The Origin and Development of Eurythmy 1920–1922

GA 277c — 17 July 1921, Dornach

42. Eurythmy Performance

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum building, the second part in the carpentry workshop.

Part I (Goetheanum building) “Göttermahl“ by C. F. Meyer with music by Leopold van der Pals “L'Art et le Peuple” by Victor Hugo Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (14) by Rudolf Steiner “Beherzigung” by J. W. v. Goethe Saying from the Soul Calendar (15) by Rudolf Steiner “Clouds“ by C. F. Meyer Saying from the Soul Calendar (16) by Rudolf Steiner “Buttercup Yellow Meadows” by Christian Morgenstern Saying from the Soul Calendar (17) by Rudolf Steiner “Vöglein“ (Little bird) by Friedrich Hebbel “Waldkonzerte” (Forest concerts) by Christian Morgenstern with music by Max Schuurman II. Part (Joinery) Music by Leopold van der Pals “The Fisherman” by J. W. v. Goethe with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Violet“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Papillons” by Jean-Philippe Rameau
“Elfe” by Joseph von Eichendorf
“Valet“ by]. J. W. v. Goethe
“The Reviewer” by J. W. v. Goethe
“To the Originals“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Séance” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear attendees!

Allow me to try to say a few words to introduce this performance, as I usually do before these performances. This is not done for the purpose of explaining the performance itself. Artistic work must speak for itself, through direct observation, and any explanation would, of course, be inartistic. However, since we are dealing here with an artistic activity that draws on artistic sources that are still unfamiliar today and also makes use of an unfamiliar artistic formal language, a few introductory words about these sources and this formal language may be said.

Our eurythmy is not something that could be categorized as pantomime, mime, dance or the like. Rather, it is about bringing something up into a certain artistic sphere that wants to have an effect as a visible language. You see here, esteemed attendees, on the stage the moving human being, namely the human being who is moved in his arms and in his hands, which are the most expressive limbs when you consider the human being as a whole. You will see movements of the human being in space, movements of groups of people.

All this should not be pantomime, not mimicry, nothing that could somehow occur to one as a gesture that is added because one believes that it could have a reference to something that accompanies the presentation in poetry or music, but it is a real, visible language. That which is otherwise revealed in human speech or song through tone or through sound is revealed in eurythmy through the movement of the human being or groups of human beings.

Therefore, what appears as eurythmy cannot be derived from some arbitrary act or from a momentary interpretation of the poetic or the musical. Rather, it is based on a real study of which movement tendencies – I do not say movements, but movement tendencies – the larynx and the other speech organs set when phonetic language or singing

These movement tendencies are, as it were, held back in their formation, in their status nascens, and pass over into those undulations of the air that then convey the tone or the sound. But what is held back in the moment of origin, what thus underlies speech and song out of human nature, can be studied and transferred to the whole human being according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphosis. This Goethean metamorphosis, which Goethe himself only applied to morphology, to the study of living beings, also allows for artistic expression.

In the individual plant leaf, Goethe sees an entire plant, only simpler and more primitive in form. In the whole plant, he sees an individual leaf, a more complicated individual leaf. He then applied the same principle to understanding the forms of other living beings, of man. One day, when certain prejudices of the present so-called scientific method have been overcome, the full scientific fruitfulness of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis will be recognized.

But this theory of metamorphosis, because it leads directly to the visual, allows for artistic expression. And so what can be observed through sensual and supersensual observation of movement tendencies in the human speech and song organs can be applied to the whole human being. And in a sense, you will see in the individual human being, in groups of people here on the stage, moving speech organizations themselves, which visibly, according to exactly the same laws by which metamorphosis gives rise to phonetic language and song, which reveal the human essence according to these laws – and even reveal them in such a way that one is closer to the laws of sound, of tone, insofar as these are lawful, in this visible language than in the case of the spoken word. Not only that the spoken word, especially in the case of the present speaking, leads to the conventional or to that which merely wants to be a communication of the thought - the thought itself can never be artistic, the thought kills the artistic - but language is always formed in a certain way according to logic.

If the poet wants to go back to the artistic, to some extent wants to seek the artistic in the shaping of language, then he must, as far as possible, disregard what makes language logical, what makes it an expression of thought, as much as possible in the already advanced, developed language, and go back to what can be shaped in the tone itself, to the musical in the form of sound. Schiller always had an indefinite melody in mind before he spoke the words of one of his poems, especially the smaller poems that he conceived in his soul. Goethe rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors with a baton because he wanted to go back to the pictorial – Schiller to the musical, Goethe to the plastic-pictorial. The poet must place into the sound-formation that which basically lies behind the language, that which the language more or less conceals, and this must be done in an, I would say, invisible eurythmy.

But it comes to expression in particular when the musical itself is to reveal itself in song. It is just as possible to sing in this visible language of eurythmy as it is to express a poem in this visible language in terms of its actual artistic content. Anyone who really enjoys the artistic process will therefore welcome with joy every expansion of art through a new formal language, through new artistic sources. And something like eurythmy, which seeks to expand the artistic in a particular area, will not meet with any real resistance from him.

But by using the human being himself as a tool in this eurythmy, one also goes back to a more artistic level than one can achieve in spoken language. After all, thought lies in spoken language. But thought is actually always inartistic. The pictorial is more artistic. Such a pictorial quality is in the broadest sense, as it can naturally be, I would say, the audible – and in the musical, that which lies not in the thought but in the human song, in the human tone, that arises from the whole, from the full human being, arises from this will element.

In language, the thought element and the will element always flow together. The thought element almost completely recedes in the visible language of eurythmy; and the will element, that is, what comes forth from the whole, full human being, comes into its own. Therefore, one can feel in the eurythmic presentation of a poem, for example, what lies at the heart of the poetry as the actual artistic element.

