Heiberg, Johanne Luise (1812–1890)

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Heiberg, Johanne Luise (1812–1890)

Danish writer, director, actress, and brilliant comedian who achieved prominence as a tragedian toward the end of her career in Schiller's Maria Stuart and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Born Johanne Luise Pätges in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the winter of 1812; died in 1890; daughter of Christian Pätges and Henriette Hartvig Pätges (both of German descent); her father was Catholic, her mother of Jewish heritage; married Johan Ludvig Heiberg (a writer and critic), in 1831; no children.

Started her training at the ballet school of the Danish Royal Theater and continued her career there as an actress; from age 14 until retirement (1864), performed lead roles in plays written for her by prominent Danish playwrights of the time as well as in dramas by Molière, Scribe, Calderon, and Sheridan; after husband's death (1831), adopted three motherless girls from West Indies; rejoined the Danish Royal Theater as its primary director (1867–74); spent the remainder of her life writing her memoirs.

Selected writings:

(light comedy) En Söndag paa Amager (A Sunday in the Country, 1848); (light comedy) Abekatten (The Monkey, 1849); Et Liv Gjenoplivet i Erindringen (A Life Re-lived in Memory, published in three editions with significant omissions and reinstatements); (ed. by A.D. Jörgensen) Et Liv Gjenoplivet i Erindringen, I–II (1891–92); (ed. by Aage Friis) Et liv gjenoplivet i erindringen, I–IV (1944); (ed. by Niels Birger Wamberg) Et liv gjenoplivet i erindringen, I–IV (1973–74).

The eighth of nine children, Johanne Luise Pätges was born during the Copenhagen winter of 1812 in a room so spare, destitute, and devoid of heat that icicles formed under the bed where her mother Henriette Pätges lay. The Pätgeses' wine shop had been destroyed during the English bombardment of the city in 1807, and with that had gone their economic resources. To provide food for the table, the Pätgeses ran boarding houses with varying success until finally they lost everything. At that point, Henriette declared herself head of the household and started selling German specialties, an enterprise which met with astounding success. Temporarily at least, money became a secondary worry; the primary obstacle to family contentment was Christian Pätges who resorted to excessive drinking in an effort to shore up the dignity he had lost with his wife usurping the role of breadwinner.

In this environment of poverty and increasingly violent parental brawls, Johanne Luise grew up as a painfully shy little girl, quiet to the point of being mute. Yet, she radiated a promise of unusual abilities which forced people to pay attention. From the time she was five, she was given dancing lessons by one of her mother's boarders; at eight, she started training at the ballet school of the Danish Royal Theater. Johanne tolerated the swishing cane of the ballet master because she loved dancing, but disparaging remarks directed at her old-fashioned, long out-grown clothes stung like nettles. The dark and melancholy disposition which would plague her throughout her life was relieved only in the soaring of the dance, precursor to the brilliance and lightness with which she would play the lead in lyrical romantic comedies.

Johanne Luise cried tears of rage and protestation when on one occasion she and her younger sister were made to dance on their father's billiard table to entertain his customers. She was saved, however, by the intervention of one of them, Johan Gebhard Harboe, who not only put an end to such performances but brought books, pens, and papers to the Pätges house. Fascinated by Johanne and moved by her projected anxiety, he took it upon himself to teach her and her little sister to read and write. Their parents could do neither, but they permitted Harboe's interference and perhaps encouraged the attention he lavished on their daughter, who was 13 years his junior. Harboe walked Johanne Luise back and forth to the theater, gave her presents, and on the whole tried to become indispensable. She readily acknowledged his role as savior from the squalor of her childhood, but she grew up to find his physical presence increasingly burdensome and his implicit demands an iron harness ready to descend on her when she was old enough to wear it.

