There is, therefore, a double significance in the earliest play of Grillparzer’s to be performed on the stage, The Ancestress (1816)—­first, in that, continuing in the direction foreshadowed by its predecessors, it takes its place beside the popular dramas of fate written by Werner and Muellner; and secondly, because at the same time the poet, now yielding more to the congenial impulse of Spanish influences, establishes his independence even in the treatment of a more or less conventional theme.  Furthermore, The Ancestress marks the beginning of Grillparzer’s friendship with Schreyvogel.  Grillparzer had translated some scenes of Calderon’s Life is a Dream which, published in 1816 by an enemy of Schreyvogel’s who wished to discredit the adaptation which Schreyvogel had made for the Burgtheater, served only to bring the two men together; for Schreyvogel was generous and Grillparzer innocent of any hostile intention.  As early as 1813 Grillparzer had thought of The Ancestress.  Schreyvogel encouraged him to complete the play, and his interest once again aroused and soon mounting to enthusiasm, he wrote in less than a month the torrent of Spanish short trochaic verses which sweeps through the four acts of this romantic drama.  Schreyvogel was delighted; but he criticized the dramatic structure; and in a revised version in five acts Grillparzer so far adopted his suggestions as to knit up the plot more closely and thus to give greater prominence to the idea of fate and retribution.  The play was performed on the thirty-first of January, 1817, and scored a tremendous success.

Critics, to be sure, were not slow to point out that the effectiveness of The Ancestress was due less to poetical qualities than to theatrical—­unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Muellner’s dramas more gruesome than dramatic.  But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it.  A friend chanced to suggest to him that the story of Sappho would furnish a text for an opera.  Grillparzer replied that the subject would perhaps yield a tragedy.  The idea took hold of him; without delay or pause for investigation he made his plan; and in three weeks his second play was ready for the stage.  Written in July, 1817, Sappho was produced at the Hofburgtheater on April 21, 1818.  Grillparzer said that in creating Sappho he had plowed pretty much with Goethe’s steer.  In form his play resembles Iphigenia and in substance it is not unlike Tasso; but upon closer examination Sappho appears to be neither a classical play of the serene, typical quality of Iphigenia nor a Kuenstlerdrama in the sense in which Tasso is one.  Grillparzer