MONTROSE J. MOSES ~ The PASSION PLAY of OBERAMMERGAU

[Text from The Passion Play of Oberammergau by Montrose J. Moses. Dodd Mead & Company, 1934]

[Photographs from the 1910 performance]

[quote]

The Oberammergau Passion Play is a survival rather than a revival; its history is almost continuous from the period of the early religious dramas of mediæval times, and it retains, however faintly, some of the characteristic features of its prototype. It is true that modern conditions have modified the form, have forced the crudities and buffoonery from the text, have softened the character conception of Judas, for example, in precisely the same manner that Shylock has been humanized since the red-wig days before Charles Macklin. But the main form and some of the effects are still left, however far from the mediæval ingeniousness it is being forced by contact with the outside world and modern stage technique.

The vital essence of the Oberammergau Passion Play is the spirit poured into the modified form - a spirit dominating the social, economic, and intellectual life of the people; time alone will tell whether the communal ideal and whether the communal mission, which guards the minds and hearts of two thousand Bavarian peasants, will be able in isolated reverence to withstand the suffusing forces of civilization; every decade opens the sluices, and the village of Ammergau has to meet the demands of a transitory and curious crowd. The building of the new theatre for the production of 1900 is part example of how time and circumstance work against tradition.

A student went to Oberammergau in 1900; in his mind he carried pictures of mediæval ingeniousness - the triple stage of heaven and earth and hell, the church background and the church-yard, the uncouth humour centred in the Devil, the primitive conceptions of scene, the simple-minded mediæval audiences; none of these did he find at Oberammergau. But with his knowledge of the ancient religious drama, he was better able himself to be a mediæval and to profit by what is left of the type. You may gather together all the dramas in England, France, and Germany, bearing upon Crucifixion and Resurrection incidents and, with proper selection, construct a passion play more original is style, more unique in conception because of the charm which lies in anachronism. But after that, it is a dead, a fixed thing, representing a genre wholly dependent upon the atmosphere in which it originally blossomed. Because of the very fact that the people of Oberammergau are aloof, simple, childlike in belief, and imbued with an inherited mission, because they have elected to do one thing and to subserve all else to that one thing, the spirit in which they preserve their institution is what makes the Passion Play a living force - to them.

Evolution has deprived Oberammergau of much of its agreement with mediævalism; Sebastian Wild's Devil is no longer used; evil spirits, which once were accustomed to carry Judas from the stage in much the same manner as they dominated the early Prophets of Christ or the Adam play, have disappeared; even Judas's death-shriek, which once rent the stillness, is no longer allowed, nor has he, since 1890, climbed the tree before his hanging, for fear unnecessary mirth from the groundlings might destroy the conscious humanizing which stamps every rôle to the smallest part.

In another vital respect the Passion Play has become modified; it nowhere accentuates the Catholic doctrine from which it sprang; at first Protestantism approached Ammergau warily, with somewhat of antagonistic criticism as to bad taste and sacrilegious intent. But we may take Matthew Arnold's statement as a conservative summary of the reasons for Protestant acceptance: It agrees with what is seen... in literature, in the writings of the Dissenters of the younger and more progressive sort, who show a disposition for regarding the Church of Rome historically rather than polemically, a wish to do justice to the undoubted grandeur of certain institutions and men produced by the Church, quite novel, and quite alien to the simple belief of earlier times, that between Protestants and Rome there was a measureless gulf fixed.

In addition, one may note that repeated renovations of the text have been made with a constant desire to reach the brotherhood of man idea; or perhaps, as indication of a community sense of good taste; it is this feeling which prompted the omission, in the 1900 production, of the scene in which Veronica hands Christus a towel on which His image is imprinted.

[end quote]