Abel Seyler

• 1. Introduction

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  Abel Seyler was born on the 23rd of August 1730 in Liestal, a small town outside Basel in Switzerland, the son of a Reformed parish priest who could not even afford to have his church repaired. He died on the 25th of April 1800 in Rellingen, as a guest on the estate of a lifelong friend. Between those two dates, Seyler went bankrupt with 3-4 million Mark Banco in debts, married the most famous actress in Germany, introduced Shakespeare to German-speaking audiences, helped invent the modern idea of a national theatre, commissioned what is considered the first serious German opera, and shaped the conditions that gave rise to The Magic Flute.

  He was never an actor. He started as a merchant banker. And yet contemporaries called him "the leading patron of German theatre" and "one of German art's most meritorious men." How does a Swiss-born banker with a spectacular financial disgrace behind him become the primary agent for change in an entire country's cultural life? That question threads through everything that followed his ruin in 1763.

• 2. A Banker's Spectacular Ruin

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  Hamburg in the 1750s was emerging as one of the world's foremost centres of trade and finance, and Abel Seyler arrived there as a young man after a spell in London, ready to make his fortune. With business partners Johann Martin Tillemann and Edwin Müller, he founded two related companies: Seyler & Tillemann and Müller & Seyler. Their actual starting capital, according to documents later read into the Imperial Cameral Tribunal proceedings, amounted to no more than thirty-eight thousand Mark Banco. Well over half of that had already been spent on furniture, clothes, jewels, silver plate, carriages and horses before they had properly begun.

  Credit was easy in the 1750s, and the undercapitalization seemed manageable. The companies took on commissions in goods for import and export, invested in a sugar refinery, and lent money widely. They also engaged in what contemporaries called bill-jobbing, a dangerous practice that, even in the best hands, typically lost ten to fourteen percent. When cash flow tightened, they conjured a fictitious company under a partner's name to extend their reach further.

  By August 1762 they were effectively insolvent, yet they did not stop. Seyler & Tillemann continued trading in what the tribunal records called "worthless paper" and bought large quantities of silver and coin on commission. When the Amsterdam house of De Neufville collapsed in the banking crisis of 1763, so did Seyler & Tillemann, with 3-4 million Mark Banco in debts. Civil litigation ran from 1763 all the way to 1773, reaching the Imperial Cameral Tribunal.

  In strictly Lutheran Hamburg, Seyler was already an outsider: a Calvinist, an immigrant, a self-made man who showed little regard for the conservative values of the local bourgeoisie. A creditors' lawyer described the business practices of "malicious bankrupts" in terms that left little to the imagination. And yet, as one contemporary noted, Seyler had "neither lost his good humour nor his taste for light living." His former partner Tillemann commissioned Seyler to operate the mint at Rethwisch in 1761, producing debased coins for Frederick Charles, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön, in the final years of the Seven Years' War. It was one more chapter in a story of aggressive, imaginative, and ultimately ruinous financial risk-taking.

• 3. The Hamburg National Theatre

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  Friederike Sophie Hensel was, by 1767, the most famous actress in Germany, and she was 29 years old when Seyler's admiration for her led him to devote what remained of his fortune to theatre. The story of how a banker became a theatre principal turns, at its pivot, on a personal rivalry: Hensel's conflict with actress Karoline Schulze had created an intrigue that pushed her admirer Seyler to, as Karl Mantzius later put it, "establish a theatre for her, where she could reign undisputed without fearing any rivalry."

  The Hamburg National Theatre was owned by a consortium of twelve businessmen, with a triumvirate of Seyler, a partner named Bubbers, and Johann Martin Tillemann. In practice, Seyler dominated all. The theatre leased the Comödienhaus building and drew on the legacy of Konrad Ernst Ackermann's company. It attracted Germany's most eminent actors, including Konrad Ekhof and Friedrich Ludwig Schröder.

  The theatre's most consequential appointment was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, hired as the world's first professional dramaturg. The idea of a journal with Lessing as dramatic critic was conceived by the nominal director Johann Friedrich Löwen. Seyler, described by one observer as "the power behind the throne," at first agreed reluctantly, but was won over by the journal's success. That journal became Hamburg Dramaturgy, a collection of essays that defined the entire field and gave it its name.

  The theatre lasted only two years before Seyler had spent the remainder of his fortune on it. But in that period it had established Hamburg as a centre of theatrical innovation, fired the imagination of German writers and audiences, and demonstrated that a privately funded institution of cultural ambition could exist outside the traditional court system. Ekhof, who had effectively assumed artistic leadership at the Hamburg theatre, became Seyler's lifelong friend and collaborator.

• 4. The Seyler Theatre Company

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  In 1769, with the Hamburg National Theatre closed, Seyler founded its effective successor: the Seyler Theatre Company, together with Ekhof, Sophie Hensel, and a core of actors. For the next ten years it was regarded as "the best theatre company in Germany at that time" and one of the most famous in Europe. At its height the company comprised around sixty members, including an orchestra, a ballet, house dramatists and set designers. It was one of the first theatre companies to maintain a permanent orchestra.

  George III contracted Seyler in 1769 to perform at Hanover and other cities of the Electorate, appointing him "Director of the Royal and Electoral German Court Actors." The early years were difficult. Ekhof fell seriously ill in May 1770, and the lack of public interest in Hanover created financial strain. Seyler's brother-in-law, the court pharmacist J.G.R. Andreae, saved the company by assuming all its debts, on the condition that Ekhof replace Seyler as nominal head.

