The Birth of ‘The Master Builder
Condensed from an essay by Michael Meyer
Ibsen wrote The Master Builder in Christiania in 1892, at the age of sixty-four.
It was the first play he had written in Norway since The
Pretenders twenty-nine years before.
People everywhere were puzzled by it, as they had been puzzled by his two
preceding plays, The Lady from the Sea and Hedda
Gabler, but for a different reason. Some
new element had entered into Ibsen’s work.
It had been perceptible in Hedda
Gabler, but in The Master Builder
it was more than perceptible; it stuck out for all to see.
Even without Freud to suggest the implications of all that talk about
towers and spires that made an old man feel giddy and a young girl hear harps in
the air, The Master Builder seemed
primarily to be a play about sexual passion.
People speculated as to what new influence could have entered into the
aged playwright’s life to turn his thoughts so sharply in this direction, and
not until after Ibsen’s death in 1906 was the answer given.
In that year Georg Brandes published a series of letters which Ibsen had
written between October 1889 and December 1890 (i.e. twenty-nine to fifteen
months before he began The Master Builder) to a young Viennese girl named Emilie Bardach.
These revealed that in the summer of 1889, when Ibsen was sixty-one and
Emilie eighteen, they had met at Gossensass in the Austrian Tyrol and that some
kind of infatuation had resulted; whether this had been mutual or one-sided was
not quite clear. They had
corresponded for over a year and then Ibsen, gently but firmly, had told her not
to write to him anymore.
Shortly after these letters appeared a friend of Ibsen, the German
literary historian Julius Elias, published an account of a conversation he had
with Ibsen concerning Emilie Bardach which seemed to put the incident into
proportion. This conversation had
taken place in Berlin in February 1891, over lunch, while Ibsen was waiting for
a train: ‘An expansive mood came
over Ibsen and, chuckling over his champagne glass, he said:
‘Do you know, my next play is already hovering before me—in general
outline, of course. One thing I can
see clearly, though—an experience I once had myself—a female character. Very
interesting—very interesting.’ Then
he related how he had met in the Tyrol a Viennese girl of very remarkable
character . . . What tempted, fascinated and delighted her was to lure other
women’s husbands away from them. She
was a demonic little wrecker; she often seemed to him like a little bird of
prey, who would gladly have included him among her victims . . . But she had no
great success with him. ‘She did
not get hold of me, but I got hold of her—for my play.
Then I fancy she consoled herself with someone else.’
That seemed to settle the mater . . . Emilie Bardach went down to history
while she was still a young woman (she survived the Second World War) as a
predatory little monster more or less identical with Hilde Wangel.
In 1923, however, two remarkable articles entitled “Ibsen and Emilie
Bardach” were published in America. The
author was an Ibsen enthusiast named Basil King.
In 1908, while traveling in Europe, he had meet Emilie, then a woman of
thirty-seven . . . She allowed him to see, and in due course to quote from, the
diary she had kept during the time she had known and corresponded with Ibsen.
These articles caused no particular sensation at the time, interest in
Ibsen being rather low in England and America during the early twenties; there
seems, however, no reason to doubt the authenticity of the diary extracts, and
they go much further than Ibsen’s (or Elias’s) account to explain the stormy
and dynamic quality of his last five plays.
Ibsen had come to Gossensass in July 1889 . . . On the outskirts of the
town there was a valley named the Pflerschtal, with a stream flowing through it
and a view of mountains and glaciers. While
walking here, Ibsen saw a girl seated on a bench with a book.
He came and sat beside her, and learned her name, her parentage, her home
residence and the fact that in Gossensass they lived so near together that his
windows looked into hers.
She fell ill, and a few days later Ibsen came to see her.
“He remained with me a long while, and was both kind and
sympathetic.” A little later: “We
talk a great deal together. His
ardour ought to make me feel proud.” Then:
“Ibsen has begun to talk to me quite seriously about myself . . . Our
being so much together cannot but have some painful influence over me.
He puts such strong feeling into what he says to me.
His words often give me a sensation of terror and cold . . . He expects
from me much, much, much more than I am afraid he will ever find.
Never in his whole life, he says, has he felt so much joy in knowing
anyone. He never admired anyone as
he admires me. But all in him is truly good and noble! . . .”
Next she writes: “Mama has just gone out, so that I have the room to myself.
At last I am free to put down the incredible things of these recent days.
Yesterday afternoon, we were alone together at last! Oh, the words! If
only they could have stamped themselves on my heart more deeply and distinctly!
