Scandal on Stage: European Theater as Moral Trial (review)

As a communal medium, theater exceeds any other art form in its ability to function as a testing ground for sociopolitical, ethical, and aesthetic norms. This study traces the history of theater’s public offenses, and analyzes scandal as a manifestation of society’s ongoing struggle to (re)establish its civic institutions, shared values, and beliefs. In doing so, it aims to shed light on a question with which drama theorists have long concerned themselves: can theater serve as a moral institution, as proposed by Friedrich Schiller in the late eighteenth century?

The book spans almost two centuries of predominantly German and French theater history, and its author must be commended for doing at least partial justice to theater’s myriad forms by including literary drama, musical composition, and ballet in his analysis. Without exception, the playwrights and composers under investigation have been well researched, and rather than adding further work analyses Ziolkowski draws on existing scholarship in order to discern the main aspects that underlie theatrical scandals across genre and time. As the author himself points out, his approach is that of a literary and cultural historian, not a theater scholar. Indeed, readers familiar with theoretical models from the field of theater studies will likely regret that the book does not engage more with contemporary ideas on performative aesthetics, or with the studies on audience sociology and reception theory referenced in the preface. Nevertheless, they will find the book useful as a source of fascinating case studies from which one can easily delve into broader theoretical reflections.

Each of the book’s five chapters focuses on two scandals from approximately the same period. Starting with Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1782), Ziolkowski convincingly argues that scandal must be regarded as a modern phenomenon that has its origins in the age of Enlightenment. The collective disapproval typical of scandal presupposes the existence of shared opinions and values, and it was only with the ascendency of the middle class that a public consciousness emerged. While a bourgeois audience adopted the theater as a site of self-representation, artists—liberated from the constraints of court and church authorities—embraced their newfound freedom to express or challenge the views and sentiments of their spectators. In the case of Die Räuber, its theme of rebellion against absolutist despotism and its unconventional focus on psychologically complex characters rather than representative types were a novelty on the European stage. Convinced of theater’s civilizing influence, Schiller confronted his audience with discomforting ideas about human nature. By contesting both the sociopolitical and the aesthetic order, Schiller successfully transformed the theater into a forum for moral and ethical debate.

In contrast, when Victor Hugo’s Hernani premiered in the months preceding the July Revolution of 1830, the play’s potentially antiroyalist message did not cause much uproar or political discussion. Instead, bourgeois and bohemian spectators clashed over formal innovations that marked the transition from a neoclassical to a romanticist style. Consequently, Ziolowski argues, Hugo failed in his attempt to use the stage as a moral institution.

The following chapters equally distinguish between sociopolitical and aesthetic sensitivities as underlying factors for public scandal. The reader will soon recognize the author’s pattern of examining the circumstances of each controversy before applying—at times somewhat abruptly—Schiller’s conception of a moral theater in order to draw conclusions about a production’s potential to “stimulate thoughtful questioning of existing ‘moral’ conventions” (136). Although they are now part of the theatrical canon, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889), Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913), and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) once produced fruitful friction with their focus on the exploitation of workers, the violent undercurrents of religious experience, and the destructive force of capitalism respectively.

Scandals are a rewarding subject for any gifted storyteller, and Ziolkowski recounts the ten cases he considers exemplary with a great deal...