Читать книгу The Scene is Changed - Ashley Dukes - Страница 6

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Munich in 1907 was a sprawling, tippling, good-natured place, provincial notwithstanding its pride as capital of a southern kingdom. Although the student population included many would-be painters, and the great Goyas and Dürers could be seen in the Old Pinakothek, it had not yet given itself the name or the airs of an "art city". From the standpoint of architecture it could never have claimed any such distinction. Many buildings were covered in stucco and decorated in the baroque style, and some of the palaces had been cheaply provided with painted windows instead of real ones. Except for a few carved and groined gateways, the medieval survivals were insignificant: the modern work was uniformly tasteless. The suburbs with their mock-gothic villas had to be seen to be believed.

Whatever character the city possessed was due to the meeting of old winding streets of shops and beerhouses with broad featureless avenues, the latter stretching out fanwise from the Residences and the English Garden. Four-seated open horse-cabs plied everywhere, and often they were loaded to the depth of their springs with stout students in grey frock-coats and coloured peaked caps, the badges of the various duelling corps. With these young gentlemen it was a point of honour not to walk, even from lecture to lecture in the scattered university buildings; and their journeys from beerhouse to beerhouse were invariably made behind a trotting horse. As their faces were often scarred in the semblance of a proposition of Euclid by the combats they had survived, the vehicles bearing them around the city were known to other students as pontes asinorum.

In winter the wheels of the cabs were taken off and replaced by sleigh-runners for months at a time; and then the scrape and rattle of wrought-iron over the cobbles gave way to the tinkle of bells. If in a thaw the snow of the street surface wore thin, men were employed to shovel it on to the roadway from the side walk, which was otherwise seldom cleared. This was one of the tasks of the public serving-men (Dienstmänner) who stood at every corner to await burdens or errands. In the hotels and pensions, other serving-men with brushes strapped to their feet skated around polishing the floors. These men, and also waiters and shopkeepers, addressed every superior in the third person. All menials took off their caps at the approach of an employer or otherwise saluted him. These survivals of feudalism are worth recalling, for the old-German picture cannot be complete without them. I doubt if there were fifty motor-driven vehicles in the whole of Munich at this time.

The crazy Ludwig, king of Bavaria and patron of Wagner, was already confined in the villa on the Starnberger See where eventually he met his death; but the Regent walked often and unattended in the city, raising his hat when passers-by stood aside to make way for him. The Court was in formal evidence only at the Opera, and then rarely. The truly popular monarch, as always in Bavaria, was the peasant from the highlands, who strode everywhere in the old part of the town with his feathered cap, short jacket and leather breeches. Gold and silver pieces were often sewn into his waistcoat. At the October Fair he could be seen grotesquely bestriding a Lohengrin swan on the roundabouts, or gaping at the fat woman who served as decoy to a tentful of freaks; and in his bucolic ranks were a few bearded and more earnest-looking fellows from Oberammergau, spending the money they had earned by acting in the Passion Play or betweenwhiles by carving toy chalets and cuckoo-clocks.

Such peasant invasions were seasonal to spring and autumn; and after Christmas Munich held its own metropolitan carnival, the Fasching, celebrated by masked balls in an old vaudeville theatre and pairs of lovers slipping through the starlit streets in early morning. In summer, tourists came to the Wagner Festival in the Prinzregententheater, one of the first in Europe to adopt the modern seating plan of a single sloping tier.

For most of the year popular symphony concerts were held in the beerhouses, where also all political meetings took place. The citizens liked to tell the tale of a Temperance Society compelled to hold its meeting in the Hofbräuhaus. Singspiele, consisting of peasant songs with vaudeville, were given on platforms in the bigger halls. One Kathe Kobus ran a more sophisticated cabaret called Simplizissimus, where no public personage, and least of all royalty, could escape ridicule. Always after these late nights, summer and winter alike, many students went to the station to catch the early train to Garmisch and climb the Zugspitze or one of the harder peaks of the Wetterstein range. The life of the mountains was close to the city.

In our pension everybody wanted to talk English to young Englishmen, and it was hard to keep to the rule of grammar and exercises by day, and reading and conversation by night, which should enable anybody to master a language in a few weeks. I certainly had no more time to spend on the business, for I have always regarded foreign languages as a kind of necessary shorthand, in which head waiters and diplomats reach the highest proficiency but ordinary folk can meet their civilized requirements if they wish.

