Introductions for Traditional Christmas Plays

GA 274 — 7 January 1917, Dornach

Introduction

on the occasion of the performance of the Christmas plays: the Paradise Play and the Shepherds' Play, to which guests were invited.

First of all, I would like to take the liberty of welcoming our esteemed guests here today and express our satisfaction at having you here with us. I would then like to say a few words about what we actually intend with the performances that we will now attempt in a modest way. I would ask you to consider the performances as a modest attempt. We cannot, of course, offer anything complete or perfect in any respect.

These are so-called Christmas plays, but Christmas plays that differ in some respects from the others that are performed more and more every year. I would like to briefly mention how I myself came to draw our friends' attention to these Christmas plays to be presented here. When I came to the university in Vienna in 1879, I met Professor Schröer, whose lectures I first attended and who then became a very good friend of mine. He is not well known outside professional circles, but I believe he has made and will continue to make outstanding contributions, particularly to the study of German dialects in Austria and, later, to research into Goethe. In the 1850s, he devoted himself not only to the study of German dialects as they existed among the individual German ethnic groups in the Austrian monarchy, but also to the study of folk customs and the various, I would say, folk cultural treasures. He was a professor at the German Lyceum in Bratislava, which is located on the line between Vienna and Budapest, and then a professor in Budapest; later at the Evangelical School in Vienna and a professor at the Technical University in Vienna. That's where I met him.

Now, in the 1950s, after Weinhold had begun collecting various Christmas plays, especially from Silesia, Schröer discovered that in the vicinity of Bratislava, in the so-called Oberufer region, in a corner that is a German enclave, old Christmas plays are still alive. These Christmas plays were performed by the farmers directly during the so-called Holy Season in every winter. We know that such Christmas plays can be traced historically; but they probably go back much further, to the 10th or 11th century. They took, as we know, their starting point from the church; they were initially based on the nativity plays, on the passion plays that were performed in the churches. But then they were separated from the churches and came into the people. Since then, many such Christmas plays have been collected, later by Hartmann and other Germanists, and now, since the suggestion was made, they are being performed in the most diverse places: Palatinate, Upper Bavarian Christmas plays and so on. All these Christmas plays that you can see elsewhere differ in some way from those that Karl Julius Schröer was able to collect in the Pressburg area from the so-called Haidbauern, as these farmers were called in the Oberufer area. He developed a keen sense for these things precisely because he had devoted himself to researching the customs and institutions of these scattered German tribes in the Oberufer region, including the so-called Heanzen, a German enclave, the Zipser Germans, the Transylvanians, the Gottschee Germans, everywhere among the individual tribes that were taken out of the context of German-speaking areas and colonized in these areas, where you can find strange things. So that one can say: the Christmas plays that live in the other areas, in the closed German-speaking areas, have developed further, while here we have preserved something in these plays that dates from the 16th century, at the latest from the first beginnings of the 17th century, and has been preserved as such. The people migrated east, took the things with them, and preserved them as they originally had in their former German homeland. The things that had always been kept in such a way that they survived from year to year in certain families went through the centuries with the generations. Every year, those who were chosen by an older, experienced man to do so, and whom he found suitable among the farm boys and farm girls, had to copy them. At the time when the grape harvest was over, the people were chosen who he thought worthy of performing the things; they were then copied, and because they each had to copy them individually, the older manuscripts in particular were lost. The manuscript on which the one pastoral play that we will see today is based may perhaps date from the beginning of the 18th century; this can be determined from the fact that it contained smudged ink because it survived a flood in 1809 that threatened the area, so that, according to the copy, we have a fairly old form before us.

But these things live on in the consciousness of the people in a very wonderful way. Since some of the manuscripts were corrupted, things were occasionally left out; this could be seen from the things that did not match in the beginnings and endings. And Schröer then questioned an old farmer, who had been the keeper of the lore for some time, and said: “You, remember, there must be something missing!” And then the man really did recall whole verses from his memory, which could be inserted. So the things lived on well in the people: from the 16th, beginning of the 17th century among these present-day farmers of the Oberufer region. Today, for the most part, everything has materialized; the things are actually extinct. It is possible that it can still be found in isolated areas in weak latecomers.

