I saw her sometimes led by the hand, but oftenest without guide or protector,--never alone, however; for, rain or shine, early or late, she carried always in her arms a huge puppet, with a face bigger than her own. It wore a shawl and a knit hood, the child herself being always bareheaded. It was some time before I could fathom the mystery of this doll, which seemed shapeless yet bulky, and heavier than the child could well lift, though she tugged at it faithfully and with an expression of care, as we often see poor babies in cities lugging about babies a little younger than themselves. At last I caught the puppet out one day without its shawl, and the mystery was revealed. It was a milliner"s bonnet-block, on which a face had been painted. No wonder it seemed heavy and shapeless; below the face was nothing but a rough base of wood. It appeared that as soon as the thing was given to the child, she conceived for it a most inconvenient and unmanageable affection,--would go nowhere without it, would not go to sleep without it, could hardly be induced to put it for one moment out of her tired little arms, which could hardly clasp it round. It seemed but a fitting reward to perpetuate some token of such faithfulness; and after a good deal of pleading I induced the child"s aunt, in whose charge she lived, to bring her to be photographed with her doll in her arms. It was not an easy thing to compa.s.s this; for the only photographer of the town, being one of the singers in the chorus, had small leisure for the practice of his trade in the Pa.s.sion Play year; but, won over by the novelty of the subject, he found an odd hour for us, and made the picture. The little thing was so frightened at the sight of the strange room and instruments that she utterly refused to stand alone for a second, which was not so much of a misfortune as I thought at first, for it gave me the aunt"s face also; and a very characteristic Oberammergau face it is.
At the same time I also secured a photograph of the good Frau Rutz. It was an ill.u.s.tration of the inborn dramatic sense in the Oberammergau people, that when I explained to Frau Rutz that I wished her to sit for a picture of an Oberammergau woman at her carving, she took the idea instantly, and appeared prompt to the minute, with a vase of her own carving, her glue-pot, and all her tools, to lay on the table by her side. "Do you not think it would be better with these?" she said simply; then she took up her vase and tool, as if to work, seated herself at the table in a pose which could not be improved, and looked up with, "Is this right?" The photographer nodded his head, and, presto! in five seconds it was done; and Frau Rutz had really been artist of her own picture. The likeness did her less than justice. Her face is even more like an old Memling portrait than is the picture.
Weather-beaten, wrinkled, thin,--as old at forty-five as it should be by rights at sixty,--hers is still a n.o.ble and beautiful countenance.
Nothing would so surprise Frau Rutz as to be told this. She laughed and shook her head when, on giving her one of the photographs, I said how much I liked it. "If it had another head on it, it might be very good," she said. She is one of the few women in Oberammergau who do delicate carving. In the previous winter she had made thirty vases of this pattern, besides doing much other work.
Very well I came to know Frau Rutz"s chiselled and expressive old face before I left Oberammergau. The front door of her house stood always open; and in a tiny kitchen opposite it,--a sort of closet in the middle of the house, lighted only by one small window opening into the hall, and by its door, which was never shut,--she was generally to be seen stirring or skimming, or scouring her bright saucepans. Whenever she saw us, she ran out with a smile, and the inquiry if there was anything she could do for us. On the day before the Pa.s.sion Play she opened her little shop. It was about the size of a steamboat stateroom, built over a bit of the sidewalk,--Oberammergau fashion,--and joined at a slant to the house; it was a set of shelves roofed over, and with a door to lock at night, not much more: eight people crowded it tight; but it was packed from sill to roof with carvings, a large part of which had been made by herself, her husband and sons, or workmen in their employ, and most of which, I think, were sold by virtue of the Frau"s smile, if it proved as potent a lure to other buyers as to me. If I drove or walked past her house without seeing it, I felt as if I had left something behind for which I ought to go back; and when she waved her hand to us, and stood looking after us as our horses dashed round the corner, I felt that good luck was invoked on the drive and the day.
Driving out of Oberammergau, there are two roads to choose from,--one up the Ammer, by way of a higher valley, and into closer knots of mountains, and so on into the Tyrol; the other down the Ammer, through meadows, doubling and climbing some of the outpost mountains of the range, and so on out to the plains. On the first road lies Ettal, and on the other Unterammergau, both within so short a distance of Oberammergau that they are to be counted in among its pleasures.
