Franz Xaver Research Articles

Katholizismus als Kulturmacht. Der Freiburger Theologe Joseph Sauer (1872–1949) und das Erbe des Franz Xaver Kraus (review)

Katholizismus als Kulturmacht Der Freiburger Theologe Joseph Sauer (18721949) and das Erbe des Franz Xaver Kraus. By Claus Arnold. [Verof fentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte: Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 86.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh. 1999. Pp. 522. DM 108.) This biography gives a thorough analysis of the intellectual life and writings of the Catholic scholar, Josef Sauer, who attained international recognition for his archaeological research, studies of Christian art, and progressive theological ideas. As told by Arnold, the story of Sauer is simultaneously a history of Catholicism in Germany from 1871 until 1949. Sauer was born on June 6,1872, in the State of Baden and grew up during the Kulturkampf. As a seminarian at the University of Freiburg, he studied historical theology, thereby distancing himself from the Neo-Scholasticism in the seminary. After his priestly ordination, he undertook doctoral studies at Freiburg, worked closely with the liberal Franz Xaver Kraus, and wrote a respected dissertation, Die Symbolik des Kirchengebaudes und seiner Ausstatung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters (1902,1924).Through Kraus, Sauer came to know the scholars associated with Reform Catholicism, including Albert Ehrhard, Herman Schell, and Martin Spahn. After Kraus's death in 1901, Sauer emerged as the primary German dialogue partner for modernist thinkers like Henri Bremond, Friedrich von Hiigel, Alfred Loisy, and George Tyrrell. He also stayed in contact with the Americanist Denis O'Connell. Advocating the renewal of theology, Sauer arranged for the German translation and publication of Loisy's L'Evangile et l'Eglise (1902); he was the only German in 1902 with a copy of Tyrrell's Religion as a Factor of Life. He supported the efforts of Karl Muth to engage Catholicism in a constructive conversation with world literature and the arts in the journal Hochland. Sauer became professor of church history at Freiburg in 1905 and was appointed in 1911 the director of Freiburg's Institute for Christian Archaeology and Art History. Active in the Gorres Gesellschaft, he shared its vision of Catholicism joining in Germany's cultural and intellectual life. Along with his liberal religious ideas, Sauer had conservative political and social views. During the Great War, he remained patriotic, even criticizing French Catholics who charged that the German government was intent upon destroying Catholicism in Belgium and France as well as in Germany. Sauer remained distant from the Weimar Republic because he judged that Germany should not be a democratic, secular society. …

Book Reviews

Nora M. Alter, Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage, reviewed by Daniel-Raymond Nadon Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, reviewed by John F. Deeney Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan, eds., The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, reviewed by Richard Foulkes Finlay Donesky, David Hare: Moral and Historical Perspectives, reviewed by Anne F. Northof Michelle M. Mattson, Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Construction of a Political Aesthetic, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis

Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Construction of a Political Aesthetic by Michelle M. Mattson (review)

Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Construction of a Political Aesthetic by Michelle M. Mattson (review)

Plainchant in nineteenth-century England: a review of some major publications of the period

The history of plainchant in the nineteenth century is dominated by the various attempts at scholarly restoration both in Britain and abroad. Up to the middle part of the century these efforts were concentrated in France, although demands for revival were being voiced in Italy by Pietro Alfieri, and in Germany by Franz Xaver Witt, amongst others. The first scholarly attempt at the restoration of plainchant was made in 1846 as a result of Jean-Louis-Félix Danjou's discovery of the eleventh-century tonary of St Bénigne de Dijon. Like the Rosetta stone, it enabled scholars to decipher the meaning of symbols which had previously eluded them. In this case the manuscript is notated with both neumes and alphabetic script, so that for the first time the melodic ductus of ancient neumes could be interpreted with certainty. This manuscript became the source for the Rheims-Cambrai Graduale Romanum complectens missas, printed in Paris in 1851, later to be published under the auspices of Cardinal Sterckx of Mechelen and edited by Duval and Bogaerts. Despite the quality of the Mechlin Graduale, it did not fail to cause immense controversy. Louis Vitet, for example, ‘was astonished that a group of four notes in the Paris gradual of 1826 should be replaced in the Rheims-Cambrai edition with a melisma of 48 notes’. Other efforts at revival were equally plagued by controversy. Lambillotte's facsimile edition of St Gall 359, published, in 1851, proved to be ‘completely unreliable’, and the 1857 Parisian Graduale romanum upon which it is based ‘contained truncated melodies’.

