United States or Christmas Island ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It shows that Wagner had his plans for "Parsifal" fairly matured in 1862, and that it was not, as some critics, who see in it a decadence of his powers, claim, a late afterthought, designed to give to Bayreuth a curiosity somewhat after the façon of the Oberammergau "Passion Play." Decadence?
These pictures, still bright after more than a century's wear, go back to the time when the peasant boy, Franz Zwink, of Oberammergau, mixed paints for a famous artist who painted the interior of the Ettal Monastery and the village church.
All the effects of accumulated tradition, all the results of years of training tend to make of them, not actors at all, but living figures of the characters they represent. And we can look back over the history of Oberammergau, and see how, through the growth of this purpose of its life, it has come to be unique among all the towns of Europe.
That little even is forgotten in the intensity of human interest. The Devil and his machinations have vanished entirely. One sees in the religious customs of the people of Oberammergau few of the superstitions common among the peasant classes of other parts of Europe.
I myself felt a perfectly genuine and generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enterprise in new places like Oklahoma. But you would hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in Oberammergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant play, but the cinema. And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma.
He is the son of a Head Forester and was born in 1867 at that Oberammergau where all the inhabitants every ten years dismiss the barber and let their long locks curl about their necks, in order to perform before the assembled multitude their Passion Play, which is pleasing in the sight of God and profitable to them.
There was a brief account of how he had followed in the path of the Prince of Peace, and of the tremendous effect he had upon his audiences. Then came the war, which tore him from his humble home. The battle raged, the Bavarians charged the French lines, and the spot-light of the story was played upon a soldier from Oberammergau who lay wounded in "No-Man's Land."
A pestilence was raging in the villages in the mountains of Bavaria and death rode down the valleys like a mighty conqueror. Hundreds were smitten and the hand of death could not be stayed. Whole villages were depopulated and even the dead were left unburied. For a while the village of Oberammergau was favored, while neighboring villages were stricken.
In his little book, "Oberammergau und Seine Bewohner," Pastor Daisenberger says: "Superstitious beliefs and customs one does not find here." Even the ordinary ghost-stories and traditions of Germany are outworn and forgotten in this town. In 1634, so the tradition says, the black death came to Oberammergau, and one-tenth of the inhabitants died.
The history of this man illustrates what I mean by the Oberammergau spirit. In 1830 he was a young peasant who saw the possibilities of the Passion Play. He went to the head of the Monastery at Ettal, and vowed to consecrate his whole life to this work, if they would make him a priest and permit him to become the spiritual director of the people of the village.
Word Of The Day