Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 6: Vampires on the German Stage

Nosferatu's Kindred header image, with shadow of Nosferatu

Continuing the series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.

During the 1920s, Bram Stoker’s Dracula cemented its position as the pre-eminent vampire story. British playwright Hamilton Dean adapted the novel for the stage in 1924, and his play was reworked by the American writer John L. Balderston in 1927. In cinema, Dracula was adapted into Nosferatu, the title and character names changed in an ultimately futile attempt to evade copyright problems. These dramatic Draculas were not an entirely new phenomenon: vampire plays had enjoyed popularity a hundred years beforehand.

In the 1820s, however, the most prominent vampire character was not Count Dracula – a much later creation – but Lord Ruthven, antagonist of John Polidori’s 1819 story “The Vampyre”. Ruthven’s exploits fascinated writers, readers and theatre-goers alike, and the character was adapted, parodied and otherwise repurposed not only in Polidori’s native Britain but also in France, America, and Germany.

“The Vampyre” concerns a young man, Aubrey, who befriends the alluring stranger Lord Ruthven (based upon Polidori’s acquaintance Lord Byron, who first gave the author the idea of writing a vampire story). The two travel together, and Aubrey falls in love with a Greek girl named Ianthe who tells him the tale of a vampire. Ianthe is later killed, and Aubrey finds her body with tooth-marks in its neck. Ruthven is subsequently shot by a brigand, and makes two peculiar dying wishes: one, that Aubrey leave his body in the open to ensure that it can lay beneath the moon; and two, that Aubrey keep his death a secret.

It transpires that Ruthven is actually a vampire, and that the moonlight has resurrected him. Back in Britain, Aubrey is aghast to find that his sister’s fiancé – purportedly the Earl of Marsden – is none other than Ruthven. However, having sworn never to mention Ruthven’s death, the young man is unable to tell anyone. The story ends in tragedy, with both Aubrey and his sister dead and Lord Ruthven still at large.

This was “The Vampyre” as Polidori wrote it. When the story crossed borders between nations and media, however, it began to mutate.

Le Vampire/Der Vampyr: Nodier and Ritter

The French writer Charles Nodier adapted “The Vampyre” as a stage play, Le Vampire, in 1820 – just one year after the original story was published – and this became the default source for stage versions of the Lord Ruthven story. Heinrich Ludwig Ritter wrote a German version of the play entitled Der Vampyr oder die Todten-Braut (“The Vampire and his Dead Bride”), which was published in 1822 — a century before the premier of Nosferatu. While the German translation was not particularly faithful, with Ritter having taken the liberty of embellishing the dialogue, Nodier’s heavily-restructured version of Polidori’s original story remained in place.

Illustration from Heinrich Ludwig Ritter's 1822 play Der Vampyr oder die Todten-Braut, showing the vampire Rutven in period dress.
How vampires were visualised a century before Nosferatu: Illustration from Der Vampyr oder die Todten-Braut (1822) showing Rutven.

In the Nodier/Ritter version, Aubrey’s trip to Greece and Ruthven’s death and resurrection are still part of the plot, but they are consigned to the backstory, with the play beginning after the hero’s sister has become engaged to the vampire. Aubrey and Ruthven have become Sir Aubray and Rutwen, the unnamed sister is now Malvina and several new characters have been added. While Polidori made Aubrey the resident of an unspecified British (implicitly English) location Nodier puts him and his ancestors in Scotland.

The original story had Aubrey learn of the vampire legend while in Greece, which is plausible: Greek folklore does indeed have vampire-like beings, and Polidori, who discussed the topic in detail in his introduction to “The Vampyre”, clearly knew this. Nodier, on the other hand, seems to have seen vampires as a Scottish phenomenon, with Aubray’s ancestral home having been haunted by a vampire – presumably Rutwen. James Robinson Planché, who wrote an English adaptation of the play (The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles) was unimpressed by Nodier’s equation of vampires with Scotland, and in his autobiography Recollections and Reflections attributed it to “the usual recklessness of French dramatists”.

The Nodier/Ritter play opens with a prologue set in a cave, featuring two symbolic figures who have no basis in Polidori: one, Ituriel, is the angel of the moon; the other, Oscar, is the protective spirit of marriage. With them in the cave is the sleeping figure of Aubray’s sister Malvina; the two spirits discuss her impending marriage to the vampire, the Earl of Marsden, and Oscar announces that he has the duty to prevent the wedding. The prologue ends with a spectre rising from his tomb – representing Rutwen – and Oscar carrying the girl to safety.

