In The Ghost Sonata, the close of Scene One, the exposing of Hummel in Scene Two, and the Student’s narration to the Girl in Scene Three are three significant instances of “states of consciousness” which “become intensified, grow more and more dense, then get entangled, either to be disentangled again or to end in unbearable inextricability.” The exposition by Hummel in Scene One surely induces in the Student—and in the audience—a sense of “unbearable inextricability” not unlike the “expository” passages in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano or the accumulation of questions in The Lesson (where the Student responds physically to words which have become like solid objects enclosing her). She divorced the Baron and married Strindberg in 1877, a scandalous move that was widely publicized. The Ghost Sonata, with that hallucinatory clarity peculiar to the surrealistic work, focuses on the universality and inescapability of guilt, bearing down on “innocent” and “sinful” alike in a debacle which seems fully as terrible as the pagan retribution rejected by the play—and this despite the concluding unction of the Student’s words on patience and hope, accompanied by “a white light,” Bocklin, and “soft, sweet, melancholy” music. This cadence can perhaps best be described in terms of Schopenhauer’s doctrine concerning the various stages in the objectification of the Will. He murdered the Dead Man by burdening him with debts he could not repay. Over the course of his lifetime, his madness took many forms. Richardson, Maurice. Trivia The Ghost Sonata is a 1907 play in three acts by Swedish playwright August Strindberg. What they really meant was that he descended to earth, to this penal colony, to this madhouse and morgue of a world. The two meet one morning. This supernatural ability allowed him to see into the future the night before, and save the inhabitants of the house that collapsed. artistic movements of the twentieth century, and as models for some of the great modern dramatists to follow, they are now viewed as monumental turning points in the history of dramatic literature. Outside on the steps are the Lady in Black and the Caretaker’s Wife. She tells the Old Man that, in spite of their crimes, everyone in the house is good at heart, and better than him, because they regret their sins and have been long-suffering because of them. Strindberg, August. Now the Lady in Black is engaged to Baron Skanskorg, an aristocrat who must first divorce his current wife before marrying his new love. His life and career at the turn of the twentieth century, however, was a twisting path of minor successes and major public humiliations, of deep psychological and spiritual turmoil, and of a love-hate relationship with women that scarred his mind and inspired him to some of his best writing. Indeed, the Student’s present inability to rescue anyone at all from the Colonel’s house was forecast (perhaps “prefigured” is the better word) by his earlier experience in the burning house. Also includes a chronology of Strindberg’s work and a bibliography of other research sources. Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg Translation by Katarina Carlson, Patrick Scheid, & Zach Trebino Adaptation by Zach Trebino & the ensemble 3 Pause. Life has its ups and downs, as we all know, and I have been in his service, and once he was in mine. Even the minor characters of the play live on a merry-go-round of betrayal. The great danger of this classification is, of course, that it encourages one to cultivate certain critical attitudes toward Strindberg’s work, perhaps to the neglect of other, equally valid, view-points. After he had struggled with the angel, Jacob’s name was changed to “Israel,” for his sons were to found the tribes of that nation. In a final irony, the Student, far from preserving any of the self-destructive and doomed “Hummel family of vampires,” is perhaps himself converted by them. SOURCES 2021 . It is about " a young student, who idealizes the lives of the inhabitants of a stylish apartment building in Stockholm. This would seem to leave the field clear for the blossoming of young love, the ghost house purged. some say it’s my own fault—others blame my parents—personally I blame it all on life itself. The Ghost Sonata is a tragic play, and thus it follows the pyramid structure of the classical tragedy.. Firstly, The Status Quo – the residents of the house are a refined, civilized bunch that both the student and the old man respect and envy in equal measure. Hummel is, of course, the patriarch of the, “AND THUS IT APPEARS THAT STRINDBERG HAS PRESENTED US WITH NOTHING LESS THAN A MODERN-DRESS, THOROUGHLY UPDATED PARABLE OF REDEMPTION—BUT A REDEMPTION STRIPPED OF ITS CHRISTIAN IDEALISM AND OPTIMISM.”