About the work
A local farce with songs in three acts by Johann Nestroy, premiered on 24 September 1835 at the Theater an der Wien; the split-level set showed two stacked apartments simultaneously.
Plot
On the ground floor lives the impoverished Schlucker family, upstairs the wealthy speculator Goldfuchs; their children Adolph and Emilie are secretly in love. A lottery win for the Schluckers and Goldfuchs’s financial ruin reverse their fortunes, until it emerges that Adolph is the heir of a wealthy, long-absent father — the class barrier dissolves, and the couple marries.
Cultural significance
The two-storey split stage caused a sensation and contributed substantially to the play’s extraordinary success of 134 performances; it remains one of Nestroy’s most pointed treatments of the divide between rich and poor.