Her discomfort and sense of guilt, increased by rumors about her engagement to Harboe, became so acute that the manager of the Royal Theater arranged for her to stay with the Wexschalls, a violinist and his actress wife. Their hospitable home was a lively and vital center for artists who came and went on a daily basis. With them, the "born old" Johanne Luise experienced being young for the first time, "as if given wings for both body and soul." For one full year, she enjoyed the admiration and attention of everyone. Men flocked around her, attracted by her elfish ways of invitation and withdrawal, and her singular beauty. Pictures show a very dark young girl with blue-grey eyes, and her contemporaries describe her hands and feet as small and expressive. Her walk was especially enchanting. "When she entered a room," wrote one admirer, "we had a feeling she descended to us, not by a staircase, but from the airy realms of imagination where she was queen." Her holiday year ended as it had to—in the name of convention

and for the sake of reputation—with an engagement. A young actor, Christopher Hvid, proposed, and before she could say either yes or no, he had declared the matter settled to someone entering the room. More a matter of timing than inclination, this accidental yet inevitable engagement should not be seen as a contradiction to Johanne Luise Pätges' belief at the time that of all miseries, "none is greater than marriage."

She had stood firm on that conviction the previous year, in 1828, when Johan Ludvig Heiberg had proposed for the first time. He had seen her three years earlier as the ingenue in a dialogue between young sweethearts and had gone backstage to inquire about "the little girl." She was 14, then; he, professor at the University of Kiel, drama critic and writer, was 35 years old. He had borne her refusal gracefully, continuing to treat her in a kind and courtly manner and letting her understand that in him she would always have a loyal and faithful friend. But he never let her go. She was not only his beloved but his muse. He wrote one play after another for her, and she performed her parts to perfection, apparently unaware that the roles she played and the words she spoke were his declaration of love.

We humans could accomplish nothing without absorbing ourselves in the accomplishment; and we do that at the risk of losing ourselves; resolving that dichotomy is our most difficult task.
—Johanne Luise Heiberg

Johan Ludvig was less than pleased when Johanne Luise moved in with the young and lively Wexschalls, and her engagement he considered a considerable—although temporary—set-back. By then, he had secured a position as dramatist and translator of plays at the Royal Theater and with his mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd , he had moved into an apartment in Copenhagen. Though her identity was kept secret, Gyllembourg was an author in her own right. At age 53, after the loss of her second husband, Carl Frederik Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, she had published her first story, "The Polonius Family." Twenty-three stories followed, all focusing on domestic issues and everyday life. Influenced by English novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, Gyllembourg wrote about women and the conflicts of love. She held progressive views of women's position in society which she demonstrated by placing her female characters in conflicting roles and showing their attempts at liberation within the paternalistic order of things. Men, too, she argued, were confined by existing cultural mores and patterns; women, therefore, should seek their independence within, rather than outside, those walls.

Gyllembourg lived in conformity with her literary prescriptions although that had not always been the case. At 16, she had married her 31-year-old teacher, Peter Andreas Heiberg, with whom she had fancied herself in love. Marriage had proved a disillusionment, and to compensate for her mistake she had turned her love and attention to her son, a precocious and intelligent child. With that focus of affection, she might have remained in the marriage had she not fallen in love. But she did, "as inevitably as the chrysalis turns into a butterfly," in the words of her future daughter-in-law, and she demanded a divorce when her husband went into political exile, a bold and unusual request for her time. P.A. Heiberg consented, but on condition that their son not be permitted to live with his mother. Thus, absence had added to incipient symbiosis when she moved in with her son Johan Ludvig after Carl Gyllembourg's premature death in 1815.

At the time of Johan Ludvig's first proposal in 1828, Johanne Luise had become an established guest in their home. In the company of Thomasine Gyllembourg, she lost her usual reticence and spoke freely and at length. Those visits continued, and she felt increasingly included in the circle of well-educated, artistic people who were their friends. Not surprisingly, she turned to Gyllembourg in April 1830, "red-eyed and despondent," when the Wexschalls' divorce left her homeless. The older woman took her in for life, first as a boarder then as her daughter-in-law. She saw in Johanne a creature who "united the warmth and loveliness of youth with the sense and seriousness of later years." She also recognized the unexpected and uncustomary depth of her son's commitment to her, and she found a way to help Johanne Luise speak the words that would put an end to her meaningless engagement to Christopher Hvid. Johan Ludvig, who at this time had acquired his own apartment, became a daily guest in his mother's house, and soon his visits and his witty, learned conversation became the high point of their days.