Ettal is one of the twelve beautiful houses which the ecclesiastics formerly owned in this part of Bavaria. These old monks had a quick eye for beauty of landscape, as well as a shrewd one for all other advantages of locality; and in the days of their power and prosperity they so crowded into these South Bavarian highlands that the region came to be called "Pfaffenwinkel," or "The Priest"s Corner." Abbeys, priories, and convents--a dozen of them, all rich and powerful--stood within a day"s journey of one another. Of these, Ettal was pre-eminent for beauty and splendor. It was founded early in the fourteenth century by a German emperor, who, being ill, was ready to promise anything to be well again, and being approached at this moment by a crafty Benedictine, promised to found a Benedictine monastery in the valley of the Ammer, if the Holy Virgin would restore him to health.
An old tradition says that as the emperor came riding up the steep Ettaler Berg, at the summit of which the monastery stands, his horse fell three times on his knees, and refused to go farther. This was construed to be a sign from heaven to point out the site of the monastery. But to all unforewarned travellers who have approached Oberammergau by way of Ettal, and been compelled to walk up the Ettaler Berg, there will seem small occasion for any suggestion of a supernatural cause for the emperor"s horse tumbling on his knees. A more unmitigated two miles of severe climb was never built into a road; the marvel is that it should have occurred to mortal man to do it, and that there is as yet but one votive tablet by the roadside in commemoration of death by apoplexy in the attempt to walk up. It was Alois Pfaurler who did thus die in July, 1866,--and before he was half-way up, too. Therefore this tablet on the spot of his death has a depressing effect on people for the latter half of their struggle, and no doubt makes them go slower.
How much the Benedictines of Ettal had to do with the Pa.s.sion Play which has made Oberammergau so famous, it is now not possible to know.
Those who know most about it disagree. In 1634, the year in which the play was first performed, it is certain that the Oberammergau community must have been under the pastoral charge of some one of the great ecclesiastical establishments in that region; and it is more than probable that the monks, who were themselves much in the way of writing and performing in religious plays, first suggested to the villagers this mode of working for the glory and profit of the Church.
Their venerable pastor, Daisenberger, to whom they owe the present version of the Pa.s.sion Play, was an Ettal monk; and one of the many plays which he has arranged or written for their dramatic training is "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal." The closing stanzas of this well express the feeling of the Oberammergauer to-day, and no doubt of the Ettal monk centuries ago, in regard to the incomparable Ammer Thal region:--
"Let G.o.d be praised! He hath this vale created To show to man the glory of his name!
And these wide hills the Lord hath consecrated Where he his love incessant may proclaim.
"Ne"er shall decay the valley"s greatest treasure, Madonna, thou the pledge of Heaven"s grace!
Her blessings will the Queen of Heaven outmeasure To her quiet Ettal and Bavaria"s race."
Most travellers who visit Oberammergau know nothing of Unterammergau, except that the white and brown lines of its roofs and spires make a charming dotted picture on the Ammer meadows, as seen from the higher seats in the Pa.s.sion Play theatre. The little hamlet is not talked about, not even in guide-books. It sits, a sort of Cinderella, and meekly does its best to take care of the strangers who come grumbling to sleep there, once in ten years, only because beds are not to be had in its more favored sister village farther up the stream. Yet it is no less picturesque, and a good deal cleaner, than is Oberammergau; gets hours more of sunshine, a freer sweep of wind, and has compa.s.sing it about a fine stretch of meadow-lands, beautiful to look at, and rich to reap.
Its houses are, like those in Oberammergau, chiefly white stucco over stone, or else dark and painted wood, often the lower story of white stucco and the upper one of dark wood, with a fringe of balconies, dried herbs, and wood-piles where the two stories join. Many of the stuccoed houses are gay with Scripture frescos, more than one hundred years old, and not faded yet. There are also many of the curious ancient windows, made of tiny round panes set in lead. When these are broken, square panes have to be set in. n.o.body can make the round ones any more. On the inside of the brown wooden shutters are paintings of bright flowers; over the windows, and above the doors, are also Scripture frescos. One old house is covered with them. One scene is Saint Francis lying on his back, with his cross by his side; and another, the coronation of the Virgin Mary, in which G.o.d the Father is represented as a venerable man wrapped in a red and yellow robe, with a long white beard, resting his hand on the round globe, while Christ, in a red mantle, is putting the crown on the head of Mary, who is resplendent in bright blue and red. On another wall is Saint Joseph, holding the infant Christ on his knee. There must have been a marvellous secret in the coloring of these old frescos, that they have so long withstood the snows, rains, and winds of the Ammer valley. The greater part of them were painted by one Franz Zwink, in the middle of the last century. The peasants called him the "wind painter," because he worked with such preternatural rapidity. Many legends attest this; among others, a droll one of his finding a woman at her churning one day and asking her for some b.u.t.ter. She refused. "If you"ll give me that b.u.t.ter," said Zwink, "I"ll paint a Mother of G.o.d for you above your door." "Very well; it is a bargain," said the woman, "provided the picture is done as soon as the b.u.t.ter," whereupon Zwink mounted to the wall, and, his brushes flying as fast as her churn dasher, lo!
