Author: Grillparzer, Franz
Biography:
GRILLPARZER, Franz (1791-1872: EB)
The son of a lawyer who lost his fortune during the Napoleonic era, he was born in Vienna on 15 Jan. 1791. Grillparzer studied law at the University of Vienna and in 1814 he became a government official in the imperial archives; in 1832 he was appointed as the imperial librarian. His first staged play, Die Ahnfrau, was a success when it was performed in 1817. Sappho, listed in this bibliography, was his second play. Grillparzer came to be recognised as Austria’s finest dramatist of the day and he was appointed court dramatist. His last play to be staged, Weh’ dem, der lügt! (1834) was, however, a failure and three later plays were not published until after his death. Grillparzer also wrote verse and short fiction. He died unmarried in Vienna on 21 Jan. 1872. The translator of Sappho, John Bramsen, was born in about 1791 probably in Berlin which he identified as his native town in the introduction to his Letters of a Prussian Traveller (1817). It is not known when he moved to England but he undertook an extensive tour of Europe, Palestine, and Egypt from 1813 to 1815 with the eldest son of Sir John Maxwell of Pollok. The 1841 Census identifies Grillparzer as a doctor of medicine. He was living at 61 Saint John St. in Oxford when he died in Jan. 1845. His will, leaving his estate to a neighbour and his housekeeper, asked for his corpse to be kept in his house for six days before the coffin was nailed shut that it might be certain he was truly dead. (EB; Encyclopedia of World Biography [2004]; ODNB [for Sir John Maxwell] 1 Oct. 2024; John Bramsen, Letters of a Prussian Traveller [1817]; ancestry.co.uk 1 Oct. 2024) SR
Other Names:
- F. Grillparzer