Theatre
Franziska
Frank Wedekind · 1912
Opening lines
Mutter
Sonderbar! Das Städtchen liegt schon im tiefsten Dunkel, und bei uns hier im Zimmer ist noch jeder Winkel hell.
Strange! The little town already lies in deepest darkness, and here in our room every corner is still bright.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from zeno.org
Synopsis
Tired of living with her mother, Franziska does not want marriage, having seen in her parents' home what it is worth. One evening, Veit Kunz, an insurance agent from Berlin, knocks at her window and proposes a bargain: for two years, disguised as a man, she will enjoy a man's freedoms and be able to pursue a career in music; at the end of that time, she will belong to him. She accepts and becomes Franz.
Context
The play was first staged in November 1912 at the Kammerspiele in Munich, with Tilly Wedekind in the title role and the author as Veit Kunz, then revived in Berlin the following year by Max Reinhardt. It parodies Goethe's Faust episode by episode, a Berlin tavern answering to Auerbach's cellar. Asked for incidental music, Busoni sketched a few pages and then gave up, to protect his own Faust project. Rarely performed after the thirties, it was revived in the mid-1990s by Stéphane Braunschweig's staging, in the translation by Éloi Recoing and Ruth Orthmann, and taken up again in Munich for its centenary in 2012.
Who it is for
Five acts, translated into French in the author's Théâtre complet; the play is read alongside Goethe's Faust.
Prizes and reception
The female counterpart of Faust in German theatre, which found in France and then in London, at the end of the twentieth century, a stage that Germany no longer gave it.
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