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The places represented are three in number and the same in both plays. Here, however, the parallel ends. Instead of Gemmingen's high-minded paterfamilias we have the rascally President von Walter, who, with his tool Wurm, reminds one of Lessing's Prince and Marinelli.
The magnanimous Amaldi furnishes the bride's dowry, the other domestic complications are easily adjusted and all ends happily. Dramatically Gemmingen's play is rather tame, though its literary merit is considerable. He had a fair measure of constructive skill, but very little of poetic impulse or of dramatic verve.
Diderot's 'Father of the Family' enjoyed a short vogue in France and Italy and met with considerable favor in Germany. Most noteworthy among minor German plays that were influenced by it is Gemmingen's 'Head of the House'. Gemmingen was himself an aristocrat, a baron by title, who was born in 1755.
We cannot wonder that the high-minded Schiller should have condemned Wagner's malodorous play as a mediocre performance. His incentive came rather from Gemmingen's 'Head of the House', which in turn carries us back to Diderot. In the hands of Diderot, democrat, moralist and apostle of the genre honnete, it was natural that the drama of class conflict should end happily.
The aristocratic lover, Gemmingen's Karl, was named Ferdinand von Walter, and Amaldi was converted into Lady Milford. One of Gemmingen's subordinate characters, the foppish nobleman, Dromer, who goes about making compliments to everybody, reappears in Schiller's play as the perfumed tale-bearer and exquisite ladies' man, Chamberlain von Kalb.
Her virtue is intact. She has not the motive, say of Gemmingen's Lotte, for self-destruction. It is hard to take her seriously at this point, and we wonder that Lady Milford takes her seriously. Truth to tell, Louise makes a rather tame and uninteresting tragic heroine. Notwithstanding all her fervid phrases, she is essentially cold.
Gemmingen's 'head of the house' is an upright German nobleman of the admirable sort, who returns home after a long absence to find the affairs of his family very much deranged. His eldest son, Karl, has fallen madly in love with Lotte Wehrmann, the daughter of an impecunious artist, gotten her with child, and promised to marry her when his father shall have returned and given his consent.
Very likely it may have suggested to him the thought of trying his own hand upon a drama in the bourgeois sphere, but it was not until July, 1782, just after he had finished reading Wagner's 'Infanticide', that the plan of 'Louise Miller' began to take shape in his mind. Gemmingen's poor artist, Wehrmann, became the poor fiddler, Miller, and the daughter Lotte was rechristened Louise.
Afterwards there was a concert at Herr von Gemmingen's, where Count Seeau also was. When her songs were finished, Cannabich said to her, "Mademoiselle, I hope you will always continue to fall off in this manner; tomorrow I will write to M. Mozart in your praise." One thing is certain; if war had not already broken out, the court would by this time have been transferred to Munich.
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