After the prologue, we meet three more new characters – Aubray’s servants Brigitte, Scop and Edgar – who discuss the happy news of Malvina being found and reunited with her brother. Scop appears particularly relieved, and invokes a local legend of a girl who, a hundred years ago, married a man who turned out to be a vampire and was discovered with her throat cut, having been last seen heading with her husband to the same cave where Malvina was found. However, we learn that Sir Aubray dismisses such talk as superstitious nonsense.

When Malvina returns to the stage – she remembers her ordeal in the cave only as a nightmare – and meets with her brother, the play uses Aubray’s dialogue to recount events from Polidori’s tale: Aubray and Rutwen’s trip to Athens; Rutwen getting shot by a brigand; Aubray leaving Rutwen’s body in the moonlight at his final request, and later finding his body gone. Next, Malvina’s fiancé finally appears on stage, and Aubury is struck by the resemblance between him and his late brother. The Earl of Marsden admits all: he is indeed Rutwen, although he remains coy about how he survived his apparent death. In contrast to Polidori’s tale, Aubray at this point has no inkling that his sister is marrying a vampire. Instead, it is Malvina who feels discomfort: she realises that the ghost in her nightmare had the face of Rutwen.

While Polidori left it ambiguous as to whether Ruthven was actually the Earl of Marsden or had simply adopted this title as a disguise, the play establishes that he does indeed own a castle in Marsden and takes us there for its second act. Here we meet two more characters of Nodier’s invention: castle steward Lovette and her father Petterson. Lovette is engaged to Aubray’s servant Edgar and is delighted when both Edgar and Aubray visit the castle – but her attention is diverted by her employer Rutwen, who she is surprised to see alive and well. The vampire tries to court the girl, but oscar – the anthropomorphised spirit of marriage seen in the prologue – intervenes to protect her. Although Lovette’s wedding to Edgar goes ahead, the party is disrupted when the groom catches Rutwen accosting the bride. Edgar responds by producing a gun and shooting the vampire.

Aubray – who is unclear as to what has just happened – runs to his friend Rutwen. Here, Nodier has Aubray make a vow to his dying companion, a plot element from the Polidori tale which, originally, occurred when the vampire was shot by the brigand. In Nodier’s version. Aubray still promises to leave Rutwen’s body beneath the moon, but his other vow is less binding than Polidori had it: he promises neither to tell his sister Malvina what has happened to Rutwen nor to avenge his death – until twelve hours have elapsed.

In the final act, Oscar warns Aubray’s servant Brigitte that Malvina is in danger. Meanwhile, Rutwen again returns from the dead and his wedding to Malvina proceeds; but before it is completed, the time limit on Aubray’s oath to Rutwen conveniently expires. In place of Polidori’s downbeat ending, Nodier concludes the tale with Rutwen making a move to silence Aubray with a dagger – only for the clock to strike in the nick of time. An “exterminating angel” appears amidst thunder and lightning, while shadowy figures emerge to drag Rutwen to his place of punishment below.

Der Vampyr: Marschner and Wohlbrück

The Nodier/Ritter play evidently retained its appeal over the course of the decade, as it was adapted into two separate operas in 1828, each entitled simply Der Vampyr. The first of these, produced in March, was written by Heinrich Marschner with a libretto by Wilhelm August Wohlbrück; Jutta Romero’s 1997 English translation can be read online.

The opera makes a number of tweaks to the story and characters. Lord Ruthven has had his original name restored, while Aubrey is now Edgar Aubry; the story’s heroine, dubbed Malvina by Nodier, is now Malwina. Furthermore, this version of the narrative gives Ruthven an origin story.

The story begins in a cave haunted by ghosts and witches, where the Vampire Master announces Ruthven as his people’s latest recruit — and also that Ruthven must procure three virgins before midnight to have his existence extended. He has already obtained one victim, Janthe, whose father Sir Berkley dashes into the cave to rescue her. He is too late to save her, instead finding her bloody-necked body, but succeeds in injuring Ruthven before fleeing. (Note that Janthe is clearly derived from Ianthe, a character present in the original Polidori tale but removed from Nodier and Ritter’s stage versions).

Edgar Aubry happens upon the injured Ruthven, who – as per Polidori – pleads that Abury leave his body where the moonlight will hit it. In this version of the story, Aubry already knows that Ruthven is a vampire; but as Ruthven saved his life at an unspecified point in the past, he is honour-bound to return the favour. The story then establishes a love triangle: Aubry is in love with Malwina (they are not siblings in Marschner and Wohlbrück’s retelling) yet Malwina’s father, Laird Davenaut, desires her to marry the Earl of Marsden. Following Polidori’s narrative, Aubry meets the Earl of Marsden and recognises him as Ruthven, but by the conditions of his oath cannot expose him.

