Fiesco (play)

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. A piece that would be free of all the weaknesses which still clung to his first piece. With Fiesco's Conspiracy, which he intended to share with no less than Lessing, Wieland and Goethe before publication, something he in the end refrained from doing, he was convinced that he would finally establish his reputation as a playwright.

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. By the end of the second of five acts, the company had dispersed except for Meyer and Iffland. As they were leaving, the director asked Streicher if he was really convinced that Schiller had written The Robbers. “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. “He recites everything in the same pompous way, whether he is reading, ‘he closed the door’ or one of his hero's main speeches.” But the drama itself had Meyer convinced. “Fiesco,” he said, “is a masterpiece and far superior to The Robbers!”

“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.”

Magnanimity of character was for Schiller, an admirer of the antique biographies of Plutarch, always appealing. This was also true for the figure of “Count Fiesque”. 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. But it is not clear whether he wanted to free Genoa from princely rule or assume power himself. As a Renaissance Man he is beyond any categorization as good or evil. Greatness of personality makes him a hero for Schiller, regardless of whether virtuous or criminal.

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. When Schiller began working on the play he had not decided which possibility to select. If he had been able to decide, he would also have known how the piece should end. But he did not know that until everything was finished except for the last two scenes. Fiesco does not know until the end what he is going to do, because Schiller does not know what he should have him do. Fiesco remains undecided, as Schiller does. This was true until beginning of November 1782, when he finally decided on one of the two different endings. And both are absolutely logical, because Fiesco is free enough to decide for either option. Schiller mentioned to Streicher in this context that the two last scenes, “cost him much more thinking” then all the rest of the play.

Rüdiger Safranski's biography Lit. comes to the conclusion that Schiller, the “freedom enthusiast”, is not concerned in Fiesco about how one should act, but rather about what action one truly wants. “It is not a matter of what one should want, but what one wants to want.” What Schiller shows is, according to Safranski, that “freedom is what makes people unpredictable, both to themselves and to others.”

In The Robbers, Schiller took as his theme “the victim of extravagant emotions.” In Fiesco he attempted “the opposite, a victim of artifice and intrigue”. 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.” Nevertheless, 75 performances proved the play's outstanding success. (See above).

Today, however, Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa appears relatively seldom on the German stage. One reason could be Schiller's relation to democracy. In the eighth scene of the second act he presents a “crowd scene” with twelve (!) workmen. These people know precisely what they do not want (the establishment of absolutistic reign in Genoa), but not what they want instead. In their perplexity they turn to Fiesco, who should “rescue” them. He tells them a fable in which rule by a large, fierce dog is to be replaced with rule by a lion (in other words, the rule of the Dorias replaced with rule by Fiesco). He persuades them to give up their wish to establish a democracy by pointing out that democracy is “the rule of the cowardly and the stupid”, that there are more cowardly people than courageous ones and more stupid people than clever ones, and that in a democracy the majority rules. Their cheers confirm Fiesco's opinion, whereupon he becomes euphorically confident of victory.

The view that democracy means “the rule of the cowardly and the stupid” and that, accordingly, the rule of a “benevolent prince” is preferable, is not considered appropriate today, but it was very common in Schiller's time, also because of the reception of Plato’s Politeia (The Republic), where Plato shows, among other things, that in the end it is better for all members of a society if those people rule who are best suited to rule. And in Plato’s opinion that is only a tiny minority. Plato has Socrates say that the majority is better suited to other tasks, such as national defense, trade, manufacture, etc., and if everybody does what he can do best, that is best for everyone. 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.” In the play Fiesco is himself unable to decide between republican and monarchic ideals, and almost gives in to the urging of his wife Leonore to give up his desire to rule in favor of love and conventional family life, but only almost. 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). In the later stage version, Schiller altered the tragic end into a surprisingly happy one, in which Fiesco does without a crown and the monarchy becomes a republic. After 1790 this was interpreted as a stand in favor of revolution, and this version of the play was accordingly often prohibited.

Schiller immersed himself in historical accounts while working on Fiesco; he pored over trade statistics and studied documents about the daily life of the time in order to obtain a feeling for the historical veracity of the conspiracy of 1547, something which had interested him already as he was writing his third dissertation. For reasons similar to Sallust in The Conspiracy of Catiline, apparently, whom he quotes right at the beginning of the piece.

Nam id facinus inprimis ego memorabile existimo sceleris atque periculi novitate. (Because I consider it an undertaking absolutely worthy of recording, due to the unusual nature of his guilt and what threatens him.)

However, different from the historian Sallust, Schiller was not concerned with the historical events in order to acquaint the public with them in this way, but rather to give his dramatic character expertiments an historically plausible background. The theatrical effect of likelihood was more important to him than historical truth per se. 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.

(in German) Matthias Luserke-Jaqui: Friedrich Schiller. (A. Francke), Tübingen, Basel 2005
(in German) Rüdiger Safranski: Friedrich Schiller oder Die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus. (Hanser), München 2004, ISBN 3-446-20548-9

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fiesco (Friedrich Schiller).

• Fiesco or, The Genoese Conspiracy at Project Gutenberg (English translation)
• Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa (English translation by Flora Kimmich)