The Actors and the Drama: Again!

UPDATED VERSION

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The following report is written as both a confirmation and an amplification of my remarks on the proper principles of Classical drama, remarks made in a trans-Atlantic telephone conversation at the beginning of this week.

The entirety of a true, Classical drama, such as a Shakespeare tragedy, or one by Friedrich Schiller, is properly conceived, composed, and acted as a subsumed expression of the principle of metaphor, as for William Empson's writing on this subject in his Seven Types of Ambiguity. The irony can be expressed in terms of three layers of awareness of the subject-matter. The first is that of the author and director. The second is that of the actor's awareness of the ironical viewpoint which is intended to be imparted, by the actors in the drama, to the awareness of the audience—in short, the metaphor which is the reality of any seriously composed Classical tragedy!. The third is the role to be performed by the actor's role on stage, in interaction with the audience.

Consider Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy as an example. Also bear in mind the tragedies of Aeschylus, the appropriate author of the authors of tragedy performed from behind the mask, on stage. The audience, for example, must never see the actor, but, rather, the part which the author is playing.

Behind, and underneath each and all of these considerations, there are no heroes among the principal figures portrayed on the stage of authentically performed, authentic tragedy. The hero, if he or she actually exists, is to be sought, as Schiller specified, from among the members of the audience, not the figures as portrayed on stage. In all of this, Schiller's Wallenstein and Jeanne d'Arc, who is, excepting one notable liberty taken by Schiller in Jeanne d'Arc's case, the most tempting example of the kind of point to be made.

Behind all these and related arrangements, there is an underlying principle of effect, which shall be plainly stated in the close of this report. However, I shall state, right now, the all-enclosing principle which the successful composition and performance of a truly Classical drama must express.

In certain leading published items published during the course of approximately the recent twelve months, and with some published references to this subject-matter earlier, I have stressed the matter of principle, that the identity of the human personality is not located within the realm of sensory experience as such; but, that our sense-perceptions are as but imperfect shadows of reality, not the reality of that individual personality. That is the relationship which the director and actors of the performance must achieve in the direction, rehearsal, and performance of authentic Classical tragedy.

Experience In Space

I have chosen to illustrate that point recently, both in discussions with my "Basement" associates, and in some written pieces, by posing the hypothetical, but also real case of the commander of a vessel in space who has no direct perceptual contact with that ongoing situation, but must rely for making judgments respecting his ongoing duties, on sets of instruments, each of which has a function of the type performed by a different quality of sense-perception.

You might ask why I have chosen to employ that specific kind of case. The answer is readily at hand. There is no empty space, but, rather, a highly complex mass of physically efficient cosmic radiation. "Space" might appear to be more or less "empty," because the pilot has no organ of sense with which to show him, explicitly, that there is no "empty space." Thus, the reality of the pilot's situation demands that he eliminate the illusion which would be the sense of experiencing what does not exist, "empty space," but only the absence of sensory knowledge of that which fills the experiencing of distance.

Thus, we point to the fact that the function of the actual human mind is not encompassed by sense-perception. Sense-perceptions are the shadows which are cast upon the actual human mind, "from outside," as the case of our pilot in space suggests. Hence, all sense-experience of physical realities is not real in itself, but really only shadows, rather than the substance, of "what is out there." The director and the body of actors of the Classical drama must sense this experience of "empty distance" as a kind of stress.

So, we must recognize which aspects of sense-impressions are not real, and, therefore, what the other person is not. Hence, all truth, on stage, or otherwise, is often hidden behind mere shadows which we might imagine to have been cast by that which is not real. To remove some of the obvious difficulty that proposition implies, we must resort to the development of those of our powers of insight which enable us to distinguish reality from shadows in such matters as these, the shadows identified as such by those methods of what is identifiable as Platonic hypothesis, methods based upon that notion of hypothesis associated with such discoveries as what Albert Einstein recognized as Johannes Kepler's actual act of discovery of the principle of universal gravitation.

Laplace, who should have known the work of Kepler in detail, was never able to discover the actual principle of gravitation; however, the reasons for his failure are clearly to be located in his attachment to the failed principles of Sarpian Liberalism, an adopted incompetence which he shared with his accomplice Augustin Cauchy.