The theatre found a place immediately in my system of German education, for the two legitimate playhouses of Munich were just opening with their seasonal variety of plays, from German sentimental comedies to Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Shaw and Gorky. One of them, the Residenztheater, a lovely playhouse which I believe was the first to install a revolving stage, announced that during the season it would present the whole of Ibsen's plays from the first to the last at fortnightly intervals. This promise was fulfilled, and I was duly grateful for having arrived in the city at such a moment. The other, the Schauspielhaus, was a typical German provincial theatre run on the repertory plan, with a stock company and a change of bill every night. The kiosks everywhere carried the playbills in large Gothic characters, which brought them to everybody's notice. London and New York should have kiosks: they get in the way of pedestrian traffic but they are the best form of theatre announcement.

The Hoftheater or Royal Opera House was flourishing: its tenor at the time was Knote, the German contemporary of Caruso. He was accustomed to sing at Munich from September to May for some modest retainer, and then he took a Covent Garden engagement to make his fortune. This theatre generally sold out all its seats for the week before noon on Monday, so that poor students had to get up early and stand in line with the Dienstmänner from seven in the morning. Their place was generally in the topmost gallery, where they could hear their girl neighbours gushing over the entry of the officers below. It was a tradition that officers should remain standing during a performance, either at the side of the parquet or the back of the boxes; and in close ranks they made an effective decoration to a full house.

When the Mozart operas were given for a cycle with famous singers, the Residenztheater could be sure of the same success; but for most of the season it offered a repertory rather like that of the Burgtheater in Vienna, with high comedy and classical drama alternating. Nothing very revolutionary could be shown on this Court stage, and the appearance of Ibsen meant that Germany already considered him a classic. His long personal association with Munich was also remembered. The policy of the Schauspielhaus was much freer. Hauptmann's The Weavers could be seen there regularly, with Gorky's Lower Depths (A Night Shelter) and Tolstoy's Power of Darkness and Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna and Strindberg's The Father, Ibsen's Ghosts and even Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession—almost the entire list of controversial plays of the period. The works that our Stage Society had presented on experimental Sunday evenings were played here nightly as a matter of course, before a regular and appreciative public. But the Munich playgoer, like others, looked abroad for talent rather than at home. Wedekind, who was then living in the suburb of Schwabing, was never performed, though many of his fantastic dramas were already written. The Austrian dramatists, like Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, found it much easier to get a hearing. The only censorship was that of the police, which was exercised immediately there was any trouble in the theatre, such as interruption of a play. I remember such a Theaterskandal arising from the production of Machiavelli's comedy Mandragola, which thirty years later I put on in London without causing one protest.

These Munich theatres may have been subsidized indirectly, but they were quite commercial in their study of public taste, and they never gave more performances of a play than the audiences were willing to pay for. A new work was given three or four times in the week after its production (usually made on a Saturday evening for the convenience of the Press). If it proved a box-office draw it was played twice weekly for several weeks or even months: if not, it was played once a fortnight for a short time and then was dropped altogether. Some plays went on year after year in the repertory, and might reach 100 performances. Production costs were trifling, for old scenery was repainted and the company were working and earning their living during the rehearsal period. But if there was no material risk in presenting a play, there was a risk of reputation. No director wanted to have failures, even in repertory where they could easily be concealed. Nor did he want to call upon his season-ticket holders, classes B and C, to fill the house at cut prices. When classes B and C made their appearance, Class A, entitled to the new plays, ceased to come at all. Success, in fact, was as all-important in repertory as in any other kind of theatre, and all eyes brightened at the word Riesenerfolg (or smash hit).

Munich then had about half a million inhabitants. If one in twenty went now and then to the opera or the play, and one in fifty went every week, the three theatres could be sure of good houses. The real proportions were perhaps higher, for in that age before the competition of the screen all habits were more settled. The whole middle class could be relied on to support the stage. From their frequent bowings to each other as they circulated in disciplined streams around the foyers in the intervals, it could be seen that the audience were well acquainted. Drab and dowdy as they were, the drama was part of their culture which in turn was part of their class-consciousness. Last night's play would be discussed by small officials in their bureaucratic round, and by professional men visiting or being visited by patients, and even by shopkeepers talking with customers. No peoples' theatres had yet been founded, and probably it never occurred to any workman to go to the Schauspielhaus or the Residenz. Poor students attended in numbers, but that was another matter. The legitimate stage was a middle-class institution, and its very creditable liberty of thought, fostered by dramatists like Ibsen, was a middle-class liberty not yet translated into a basic political creed. Priests were often to be seen at the play, especially at the Sunday afternoon performances when the day's Masses were over; and the public in general must have been pretty well divided between the devout and the liberal (for political liberalism always implied some sort of protestantism or free-thinking). But the one thing that united them was membership of what is called the bourgeoisie.

