Observations on the Viennese Theater

OBSERVATIONS ON THE VIENNESE THEATER VIENNA, one of Europe's oldest theab'ical capitals, is worth our attention not only because of the vigor of its theatrical life but also because of its reluctance to go with international theatrical trends and its preference for a path outlined for it by its own rich theatrical tradition. In observing the Viennese theater one is forcefully reminded of the truism that although theater and literature are related they are not identical with one another. In the theater the literary component, the logos, has to share its place with the play component, the mimos. A struggle between the two for ascendency is discernible throughout the history of the European stage. Great theatrical performances have often been the result of a happy synthesis of these two elements. Where one of them has heavily predominated at the expense of the other, the outcome has usually not been a happy one: a preponderance of the mimos favors a theater that is purely amusement and entertainment, and-worse perhaps-that of the logos brings about bloodless, academic performances. The prominent, contemporary Viennese playwright Fritz Hochwalder pleads for a mimos-dominated theater: "Theater is by no means literature. It may become literature. From the viewpoint of the stage, literature is only the noble patina which the products of great theatrical periods acquire with age. From its beginnings and in its periods of highest efflorescence, genuine theater was always closer to the circus and to clownery than to the university seminar and the scholar's study. Sometimes, as I mentioned, the theater will eventually become literature; when it begins as literature, it will usually not live long as theater:'l If we accept this utterance as paradigmatic for the Viennese attitude toward the theater, and I believe we may, then it will not astonish us that Vienna in the era of the baroque, i.e. an era that valued the theater per se, was, next to Paris, the leading theatrical capital of Europe. The baroque theater and the baroque opera satisfied eye, ear, and intellect equally and thus constituted the true Gesamtkunstwerk, about two hundred years before it was postulated by Richard Wagner. The baroque spirit is still present in the Ausb'ian culture of today. In the theater, its last great representative was Max Reinhardt, who, as a true baroque theatrical artist, regarded literature as merely the 1. Fritz Hochwiilder, "Ueber mein Theater," quoted in Hans Weigel's introduction to HochwiiIder, Dramen, Vol. I (Miinchen, n.d.), p. 9. All translations into English are my own. 58 1962 VIENNESE THEATER 59 substratum, though a most important one, for the stage spectacle. Also Hofmannsthal, one of Austria's great masters of the written word, knew nevertheless that true theater is more than literature, and that it continues beyond the words; it might have been this insight which led him to write libretti for Richard Strauss. The fact that the spirit of the baroque is still alive in the cultural life of Vienna attests to its strong historical continuity and conservatism. Josef Nadler, the literary historian, has compared Austrian literature to an even-flowing stream with a steady gradient. Such a flow, one might add, contrasts very much with the main stream of German literature , which has anything but a steady current. One of the important'differences between the history of the theater in Vienna and that in other German-speaking cities has to do with the flowering and decline of the improvised drama, comparable to the Italian commedia dell'arte. After periods of efflorescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the old improvised drama was challenged around the middle of the eighteenth century by the new literary play, which was patterned after the French classical drama. This new type of drama, vigorously championed by Gottsched, who was at that time the unchallenged arbiter of the arts and literature in Germany, soon completely vanquished the old in most of Germany. In Vienna, on the other hand, where the art of the improvised play was particularly highly developed and was popular with all classes and so respectable that, for example, Haydn wrote the music for KurzBernardon 's improvised clown comedy Der neue...