Peter Costello
Passion Play: Oberammergau 2020
by Christian Tüeckl and others (Theatre der Zeit, £30.00; ISBN-13: 978-3957492845)
The village of Oberammergau lies some 45 miles south of Munich in the Tyrol. In many ways it is a remote place, but in time of war and plague, no place is truly remote, in the sense of being totally cut off. Today, it is the focus of many visitors, especially every 10 years when the famous Passion play is enacted.
Local tradition tells of the play’s origins. Back in the time of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), part of the terrible struggle between Catholics and Protestants for mastery of Europe, the armies of several belligerent nations marched back and forth across the German landscape. After the destructive soldiers came the ravaging plague.
Out of all the mountain villages of the Bavarian highlands Oberammergau remained free of the plague for a while, thanks to a strict quarantine. This was strictly enforced, the roads in and out patrolled by guards. No one was allowed to leave, not a living thing to enter.
But then Caspar Schuchler, a native of the village who had been working in nearby Eschcenlohe, where the plague raged, longed to enjoy his normal family life again.
Guards
One night he crept in behind the backs of the for once inattentive guards. He got to his house, embraced his wife and his children. Three days later he and the family were dead, the village was infected, and the disease was ranging up the Ammergau Valley.
His one selfish act had killed many and endangered the rest. And all because Caspar Schuchler had longed for “things to be normal again”: the story might well be a moral fable for our times.
When the plague at last lifted, the good people of the village of Oberammergau vowed that in thanksgiving for that relief they would present every decade a Passion play in remembrance of a term of trial. The vow was made in 1633, the play first enacted in 1634.
Passion plays had been common back in the Middle Ages before the Reformation. But by then were much rarer. The text of the play was the work, so it seems, of the monks of an abbey further up the valley — the ability to write was a rare talent in these days. Their script was based, however, on earlier ones and followed the traditional form.
In 1662 a new text was by Sebastian Wild. Again in the 1750s the text was revised by Fr Rosner, a Benedictine, after the model of the then influential Jesuit theatres. In 1780 yet another revision was made by another Benedictine.
Music
Finally, Fr Joseph Alois Daisenberger, who died in1883, produced a finalised simplified version, shorn of earlier encumbrances, converting the poetry into prose, but retaining the music which had been composed by the local school master, back in 1814.
There were some hundreds of parts in the play, allowing most the villagers of the time to take part. From the beginning the actors were on a stage open to the weather, so in some years they would be drenched. Only in the early 20th Century were the audience seats closed over.
Yet despite these difficulties, one critic of the time observed, “the artistic and dramatic nature of the performance were very striking”.
Attention
For the first two centuries the play received little attention, the village being so remote. But in 1850 Edward Devrient, a star of the Munich Opera and a theatre historian, brought Oberammergau firmly to the attention of the wider world, as an example of early music drama.
Visitors began to arrive in larger numbers, thanks to the developing train services that were transforming Europe. By 1890, Cook’s of London was running excursions across Europe to the village.
The pastor’s revised text was in response to this new situation. The drama began to receive well known writers, people such as Sir Richard Burton the explorer and Arabist, who was curious (so he said) to compare it with events at Mecca! Others included J. K. Jerome, in a more light-hearted (but still serious) manner, and F. W. Farrar, the Anglican Dean of Canterbury, famous for his widely read Life of Christ. So Oberammergau had an appeal to a wide range of visitors. It has never lost this appeal.
The late 19th-Century script was still in use up to 1960. But some emendation to its language had to be made later in the light of Vatican II’s revision of the anti-Jewish sentiments that had crept into the liturgy and were no longer deemed appropriate.
The passion play’s stage (which Sir Richard Burton describes in great detail, down to a plan of the theatre, with the costs of the seats) was modelled on the old plays. In the drama there were 18 acts and some 40 scenes, for each stage of Christ’s passion is prefaced by a tableau of an Old Testament incident relevant to it (much as the readings during Mass are arranged).
It began at 8 in the morning, and after midday break of an hour and a half for dinner, ended about 6pm.
To criticise any part of it as uninteresting, is like saying that half the Bible might very well be omitted…”
Many people, used to the ways of the commercial theatre everywhere, found all this tedious, as a theatrical event, and said so. But it was pointed out for the people of Oberammergau, and most of the visitors, this was not a theatrical event.
What was on show was not intended to be an entertainment, as even Jerome noted, “but a religious service. To criticise any part of it as uninteresting, is like saying that half the Bible might very well be omitted, and that the whole story could have been told in a third of the space.”
A solemn religious service is what it was and is and will remain. The news that this summer’s presentation of the Passion Play at Oberammergau has been cancelled came as no surprise in the present situation. The drama, however, has merely been postponed to 2022. The remarkable presentation will, like most aspects of normal life, return in due course.
But in the light of what Europe is passing through now, the history of the drama is revealing in other ways.
In the preparations for this summer’s event the book of the play had already been printed, and remains available. It perhaps worth buying it now, so that anyone planning a visit in the summer of 2022 will be fully grounded in the background and the nature of what they are going to see.