This must also be taken into account when, as is the case here, many poems are accompanied in eurythmy not only by music, which also happens, but also by recitation and declamation, which is then only a different expression, a different revelation of what is being declaimed, recited. But we must realize that we must go back from the present declamation and recitation, which belong to an unartistic age, to real artistic recitation and declamation. Here we are not dealing with what is particularly valued today – with the emphasis of the prosaic, the literal – but with the development of the rhythmic, the metrical, and even the melodious, textual, thematic element that underlies it as the truly artistic. In poetry, the literal can never be the essential, but only that which serves as a kind of ladder – the rhythmic, the musical, the metrical, the melodious, the thematic – to be strung together in the words, which are actually used only to form sounds and tones. This formal artistic element must be worked out in the recitation and declamation that accompany the eurythmy. Recently, attempts have been made to develop this recitation and declamation here in a way that recalls more artistic epochs than the present one. But what needs to be trained here today is often not only dismissed, but also insulted. Of course, we cannot be slowed down in the development of what must come again: a truly artistic recitation and declamation.

In declamation and recitation, all that is artistic must arise through formally artistic means, not through the kind of emphasis that people love today and that actually arose only from the inability to find real art in poetry. It is no wonder that a single chapter, I might say, of what must be cultivated here at the Goetheanum and what is cultivated with a purely artistic sense — at least in intention — is distorted and criticized in the world when one sees how otherwise everything that emanates from the Goetheanum in Dornach is worked against with untruth and dishonesty. . Only recently we had an example of this in the form of a report that a so-called sensational brochure about the Goetheanum was being prepared by a quarter from which dozens of lies have been issued in the past. We shall just have to listen expectantly to see whether those people, who have been amply proved that only lies come from that quarter, will now pounce on the new one with wild greed, which of course is also unknown to me. But the side that has only ever lied about the Goetheanum is very well known to me. As I said, when something like this happens on a large scale, it is no wonder that all sorts of things are said out of a lack of understanding or – as has happened recently – out of truly party-political, dishonest opposition to such specific aspects as the search for a real art of declamation and recitation.

That, for the moment, ladies and gentlemen, about the artistic aspect of eurythmy, which, however, has two other sides. I can only mention one of them briefly: that is the therapeutic and hygienic side of eurythmy. The movements that one encounters in eurythmy are drawn from the innermost laws of the human organism, just as language and song come from the laws of the speech organs. And it must be said that anyone who is familiar with the form of the speech organs can see in this form what can be communicated to people through singing and what can be communicated through artistically treated language in poetry. But in the same way, the human organism as a whole contains the potential for certain movements that can be derived from it. If these are faithfully derived from the human organism, they can also be transformed into movements that, because they are derived from human nature, have a therapeutic effect. These are different movements, transformed, metamorphosed movements, which appear on the therapeutic-hygienic side, in contrast to the artistic movements of eurythmy, which can be seen here. But basically they are based on the same source.

The third element in this eurythmy is the pedagogical-didactic element, which we have been applying for two years now at the Freie Waldorfschule founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run and where eurythmy is taught to the youngest and oldest schoolchildren as a compulsory subject alongside ordinary gymnastics - as a form of gymnastics that is inspired and spiritualized.

I have to keep saying: people will one day think more objectively about gymnastics than they do today; but it is not said by me, but I have to keep saying what one of the most famous physiologists of the present day said to me, who once heard what I said about it and who therefore told me afterwards: ordinary gymnastics should not be seen as something that, from a physiological point of view, point of view, but as a form of torture. Now, as I said, he was one of the most famous physiologists – I don't want to repeat what he said about gymnastics. It is reduced to a basis of what can be researched in a physiological way.

But what is illuminated, inspired and spiritualized in the child through eurythmy is felt by the child. And this is clearly evident in the Waldorf school as something that really comes from the most elementary core of human nature. The child feels truly at home in its element, because it not only experiences physical movement, but because the child's body, soul and spirit are truly emphasized as a unity. And it is no small thing that something is developed in the child that is now missing and will be increasingly missing in every following generation, something that can never be achieved in ordinary gymnastics: soul initiative, initiative of the will. This can only be judged by someone who sees how the child grows in its soul-bodily development from week to week, from month to month, from year to year. It is the case that the child actually develops its will initiative to a particular degree through this eurythmic gymnastics, whereby it is certainly not a one-sided soul or spiritual training that is meant. Rather, precisely because the whole, full human being is appealed to, the human being is furthered in his development through eurythmy as inspired gymnastics in body, soul and spirit.

Here in our presentation, you are now confronted with the artistic. But one may say that when Goethe, with his view of art, took the position: When nature begins to reveal its apparent secrets, as he says, he feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. In particular, if one does not use an external instrument, but uses a human being as an instrument – and all the secrets of the world are contained in the human being, the human being is a microcosm, that is not a phrase, it is a fact - and so we can say in response to this saying of Goethe: When man, as a higher nature, begins to reveal his inner secrets of growth and of creation, he feels a deep longing to create that which can arise out of himself!

And when Goethe says elsewhere: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he takes harmony, measure and meaning together, produces a summit within himself and rises to the production of a work of art, then one may also say: When man searches within himself, in his overall organization, for order, harmony, measure and meaning, in order to elevate them to a higher level, then himself, as the most worthy tool, something artistic will certainly arise.

What I always want to say at the end of each introduction to our performances – and so also today, dear audience – remains: We ask the esteemed audience to be lenient because what is already eurythmic art today is just only a beginning. We are our own harshest critics. But we also know that, given time, the germ of an idea will develop into something that can stand on its own as a fully-fledged art alongside its older sister art, eurythmy. It is more likely that others will do this than that we will.