Sancta Susanna: opera in one act by Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was one of the most important German composers of the 20th century.

Alfred Einstein’s famous assessment of Hindemith as the natural musician “who produces music as a tree bears fruit” may easily and appropriately be extended to all his music making, not just composition.

In 1921 he composed the one act opera “Sancta Susanna” on a libretto based on the play “Sancta Susanna” by August Stramm.

August Stramm

August Stramm was a German poet, born in Muenster in 1874. He became a postal official after his university studies, and started contributing to the periodical “Der Sturm” in 1913.

Der Strum, October 1917

Although Stramm in 1914 was a reserve officer, he enthusiastically enlisted for active duty and was sent to the front.

Stramm died in 1915 at the Russian front, in Belarus.

Stramm’s supercharged theatrical style had led to his works being dubbed Schreidramen (Screamplays).

Though the play’s religio-erotic symbolism is the outward manifestation of its power to disturb, Hindemith’s music grippingly reinforces and intensifies that disturbance. Impressive though the first two members
of his operatic trilogy had been, Sancta Susanna is his first authentic masterpiece. Here he has powerfully assimilated all the contemporary influences, and the music speaks an Expressionist language entirely
Hindemith’s own.

The spine-tingling virtuosity of the orchestration is remarkable for the hallucinatory vividness of its scene-painting and its portrayal (betrayal, rather) of Angst and subconscious desire with a phantasmal
refinement of instrumental chiaroscuro. Yet Hindemith’s opera has firm tonal foundations, upon which fierce dissonance alternates with delusory consonance in nightmarish ways. Sancta Susanna is
built, like its cathedral cloister, in large, wellproportioned blocks. The music is almost monothematic, proceeding by variation of a principal melody (the lyric, nightingale-like flute solo heard in the deceptively beautiful nocturnal prelude). From this source derive many sinister subsidiaries, such as the clarinet theme for the appearance of the horrific spider – which in turn becomes the theme of the nuns’ denunciation of Susanna as she entraps herself in the web of her own emotions.

Paul Hindemith composed Sancta Susanna as part of a trilogy, which also included Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Das Nusch-Nuschi. These two works premiered in 1921, but Sancta Susannawas not performed because of its obscene content.

Fritz Busch, who was responsible in 1921 for the turbulent premieres of Das NuschNuschi (which infuriated the audience by using a quotation from Tristan to accompany a burlesque castration scene) and Miirder, Hoffnung der Frauen (“Murderer, hope of women”, a setting of Oskar Kokoschka’s luridly incomprehensible expressionist drama about the war of the sexes), flatly refused to conduct Sancta Susanna on the grounds of its blasphemous obscenity: Susanna is an hysterical nun who first strips naked in front of the convent high altar and then tears the loincloth from a statue of the crucified Christ. The three scores made Hindemith’s name as an enfant terrible.

Sancta Susanna finally premiered in Frankfurt in 1922 and caused immediately a scandal.

Sancta Susanna was charged with blasphemy and Frankfurt institutions like the Catholic Women’s League protested against the performances and even demanded the pieces be withdrawn.
In 1934 Hindemith banned further productions of the three works. He had distanced himself from the compositional style of his early works and was unwilling to subject the works to any further public debate on morality.

Reviewing the world premiere in 1922, philosopher Theodore Adorno wrote:

In Sancta Susanna, everything that happened musically is developed from one theme; a theme of emotional power which pertains not to one individual, nor to one mood, but quite simply to the fundamentally irrational occurrences of this opera.

Synopsis (from the Chandos booklet)

In the cloister chapel of a nunnery, old Sister Clementia discovers the young nun Susanna in abject prayer before the high altar, troubled in spirit and body by the warm, windy, nightingale-loud summer night.

They become aware of movement outside: a couple is making love under the linden-trees.

Susanna calls the peasant-girl inside and tries to make her feel guilty; she demands to see the man too, but he enters only to snatch his girl away.

Susanna curses him as Satan.

Clementia, agitated, seems to be hearing something.

She tells Susanna how, many years ago, on a night like this, she saw a girl come naked to the altar and embrace and kiss the life-size figure of the crucified Christ.

For this blasphemy she was buried alive, and the image has been veiled ever since.

The tale only fans Susanna’s repressed sexual hysteria.

