A large portion of Europe was ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty
throughout the eighteenth century. The significant landmass that now comprises
Germany, Austria and much of Eastern Europe, as well as Spain, was all under
the relatively loose control of one emperor. Locally, kings and dukes ruled
their own regions, and also came together when necessary to elect a new
emperor. In attempts to improve their
areas culturally many of the local rulers looked to France and Italy as models.
During the eighteenth century, the opera, musically pleasing and
scenically splendid, was performed in every kingdom in Europe. Theatres were
built to compete with other kingdoms across the continent. Rival kingdoms had
large amounts of money and could call on and pay the best talent, which was
usually Italian (see the
play or film Amadeus
to confirm). So Italian composers, writers, scenic artists and theatre
architects inundated the courts of Europe. To give just a few examples of
this spread of theatre, in Copenhagen a royal theatre opened in 1725, the
Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow was created in 1776 and by the late eighteenth
century Russia had four state run theatres, in 1782 the Drottningholm Theatre
in Stockholm was built, and the next year in Prague the Nostitz or Estates
Theatre, where Mozart premiered Don
Giovanni, was built.
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| The Hermitage, as any schoolboy knows, is located in the Winter Palace, St Petersburg Russia |
Brief sidebar: Dr Jack
saw a production of Don Giovanni at the Estates on Christmas Day 2011. It was well staged and sung, but the real thrill
was to be in a beautiful theatre, and the one where the work was first staged!
All over Europe scenic spectacle increased, as did the size of
theatre auditoriums. All over Europe the middle class began to attend the
theatre, seeing sentimental comedies and domestic tragedies, which held up a
reasonable and moral mirror to their society. I’m not going to spend time on
the particulars of the spectacle, as you’ve read it before, particularly in the
lecture on eighteenth century Italy, but remember that such staging applies throughout the continent.
The most vital emerging theatrical power was centered in an area
of loosely confederated kingdoms and duchies that would one day become Germany
and Austria. Several forces converged to create a unified German-language
drama by century’s end. Since the mid-1500s the Jesuits had been active
in a counter-reformation, which attempted to fend off Protestantism and to
prove the
Catholic Church as the one true Church of Christianity. One of the Jesuits’ primary tools was drama. But although
Jesuit drama started off in Latin and was limited to Jesuit schools, by the
early eighteenth century the Jesuits began to use the German language for their
plays, and also increased the spectacular elements of the dramas to entice
larger public audiences. Thus Jesuit drama
became a force for religion, the German language and for theatre.
In addition, English acting
troupes had begun to visit the Germanic states as early as the 1580s.
Of course there was a language barrier, so the British players emphasized pantomime,
music and dance in their shows. The most successful English performers
were the clowns, whose physical slapstick style was
universal. After
this, German language public entertainments sprang up that featured a
hodge-podge of variety acts using clowns as central figures. By the early
eighteenth century, one of the clown-types, “Hanswurst,” had become
dominant. Hanswurst (a direct
translation yields something like Johnny Sausage) combined English clowns, commedia dell’arte
characters, and the
medieval fool to create a highly popular character. The foremost
Hanswurst performer was an actor named Josef
Stranitsky, who became immensely popular. Stranitsky toured through
the Austro-Germanic lands and these tours had a strong hand in developing a
Germanic public theatre. Stranitsky’s base was Vienna, which became Central
Europe’s artistic and cultural capital.
However, some began to object to a clown-centered public theatre,
and theatrical reformers attempted to improve and elevate this “low” form of
entertainment. At the head of the intellectual movement in the Germanic
states in the early eighteenth century was a man named Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766). He and his supporters
wanted to unify the country, and to educate it. To unify the country, Gottsched
argued, unify the language.
In 1727 Gottsched joined forces with a professional acting company
that was sympathetic to his arguments. Carolina
Neuber and her husband Johann ran this company.
