Chapter 1
Maurice Maeterlinck and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
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Abstract
The European modernist theatre started in Belgium around 1900 with Maurice Maeterlinck, a key-figure of the European retheatralization movement. This movement aimed to bring about a rebirth of the theatre as an autonomous art by freeing it from the dictates of the dramatic text. Paradoxically, this started within the dramatic text: Maeterlinck’s. Profiting from the modernist crisis of language and representation, Maeterlinck frequently reduced the actor’s voice to silence and highlighted the language of its body. This chapter focuses on a fundamental problem discovered by Maeterlinck: the actor manifests himself both by the phenomenological reality of his physical body and by the semantic body of the role that he performs. Maeterlinck was the first to state that the individual human body (especially that of star actors) must be banned from the scene and replaced by a pure theatrical body sign. His favourite model was the marionette, which, hanging on threads as it does, also embodies the “tragique quotidien,” the fundamental determinism of all human beings. Given the powerful impact of his dramas on European stages, Maeterlinck’s program of depersonalization spread all over Europe. Modernists and avant-gardists radicalized it into increasing abstraction. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was especially fascinated by Maeterlinck’s combination of depersonalization and the “tragique quotidien.” However, influenced by Viennese historicism, Hofmannsthal looked for less radical solutions. Using the marionette as an aesthetic and anthropological model, he merged old European traditions (allegory and theatrum mundi) with modernist approaches (E. Craig’s “Über-Marionette”). This chapter sets out to trace this process in several dramatic texts and theatre projects of Hofmannsthal.