Johan Ludvig Heiberg Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

, son of the political writer Peter Andreas Heiberg

Peter Andreas Heiberg

Peter Andreas Heiberg was a Danish author and philologist. He was born in Vordingborg, Denmark. The Heiberg ancestry can be traced back to Norway, and has produced a long line of priests, headmasters and other learned men...

 (1758–1841), and of the novelist, afterwards the Baroness Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd

Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd

Baroness Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd was a Danish author, born in Copenhagen. Her maiden name was Buntzen....

, was born in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

.

In 1800 his father was exiled and settled in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, where he was employed in the French foreign office, retiring in 1817 with a pension. His political and satirical writings continued to exercise great influence over his fellow-countrymen. Johan Ludvig Heiberg was taken by K.L. Rahbek and his wife into their house, Bakkehuset (now part of the Danish Maritime Safety Administration). He was educated at the University of Copenhagen

University of Copenhagen

The University of Copenhagen is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark. Founded in 1479, it has more than 37,000 students, the majority of whom are female , and more than 7,000 employees. The university has several campuses located in and around Copenhagen, with the...

, and his first publication, entitled The Theatre for Marionettes (1814), included two romantic dramas. This was followed by Christmas Jokes and New Years Tricks (1816), The Initiation of Psyche (1817), and The Prophecy of Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe , born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations...

, a satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 on the eccentricities of the Romantic writers, especially on the sentimentality of Ingemann. These works attracted attention at a time when Baggesen

Jens Immanuel Baggesen

Jens Immanuel Baggesen was a Danish poet.-Early life and education:Baggesen was born at Korsør. His parents were very poor, and before he was twelve he was sent to copy documents at the office of the clerk of the district. He was a melancholy, feeble child, and before this he had attempted suicide...

, Oehlenschläger

Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger

Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger was a Danish poet and playwright. He introduced romanticism into Danish literature.-Biography:He was born in Vesterbro, then a suburb of Copenhagen, on 14 November 1779...

 and Ingemann

Bernhard Severin Ingemann

Bernhard Severin Ingemann was a Danish novelist and poet.Ingemann was born in Thorkildstrup, on the island of Falster, Denmark. The son of a vicar, he was left fatherless in his youth. While a student at the University of Copenhagen he published his first collection of poems Bernhard Severin...

 possessed the popular ear, and were understood at once to be the opening of a great career.
In 1817 Heiberg took his degree, and in 1819 went abroad with a grant from government. He proceeded to Paris, and spent the next three years there with his father. In 1822 he published his drama Nina and was made professor of the Danish language

Danish language

Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

 at the University of Kiel

University of Kiel

The University of Kiel is a university in the city of Kiel, Germany. It was founded in 1665 as the Academia Holsatorum Chiloniensis by Christian Albert, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and has approximately 23,000 students today...

, where he delivered a course of lectures, comparing the Scandinavian mythology as found in the Edda

Edda

The term Edda applies to the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, both of which were written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age...

 with the poems of Oehlenschläger. These lectures were published in German in 1827.

In 1825 Heiberg came back to Copenhagen for the purpose of introducing the vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 on the Danish stage. He composed a great number of these vaudevilles, of which the best known are King Solomon and George the Hatmaker (1825); April Fools (1826); A Story in Rosenborg Garden (1827); Kjøge Huskors (1831); The Danes in Paris (1833); No (1836); and Yes (1839). He took his models from the French theatre, but showed extraordinary skill in blending the words and the music; but the subjects and the humour were essentially Danish and even topical.

Meanwhile he was producing dramatic work of a more serious kind; in 1828 he brought out the national drama of Elves' Hill

Elves' Hill

Elves' Hill is a comedy by Johan Ludvig Heiberg, with overture and incidental music by Friedrich Kuhlau , which is considered the first Danish national play....

; in 1830 The Inseparables; in 1835 the fairy comedy of The Elves, a dramatic version of Tieck's Elfin; and in 1838 Fata Morgana. In 1841 Heiberg published a volume of New Poems containing A Soul after Death, a comedy which is perhaps his masterpiece, The Newly Wedded Pair, and other pieces.

He edited from 1827 to 1830 the famous weekly, the Flyvende Post (The Flying Post), and subsequently the Interimsblade (1834–1837) and the Intelligensblade (1842–1843). In his journalism he carried on his warfare against the excessive pretensions of the Romanticists, and produced much valuable and penetrating criticism of art and literature. In 1831 he married the great actress Johanne Luise Pätges

Johanne Luise Heiberg

Johanne Luise Heiberg was one of the greatest Danish actresses of the 19th century. She is most famous for her work at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, where she achieved great success.-Early life:...

 (1812–1890), herself the author of some popular vaudevilles.

Heiberg's scathing satires, however, made him very unpopular; and this antagonism reached its height when, in 1845, he published his malicious little drama of The Nut Crackers. Nevertheless he became in 1849 director of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. He filled the post for seven years, working with great zeal and conscientiousness, but was forced by intrigues from without to resign it in 1856. Heiberg died at Bonderup Manor, near Ringsted

Ringsted

Ringsted, a city in Ringsted municipality, is in the middle of the Danish island of Zealand. The municipal population is about 31,000 and the city population is 21,151 .Ringsted is approximately 60 km from Copenhagen.-Modern hotspot:...

, on 25 August 1860.

His influence upon taste and critical opinion was greater than that of any writer of his time, and can only be compared with that of Holberg

Ludvig Holberg

Ludvig Holberg, Baron of Holberg was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright born in Bergen, Norway, during the time of the Dano-Norwegian double monarchy, who spent most of his adult life in Denmark. He was influenced by Humanism, the Enlightenment and the Baroque...

 in the 18th century. Most of the poets of the Romantic movement in Denmark were very grave and serious; Heiberg added the element of humour, elegance and irony. He had the genius of good taste, and his witty and delicate productions stand almost unique in the literature of his country. First of all he created a Danish critical tradition based upon firm and consequent principles of aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 breaking with the often extremely subjective and occasional value judgements of his predecessors. In return he has not avoided being regarded a conservative formalist

Formalism (literature)

Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...

 and elitist by posterity and the reaction against his line was already started by Georg Brandes

Georg Brandes

Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was a Danish critic and scholar who had great influence on Scandinavian and European literature from the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century. He is seen as the theorist behind the "Modern Breakthrough" of Scandinavian culture...

 who was, however, affected by his school too. At any rate most of later Danish critics had to make up their mind about his ideas.

The poetical works of Heiberg were collected, in 11 vols, in 1861–1862, and his prose writings (11 vols) in the same year. The last volume of his prose works contains some fragments of autobiography. See also Georg Brandes, Essays (1889). For the elder Heiberg see monographs by Thaarup (1883) and by Schwanenflügel (1891).

Literature

• Den lille Salmonsen, vol. V, Copenh., 1938 (in Danish)