Wallenstein

A certain small-minded specialist suffered the delusion, that the "tragic principle" of the Wallenstein trilogy is to be identified with Wallenstein's violation to his oath with the emperor. Some credulous believers in the argument of that specialist, believers known to me, swallowed that nonsensical, suggested view of matters.

What was the actual principle exhibited by Schiller's actually scientific view of history bearing of the subject of his Wallenstein trilogy? Working on background, as we must usually do in such cases, the Thirty Years War was a continuation of the entire sweep of the religious warfare which dominated the history of the A.D. 1492-1648 interval. That sweep is marked by the relative collapse of the Habsburg domination of European affairs, and by the failure of the extended Council of Trent, which cleared the way for the rising power of the influence of the dogma of that Paolo Sarpi whose dogmatic philosophical Liberalism would clear the way for the shift of the center of power in Europe, from the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic regions dominated by the Anglo-Dutch system of Sarpianism's philosophical Liberalism. The Thirty Years War of A.D. 1618-1648, saw the temporary rise of the power of France, but then the fall of France's power as orchestrated by the consolidation of the Anglo-Dutch expression of Venetian power from behind the curtains, around the Sarpian Anglo-Dutch Liberal power which was established by Lord Shelburne's triumph in the February 1763 Peace of Paris ending "The Seven Years War."

Now, then, consider Friedrich Schiller's intensive strategic studies of the war in the Netherlands, and the continuation of that legacy in the eruption and continuation of the Thirty Years War beyond the death of Wallenstein. Now, against such elements of historical background, read Schiller's Wallenstein Trilogy from beginning to close.

What, precisely, has happened? Or, better said, what has happened strategically?

Ask oneself: what is the difference between the opinions and passions of the participants in that segment of the real history of the Thirty Years War which encompasses the role of a living Wallenstein? What has happened to transform the course of European history over the period which the viewers of the performance of the Wallenstein Trilogy have available to them as the actual experience of not only the 1492-1648 history of Europe, through the death of England's Queen Anne? What is known of that history and its outcome through the American and European history up through the time of the death of Schiller? What has happened, as known to author and historian Schiller, during this interval of history? What is that playwright saying to the audience of his own adult life-time with the composition and performance of his Wallenstein trilogy?

Through whose eyes and ears, and at what distance in the passage of the experience of space-time, is the setting of the experience of 1618-1634 presented to Schiller's own contemporary audience? Is the audience's knowledge the knowledge of what had happened during and following that experience put upon the stage? Shall we view what is being considered only as an immediately current event in such a radically existentialist fashion as to implicitly deny the efficient existence of history as a force within the present moment? Shall we presume that only the present moment exists, as more or less independent of even the most traumatic effects of earlier history? Should we presume that society has no moral right to employ past experience as of relevance to the oncoming future time?

How, then, do we express such efficient truths on stage?

Let us therefore emphasize that "Seven Types of Ambiguity," is the subject of historical irony respecting past, present, and future all at once. The most crucial of such ambiguities is that of metaphor, the juxtaposition of a set of contradictory, but coincident states of being, a coincidence which expresses the past, present, and future of a process, all as if within the frame of a single experience of thought.

The function of the true Classical drama, is to present that multiply ironical juxtaposition of this efficiently contrasted states of being, of combined points of reference, as in a single conception of thought.

The actor must know the character he plays, and the setting in which the characters of stage are situated with respect to past, present, and future, all at once. It is the effect of a prescience of that and its prospective outcomes, which the interaction of the players as a unified domain must reflect. It is the tension so defined for both the players and their audiences, which is a measure of the standard for a successful play and its performance. The play must thus enrich their immortal souls!

I now add the following to the foregoing portions of this present edition of the report.

The Case of Don Giovanni

The typically, relatively good performances of Mozart's Don Giovanni are usually spoiled, a spoiling as if by a kind of apparent tradition expressed in the handiwork of the usual directors' role in staging.

The opening scene, with the killing of the Commendatore, and that proximately closing part, the setting and performance of the confrontation between Don Giovanni and the statue, are often well done by the relevant professionals. I think that the crucial, ironical point of the supplementary, closing episode, when included, is often mislain, that, chiefly, because of the tendency for an almost Romantic opera-seria silliness in most of what proceeds between the opening scene and the last act's approach to the confrontation between the statue and Don Giovanni. One often wonders if the parts in between the opening, and the scene with the statue, are being staged as a kind of attempt to please the customary "shicky-mickeys" occupying in the better-paying seats of the audience.