Relationship between hemodynamics and morphology in pulmonary hypertension — a quantitative intravascular ultrasound study: Adrian C.Borges, Franz Xaver Kleber, Roland Wensel, Christian Opitz, Gert Baumann, Medical Department I, Humboldt-University Berlin (Charité), Germany

Relationship between hemodynamics and morphology in pulmonary hypertension — a quantitative intravascular ultrasound study: Adrian C.Borges, Franz Xaver Kleber, Roland Wensel, Christian Opitz, Gert Baumann, Medical Department I, Humboldt-University Berlin (Charité), Germany

Salieri's Così fan tutte

The several contradictory, and even apologetic, explanations that were put forward concerning the origins of Mozart's Così fan tutte, ossia La scola degli amanti in the years following its première in 1790 reflect both the dearth of hard information concerning the commission to Mozart, and the unease with which the post-Josephinian era greeted this most unsettling of comic operas. One of the composer's first biographers, Franz Xaver Nêmetschek, wrote:In the year 1789 in the month of December Mozart wrote the Italian comic opera Cosi fan tutte, or ‘The School for Lovers’; people are universally amazed that this great genius could condescend to waste his heavenly sweet melodies on such a miserable and clumsy text. It was not in his power to refuse the commission, and the text was given expressly to him.

The Theatre of Frustration: Super Realism in the Dramatic Work of F.X. Kroetz and Michel Tremblay by Renate Usmiani, and: The Theater of Franz Xaver Kroetz by Ingeborg C. Walther (review)

The Theatre of Frustration: Super Realism in the Dramatic Work of F.X. Kroetz and Michel Tremblay by Renate Usmiani, and: The Theater of Franz Xaver Kroetz by Ingeborg C. Walther (review)

Book Reviews

Anthony Jenkins, The Making of Victorian Drama, reviewed by Victore Emeijanow Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s, reviewed by Katharine Worth Peter Skrine, Hauptmann, Wedekind and Schnitzler, reviewed by Simon Williams Roland Beyen, Bibliographie de Michel de Ghelderode, reviewed by David Willinger Roland Beyen, Correspondance Michel de Ghelderode: 1919-1927, reviewed by David Willinger Roland Beyen, Le Rire de Michel de Ghelderode, reviewed by David Willinger Renate Usmiani, The Theatre of Frustration: Super Realism in the Dramatic Work of F.X. Kroetz and Michel Tremblay, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis Ingeborg C. Walther, The Theater of Franz Xaver Kroetz, reviewed by Susan L. Cocalis

The Theater of Franz Xaver Kroetz

Contents: The book explores the critical Volksstuecke of Franz Xaver Kroetz within the context of West German theater during the nineteen seventies, showing to what extent they both reflect and resist the New Subjectivism of Handke, Strauss etc.

Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Use and Abuse of the Unborn Child

Franz Xaver Kroetz was arguably the most popular West German playwright of the seventies, and at the same time, one of the most explicitly political authors of that decade. His work sought to confront West German society with the victims of its own economic successes. And yet his aesthetic strategies and thematic emphases always seemed to hamper the realization of his political ambitions. Works of art that are generated on the basis of an explicitly political aesthetic are generally just as self-contradictory as are works of art that have no pretense to an expressed political foundation, and it is at points of inner contradiction that an analysis of an explicitly political aesthetic strategy can often be most productive. Such an analysis of Kroetz's overall political aesthetic project uncovers contradictions between his avowedly radical leftist position throughout the seventies and early eighties and his presentation of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and birth in his plays of that period. This article examines the following questions: How do the discrepancies between Kroetz's political aesthetic objectives and his perception of socio-political realities manifest themselves within one specific thematic area such as pregnancy? How does he construct the (unborn) child to crystallize certain views on contemporary society or to further his own political, aesthetic project? Where does the unborn child fit into his overall portrayal of interpersonal relations generally and relations between the sexes specifically? Kroetz became the dramatic sensation of the West German stage when two of his early one-act plays premiered to a scandalized German audience in 1971. One scene that met with vehement vocal opposition was the onstage attempt by one of the characters in Heimarbeit to perform an abortion on herself. The view of a young woman wielding a knitting needle with the explicit intent of using it for a home-abortion, albeit facing away from the audience, proved too much for staid West German theatre audiences. The attempted abortion incited intense protest within the West German public, and the demonstrations clearly expressed the public's outrage with the author's work. Yet the scandal itself may very well

The Hermeneutics of Democracy: Nestroy, Horvath, Turrini and the Development of the "Volksstück"

