Adolphe Appia: Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre

Richard C. Beacham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134356256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This account, analysis and critical evaluation of the work of Appia demonstrates how his far-sighted imagination also embraced the fundamental reform of scenic design, the use of theatrical space, and a greatly expanded conception of the nature and possibilities of theatrical art.

1 PROLOGUE: CHALLENGE AND STALEMATE IN SYMBOLISM

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period of extraordinary artistic ferment throughout Europe. Although the underlying causes and expressions of this restless spirit of innovation and experiment are complex, extensive, and well worthy of study in themselves, essentially they all had their origins in a fundamental revolt against the dominant artistic style of the day: realism. Whether in the literary, plastic or graphic arts, the realist hegemony held sway; the curious and partial exception being theatrical practice, which was always notoriously behind the times aesthetically, and which, in any case, few observers of the period would have been comfortable in dignifying with the title ‘art’.

For a century and more – since at least the time of Diderot – manifestoes calling for greater realism in the theatre had been issued, and at least in the hands of the more advanced playwrights, the drama itself had become increasingly concerned with realistic characters and situations. Stagecraft, however, and above all the practice of scene design, lagged far behind. It had remained for centuries the captive of the aesthetics of perspective painting, which, ironically, had first been introduced during the Renaissance to give greater scenic realism to theatrical presentation, but whose alien principles and their demands had never ceased to dominate it, severely curtailing the potential for truly naturalistic settings. Thus the scenic requisites of the nineteenth-century theatre were still essentially artificial: painted, trompe l’oeil effects executed on flat canvases pretending to be solid three-dimensional objects. These ‘flats’ in fact were nothing more than paintings, arranged around the stage behind the proscenium arch to give what in the flickering candlelight of earlier times may have passed for plausible settings but in the harsher glow of gaslight stood exposed as palpable ‘fakes’.

Now, still in the thrall of painting, and only beginning to grope towards truly realistic settings, the theatre found itself in the second half of the nineteenth century ‘high and dry’, as the artistic tide swept at full flood in the very opposite direction and, increasingly, the other arts turned away into more abstract and symbolic modes of expression. The theatre, not for the first, and certainly not for the last, time in its haphazard history, was in crisis – at best behind the times, and at worst, artistically speaking, retrograde and irrelevant. Nevertheless, and this too had been true throughout its history, it yet contained within itself an extraordinary potential for reform, and even for regeneration. In the very desert of its isolation, a new voice was heard within it, which not only pointed the way which in time would lead to its own renewal, but, remarkably, provided radical challenge and leadership to the other arts as well.

Richard Wagner seized the initiative and, as prophet, iconoclast, and creative artist, reformed music-drama; in doing so he exercised enormous influence upon a host of other non-theatrical artists and theorists as well, many of whom soon followed, devoted converts, in his luminous path. Wagner demanded that dramatic art return to its distant sources, there to be nourished again on myth, dream and archetype, attaining thereby once more the purity, perfection and beauty which had been its glory in antiquity. The drama, Wagner passionately believed, must cease to strive after realism; must use instead its uniquely expressive potential to explore the inner meaning, as well as the mysteries, of human life. To Wagner’s way of thinking, a musically-arranged and musically-executed histrionic performance was “the one indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man”, “the most perfect art-work”.’¹

Others – poets, musicians, and painters already sceptical of orthodox art – found the force of his ideas and example irresistible. Throughout Europe a new movement in the arts, ‘symbolism’, arose (with Wagner adored as a veritable ‘patron saint’), to push back ever farther the sovereignty of realism in all the arts. The French poets, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud called for and produced poems whose expression relied not on realistic description or imagery, but upon evocative signs and verbal symbols; words aimed at inspiring an emotional, even irrational, response in the reader by awakening inner resonances in the realm of fantasy, mysticism and the sub-concious. Poetry strove to imitate music, while music too, by nature the purest and most abstract of the arts, was intermingled with poetry to reinforce its appeal and effectiveness in inducing a dream-like state within which the imagination might freely express itself, liberated from the shackles of rational thought and control and the limits of perceived reality.

