Friedrich Ludwig Wilhelm Meyer (1758–1840) is best known today for his 1819 biography of actor, director, and playwright Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816), one of the most important figures of the German-language stage in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. (On Schröder’s importance for early Mozart reception in Hamburg, see our commentary on the Mozart memorial concert in Hamburg on 19 Feb 1792.) Meyer knew Schröder personally and was able to base his biography on letters and other primary sources, including (most significantly for Mozart scholarship) a travel diary that Schröder kept during a tour of German-language theaters in April, May, and June 1791 looking for new repertoire and actors for his company in Hamburg. (For more on the diary and the passages in it relating to Mozart, see our entries for 1 May 1791 and 10 May 1791.) However, the passage transcribed above is not from a primary source; it is, rather, Meyer’s recollection in 1819 of an event in 1783, Schlosser’s dedication to Schröder of his translation of Prometheus Bound. Thus the reference to Mozart may well be a later elaboration, rather than a report of something Meyer communicated to Schröder at the time. Even so, Meyer’s notion that Mozart would have been an appropriate (and potentially eager) composer for a melodrama based on Prometheus Bound is of sufficient interest to include here, despite its uncertain chronology.

Meyer was born on 26 Jan 1758 (many references incorrectly have 1759) in Harburg, now a district of Hamburg, but at that time a nearby town in the Electorate of Hannover; Meyer’s father was the town’s postmaster (Zimmermann 1890, 7; Goedeke 1916, iv/1:1095). Meyer’s family moved to Hamburg when he was very young, and he received his early education at the Johanneum there. His lifelong love of the theater was sparked by his youthful experiences in Hamburg, during a period that included the short-lived but epochal National Theater (also called the Hamburgische Entreprise, 1767–1769), where Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was dramaturge, and young Schröder was a member of the company. From 1776 to 1779 Meyer studied law in Göttingen, and during that period he became acquainted with writer and poet Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter (1746–1797), to whom he refers in the passage above.

Upon leaving university in 1779, Meyer initially took a position as private secretary in St. Petersburg, but soon returned to Germany after his employer was killed in a duel. Over the following few years—Zimmermann (1890, 12) aptly calls them Meyer’s “Wanderjahre”—Meyer briefly held a variety of positions that need not be cataloged here; for present purposes we need only note that he visited Vienna at least as early as 1781: Campe (1847, 53) quotes a letter that Meyer sent from Vienna dated 9 Aug 1781, and other letters place him there on 3 Feb 1782 and in June of that year (Campe 1847, 61–62). Meyer was apparently also in Vienna in the first months of 1783, although the exact dates remain unclear; in any case, he seems not to have been in the city continuously over this period. He is said to have had a commission—indirectly from the Prussian court or at least from someone hoping to advise the court—to observe the political scene in the imperial capital. Campe (1847, 71–94) quotes extensive passages from Meyer’s resulting report in French; the report provides, among other things, a fascinating outsider’s view of the character and actions of Joseph II. Meyer’s sojourns in Vienna overlapped with Schröder’s time there as a member of the court theater (1781 to 1785), and the two were evidently in close contact. At least two of Meyer’s own translations and one of his original plays were premiered in the Burgtheater in 1781 and 1782, and Meyer is said to have collaborated with Schröder on at least three translations first performed there in 1783 and 1784 (see below). From 1785 to 1788 Meyer held a position as librarian in Göttingen, where he was also listed as an “ausserordentlicher Professor” of philosophy at the university (Saalfeld 1820, 632); he then spent the years 1788 to 1791 in England. Upon returning to Germany, he initially settled in Berlin, but in 1797 retired to Bramstedt in Holstein, his home for the rest of his life.

Historically, the ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound (Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης, Promētheus Desmōtēs) has been attributed to Aeschylus, although this attribution has been questioned by recent scholars; in the eighteenth century, however, Aeschylus was generally held to be the author. The translation that Meyer refers to, Prometheus in Fesseln (Basel, 1784), was made by the Enlightenment writer Johann Georg Schlosser (1739–1799), Goethe’s brother-in-law; Schlosser was in Vienna in 1783 at the behest of Emperor Joseph II to take part in conferences on legal reform in the Austrian lands (ADB). Schlosser was, among many other things, an industrious translator from ancient Greek; his translations include works by Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes, Homer, and Callimachus, in addition to Prometheus in Fesseln. The 1784 Basel edition of the play is indeed dedicated to Schröder; the beginning of Schlosser’s 22-page preface is headed “An Schroedtern in Wien”.

