Franz von Dingelstedt's varied career should have brought him great satisfaction. He made a striking start as a lyric poet, whose ironical, elegiac, and yet incipiently sentimental verse suggested that he might become a major figure among the writers of the Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) movement. His early journalistic writings and short stories offered similar promise. Though he never abandoned writing, as he approached middle age he turned his energies more exclusively toward the theater, where he had a brilliantly successful career as producer, stage director, theater manager, and ultimately Intendant (director) of both the Vienna Burgtheater and the Hofoperntheater (Court Opera). Few of his contemporaries in the worlds of letters or the theater achieved such prestige or wealth; yet Dingelstedt seems to have died a disappointed man. As Paul Lindau's sad epitaph puts it: "Wenn ihr mich (möglichst spät) begrabt, / Sei dies auf...