Other prominent men who proposed marriage to the rising star did so on condition she leave the theater; as an actress, she would compromise their position in society. Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Thomasine Gyllembourg took the opposite view: to demand that Johanne Luise Pätges turn her back on the stage would be as cruel as cutting out the tongue of a nightingale. So Johan Ludvig gradually won her over by asking nothing more than she was willing to give, and his mother promoted his suit by making the young actress feel grateful for her protection. Together, they enclosed her in a circle of three that would remain unbroken even after the two elder members had passed away.

Johanne Luise Pätges and Johan Ludvig Heiberg married in 1831 without letting anyone know beforehand. They celebrated their honeymoon in a village outside Copenhagen while Thomasine was busily at work decorating and arranging the home the three of them would share. She directed the carpenters and the painters and bought sheets and other linen. Divorced and widowed, she had lost her home twice and would let nothing interfere with her plans for future happiness with her son and daughter-in-law. Johan Ludvig wanted to set up his own household but renounced the idea when his mother let him understand that their living together was a matter of life and death for her. His wife was too grateful and too young to offer an opinion contrary to that of her mother-in-law.

Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Thomasine (1773–1856)

Danish author and baroness. Name variations: Baroness or Countess Thomasine Gyllembourg. Pronunciation: Gullem-BORG AY-rens-verd. Born Thomasine Christine Buntzen on November 9, 1773, in Copenhagen, Denmark; died in Copenhagen on July 2, 1856; married Peter Andreas Heiberg (a writer), in 1789 (divorced 1800); married Swedish baron Karl or Carl Frederik Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, in December 1801 (died 1815); children: (first marriage) Johan Ludvig Heiberg (a writer).

Thomasine Gyllembourg was one of Denmark's first great women writers and one of its first realists, but she initially attracted notice because of her great beauty. Before age 17, she married the famous writer Peter Andreas Heiberg. In the following year, she gave birth to her son, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who would become an acclaimed poet and critic. In 1800, after her husband was exiled for liberalism, she obtained a divorce. In December 1801, she married the Swedish baron Carl F. Ehrensvärd. Ehrensvärd, who had taken refuge in Denmark and adopted the name Gyllembourg, was also a political fugitive: he had been implicated in the assassination of Sweden's Gustavus III. Carl died in 1815.

In 1822, Thomasine followed her son to Kiel, where he was appointed professor, and in 1825 she returned with him to Copenhagen. When her son married the legendary actress Johanne Luise Heiberg in 1831, Thomasine lived with them as part of an intense menage à trois.

In 1827, she had first appeared as an author by publishing her novel Familien Polonius (The Polonius Family) in her son's newspaper Flyvende Post. The following year, the journal had published The Magic Ring, which was immediately succeeded by En Hverdags historie (Everyday History). The popularity of this anonymous work was so widespread that the author would write under the name "The Author of Everyday History" until the end of her life. Thomasine published three volumes of Old and New Novels (1833–34), New Stories (1835–36), Montanus the Younger (1839), Ricida (1839), One in All (1840), Near and Far (1841), A Correspondence (1843), The Cross Ways (1844), and Two Generations (1845).

From 1849 to 1851, Thomasine was immersed in bringing out a library edition of her collected works in 12 volumes. Her literary identity remained a secret, even from her closest friends, until the day she died in her son's house in Copenhagen on July 2, 1856. At the turn of the century, her style was considered by critics as clear, sparkling, and witty, and she was favorably compared to Elizabeth Gaskell .

suggested reading:

Heiberg, Johanne Luise. Et Liv Gjenoplivet i Erindringen (A Life Re-lived in Memory), published in three editions.

Heiberg, Peter Andreas. Heiberg og Thomasine Gyllembourg (in Danish), 1882.

At the theater, Johanne Luise Heiberg's star was in steady ascension. Her husband continued to write plays for her, appealing to the lighthearted, girlish part of her nature that he loved. She reached perfection not only in his satirical comedies but in the romantic plays Denmark's other leading dramatists produced in her honor, as well as in the French conversation pieces for which she had been trained in Madame Gyllembourg's drawing room. Those plays released her playfulness, her elfin grace, and charismatic manner. She was showered with flowers, gifts, and anonymous letters. Her dress and hair became fashion statements, and her picture appeared on handkerchiefs and perfume bottles. Wherever she went, people crowded around her, fascinated by her radiance. A few nights before her 30th birthday, the students of Copenhagen honored her with a torchlight procession; her audience disengaged the horses from her coach and pulled it through the streets themselves. On that occasion, they paid tribute to an actress who had brilliantly emerged from the comedies of her earlier repertoire to roles of complex and intriguing individuals, roles for women that had begun to appear in the plays of the early 1840s.