She, too, imagines she hears the voice of the entombed girl and, stripping naked, she defies Clementia and rips the covering from Christ’s torso.

But she is terrified when a huge spider falls into her hair from the crucifix, and cowers beneath the altar while midnight strikes and the other nuns file into the chapel.

Nevertheless she finds a transfiguring strength from her act: she demands that they wall her up, and endures their curses as the curtain falls.

In the Gramophone review of the opera, we read:

“Musically speaking, the shock value of Sancta Susanna lies in the expectations aroused by the opening (a delicately atmospheric, romantic nocturne with almost Puccinian overtones; the quiet, chant-like dialogue that follows) and their contradiction by the feverish, obsessive music (Hindemith predicting his Cardillac manner—only four years off, after all) of the main action.”

A much larger-scale summing-up of Hindemith’s ideas had come earlier in the 1930s with the completion of the opera Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Artist) and the symphony based on it. The German painter Matthias Grunewald symbolized for Hindemith the dilemma of all artists caught up in political upheavals: Hindemith had himself been attacked by the Nazis, and in 1937 was forced to leave Germany. The three movements of the symphony Mathis der Maler each represent one of the panels of Grunewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim, and the warmth and humanity of the work show the composer coming to terms with his Classical and Romantic heritage, and with his innate respect for tradition.

Hindemith found refuge from the Nazis in America, where he taught at Yale University and took United States citizenship in 1946. A series of orchestral commissions included the Symphonic metamorphosis on themes of Carl Maria von Weber, whose wordy title conceals a work of the most deft and delightful humour, an antidote to the common view of the mature Hindemith as a composer of unbending Teutonic seriousness. In 1953 he moved to Switzerland, and there, in his last years, completed Die Harmonic der Welt (The Harmony of the World), a mystical opera about the astronomer Johan Kepler.

Emilio Vedova – Italian Artist

During my recent visit to Venice, I was lucky to discover the Italian artist – painter, Emilio Vedova, who impressed me. Emilio Vedova was known as the ‘Italian brother’ of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

This post is triggered by the Exhibition “…in continuum”, that was on show in Venice until the end of November 2011.

The biographical notes that follow and the short description of the exhibition come from the site of the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova’s Foundation.

Biographical notes

Emilio Vedova painting in his studio

Born in Venice into a family of workers and artisans, from the 1930s onwards Vedova began an intense activity as a self-taught artist, drawing figures and buildings. In 1942, the young Vedova joined the anti-Novecento movement known as “Corrente”.
An anti-Fascist, he worked for the Resistance from 1944 to 1945 and in 1946, he was one of the co-signers of the “Oltre Guernica” manifesto in Milan. In the same year in Venice he was one of the founders of the “Nuova Secessione Italiana” followed by the “Fronte Nuovo delle Arti”.
In 1948 he made his debut in the Venice Biennale, the first of many appearances in this event: in 1952 an entire room was devoted to his work, in 1960 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting and in 1997 the prestigious Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement.

In the early 1950s he created his celebrated cycles of works: “Scontro di situazioni” (Collision of Situations), “Ciclo della Protesta” (Protest Cycle), “Cicli della Natura” (Cycles of Nature). In 1954, at the second São Paolo Art Biennial he won a prize that would allow him to spend three months in Brazil, where he encountered an extreme, hard reality that would leave its mark on him. In 1961 he designed the sets and costumes for Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza ‘60” (Intolerance ’60); in 1984 he would work with the composer again on “Prometeo”.
From 1961 onwards he worked on his “Plurimi” creating an initial Venetian series followed by works made from 1963 to 1964 in Berlin including the seven pieces forming the “Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ‘64” (Absurd Berlin Diary ’64) presented at the 1964 Kassel Documenta where he also showed in 1955, 1959 and 1982. From 1965 to 1967 he worked on “Spazio/Plurimo/Luce” (Space/Plurimo/Light) for the Montreal EXPO.

He carried out intense teaching activities in various American universities followed by the Sommerakademie in Salzburg and the Academy of Venice. His artistic career was characterised by a constant desire to explore and innovate.
In the 1970s he created the “Plurimi Binari” in the “Lacerazione” (Laceration) and “Carnevali” (So-called carnivals) cycles followed by the vast cycles of “teleri” (big canvases) and his “Disks”, “Tondi”, “Oltre” (Beyond) and “…in continuum…” (…in continuum…) works. He won numerous prestigious prizes and awards. His last important solo exhibitions included the major retrospective held at Castello di Rivoli in 1998 and, after his death in 2006, the sister shows at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Berlinische Galerie (Berlin).