This is no doubt clearer to me to-day than it could ever have been at the time, for a young foreigner finds nothing harder to grasp than the social distinctions (or lack of them) in the country where he happens to be. To an Englishman the absence of what is technically called a lady was noticeable in Munich, and I confess sometimes welcome. Such beings must have existed in Prussia and Saxony, and even in their most formidable shape; but in Bavaria all women seemed to be women and amiable at that. A Cambridge scientist who was in Munich with a vivisection permit, making experiments on mice, told me that German women had one passion, the cream bun; but this was a falsehood of specialist observation. They certainly liked cream buns, as Nora in A Doll's House liked macaroons; but above all they enjoyed being approached as human beings, neither housewives nor bluestockings. The girl from the suburbs who came for a day's walk in the mountains remained almost indistinguishable in her manners, her reserve or abandonment or charm, from the young professor's wife presiding at a tea-table.

If these social observations are allowed, a word can be said about the racial question too. In all that time I was in Germany I cannot remember any feeling against Jews, either in the theatre where many of them were working or in ordinary life. There may have been some such prejudice among the student or official classes, but a looker-on would never have noticed it. Only in the years after 1919 did mutterings begin to the effect that the Jews had undermined German culture. And since the Nazis have attributed "culture-bolshevism" in Germany to the Weimar Republic, I would add that this "culture-bolshevism", meaning liberalism in thought and art, flourished before 1914 under Wilhelm II and was then much commoner than at any time in the 1920's.

My day's work in the university began at seven in the morning by attendance at an hour's lecture on the physics of the sun, and continued in the forenoon with some laboratory work on physico-chemical subjects. But with no examinations to pass, there was no need to take all this too seriously; and in fact discoveries in the field of radioactivity had made theories obsolete which had been the foundation of my knowledge as schoolboy, student and graduate. The movement of knowledge seemed suddenly to have taken the increasing tempo of the world which was manifesting itself in the internal combustion engine and the beginnings of flight. Or was this partly the fancy of a young man turning from exact knowledge to drama?

I made friends in the university with liberal students, outside the duelling Corps, who were glad to talk with an Englishman of these things; and these companions tended to be students of literature rather than my fellows from the research laboratories. Our conversations often took the form of one hour's English exchanged for one hour's German. I had brought a silk hat and tail suit with me from England, and this made me an embarrassing number of new friends, for every student needed such an outfit in which to pay his formal call on his professors once a term. Borrowing was the rule; and sometimes the student returning my clothes was accompanied by another known to him but not to me, who bowed stiffly on my threshold and asked if he might have the honour of wearing them next.

The afternoons were spent in walking or riding, horseback or bicycle, with such student acquaintances; and on Sundays we joined in scrambles on the Bavarian peaks, where the rock was friable and treacherous compared with the basalt of the Lakes or North Wales which I already knew. We carried coils of rope which were seldom used: at the summit there was generally a comfortable inn crowded with walkers who had come up by the path and were toasting the beauties of the view in beer or red Tiroler wine. On such days one returned too late for the theatre; but most of my other evenings were spent there, always with a student card at minimum price. By this time I knew the personalities of all the players, and even of the prompter who read each part aloud, sometimes too audibly, from his hooded box in the middle of the footlights. It was perhaps too much to expect of any company that they should keep the text of as many as ten plays in their heads at the same time. But to remember words was easier than to preserve distinctions of character: type-playing showed itself as the real weakness of the repertory system. Some of the heavy fathers, elderly spinsters and young lovers soon appeared rather in the manner of a stage procession, whose individual members had gone off and were coming on again with old familiar faces.

It was the director's task to give variety and freshness to plays under these casting conditions. The total repertory required two or three of these Regisseure beside the general director responsible for all productions; and there was always an evening director (Abendregisseur) who timed and scrutinized every act and scene, and had powers to call an extra rehearsal any morning. Directors of separate plays had a free hand, and some of them showed an individual imagination that went far beyond the most skilful of stage management. I began to know one director by his lighting, another by his variation of stage levels; and to see possibilities in the art of staging plays which our English theatre, in spite of Craig's writings, had not begun to realize. With all this in mind, I sought to make back-stage contacts which would help me to understand the technical aspect of theatre. My first ambition was to write plays; but I wanted to work myself into theatre life, to attend rehearsals, and to learn how everything was done. This was far from easy, for a German theatre playing repertory had no time to spare for a young English scientist with a dramatic hobby. As for other students, they laughed at me and advised making love to an actress; adding that after a week of her I should find a waitress more fun. There was something in this, for when I met stage folk I found them personally disappointing. I remember that one of the directors envied me the life of science, and said that whenever he entered a stage door he felt he should put on the white overalls of a specialist, because the artist was a pathological case.

