The ghost sonata
The Ghost Sonata (Swedish: Spöksonaten ) is a chamber play by Johan August Strindberg . The first performance took place on January 21, 1908 in the Intima teatern , which Strindberg had founded the year before together with the actor August Falck . The premiere failed and the play only became a success four years after the author's death, thanks to Max Reinhardt's spectacular Berlin production in 1916.
action
The action takes place in an old house that is home to a food company that has been trapped like ghosts in their made-up stories for many years, which they need to maintain their exterior facade. The main characters are the master of the house, who pretends to be a noble colonel, his wife, who already walks around like a walking mummy during his lifetime, her daughter, who is actually the daughter of Director Hummel, the old man, and a poor student who is in love with the daughter. In the course of the play, some of the characters die. In the end, the student is left disaffected.
Strindberg was an admirer of Beethoven and transferred the sonata form of chamber music to drama. He even added an opus number to his “literary sonata” . Strindberg: "We wanted to call it that after Beethoven's ghost sonata and the ghost trio , not a spooky sonata."
Settings
The Berlin composer Aribert Reimann chose Spöksonatas as the basis for his opera Die Gespenstersonate , which premiered in Berlin in 1984.
Radio plays
- 1926: Ghost Sonata - Production: Südwestdeutscher Rundfunkdienst AG (SÜWRAG)
First broadcast: September 20, 1926 - Live broadcast without recording
Director and speaker: Not specified. - 1927: Ghost Sonata - Production: Nordische Rundfunk AG (NORAG);
Commentary and direction: Hans Flesch .
First broadcast: January 17, 1927 - live broadcast without recording
Speaker:- Konrad Gebhardt : Director Hummel / The Student Archenholz
- Karl Pündter : The Colonel
- Leontine Sagan : The Mummy, the Colonel's wife
- Maria Lorenz : His daughter
- Hans Freundt : Johannssen, Hummel's servant
- John Walter : Bengston, servant to the colonel
- Edith Scholz : The cook
Secondary literature
- Egil Törnqvist : Strindberg's Ghost Sonata . Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2000, ISBN 9789053564356 .