When was the first performance of one of Max Rudolf Frisch's plays?
307267#10
Frisch was already a regular visitor at the Zürich Playhouse ("Schauspielhaus") while still a student. Drama in Zürich was experiencing a golden age at this time, thanks to the flood of theatrical talent in exile from Germany and Austria. From 1944 the Playhouse director Kurt Hirschfeld encouraged Frisch to work for the theatre, and backed him when he did so. In "", his first play, written in 1944 and first performed in 1946, Frisch, who had himself been married since 1942, addressed the question of how the dreams and yearnings of the individual could be reconciled with married life. In his 1944 novel "" ("I adore that which burns me") he had already placed emphasis on the incompatibility between the artistic life and respectable middle class existence. The novel reintroduces as its protagonist the artist Jürg Reinhart, familiar to readers of Frisch's first novel, and in many respects a representation of the author himself. It deals with a love affair that ends badly. This same tension is at the centre of a subsequent narrative by Frisch published, initially, by in 1945 and titled "" ("Bin or the Journey to Beijing").
Both of his next two works for the theatre reflect the war. "" ("Nun singen sie wieder"), though written in 1945, was actually performed ahead of his first play "Santa Cruz". It addresses the question of the personal guilt of soldiers who obey inhuman orders, and treats the matter in terms of the subjective perspectives of those involved. The piece, which avoids simplistic judgements, played to audiences not just in Zürich but also in German theatres during the 1946/47 season. The NZZ, then as now his native city's powerfully influential newspaper, pilloried the piece on its front page, claiming that it "embroidered" the horrors of National Socialism, and they refused to print Frisch's rebuttal. "The Chinese Wall" ("Die Chinesische Mauer") which appeared in 1946, explores the possibility that humanity might itself be eradicated by the (then recently invented) atomic bomb. The piece unleashed public discussion of the issues involved, and can today be compared with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "The Physicists" (1962) and "" ("In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer"), though these pieces are all now for the most part forgotten.
Max Frisch
307267#22
His next play "" ("Biografie: Ein Spiel"), followed on naturally. Frisch was disappointed that his commercially very successful plays "Biedermann und die Brandstifter" and "Andorra" had both been, in his view, widely misunderstood. His answer was to move away from the play as a form of parable, in favour of a new form of expression which he termed "Dramaturgy of Permutation" (""Dramaturgie der Permutation""), a form which he had introduced with "Gantenbein" and which he now progressed with "Biographie", written in its original version in 1967. At the centre of the play is a behavioural scientist who is given the chance to live his life again, and finds himself unable to take any key decisions differently the second time round. The Swiss premier of the play was to have been directed by Rudolf Noelte, but Frisch and Noelte fell out in the Autumn of 1967, a week before the scheduled first performance, which led to the Zürich opening being postponed for several months. In the end the play opened in the Zürich Playhouse in February 1968, the performances being directed by Leopold Lindtberg. Lindtberg was a long established and well regarded theatre director, but his production of "" neither impressed the critics nor delighted theatre audiences. Frisch ended up deciding that he had been expecting more from the audience than he should have expected them to bring to the theatrical experience. After this latest disappointment it would be another eleven years before Frisch returned to theatrical writing.
Max Frisch
307267#28
Old age and the transience of life now came increasingly to the fore in Frisch's work. In 1976 he began work on the play "", although it was not ready to be performed for another three years. The word triptych is more usually applied to paintings, and the play is set in three triptych-like sections in which many of the key characters are notionally dead. The piece was first unveiled as a radio play in April 1979, receiving its stage premier in Lausanne six months later. The play was rejected for performance in Frankfurt am Main where it was deemed too apolitical. The Austrian premier in Vienna at the Burgtheater was seen by Frisch as a success, although the audience reaction to the complexity of the work's unconventional structure was still a little cautious.
Max Frisch
307267#16
In 1951, Frisch was awarded a travel grant by the Rockefeller Foundation and between April 1951 and May 1952 he visited the United States and Mexico. During this time, under the working title "What do you do with love?" (""Was macht ihr mit der Liebe?"") on what later became his novel, "I'm Not Stiller" ("Stiller"). Similar themes also underpinned the play "" ("Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie") which in May 1953 would open simultaneously at theatres in Zürich and Berlin. In this play Frisch returned to his theme of the conflict between conjugal obligations and intellectual interests. The leading character is a parody Don Juan, whose priorities involve studying geometry and playing chess, while women are let into his life only periodically. After his unfeeling conduct has led to numerous deaths the anti-hero finds himself falling in love with a former prostitute. The play proved popular and has been performed more than a thousand times, making it Frisch's third most popular drama after "The Fire Raisers" (1953) and "Andorra" (1961).
