SOURCE: “Grillparzer's Esther: A Fragment for Good Reason,” in Michigan Germanic Studies, Vol. 1, No. Fall, 1975, pp. 165-79.

In the following essay, Little speculates on the ending of Grillparzer's fragment, Esther, and on the reasons why the playwright abandoned the work.

With no perceptible voice of dissent critics have perennially acclaimed Esther as one of Grillparzer's finest, most mature works, although the poet left it a torso. In 1874 Wilhelm Scherer called it “seine genialste Dichtung,”¹ and nearly a century later Heinz Politzer described it as “ein Produkt aus des Dichters bester Zeit.”² In the intervening years other critics have expressed much the same opinion, and the “Liebesszene” between Esther and the King was regarded by Emil Reich as “eine der glänzendsten der Weltliteratur,”³ a view shared by Georg Witkowski: “die grosse Liebesszene … zählt zu dem Schönsten in aller Poesie.”⁴ Although Esther is no longer performed so...