…In Continuum

June 1, 2011 – November 30, 2011

Emilio Vedova began his artistic research in the 1930s surrounded by the seventeenth-century Baroque atmosphere of Venice. In the following decade, he was already a major figure in the post-war art scene, and in the 1950s, together with Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, he became a leading exponent of Italian and European art informel alongside abstract expressionist painters from the United States such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. The winner of the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 1997 Venice Biennale, he endlessly fought for the freedom of the artistic experience against all forms of repression.

…in continuum, compenetrazioni/traslati ’87/’88 (…in continuum, compenetrations/transferred ’87/’88) is a cycle of 109 large canvases conceived and executed between 1987 and 1988. White on black and black on white paintings made using a unique technique, which Vedova called “blind painting”… in continuum is a sort of accumulation “with no beginning or end” that invades space in free and random layers. The potential gesture of arranging these canvases in ever-changing images in motion is meant to express the unstable precariousness of our lives and actions.

In an article on Italymag, we read:

[From the dark geometries of his experiments with cubism, Vedova's work from 1950 onward grew increasingly abstract, placing him in league with the European ''Art Informel'' movement that paralleled the work of abstract expressionists in America like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

''My [works] are not creations, but earthquakes,” Vedova once said.

”They are not paintings, but breaths”.

Vedova’s experimenting would eventually carry his work off the canvas altogether into the groundbreaking new terrain of artificial light play and installation art, for which he was featured in the Italian pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal.]

Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza – Venice 1961

Vedova worked with his friend Luigi Nono in the production of Intolleranza, at “La Fenice” in Venice, 1961.

The Italian Pavilion in the Montreal 1967 Expo

In 1967 Emilio Vedova was appointed by the Italian Government to create an installation for the Italian Pavilion of the Montreal Expo. Vedova came up with this great ideas of using small glass slides, especially created to reproduce his abstract painting, and then projected on the asymmetrical walls of the Pavilion. He then asked Nono to compose some electronic music, but Nono had no time, and suggested to ask Marino. He replied: “I could do something, but keep in mind that I am no composer”. The result is Parete (Wall) 1967, a spectacular and intense 30-minutes loop of pure and intense electronics, a magmatic cascade of harsh sounds and deep drones, and a fantastic counterpart to the harsh and expressionistic painting of Vedova.

P.S. For whatever reasons, Vedova has not been a darling of the publicity circus in Europe and the USA. Artists of lesser qualities have been publicized and known, but not Vedova. In any case, this is a matter for another discussion.

In lieblicher Blaue – In lovely blue: A poem by Friedrich Holderlin

Louise Keller, Holderlin (1842) drawing

More than a year ago, I wrote a post about Holderlin’s “Hyperion”. Today I revisit the great German poet, and present his poem “In lovely blue”. I have added some pictures to the words. In addition, there are explicary notes to the poem and the pictures. All of them are at the end of the post.

In Lovely Blue
by Friedrich Hölderlin
(Translated by Glenn Wallis)

Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, MOMA, Ney York (See Note 1)

In lovely blue blooms the steeple with its metal
roof. Around the roof swirls the swallows’ cry,
surrounded by most touching blue. The sun rises high
above and tints the roof tin. But in the wind beyond, silently,
a weathercock crows. When someone comes forth from
the stairs of the belfry, it is a still life. And though the form
is so utterly strange, it becomes the figure of a
human being. The windows out of which the bells resound are as
gates to beauty. Because gates still take after nature
they resemble forest trees. Purity, too, is beauty. From within, out
of diverse things, a grave spirit emerges. So simple,
these images, so holy, that one often fears
to describe them. But the heavenly ones, always
good, possess, even more than the wealthy, virtue and
joy. Humans may follow suit. Might a person, when
life is full of trouble, look up and say: I, too,
want to be like this? Yes. As long as friendliness and purity
dwell in our hearts, we may measure ourselves not unfavorably
with the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest
as the sky?(a) This I tend to believe. It is the measure
of the human. Deserving, yet poetically, we dwell
on this earth (b). The shadow of night with its stars,
if I may say so, is no purer than we
who exist in the image of the divine (c).

