The ghost sonata

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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

Secondary literature

Web links