Painting, too, was swept up in turn into the anti-realist flux. The long-established conventions of naturalistic representation were loosened, and in some cases abandoned altogether. Perspective technique itself was foremost amongst these, as artists no longer attempted to give the accurate illusion of three dimensions to objects they depicted, but other conventions were affected as well. Colour, shape and line, as well as subject-matter, were all chosen, modified and coordinated to suggest emotional, psychological and spiritual states. Just as the symbolist writers and musicians sought to engage the imagination of those encountering their work, so now painters too created pictures intended to increase the beholders’ share in interpreting the image by inviting them to ‘fill it in’, and in the process to introduce subjective elements of their own fantasy and imagination, while responding as well to those suggested but not explicitly depicted by the artist.

Although the symbolist movement in painting, together with its expression in literature, was centred in France, both found support and emulation throughout Europe, as the broad anti-realist reaction became an important factor in the artistic ‘spirit’ of the age. Those influenced by it outside France included, amongst many others, Oscar Wilde, Beardsley, Yeats and Whistler in the British Isles, and Ibsen, Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Bocklin and Edvard Munch on the Continent.

The spiritual home of the movement, however, remained in France, where one of the terms used to designate the reaction as applied to painting was coined by Gauguin, who called his method ‘synthetish-symbolic’. By this, Gauguin and the group of painters directly influenced by him – the so called ‘Nabi’ school – ‘meant simply the recording of form in symbolic line and colour as distinguished from the imitative procedures presented in realist and impressionist doctrines … certain characters in his pictures were intended to record mental images and ideas as distinguished from visual experience’.²

The Nabis (the word was taken from Hebrew, meaning ‘prophet’), whose prominent members included Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and, pre-eminently, Paul Sérusier, collaborated and exhibited together as a group from 1888 to about 1900. The impulse of their work originated with Gauguin, but their effective organiser and spokesman was Sérusier, whose dictum, ‘art is a means of communication between souls’, became one of their guiding principles, along with ‘resemblance is the enemy‘.

Sérusier was extremely interested in the theatre – had, indeed, considered becoming an actor – and, following his example, most of the Nabi painters soon became involved in creating actual theatrical décors, while frequently publishing their designs in the avant-garde theatrical journals of the day, including, most prominently, the Revue Blanche, which, together with the short-lived, but highly provocative Revue Wagnérienne, had a major impact on the symbolist movement and its dissemination.

The painters found that the symbolist writers had already discovered in the theatre both a challenging testing-ground for their theories, and potentially, a very effective venue for publicising them. Symbolist playwrights set out to create a new theatrical language together with a dramaturgy capable of providing a visible and practical exploration of their ideas. As Professor Katherine Worth notes, ‘performers were testing Rimbaud’s dream of a language “of the soul for the soul, containing everything; smells, sounds, colours”; Pater’s dictum that all art aspires towards the condition of music; the Nietzschean concept of Dionysiac unity “wherein actor becomes transformed into dancer, dancer into musician, musician into lyric poet”.’³

Since scene design had followed the fashions of painting for centuries, it was hardly surprising to find it attempting now to accommodate the latest symbolist development. However, this attempt at once stumbled against an intractable problem, one which starkly revealed the fundamental aesthetic incompatibility between stage settings and painting. Painting, so long as it depicted surface reality in a more or less naturalistic mode, had served the theatre’s requirement for the realisation (or more accurately, for the illustration) of its fictive locales tolerably well. But once divorced from realism, such scenery became merely and manifestly painting again, and no longer could suggest – because it no longer sought to depict – three-dimensional settings.

One of the foremost symbolist dramatists, Maurice Maeterlinck, perceived the crux of the problem. Whilst calling for ‘musical scenery’, he nevertheless recognised that the mise en scène as currently practised was quite incapable of conveying the suggestive qualities, the inner essences, of sublime drama. ‘The majority of the great poems of humanity are not stageable’, he wrote. ‘The staging of a Masterpiece with the help of human and unpredictable elements is a contradiction.’⁴ The immediate evidence of this contradiction, in terms of scenery, was that there was as yet no ‘visual language’ to correspond to the language of drama and poetry, giving them expression in space. And whilst bravely proclaiming that ‘speech creates scenery like everything else’,⁵ in practical terms symbolist playwrights seeking to present their plays in the theatre found themselves in a virtual aesthetic cul-de-sac. The theatre could not accommodate them, could not stage them; and, more troubling still, in the light of the new symbolist insights and values, even its traditional handling of its own orthodox works now seemed decidedly tawdry and inadequate.