when the b.u.t.ter was done, there shone out the fresh Madonna over the door, and the b.u.t.ter had been fairly earned. Zwink was an athletic fellow, and walked as swiftly as he painted; gay, moreover, for there is a tradition of his having run all the way to Munich once for a dance. Being too poor to hire a horse, he ran thither in one day, danced all night, and the next day ran back to Oberammergau, fresh and merry. He was originally only a color-rubber in the studio of one of the old rococo painters; but certain it is that he either stole or invented a most triumphant system of coloring, whose secret is unknown to-day. It is said that in 1790 every house in both Ober and Unter Ammergau was painted in this way. But repeated fires have destroyed many of the most valuable frescos, and many others have been ruthlessly covered up by whitewash. An old history of the valley says that when the inhabitants saw flames consuming these sacred images, they wept aloud in terror and grief, not so much for the loss of their dwellings as for the irreparable loss of the guardian pictures. The effect of these on a race for three generations,--one after another growing up in the habit, from earliest infancy, of gazing on the visible representations of G.o.d and Christ and the Mother of G.o.d, placed as if in token of perpetual presence and protection on the very walls and roofs of their homes--must be incalculably great. Such a people would be religious by nature, as inherently and organically as they were hardy of frame by reason of the stern necessities of their existence. It is a poor proof of the superiority of enlightened, emanc.i.p.ated, and cultivated intellect, with all its fine a.n.a.lyses of what G.o.d is not, if it tends to hold in scorn or dares to hold in pity the ignorance which is yet so full of spirituality that it believes it can even see what G.o.d is, and feels safer by night and day with a cross at each gable of the roof.
One of the Unterammergau women, seeing me closely studying the frescos on her house, asked me to come in, and with half-shy hospitality, and a sort of childlike glee at my interest, showed me every room. The house is one of some note, as note is reckoned in Unterammergau: it was built in 1700, is well covered with Zwink"s frescos, and bears an inscription stating that it was the birthplace of one "Max Anrich, canon of St. Zeno." It is the dwelling now of only humble people, but has traces of better days in the square-blocked wooden ceilings and curious old gayly-painted cupboards. Around three sides of the living-room ran a wooden bench, which made chairs a superfluous luxury. In one corner, on a raised stone platform, stood a square stove, surrounded by a broad bench; two steps led up to this bench, and from the bench, two steps more to the lower round of a ladder-like stair leading to the chamber overhead. The kitchen had a brick floor, worn and sunken in hollows; the stove was raised up on a high stone platform, with a similar bench around it, and the woman explained that to sit on this bench with your back to the fire was a very good thing to do in winter. Every nook, every utensil, was shining clean. In one corner stood a great box full of whetstones, scythe-sharpeners; the making of these was the industry by which the brothers earned the most of their money, she said; surely very little money, then, must come into the house. There were four brothers, three sisters, and the old mother, who sat at a window smiling foolishly all the time, aged, imbecile, but very happy. As we drove away, one of the sisters came running with a few little blossoms she had picked from her balcony; she halted, disappointed, and too shy to offer them, but her whole face lighted up with pleasure as I ordered the driver to halt that I might take her gift. She little knew that I was thinking how much the hospitality of her people shamed the cold indifference of so-called finer breeding.
A few rods on, we came to a barn, in whose open doorway stood two women threshing wheat with ringing flails. Red handkerchiefs twisted tight round their heads and down to their eyebrows, barefooted, bare-legged, bare-armed to the shoulders, swinging their flails l.u.s.tily, and laughing as they saw me stop my horses to have a better look at them; they made one of the vividest pictures I saw in the Ammer valley. Women often are hired there for this work of threshing, and they are expected to swing flails with that l.u.s.ty stroke all day long for one mark.
THE Pa.s.sION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU.
The stir the Pa.s.sion Play brings does not begin in Oberammergau till the Friday afternoon before the Sabbath of the play. Then, gradually, as a hum begins and swells in a disturbed hive of bees, begins and swells the bustle of the incoming of strangers into the little place.