Johanne Luise Heiberg's first appearance in a part that explored and demanded her entire being was afforded her by the playwright Henrik Hertz, who had spent a summer with the Heibergs and Thomasine Gyllembourg and had fallen deeply in love with Johanne Luise. In the process, he had come to understand that her magnetism, her enduring sweetness, had a darker side, which she experienced as desperate lone-liness and a need for physical contact. From childhood on, Heiberg had felt ashamed of her mother's Jewish heritage. She considered it sinful and strange and had striven to be a good Christian and a light-hearted Dane. Hertz, himself a Jew, had intuited the conflict. He recognized that her success, based on artistic brilliance and domestic perfection, was achieved by a transformation of opposing forces, an insight Heiberg shares in her memoirs when she describes herself as a child. "Whoever saw me in the world of performance would consider me a happy and playful child, and yet, I believe the partly unconscious interest I awakened in the audience was due to the backdrop of melancholy." Heiberg was well acquainted with her emotional range that went from sensitive aesthetic refinement to coarse sensuality. As a child, she had learned to harness her forces in the cause of survival. As an adult, under the guidance of her husband, she had become civilized; but from time to time, she reckoned with the demons within, the filter through which she released her tragic roles and achieved her artistic stature. As one of her critics put it, "Only through the demonic has Mrs. Heiberg been great."

Johan Ludvig's civilizing influence on the barely literate young girl he married may be considered in the image of Pygmalion forming and shaping his Galatea. He taught her philosophy, religion, and aesthetics, and under his guidance she became the hostess of the most cultured, most refined home in Copenhagen where artists of all kinds, politicians, theologians, and philosophers would gather for food and conversation. Yet this diet which fed the artist so richly may be said to have starved the woman who suffered the lack of physical intimacy and children. Johan Ludvig did not miss them. An aesthete to the core and by nature transitory in his affections, he would continue to feed his fancy by the presence of young girls. The actress in his wife had responded to his demands and played the parts he had written for her with incomparable grace and lightness. Perhaps to accommodate her wider range, he added a moonlight dimension in his most famous play The Elf Hill, but he never came to understand the deeply melancholic aspects of her being. He thought them a woman's hypersensitivity, an aberration which reason could control; therefore, he ignored them and encouraged her to suppress them, which she did at her peril.

Instead of children, Johanne Luise Heiberg had her mother-in-law whom she loved and whose opinions she shared in the main. If either encountered matters that disturbed, the other was always available with open ears and loving sympathy. It was the little things that wedged them apart. "Never in my life have I seen such a combination of big and little as it existed in her," wrote Heiberg in her memoirs. "She who could grasp the greatest concepts in religion, art, and poetry would be equally concerned about the smallest domestic things…. What I thought themost unimportant thing in the world she would find exceedingly important, and thus we two very different creatures found it difficult to pull together. When I went at a trot, she chose a foot-pace, when I broke into a gallop, she would at best go at a trot. That caused perpetual jerks which tired me and tired her, so none of us was really comfortable in our closeness with one another—because we were too close."

Heiberg's ability to sublimate her sufferings into art did not fail her when in the course of the 1840s she fell in love with her leading man, Michael Wiehe. She "discovered" him among the young aspiring actors at the theater, and together they became the romantic lovers of the century—on stage, for all to see. When after more than a decade of joint performances, Wiehe left the theater in the wake of a friend who had been fired, she was deeply hurt and "unspeakably sad," because "the actor with whom my artistic work was so closely fused [would] no longer perform his art by my side…. Few people, perhaps noone, has caused me greater suffering than he. And yet I think no one was dearer to his heart than I. Where I am concerned, there were years during which I attached myself to him with a fervor I thought inextinguishable. It was an illusion. He poured a mountain of ice on my heart and I tore his picture from it."

