Monday, Dec. 14, 1936
New Play in Manhattan
Prelude to Exile (by William McNally; Theatre Guild, producer). The things which happen to people in real life often appear to be events in a trashy novel.
For example, the everyday behavior of a great artist is likely to resemble ham acting. Wilfrid Lawson, a spectacular and accomplished performer,* is no ham actor.
Cast in this play as Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Mr. Lawson not only looks like the great musician but acts very much as Wagner must have acted during his extraordinary life. Yet the effect of his impersonation of the great German composer is definitely hammy.
Proceeding under such limitations, Prelude to Exile, in writing, acting and direction, is as good a theatrical biography of a genius as could reasonably be expected.
It pops its protagonist on the boards naked in all his pompous vanity, groping lubricity, childish craftiness, monetary venality and explosive blasphemy. Author McNally has studied the character of Wagner with an unblinded eye, makes full allowances for the poetic moral license commonly granted artists. The McNally-Lawson Wagner states the morality of an artist very clearly when he confesses that he has been mean, selfish, harsh, unfaithful, ungrateful; but, he says, he has learned his trade so well that no one in the world can teach him anything about music, and he has never allowed the most egregious hardships and humiliations to swerve him from his job of composing great music.
The play opens and closes in 1858. Its title is something of a misnomer since Wagner's exile dates from 1849, when he fled Dresden after getting mixed up in revolutionary politics. In 1858 the musician and his wife Minna (Evelyn Varden) are under the patronage of Otto Wesendonck (Leo G. Carroll) at Zurich. With Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Das Rheingold and Die Walkuere behind him, Wagner has finished the libretto of Tristan und Isolde, is working on the music, under the inspiration of Mathilda Wesendonck (Eva Le Gallienne), with the Schnorrs (Arthur Gerry and Beal Hober) singing his scores and Cosima Liszt von Bulow (Miriam Battista) fluttering about in round-eyed adulation. Minna -- jealous, nagging, nerve-fraying epitome of an artist's devoted wife -- translates her dislike of the Wesendonck affair into criticism of Tristan: "Nothing happens in it from beginning to end, just two people bleating and bleating about how much they love each other." She intercepts a love letter, stirs up a series of rumpuses, and Mine Wesendonck agrees to flee with the musician. At the moment of her capitulation the ecstatic composer captures the long-sought theme for his "Liebestod." Mme Wesendonck then understands that when he makes love to her he has in his mind only the bright image of Isolde. This so disconcerts her that she decides not to accompany him after all.
Always the self-dramatizer, Wagner lifts his arm and thunders: "Let this be your epitaph -- 'I struck down the mightiest talent that God ever created for the enrichment of music!'" Grandiosely he flings away the envelope containing a loan of money from her husband, but, a moment before his carriage rolls away, sends a servant back to retrieve it.
*Last year in Libel, impersonating a lawyer, Actor Lawson achieved the remarkable feat of turning brick-red when his War record was aspersed from the witness box.
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