All that has been offered me before was only the pretence of love.
This is the true love, the ideal, he says, to which without knowing it he
gave himself in his art. At last,
he is a true poet through pain and renunciation.
And yet he is glad of having known me—the most beautiful! the
wonderful! . . .”
Neither Ibsen’s wife nor Emilie’s mother suspected what was afoot.
But: “The obstacles!
How they grow more numerous, the more I think of them!
The difference of age!—his wife!—his son!—all there is to keep us
apart! Did that have to happen?
Could I have foreseen it? Could
I have prevented it? When he talks
to me as he does, I often feel that I must go far away from here—far
away!—and yet I suffer at the thought of leaving him . . . The days we have
still to spend can now be counted. I
don’t think about the future. We
had a long talk together in the morning, and after lunch he came again and sat
with me. What am I to think?
He says it is to be my life’s aim to work with him.
We are to write to each other often; but what am I to write?”
A week later, On 27 September, Emilie noted in her diary:
“Our last day at Gossensass. Then
nothing but memory will remain. Two
weeks ago, memory seemed to Ibsen so beautiful, and now—he says that tomorrow
he will stand on the ruins of his happiness.
These last two months are more important in his life than anything that
has gone before . . . I feel quieter because he is quieter, though yesterday he
was terrible.”
That night, at 3 a.m., the express from Verona to Vienna passed through
Gossensass, and Emilie left on it. The
same night, she wrote in her diary: “He
means to posses me. This is his
absolute will. He intends to
overcome all obstacles. I do what I
can to keep him from feeling this, and yet I listen as he describes what is to
lie before us—going from one country to another—I with him—enjoying his
triumphs together . . .”
Nearly forty years later Emilie said that Ibsen had, in Gossensass,
“spoken to her of the possibility of a divorce and of a subsequent union with
her . . .” Once back at his home
in Munich, however, Ibsen seemed to resign himself to the impossibility of going
through with such a plan. Perhaps he feared the scandal; perhaps he felt a duty toward
his sickly and aging wife; perhaps he reflected that the difference of
forty-three years between their ages was too great; perhaps, away from
Gossensass, he felt old . . . At any rate, his letters from Munich to Emilie in
Vienna are no more than those of an affectionate old man to a charming
schoolgirl.
Ibsen to Emilie, 7 October 1889: “With
my whole heart I thank you, my beloved Fraülein, for the dear and delightful
letter which I received on the last day of my stay at Gossensass, and have read
over and over again. There the last
autumn week was a very sad one, or it was so to me.
No more sunshine. Everything—gone.
The few remaining guests could give me no compensation for our brief and
beautiful end-of-summer life. I
went to walk in the Pflerschtal. There,
there is a bench were two can commune together.
But the bench was empty and I went by without sitting down . . . A
thousand greetings from your devoted—H.I.”
On 15 October he writes again: “My
imagination is ragingly at work, but is always straying to where in working
hours it should not. I cannot keep
down the memories of the summer, neither do I want to.
The things we have lived through I live again and again—and still
again. To make a poem of them is
for the time being impossible . . . Do you remember that once we talked about
Stupidity and Madness—or more correctly, I talked about it—and you took up
the role of teacher and remarked, in your soft, musical voice, and with your
far-away look, that there is always a difference between Stupidity and Madness .
. . Well, I keep thinking over and over again:
was it Stupidity or was it Madness that we should have come together?
Or was it both Stupidity and Madness?
Or was it neither?
“I believe the last is the only supposition that would stand the test.
It was a simple necessity of nature.
It was equally our fate . . . Your always devoted—H.I.”
Ibsen to Emilie, 29 October 1889: “Don’t
be uneasy because just now I cannot work. In
the back of my mind I am working all the time.
I am dreaming over something which, when it has ripened, will become a
poem ."
Emilie’s diary: “Oh, the terror and beauty of having him care about me as
he never cared about anyone else! But
when he is suffering he calls it hohes,
schmerzliches Glück—high and painful fate!”
Ibsen to Emilie, 19 November 1889: “.
. . preparations for my new play. Sit
tight at my desk the whole day. Go
out only towards evening. I dream,
and remember, and write. To dream
is fine; but the reality at times can be still finer.
Your devoted—H.I.”
On the back of the photograph stood the inscription:
“An die Maisonne eines Septemberlebens”—“To the May sun of the
September life.”
