DOI Heft:
Nr. 102 (Septembre 1901)
DOI Artikel:Macfall, Haldane: Some thoughts on the art of Gordon Craig, with particular reference to stage craft
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19788#0284
Gordon Craig
of Shakespeare or "a splendidly mounted
opera," in a nightmare of tangled emotions
—in a state very far removed from that which
the genius whose work we had witnessed had
cared to produce. We are astounded, on reflection,
that a play by Shakespeare has not given us the
atmosphere which its mere reading has produced
in our imagination. We are suddenly a-wonder
how very few of the great lines have reached our
memory. Yet the whole vast industry of the
operatic and theatrical world, on the Continent
and in England, is to-day being bent to creating
and intensifying this confusion, at ever-increasing
cost and with all the thriftless energy of misplaced
enthusiasm !
Art is Suggestion. A scene may be an absolutely
true transcript of the real place, but it may be
utterly lacking in the power to suggest that
atmosphere and that mysterious essence which we
call the mood of the real place. Shakespeare never
saw ancient Rome, never set foot in Renaissance
Italy, to his eyes Scotland was but a legend writ
across the mists of the north : yet in Julius Ccesar
we breathe the very atmosphere of ancient Rome;
in Romeo and Juliet we step out of our every-day
husks, cross the airy bridge of romance, and led
into the picturesque streets of our imagination, we
are, at a stroke of genius, in very Italy—we gaze,
convinced, at the clash of steel where the rapier
settles the squabbles of the young bloods in old-
time Verona; in Macbeth we inhale the wild, law-
less air of the Highlands, and this with an emotion
that all the scholarship of the centuries could not
evoke for us in a hundred volumes of facts.
The unpicturesque and dreary background of
the concert platform, being wholly commonplace,
is so remote from, so inappropriate to the music,
that the mind rejects it altogether as a factor in
the performance, it becomes a negligeable quantity
to the mood of the music, and thus allows the
faculties to dwell upon that music untrammelled.
Probably struck by this fact, someone wrote,
stupidly enough, a while ago, to prove that opera
in rehearsal, played upon the bare stage, was a
much more artistic thing than when played with
its scenery—a statement the fatuous exaggeration
of which is at once laid bare on the simple reflec-
tion that such a background would be as much
out of harmony with the emotional root-idea of
the different scenes of the play as is the specta-
cular debauch to which we are accustomed. Yet
the man who wrote these lines had an uncritical
right sense that "spectacular splendour" was
killing the opera. But destructive criticism is
indifferent surgery. The creative gift must destroy
this evil of the theatre, building up an emotional
reality upon the site of the razed sham.
It is through man's imagination that he reaches
of Shakespeare or "a splendidly mounted
opera," in a nightmare of tangled emotions
—in a state very far removed from that which
the genius whose work we had witnessed had
cared to produce. We are astounded, on reflection,
that a play by Shakespeare has not given us the
atmosphere which its mere reading has produced
in our imagination. We are suddenly a-wonder
how very few of the great lines have reached our
memory. Yet the whole vast industry of the
operatic and theatrical world, on the Continent
and in England, is to-day being bent to creating
and intensifying this confusion, at ever-increasing
cost and with all the thriftless energy of misplaced
enthusiasm !
Art is Suggestion. A scene may be an absolutely
true transcript of the real place, but it may be
utterly lacking in the power to suggest that
atmosphere and that mysterious essence which we
call the mood of the real place. Shakespeare never
saw ancient Rome, never set foot in Renaissance
Italy, to his eyes Scotland was but a legend writ
across the mists of the north : yet in Julius Ccesar
we breathe the very atmosphere of ancient Rome;
in Romeo and Juliet we step out of our every-day
husks, cross the airy bridge of romance, and led
into the picturesque streets of our imagination, we
are, at a stroke of genius, in very Italy—we gaze,
convinced, at the clash of steel where the rapier
settles the squabbles of the young bloods in old-
time Verona; in Macbeth we inhale the wild, law-
less air of the Highlands, and this with an emotion
that all the scholarship of the centuries could not
evoke for us in a hundred volumes of facts.
The unpicturesque and dreary background of
the concert platform, being wholly commonplace,
is so remote from, so inappropriate to the music,
that the mind rejects it altogether as a factor in
the performance, it becomes a negligeable quantity
to the mood of the music, and thus allows the
faculties to dwell upon that music untrammelled.
Probably struck by this fact, someone wrote,
stupidly enough, a while ago, to prove that opera
in rehearsal, played upon the bare stage, was a
much more artistic thing than when played with
its scenery—a statement the fatuous exaggeration
of which is at once laid bare on the simple reflec-
tion that such a background would be as much
out of harmony with the emotional root-idea of
the different scenes of the play as is the specta-
cular debauch to which we are accustomed. Yet
the man who wrote these lines had an uncritical
right sense that "spectacular splendour" was
killing the opera. But destructive criticism is
indifferent surgery. The creative gift must destroy
this evil of the theatre, building up an emotional
reality upon the site of the razed sham.
It is through man's imagination that he reaches