Meanwhile, the opera draws upon the Nodier/Ritter version by making secondary characters out of the servants at Ruthven’s Marsden estate, who act as something akin to Shakespearean fools when two of their number, Toms Blunt and James Gadshill, debate the three main pleasures in life. Gadshill specifies these to be wine, women and song; Blunt disagrees, arguing that the three pleasures are actually drinking, drinking and drinking. Mrs. Blunt is not amused.

Two of the servants have a daughter, Emmy Perth, who is derived from Nodier’s character Lovette. Here, the love triangle becomes a pentagon: Ruthven begins courting Emmy, even as she is due to marry a man named George (based on Nodier’s Edgar). The comedy switches abruptly back to horror as the Blunts’ banter is interrupted by gunfire: Ruthven has murdered Emmy, whose corpse is brought onstage, and George announces that he has shot her killer.

As Ruthven was shot in the moonlight, he survives to pursue the third of his three chosen victims: Malwina. The opera defers to the Nodier/Ritter ending by having Aubry expose Ruthven as a vampire at the last minute, and the villain is promptly struck by lightning.

Der Vampyr: Lindpaintner and Heigal

The next operatic Der Vampyr of 1828 was written by Peter Joseph Lindpaintner, with a libretto by Cäsar Max Heigl, and produced in September. This version finally drops the Scottish setting imposed by Nodier, but oddly replaces it with another country that has no particular association with vampires – this time, France. The characters are given new names to fit the French backdrop: Lord Ruthven is confusingly renamed Count Aubri, while the counterpart to Aubrey is Ingnerand, count of Port d’Amour; the heroine is neither his sister nor his lover but, this time, his daughter.

The story opens in the run-up to a wedding between Lorette and Lavigne (the latest reincarnations of Nodier’s doomed couple Lovette and Edgar) but the happy mood is disrupted by the news that Ingnerand’s daughter Isolde has gloretteedgarone missing. Etienne, a gardener, blames a vampire for her disappearance, before warning all young girls to watch out: a beautiful young man with pale skin and glowing eyes may well be a vampire.

In fact, Isolde is marrying her lover, Count Hippolytus (was this name borrowed from E. T. A. Hoffman, perhaps?) But the wedding is interrupted by the vampire Count Aubri, who seduces the maiden. Isolde is forced to choose which of the two men she shall marry, and she settles upon Aubri. The vampire then begins courting Lorette, who likewise chooses him over her fiancé Lavinge.

After singing a duet about their shared hatred of Aubri, Hippolytus and Lavigne arrive at the vampire’s wedding to Lorette. Hippolytus injures Aubri, but the vampire convinces Ingnerand to swear not to let Isolde know of what has happened. Despite agreeing to this vow, Ingnerand goes on to confront Aubri in the opera’s climax just as he is trying to kill Isolde. The vampire is again sent to hell, and this time around Nodier’s exterminating angel is given a name: Atramidur. This agent of punishment arrives with an entire chorus from the underworld to hand Aubri his just deserts.

Ruthven’s Legacy

Still from the 1922 film Nosferatu: the vampire perishes in the sun.
Nosferatu: the vampire perishes in the morning sun.

Lord Ruthven may have long been supplanted by Count Dracula, but his influence lingers. For one, the Marschner/Wohlbrück opera has been periodically updated. In 1992, the BBC aired a miniseries entitled The Vampyr: A Soap Opera in which Ruthven (now renamed Ripley) was resurrected in the modern era. In 2014 came a production with a reworked libretto by playwright John J. King, in which the characters were renamed as jokey homages to various post-Polidori vampire tales from Dracula through to Twilight. In this version, Ruthven became Nedward Barnabas Collins, while his supporting cast included Jonathan Parker, Della Swann and Muffy the Vampire Nay-Sayer.

Nosferatu, too, may well have been influenced on some level by Lord Ruthven’s adventures. Polidori established that his vampire could be resurrected by moonlight, a plot element that made it into the stage versions but was largely ignored by later vampire fiction. Nosferatu, meanwhile, introduced the opposite idea: that a vampire can be killed by sunlight. This notion captured the imagination and became a genre convention.

Perhaps the German vampire theatre of 1822 and the German vampire cinema of 1922 are not as far removed as might be thought.


Next: A German vampire story that may have influenced Bram Stoker…

Series Navigation<< Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 5: Lost in TranslationNosferatu’s Kindred, Part 7: Karl von Wachsmann and The Mysterious Stranger >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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