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The festivals

In the summer of 1912 a three-week festival demonstrated the education and artistic activities of the Hellerau Institute. This culminated in a programme of 'plastic music representations', that included the Descent in the Underworld scene from Gluck’s Orpheus. Visitors came from many different countries – relatives, prospective students, artists, writers, royalty, statesmen, the curious public – over 4000 people arrived to see the place which several writers now called a new Bayreuth. During the day they could tour the garden city, watch classes and demonstrations of the eurhythmics method, and learn about the studio-theatre and its extraordinary lighting apparatus. Incredulous visitors returning from Hellerau described an entire community animated by a single idea and goal, and spoke of children and adults alike practicing eurhythmics exercises in the streets and open areas of the new garden city.

The following summer, 1913, the school mounted the complete Orpheus. The festival consisted of three cycles each taking place over two days. The first day consisted entirely of demonstrations and training, and at the second, following an afternoon presentation of exercises, Orpheus was given in its entirety. The press and public hailed the production as a major artistic breakthrough.

picture Festival presentation of eurhythmics


Appia's stage settings for Orpheus

This is a version created by Appia in 1926 of his design for the Descent of Orpheus staged at Hellerau in 1912 and 1913.

picture Design for The Decent of Orpheus

This is a version created by Appia in 1926, of his 1912 design for the Elysian Fields scene in Orpheus, Act three.

picture Design for the Elysian Fields scene in Orpheus


The performance of Orpheus

picture The Mourners, Orpheus Act 1

picture Rehearsal photo of Orpheus and the Furies


Reactions to the festivals

5,000 people in all attended the Festival of 1913. The visitors included great many illustrious artists. Shaw and Granville Barker came from England; Max Reinhardt, Ernst Stern, Alfred Roller, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Leopold Jessner, Oskar Kokoschka and Rudolf von Laban from Germany; from Russia, Rachmaninoff, Stanislavski, Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Pavolova; from France Georges Pitoeff, Paul Claudel, and Darius milhaud; and a great many others, including the major European theatre critics.

A selection of eye-witness reactions

One easily forgets that the Hellerau Institute is a school. Indeed, in light of the perfection of the Orpheus interpretation, one is irresistibly drawn into believing that the only goal of the Institute is the staging of masterpieces

Through all three acts one never had the feeling that one was at a presentation: we had before us real life, translated into music, magnificent music, which became living. It could not be otherwise, since all the performers were possessed by music; it possesses them both physically and emotionally; the music was for them a principle of life like the act of breathing…the radiating inner beauty was indescribable. Most impressive of all was the naturalness – one forgot that it was an opera – the most conventional and unbelievable of all arts.

It is a union of music, the plastic sense, and light, the like of which I have never seen… the painted canvases, the props, all the ridiculous encumbrance of the old theatre are swept away; everything is replaced by an architecture which gives the essential lines of the dramatic action and fixes the course and direction along which it develops.

It was music made visible, and when the curtain had fallen…men and women stood shouting their delight at the revelation of a new form of art.

The following are sketches by Hugo Böttinger illustrating "the dance of the furies" from the Hellerau production of Orpheus

picture Hugo Böttinger sketch 1

picture Hugo Böttinger sketch 2

picture Hugo Böttinger sketch 3

picture Hugo Böttinger sketch 4

picture Hugo Böttinger sketch 5


Orpheus and Eurydice

From the very beginning of opera in Renaissance Italy, the myth of Orpheus has occupied a prominent position in the artistic consciousness of composers and librettists. In Greek mythology, the gods were the first to enjoy the creative power of music making. It was therefore not fortuitous that Orpheus – an exceptionally gifted poet and musician – should be uniquely permitted by the gods to cross the dreaded gulf between life and death in search of is bride who had been mortally wounded by a viper on their wedding day.

When Gluck first took of this theme for his opera Orpheus and Eurydice, performed initially in Vienna in 1762 he was determined to treat it in a manner that stripped away the fossilised conventions of the Italian opera seria in order to concentrate instead on the emotional core of the myth. In this early version of the opera, there is a clarity and simplicity that is strikingly different from anything seen before on the operatic stage. It was these qualities which made a presentation of it at Hellerau, attractive to Appia and Jaques-Dalcroze.

Later additions to the opera, some written by Gluck for a production of the opera in Paris in 1774, and others by a succession of composer throughout the nineteenth century, have only served to obscure the elegant simplicity of this original version. Jaques-Dalcroze and Appia, in planning their 1913 production of the opera appear to have worked from one of these later version, which was doubtless instrumental in persuading them to revert to the opening funeral scene at the end of their production as a means of avoiding the lengthy pastoral dances added to the conclusion of these later versions.


Gluck and opera

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) was the leading figure of the reform of operatic conventions in the pre-classical period running from approximately 1750 to 1770. He was born in Bohemia, studied in Italy, visited London – where he was impressed and briefly influenced by the stage works of Handel, traveled back through France -- where the early works of Rameau made a further assessment necessary, and eventually became court composer to the emperor at Vienna, where he wrote Orpheus and Eurydice in 1762.

In the preface to the opera Alceste, of 1769, he wrote of his desire to confine music to its true function of serving the poetry without interruptions and superfluous ornaments. In pursuit of this aim, he was prepared to sacrifice all of the conventions of Italian opera if necessary in order to create what he believed was the ideal of opera initially proclaimed one hundred and fifty years earlier by the founders of the style.

My intention was to purify music from all the abuses which have crept into Italian opera through the vanity of the singers and the excessive compliance of the composer and have made the most splendid and beautiful of all arts the most ridiculous and boring. It tried therefore to bring musicians back to their real task of serving the poetry by intensifying the expression of emotion and the appeal of every situation, without interrupting the plot or weakening it by unnecessary ornamentation.