In November 1970, the Institut fur Osterreichkunde held its tenth Literarhistorikertagung in St. Polten. One of the speakers at that conference, Burgtheater dramaturge Heinz Gerstinger, presented a paper entitled Das auf dem gegenwartigen Theater. Gerstinger began his discussion of the genre and its place within the theatre by noting that, Noch vor wenigen Jahren ware ein Referat mit dem Titel `Das auf dem gegenwartigen Theater' bestenfalls bei einem Kursus fur Dilettantenbuhnen moglich gewesen, dort, wo man kritiklos akzeptiert (93). Gerstinger's remarks allude to the way in which the Volksstuck was changing the literary landscape of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. At the same time, his comments also indicate how these changes were altering the concept of the Volksstuck itself. Within a few years a dramatic form once rejected as gesunkenes Kulturgut had been elevated to such an extent that the title of a 1978 article proclaimed: Heute sind alle guten Stucke Volksstucke (Profitlich). Two major developments advanced the rehabilitation of the Volksstuck. In the mid-sixties, theatrical producers and literary critics rediscovered the dramas of Odon von Horvath and Marieluise Fleiser. The reemergence of these texts, in turn, provided a new generation of playwrights with the impetus to create a Volksstuck addressing contemporary socio-political realities. Authors such as Peter Turrini, Wolfgang Bauer, and Harald Sommer in Austria, together with Franz Xaver Kroetz, Martin Sperr, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in West Germany, contributed to reestablishing the Volksstuck as a viable and popular literary genre.

"Think what you are saying": Verbal Politics in the Early Plays Of Handke and Kroetz

Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz have, as both will readily admit, very little in common. If anything, they occupy opposite ends in the spectrum of contemporary German dramaturgy and, with each successive play, seem to move further apart. Handke's abstract subjectivity has in recent plays (such as Vber die Dörfer, 198 I ) deepened into neaI mysticism. Kroetz, on the other hand , has moved from sub-proletarian naturalism to , more recently, an almost cinematic depiction of middle-class moral styles (as in Furchl und Hoffnung der BDR, [984). Handke is a private person, an individualist with an aversionto labels, systems, and political affiliations. His critical acclaim has always been greater than his popularity and some of his best writing has been done in the novel, rather than the dramatic genre. Kroetz is a highly prolific and populaI playwright (and actor). Much produced, often interviewed, he is outspoken, polemical, politically engaged, a one-time member and even spokesman of the German Communist Party (KPD).

The Catalogue of Raffaele Panuzzi and the Repertory of the Papal Chapel in the 15th and 16th Centuries

he catalogue of the holdings of the Papal Chapel prepared by Raffaele Panuzzi in 16871 has been well known to scholars of Roman music for more than a century, at least since the work of Franz Xaver Haberl.2 Yet heretofore, it has been used mainly for the reclamation of attributions, some questionable, most promi427 nently Jeremy Noble's 1971 discovery of a previously unknown ascription of a motet to Josquin.3 It is in the realm of such new evidence that Panuzzi's work bears importance for us today, for as a catalogue it has severe limitations.

Central European drawings 1680-1800: a selection from American collections

Central Europe occupies a prominent place in many realms of eighteenth-century culture. This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, organized in 1989 by The Art Museum, Princeton University, which presents some of the little-known accomplishments of artists from the region of present-day East and West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Providing the first available survey of drawings of the period in English, the illustrated introduction to the catalogue considers the works in historical and artistic context. The book includes important drawings by artists such as Cosmas Damian Asam, Egid Quirin Asam, Matthus Gnther, and Adrian Zingg. Published for the first time are unique drawings by such important sculptors as Georg Raphael Donner and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The fully illustrated catalogue contains 105 entries, many of which deal with major issues of art of the time and treat the drawings exhibited in relation to works elsewhere. Biographies are presented for all the artists exhibited.

Mozart's Requiem: on preparing a new edition

This text discusses Mozart's Requiem which was left incomplete when he died on 5 December 1791. The score of his Requiem which he had been attempting to finish, to fulfil an anonymous commission from Count Franz von Walsegg-Stuppach was eventually completed by his pupil and assistant, Franz Xaver Sussmayr on the request of Mozart's widow. Considerable controversy has surrounded the question of how much of the work was, in fact by Sussmayr and how much was filled out from Mozart's original sketches. The author's conclusion here throws doubt on Sussmayr's claims for his own contribution. Maunder has prepared a new edition of the Requiem, which attempts to come closer to what Mozart might have written had he lived to complete it. This present work, dealing with his preparation for the reconstruction, contains detailed arguments concerning the authenticity or otherwise of the movements missing from Mozart's autograph. The author has also written a study of the background to two movements of the Requiem, and of the stylistic comparison with contemporary works of Mozart which has enabled him to propose a reconstruction of certain movements and to isolate with greater certainty the work of Sussmayr.

