Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [206]
More a poem than a play, Wilde’s Salome was an exercise in purple, an orgy in words, which succeeded on paper but embarrassed on the stage. It offered the spectacle of Salome pouring out her hot erotic pleas to the eyes, the hair, the limbs, the body and the love of Iokanaan, of King Herod avid for his stepdaughter, of her voluptuous dance to excite his lust and win her ghastly desire, of the black Executioner’s huge arm rising from the pit holding the bearded bloody head of the Prophet who had scorned her, of her necrophilic raptures addressed to the head on the platter and her final conquest of its dead lips, of Herod’s climactic order of horror and remorse, “Kill that woman!” and of her death crushed beneath the shields of his soldiers. Performed in flesh and blood it delighted the Berlin audience. Wilde’s moonlit fantasia, in Germany, came into its own and enjoyed a phenomenal run of two hundred performances.
The undercurrent of morbidity in Germany, which Rolland had already noticed, grew more apparent in the first decade of the new century. It increased in proportion as Germany’s wealth and strength and arrogance increased, as if the pressure of so much industrial success and military power were creating an inner reaction in the form of a need to negate, to expose the worms and passions writhing within that masterful, prosperous, well-behaved, orderly people. It was as if Bismarck had perforce produced Krafft-Ebing. Indeed Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis which appeared in 1886 provided a well of lurid resource on which the German drama, then the most vigorous form of national literature, could draw.
The theatre ranked with music and opera as a German pleasure and, beginning in the nineties, broke out in a surge of problem plays stemming from Ibsen and in new styles of acting and experiments in stagecraft. Proclaiming the doctrine of Realism and Naturalism, the Freie Bühne (Independent Theatre) of Berlin, copied after the Théâtre Libre of Paris, opened in 1889 with Ibsen’s Ghosts followed by Hauptmann’s first play, Before Dawn. Theatres sprouted and multiplied. Society’s masks were torn off and the “beast in man,” Zola’s objective, was enthusiastically exposed. Besides Ibsen, Strindberg’s cruel Miss Julie, Tolstoy’s Powers of Darkness, Zola’s Therèse Raquin, the symbolist and neo-romantic dramas of Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio and von Hofmannsthal, the social plays of Ibsen’s disciple Shaw, the worldly satires of Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna and a proliferation of German tragedies were performed. Student stage societies revived Oedipus Rex and Euripides, the Modern Touring Company took the new drama to the provinces, and a people’s theatre, the Freie Volksbühne, followed by the Neue Freie Volksbühne, allied it to Socialism. In Munich, the Intimes Theater was founded in 1895 by Ernst von Wolzogen, librettist of Strauss’s opera Feuersnot. To achieve the same intimate atmosphere for experimental plays, Reinhardt founded the Kleines Theater in 1902, where, besides Salome, he produced Maxim Gorky’s awful look at society’s dregs, The Lower Depths.
Tragedy was the staple of the German theatre. Social comedies with happy endings were not a German genre. German fun was confined to buffoonery, either painful or coarse. Their tragedies were not so much curative, like Ibsen’s, nor compassionate, like Chekhov’s, but obsessively focused on mankind’s cruelty to man, on his bent toward self-destruction and on death. Death by murder, suicide or some more esoteric form resolved nearly all German drama of the nineties and early 1900’s. In Hauptmann’s Hannele the child heroine dies of neglect and abuse in