Together the Neubers and Gottsched worked for theatrical reform. There were
however a few fundamental problems with this alliance. First, in order to
rid the German stage of the Hanswurst mentality, Gottsched turned to French Neoclassical
models, including the long poetic lines of rhyming couplets that Racine and
Molière had used. This resulted in a rather stilted style. Gottsched
wrote several plays following the French model, the most famous being The Dying Cato, which was, shall we say,
NOT audience friendly. A rift soon formed between Gottsched and Carolina
Neuber, and the theatrical alliance was broken in 1739.
Some good came of the alliance, especially from Neuber’s
disciplined approach to theatre. She fought to reform her company in
these ways, by:
1. insisting on careful rehearsals
2. banning improvisation from performances
3. setting extra duties for each actor, making for a
stronger sense of
“company”
4. making sure her players’ private lives were spotless
From Neuber’s well-organized troupe, actors such as Johann Friedrich Schönemann (1704-1782)
formed their own troupes,
and gradually built a base of disciplined and
talented acting companies throughout the Germanic states. One of the most
important companies was situated in Hamburg, where a “national,” subsidized theatre
was created in 1767. Although it quickly fell on hard times and closed a
mere two years after it had opened, it served as a model for subsidized
theatres throughout Germany, and several of these sprang up in the 1770s and
80s. Heavy subsidy for German theatre continues today.
One of the most important figures at the Hamburg National Theatre was Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), who wrote
plays and also read other new plays,
helped choose plays to be presented at the theatre, and even served as in-house
critic of the company’s work. This position was called “dramaturg.” The position soon became an
essential feature of Germanic theatres, and it remains so today.
Lessing wrote a vital work of criticism, called Hamburg
Dramaturgy, which among other things discredited Gottsched’s emphasis
on the French version of Neoclassicism. In it, Lessing stated, “No nation
has more misapprehended the rules of ancient drama than the French.”
Instead of the French model, Lessing used English sentimental drama and the
French le drame – from these sources
he popularized a new “German” drama.
Lessing also wrote plays that are still part of the repertoire of
many German theatres. The plays were written in the sentimental
style. Minna von Barnhelm (1767)
is a sentimental comedy, dealing with lovers on opposite sides of the Seven
Years’ War. Of course Minna and her beau are united at the end. By uniting the
lovers, Lessing also pushed subtly for German unification. Lessing’s
domestic tragedy, Miss Sara Sampson,
sets the Medea story in contemporary England.
Lessing’s last important work, Nathan
the Wise (1779), was written in blank verse, not Gottsched’s rhyming
couplets. Future German writers, including Goethe and Schiller, would
also use blank verse in their playwriting.
Goethe and Schiller, along with several other writers, continued
to shake the neoclassic ideal in Germany. These writers formed a
movement
called sturm und drang (“storm and stress”), a revolt against eighteenth
century rationalism. The movement was named after the title of one of its
plays, Sturm and Drang (1776) written
by FM Klinger. The tone of the play was tremendously emotional, which was
typical of other plays of the movement. Some of the plays, in addition to
a focus on emotion over reason, also represented a stylistic revolt.
Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen
(1773), for example, had 54 scenes, all sorts of sub- and parallel plots, and
moved between many settings. One of the most important pieces from this
revolutionary movement was Schiller’s play The
Robbers (1782), which echoed Rousseau’s philosophy and advocated liberal,
democratic ideas.
Sturm und drang was
revolutionary, but it was not successful in the realm of practical theatre. Few
of the plays were produced, and even those weren’t very popular. Goethe and
Schiller moved away from this style in their later writings, and moved towards
a new form known as Weimar Classicism.
Weimar was a duchy, which thanks to its young duke became a sort
of artists’ colony and fashionable retreat in the very late eighteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, just back
from
an enlightening trip to Italy, was appointed head of the court theatre at
Weimar in 1796. At this theatre, Goethe began to present plays that he created
out of dismay with the insignificance of domestic dramas and with the overly
emotional sturm und drang
writings. Goethe argued that drama should not create the illusion of
reality, but that it should transform and transcend reality in search of ideal
truth. One of his finest early efforts in this mode was his Iphigenia in Tauris (1787), but his
sterling achievement was Faust.