Kroetz's ‘Request Concert’ in India, Part Three: Madras

In the earlier instalments of this series of articles, published in NTQ 11 and 12, Rustom Bharucha described. first, how he and fellow director Manuel Lutgenhorst became fascinated with the idea of transposing Franz Xaver Kroetz's play without words. Request Concert, about the last evening in the life of a very ordinary German woman. into a variety of social contexts in his native India. He then provided detailed descriptions of the productions as realized under their direction in Calcutta and Bombay, revealing the very difficult kinds of insight they offered both into the theatrical potential of the play, and the different natures of the urban societies to which it was being adapted. The performances of Usha Ganguli in Calcutta and of Sulabha Deshpande in Bombay – themselves strongly contrasting both in actorly approach and in realization – were followed in Madras, in a production by Lutgenhorst. by the very different interpretation of the dancer Chandralekha, who brought to the play the energies and disciplines of Bharat Natyam. revealing yet other stylistic possibilities and sustaining a creative tension between these possibilities and the surface realism of the play.

Kroetz's ‘Request Concert’ in India, Part Two: Bombay

In the first of this series of three articles, published in NTQ 11, the director Rustom Bharucha – born in India. but living and working mainly in New York – described how he initially became intrigued by the idea of transposing Franz Xaver Kroetz's play without words, Request Concert, concerning the last evening in the life of a very ordinary German woman, into a variety of Asian contexts. His ambition was first realized – in collaboration with fellow-director Manuel Lutgenhorst, and with valued assistance from the International School of Theatre Anthropology – in a production mounted in Calcutta, with the actress Joya Sen. The following account of the second production, in Bombay, illuminates both the varieties of Indian urban life and the varieties of theatrical experience, with fascinating insights into the nature of Bombay's competitive, media-saturated society, and the perceptions of the actress Sulabha Deshpande concerning her role and its technical requirements – and how both shed new light on this play and on the nature of theatricality.

Kroetz's ‘Request Concert’ in India, Part One: Calcutta

What happens when a play without words, about one evening in the life of a lonely middle-aged woman, is transposed from its original bourgeois German setting into that of a deprived Indian city? Rustom Bharucha, himself born in Calcutta and now an expatriate living in the USA, was so impressed by an American production of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Request Concert that, together with a German colleague Manuel Lutgenhorst, he set out to relate the problems, theatrical and social, posed by this one-woman play to the conditions of nine Asian cities over a period of three years. He began in his native city, where Kroetz's Fraulein Rasch became the unmarried office-worker Joya Sen in the performance by Calcutta actress Usha Ganguli. The rehearsals and the final production – in a converted puppet theatre – were illuminating both in the similarities and the differences they revealed between East and West, and in this, the first of three accounts of Request Concert in its Indian productions, Rustom Bharucha records the mutual learning process involved in a fascinating intercultural experience.

Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back

M fy essay has two beginnings. The first is the silence of the Turks in works of contemporary drama. In the scene ironically titled Foreigners' German (Ausldnderdeutsch) in Franz Xaver Kroetz's Furcht und Hoffnung der BRD (1984), the Turk smiles, laughs, nods, shows hesitation, confusion, and even deliberation. But he never speaks.' The woman who has invited him to her apartment converses with him about relationships between men and women in Turkey and in Germany, about intercultural marriage between Turkish men and women, and, nervously and coyly, about the possibility of their own sexual relationship. Assured by his responses that he finds her desirable and would want to marry her even if they were in Turkey, she decides to go to bed with him, with the proviso that the Turk be careful (77); she is fearful, she explains, of becoming the mother of a Turkish child in Germany. Kroetz's short scene depicts the development of a kind of trust on the part of the woman. Her questions throughout express

"Dreams Against the Cold": Characterization in Kroetz's Help Wanted

As interest in Franz Xaver Kroetz spreads and more productions of his plays are mounted in North America, increasing numbers of American actors will confront a challenge for which their training does not fully prepare them. Kroetz's characters are deceptively realistic. Like so many others from Zola to Albee, they inhabit a world that mirrors, poetically or photographically, that of their audience. They behave in a manner that is, in Chekhov's words, "just as complex and yet just as simple as in life." Their much heralded ordinariness — with few exceptions they are unassuming middle–class working people — reinforces their naturalism, but they are somehow more than real. Rather than a deep psychology or an inescapable past, Kroetz endows his characters with a self-consciousness triggered by their immediate situation. They scrutinize themselves constantly, as if from the outside, and this imposes on them a duality of character which makes an actor's close identification with his role a reductive approach. Kroetz's recent play, Help Wanted, both in its structure and its ostensible subject matter, clarifies this method of characterization and suggests his ultimate concerns as a playwright.