. Alison hunts for Taylor; Buried secrets threaten Caitlin, Ava and Dylan as they tighten the noose around their number one suspect. Guy is a rare beast mykullmelton. a thing to shudder at.” The “underlying narrative” is complex in the telling, but perfectly lucid as the embodiment of this main theme. The Colonel suffers all the lies he has told to create the illusion of a happy, prosperous life. That evening, inside the house, Bengtsson and the other servants are setting up for the inhabitants’ traditional “ghost supper.” Johansson has joined them as a waiter. After a stretch of a few years during which Strindberg scorned the company of women, he married for the last time in 1901. .”. Director Hummel who fears a milk girl, can not see, but the Student can. .” (Isaiah LXV:9). One-by-one the guests arrive—the Student; Miss Beatrice von Holsteinkrona, the Old Man’s former fiancee from upstairs; Baron Skanskorg, whom the Old Man recognizes as a jewel thief; and Amelia, the Mummy. In a book that describes trends in dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the twentieth century, Nicoll places August Strindberg alongside Ibsen and his other Scandinavian contemporaries in an essay titled “Strindberg and the Play of the Subconscious.”. He did not sanction the more radical implications of, say, Gordon Craig’s manifestoes in The Mask which championed an almost autonomous aesthetic of the theatre, an aesthetic foreseen by Hegel when he wrote, of developments in the arts of the theatre: that which in the first instance had merely the force of an assistant and accompaniment, becomes an object on its own account, and receives the appearance in its own domain of an essentially independent beauty. The Ghost Sonata 3. But by Scene II we are as suspicious of Hummel’s intention as is the Mummy. The Ghost Sonata 3. “Think of living up there in the top flat,” he has said to his companion, “with a beautiful young wife, two pretty little children and an income of twenty thousand crowns a year.”. Girl, and the Student’s acquiescence to what is unmistakably a Schopenhauerian awareness of the hellishness of life. Hummel admits the “fairy-tale” quality of his narration to the Student, admits the near impossibility of disentangling the threads of earlier action and the current relationships among the characters. For the rest of his life Strindberg experienced a strong attraction toward women he thought of as pure, motherly figures, and a repulsion from women he damned as promiscuous sinners. Strindberg was an author whose life was an open book. I am not especially troubled by the fact that we find no ladders leading to heaven, or pillows of stone, in The Ghost Sonata. While the industrial age had brought many women out of the home and into the workplace, the jobs available to them were mainly unskilled, menial tasks that required long hours for little pay. The Student says of the girl’s house: “I thought it was paradise itself that first time I saw you coming in here.” But the flowers in the “paradise” are poisonous; it is in fact a place of ordeals, where no dreams come true. As a young man, the Colonel was actually a poor kitchen servant who stole Jacob Hummel’s fiancee from him. But what hereditary evil is, few know: it is believed to be doing evil; but it is willing and thence thinking evil. For her part, Siri was enchanted by romantic notions of the theatre and wanted to leave her dull family life and become We have not witnessed this play for long before getting a disturbing sense that nothing is quite right, that even a “spiritual logic” is being tampered with. In the following essay, Berry presents how Strindberg uses the dialogue and staging of The Ghost Sonata to develop his concept of reality as a “single and unified fabric consisting of a homogeneous blend of matter and mind.”. Lane A. Glenn is a Ph.D. specializing in theatre history and literature. The Milkmaid is a silent, suffering ghost who died innocent, and before her time. And from this rich background, Strindberg no doubt drew the materials which he has assembled to produce The Ghost Sonata. His wife is divorcing him and presenting him with a stone mansion just to get rid of him. thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob” (LX:16). Hummel, despite his wickedness, exerts incredible power over all others in the play, by keeping them in his debt. I must have been born with the latter kind in my veins, because I cannot see what is ugly as beautiful and I cannot call what is evil good. Young, heroic and idealistic at the beginning of the play, Arkenholtz has not yet seen enough of the world to know that what he wants—paradise on earth—is unattainable, that it doesn’t exist. Source: Stephen C. Bandy, “Strindberg’s Biblical Sources for The Ghost Sonata,” in Scandinavian Studies, August, 1968, Vol. Plan is to lie to the family has passed through Samaria while traveling from to! They divorced in 1891, and the Old Man casting a white on! 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