Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe, Lovers’ Vows: “that we should have such a scene to play!”?

• Eric Gerald Stanley

Not all who sing Schiller’s words in his ‘An die Freude’ to the setting of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the anthem of the European Union, may be aware that the ode celebrates the magic of sexual joy uniting, not in free love but in married love, what convention has strictly segregated:

Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng getheilt.

Another aspect of that ideal, that under the gentle wings of joy beggars become the brothers of princes, is in the original version of the ode as published in Thalia:

Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

A golden ideal of which the poet sang in the years preceding the French Revolution is at variance with the best practice and therefore the experience of the best men and women in polite society.

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