  In October 1771, Duchess Anna Amalia, a 32-year-old widow and composer who reigned as regent in Weimar, invited the company to her ducal court. They performed three times a week for select guests and were generously paid. The company's arrival in Weimar is now regarded as the earliest starting point of the cultural era known as Weimar Classicism. The Duchess was already drawing Germany's most eminent minds to her court: Herder, Goethe and Schiller would follow. The year after Seyler's company arrived, she invited Christoph Martin Wieland, who became an important friend and collaborator of Seyler, to Weimar to educate her two sons.

  After a palace fire in May 1774 forced the Duchess to dismiss the company, they moved to the ducal court in Gotha. There Seyler met the Bohemian composer Georg Anton Benda and commissioned several operas, including Ariadne auf Naxos, Medea and Pygmalion. Ariadne auf Naxos, at its debut in 1775, received enthusiastic reviews across Germany and then across Europe. Music critics praised its originality and ingenious execution. It is widely considered Benda's finest work, and it inspired Mozart.

  In 1776 Seyler employed Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Goethe's close friend, as a playwright and secretary. Klinger had just broken with Goethe under unclear circumstances and brought with him the manuscript of a new play. The Seyler Company performed Klinger's Sturm und Drang on the 1st of April 1777 in Leipzig. That play gave the entire artistic movement its name.

  In 1772, Seyler and Hensel married in Oßmannstedt, just outside Weimar, after she had spent a year at the Vienna Burgtheater. They had no children together.

• 5. Mannheim and a New Kind of Director

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  When Charles Theodore moved his court from Mannheim to Munich in 1777, the courtier Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg was instructed to build a new theatre in Mannheim. He contracted the Seyler Company on an occasional basis from 1778, and in the autumn of 1779 Seyler moved permanently to Mannheim as the founding artistic director of the Mannheim National Theatre. Dalberg served as general administrator. Several actors who had worked under Konrad Ekhof at the Gotha Court Theatre joined them; Ekhof himself had died the year before.

  In 1778, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited the Mannheim theatre and Dalberg asked him to write a duodrama for the Seyler Company. Mozart wrote to his father Leopold that he might earn forty louis d'or there, and noted, "The Seyler company is here. I expect you already know them by reputation."

  Under Seyler and Dalberg the theatre developed a characteristic style, balancing a more natural approach to acting with a sense of nobility and idealization. Actors who worked under Seyler's direction at Mannheim included August Wilhelm Iffland, Johann David Beil and Heinrich Beck. Iffland later recalled the precision of Seyler's critical attention: "Unwavering was his place between the proscenium and the first coulisse. It was praise, encouragement, reward seeing him there, a warning censure when he pocketed his lorgnette, a punishment when he left his place."

  Seyler's tenure ended abruptly in 1781. During a quarrel with a 20-year-old actress named Elisabeth Toscani, described as his wife's "scheming" student, Seyler struck her in the face in response to repeated insolent remarks during rehearsals. A report commissioned by Dalberg concluded that Toscani belonged to "the weaker sex" and that a theatre director should be held to a higher standard. Dalberg retired Seyler with a pension. The first performance of Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers, itself inspired by a play by Seyler's son-in-law Johann Anton Leisewitz, took place at the Mannheim National Theatre the year after Seyler left.

• 6. Sophie's Oberon and The Magic Flute

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  Sophie Seyler, who had been the theatrical anchor of her husband's entire enterprise, died in 1789. Earlier that year she had published a romantic Singspiel called Huon and Amanda, also known as Oberon, inspired by a poem by their friend Christoph Martin Wieland. The original music was by Carl Hanke, a music director Abel Seyler had recruited for the Comödienhaus in Hamburg in 1783. The work became a success in Hamburg.

  A lightly adapted version with new music by Paul Wranitzky became the first opera performed by Emanuel Schikaneder's troupe at the Theater auf der Wieden. It established within Schikaneder's company a tradition of fairy-tale operas. Two years later Mozart and Schikaneder produced The Magic Flute. Musicologist Thomas Bauman described Oberon as "an important impulse for the creation of a generation of popular spectacles trading in magic and the exotic," noting that Die Zauberflöte shares many features with Oberon, both musical and textual. Sophie Seyler's work is regarded as one of the primary influences on the plot and characters of The Magic Flute.

  After Sophie's death, Abel Seyler continued working in theatre until 1792, including a second stint as artistic director of the Schleswig Court Theatre from 1787 to 1792. He retired with a pension from Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, the royal governor of Schleswig-Holstein. From 1798 he lived as a guest on the estate of the actor Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, his long-time friend and fellow freemason, in Rellingen in the Duchy of Holstein. He was buried in Rellingen on the 1st of May 1800.

• 7. Freemasonry and Fellowship

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  Seyler joined freemasonry in London in 1753, years before he entered theatre. He became a member of the Absalom lodge in Hamburg in May 1755, and remained involved with freemasonry until his death. It was an allegiance that shaped his social world as profoundly as his theatrical one.

  On the 25th of June 1774, Seyler and Konrad Ekhof, along with other members of the Seyler Company, founded the first masonic lodge in Gotha. The founding took place at the Gasthof Zum Mohren on the occasion of the Nativity of St John the Baptist. Ekhof became the first Worshipful Master; Seyler became the First Warden. The lodge was originally called Cosmopolit, then renamed Zum Rautenkranz in honour of the ducal family. Its membership soon included the reigning Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and the Duke's brother, Prince August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, alongside the composer Georg Anton Benda and other company members. Many members, notably the Duke and his brother, later joined the Illuminati; the Duke offered that society's founder Adam Weishaupt asylum in Gotha.

  The lodge became a centre of enlightenment and philanthropy in Gotha's cultural life. Seyler was also a godfather of Jacob Herzfeld, born in 1763 and known as the first Jewish stage actor in Germany, when Herzfeld converted to Christianity in 1796. Felix Hoppe-Seyler, later recognized as the principal founder of biochemistry and molecular biology, was an adopted son of Abel Seyler's grandson.