Tales from the Vienna Woods

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data
Title: Tales from the Vienna Woods
Genus: Volksstück in three parts (15 images)
Original language: German
Author: Ödön from Horváth
Premiere: November 2, 1931
Place of premiere: German Theater Berlin
Place and time of the action: in our days in Vienna, in the Vienna Woods and outside in the Wachau
persons
  • Marianne
  • Alfred
  • Magician King
  • The mother
  • The grandmother
  • Ferdinand from Hierling
  • Valerie
  • Oscar
  • Havlitschek
  • Rittmeister
  • Eric
  • Ida
  • A madam
  • baroness
  • Helene
  • The emcee
  • The mister
  • confessor
  • Emma
  • The servant
  • Two aunts

Tales from the Vienna Woods is the most famous play by the Austro-Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth (1901–1938). It premiered in Berlin in 1931 and has been filmed several times to this day. Even before the premiere , Horváth received the Kleist Prize in 1931 at the suggestion of Carl Zuckmayer . The title is based on the Waltz stories from the Vienna Woods by Johann Strauss (son) .

Horváth's play, written in the late 1920s during the period of catastrophic unemployment and the Great Depression , is a key work of modern drama and was called by Erich Kästner "a Viennese folk play against the Viennese folk play" . Horváth concisely and laconically unmasked the cliché of the “Viennese cosiness” and, using their well-known clichés, cruelly displays their mendacity.

contents

Marianne, the “ sweet Viennese girl ”, is running away from her engagement to the honest butcher Oskar, who has his shop next to her father's doll clinic in Vienna 's eighth district . She has a child from Alfred, who is a scoundrel and Hallodri , and they are heartbroken in Vienna's eighteenth district. Alfred gives the child to his grandmother, who lives with Alfred's mother in the beautiful, fresh air of the Wachau an der Donau.

The tobacconist Valerie, who also has her shop in the street of the Puppenklinik, has lost her former lover Alfred to the young Marianne and is now comforting herself with the German law student Erich, with whom Adolf Hitler's Germany is announced grotesquely and energetically. Opposite him is the Rittmeister , a representative of the old Austria-Hungary.

In need and misery Marianne completes a social decline, which she finally leads through the mediation of Alfred's friend Hierlinger and a baroness "with connections" as an erotic dancer in a demi-world vaudeville. The magical king, Marianne's hard-hearted father, has to recognize his abandoned child in the nightclub "Maxim" as a naked allegorical figure in "living pictures". "The Mister", a Viennese who has returned from America with a love of his homeland that is kitschy this year, who throws around with money, tries to buy Marianne as a prostitute, which she refuses. The rejection makes the "Mister" angry, he sees to it that she goes to jail because she supposedly wanted to steal from him.

Marianne is finally married by the butcher Oskar after all, because the troublesome child died after Alfred's grandmother intentionally exposed the boy to cold weather in the hope that he would develop fatal pneumonia. While Marianne is kissed by Oskar, the grandmother plays unmoved on her zither "Tales from the Vienna Woods" by Johann Strauss.

The turn for the better is not marked at the end, but the continuation of desolate brutalities is sealed.

Location and time

The “silent street” in Vienna's 8th district , the house at Lange Gasse 29, with the balcony of the magical king
The Wachau in Lower Austria with the Danube

The piece takes place in Vienna , in the Vienna Woods and in the Wachau in Lower Austria . The central location is a “quiet street” in the 8th district of Vienna , in which there is a butcher 's shop , a doll's clinic and a tobacco shop . The piece takes place “in our days”.

The house at Langen Gasse 29 in Vienna's 8th district, not far from the Theater in der Josefstadt, served Horváth as a model for this street (Horváth's comments add: “The original location is Lange Gasse”), the magic king's balcony is always there still to see. Horváth himself lived in a parallel street, Piaristengasse, in 1919, but between 1920 and 1931 also several times in the Zipser guesthouse , Lange Gasse 49.

First part

  • Out in the Wachau . In front of a house at the foot of a castle ruin .
  • Quiet Street in the eighth district . From left to right: Oscar's dignified butcher's shop with half cattle and calves, sausages, ham and pork heads in the display. Next to it a doll clinic with a company sign “Zum Zauberkönig” - with joke articles, skulls, dolls, toys, rockets, tin soldiers and a skeleton in the window. Finally: a small tobacco shop with newspapers, magazines and postcards in front of the door. Above the doll clinic there is a balcony with flowers, which belongs to the private apartment of the magician king.
  • The next Sunday in the Vienna Woods . In a clearing on the banks of the beautiful blue Danube.
  • On the beautiful blue Danube . Now the sun has set, it is already dawn.

