124. Secession Stage in Berlin

Performance of the Secession Stage, Berlin

Wilhelm von Scholz dedicated himself to a muse similar to Maeterlinck's. There was beauty in the images that mysteriously allowed the first performance of the Secession Stage to pass us by. A poet had his say, who wants to say a lot of meaningful things, but whose wealth of feeling is not yet sufficient for his intentions. But it is uplifting to hear so much and such earnest desire. There should be no dispute that the attempt to bring this saga to the stage was justified. Martin Zickel and Paul Martin, who founded and direct the Secession Stage, deserve thanks for this attempt. In the prologue to his "Besiegten", Wilhelm von Scholz beautifully expresses what has become a dramatic problem:

"For all days serve the evening,
The sinking evening,
The rising evening,
Which with deep shadowing wing beat
Takes away what grieves the earth,
That builds the starry frames
And calls the springs to murmur,
To whom the day ascends
'Like a shining temple staircase,
That leads to the murmuring marble dawn,
Leading over in a white train
The priest to touch the harp..."

The poet seeks to dramatize transience, which is deeply related to the eternal source of all being. Becoming, which hovers in fluctuating appearance, has become a problem for him. The main character of his dramatic tale is both a knight and a monk. He reaches deep into life, for he unleashes life's deepest power, love, wherever he goes. But with the blossoming of life, he also brings death. The plot is simple. The "Knight of the Star", who is "both a monk and a singer - and pale as death", lures "all women to their doom". "He loves them, and they become quiet and rich until they die from his gaze". "He kills them sometimes in a night, in an hour that they laugh sweetly through." This is also what happens in the process on which the little drama is based. If this is not fully comprehensible from the stage, it is not because of the thoroughly genuine, true basic idea. It is one of the elements of our spiritual life that appear countless times in every human being who is capable of introspection and who knows how to observe nature in its eternal urge for value; how it repeatedly spreads death over life and conjures life out of death, how it transforms the present into memory and allows greatness to endure in the monument alone. If the poet, in addition to his ability to perceive the simply great, also had the other ability to depict it in equally simple greatness, then there could be no complaint about the incomprehensibility of his creation. If this were the case, then we would have before us in vivid figures what resonates in us as an uplifting mood when the knight-turned-monk stands by the corpse of those he has killed and extinguishes the candles that symbolically represent the circle of becoming: forgotten childhood happiness, young love, mature love, the joyful fulfillment of duty, truth, beauty, faith. But then the poet would not have needed to have his dramatic poem introduced by the personified legend with the words:

"Do not seek the word that can solve everything,
What this hour of heavy twilight dream
Will bring you. A shy spell
Stir, when a day sprays in fragrance and foam
Often wafting your soul,
Until you are alone, you in empty space! No word tells you what you feel -
It becomes clouds until it fades away cloudy."

This is the true poet's power over the word, that he knows how to shape it, so that it does not turn into clouds and fade away cloudy and shapeless, but presents to us as a form, full of content and definite, what we feel. We can learn from the poet who promises that in his work "death and life ... ... join hands", that he does not point us up to the clouds and lull our imagination with their ever-changing indeterminacies; we want to see the greatest in full wakefulness, not in a dream. It remains an incontrovertible truth that it is the poet's task to fix in permanent forms what hovers in fluctuating appearances. And we cannot forgive the dramatist if he wants to treat us like Hamlet treats Polonius. Purely atmospheric drama must contain the kind of greatness that wafts over us from Maeterlinck's creations if we are to overlook the lack of design. For Maeterlinck, who sees so much in the everyday events that pass us by, the blurred, ambiguous atmospheric tones are much better suited than the definite, closed unambiguousness of the view. Wilhelm von Scholz, however, does not have the quiet weaving of eternal elemental forces in the smallest things in mind; rather, he is faced with an eternal mystery of the world in its abstract linearity; and for this he searches for expression, for embodiment. But he cannot find it. Maeterlinck seeks the eternal in the small processes in which it undoubtedly lives, because it is all-pervading, but where it has no formative effect. Scholz simply lags behind the creative imagination with his feeling.

Why the directors of the Secession stage brought us Frank Wedekind's "Kammersänger" is beyond me. The great Wagnerian tenor Girardo, who is idolized by immature girls and mature women, and the plot of the extremely lively drama with the background of a cynical view of life are excellently suited for an evening performance on one of our usual stages. Nothing stands in the way of such a performance. The theater audience would enjoy the caricatures, and the critics would praise it, as they have done so very well. You have quite rightly sensed that Wedekind can do what he wants; Scholz can't do what he wants. Well, there are other "drama poets" who can also do what they want: Blumenthal, Schönthan and so on. And we can name a few who couldn't always do what they wanted, if of course we don't want to associate Scholz with them somehow: Hebbel, Kleist and - Goethe and Schiller.