By sunset the crooked lanes and streets are swarming with people who have all fancied they were coming in good season before the crowd. The open s.p.a.ce in front of George Lang"s house was a scene for a painter as the sun went down on Friday, Sept. 5, 1880. The village herd of cows was straggling past on its easy homeward way, the fifty bells tinkling even more sleepily than in the morning; a little goat-herd, with bright brown eyes, and bright brown partridge feathers in his hat, was worrying his little flock of goats along in the jam; vehicles of all sorts,--einspanners, diligences, landaus,--all pulling, twisting, turning, despairing, were trying to go the drivers did not know where, and were asking the way helplessly of each other. To heighten the confusion, a load of hay upset in the middle of the crowd. Twenty shoulders were under it in a twinkling, and the cart was rolled on, limping, on three wheels, friendly hands holding up the corner. Thirty-four vehicles, one after another, halted in front of George Lang"s door. Out of many of them the occupants jumped confidently, looking much satisfied at sight of so comfortable a house, and presenting little slips of white paper consigning them to Mr. Lang"s care. Much crestfallen, they re-entered their vehicles, to be driven to the quarters reserved for them elsewhere. Some argued; some grumbled; some entreated: all in vain. The decrees of the house of Lang are like those of the Medes and Persians.
It was long after midnight before the sound of wheels and voices and the cracks of postilions" whips ceased under my windows; and it began again before daylight the next morning. All was hurry and stir,--crowds going to the early ma.s.s; still greater crowds, with anxious faces, besieging the doors of the building where were to be issued the numbered tickets for seats at the Play; more crowds coming in, chiefly pedestrians; peasant men and women in all varieties and colors of costume; Englishmen in natty travelling-clothes, with white veils streaming from their hats; Roman Catholic priests in squads, their square-brimmed hats and high black coats white with dust. Eager, intent, swift, by hundreds and hundreds they poured in. Without seeing it, one can never realize what a spectacle is produced by this rushing in of six thousand people into a little town in the s.p.a.ce of thirty-six hours. There can be nothing like it except in the movements of armies. Being in the streets was like being in a chorus or village-fair scene on an opera stage a mile big, and crowded full from corner to corner. The only thing to do was to abandon one"s self to currents, like a ship afloat, and drift, now down this street and now down that, now whirl into an eddy and come to a stop, and now hurry purposelessly on, just as the preponderating push might determine.
Mingled up in it all, in everybody"s way and under all the horses"
feet, were dozens of little mites of Oberammergauers, looking five, six, seven years of age, like lost children, offering for sale "books of the Pa.s.sion Play." Every creature above the age of an infant is busy at this time in other ways in Oberammergau; so it is left for the babies to hawk the librettos round the streets, and very shrewdly they do it. Little tots that are trusted with only one book at a time,--all they can carry,--as soon as it is sold, grab the pennies in chubby hands and toddle home after another.
As the day wore on, the crowd and the hum of it increased into a jam and a racket. By four o"clock it was a din of wheels, cracking whips, and postilions" cries. Great diligences, loaded down till they squeaked and groaned on their axles; hay-wagons of all sizes, rigged with white cloth stretched on poles for a cover, and rough planks fastened to the sides for seats, came in procession, all packed with the country people; hundreds of shabby einspanners, bringing two or three, and sometimes a fourth holding on behind with dangling feet; fine travelling-carriages of rich people, their postilions decked in blue and silver, with shining black hats, and bra.s.s horns swung over their shoulders by green and white cords and ta.s.sels,--on they came into the twist and tangle, making it worse, minute by minute.
Most remarkable among all the remarkable costumes to be seen was that of an old woman from Dachau. She was only a peasant, but she was a peasant of some estate and degree. She had come as escort and maid for four young women belonging to a Roman Catholic inst.i.tution, and wearing its plain uniform. The contrast between the young ladies"
conventional garb of black and white and the blazing toilet of their guide and protector was ludicrous. She wore a jacket of brocade stiff with red, green, and silver embroidery; the sleeves puffed out big at the shoulder, straight and tight below to the wrist. It came down behind only a little lower than her shoulder-blades, and it was open in front from the throat to the waist-belt, showing beneath a solid ma.s.s of gold and silver braid. Nine enormous silver b.u.t.tons were sewed on each side the fronts; a scarf of soft black silk was fastened tight round her throat by a superb silver ornament, all twists and chains and disks. Her black woollen petticoat was laid in small, close flutings, straight from belt to hem, edged with scarlet, and apparently was stiff enough to stand alone. It was held out from her body, just below the belt, by a stiff rope coil underneath it, making a tight, hard, round ridge just below her waist, and nearly doubling her apparent size. All the women in Dachau must be as "thick" as that, she said; and "lovers must have long arms to reach round them!" The jacket, petticoat, and scarf, and all her ornaments, had belonged to her grandmother. What a comment on the quality of the fabrics and the perpetuity of a fashion! She was as elegant to-day as her ancestor had been nearly a century before her. On her head she wore a structure of brocaded black ribbon, built up into high projecting horns or towers, and floating in streamers behind. As she herself was nearly six feet tall, this shining brocade fortress on the top of her head moved about above the heads of the crowd like something carried aloft for show in a procession.
