Try about the theater

An essay on theater is an essay by Thomas Mann , written between February and May 1907. Essentially, it is about Thomas Mann's analysis of Richard Wagner's art-theoretical writings . He fights against his position that the drama is superior to the novel. Wagner's demand that the theater should return to folklore is affirmed.

The sharpness with which the failed playwright Thomas Mann ( Fiorenza ) ascribes an inferiority to the drama compared to the novel is shown in the text - as is usual with Thomas Mann when he polemicises (the suffering and greatness of Richard Wagner , Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of our experience ) - relativized by neutral and indifferent interweaving as well as by one or the other appreciative comment.

Emergence

With his drama Fiorenza , Thomas Mann failed in terms of its suitability for the stage. He describes it "as a whole work of art, but misshapen." "In« Fiorenza »there can be no talk of an actual dramatic effect, the effect is completely novelistic, and the main emphasis is on the linguistic." And further: " "Fiorenza" must literally be cut in half if it is to be turned into a tolerably normal evening at the theater. ” The theater essay was created based on his experiences with his only drama.

With the essay Thomas Mann responded to a survey by the magazine Nord und Süd on the influence of modern theater on ethical and aesthetic education. The editor Moritz Heimann from Verlag S. Fischer rejected the text in his letter of May 7, 1907. Thomas Mann was now considering including the essay in Maximilian Harden's magazine Zukunft . The first print appeared in the January and February 1908 issues of Nord and Süd . The fifth chapter (of a total of six) was preprinted on July 26, 1907 under the title Das Theater als Tempel in Morgen magazine .

central message

Thomas Mann places epic prose, the art of the novel, above the art genre drama . At the same time he confirms himself to the world as an epic.

According to Thomas Mann's impression, the theater gets by without literature - it can exist without it. The novel that is superior to him contains more poetry and drama than the drama itself. In addition, the novel is more precise, more complete, more knowledgeable, more conscientious, more profound than the drama. "Epic surveying" makes it superior to drama, the essence of which - in tragedy - is "wrong action" . Also psychologically and in everything “that concerns the knowledge of the human being in body and character” , the “narrated person” in the novel is round, whole, real and plastic. Drama, on the other hand, is an art of silhouette. The narrator also has more to do than the playwright. He still has to do everything that the actor illustrates, what the director does, what the painters [stage designers], machinists and even the musicians teach. In the theater there is a division of labor.

The epic prose is a means of representation that is capable of ironic non-commitment and the finest indirectness. In terms of refinement of the artistic technique, the novel is at least not inferior to the drama. In the theater, the spiritual and sensual suggestion (Thomas Mann sees it as an essential concern of art in general) is “coarsened” into a panoptic illusionism . Drama, theater, like a bad illustration, tyrannizes the imagination. It is set to an inadequate meaningfulness. The drama, the theater with its obtrusive addiction to deception, its technical magic apparatus, its peeping pleasures against the entrance is an "art surrogate" for the dull crowd, a "popular amusement" , a higher - and not always higher - "childishness" . - Thomas Mann's confession: “Has the theater ever given me a pure enjoyment, a high and undoubted beauty experience? No."

The origin and essence of all theater is the impromptu mimic production, which can be seen most clearly in the original folk drama, the puppet theater. Here Wagner found inspiration for his Siegfried in Der Ring des Nibelungen , “this ideal puppet theater with its harmless hero! Hasn't anyone yet understood the high resemblance between this Siegfried and the little flatbed swinger from the annual market? "

Literature, Thomas Mann admits, was the act when the reading drama was written. Here the gap, the discord between poetry and theater is eliminated. But for the 'scaffolding' it applies that the rank of a theater is determined by how well or badly comedy is played there - not according to the extent to which it favors literature.

swell

1. ↑ Original text: Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Thomas Mann. Essays. Volume 1, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-048268-9 , pp. 53-93.
2. ↑ Thomas Mann on September 3, 1905 to Ida Boy-Edd
3. ↑ on January 19, 1906 to E. Hoffmann-Krayer
4. ↑ on March 20, 1910 to Heinrich Mann
5. ↑ Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Thomas Mann. Essays. Volume 1, p. 328.
6. ↑ Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Thomas Mann. Essays. Volume 1, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 331.

Secondary literature

• Günther Blöcker: Thomas Mann and the theater. To the death of the poet. In: Theater and Time. 1, 1955.
• Lavinia Jollos-Mazzuchetti: Thomas Mann and the Theater. In: Sense and Form. Thomas Mann special issue. 1965.
• Alfred Ettinger: The epic as a theatrical writer. Thomas Mann's relationship to the theater in his life and work. Diss. Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-8204-1145-3 .