Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801-62)
W.E.Yates celebrates the bicentenary of a great Austrian satirist.

On 7 December 2001 Austria will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Nestroy, the supreme comic dramatist of the German language. Though absolutely on a par with the other great names of international comedy, ironically he is known to English-language audiences not by his own work, but through Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker and Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle, two brilliant but free adaptations. Yet in Vienna he dominated the commercial stage as actor-dramatist for nearly thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century, working in a theatrical culture tuned to entertainment. Some 76 of his plays have survived. They have all the lightness of farce but express a universal scepticism. They were carefully crafted, often going through several drafts. This is documented in the critical edition of Nestroy's works published by Deuticke, which is due to be completed in December 2001 in time for the bicentenary - in the view of the literary historian Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, 'the most important and impressive achievement in literary scholarship to have been generated in Austria in the twentieth century'.

What has deterred translators, by contrast with the successful versions that exist of the great Parisian comic playwrights, Molière, Labiche, Feydeau, is that Nestroy's language includes registers of Viennese German. He is not a 'dialect dramatist', writing in an idiom cashing in on cosy local colour; indeed his work is not cosy at all. His language is stylised, ranging from stagy literary German to natural Viennese, full of theatrical allusions, enriched by flights of vivid metaphor, and constantly exposing the clichés that mask hypocrisy and deception. The period when he wrote - roughly 1830 to 1860 - was one of flourishing comedy in the great European theatrical centres, Paris, London, and Vienna; his career overlaps with those of Scribe, Boucicault, and Labiche. They all share an international stock of comic plots and devices, but Nestroy is distinguished by his linguistic inventiveness, playing with contrasting registers and flights of vivid metaphor in reflections on the injustice of a world governed by chance (or Providence), whose arbitrary dispositions can fleetingly be set aside in the fictional world of comedy - only for the conventional happy ending to underscore the knowing improbability of the fiction. His linguistic awareness and scepticism made him a natural parodist, and his hatchet-job on the pretentiously inflated language of Hebbel's tragedy Judith (1849) is recognised as the classic parody in German.

The virtuoso brilliance of his language was clear to his contemporaries, even if many mid-nineteenth-century critics looked down on 'wit' and demanded something more sentimental, more edifyingly moralistic. But its quality and importance came to be fully appreciated only when his work was championed by the great twentieth-century satirist Karl Kraus. To quote Schmidt-Dengler again, Hofmannsthal's Chandos Letter of 1902 and Kraus's lecture 'Nestroy und die Nachwelt' ('Nestroy and Posterity', 1912) are the two outstanding texts that stimulated the language-consciousness of the early twentieth century, not only in imaginative literature but also in philosophy. It was, after all, a Nestroy quotation that Wittgenstein chose as an epigraph for his Philosophical Investigations: 'Progress always appears much greater than it actually is.'

Like much commercial comedy in the early nineteenth century, especially in Paris, Nestroy's plays contain musical numbers. These include a Viennese speciality, comic medleys based on operas of the day (Nestroy began his career as an operatic bass-baritone). In his mature work, however, the musical element is increasingly concentrated in two or three solo scenes, consisting of a satirical song and a linked monologue, performed by the main character (usually played by Nestroy himself). These breaks in the illusion, a century before Brecht, relate the fictional action to wider issues in the real world. The commercial theatre was subjected to strict censorship, a restraint on any satirist, but one with the long-term advantage that Nestroy's satire is not directed at specific cases (which was forbidden) but is couched in general and therefore less ephemeral terms. His most famous plays reflect a deep-seated discontent with a static society (Einen Jux will er sich machen, 1842 - Stoppard's 'On the Razzle' is the best possible rendering of the title); they satirise prejudice (Der Talisman ['The Talisman'], 1840), moral double standards (Das Mädl aus der Vorstadt ['The Girl from the Poor District'], 1841), or false friendship (Der Zerrissene ['A Man of Moods'], 1844 - the play chosen by the Burgtheater, the Austrian national theatre, for a commemorative new production in autumn 2001). Only when censorship was briefly lifted after the outbreak of revolution in 1848 was Nestroy able to tackle political issues head-on. The result, Freiheit in Krähwinkel, was a satire of the revolution itself; and readers interested in getting something of the flavour of his style might look at the translation by Sybil and Colin Welch, Liberty Comes to Krähwinkel, published in 1960-61 in the Tulane Drama Review.

The bicentenary is being marked by a number of useful new publications in German. One is a biography by Walter Schübler, Nestroy. Eine Biographie in 30 Szenen (Residenz), in which Nestroy's career is presented not as continuous narrative but in fifty separate thematic chapters, a strategy reflecting the fragmentariness of the surviving biographical documentation; there is also a reference book by Renate Wagner, Nestroy Zum Nachschlagen. Sein Leben - Sein Werk - Seine Zeit (Styria), which includes a detailed 'chronicle' (attractively illustrated but factually unreliable). The outstanding new publication is the critical study by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler already referred to, Nestroy. Die Launen des Glücks (Zsolnay). Schmidt-Dengler, who is not a Nestroy specialist, brings a fresh interpretative eye to some lesser-known plays, his reading grounded in Karl Kraus's admiration of the imaginative power of Nestroy's language. This volume, just published, is the best compact critical assessment we have.

The famous satirical comedies, which Nestroy wrote when he was at his peak for about a decade from the late 1830s, continue to be much performed, but we still lack a collected volume of convincing translations. The best attempt is probably a volume Three Comedies by Johann Nestroy (Ungar, N.Y. 1967) containing texts in American English by two Austrian émigrés, Max Knight and Joseph Fabry. The best-known versions are, however, as I have said, not translations but rather free adaptations of Einen Jux will er sich machen, Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker (1955) and especially Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle (1981, 1982), which captures the breathlessness of the comic action - even if not the language. That remains a tantalising challenge.

W. E. Yates was Professor of German at the University of Exeter, 1972-2001; he edits the journal Nestroyana.