Another interesting sight was the peasants who had come bringing edelweiss and blue gentians to sell,--great bunches of the lovely dark blue chalices, drooping a little, but wonderfully fresh to have come two days, or even three, from home; the edelweiss blossoms were there by sheaves, and ten pfennigs a flower seemed none too much to pay to a man who had climbed among dangerous glaciers to pick it, and had walked three whole days to bring it to market.
The very poor people, who had walked, were the most interesting. They came in groups, evidently families, two women to one man; carrying their provisions in baskets, bundles, or knapsacks; worn and haggard with dust and fatigue, but wearing a noticeable look of earnestness, almost of exaltation. Many of them had walked forty or fifty miles; they had brought only black bread to eat; they would sleep the two nights on hay in some barn,--those of them who had had the great good fortune to secure such a luxury; the rest--and that meant hundreds--would sit on the ground anywhere where they could find a spot clear and a rest for their heads; and after two nights and a day of this, they trudged back again their forty miles or fifty, refreshed, glad, and satisfied for the rest of their lives. This is what the Pa.s.sion Play means to the devout, ignorant Catholic peasant of Bavaria to-day, and this is what it has meant to his race for hundreds of years.
The antagonism and enlightenment of the Reformation did not reach the Bavarian peasant,--did not so much as disturb his reverence for the tangible tokens and presentations of his religion. He did not so much as know when miracle plays were cast out and forbidden in other countries. But it was sixty-one years later than this that the Oberammergau people, stricken with terror at a plague in their village, knew no better device to stay it than to vow to G.o.d the performance of a Play of the Divine Pa.s.sion of Christ. It is as holy a thing to the ma.s.ses of them now as it was then; and no one can do justice to the play, even as a dramatic spectacle, who does not look at it with recognition of this fact.
The early history of the Play itself is not known. The oldest text-book of it now extant bears the date 1662,--nearly a generation later than the first performance of it in Oberammergau. This ma.n.u.script is still in possession of the Lang family, and is greatly amusing in parts. The prologue gives an account of the New Testament plan of salvation, and exhorts all people to avail themselves of it with grat.i.tude and devotion. At this juncture in rushes a demon messenger from the devil, bearing a letter, which he unfolds and reads. In this letter the devil requests all the people not to yield to the influence of this play, asks them to make all the discordant noises they can while it is going on, and promises to reward them well if they will do so. The letter is signed: "I, Lucifer, Dog of h.e.l.l, in my h.e.l.lish house, where the fire pours out of the windows." The demon, having read the letter aloud, folds it up and addresses the audience, saying: "Now you have heard what my master wishes. He is a very good master, and will reward you! Hie, Devil! up and away!" with which he leaps off the stage, and the play at once begins, opening with a scene laid in Bethany,--a meeting between Christ and his disciples. These grotesque fancies, quips, and cranks were gradually banished from the Play. Every year it was more or less altered, priest after priest revising or rewriting it, down to the time of the now venerable Daisenberger, who spent his youth in the monastery of Ettal, and first saw the Pa.s.sion Play acted at Oberammergau in 1830.
In 1845 the Oberammergau people, in unanimous enthusiasm, demanded to have Daisenberger appointed as their pastor. He at once identified himself warmly with the dramatic as well as the spiritual life of the community; and it is to his learning and skill that the final admirable form of the Pa.s.sion Play, and the villagers" wonderful success in rendering it, are due. He has written many Biblical dramas and historical plays founded on incidents in the history of Bavaria.
Chief among these are: "The Founding of the Monastery of Ettal,"
"Theolinda," "King Heinrich and Duke Arnold of Bavaria," "Otto Von Wittelsbach at the Veronese Hermitage," "The Bavarians in the Peasants" War," "Luitberge, d.u.c.h.ess of Bavaria." He has also dramatized some of the legends of the saints, and has translated the "Antigone" of Sophocles and arranged it for the Oberammergau stage. A half-century"s training under the guidance of so learned and dramatic a writer, who added to his learning and fine dramatic faculty a profound spirituality and pa.s.sionate adherence to the faiths and dogmas of the Church, might well create, in a simple religious community, a capacity and a fervor even greater than have been shown by the Oberammergau people. To understand the extent and the method of their attainment, it is needful to realize all this; but no amount of study of the details of the long process can fully convey or set forth the subtle influences which must have pervaded the very air of the place during these years. The acting of plays has been not only the one recreation of their life, otherwise hard-worked, sombre, and stern,--it has been their one channel for the two greatest pa.s.sions of the human heart,--love of approbation and the instinct of religious worship; for the Oberammergau peasant, both these pa.s.sions have centred on and in his chance to win fame, please his priest, and honor G.o.d, by playing well some worthy part in the Pa.s.sion Play. The hope and the ambition for this have been the earliest emotions roused in the Oberammergau child"s breast. In the tableaux of the Play even very young children take part, and it is said that it has always been the reward held up to them as soon as they could know what the words meant: "If thou art good, thou mayest possibly have the honor of being selected to play in the Pa.s.sion Play when the year comes round." Not to be considered fit to take any part in the Play is held, in Oberammergau, to be disgrace; while to be regarded as worthy to render the part of the Christus is the greatest honor which a man can receive in this world. To take away from an actor a part he has once played is a shame that can hardly be borne; and it is on record that once a man to whom this had happened sank into a melancholy which became madness.
