations (published in the 1680s).