Emilia Galotti

The DT’s Emila Galotti, first staged in 2001, is one of the most successful productions in recent German theater; it’s sold out over a hundred times at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and has been hailed by audiences in various German cities and on tours abroad, in cities such as Belgrade (Serbia), Rome, Mexico City, Bolzano (Italy) and Bogotá (Colombia) and will, after New York City, furthermore be shown in Moscow, Tokyo and Winterthur (Switzerland) this season. Set to stunning light and sound effects on a bare stage, director Michael Thalheimer transforms Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s classic drama, written in 1772, into a timeless modern story about the failure of communication. Everything that’s said in this production is ambiguous: pledges of love, vows of revenge and proclamations of faithfulness and virtue. Only the actions speak an unequivocal language: the mute dialogue of hopelessness.

Prince Hettore Gonzaga doesn’t care about anything -- except Emilia Galotti, the daughter of a pious middle-class army officer. His desire changes everything in the live of the sensible, God-fearing girl. As the play commences it’s ten o’clock in the morning – three days after the two have met fatefully in the church. The Prince learns that Emilia is to become another man’s wife in two hour’s time, in a bond, that is not founded on political or economical strategies, but purely on love. Panic rushes in. From now on, miscalculations and ill-judged actions determine the course of events. The Prince wants to postpone Emilia’s wedding, but he misjudges the brutal way his friend Marinelli will go about that business. He underestimates the reactions of Emilia and her parents - especially her father is a man with strong codes of honor watching sharply over his daughter. Finally, Gonzaga’s long-time mistress, the Countess Orsina won’t be pushed aside so easily… Marinelli has Emilia’s groom, the Count Appiani, murdered and abducts the bride to a nearby castle. Still, the Prince is unable to enjoy his conquest. By the time the wedding day whose “morning was so beautiful” draws to a close, it’s all over.

For Emila Galotti, Lessing has taken up a motif by Roman historian Titus Livius. “Ad urbe condita (Of the origin of the city) III” tells the tale of Roman girl Virginia, who is killed by her father, because he feels that this is the only way to protect her from the Decemvir Appius Claudius. This causes a national upraising, Appius Claudius has to step down and is thrown into prison, where he kills himself. It is hardly a coincidence that Lessing in Emila Galotti takes a divergent approach in deciding to chose a less direct political placement of the story and refrains from having the actions of Odoardo cause some form of national upraising. In a letter to his brother Karl on March 1st, 1772, Lessing writes, “You understand, it should be nothing but a modernized Virginia, who is freed from all interest of the state.”

Whereas some understand the drama as directly discussing the struggles and contrasts between different classes, be it aristocracy and bourgeoisie or the people and the leadership, others feel that what makes Emila Galotti without any doubt a political drama is something different – Lessing’s focus on exploring the tendencies of people to withdraw to privacy, where they, shielded from the political public, tend to moral-religious maxims, which, in its lack of Enlightenment, leads to a dependancy that just allows aristocracy and leadership to surpress them.

Michael Thalheimer’s production explores this gulf between words and deeds: the contradiction between the rapid-fire language, which comes fast and furious in an attempt to avert the incomprehensible new situation, and the actions which are borne of helplessness. Everything that’s said aloud is merely provisional. Now and then, when the characters themselves become aware of this, their rapid flow of words comes to an astonished halt for minutes at a time, until the whirl of actions and reactions pulls them ever closer to catastrophe. With the tried and tested radicalism already witnessed in his productions of Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom and Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei, the director works his way to the very heart of Lessing’s play, which is among the darkest in all of German literature.