When the time approaches for the choice of the actors and the a.s.signment of the parts, the whole village is in a turmoil. The selections and a.s.signments are made by a committee of forty-five, presided over by the priest and by the venerable "Geistlicher Rath"
Daisenberger, who, now in his eightieth year, still takes the keenest interest in all the dramatic performances of his pupils. The election day is in the last week of December of the year before the Play; and the members of the committee, before going to this meeting, attend a ma.s.s in the church. The deciding as to the players for 1880 took three days" time, and great heart-burnings were experienced in the community. In regard to the half-dozen prominent parts there is rarely much disagreement; but as there are some seven hundred actors required for the Play, there must inevitably be antagonisms and jealousies among the minor characters. However, when the result of the discussions and votes of the committee is made public, all dissension ceases. One of the older actors is appointed to take charge of the rehearsals, and from his authority there is no appeal. Each player is required to rehea.r.s.e his part four times a week; and as early in the spring as the snow is out of the theatre the final rehearsals begin.
Thus each Pa.s.sion Play year is a year of very hard work for the Oberammergauers. Except for their constant familiarity with stage routine and unbroken habit of stage representation through the intervening years, they would never be able to endure the strain of the Pa.s.sion Play summers; and as it is, they look wan and worn before the season is ended.
It is a thankless return that they have received at the hands of some travellers, who have seen in the Pa.s.sion Play little more than a show of mountebanks acting for money. The truth is that the individual performers receive an incredibly small share of the profits of the Play. There is not another village in the world whose members would work so hard, and at so great personal sacrifice, for the good of their community and their Church. Every dollar of the money received goes into the hands of a committee selected by the people. After all the costs are paid, the profits are divided into four portions: one quarter is set aside to be expended for the Church, for the school, and for the poor; another for the improvement of the village, for repairs of highways, public buildings, etc.; a third is divided among the tax-paying citizens of the town who have incurred the expense of preparing for the Play, buying the costumes, etc. The remaining quarter is apportioned among the players, according to the importance of their respective parts; as there are seven hundred of them, it is easy to see that the individual gains cannot be very great.
The music of the Play, as now performed, was written in 1814, by Rochus Dedler, an Oberammergau schoolmaster. It has for many years been made a _sine qua non_ of this position in Oberammergau that the master must be a musician, and, if possible, a composer; and Dedler is not the only composer who has been content in the humble position of schoolmaster in this village of peasants. Every day the children are drilled in chorus singing and in recitative; with ma.s.ses and other church music they are early made familiar. Thus is every avenue of training made to minister to the development of material for the perfection of the Pa.s.sion Play.
Dedler is said to have been a man of almost inspired nature. He wrote often by night, and with preternatural rapidity. The music of the Pa.s.sion Play was begun on the evening of Trinity Sunday; he called his six children together, made them kneel in a circle around him, and saying, "Now I begin," ordered them all to devote themselves to earnest prayer for him that he might write music worthy of the good themes of the Play. The last notes were written on the following Christmas Day, and they are indeed worthy of the story for which they are at once the expression and the setting. The harmonies are dignified, simple, and tender, with movements at times much resembling some of Mozart"s Ma.s.ses. Many of the chorals are full of solemn beauty. A daughter of Dedler"s is still living in Munich; and to her the grateful and honest-minded Oberammergau people have sent, after each performance of the Pa.s.sion Play, a sum of money in token of their sense of indebtedness to her father"s work.