During and immediately following what is called "World War II," I was informed by what were known to me, then, as professionally Classically trained young musicians of approximately my own generation, of their habit of standing outside the premises of major musical events in New York City, hoping for a cheap, or perhaps even free ticket to the performance.

Then, beginning with the time after the close of the war, the depravity which became Professor Sidney Hook's European "Congress for Cultural Freedom" joined with the philistine whore's passion for the pure fraud of elevated pitch, and the morality of professionals and audiences alike who tended to become redolently "spoiled."

What has transpired, in fact, between the opening scene and the second part which leads into and through the confrontation with the statue? Then, what is deadly bit of irony in the inclusion of the postlude?

What is, quite literally, the Hell going on between the opening scene and during the second part of the last act leading into the role of the statue? In the reality of the libretto used by Mozart, what is actually happening in the parts betwixt and between, is the pure evil summarized by the catalogue aria's scenes. Why is that character of the parts between the opening drama and the second part of the last act not presented as the growing sense of tension associated with the hopeless quality of hellishness among the players in the parts between?

Then, there comes the waiting moment of triumph in the judgment passed on Don Giovanni himself; but, then, there is the closing note, that, notwithstanding what just happened to Don Giovanni, the same-old, same-old, is still back in business, singing the same-old, same-old, pretty music, all over again.

None of this problem with the typical staging and performances could have occurred, if the profundity of the creative genius of Mozart had not been passed over in the staging, passed over for whatever assortment of reasons, in the rather typical qualities of performances in between the opening moment and the scene with the statue.

There is nothing morbid, or silly in the mind of that genius, Mozart, which apparently was a more master of Bach's practice of composing fugues, as that achievement followed Haydn's revolution in composing string quartets, and Mozart's own experience with van Swieten's Sunday, Vienna salon. Do not permit a specific quality of elegant genius in Mozart's Bachian counterpoint mislead you. Perhaps this corruption expresses what many performers, or their patrons, wished to adduce from the Haydn-Mozart experience of Bach's genius; this, perhaps, because, perhaps, they have wished to separate the heirs of grandpa Bach from the superficiality to which they aspired to consign Bach's heirs, Mozart notably included. Truly Classical composition would not have been possible without the continued celebration of, and devotion to revolutionary impact expressed by Bach, without that Bach expressed by the St. John and St. Matthew Passions.

In all truly Classical great tragedy, that in the tradition of Bach's St. John and St. Matthew passions—as by Mozart's own, great Requiem, there is an obligatory expression of a union of the profoundly tragic history of mankind, but also the ironical expression of joyful realization of the true principle of triumph through the experience of tragedy. So, among the quality of audience which should have walked out of the theater when the performance of Don Giovanni had been completed, there should have been an induced sense of a hearty sense of triumphant laughter tragedy in the case which had just been performed: "Don't you see, that despite the silliness of the survivors of the developments in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Mozart himself is certain of the triumph of his personal mission in history, in the end.

Naturally, the typical folly of most audiences which I have observed as departing the experience of a great tragic work such as Mozart's Don Giovanni, is that they are silly pessimists who can not recognize the triumphant quality of the European civilization expressed in the lesson of that still-living past history taught by Schiller's profoundly insightful, and exhaustively accurate and profound treatment of modern European history; that being what is expressed in the view of the experience of the hero Wallenstein of which Schiller's own view, presented to his audiences of his time, of the history of modern Europe is to be seen more clearly, through Schiller's own composition of that great trilogy, a trilogy in whose presence the audiences of Schiller's time, and still today, sit or stand in awe of the genius of that real-life history itself, and of the profundity of Schiller's own genius, his insight into the larger process of history within which the reality of European history up to that moment in the theater when the trilogy of the historical Wallenstein should be intended to be performed for the audiences since Schiller's own time.

We, today, live in precisely such kinds of times, and we must inform ourselves to view such matters in this fashion. Hail the pure genius of Mozart? Indeed! But understand his true passion, in laughing at the Satans of Vienna, then, now, today, once, again!