When: 6 April 1779

The first Iphigenie, 6 April 1779

Goethe's Iphigenie was first performed in its prose version on Easter Tuesday 1779, with Corona Schröter in the title role and Goethe himself playing Orest.

The Weimar court theatre of the 1770s was an amateur company, and this is the evening that shows what that actually meant: the play's author on stage in a supporting part, opposite the one professional in the building, performing a work he had written towards her.

The actress who inspired the figure

Corona Schröter had come to Weimar in March 1776 on Goethe's recruitment, a working singer and actress whose voice was giving out after too much early training. The Neue Deutsche Biographie states plainly that she inspired the figure of Iphigenie.^[1] So the sequence runs the unusual way round: the part was shaped by the performer rather than cast to her, and on Easter Tuesday 1779 she gave it for the first time, with Goethe as Orest.

The verdict, and what it was worth

The nineteenth century's judgement on her performance was not measured and did not need to be: she did not portray Iphigenia, she was Iphigenia.^[1] That is a reviewer's sentence rather than a historian's, and it has outlived every measured thing written about the same evening — which is its own comment on what the court theatre was for.