The Pa.s.sion Play cannot be considered solely as a drama; neither is it to be considered simply as a historical panorama, presenting the salient points in the earthly career of Jesus called Christ. To consider it in either of these ways, or to behold it in the spirit born of either of these two views, is to do only partial justice to it. Whatever there might have been in the beginning of theatrical show and diversion and fantastic conceit about it, has been long ago eliminated. Generation after generation of devout and holy men have looked upon it more and more as a vehicle for the profoundest truths of their religion, and have added to it, scene by scene, speech by speech, everything which in their esteem could enhance its solemnity and make clear its teaching. However much one may disagree with its doctrines, reject its a.s.sumptions, or question its interpretations, that is no reason for overlooking its significance as a tangible and rounded presentation of that scheme of the redemption of the world in which to-day millions of men and women have full faith. It is by no means distinctively a Roman Catholic presentation of this scheme; it is Christian. The Holy Virgin of the Roman Catholic Church is, in this play, from first to last, only the mother of Jesus,--the mother whom all lovers and followers of Jesus, wherever they place him or her, however they define his nature and her relations to him, yet hold blessed among the women who have given birth to leaders and saviors of men.
This presentation of the scheme of redemption seeks to portray not only the scenes of the life of Jesus on earth, but the typical foreshadowing of it in the Old Testament narratives,--its prophecy as well as its fulfilment. To this end there are given, before each act of the Play, tableaux of Old Testament events, supposed to be directly typical, and intended to be prophetic, of the scenes in Christ"s life which are depicted in the act following. These are selected with skill, and rendered with marvellous effect. For instance, a tableau of the plotting of Joseph"s brethren to sell him into Egypt, is given before the act in which the Jewish priests in the full council of the Sanhedrim plot the death of Jesus; a tableau of the miraculous fall of manna for the Israelites in the wilderness, before the act in which is given Christ"s Last Supper with his Disciples; the sale of Joseph to the Midianites before the bargain of Judas with the priests for the betrayal of Jesus; the death of Abel, and Cain"s despair, before the act in which Judas, driven mad by remorse, throws down at the feet of the priests the "price of blood," and rushes out to hang himself; Daniel defending himself to Darius, before the act in which Jesus is brought into the presence of Pilate for trial; the sacrifice of Isaac, before the scourging of Jesus and his crowning with the thorns: these are a few of the best and most relevant ones.
The Play is divided into eighteen acts, and covers the time from Christ"s entry into Jerusalem at the time of his driving the money-changers out of the temple till his ascension. The salient points, both historical and graphic, are admirably chosen for a continuous representation. In the second act is seen the High Council of the Jewish Sanhedrim plotting measures for the ruin and death of Jesus. This is followed by his Departure from Bethany, the Last Journey to Jerusalem, the Last Supper, the Final Interview between Judas and the Sanhedrim, the Betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The performance of the Play up to this point consumes four hours; and as there is here a natural break in the action, an interval of an hour"s rest is taken. It comes none too soon, either to actors or spectators, after so long a strain of unbroken attention and deep emotion.
The next act is the bringing of Jesus before the High-Priest Annas; Annas orders him taken before Caiaphas, and this is the ninth act of the Play. Then follow: The Despair of Judas and his Bitter Reproaches to the Sanhedrim, The Interview between Jesus and Pilate, His Appearance before Herod, His Scourging and Crowning with Thorns, The p.r.o.nouncing of his Death Sentence by Pilate, The Ascent to Golgotha, The Crucifixion and Burial, The Resurrection and Ascension. The whole lesson of Christ"s life, the whole lesson of Christ"s death, are thus shown, taught, impressed with a vividness which one must be callous not to feel. The quality or condition of mind which can remain to the end either unmoved or antagonistic is not to be envied. But, setting aside all and every consideration of the moral quality of the Play, looking at it simply as a dramatic spectacle, as a matter of acting, of pictorial effects, it is impossible to deny to it a place among the masterly theatrical representations of the world. One"s natural incredulity as to the possibility of true dramatic skill on the part of comparatively unlettered peasants melts and disappears at sight of the first act, The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem.
The stage, open to the sky, with a background so ingeniously arranged as to give a good representation of several streets of the city, is crowded in a few moments by five hundred men and women and children, all waving palm branches, singing hosannas, and crowding around the central figure of Jesus riding on an a.s.s. The verisimilitude of the scene is bewildering. The splendor of the colors is dazzling. Watching this crowd of five hundred actors closely, one finds not a single man, woman, or little child performing his part mechanically or absently. The whole five hundred are acting as if each one regarded his part as the central and prominent one; in fact, they are so acting that it does not seem acting: this is characteristic of the acting throughout the play. There is not a moment"s slighting or tameness anywhere. The most insignificant part is rendered as honestly as the most important, and with the same abandon and fervor. There are myriads of little by-plays and touches, which one hardly recognizes in the first seeing of it, the interest is so intense and the movement so rapid; but, seeing it a second time, one is almost more impressed by these perfections in minor points than by the rendering of the chief parts. The scribes who sit quietly writing in the foreground of the Sanhedrim Court; the disciples who have nothing to do but to appear to listen while Jesus speaks; the money-changers picking up their coins; the messengers who come with only a word or two to speak; the soldiers drawing lots among themselves in a group for Jesus" garments, at a moment when all attention might be supposed to be concentrated on the central figures of the Crucifixion,--every one of these acts with an enthusiasm and absorption only to be explained by the mingling of a certain element of religious fervor with native and long-trained dramatic instinct.