The symbolist theatrical experiments thus did more to highlight and demonstrate the problems which the contemporary theatre faced than to provide any comprehensive solution. The Théâtre d’Art, founded in 1890, staged seven symbolist productions before it closed to be succeeded in 1893 by the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, which continued as the focus of avant-garde work until the turn of the century. The Nabis created scenery for productions at both theatres, according to their concept of stage setting as ‘a pure ornamental fiction that creates the illusion by virtue of the analogies with the drama suggested by the lines and colours’.⁶

In practice, however, this meant that their work was confined to little more than providing ‘discrete decorative backgrounds’.⁷ Despite their sometimes expansive claims of significant innovation, in limiting their work to such backdrops and little else they adhered to a tradition dating back to the late fifteenth century, when such paintings were first employed in the court theatres of Renaissance Italy. The style and content of the painting may have changed; the basic principle – the concept of the nature and function of scenery – remained the same.

Nothing more graphically demonstrated at one and the same time both the symbolists’ desire for radical reform and their inability to escape imaginatively from the tyranny of painting than an announcement at the beginning of 1891 that future performances at the Théâtre d’Art would ‘end with a mise en scène of a painting unknown to the public or with a project of a painter of the new school. The curtain will remain up on the tableau for three minutes … scenic music and combined scents suited to the subject of the represented picture will prepare for it and then will perfect the impression’.⁸ The symbolists were staging paintings! The introduction of the new art into the theatre was complete, but it remained quite incapable of formulating a new art of the theatre.

What was required was a fundamentally new approach, one which would analyse the essential, formal elements of stage setting as boldly and succinctly as the Nabis had analysed painting. ‘A picture – before being a horse, a nude or an anecdotal subject – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.’⁹ Such an approach must recognise that painting could not form the basis of, was not even necessary to, stage setting, which on the contrary must be composed out of its own integral elements: space, solid objects, light and colour, all mutually coordinated and arranged in harmony with the other expressive elements to realise a dramatic work in the theatre.

The ultimate test of such a genuinely new approach would be to stage Wagnerian opera, for although Wagner’s works had given profound inspiration and stimulus to dramatic art, and to poetry, music and painting as well, he had conspicuously failed to reform scenic practice – a fact sadly acknowledged by the more perceptive symbolists, who regretted that Wagner had climbed only ‘halfway up the holy mountain.’¹⁰

Moving amongst the symbolist artists and Parisian followers of Wagner in the mid 1880s – but not attracting much notice from them – was a shy and rather diffident young Swiss artist, Adolphe Appia. A fervid Wagnerian himself, Appia had for some time been considering both the specific problems involved in staging Wagner’s works and the implications which such problems – and their solution – had for theatrical reform in general. Encouraged by his friends within the Wagner circle in Paris, and experience gained during his studies in Germany and Austria, Appia returned to Switzerland and, in the summer of 1891, began to put his thoughts on paper. The work, which was published in Paris in 1895, addressed the problem head on. Appia entitled it La...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction to the Series
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prologue: challenge and stalemate in symbolism
• 2 Early theatrical investigations and the confrontation with Wagner
• 3 First writings, scenarios and designs
• 4 Texts on the reform of theatrical production
• 5 First practical experiments and the collaboration with Jaques-Dalcroze
• 6 Triumph at Hellerau
• 7 Texts on theatre and eurhythmics 1902–1912
• 8 Tristan und Isolde at La Scala and the designs for Hamlet
• 9 Appia and others
• 10 Productions of the Ring and Prometheus
• 11 Texts on the aesthetics of theatre
• 12 After Appia
• 13 Epilogue: ‘Bearers of the flame’
• 14 Visionary and prophetic texts
• Select bibliography
• Adolphe Appia, 1862–1928: A Theatrical Chronology
• Index