Fiesco (play)

Fiesco (full title – Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua, or Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa) is the second full length drama written by the German playwright Friedrich Schiller. It is a republican tragedy based on the historical conspiracy of Giovanni Luigi Fieschi against Andrea Doria in Genoa in 1547. Schiller began it after the 1782 premiere of his first play, The Robbers, and dedicated it to his teacher Jakob Friedrich von Abel. It has 75 scenes, which is more than Goethe’s highly popular Götz von Berlichingen. It premiered in Bonn in 1783 at the Hoftheater.

The play was the basis for the 1921 German silent film The Conspiracy in Genoa directed by Paul Leni.

When Schiller fled from Stuttgart to Mannheim on 22 September 1782, he took with him the almost completed manuscript of a play which he asserted he was striving to bring to a state of perfection never before seen on the German stage. A piece that would be free of all the weaknesses which still clung to his first piece. With Fiesco's Conspiracy, which he intended to share with no less than Lessing, Wieland and Goethe before publication, something he in the end refrained from doing, he was convinced that he would finally establish his reputation as a playwright.

On 27 September the author recited his play to the players of the Mannheim Theater at the home of Wilhelm Christian Meyer, its director. Andreas Streicher, who had fled with Schiller, gave an account of the afternoon: The reaction of the listeners was devastating. By the end of the second of five acts, the company had dispersed except for Meyer and Iffland. As they were leaving, the director asked Streicher if he was really convinced that Schiller had written The Robbers. “Because Fiesco is the worst piece I have ever heard in my life, and because it is impossible that the same Schiller who wrote The Robbers would have produced anything so coarse and dreadful.” Streicher left the manuscript with him, and after reading it that night, Meyer completely reversed his previous opinion. What he had found so disagreeable about the piece was due to the author’s strong Swabian accent and the “terrible way he declaimed everything,” a style of presentation Schiller himself esteemed highly. “He recites everything in the same pompous way, whether he is reading, ‘he closed the door’ or one of his hero’s main speeches.” But the drama itself had Meyer convinced. “Fiesco,” he said, “is a masterpiece and far superior to The Robbers!”

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