FOREIGN DRAMA ON THE ENGLISH AND 

 AMERICAN STAGE 1 



II. GERMAN DRAMA 

 By Charles C. Ayer 



If Germany has been less prolific than France in furnishing the 

 English and American stage with plays, a study of some good history 

 of German literature and especially an examination of old files of theater 

 programs will show that we are nevertheless indebted to Germany for 

 many valuable contributions to our repertory either in the form of direct 

 translations or as adaptations. 



The theater in Germany originated, as it did in France and elsewhere, 

 in the church. It formed a part of the service dealing with sacred sub- 

 jects or events drawn from the Scriptures or from the lives of the saints. 

 To these were added allegorical representations of didactic trend. From 

 the church the drama gradually moved out upon the public square but 

 did not lose its moralizing tendency even in the plays of Hans Sachs. 



With all of this mediaeval theater, we have nothing to do. It merely 

 belongs to dramatic history, as it does in France. Indeed, to find the 

 first German milestone on the English stage, we should move on to mod- 

 ern times without delay, had it not been for Richard Wagner (1813-83). 

 He was inspired to devote his genius to the redevelopment of mediaeval 

 sagas, with the result that, indirectly at least, many of the stories of the 

 Middle Ages are now accessible to us in operatic form. Tannhauser 

 (1845) has been traced back in popular legend to the fourteenth century 

 and Lohengrin (1847) to the end of the thirteenth century. Likewise 

 Parsifal, the sacred music drama which Wagner dedicated to the fes- 

 festival theater at Bayreuth in 1882, dates back to the famous poem by 

 Wolfram von Eschenbach, which is said to have been written between 

 1205 and 1220. Also the four operas of the Nibelungenring, Rheingold 

 (1854), Die Walkure (1856), Siegfried (1869) and Die Gotterdammerung 

 (1874), with which the Bayreuth Festival Theater was opened in 1876, 



1 See "Foreign Drama on the English and American Stage. I. French Drama," University of Colo- 

 rado Studies, Vol. VI, No. 4, pp. 287-97, June, 1909. 



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