Andre Butzer, Nasaheim (See Note 2)

Is there measure on earth? There is none. (d) For
the creator’s worlds can never contain the clap of thunder.
Because it blooms under the sun, a flower, too, is beautiful.
In life, the eye often finds creatures to call more beautiful
still than flowers. Oh! I know this well!
For to bleed in body and heart and cease to be whole—
does this please God? The soul, I believe, must remain
pure, or else the eagle will wing its way to the almighty
with songs of praise and the voice of so many
birds. It is substance and it is form. Beautiful little
brook, so touching you seem as you roll so clear,
like the eye of God, through the Milky Way. I know
you well. But tears stream from my eyes. A clear
life I see in the forms of creation that blooms around me
because I do not compare them unreasonably with the lonely pigeons
in the churchyard. People’s laughter seems
to grieve me—after all, I have a heart. Would I
like to be a comet? I believe so. For they have the quickness
of birds, they blossom in fire, and in their purity is as children’s.
To wish for more is beyond the measure of human nature.
The clarity of virtue also deserves praise from the grave
spirit that blows between the garden’s three pillars. A beautiful virgin must
garland her head with myrtle, for to do so is simply
her nature and her sensibility. But myrtle trees are found in Greece.

Samuel Francis, In lovely Blueness 2 (1955-56) (See Note 3)

When a person looks into a mirror and sees
his image, as if painted, that is like the Manes.
The human form has eyes, but the moon has light.
Perhaps King Oedipus (e) had an eye too many. This
man’s suffering seems indescribable, unspeakable,
inexpressible. When the drama presents it so, so it is. But how is it with me?
Am I thinking now of your suffering? Like brooks, the end of
Something as vast as Asia is carrying me toward it. Oedipus, of course, suffered like this, too;
and certainly for the same reason. Did Hercules suffer as well? Of course.
Did not the Dioscuri, too, in their friendship bear pain?
As Hercules fought with God—that is
suffering. And immortality in envy of this life—
to divide these two—that, too, is suffering. But it is also
suffering when a person is covered with freckles—
to be completely covered with freckles! The beautiful
sun does that, for it draws out everything. The path
seduces the young with the charm of its rays, like roses.
Oedipus’s suffering is like a poor man
wailing that he is deprived. Son Laios, poor
stranger in Greece. Life is death, and
death is also a life.

Emil Nolde, March Landscape in the evening (See Note 4)

Notes to the poem

(a) Note that in German, Sky is Himmel, which also stands for Heaven.

(b) This is the phrase that Heidegger used in his essay “…poetically man dwells…”.

(c) Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 verse 26: ‘And God said: Let us make man in our image’.

(d) Holderlin seems to imply that only in the heavenly skies one can find measure, therefore introducing a metaphysical element in the poem. Werner Marx, who was the professor who took Heidegger’s teaching post at the University of Freiburg, wrote a book with the same question in its title, and “Foundations for  a nonmetaphysical ethics” as its subtitle.

(e) Holderlin translated Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus and Antigone. These translations are significant interprpetations of the works.

Notes accompanying the pictures

(1) Note  to Yves Klein’s painting: Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.(Source: MOMA)

(2) Question: On the other hand, perhaps it is Friedrich Holderlin who has organized you? Why is Friedrich Holderlin ‘Kommando’, rather than, e.g., ‘Muse’?

No. Holderlin is just one of my main heroes and he is my favorite poet in my private library. He is my choice and therefore I myself am Holderlin, I can call myself N-Holderlin, which means NASAHEIM(*)-Holderlin, a self-fullfilling prophecy of abstract art. There is no form of art without a relation towards utopia and therefore abstraction. The show is called Kommando because it was a very high or a very low order from heaven that initiated the show. Within the world of art, which is a completely useless world, a Kommando can be a group of people, or an individual that tries to find a way out of this world.

(*) “Nasaheim” – the outerspace station of Anaheim/Disneyland.

(Source: An Interview With Andre Butzer, Artist And Curator Of ‘Kommando Friedrich Holderlin’ At Max Hetzler, Berlin, Saatchi Online Magazine)

(3) This at once airy and expansive composition by Sam Francis brilliantly demonstrates the artist’s unique combination of Abstract Expressionist and late Impressionist influences. With its soft pastel palette, the monumental abstract work creates the sensation of standing before a vast and boundless space. Francis, who often found his inspiration in literary sources, titled the painting after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin which begins with the narrator looking to the sky: “In lovely blue the steeple blossoms/ With its metal roof. Around which/ Drift swallow cries, around which/ Lies most loving blue.” (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)

(4) Nolde’s landscape is a landscape dominated by the sky of North Germany, near the Danish borders, Nolde’s home.