This dramatic instinct is shown almost as much in the tableaux as in the acting. The poses and grouping are wonderful, and the power of remaining a long time motionless is certainly a trait which the Oberammergau people possess to a well-nigh superhuman extent. The curtain remained up, during many of these tableaux, five and seven minutes; and there was not a trace of unsteadiness to be seen in one of the characters. Even through a powerful gla.s.s I could not detect so much as the twitching of a muscle. This is especially noticeable in the tableau of the Fall of Manna in the Wilderness, which is one of the finest of the Play. There are in it more than four hundred persons; one hundred and fifty of them are children, some not over three years of age. These children are conspicuously grouped in the foreground; many of them are in att.i.tudes which must be difficult to keep,--bent on one knee or with outstretched hand or with uplifted face,--but not one of the little creatures stirs head or foot or eye.
Neither is there to be seen, as the curtain begins to fall, any tremor of preparation to move. Motionless as death they stand till the curtain shuts even their feet from view. Too much praise cannot be bestowed on the fidelity, accuracy, and beauty of the costumes. They are gorgeous in color and fabric, and have been studied carefully from the best authorities extant, and are not the least among the surprises which the Play affords to all who go to see it expecting it to be on the plane of ordinary theatrical representations. The splendor of some of the more crowded scenes is rarely equalled: such a combination of severe simplicity of outlines and contours, cla.s.sic models of drapery, with brilliancy of coloring, is not to be seen in any other play now acted.
The high-water mark of the acting in the Play seems to me to be reached, not in the Christus, but by Judas. This part is played by an old man, Gregory Lechner. He is over sixty years of age, and his snowy beard and his hair have to be dyed to the red hue which is desired for the crafty Judas"s face. From the time when, in Simon"s house, he stands by, grumbling at the waste of the precious ointment poured by Mary Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, to the last moment of his wretched existence, when he is seen wandering in a desolate wilderness, about to take his own life in his remorse and despair, Judas" acting is superb. Face, att.i.tudes, voice, action,--all are grandly true to the character, and marvellously full of life. It would be considered splendid acting on any stage in the world. Nothing could surpa.s.s its subtlety and fineness of conception, or the fire of its rendering. It is a conception quite unlike those ordinarily held of the character of Judas; ascribes the betrayal neither to a wilful, malignant treachery, nor, as is sometimes done, to a secret purpose of forcing Jesus to vindicate his claims to divine nature by working a miracle of discomfiture to his enemies, but to pure, unrestrained avarice,--the deadliest pa.s.sion which can get possession of the human soul. This theory is tenable at every point of Judas" career as recorded in the Bible, and affords far broader scope for dramatic delineation than any other theory of his character and conduct. It is, in fact, the only theory which seems compatible with the entire belief in the supernatural nature of Jesus. Expecting up to the last minute that supernatural agencies would hinder the accomplishment of the Jews" utmost malice, he thought to realize the full benefit of the price of the betrayal, and yet not seriously imperil either the ultimate ends or the personal safety of Jesus. The struggle between the insatiable demon of avarice in his heart and all the n.o.bler impulses restraining it is a struggle which is to be seen going on in his thoughts and repeated in his face in every scene in which he appears; and his final despair and remorse are but the natural culmination of the deed which he did only under the temporary control of a pa.s.sion against which he was all the time struggling, and which he himself held in detestation and scorn. The gesture and look with which he at last flings down the bag of silver in the presence of the a.s.sembled Sanhedrim, exclaiming,--
"Ye have made me a betrayer!
Release again the innocent One! My Hands shall be clean,"
are a triumph of dramatic art never to be forgotten. His last words as he wanders distraught in the dark wastes among barren trees, are one of the finest monologues of the Play. It was written by the priest Daisenberger.
"Oh, were the Master there! Oh, could I see His face once more! I"d cast me at his feet, And cling to him, my only saving hope.
But now he lieth in prison,--is, perhaps, Already murdered by his raging foe,-- Alas, through my own guilt, through my own guilt!
I am the outcast villain who hath brought My benefactor to these bonds and death!
The sc.u.m of men! There is no help for me!
For me no hope! My crime is much too great!
The tearful crime no penance can make good!
Too late! Too late! For he is dead--and I-- I am his murderer!