Choir (theater)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Getty Villa - Vase with a choir of stilt walkers - inv.VEX.2010.3.65

In ancient Greece, the choir was initially the name for an enclosed dance floor. Later the word meant the round and round dance itself, especially the round dance associated with singing, performed on festive occasions in honor of a deity . Finally, the name was transferred to the group of dancers and singers who participated in the drama as companions of the plot.

History of the Greek choir

It is believed that the Greek theater choir emerged from the Greek cult dance and song for various deities . One of its most important forms was the dithyramb . The drama developed from the choir singing . The choir offered a variety of background information to help the audience follow the performance. He commented on the central themes of the play and showed how an ideal audience should react to the drama. It mainly represented the opinion of the broad masses in history. With Sophocles , the choir served as an omniscient commentator, who supported the general moral ideas with its utterances . He could act as an invisible person as well as a participant in the action. In many ancient Greek dramas, the choir expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as fears and secrets. Usually the choir sang, but also spoke short sentences in unison .

The choir was an important staple of early Greek theater at a time when tragedies and comedies were mostly lyrical works. Before Aeschylus introduced the theater with multiple, interacting actors , the choir was the only actor besides the main actor. In the 5th century the importance of the choir began to fade. Later dramatists, such as Menander , paid little attention to the choir.

Due to the size of Greek theaters , the choir's actions had to be exaggerated and their voices loud enough for everyone to see and hear. The choir used techniques such as synchronization , short echo waves , physical theater and masks . Usually the choir consisted of citizens who rehearsed under the direction of a choir leader. The tragic choir consisted of 12–15 singers without masks, in the comedy there were 24 singers with masks and in the satyr play there were mostly 12 masked singers.

Modern uses of the theater choir

In the present, the choir continues to be found in some operas as a musical ingredient in sound composition and, at the beginning of the 21st century, increasingly outside of music theater in performances in major German-speaking theaters in Vienna ( Ein Sportstück , 1998), Weimar ( Friedrich Schiller's Maria Stuart ) , several times at the Staatstheater Stuttgart and in several plays at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden . In the controversial Dresden production by theater director Volker Lösch , based loosely on Gerhart Hauptmann's Die Weber (2004), a theater choir made up of those affected by Hartz IV transposes the drama into the conflict-ridden present of contemporaries. The considerable risk, which caused a sensation nationally for and against through scandalization and court decisions, was very successful with the paying public.

The most important choir productions in the German-speaking countries in the last few decades came from Einar Schleef , whose often scandalous implementations of dramatic subjects ( Goethe , Brecht , Hauptmann , Hochhuth ) were often based on the alternating chants of a female and a male choir and a large part of the texts originally intended for the individual characters Choir handed over.

Also Elfriede Jelinek uses in her pieces - already in What happened after Nora left her husband or pillars of society , but more insistent in a sports piece and specifically in Wolken.Heim - the choir as an "instance" where no moral authority of the choir is, but a mirror of the “profane, the ordinary”, embodied by the audience in the theater par excellence.

Web links

literature

  • Nikos Ch. Chourmouziadis : Ο χορός στο αρχαίο ελληνικό δράμα. Στιγμή, Αθήνα 2010. - ("The choir in ancient Greek drama")

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ choir . In: Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon . 6th edition. Volume 4, Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1906, pp.  92–93 .
  2. ↑ choir . In: Brockhaus' Kleines Konversations-Lexikon . 5th edition. Volume 1, F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1911, p.  341 .
  3. ↑ choir . In: Heinrich August Pierer , Julius Löbe (Hrsg.): Universal Lexicon of the Present and the Past . 4th edition. tape 4 . Altenburg 1858, p. 80-81 ( zeno.org ).
  4. ↑ Torsten Beyer: Einar Schleef - The rebirth of the choir as a criticism of the bourgeois tragedy in theater-wissenschaft.de.
  5. ↑  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.titel-magazin.de
  6. ^ Günther Fischer: Reviews: Elfriede Jelinek: "Sportstück" piece for Greek choir. In: Spiegel Online . January 23, 1998, accessed December 30, 2016 .