Existentialism – Part I: Kierkegaard (Updated2: 27/3/11)

Ernst Barlach 'Der Mann im Stock', 1918

Introduction

Today I want to write about “existentialism”. Existentialism is a mutli-faceted term. In this post, I refer to a particular way of looking and experienting the human condition. this way has been expressed in philosophy, literature, the movies, the arts.

K. Kohlwitz, Lamentation: Memorial for Ernst Barlach, 1940Let's start with Cartesius' "Cogito, ergo sum", "I think, therefore I am".Barlach, Die Verlassenen (The Abandoned), 1930-34, Lithograph

Sartre turned Cartesius up side down, by saying “existence precedes essence”.

Barlach, Man

But is was Heidegger before Sartre who actualy turned against all tradition and proposed that being is time.

Barlach: the shivering crone

But how did it all begin? The answer lies somewhere in between Cartesius and Heidegger. But where? And is it only one or many potential sources of this new way of looking at “being”?  The starting point for my post is Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and writer.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and writer. He lived in the first half of the 19th century and has written many diverse books.  I prefer to quote directly from his writings, rather than attempt to interpret him, a task for which I am not sufficient by any stretch of the imagination.

“Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause – that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks about this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance- backward.” Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, I-VII, Bloomington:Indiana University Press  (IV A 164)

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past…

…What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

T.S. Elliot, Four Quartets

“All essential knowledge concerns existence, or only that knowledge that relates to existence is essential, is essential knowledge. All knowledge that is not existential, that does not involve inward reflection, is really accidental knowledge, its degree and compass are essentially a matter of no importance.” Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

“Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way. Trust a girl, and you will regret it. Do not trust her, and you will also regret it. … Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or

“Οδός άνω κάτω μία και ωυτή”
Ηράκλειτος (Απ. 60)

(Ευχαριστω τον Μανωλη για το σχολιο του και την παραπομπη στον Ηρακλειτο)

“The way up, the way down, one and the same”

Heracletus

(The Heracletus quote was contributed in a comment by Manolis)

Gustav Moreau: Prometheus

“To be able to forget always depends upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends upon how one experiences actuality. ….nil admirari (marvel at nothing) is the proper wisdom of life. No part of life ought to have  so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any momenthe wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment. ….A person’s resiliency can actually be measured by his power to forget…..forgetfulness is not identical with the art of being able to forget. ”  Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Poster created by Robert Ullmann

“My Cordelia,

I am in love with myself, people say of me. …And why? Because I am in love with you; for you I love and you alone and everything that that truly belongs to you, and thus I love myself because this self of mine belongs to you, so that if I stopped loving you, I would stop loving myself.”  Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Brancusi: The sleeping Muse

1001 Ways to Die – (3) Heinrich von Kleist, Writer

2011 will mark the 200th anniversary of the death of the great German writer Heinrich von Kleist.

Kleist was born in the market town of Frankfurt on the Oder into an aristocratic Prussian family that had produced a long line of distinguished military men. Following tradition, he joined a regiment of the royal foot guards when he was not yet 15. He saw action against the French, but he was quite unsuited to the discipline and monotony of military life. “So many officers, so many drill masters, so many soldiers, so many slaves,” he wrote.

Unappreciated in his own time, Kleist posthumously received wide critical acclaim for his short prose. His eight short stories, or Novellen, originally puhlished in two volumes in 1810-11, are considered comparable to the work of Giovanni Boccaccio and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In addition to his Novellen, Kleist wrote eight plays and many political essays. The extreme stylization and frank sexuality of his works shocked his contemporaries, denying him the acclaim he coveted; however, these same qualities have ensured continuing interest in his work today, and he is now particularly praised for his acute psychological insight and honest depictions of sexuality.

In Greece Kleist is mostly known for his play “The Broken Jug”, which he wrote in 1808. The play was staged for the first time in Greece by the National Theater, in 1954, under the direction of Alexis Solomos.