Second part

  • Again in the quiet street in the eighth district, in front of Oskar's butcher's shop, the doll's clinic and Frau Valerie's tobacco shop.
  • Furnished room in the eighteenth district . Extremely inexpensive. At seven in the morning. The day is gray and the light dim.
  • Small café in the second district
  • With the baroness with the international connections
  • Out in the Wachau. Here, too, the sun shines like it used to - only that there is now an old stroller in front of the house.
  • And again in the quiet street in the eighth district. It is already late in the afternoon.
  • In St. Stephen's Cathedral . In front of the side altar of St. Anthony .

third part

  • At the Heuriger . With Schrammel music and rain of flowers.
  • Maxim, with a bar and private rooms; in the background a cabaret stage with a wide ramp.
  • Out in the Wachau.
  • And again in the quiet street in the eighth district.
  • Out in the Wachau.

Shape and style

The Vienna Woods , setting of Ödön von Horváth's "Tales from the Vienna Woods"

Viennese folk piece

Alfred Polgar described the stories from the Vienna Woods as "a folk piece and the parody of it" . Horváth dismantled the ambiguous “Viennese cosiness”, behind the facade of which there were excesses of meanness and meanness, and unmasked the petty bourgeois mentality and its facade as a deceptive idyll :

He took over the retired Rittmeister known from films, operettas and dramas, the sweet girls, the useless Hallodri, the family-addicted petty bourgeoisie; he took over the plush, but he knocked it out so that the moths flew open and the eaten areas became visible. It showed the front and the other side of the traditional Viennese world. He let these people sing their songs, speak their chatty dialect, wander through their wine taverns drunk and also showed the laziness, malice, mendacious piety, toxicity and narrow-mindedness that lie behind and in those marketable properties. He not only destroyed the traditional Viennese figure panopticon, he also designed a new, more genuine one. ( Erich Kästner , Neue Leipziger Zeitung, November 1931)

Like Horváth's other folk plays, Die Bergbahn (1926), Italian Night (1930), Faith, Love, Hope (1932), or Kasimir and Karoline (1932), the piece is in the tradition of the old Viennese folk theater , especially in the Follow-up to the linguistically powerful pieces by Johann Nestroy . (Horváth said: “One would have to be a Nestroy to be able to define everything that stands in one's way undefined!” ) Horváth has tightened and modified the concept of the folk piece . Tragicomic elements and linguistic caricature of the characters were added and were used for social criticism and to characterize the emerging fascism .

“I did not use this term 'folk piece' arbitrarily, i. H. not simply because my pieces are more or less Bavarian or Austrian accented dialect pieces, but because I had in mind something similar to the continuation of the old folk piece. The old folk play, which for us young people more or less of course only has a historical value, because the shapes of these folk plays, i.e. the carriers of the plot, have changed incredibly in the last two decades. - You will perhaps argue against me now that the so-called eternally human problems of the good old folk play still move people today. - Certainly they move them - but differently. There are a number of eternal human problems that our grandparents wept and laugh about today - or vice versa. So if you want to continue the old folk play today, you will of course bring today's people from the people - namely from the authoritative strata of the people that are characteristic of our time. So: today's people belong to a today's folk piece, and with this statement one arrives at an interesting result: If you want to create a true author, you have to take into account the complete disintegration of dialects by educational jargon. (...) With full consciousness I destroyed the old folk play, formally and ethically, and tried to find the new form of the folk play as a dramatic chronicler. " (Horváth's radio interview on April 6, 1932 on Bayerischer Rundfunk )

Language and dialect

Horváth's characters try to distinguish themselves in a language that often appears artificial. In an educational jargon they use quotes and what they have read to give themselves a claim that is supposed to hide their ignorance, even their stupidity. The characters have something frighteningly animalistic about them, they are afraid like animals, bite in order not to be bitten themselves, and destroy in blind despair without even being able to understand the consequences. Horváth placed this process of speechlessness at the center of much of his work. His characters consist of everyday people, small, often failed existences, representatives of a degraded middle class , petty bourgeoisie and proletarians . Poor creatures who can only represent themselves in unreflected borrowed language.

“The characters don't get a word, just words. The speech is an excuse. The phrase threshes those who think they are threshing. ” ( Dieter Hildebrandt ,“ Der Jargon der Ineigentlichkeit ”, 1971).