Meyer is correct that the play was not given in Vienna. Although stories and characters from ancient Greek sources were not uncommon on the German-language stage at that time, the performance of ancient Greek plays was extremely rare. In the eighteenth century, the only such play performed by the Viennese court theater was The Trojan Women by Euripides, in a translation by Johann Elias Schlegel as Die Trojanerinnen, which had its premiere in the Burgtheater on 17 Jun 1782, with Schröder in the role of Ulysses; it was given just two more times that season before disappearing from the repertoire (Alth & Obzyna 1979, i:31; Hadamowsky 125). No work by Aeschylus was performed in the Burgtheater until 1900, a production of The Oresteia (Alth & Obzyna 1979, i:395).

After the reference to Schlosser’s translation, Meyer’s narrative may seem to a modern reader to take a slight chronological detour: he writes “zu der Zeit, wo die Melodramen auf der Bühne herrschten” (“at the time when melodramas ruled the stage”). While melodramas remained popular in 1783, we know that the peak enthusiasm for the new genre on the German stage was somewhat earlier, in the mid and late 1770s. Nothing is known about Meyer’s personal experiences with melodrama, however, and he did not have the benefit of modern scholarship in judging the chronology of the genre’s reception; so we should not jump to the conclusion that he is referring to the late 1770s in this passage. If we understand his recollection to imply that he made his point about Prometheus Bound to Schröder in person, then this conversation would most likely have taken place in 1781, 1782, or 1783, when both were in Vienna and in direct contact. On the other hand, Meyer’s choice of words (“ich hatte meinem Freunde … bemerklich gemacht”) does not rule out the possibility that he might have made the point to Schröder in a letter, and they are known to have corresponded frequently when not in direct contact. In any case, Meyer’s recollection in 1819 concerns an event over 35 years in the past, and human memory is notoriously fallible, particularly on the precise chronology of events far in the past.

The first full-length melodrama is generally held to be Rousseau’s Pygmalion, written around 1762 and first performed in 1770. The genre was introduced to German-speaking audiences in 1772, when adaptations of Rousseau’s text were performed in Weimar, with music by Anton Schweizer, and that same year in Vienna with music by Franz Asplmayr (both works are lost). But the German vogue for the new genre was triggered mainly by two melodramas that premiered in 1775, both with music by Georg Benda: Ariadne auf Naxos, on a text by Johann Christian Brandes (based on a cantata by Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg), first performed in Gotha on 27 Jan; and Medea, on a text by Meyer’s friend Gotter, first performed in Leipzig on 2 May that same year. Both quickly became popular staples in the repertories of theater companies throughout the German-speaking lands, and both were considered show pieces for their female leads. It was Mozart’s experience of Medea in Mannheim—very likely at the performances on 17 and 18 Feb 1778 with Sophie Seyler, for whom the title role had been written—and of Ariadne auf Naxos, which was performed in Mannheim on 30 Oct 1778, a performance he may also have attended, that triggered his brief but ardent enthusiasm for melodrama (see especially Mozart’s letter to his father of 12 Nov 1778, Briefe, ii:505–6; for further discussion, see the Notes below). The only known surviving results of this enthusiasm are the two items marked “melologo” in his uncompleted singspiel Zaide, K. 344 (no. 2, “Unerforschliche Fügung”, and the opening of no. 9, “Zaide entflohen!”), and (arguably) his music for the transition between Acts 3 and 4 of Thamos, König in Ägypten, where the music continues under the opening dialogue of the fourth act, although not in the manner of Benda’s melodramas, which alternate music and spoken word (see K. 345, no. 4, and the discussion of this entr’acte as “melodrama” in Abert 1919, i:821–22, English translation in Abert 2007, 581–82). Mozart may also have begun work on a full-scale melodrama in 1778: on 3 Dec of that year, he wrote to his father from Mannheim (Briefe, ii:516) that he was composing an extended “Duodrame” (“duodrama,” a melodrama with two characters) entitled Semiramis on a text by his friend Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen (1755–1836). Neither music nor text for this work are known to survive, and it is unclear whether Mozart actually even began composing it. Oddly, however, Semiramis is repeatedly cited as one of Mozart’s dramatic works in the brief entries on the composer in several installments of Heinrich August Ottokar Reichard’s Theater-Kalender, beginning with the issue of 1779 (on this point, see also Dokumente, 162). So Reichard, for whatever reason, thought that Mozart had completed such a work.