{Goethe, a literary father-figure to Heinrich von Kleist, may have sensed an Oedipal bloodlust in the emerging poet and playwright: “With the best will in the world towards this poet,” he wrote, in a review of The Broken Jug, “I have always been moved to horror and disgust by something in his works, as though there were a body well planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease.”}

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/kleist_new_translations/#ixzz1D56qSlse

I got to know Kleist and his work more, when a good friend some years ago, gave me as a present Kleist’s novellas. It was a revellation. I quote from a “New Republic” article:

Patricia O'Donovan's work based on the story by Heinrich von Kleist

{Heinrich von Kleist’s famous story “The Earthquake in Chile” is set in Santiago in 1647. A young Carmelite nun named Josephe, condemned to death for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, is about to be beheaded. Across town, her lover, Jeronimo Rugera, is preparing to hang himself in the prison where he has been incarcerated. Just as the bells announcing Josephe’s imminent execution begin to toll, a gigantic earthquake strikes: We now know that it measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale, just a little less than the recent 8.8 quake. The pillar on which Jeronimo was to hang himself becomes his support, and he escapes as the building collapses around him. His beloved, saved by the same “heavenly miracle,” finds him in the countryside, where the refugees from the city have gathered. (This quotation and the others come from Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Kleist’s Selected Prose, just out in an attractive new edition from Archipelago Books.) The same townspeople who earlier that day had gathered to watch Josephe’s execution now greet the pair with warmth and compassion. Had the past, they wonder, only been a bad dream? The earthquake seems to have acted as a great leveler, erasing the previous divisions of class and piety:

Amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, monks and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, as though the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.}

Later when I was living in London, I got introduced to other Kleist plays, like “The Prince of Homburg”  and “Penthesilea”. The appreciation of Kleist’s work grew even more when I discovered Hans Werner Henze, the German composer who wrote an opera based on the play “The Prince of Homburg” in 1958.

von Menzel Adolf: Illustration to Kleist's - The Broken Jug

{As (Thomas) Mann stressed to Anglo-Saxon readers, one cannot account for Kleist’s narrative quirks with historical perspective. “No other contemporary writer resembled him in the least. His method of storytelling is as eccentric as his plots, and with very few exceptions…Kleist’s contemporaries found his fiction intolerably mannered, unpalatable in fact.”}

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/kleist_new_translations/#ixzz1D57I1fVx

In his essay “On the Theater of Marionettes,” an ironic, fictionalized dialogue, Kleist consider’s Man’s fall from Eden and asks whether human self-consciousness is less a blessing than a curse.

Excerpt from “On the Theater of Marionettes”

{In this context, Mr. C… replied in a right friendly manner, I must tell you another story, of which you will immediately comprehend the connection.

On a trip to Russia I happened to find myself on the country estate of a certain Sir von G…, a Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at the time very much focused on their fencing; especially the older one, who had just returned from his university studies, played the virtuoso, and one morning up in his room handed me a rapier. We fenced, yet I proved superior; passion helped put him off his guard; with almost every thrust I struck home, until, finally, his rapier flew into a corner. Half in jest, half pained, he said, as he picked up his rapier, that he had found his master; but everything in nature finds its match, and he would soon lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: Off with him! Off with him! To the woodshed he must go! Whereupon they took me by the hand and led me to a bear that Sir von G…, their father, was training in the yard.

When I appeared before him in stunned amazement, the bear stood upright on its hind legs, with his back to a post to which he was attached, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me straight in the eye: this was his fencing position. And finding myself face to face with such an opponent, I did not know if I was dreaming; but Sir von G…, egged me on: Thrust man! Thrust! he said. See if you can teach him a thing or two! And having gotten over my initial amazement, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a very slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I tried with feints to trick him; the bear did not budge. And once again I lunged with a nimble stroke that would have pierced without fail any human breast; but the bear made a very slight motion with its paw and parried the thrust. Now I was almost as befuddled as had been the young Sir von G… The bear’s perfect calm helped rob me of my own composure, I varied thrusts and feints, sweat dripped from my brow: for naught! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; but, unlike any human counterpart would have done, not a single time did he go for my feints: Looking at me eye to eye, as if he could read my soul, he stood stock still, paw raised and ready, and if my thrusts were ruses, he did not even budge.

Do you believe this story?