Ibsen to Emilie, 22 December 1889: “I
read your letter over and over, for through it the voice of the summer awakens
so clearly. I see—I experience
again—the things we lived together. As
a lovely summer creature, dear Princess, I have known you, as a being of the
season of butterflies and wild flowers. How
I should like to see you as you are in winter!
I am always with you in spirit . . .”
Ibsen to Emilie, 16 February 1890: “Henceforth,
till we see each other face to face, you will hear little from me, and very
seldom. Believe me, it is better so.
It is the only right thing. It
is a matter of conscience with me to end our correspondence, or at least to
limit it. You yourself should have
as little to do with me as possible. With
your young life you have other aims to follow, other tasks to fulfill . . .”
Emilie made no entries in her diary for four days after receiving the
news that Ibsen wished to break off their correspondence.
Then suddenly: “What is my
inner life after Ibsen’s letter? I
wrote at once, and henceforth will be silent, silent.”
Ten days later: “Will he
never write any more? I cannot
think about it. Who could?
And yet, not to do so is in his nature.
In his very kindness there is often cruelty . . .”
Seven months later, he broke his silence to write to Emilie a letter of
sympathy on the death of her father. Thereafter,
for seven years, there was no contact between them.
Then, on his seventieth birthday, an occasion of great celebration in
Scandinavia, she sent him a telegram of congratulation.
His letter of reply was the last message that passed between them:
“Accept my most deeply felt thanks for your message.
The summer in Gossensass was the happiest, the most beautiful, of my
whole life. I scarcely dare to think of it—and yet I must think of it
always. Always!
Your truly devoted H.I.”
It is against this background that we must read The
Master Builder. Other
influences, of course, intrude into it. He
had returned to Norway by the time he began to write it, and took pains to make
Hilde almost ostentatiously Norwegian in her speech and manners.
He had by this time struck the qualities which he admired in Emilie,
notably the combination of eagerness and sensitivity, and it may be that her
name, Hildur, caused him to remember the Hilde whom he had created as a minor
character in The Lady from the Sea and
whom he now resurrected, ten years older, to play a more important role.
(Unlike Emilie, Hildur—from all accounts a notably gentle person—made
no excessive, Hilde-like demands on Ibsen, and he remained devoted to her until
his death; the recent attempt by some scholars to identify Huldur with Hilde
seems a sad error of judgment.) Aline
Solness is plainly based on Ibsen’s own wife, and the relationship between the
Solnesses bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that which appears to have
existed at this time in the Ibsen household.
The character of Solness was the nearest thing to a self-portrait that
Ibsen had yet attempted, though he was to follow it with two equally merciless
likenesses in John Gabriel Borkman and
When We Dead Awaken.
He admitted in a speech that “Solness is a man who is somewhat related
to me.” Ibsen had long regarded
himself as a builder and his plays as works of architecture . . . Like Solness,
he had always had a fear of looking down from a great height, or into a deep
chasm, and this had become worse as he had grown older.
Solness’s ruthlessness, his readiness to sacrifice the happiness of
those nearest to him for the sake of his ambition, his longing for and fear of
youth, and the conflict in him between aesthetic and ethical demands—all these
were Ibsen’s too.
Ever since childhood, Ibsen had been fascinated by towers.
In the memoirs of his childhood and youth which he had compiled a few
years previously, he had mentioned that the house in which he was born “stood
exactly opposite the front of the church, with its high flight of steps and its
conspicuous tower . . .” It was from the opening of this tower that he
received “the first conscious and permanent impression on my mind.
My nurse one day took me up the tower and allowed me to sit on the ledge
outside . . . I perfectly recollect how amazed I was at looking down on the tops
of the hats of the people below.” His
mother happened to look up from her window, saw him there, shrieked and fainted
“as people used to do in those days . . .”
In a letter written to his sister Hedvig on 13 March 1891, when he was
already planning The Master Builder, Ibsen recalled that “the house where I was
born and lived the first years of my childhood, and the old church with its
christening-angel under the roof, are now burned down.
All that my earliest memories are associated with—it was all burned.”
These feelings are strongly echoed in Solness’s account of the burning
of his wife’s ancestral home . . . the legend of the master builder who had built St. Michael’s
Church there and had thrown himself down from the tower because he was afraid
the roof would not hold. Ibsen said
he thought the legend must have arisen in Scandinavia, and when the others
observed that every famous cathedral in Germany had the same legend, he replied
that this must be because people felt instinctively that a man could not build
so high without paying the penalty for his hubris.
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