MODERN DRAMA

The flowering of modernism in turn-of-the-century Vienna is most generally associated with poets and men of letters gathering in coffee-houses, with the artists and architects of the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, and with the musicians of the Second Viennese School; but there were also a series of significant events in the theatre which contributed to the new impetus. The importance that was accorded to the theatre is reflected in Stefan Zweig's account of how the middle-class Viennese of the period scanned their newspapers not for political news but for articles about the theatre — a classic illustration of the divorce between intellectual and artistic life and political developments.

One of the catalysts of the modernist movement in Vienna was an ‘Ibsen week’ in April 1891, when the Norwegian dramatist attended the first night of the Burgtheater production of The Pretenders and of the first Austrian performance of The Wild Duck in the Deutsches Volkstheater, and there were performances of four plays in all in the Burgtheater and the Deutsches Volkstheater. Just under a year later, the appearance of Eleonora Duse in the Carltheater provided the young Hofmannsthal with ’the most powerful theatrical impression’ he had received up to then. One of the roles she played on that first visit was Ibsen's Nora. The Theater an der Wien was the site of a series of important performances by touring celebrities: Sarah Bernhardt appeared there in 1882, 1887, and 1908; Eleonora Duse in 1895, 1900 (she also played in the Burgtheater that year), 1906, and 1907; the Berlin companies of Otto Brahm in 1906 and 1907 and of Max Reinhardt in 1905, 1907, and 1910.