It is the catastrophe between what the characters say and what they mean, between what they have to mean because they were brought up to do so and what they are ultimately unable to mean (Kurt Kahl) . Your speechlessness is not represented by real silence, but by substitute actions, empty phrases, meditating in templates, proverbs, politeness and discomfort formulas and in the phrase as "second-hand speaking". Marianne philosophizes helplessly: "Above us, fate weaves knots in our lives."

“But now Germany, like all other European countries, consists of ninety per cent of accomplished or prevented petty bourgeoisie. (...) The petty bourgeoisie has now broken down the actual dialects, namely through educational jargon. In order to be able to portray today's person realistically, I have to let the educational jargon do the talking. The educational jargon (and its causes) naturally provoke criticism - and this is how the dialogue of the new folk play emerges, and with it the person and thus the dramatic plot - a synthesis of seriousness and irony. "

In the piece, Horváth also particularly points out the pauses in the dialogue, which he describes as “silence”, because “here the consciousness or the subconscious is fighting with each other, and that has to become visible”.

“No word of dialect may be spoken! Every word must be spoken in High German, but in the same way as someone who normally only speaks dialect and now forces himself to speak High German. " (Ödön von Horváth:" Instructions for use ", 1932)

music

Original title page of the waltz Tales from the Vienna Woods op.325 by Johann Strauss (1868)

The title of the piece is taken from the waltz “ Tales from the Vienna Woods ” op. 325 by Johann Strauss (Sohn) , but with a slightly different spelling. After a bagpipe introduction and a flute motif that is supposed to imitate the birdsong, Strauss significantly uses the zither as a solo instrument, the instrument that grandmother plays in the piece in front of her house in the Wachau and with which Marianne tries to kill her in the end. (For an example of the melody, see web links) The waltz occurs several times in the piece.

At the beginning of the piece it says “There is a ringing and singing in the air - as if the waltz 'Stories from the Vienna Woods' by Johann Strauss kept fading away somewhere.” In the quiet street “someone plays the 'stories' several times on a worn-out piano from the Vienna Woods' by Johann Strauss ” . At the end of the piece, when Oskar leads Marianne away as “prey”, Horváth quotes: He supports her, gives her a kiss on the mouth, and slowly lets off with her - and there is a ringing and singing in the air, as if something heavenly was playing String orchestra the 'Stories from the Vienna Woods' by Johann Strauss.

The music plays an important role in the piece, the title of which sounds like three-four time and Heurigenseligkeit . Again and again the characters "listen" to the music or hum it softly. The Viennese waltz, in particular, acts like a means of obfuscation, like a dizzying promise of happiness. This sometimes gives the piece an almost cheesy note. This also makes it clear that this cozy Viennese world does not really exist: in reality, one tragedy after another is happening. Everyday life is determined by mendacity, feigned politeness and hypocrisy.

In the scene instructions for the picture "On the beautiful blue Danube" (the original title of the " Danube Waltz "), which triggered the family catastrophe, a lovely Strauss waltz also appears at the beginning of the scene: Now the sun has set, it is already dawning and in the distance dear aunt is playing her travel gramophone, Johann Strauss's 'Spring Voices' waltz.

Viennese music is also played in the night bar "Maxim", first the waltz ' Wiener Blut ' by Johann Strauss (while some girls in traditional Viennese costumes dance waltzes on the stage), then the Hoch und Deutschmeistermarsch by Wilhelm August Jurek , then she plays Chapel ' On the beautiful blue Danube ' ( "meanwhile the magical king checks the virginity of the lady in the green dress at the bar" ), followed by 'Fridericus rex'. At the end of this performance the audience will sing the first verse of the ' Deutschlandlied '. Then Schumann's ' Träumerei ' can be heard while Marianne poses naked on a golden ball, “one-legged, depicting happiness” . Her father discovers her - and has a heart attack.

The scene at the Heurigen, the prelude to the family tragedy in Maxim, is accompanied by Schrammel music and rain of flowers . The Schrammelmusik is next to the Viennese Waltz, the second synonym for Viennese cosiness and harmony.

The setting “Outside in the Wachau” is taken from the song of the same name by Ernst Arnold , a famous Boston Waltz from 1920, the text of which looks like a description of the figure of Marianne: “Out there in the Wachau, the Danube flows so blue, If there is a lonely winemaker's house, a girl looks out, her lips are red as blood and she can kiss so well, her eyes are violet-blue - from the girl in the Wachau! ” (see web links). Marianne sings this song during her interview in the baroness's apartment "with the international connections" that drive her into prostitution. This song is also sung by everyone at the Heuriger.