Absolutely! I replied with cheerful applause; I’d believe it from the lips of any stranger; all the more so from you!

Well then, my fine friend, said Mr. C…, you now have all the knowledge you need to grasp my meaning. We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant.—But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point and, after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance: so, too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite—such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, i.e. in the jointed manikin or the god.

In which case, I observed, a bit befuddled, would we then have to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge again to fall back into the state of innocence?

Undoubtedly, he replied; which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.}

Kleist shot himself on the 21 November 1811, on a small hill by the shore of the Wannsee lake just outside Berlin, having first shot dead a woman called Henrietta Vogel, who was the wife of an acquaintance and who in the subsequent autopsy would be found to have been suffering from incurable cancer. There was no love affair between the two of them, although when I first read the events, I trully wished this were the case.

As an ending to the post, I would like to present his masterpiece, the play “The Prince of Homburg”, with the help of two articles from the British newspaper, “The Guardian”.

The Prince of Homburg

“Encountering Kleist, one’s first impression is of a compelling strangeness. Nowhere is this more potent than in his masterpiece The Prince of Homburg, with its moonstruck opening tableau, its sleepwalking hero, its plot developing ominously and unstoppably from a single and essentially mysterious incident. The strangeness is compounded for a modern audience by the setting of the play. We are somewhere called Prussia, with the semi-legendary historical incident that inspired the play – the Prince’s cavalry charge at the 17th-century battle of Fehrbellin – transposed into a recognisable early 19th-century world of bureaucracy, organised warfare and journalism. But this is not the Prussia of history, for all the concrete details of its steely military orthodoxy. It is an interior landscape of the imagination, one very different from that of the English 19th century.

Kleist’s characters are confined, trapped, caught; but their imaginations and their narratives are opened up by the same vistas of exaltation and devastation that are to be found in the music of Beethoven, the visionary architecture of Schinkel, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. They live on a stage where the stoniest of certainties can be suddenly evacuated by doubt, or hope, or catastrophe; where the sternest of hierarchies can unexpectedly warp, dissolve and then cruelly reassert themselves. Even time can be dangerously swift one moment, rapturously suspended the next. Darkness is suddenly challenged by light; brightness suddenly overwhelmed by the night.

No wonder that Kleist’s stories and plays are so haunted by sudden disaster and inexplicable reversals of fortune. Contemporaries still devoted to a more optimistic reading of the ideals of the Enlightenment found the violent emotions, the radical ambiguities and black ironies of his work hard to stomach. On publication The Prince of Hom burg was widely deemed unperformable. In addition, its portrayal of a high-ranking Prussian officer who collapses centre-stage in grovelling terror at the prospect of his own imminent death carried swift condemnation from the state censor.”

(Source: Neil Bartlett in the Guardian)

“Set during the time of Brandenburg’s war with the Swedes, the play starts mesmerisingly. In a moonlit garden, the eponymous prince has vivid dreams of military glory and royal betrothal. But, on waking, he becomes a distracted figure who fails to attend to the battle-plans of the ruling Elector.

As a result, in ordering the cavalry to charge too early, the prince suffers a bad case of premature exhortation. Although the Swedes are routed, the prince is court-martialled for disobeying orders and sentenced to death. What follows is an intricate cat-and-mouse game in which the Elector, bombarded with pleas for mercy by his generals and his niece, offers to quash the sentence if the prince himself can prove it was unjust.

…

But Kleist’s play is infinitely more subtle and morally ambiguous than that. In part, it is about the age-old conflict between freedom and order. But it is also a startlingly prophetic play about the equivocal nature of reality. In his dreams, the prince seems on solid ground. Only when he wakes is he plunged into a world of utter confusion. In this sense, it is only a short step, as George Steiner once pointed out, from Kleist to Pirandello.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Abyss – The Loss of the Face

Edward Munch - The Kiss of Death

“If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you”

Friedrich Nietzsche

…the face is being absorbed into abstract space

Frank Auerbach - Helen Gillespie

…the abyss is swallowing the face

Max Beckmann - Stepping back from the Abyss

…a temporary regression, escape from the absolute emptiness

Francis Bacon - Head IV

…ascending screaming into black hell

Leon Kossof - Portrait of Phillip

….turning into mud

Klee - Embrace

… the embrace is another way out

Edward Munch - Death and Love

… but it could be the wrong one