This play was huge, a sprawling, episodic piece, more romantic than classic!
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| I tried to get in to this when I was there - completely sold out! |
At Weimar, Goethe also produced several plays by his old friend Friedrich Schiller. After abandoning sturm und drang, Schiller
had also
looked back to history and to the classical era for his inspiration, and many
of his best mature plays were based on historical subjects: Don Carlos (1787) is based on a
true story set in the Spanish Inquisition; Wallenstein’s
Camp (1798) was about the Thirty Years’ War; Maria Stuart (1800) is a great take on Mary Queen of Scots and
Elizabeth; The Maid of Orleans (1801)
dramatizes the Saint Joan story; and William
Tell, which we know best from Rossini’s overture to his opera version, is
about Swiss independence.
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| I DID see this - FIERCE! McTeer, right, played Mary, Walter played Eslizabeth - wow! |
Goethe wrote extensive rules for the actors in his well trained,
closely disciplined company, most of which focused on how to properly perform a
drama that seeks to transcend reality. Here are a few of the rules:
43. A beautiful contemplative pose for a young man:
the chest and the entire body erect and up, the feet in the fourth dance
position, the head somewhat inclined to one side, the eyes fixed to the ground,
with arms hanging loosely.
51. The movement of the arms should be done in
sequence. First the hand should be moved, then the elbow, and finally the
entire arm. It should never be lifted suddenly, for any movement in
disregard of the sequence would result in ugly stiffness.
73. A very coarse blunder to be avoided: if the seated
actor, raising himself slightly, pulls his chair forward after he has seized it
by passing his hands between the thighs. This is an offense not only against
the ideal of beauty, but still more against propriety.
74. The actor should not produce a handkerchief on the
stage, nor blow his nose or spit...
88. Whoever makes his entrance for a soliloquy from an
upstage wing does well to move diagonally so that he reaches the opposite side
of the proscenium. Diagonal movements are in general very pleasing.
Only one-third of the money needed to run the Weimar Theatre was
provided by the duke. So Goethe was driven in part by box office, and he
began to have trouble filling the 500 seats in the
theatre auditorium. He
eventually lost control of the theatre to Caroline
Jagemann, an actress and also, as luck would have it, the duke’s
mistress. Jagemann pushed for the more popular sentimental dramas usually
written by Friedrich von Kotzebue,
the most prolific and popular playwright in Europe at the turn of the century. He was
frequently translated into French
and English. Kotzebue wrote 200 plays,
in many styles, but one of his most popular plays was called Misanthropy and Repentance; or, The
Stranger. This piece combined sensational subjects, striking
spectacular effects, and humanitarian sentiments into a new form that would
come to be known as melodrama. In one of his plays, called Poverty and Nobleness of Mind (how's that for a title?) Plum has
abandoned his child Louisa because her birth caused the death of Plum’s beloved
wife. Here’s a bit of the last scene. Plum returns to
his wife’s room, reminisces about her, and comes upon a young girl:
Plum: Girl, what are you doing?
The girl: She was my mother.
Plum: Louisa?
Louisa: Your daughter.
(Plum’s knees
fail and he sinks back on a chair)
Plum: Are you really my daughter?
Louisa: Does not your heart say yes?
Plum: Yes, you are!
Louisa: Do you forgive me?
Plum: Do you forgive ME? Beloved child, help me up...my
knees tremble -- lead me under the picture of your mother, that there I may
bless you!
(and the curtain
slowly falls... )
The ideal of Goethe’s classicism paled next to the popular appeal
of Kotzebue’s melodrama. Jagemann was able to convince the duke to produce a
dog drama, which sent Goethe running & screaming from the theatre. Dog
drama? Oh, yes! You’ll find out more about dog and other kinds of
melodrama when we look at Romantic theatre...next!
Lovely work!
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