Stupidity as a feeling of infinity

The piece is preceded by the sentence “Nothing gives the feeling of infinity as much as stupidity. “Even in the - grammatically incorrect - spelling, Horváth points to the unconscious world of thought and linguistic ambition of his characters. The unmasking of consciousness and the struggle between consciousness and the unconscious that precedes this unmasking was the basic motif of all of Horváth's pieces.

"As in all of my plays, I try to be as ruthless as possible against stupidity and lies, because this ruthlessness is probably the most noble task of an aesthetic writer who sometimes imagines that he only writes so that people can recognize themselves. Please know yourself! " (Aside from" Faith, Love, Hope ", 1932)

The stupidity is for Horváth the instrument of consciousness, by which it tried to evade all calamities, uncomfortable conflicts, harsh self-knowledge processes and the feeling of infinity, that is the euphoric self-activity, power, freedom and untroubled certainty of being in the right, creeps up. Stupidity is willful ignorance, consciously ignoring facts. Where stupidity and the unwillingness to use one's own brain meet a desolate environment, the climate develops for collective malice , for human annihilation, racism and other varieties of perverted mass behavior in which everyone participates for his or her person.

Horváth exposes the stupidity that often manifests itself in Vienna as “charming wickedness”. The characters in the play are petty bourgeoisie and philistines who formed a potential electorate for the National Socialists during the great economic crisis and impoverishment that followed the First World War . What holds them together is “unity based on malicious disdain ” ( Alfred Polgar ). Horváth paints a picture of petty bourgeois life in the Austrian interwar period, the time of the onset of National Socialism . People hide behind a facade, live in an "ideal world" which, however, only turns out to be an illusory world, and do not want to see reality.

“I don't counter-write, I just show it… I also never write for anyone, and there is a possibility that it will work 'against' right away. I only have two things to write against, that is stupidity and lies. And two things I stand up for, that is reason and sincerity. "

Horváth's gaze was merciless because it unmasked people, because it showed them in their simplicity, in their harshness and cruelty, in their endeavors to hurt others, not out of meanness but out of stupidity. The basic elements of the plot are "unsuccessful human communication, failed life, mutual hatred, latent violence, deceptive idyll and facade morality, doubts about the existence of God" ( Theo Buck ).

Performance history

The premiere took place on November 2, 1931 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin under the direction of Heinz Hilpert . Cast: Carola Neher (Marianne), Peter Lorre (Alfred), Hans Moser (Magic King), Paul Hörbiger (Rittmeister), Lucie Höflich (Valerie), Frida Richard (grandmother), Lina Woiwode (mother), Heinrich Heilinger (Oskar), Felicitas Kobylanska (Ida), Josef Danegger (Havlitschek), Paul Dahlke (Erich), Elisabeth Neumann (madam), Hermann Wlach (confessor), Willy Trenk-Trebitsch (Hierlinger Ferdinand). In the same year the piece was printed by Propylaen-Verlag , whereby the originally seven-part piece was reclassified into three parts.

Program for the premiere on November 2, 1931 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin under Heinz Hilpert

The performance marked the climax of Horváth's artistic success and was repeated twenty-eight times in two months, despite sharp criticism from conservative circles. "You laugh at so much sad zoology" , wrote one critic after the premiere, Oscar Bie saw in it a "high point of stage life, the fusion of person and milieu, as one has seldom seen in this house ", and the theater pope Alfred Kerr judged in the Berliner Tagblatt: “A strongest force among the boys, Horváth, spans larger parts of life here than before. (...) A who among the boys; a blood; a stock. Otherwise there is no turning back into the foolishness of the fibula; but a juice. And a wealth. "

The right-wing radical press, however, called the play an “unprecedented insolence” , “mess” , “filth of the first order” ( Völkischer Beobachter ) and “a dramatic denigration of old Austria-Hungary” . In the National Socialist Monday paper “The Attack” by Joseph Goebbels it was said that the “golden Viennese heart drowned helplessly and helplessly in Horváth's manure.” When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, all of Horváth's plays were removed from German theaters and prohibited from performing , Horváth moved to Vienna, after the annexation of Austria in 1938 to Paris.

