La Ronde E-Book

Arthur Schnitzler

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 136

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Arthur Schnitzler's famous 'daisy-chain' play of sexual coupling, set in Vienna in the 1890s. La Ronde is a play of ten scenes, each depicting a couple in a sexual liaison. There are ten characters altogether, each appearing in two adjacent scenes, forming an endless chain of sexual links across all the layers of Viennese society. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, features a translation by Stephen Unwin and Peter Zombory-Moldovan.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

LA RONDE

by

Arthur Schnitzler

translated and introduced byStephen Unwin and Peter Zombory-Moldovan

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Arthur Schnitzler: Key Dates

Characters

La Ronde

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931)

Arthur Schnitzler was born in Vienna on 15 May 1862, the eldest child of Louise and Professor Johann Schnitzler, a distinguished laryngologist. His maternal grandfather, Philip Markbreiter, had also been a doctor, and Arthur was expected to follow in their footsteps. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and served as an army medical officer for a year. He took up a junior clinical post at the Vienna General Hospital and edited a medical journal founded by his father.

His interest in medicine was limited from the outset, and after his father’s death in 1893 he confined himself to private practice. He was, however, drawn to the emerging science of psychiatry and wrote a paper on speech loss and its treatment by hypnosis. His interest in Sigmund Freud’s exploration of the unconscious mind also informs much of his literary work.

With anti-Semitism on the rise in Vienna from the 1880s, Schnitzler – who dismissed all religion as dogma – was never allowed to forget his Jewish ancestry. His circle of friends included many of the great literary figures of the day. He corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Brandes and Hugo von Hofmannstahl, among many others. He visited London, Paris and Berlin, and called on Henrik Ibsen in Norway in 1896.

His private life was complex. He had relationships with numerous women – often at the same time – including a stormy affair with the actress Adele Sandrock. He fell in love with one of his patients, Marie Reinhard, who gave birth to their stillborn child in 1897. In 1899 he met and married the actress Olga Gussmann, with whom he had a son, Heinrich, and a daughter, Lili; they divorced in 1921. Throughout his life he kept a diary (the manuscript runs to some 8,000 pages) remarkable for its frank descriptions of his many sexual encounters; it includes, for a while, a record of every orgasm.

Schnitzler’s first major dramatic work, Anatol, a cycle of one-act plays, was completed in 1892. This was soon followed by Liebelei (sometimes translated as ‘Flirtations’) in 1894 and Reigen (La Ronde) in 1897; these, along with his study of anti-Semitism, Professor Bernhardi (1912), are the plays for which he is best known. Others include The Green Cockatoo (1899), The Lonely Way (1904) and his last stage play, The Walk to the Fish Pond (1931). He also wrote prose works, including two collections of stories, The Greek Dancing Girl (1905) and Souls in Twilight (1907), as well as a number of novellas; the best known are Dying (1894), Fräulein Else (1924), Dream Story (1926), and Therese: A Chronicle of a Woman’s Life (1928). His Book of Maxims and Doubts, Aphorisms and Fragments appeared in 1927; his memoir, My Youth in Vienna, was published in 1968.

Many of his plays were premiered at Vienna’s prestigious Burgtheater and were, for the most part, critically and commercially successful. He was, however, no stranger to controversy: he was forced to give up his army commission following the publication in 1901 of his satirical novel Lieutenant Gustl (which was said to have ‘tarnished the image of the Austro-Hungarian army’), and La Ronde was the subject of widely publicised criminal proceedings in Berlin in 1921 (see below, ‘The Struggle for Acceptance’).

Schnitzler’s last years were overshadowed by the suicide in 1928 of his daughter, Lili. His last novel, Flight into Darkness, was published in 1931. He died of a brain haemorrhage the same year in Vienna on 21 October.

Vienna 1900

The Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1867-1918 stretched from the Alps to the Russian steppe and from the forests of Poland to the shores of the Adriatic. Schnitzler’s Vienna was its political, economic and cultural capital. The city was home to the glittering Hapsburg court and a large and prosperous middle class. It had grown rapidly following the revolutions of 1848, with migrants drawn from every corner of the Empire by the city’s cosmopolitan energy, its reputation for tolerance and the opportunities for material and social advancement it could offer. Of a population in 1910 of over two million, one in ten was Jewish by faith or descent; although the recent influx of mainly Galician Jews had little in common with the assimilated and much wealthier minority prominent in the city’s academic, professional and cultural life.

