Josephine Lang And Christian Reinhold Köstlin

Abstract In the spring of 1840, Josephine Lang fell ill with pleurisy. The Bavarian Queen Mother, Caroline, who had for a number of years taken a warm interest in Lang, sent the young composer to the health resort of Kreuth, known today as Wildbad Kreuth, for a whey cure. Lang arrived there on 13 June 1840. On the evening of 30 June, another invalid arrived in Kreuth: the law scholar and writer Christian Reinhold Köstlin. Born in 1813 in Stuttgart, he was the second son of the Protestant prelate Nathanael Köstlin. He had a strong predilection for the arts. He was apparently a good pianist; his son wrote that he played all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from memory. He was passionately interested in theater and was a prolific writer of poems and novellas. At the wish of his father he had studied law, at the universities of Tübingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin. After earning his doctorate, he had practiced law in Stuttgart and, in 1839, acceded to a position in the law faculty at the University of Tübingen. While being extremely productive in his “official” career, he was also attempting to make a name for himself as a novelist, dramatist, and poet.3 Owing in part to the demands of maintaining two careers, Köstlin had fallen critically ill in the spring of 1840. Kreuth gossip had it that “shattering events”5 had also contributed to his illness; these supposedly involved an unhappy love affair with the prominent singer Agnese Schebest, who either had not returned or had betrayed his love.6 Köstlin had indeed been in love with Schebest for more than three years. His diary-like poetry manuscripts document many upheavals in this relationship, but they do not refer to any crisis in the first half of 1840.