The Final Five: Schiller's Late Plays on the Weimar Stage

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Against the classicizing stage Goethe had rebuilt in 1798, he premiered Friedrich Schiller's late plays at Weimar in rapid succession: the Wallenstein trilogy, opening the rebuilt theatre with Wallensteins Lager in 1798 and continuing with Die Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod in 1799, Maria Stuart on 14 June 1800, Die Braut von Messina on 19 March 1803, and Wilhelm Tell on 17 March 1804, Schiller's last completed play, staged at Weimar the year before his death. The one exception was Die Jungfrau von Orleans, which premiered not at Weimar but in Leipzig on 11 September 1801. This run is generally treated as the Weimar court theatre's most celebrated period, the point at which Goethe's staging discipline and Schiller's dramaturgy were most fully in step with one another. Schiller was not a passive author handing scripts to a director; he took a hands on role in rehearsal, shaping performance alongside Goethe rather than simply supplying text for Goethe's company to interpret. The partnership behind these five plays, extending beyond the stage to the pair's joint editorship of literary journals and their co-written satirical epigram cycle Xenien in 1796, is what scholars mean when they call Goethe and Schiller joint architects of Weimar Classicism rather than a poet and his director.