Now it is particularly interesting that the farmers who performed it were just farmers and not artists. We are trying to set up the performance in such a way that it gives a picture of what it was like among the farmers. I myself have often talked about it with Schröer. We were both extremely interested in it, and I was able to get a picture of how things were among the farmers in the 15th century. It is interesting, however, that a certain mood was associated with the things, which is characterized by the fact that the people who were allowed to play along not only prepared themselves by learning things by heart, rehearsing and so on, but also prepared themselves morally, so to speak. Each person received a piece of paper with the rules he had to follow. If he was considered worthy to play, he had to fulfill four conditions. The performance then began with the first Sunday of Advent, continued through Christmas and into the time of the Epiphany, and some even lasted until the carnival season. But as I said, the players were given a piece of paper on which they had written their moral conditions. Firstly, those who had to play along were not allowed, and this is very important – if you have lived among farmers, you know that these four conditions are extremely important – they were not allowed, and I quote literally, to go to a girl's house during the whole time; secondly, they were not allowed to sing rogue songs or the like; thirdly, they were not allowed to lead a life that could be challenged in any way during the whole time, so they had to live a very modest life, that is, they had to prepare themselves morally, and fourthly, they had to obey unconditionally the one who, as the oldest, was their teacher and who rehearsed these things with them.

Then these things were rehearsed, and they then had to perform them in an inn. The set-up was such that the benches for the audience were simply placed in a horseshoe shape, and the play was performed in the middle of the hall, so that those who listened and those who performed were in the same room. People regarded it as a thoroughly festive occasion and not at all as something comical. For example, when the people were parading through the village, such a company, as they were called – a company = the whole ensemble of actors playing together, that was called the company – was once greeted with secular music. They explained that they did not want that, they were not actors, and that they should not be subjected to such treatment.

Now, I would like to note that ribaldry occurs in things that one might even laugh and smile at from time to time, despite the fact that they are the highest matters of humanity in the play; this must be attributed to the overall mood from which such things arise in the peasantry. It must be clear to everyone that in the peasantry, the highest matters are not actually treated sentimentally, but that the most sacred things can be mixed with the funny and the bawdy. For the peasant mind and for the peasant soul, this does not at all desecrate the highest matters – in the areas there, I mean. The people who listened to it did not just want to listen to things with long faces and in a sentimental mood, but they wanted to have something at the same time that pushed them beyond sentimentality. If you see the Shepherds' Play, you will notice that the child is not just placed in the manger; but the shepherds were instructed by their teacher not just to worship the child, but to set up the manger like a cradle – and actually weigh something with their feet. So that a cheerful mood was actually mixed into the very serious and solemn mood.

I notice that in these plays we have something that has had a balancing, harmonizing effect on the population at the same time. The population in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when these plays were still performed, was half Protestant and half Catholic, one might say. While they were otherwise strictly separated in their religious services and religious practices, they came together in these plays. It is very strange how, when you delve deeper into what has developed from the culture of the vernacular, you find connections that point to ancient human predispositions. Just as a poet wrote a poem in the Lower Austrian German dialect that is like the Homeric Songs in Lower Austrian dialect in hexameters, we see the emergence of something that is called here: the singing of the companionship, something that, despite the differences, is reminiscent of the ancient choruses of Greek tragedy.

Of course, we cannot present details that arose in connection with the farming culture here. You will see later that the devil plays a certain role in one of the plays. The devil was not just used as a fellow player. The people moved from village to village, these were the actual Oberufer village S. Martin, Salendorf, Nikolas and so on, the people moved around and performed in the inns that were designated for these things. But the devil got dressed earlier and walked through the village with a cow horn and blew it into all the windows, calling the people together. Of course we can't imitate that here, can we. When he saw a wagon coming, he would jump up and tell the people that they had to come with him to see something beautiful. These were performances that, I would say, held the whole culture together at that time.

Now, we will perform two of these plays. In the peasant performances, there was always a third play, but we don't have an edition of that. It was a carnival play. Usually the sequence was that first the shepherd play was performed, then the Paradeis play (we will present it the other way around here), and finally, like a kind of satirical play, which in turn is reminiscent of ancient institutions, a carnival play was performed. So it was a real trilogy. We just don't have the carnival play here.

So now I ask you to listen to the things in the dialect, which is very similar to the Bavarian-Austrian dialect, but still differs in some ways. It is intended to be only a modest attempt, which is only indirectly related to our anthroposophical work, an attempt to extract the spiritual life of a particular age and to continue it historically. I would like to say: it should be a historical attempt to present a piece of culture that cannot be seen otherwise, in a modest way.

The music is by our friend Mr. van der Pals, with the exception of the chorales, which are old, and was composed especially for these Christmas plays.