But it was her husband that had done the firing. Michael Wiehe's walk-out took place in 1855, six years after Johan Ludvig had been made manager of the Danish Royal Theater. The promotion had come too late in his career. Twenty-five years earlier, he had been a revolutionary, bringing the age of sentimentality to an end with his light satirical comedies and his incisive critiques. His sure critical taste, based on years of literary studies, and his sharp, precise and elegant phrasing had gradually set the standards for literary achievement. He knew what was good, and that certainty prevented his acknowledgment of the changing times. By mid-century, he was considered a reactionary. The new revolutionaries, among them the leading actor Frederik Ludvig Hoedt and, to a lesser extent, Michael Wiehe, argued for more realism and naturalism in the performance of roles. They rejected the romantic soaring, the Tristan approach to a Romeo, and demanded presentations which were anchored in reality. When Johan Ludvig fired Hoedt in 1855, Wiehe went with him.

Johan Ludvig's stance put his wife in a difficult position. Twelve years earlier, in 1833, she had been the ringleader of a group of women, leading actresses at the Royal Theater, who demanded decent dressing rooms with sofas, chests of drawers with keys, and full-length mirrors, as well as respect on a par with that accorded their male colleagues. As the wife of the chief administrator and the leading actress, she was in the middle of the warring parties. Understandably, this ideological strife and attendant politics, the tension between the old and the new, and the loss of Michael Wiehe led to a physical breakdown. Heiberg had worked hard for many years, sometimes playing four different major roles in the course of seven nights, and always demanding the utmost from her performance. She was of the conviction that an actor frequently knows the character she portrays better than the dramatist who created it. Her task, then, was to present the character so the audience could see exactly what the writer intended, a feat which depended for its success on sublime concentration.

In the summers of 1854 and 1855, she spent time at two German spas, Marienbad and Franzenbad, seeking a cure for stomach and side pains. Her letters home show her longing for her husband, who at 60 no longer connects with her. "There is in your everyday relationships something cold," she writes, "no matter how amiable they are. Your kind thoughts rarely find expression in words…. You rarely feel the need to caress those you love." Johan Ludvig did not hear her cry for help, nor did her doctor. One admonished her against giving in to melancholia, the other diagnosed her as suffering from nervous tension and recommended she take the baths.

To put her mind to rest and let go of the oppressive thoughts which pursued her everywhere, she started writing her memoirs during the winter of 1855. She intended to focus on memories of her childhood, youth, marriage, and career and describe the development she had undergone:

I will write openly, honestly, and truthfully about events and people in my life and about the development I have gradually undergone in encounters with people who have crossed my way…. My writings must becandid, open, forthright and truthful; after all, the recollections of a lifetime are not a story, a novel or a play.

Initially, she had little thought of anyone reading her outpourings, and she allowed herself a certain nostalgia in the descriptions of bygone times. The early sections of her memoirs seem less problematic and considerably brighter than the later years from which her writings were to serve as a means of escape. The frequently moralizing tone is especially prevalent in the third volume which depicts the actors who had opposed Johan Ludvig Heiberg as vain and capricious. She poses the "vulgar" public, the "childish" actors led by the "tactless" Hoedt under the banner of the "coarsest naturalism" and the "liberal" press in opposition to the cultured, truth-loving Johan Ludvig. Johan Ludvig "represented to my mind the fine, educated man vis a vis coarse and foolish arrogance, defamation and vile assailment." Heiberg wrote her memoirs between 1855 and 1890, and the gradual metamorphosis from being a story of her life to becoming a monument to her husband and his "unappreciated" work shows her never-failing sense of duty to the man who had shaped her and cultural life in Denmark for three decades.

Thomasine Gyllembourg's long life came to an end in 1856; she was 83 years old. That same summer, Johan Ludvig tended his resignation from the theater, and his wife asked for a leave of absence. Four years later, in August 1860, Johan Ludvig passed away with her hand in his. Johanne Luise Heiberg remained with the theater as an actress until 1864 and returned as a director of plays from 1867 to 1874. By then, she had adopted three little girls from the West Indies and built a house for the four of them at the outskirts of Copenhagen. There she had a room with a lock where only she could go. And there she completed the memoirs which in three different editions have invited readers to see and not see the truth of the Heibergs' public and private lives.