Swedish playwright August Strindberg wrote four ‘chamber’ plays in 1907. To emphasise their affinity with music and that they were a cycle on related themes he gave each one an opus number. The Ghost Sonata is Opus 3. Strindberg later wrote that the four pieces taken together made up ‘his last sonatas’ on the analogy of a composer like Beethoven. Themes and ideas from one play were picked up and modulated in others. Some critics have made direct analogies to sonata form, describing the first of the play’s three scenes as a busy allegro, followed by scene 2 as a largo punctuated by long silences, the third and final scene being an andante, followed by the coda of the Student’s final speech.
The Ghost Sonata and its three cousins were written after another hiatus in Strindberg’s play-writing (the first one 1892 to 1898; this one 1902 to 1906).
Chamber pieces were very much a la mode. Max Reinhardt had just opened the Kammerspiele in Berlin. Strindberg was approached to write smaller pieces by actor and impresario August Falk who created a small theatre seating 161 guests in Stockholm, and named the Intimate Theatre, which for the 3 years of its existence became a centre of theatrical innovation.
Translator and editor of the Oxford University Press edition, Michael Robinson, quotes passages from Strindberg’s letters explaining what a chamber theatre was. The bit that caught my eye says, ‘No predetermined form is to restrict the author, for the motif determines the form. Consequently, freedom in treatment restricted only by the unity of the ideas and the feeling for style’ (quote Introduction page xxxi).
The Ghost Sonata is surprising from the start, the initial surprise being that it’s set outside. If any playwright suited grim claustrophobic interiors it’s Strindberg but this one is set outside a modern (in 1900) block of flats. Also, for the first time it doesn’t have a small cast (The Father: 6, Miss Julie: 3, Dance of Death: 3) but a relatively large one of 16. Mind you, they are all given generic type names (the Old Man, the Student, the Milkmaid and so on).
But all this is trivial compared with what follows. Although it has a realistic enough setting, the relations between all these people are a dreamlike fantasia.
The Ghost Sonata is in three scenes, each of which (rather inevitably) contains a death. Having read 13 plays by Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg I wonder if these Great Playwrights knew how to write a play which doesn’t end in a death of one sort or another (murder, suicide, accident).
Is The Ghost Sonata a modernist version of a fairy tale? The Old Man and the Student both explicitly compare what’s going on to a fairy tale. On this reading a heroic young Student, born on a Sunday and therefore in folklore able to see more clearly than other people, is introduced into an expensive modern house which from the outside he regards as paradise, through the intervention of an all-powerful fairy godfather (the Old Man, also named Hummel) and here encounters the fair damsel he had glimpsed from the street and who languishes in thrall to a vampire-like Cook.
True up to a point but, like the musical analogy, this interpretation leaves out all the weird details and the unaccountable reversals. The young damsel he’s meant to rescue fades away and dies. The fairy godfather who smuggled him in and, at many points of Scene 1 is compared to the Devil or Mephistopheles, half way through Scene 2 his powers desert him and he too is killed.
Or you could summarise The Ghost Sonata as: an eighty-year-old man in a wheelchair named Hummel overhears a thirsty Student named Arkenholz asking what appears to be thin air for a drink. (The Student thinks he is asking a Milkmaid for a drink. Why can no one else see her but him?). Anyway, this Hummel enlists the Student to enter a haunted house on a beautiful Sunday morning and rescue a young woman trapped inside…
But the characters are uncanny and unpredictable. Inexplicable things keep happening. At the formal dinner which is the centrepiece of Scene 2 the Old Man unmasks everyone present, pointing out that they’re hypocrites with false identities. And yet somehow it’s he, the unmasker, who meets his death. Not violently. He just shrinks and fades away.
What are we to make of the Mummy who, the first time we’re shown into her room talks and behaves like a parrot and yet slowly gains ascendency over the Old Man until it is he who starts talking parrot style.
There is much talk of this world being a hell or purgatory in which nobody is who they seem, in which nobody is responsible for their actions. The student calls it:
STUDENT: This world of illusion, guilt, suffering and death, this world of endless change, disappointment and pain…
Michael Robinson associates this with Strindberg’s late conversion to the teachings of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg who thought the visible world was a purgatorial preparation for a better one after death. But Strindberg characters talked like this before he’d read Swedenborg (and in fact so do Ibsen’s characters). It seems to have been standard Scandi noir, the same Scandi attitude that inspired Edvard Munch to his cheery paintings.
In any case, none of these ‘rational’ explanations account for the Old Man standing up in his wheelchair addressing a crowd of beggars, for the vampire cook, for the Colonel who is an impostor and only held together by his corset, or for the Mummy who starts out talking like a parrot, who hides herself away from the room which contains a statue of her as a nubile young woman, and who ends up stopping time itself!
At the end of the play the entire room, the ‘hyacinth room’ where the Student meets his admired beloved, disappears – presumably this just means the lights are dimmed right down to darkness – and replaced by a large copy of painter Arnold Böcklin’s famous and super-symbolist painting, The Isle of the Dead.
The Ghost Sonata lacks the relatable angst of ‘The Father’, ‘Miss Julie’ or ‘A Dance of Death’ and yet in many ways, because of the teasing transformations, the general absurdity and uncanny, dreamlike transformations, I think I enjoyed reading it the most.
The Ghost Sonata anticipates surreal plays and writings – the entire dream ethos of surrealism– and foreshadows the theatre of the absurd which was to become a dominant force in mid-twentieth century theatre.
Credit
I read ‘The Ghost Sonata‘ in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.
Related links
Strindberg reviews
- The Father (1887)
- Miss Julie (1888)
- Dance of Death (1900)
- The Ghost Sonata (1907)
- Play reviews
Books & Boots 