At about this time Shaw's Candida was announced by the Schauspielhaus, and on going to the first night I found that the director, misreading a stage direction which describes the poet Marchbanks as having apparently slept in the heather, had dressed him as a sportsman who only needed a rifle to be in perfect trim for deer-stalking. Otherwise the play had been understood well enough. I wrote to Shaw to give an account of this production, and received by return mail one of those lively postcards which all who know him, and others too, have accumulated in the course of years. This message from the Dichter was a sufficient passport to the authorities of the theatre, I was invited to rehearsals of all foreign plays, and at the director's suggestion I was emboldened to write two articles on English and Irish drama for the Neueste Nachrichten, where they duly appeared. So it happened that my first earnings as a writer were for work in a language not my own. A student of philosophy had looked over the script for me; and sharing the fifty marks which arrived at my Munich address by money order, we had a convivial evening at a wine shop, for as he said philosophically, that is always better for men of letters than a beerhouse. On the way home I was obliged to stop and tell him how strongly the Dichter Shaw would have disapproved our entire proceeding, had he known of it; but he sawed the air with vague gestures and imaginary further toasts to die schöne Philosophie. During the evening we had become sworn brothers in the student fashion. Physicists and mathematicians now began to ask me why I was no longer attending their lectures, but writing for the papers instead. I snatched a fortnight's holiday in Vienna and Budapest, going third class by night train, to think about this question of science and art.

At the Burgtheater in Vienna I was able to see German classics played with gestures in proportion to the immensity of the stage. Those were the great days of the Burg, when even the ushers, dignified grey-haired men, wore gold braid on their uniforms and carried cocked hats which got in the way of their selling of programmes. The vast Imperial box faced the stage from the middle of the first balcony, and one evening I saw it occupied by Franz-Joseph. I could now appreciate the life of Vienna, its cafés where all the business of the city was done, the Prater and the vineyards of the Wienerwald, the Zentralcafé with its chess-players and their lookers-on, and the old town within the Ring. This was before the time of the Theater in der Josefstadt, and I recall nothing on the stage that was half as exciting as the Breughels and the Danube. Maybe, at twenty-three, the poise of life was helping to balance the authority of science and the attraction of art. At Budapest, without understanding a word, I could follow the performance both of classics and some modern plays in the style since perfected by Molnar. A strong and colourful theatricality marked everything on the Hungarian stage, from the State Theatre to the gipsy cabarets; but in this capital too the drama of living for me was uppermost.

When I came back to Munich the city seemed more provincial than ever. I took a dislike, quite unreasonably, to the youths and maidens munching ham rolls in the long interval at the Schauspielhaus, and the endless procession of their dull elders circulating in the corridor around the hat-and-cloak rooms, the compulsory financial pillar of the German stage. I knew how important an institution this theatre was to the young life of Germany, as it had been to me; but nothing less than the stage of Berlin, where plays had long runs and Reinhardt was in command at the Deutsches Theater, would have contented me. I had to escape from science and Bavaria together. At the worst, I knew that an English honours graduation followed by a German post-graduate course could always earn me a living in a university college at home; and meanwhile the world was giving me a free chance as writer and theatre man.

An opportunity arose of going to Zurich for a further stay in Europe, and I accepted it at once. The change of university solved the scientific problem forthwith, and new surroundings promised greater freedom of every kind. Perhaps the Alps of Switzerland were higher too; it was certain that the Zugspitze was dwindling. This was the summer of 1908; and had I known it, I was saying farewell to Old Germany and everything it meant. Leaning from the window as the train started, I exchanged the familiar Du with fellow-students, and then blew a kiss to a Munich girl I had never set eyes on before. When we were safely moving out, she returned it gaily. An hour or two later we drew up on a pier by Lake Constance, and embarked on a steamboat which lost the German shore to view before sighting the Swiss lowlands with their jagged background. Yes, the Alps were higher; and the next great lake with the city at its outflow looked very much as the posters of Continental travel had always pictured it.