Construction of the majestic Ringstrasse (Ring Boulevard) had started in 1857, and the city boasted magnificent new imperial and civic buildings, a thriving university, and a world-famous opera house and theatre. Vienna prided itself on catering for the civilised pleasures of urban life: its spacious parks and popular entertainments were thronged at weekends, middle-class audiences flocked to the latest operettas and the aristocratic splendour of the New Year Ball was legendary. The city’s elegant restaurants and, above all, its coffee-houses played a central part in its vibrant social, cultural and intellectual life.

Cautious political reforms following Austria’s defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 had given Vienna a degree of political stability. The stock exchange crash of 1873, however, led to a twenty-year depression and, by the 1880s, the deficiencies of the all-powerful but sclerotic imperial system were starting to show. Society was rocked by a series of royal and political scandals. The narrow electoral franchise, which restricted voting rights to the educated and well-off, was coming under concerted attack, together with the Liberal political ascendancy which it had produced. In 1895 the populist demagogue Karl Lueger (1844-1910) was elected mayor of Vienna, and in 1901 twenty-one members of Georg von Schönerer’s (1842-1921) virulently anti-Semitic Pan-German Party entered Parliament.

This combination of bourgeois complacency with increasing political instability was the setting for an extraordinary artistic, scientific and philosophical flowering, a ‘golden age’ in which, according to Stefan Zweig’s memoirs, ‘the desire for culture was more passionate than in other European cities’. Its chief characteristic (perhaps in reaction to the increasing tensions in the body politic) was a tendency to look inward rather than outward, most notably illustrated by the pioneering exploration of the subconscious undertaken by Josef Breuer (1842-1925) and, preeminently, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), in whose home the Mittwochsgesellschaft (‘Wednesday Society’), the precursor of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, held its weekly meetings from 1901.

Vienna had long been a centre, also, of musical excellence. As the old century was drawing to a close, the waltzes of Johann Strauss II (1825-99), with their hint of sweet melancholy, captured the city’s hedonistic self-image and its fondness for sentimentality; the operetta was the great popular form, with Franz Lehár’s (1870-1948) masterpiece The Merry Widow premiered at the Theater an der Wien in 1905; while the more challenging symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and the early, difficult, music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) tested the limits of popular taste.

Meanwhile, the conservatism evident in the visual arts was challenged by the Secession, a society founded in 1897 by nineteen young artists and architects in reaction to (or secession from) the prevailing Academic tradition, which favoured historical subjects and styles. Its first president was Gustav Klimt (1862-1914); other key members were the architects and designers Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Otto Wagner (1841-1918) and Josef Maria Olbrich (1867-1908). The movement embraced the Jugendstil, a distinctive variant of the Art Nouveau style current in Paris. In 1903 Klimt and a number of others broke off from the Secession and set up the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops), with the aim of reforming product design: among its leading figures was the painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918). One of the most significant architects of the period, Adolf Loos (1870-1933), whose provocative manifesto was entitled Ornament and Crime, belonged to neither group.

By the standards of Britain, France and Russia, nineteenth-century Austrian literature was relatively undistinguished. In 1890, however, a group of young writers – including Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg (1859-1919) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) – formed Jung-Wien (Young Vienna), a progressive literary society which met in the famous Café Griensteidl. The group later included the young Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and, until he turned against it, Karl Kraus (1874-1936), the influential editor and financier of the provocative satirical magazine Die Fackel (The Torch).

Turn-of-the-century Vienna saw extraordinary levels of artistic innovation and achievement, when remarkable individuals pushed back the boundaries of what could be said and done. The boulevard realism of La Ronde, the celestial vistas of Mahler’s symphonies, the simplicity of Loos’s Michaelerplatz house and the gold-encrusted paintings of Klimt do not belong to any single ‘movement’. In each case, however, the idea of what art could represent, or of what constituted its proper language of expression, was being challenged. That was certainly true of La Ronde, as Schnitzler was acutely aware.

La Ronde: What Happens in the Play

La Ronde consists of ten self-contained scenes. There are two characters in each – a man and a woman. One of them appears again in the next scene, with a different partner. The tenth and final scene completes the cycle, with the return of one of the characters from the first scene.

The play is set in and around the Vienna of its time. One scene takes place in a country inn not far from the capital; the rest are located in various places, some public, some private, in the city. Some are quite specific and would have been familiar to anyone living in Vienna. Many actual place-names, establishments and well-known haunts are mentioned. Other scenes are set in private houses and apartments, precisely described in Schnitzler’s meticulous stage directions and representing certain characteristic, and socially specific, types.

