Die Braut von Messina

(The Bride of Messina) by Friedrich Schiller. Premiered 1803. Schiller's overriding concern with this blank-verse tragedy was the chorus. For the program of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's premiere staging in Weimar, he published a lengthy essay on the role of a chorus and the performance of choral verse in tragedy. Schiller borrowed plot devices from Sophocles and Dante, featuring a child fatally cursed (she later becomes the bride of the title) and two brothers in love with her. He set the play in medieval Messina on the island of Sicily, where two princelings are at odds over the title of their recently deceased father. The bride, Beatrice, as an infant was left exposed to die on a hillside, the result of a dream that she would bring disaster to her family. Beatrice found protection as an infant from Isabella, the mother of the two aforementioned brothers. Isabella's attempts to reconcile her sons at first succeed, then they fall apart on the realization that they have both fallen in love with Beatrice. One brother kills the other, then himself. The chorus observes, reports on, and participates in the action.