Der arme Spielmann

Der arme Spielmann; The Poor Fiddler (1848)

Grillparzer’s prose masterpiece is told from the perspective of an unnamed bourgeois narrator who encounters a poor street musician, the ‘Spielmann’ or ‘Fiddler’ of the title. The narrator follows the Fiddler to his home in the Leopoldstadt, a district in central Vienna which is surrounded by the Danube. The Fiddler, whose name is Jakob, tells the story of his life to the narrator:

Jakob’s rich father decides that he is inept and not worth educating and so finds him a job as a copyist. There Jakob hears a young woman singing in the courtyard. He is so inspired by her song that he starts playing the violin again, despite having hated it as a child. The singer turns out to be Barbara Griesler, a young woman who earns money by selling cakes and taking in laundry. Jakob visits Barbara at her father’s house and falls in love with her, but she has another suitor, a butcher. Jakob’s father dies of a stroke and Barbara suggests to Jakob that he could invest in a laundry (Putzladen) and she could run it for him. But she tells Jakob: ‘Aber ändern müßten Sie sich! Ich hasse die weibischen Männer.’; ‘You would have to change your ways! I hate feminine men.’

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/grillprz/spielman/spielmn6.html

Unfortunately, Jakob has entrusted his money to his late father’s secretary. The secretary steals his money and vanishes. Barbara’s father tells Jakob never to darken his doorstep again. Barbara visits Jakob to return his linen and say goodbye forever. Then she leaves and marries the butcher. Jakob becomes a street musician in order to earn his living. A few years later Barbara returns to Vienna. Now she has two children, a boy called Jakob, and a girl. Jakob the violinist gives a violin lesson to Jakob the butcher’s son every Sunday. Sometimes Barbara even joins them and sings her song. But the poor fiddler dies in the flooding of the Leopoldstadt, which actually occurred in early 1830. The fiddler rescues children from the flood, and he also rescues his neighbour’s paper money which was locked in a cabinet, but in doing so he catches a fatal chill and dies.

The nameless narrator becomes fascinated with the Fiddler, whose name is Jakob; thus on one level the story explores the relationship between Bürger (bourgeois) and Künstler (artist). The bourgeois narrator is a type of voyeur who gives the Fiddler money so that he can experience his story vicariously. The narrator selects and protects the eccentric Fiddler in order to feed his own need for disorder. The narrator even admits to Jakob ‘dass ich Ihrer Geschichte lüstern bin’; ‘that I am lusting for your story’. https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/grillprz/spielman/spielmn3.html

Even after the Fiddler’s the nameless narrator does not give up his pursuit. The narrator visits Barbara and offers to buy Jakob’s violin. Barbara refuses and shuts the violin away in the drawer. As she does so, the narrator peers intently at her face so that he can see her tears.

Franz Kafka greatly admired this story and it contains elements which anticipate aspects of Kafka’s stories. When the Fiddler says ‘die väterliche Wohnung war mir dabei ein Schreckbild’; ‘the father’s home was an image of terror to me’, this recalls the description of the father as a ‘Schreckbild’; ‘image of terror’ in Das Urteil; The Judgement. Barbara’s strange, haunting singing is not far removed from the singing in Josefine the Singer, or The Mouse People. And Barbara herself, with her strapping physique and her disappointed love, seems almost like a cousin of Olga in Das Schloss; The Castle.

Further Reading

Clifford A. Bernd (ed.), Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann: New Directions in Criticism (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1988)

Katra Byram, ‘German Realism’s Proximal Others: Franz Grillparzer’s The Poor Fiddler and Theodor Storm’s Ein Doppelgänger’, in Realism’s Others, ed. by Geoffrey Baker and Eva Aldea (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 49-67

Michael Minden, ‘Grillparzer, Der arme Spielmann’, in Landmarks in German Short Prose, ed. by Peter Hutchinson (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 95-110

Boyd Mullan, ‘Der arme Spielmann and Storm’s Ein stiller Musikant’, German Life and Letters 44:3 (1991), 187-97

Ian F. Roe, Franz Grillparzer: A Century of Criticism (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), pp. 116-25

Walter Silz, ‘Grillparzer, Der arme Spielmann’, in Silz, Realism and Reality: Studies in the German Novelle of Poetic Realism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 67-78

Martin Sutton, ‘The Invisible Woman? Reflections on the Figure of Barbara in Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann’, in “Was nützt der Glaube ohne Werke…” Studien zu Franz Grillparzer anläßlich seines 200. Geburtstages, ed. by August Obermaier (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1991), pp. 144-61

Martin Swales, ‘Grillparzer, Der arme Spielmann’, in Martin Swales, The German Novelle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 114-32

John Walker, ‘Poetic Realism, the German Novelle and the Legacy of German Idealist Aesthetics: Franz Grillparzer's Der arme Spielmann’, German Life and Letters 68:4 (2015), 543-53