Goethe's Tasso: Reading the Directions

GAIL K. HART Goethe's Tasso: Reading the Directions WHEREAS (FAVORABLE) FIRST impressions are the foundation of advantageous social relations, it is usually last impressions which count in the drama. The position of the actors as the curtain falls (or as the reader imagines it falling), their last words or gestures can retroactively affect the character of a play, to say nothing of fixing its generic status. If a comedy ends happily and a tragedy ends sadly—to use the broadest distinction available1—then the ending could under the right circumstances be the sole determinant of a play's generic affiliation, the final frontier between laughter and Kleenex. Goethe's Stella, with its two interchangeable endings, is a good example. The lovely Stella may either conclude her performance in a three-sided embrace with her beloved Fernando and his (remarkably) understanding wife or she may die a pitiable death on an empty stage, explaining, "Und ich sterbe allein."2 Thus Stella is actually two plays, one designated as comic and the other tragic—though one could reasonably argue that they are both rather comical. Goethe's Tas so on the other hand has only one ending, though this is not clear from the secondary literature. To judge by the secondary literature, it would appear that in Tas so Goethe accomplished with one ending what required two in Stella, that is, he created a play which has been received both as tragic and nontragic , as having both a negative outcome and a positive one. Some insist that it ends tragically with the poet's complete breakdown or isolation3, some detect a note of hope since this isolation results from a high poetic gift which Tasso affirms—the rank of "poet" being a high station from which Tasso has not fallen.4 Still others maintain that this is an unequivocally happy ending which depicts Tasso emerging from isolation to embrace Antonio and the (good) active life he represents.5 Many feel that the ending is ambivalent, left open by Goethe for his spectator/reader to decide6 and some of these feel that Goethe himself 126 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA could not decide—he had, after all, referred to it on various occasions as a tragedy and then subtitled it "Ein Schauspiel."7 The question of tragedy is both convoluted and cumbersome, since the classical definition admits of so many interpretations and modifications, and I do not propose to address it directly.8 Much depends on the reader's perception of tragedy, of Tasso and of his role (is The Artist a tragic figure? is Tasso The Artist or an artist?) and I prefer to leave these matters in the eye of the beholder. My purpose is to comment on the nature of the last impression which I believe Goethe was trying to make and to address the problem of isolation vs. integration through an examination of the technical notation. Though the poet's final isolation (when granted) has also been viewed as "elevation," I will assume for the sake of argument that isolation is bad (as it generally is) and that integration is good and that an ending which depicts intractable isolation is a "sad" one whereas a final moment of integration constitutes a "happy" conclusion. Perhaps the most intriguing formal aspect of Goethe's Tasso is the author's experiment with stage notation. At first glance, Goethe's stage directions appear to have been applied inconsistently, almost capriciously, to the dialogue they accompany. They often appear where they are unneeded, reiterating actions already conveyed by the dialogue and just as often they are absent, leaving bare dialogue to express action or gesture. Yet, by virtue of their placement, wording and interaction with the dialogue, these ostensibly technical insertions become an integral part of Goethe's poetic text, echoing its essential thematics on a formal level. Despite the existence of arguably more pressing concerns, the poetic status of stage directions in general has been (occasionally) investigated and (sporadically) debated in this century by theoreticians of the drama. The two positions which emerge from this poorly attended dispute9 are roughly those of Siegfried Mauermann and Jens Soltau. Mauermann allows that stage directions...