Max Frisch
307267#4
Between February and October 1933 he travelled extensively through eastern and southeastern Europe, financing his expeditions with reports written for newspapers and magazines. One of his first contributions was a report on the Prague World Ice Hockey Championship (1933) for the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung". Other destinations were Budapest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Istanbul, Athens, Bari, and Rome. Another product of this extensive tour was Frisch's first novel, "Jürg Reinhart", which appeared in 1934. In it Reinhart represents the author, undertaking a trip through the Balkans as a way to find purpose in life. In the end the eponymous hero concludes that he can only become fully adult by performing a "manly act". This he achieves by helping the terminally ill daughter of his landlady end her life painlessly.
Max Frisch
307267#64
For the novels "I'm Not Stiller" and "Homo Faber" there were several film proposals, one of which involved casting the actor Anthony Quinn in "Homo Faber", but none of these proposals was ever realised. It is nevertheless interesting that several of Frisch's dramas were filmed for television adaptations. It was in this way that the first filmic adaptation of a Frisch prose work appeared in 1975, thanks to Georg Radanowicz, and titled "The Misfortune" ("Das Unglück"). This was based on a sketch from one of Frisch's "Diaries". It was followed in 1981 by a Richard Dindo television production based on the narrative "Montauk" and one by Krzysztof Zanussi based on "Bluebeard". It finally became possible, some months after Frisch's death, for a full-scale cinema version of "Homo Faber" to be produced. While Frisch was still alive he had collaborated with the filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff on this production, but the critics were nevertheless underwhelmed by the result. In 1992, however, "Holozän", a film adaptation by Heinz Bütler and Manfred Eicher of "Man in the Holocene", received a "special award" at the Locarno International Film Festival.
Max Frisch
307267#32
Many of Frisch's most important plays, such as "" ("Count Öderland") (1951), "" ("Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie") (1953), "The Fire Raisers" (1953) and "Andorra" (1961), were initially sketched out in the "Diary 1946–1949" ("Tagebuch 1946–1949") some years before they appeared as stage plays. At the same time several of his novels such as "I'm Not Stiller" (1954), "Homo Faber" (1957) as well as the narrative work "Montauk" (1975) take the form of diaries created by their respective protagonists. Sybille Heidenreich points out that even the more open narrative form employed in "Gantenbein / A Wilderness of Mirrors" (1964) closely follows the diary format. Rolf Keiser points out that when Frisch was involved in the publication of his collected works in 1976, the author was keen to ensure that they were sequenced chronologically and not grouped according to genre: in this way the sequencing of the collected works faithfully reflects the chronological nature of a diary.
Max Frisch
833324#5
His first major plays were performed in 1960 in Lübeck, Mannheim and Heidelberg. Since then, his plays have been performed in the whole world. Dorst's work has been recognized with many prizes and distinctions, including the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize (1964), Prize of the City of Florence (1970), Literature Prize of the Bayerische Akademie der Künste (1983), Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis (1989), Georg Büchner Prize (1990), E.T.A. Hoffmann Prize (1996) and the city of Zurich's Max Frisch Prize (1998). In 2006, he was awarded the Samuel Bogumil Linde Prize. He was awarded the European Prize for Literature (2008). Dorst held visiting professorships at universities in Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
Tankred Dorst
307267#19
The success of "The Fire Raisers" established Frisch as a world-class dramatist. It deals with a lower middle-class man who is in the habit of giving shelter to vagrants who, despite clear warning signs to which he fails to react, burn down his house. Early sketches for the piece had been produced, in the wake of the communist take-over in Czechoslovakia, back in 1948, and had been published in his "Tagebuch 1946–1949". A radio play based on the text had been transmitted in 1953 on Bavarian Radio (BR). Frisch's intention with the play was to shake the self-confidence of the audience that, faced with equivalent dangers, they would necessarily react with the necessary prudence. Swiss audiences simply understood the play as a warning against Communism, and the author felt correspondingly misunderstood. For the subsequent premier in West Germany he added a little sequel which was intended as a warning against Nazism, though this was later removed.
Max Frisch
307267#58
"I'm Not Stiller" started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3,000 in its first year, but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies. The next novel, "Homo Faber", was another best seller, with four million copies of the German language version produced by 1998. "The Fire Raisers" and "Andorra" are the most successful German language plays of all time, with respectively 250 and 230 productions up till 1996, according to an estimate made by the literary critic Volker Hage. The two plays, along with "Homo Faber" became curriculum favourites with schools in the German-speaking middle European countries. Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, "Homo Faber", has been translated into twenty-five languages.
Max Frisch