DIE BEIDEN LEONOREN

(The two Leonores) by Paul Lindau.

   Premiered 1888. In this comedy, Otto Kaiser is a local judge with a wife named Leonore who is 20 years his junior. She is a fun-loving woman who takes nothing very seriously, frequently embarrassing her stern and often inflexible husband at social gatherings. When a young man of her husband's acquaintance named Hermann Wieberg propositions her, she does little to discourage him. Meanwhile her husband's uncle Christian warns Otto about the conduct of his wife, and Otto is appropriately concerned. The second Leonore of the title arrives in the person of Leonore's daughter, who has been attending boarding school in Switzerland. Like her mother, she is affable, gregarious, and beautiful. Hermann falls madly in love with her, in the process abandoning any thought of an affair with her mother.

   What happens next is unexpected: the daughter falls in love with Hermann, and the elder Leonore recognizes a change in her formerly flirtatious suitor. She agrees that a marriage between her daughter and Hermann would be best for all concerned and even her husband Otto agrees. Lindau's comedy was the kind Otto Brahm and other critics of Berlin's boulevard theater culture despised; its enormous popularity with audiences throughout Germany in the late 1880s did little to assuage Lindau's vociferous critics.