About the work
Die schlimmen Buben in der Schule (roughly, The Naughty Boys at School) is a one-act burlesque with songs by Johann Nestroy, adapted from the French vaudeville Le Maître d'école by Lockroy and Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois (1841). Nestroy wrote the short piece for the opening of Vienna's newly rebuilt Carltheater, where it premiered on 10 December 1847 as part of an opening-night bill of several one-act plays, with music by Michael Hebenstreit.
Plot
At a boarding school, the assistant teacher Franz secretly hands out answer slips before an exam, but the boys mix them up among themselves. When the hard-of-hearing baron arrives to examine them, none of the memorised answers match the questions asked, yet he notices nothing and rewards every pupil regardless. Franz ends up winning both a teaching post and the headmaster's daughter.
Cultural significance
With roughly a hundred performances already in its premiere year, the piece became one of Nestroy's most successful one-act plays and remains a repertory favourite today. Modern readings have taken the deaf baron's obliviousness to the chaos in his own school as a jab at clueless authority.