“Horváth looked straight into the eye of Medusa, who is called life, and without trembling actually represented what is happening in what seems to be happening. There was a truthfulness and an inexorability in the portrayal of people's lack of relationship to one another that one spoke of a great brutality, of cynicism and irony; all of which was not the case. Because Horváth was a person who absolutely did not see life with negative, but only with X-ray eyes - as it really is . "( Heinz Hilpert , director of the Berlin premiere in 1931)

A theatrical scandal the Austrian premiere fell on December 1, 1948 Vienna People's Theater with Inge Konradihaus (Marianne), Harry foot (Alfred), Karl Skraup (Magic Kingdom), Dagny Servaes (Valerie), Dorothea Neff (grandmother), Egon von Jordan ( Rittmeister), Otto Wögerer (Oskar) directed by Hans Jungbauer and in the set design by Gustav Mankers , who was accused of “blasphemy against Vienneseism ”.

"To call this spectacle of half-fools and criminals a folk piece is presumptuous." ( Monday edition , December 1948)
“Horvath calls his piece a folk piece. But what do these internally lazy lemurs, these swamp flowers, which can thrive in any big city, have to do with the people, with the people of Vienna? " ( Wiener Tageszeitung , December 1948)
“Shedding light on the dark, remote and ugly in people is not new and has also occupied poets. From them to Ödön Horváth there is a never-ending path. For what Horváth lacks in a poet is the human heart, the feeling. These poster fates, which tell not stories from the Vienna Woods but rather colportages from its lowlands, may all have an excuse that there is something like this in life too. But, thank God, life is not all made up of aging hysterics, young pimps, mean grandmothers, stupid butchers and weak creatures. Otherwise there would only be one thing left: to hang up. " (Peter Loos in Der Abend , December 2, 1948)

There were other important productions of the play

Incidental music for the piece was composed by Werner Pirchner (PWV 26).

In 1970 Peter Handke wrote a retelling of the piece: “Dead silence at the Heurigen. A retelling ", a description with the help of a conscious " selection of sentences from the piece that are intended to comment on the consciousness formulated in it. "

The Croatian Miro Belamaric wrote an opera based on Horváth's play. The premiere took place in 1993 at the European Culture Days at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe .

In 2014 Wang Xinpeng designed a ballet version based on the motifs of the piece with the Dortmund Ballet. Concept and scenario come from Christian Baier , the music from Johann Strauss and Alban Berg .

Film adaptations

Current issues

Translations

  • Tales from the Vienna woods , by Christopher Hampton , 1977
  • Tales from the Vienna woods , a new version by David Harrower, from a literal translation by Laura Gribble, 2003
  • Tales from the Vienna woods , by Tom Wright, based on translations by Hampton and Harrower, for the Sydney Theater Company (performed at the Opera House Drama Theater from November 17 to December 15, 2007)

literature

  • Ödön von Horváth: Stories from the Vienna Woods. Folk piece in three parts . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, 167 pages, ISBN 3-518-18826-7
  • Peter Handke : Dead silence at the Heuriger. A retelling. In: I am a resident of the ivory tower. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  • Henk J. Koning: Nestroy and Horváth: an unequal brotherhood? In: Orbis Linguarum . Legnickie rozprawy filologiczne , Vol. 21, Nauczycielskie Kolegium Jʻezyków Obcych w Legnicy , Legnica / Wrocław 2002, ( full text ( Memento from September 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) free of charge).
  • Traugott Krischke (Ed.): Materials on Ödön von Horváth's "Stories from the Vienna Woods". Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972, DNB 720127270 .
  • Traugott Krischke: Ödön von Horváth. Child of his time. Heyne, Munich 1980; 1998, ISBN 3-548-26525-1 .
  • Hajo Kurzenberger: Horváths Volksstücke: Description of a poetic process , Fink, Munich 1974, DNB 740080687 (dissertation University of Heidelberg 1972, 179 pages).
  • Christine Schmidjell (ed.): Ödön von Horváth: stories from the Viennese forest. Explanations and documents. Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-15-016016-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Stories from the Vienna Woods premiered. Deutschlandfunk, deutschlandfunk.de accessed on November 2, 2021 [1]
  2. ^ Theater program from 2010 from Mödling , where the play was performed as a station theater after the original seven parts.
  3. Paulus Manker : “The theater man Gustav Manker . Searching for traces. “Amalthea, Vienna 2010 ISBN 978-3-85002-738-0
  4. Gruber / Stories from the Vienna Woods ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (contributors etc .; on the website www.wienersymphoniker.at, accessed July 2014)
  5. ^ Program booklet for the premiere in the Theater an der Wien