Das Haus Lonei

(The Lonei Household) by Adolph L'Arronge.

   Premiered 1880. Herr Lonei has reared his children strictly, practicing a Prussian regimen that allows little exercise of personal freedom. The result is that Herr Lonei's son Kurt is still in high school at age 21, unable or unwilling to pass the school's final examinations. He instead wants to become an actor, an idea Lonei finds absolutely abhorrent. But Herr Lonei relents slightly and hires the well-known actor Reinhard to be Kurt's tutor. Reinhard is unusual because he has attended university before going on stage, and Lonei hopes his son Kurt will find in Reinhard a model to emulate. During his tutorial visits to the Lonei household, however, Reinhard becomes acquainted with Kurt's sister Marie, a lovely girl who has long admired Reinhard and who is secretly in love with him. After much effort, Kurt takes the school exams but once again fails them. In despair, he throws himself into the nearby barge canal and would have drowned had Reinhard not been conveniently passing by to rescue him. Kurt's near-death experience enables him to takes the school exam once more, and this time he passes it—barely. In gratitude, Lonei agrees that his daughter Marie and Reinhard can get married.

   L'Arronge used the theater as a kind of pejorative gag, an acknowledgment of the actor's low social status in Germany. But he also parodied the inflexibility of the self-made man in Herr Lonei, whose financial success has enabled him to rise in social status though he personally remains a dislikable ignoramus.