The Count of Gleichen:

Ernst, Count of Gleichen, has been imprisoned during the Crusades and is now the slave of the Sultan of Cairo. The latter’s daughter, Suleika, who loves Ernst, helps him take flight and flees with him. She converts to Christianity and, with the special permission of the Pope and his wife’s agreement, the Count of Gleichen can marry her and live happily ever after with his two wives.

That the Viennese censors did not allow such a story to be shown in Austrian theatres should not surprise us. The two months taken for their decision was an extremely short time and suggests that they did not scrutinised the entire play in order to find hidden attacks against Metternich’s regime but were simply shocked by the celebration of bigamy and condemned the play from a moral point of view. At that time for instance, Schiller’s plays, which could hardly be forbidden, were "reshaped" to have such immoral themes as a son’s hatred for his father or the existence of a royal beloved removed. One doesn’t know what is more to be admired: Schubert’s naiveté if he really thought the libretto could be accepted (he had already had to suffer from the censors’ narrow-mindedness in former operas and some words had been cancelled from his private letters too) or his determination to compose a subject he liked whatever the Censors thought of it.

The legend is Thuringian and is the subject of a cycle of Romantic frescoes in the town-hall of Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, the region which is at about the geographical centre of the reunified Germany. Some twenty miles south-west of Erfurt three castles called "die drei Gleichen" (the three similar) can still be seen, controlling an old trade route (now the highway from Frankfurt to Dresden). This name is not unusual in Germany where other pairs of twin-castles bear the name of "zwei Gleichen".

Ernst Count of Gleichen, a member of the rich and mighty family holding at least one of these castles, took part in the Crusades in the early 13th century. His tombstone can be seen in the cathedral of Erfurt; bearing the inscription Hic ossa cubant comit. Ernesti de Gleichen ejusque uxorum. R.i.p. (Here rests Ernst, Count of Gleichen and his two wives. RIP). Carved in the stone, one can see a knight between two women. Nevertheless, no evidence has been found to prove that the Count lived with two wives together, in Erfurt, in Rome, or anywhere else. One possible interpretation is that the Count married a second time after his first wife’s death and that he was buried with his two successive wives. Another reading is more complicated, but seems to be closer to the truth. It has been proven that the Count’s tomb has not always been in the cathedral. It was formerly in a convent, where his mother had retired when widowed. The Count could have been buried with his wife and his mother, who is represented as a nun. As the memory of the historical facts faded, the mother’s clothes were interpreted as an oriental suit, and the legend was born. It is hard to say now whether it happened before or after the tomb was transferred to the cathedral but at that time the new inscription was made.

Of course, such a legend could not just be the result of a misinterpretation of a tombstone. Some kind of background must have been there with a receptive climate. The legend bears similarities with another legend from the same country, which has earned a far greater fame as operatic subject: Tannhäuser. Some of the ingredients are the same: the pilgrimage to Rome, the selfless figure of a woman and, above all, the conflict between a Christian and a pagan world, conflict which is expressed as the main figure’s dilemma between two loves (Venus vs. Elisabeth in one case, Suleika vs. Ottilie in the other). Here we should search for the kernel of both stories.

During the early Middle Ages, the border between the Christianised and the still pagan Europe was drawn through Middle Germany, the Saxons being from that point of view Charlemagne’s toughest enemies. A chain of abbeys along the Weser river still testifies to this. Many proselytes to the Christian faith in that part of Europe had to pay with their lives including St. Bonifacius, and St. Adalbert. The Holy Elisabeth of Thuringia, who appears in the Tannhäuser legend, is said to have endured a real martyrdom trying to import Christian virtues to the Thuringian court. The Saxons’ conversion was long, difficult and bloody and for many people it seemed to be a kind of cultural slavery to the distant and mighty Rome.

It is no wonder then that precisely that part of Germany should also be the cradle of the Reformation. Luther wrote his German translation of the Bible in the Wartburg, the very castle where Tannhäuser’s story takes place and where Elisabeth actually lived, in the neighbourhood of the Gleichen castles. At about the same time, the tomb of the Count of Gleichen was transferred to the cathedral of Erfurt. So we can imagine the following scenario: The theme of the Christianisation of Saxony, similar to that of the Saxon invasion of Britain, gave the background to popular tales which incorporated other events, from different periods: the poetic rivalry at the Landgrave’s court, the epic of the Crusades, and so on. Like the Arthurian legends, some of those tales were mixed into a variable and complex mosaic. Unlike them though, they were not written down till the late 18th century, so they could evolve further. A first step in the evolution took place in the 16th century when the atmosphere became clearly anti-Roman, a time when the Pope’s cruelty with Tannhäuser and acceptance of bigamy with the Count of Gleichen, could become a criticism of the corrupted morals of the Catholic Church.

While Tannhäuser’s first act takes place in Venus’s cave in the Thuringian Forest, in Schubert’s opera the first act is located in Cairo. The importance of the oriental component could be the result of another evolution of the legend on its way to an operatic libretto. It is a kind of oriental embroidery which cannot be taken from the European cultural background of the late 17th and the 18th century. We can find it in Hasse’s Solimano, in Gluck’s Pilgrims to Mecca, in Haydn’s Incontro improviso, and of course in Mozart’s unfinished Zaide and Abduction from the Seraglio and in Rossini’s Italian girl in Algiers and Weber’s Oberon.

Tales about the Crusades, with Christians taken into slavery by Barbaresque pirates, enjoyed a revival after the defeat of the Turkish army before Vienna in the 1680’s and the following campaign which lead as far as Belgrade. Many more details came to light about the Turks in general, their customs and their music; the shock caused by their threatening Europe and the relief from the Christians’ victories initiated a new flood of legends and tales and a new curiosity, curiosity which was encouraged by the Enlightenment and a more modern point of view about the so different neighbour. A literary consequence was Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.

In the 17th century the French translation of the Thousand and one Nights, which was in turn to be translated into the main European languages, had launched a new fashion for Oriental erotic stories. Literature that was usually condemned by the Church was more or less tolerated as long as it was supposed to tell about seraglios; the mixture of exotic and erotic made then, as now, a successful cocktail. Love stories in an Oriental atmosphere were extremely popular, not only as novels but also as theatre pieces and of course operas where the sound of the newly discovered "Turkish music" was another attraction.

The plot of the opera is thus the combination of many different components from different times and different origins. An old legend, which picked up new colours and nuances through the centuries, is taken over by a young Viennese at the beginning of the Restoration. What would he make of it?