1.    The Prostitute picks up The Soldier, offering him sex for free; he refuses to go home with her, so they have sex by the river. He has to get back to barracks and refuses to tell her his name. He laughs off her request for a tip.

2.    The Soldier has led The Maid out of a dance hall on a Sunday evening. They hardly know each other but soon go and have sex in the park. He quickly loses interest in her and wants to get back to the dance, but she prevaricates, asking if he is fond of her. His reluctant promise to walk her home is soon forgotten as he finds a new dancing partner.

3.    A hot summer’s afternoon. The Young Master has been left alone in the house and seduces The Maid. She is worried that they might be interrupted, and he is concerned about the imminent visit of Dr Schüller. They have sex; she asks him to stay, but he leaves for the café. As soon as he’s gone she steals a cigar.

4.    The Young Master has borrowed an apartment for an assignation with The Young Wife. She appears thickly veiled, very anxious, and uttering all the clichés of the tempted wife. He pretends that the apartment is his, and she allows herself to be seduced. However, he suffers a bout of impotence for which he makes grandiose excuses. She mocks and teases him; a second attempt at sex is more successful. Unnerved by the prospect of the lies she is going to have to tell her husband, she declares that she will never see him again. But they are attending the same ball the following night and will meet there.

5.    Late evening. The Young Wife is in bed. The Husband comes in and tells her that he still loves her and that the time has come once again for them to be more than ‘just good friends’. He explains that their repeated periods of sexual abstinence mean that they keep having ‘honeymoons’. She starts to ask him about the women he slept with before they were married and wonders if married women ever prostitute themselves. Having made love, he recalls the first night of their honeymoon in Venice, secure in the (false) knowledge of her fidelity.

6.    The Husband is having dinner with The Sweet Young Thing in the private room of a restaurant. She is both flirtatious and innocent, and he wants to know everything about her – especially how promiscuous she is. She swoons – declaring that someone must have drugged her wine – and they have sex. She is desperate to know if he loves her, and wants to see him again. He says that he doesn’t live in Vienna and packs her off home to her mother.

7.    The Sweet Young Thing visits The Poet’s room. It is dark but he refuses to light the lamps. He claims that he loves her and asks if she loves him in return. After having sex he says that he is Biebitz, a famous playwright (of whom she has never heard); then he informs her that he is only a shop assistant who plays the piano in a bar. She is bewildered, and he invites her to see Biebitz’s latest, declaring ‘I’ll only really know you, when I know what you think about the play.’

8.    The Poet (who really is Biebitz) is with a famous Actress in a country inn ‘two hours from Vienna’. She keeps wrong-footing him by declaring her passion for him, but also her devotion to a man called Fritz. She says that she is going to bed without him but, moments later, invites him to join her. She taunts him with who she is betraying and they have sex. He is upset that she didn’t perform in his play; she replies that she was ill, sick with longing for him.

9.    The Count, a cavalry officer, is paying a visit to The Actress. It is mid-morning, but she is still in bed, recuperating from some (imagined) indisposition. He says he was enchanted by her performance the previous night, and she flirts with him. He expounds his bleakly hedonistic view of life and tells her that he finds it difficult to be happy, even after having been posted back to Vienna. She teases him about his mistress. When she offers herself, he at first declines, pleading an aversion to sex in the mornings. But he soon succumbs and promises to return after her performance that evening.

10.    The Count wakes up on a sofa in the squalid room of The Prostitute. She is in bed, still asleep. He can remember almost nothing of the drunken night before. When she wakes, he questions her about her life. Her eyes reminds him of someone from his past; he tells her that she could have made a fortune, but she seems content with her lot. His romantic delusions are punctured when he learns that they had sex before he passed out. He leaves as another day dawns over Vienna.

La Ronde: Sex and Society

Schnitzler’s play takes both its title and its structure from the roundelay or round-dance – perhaps the most basic and ancient of folk-dances, in which alternate boys and girls join hands to form a circle. The French know it as la ronde, the Germans as der Reigen. The dance is a primal and universal symbol of the earth, the circle of the seasons, and the cycle of life. It has sexual connotations, subversive of the idea of sexual fidelity to a single partner: for each boy is linked to two girls, and each girl to two boys. But it also has cultural associations with death: the mediaeval allegory of the danse macabre takes the form of the round-dance in which high and low, rich and poor caper together to the grave. This juxtaposition of sex and death is at the heart of the play.

Schnitzler once observed that ‘what lies at the deepest level of human nature is the fear of death’ – a primal instinct more profound even than the sexual desire that apparently brings the characters in La Ronde