It is clear why Meyer referred to Georg Benda as a suitable composer for a melodrama based on Prometheus Bound, and to Gotter as suitable for adapting the text: Benda composed the music for both of the most famous German-language melodramas of the time, and Gotter wrote the text for one of them. Meyer also mentions Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814) as a possible composer for his hypothetical Promethean melodrama: Meyer would probably have known Reichardt’s melodrama Cephalus und Prokris on a text by Karl Wilhelm Ramler, which premiered in Hamburg on 7 Jul 1777.

But why does Meyer mention Mozart as a potential composer for a melodrama based on Prometheus Bound? It is highly unlikely that Meyer would have known Mozart’s melodramas in the uncompleted Zaide, which was published only in 1838 and is not known to have been performed until 1866. It is conceivable that he might have seen Gebler’s Thamos performed with Mozart’s incidental music, but at present we have no documentation that he did. And It is possible, of course, that Meyer was merely letting his imagination run free when he wrote this passage, based on his experience (probably extensive by 1819) of Mozart’s other dramatic works. But Meyer, a lifelong theater buff, very likely followed the Theater-Kalender closely; if so, he may well have known of its repeated references to Mozart’s Semiramis, and he may have assumed that the work actually existed. (However, the Theater-Kalender consistently refers to Semiramis as a “musikalisches Drama,” a term Meyer might not have associated with the technique and genre of melodrama.)

If Schröder himself ever performed in a melodrama (as Jason in Medea, for example), Meyer does not mention it. Again, Meyer may simply have been describing imagined possibilities: “if Schröder were ever to appear in a melodrama, the material of Prometheus Bound would be perfectly suited to him.” (One assumes that Meyer imagined Schröder in the title role; other male roles in Schlosser’s translation are Vulkan, Stärke, Gewalt, and Hermes, corresponding to Hephaestus, Kratos, Bia, and Hermes in the Greek original.) Meyer’s reference to Gotter as an appropriate person to adapt the material should not be taken as an insult to Schlosser, whose intention had been to make a close German translation of the ancient Greek, the literary style of which may not have been well suited to melodrama. Gotter, whose adaptation of Medea had been a considerable hit, would have been an obvious choice to adapt such material into a suitable form.

From the standpoint of literary history, Meyer is remembered today more for the prominent writers he knew than for his own writings, which (apart from his biography of Schröder) are largely forgotten. But he was quite productive: Goedeke (1916, iv/1, 1097–99) lists around 25 plays, two singspiel libretti, and 10 longer prose works, in addition to a large number of poems and shorter prose pieces published in periodicals of the time. The great majority of the dramatic and longer prose works consists of translations and adaptations from French and English, languages that Meyer had taken special pains to master during his education; but he also wrote a few original works. Meyer is also credited with at least two singspiel libretti: Das Blendwerk (ca. 1778), after La fausse magie by Marmontel, with music by Grétry; and the original one-act Die Reue vor der Hochzeit (1782; no setting is known). Meyer’s poem “Una” was set by Zumsteeg, who published it in the first volume of his Kleine Balladen und Lieder (1800; the volume can be downloaded here).

Although standard references note merely that Meyer was in Vienna in the early 1780s on a confidential mission, one suspects that he would eagerly have accepted any opportunity to bask in the rich theatrical life of Vienna, where his friend Schröder was currently a leading actor in the court theater. In fact, some of Meyer’s own plays were given in the Burgtheater during these years. His Der seltne Freyer, adapted from a French original, Monsieur de Saint Charles, ou L’Homme comme il y en a peu (attributed to Gernevalde), was a moderate success in Vienna; it was first performed in the Burgtheater on 29 Sep 1781, with Schröder in the role of Herr von Karlstein, and it remained in the repertory of the court theater until 1794, receiving twenty-six performances over that period (Alth & Obzyna 1979, i:28; Hadamowsky 113). Meyer’s Imogen, adapted from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, was premiered in the Burgtheater on 16 Dec 1782, with Schröder in the role of Cymbeline; it was given five more times that season, and remained in the repertory of the court theater until 1792 (Alth & Obzyna 1979, i:33; Hadamowsky, 64). Meyer’s original play Treue und Undank was first performed in the Burgtheater on 20 May 1782 (with Joseph Lange in the role of Sir Thomas Callico), but was not a success and was dropped from the repertory after just two more performances. Meyer also collaborated with Schröder on at least three other translations and adaptations from English or French during these years, all of which were performed by the court theater (see the Notes below).

While Meyer’s reference in 1819 to Mozart as a potential composer for a melodrama based on Prometheus Bound may not provide direct insight into the composer or his reception during his lifetime, it is nonetheless fascinating to imagine what the composer of Don Giovanni might have done with the story of Prometheus.