The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Continuing our series of lantern lectures, we will today pick out a single artist—albeit one of the very greatest in the artistic evolution of humanity. I refer to Rembrandt.

In this case the former kind of introduction, indicating the historic background of the artist's life and times, would be a little out of place. With an individual artist such as Rembrandt, it is more important to give ourselves up to the immediate impression of his works—so far as is possible through some few reproductions. For only when we bring before our souls in sequence at least a few of his main works,—only then do we realise how unique a figure is Rembrandt in the history of mankind. We should, indeed, be adopting a false method if we tried—as in the case of Michelangelo, Raphael and others—to reveal the background of his creations more from the point of view of the history of his times. For Rembrandt, as a human phenomenon, stands, to a great extent, isolated. He grows out of the broad foundations of the race. In his case it is far more important to see how he himself stands in the stream of evolution—to see what radiates from him into the stream of evolution—than to attempt to describe him as a product of it.

This is the essential point—to recognise the immense originality which is peculiar to Rembrandt. As an isolated phenomenon of history, he grows out of the broad mass of the European people, once more bearing witness to the truth that when we contemplate the creative work of human individualities, we cannot simply construct a succession of historic causes and effects. Sooner or later we must realise the fact that just as one plant in the garden, standing beside another in a row, has not its cause in the neighbouring plant, so the successive phenomena of history have not always their causes in the preceding ones.

As the plants grow forth from the common soil under the influence of the common sunlight, so do the phenomena of history grow from cut a common soil, conjured forth by the activity of the Spiritual that ensouls humanity.

In Rembrandt we must look for something elemental and original. Many people in Mid-Europe began to feel this very strongly about the end of the eighties and the beginnings of the nineties of last century. It was curious to see what a far-reaching influence a certain book had which was published about that time. The book was not exactly about Rembrandt, but took its start from Rembrandt.

When I left Vienna at the end of the 1880s, I went out of an atmosphere in which everyone was reading and discussing this book Rembrandt as an Educator, by a German. Such was its title. I found the same atmosphere when I came to Weimar, and it went on for two or three years longer. Everyone was reading Rembrandt as an Educator. I myself—if I may interpolate this remark—found the book to some extent antipathetic. To me it was as though the author—undoubtedly a man of keen perceptions—had written down on scraps of paper in the course of time, all manner of ideas that had occurred to him. He might then have thrown them all together into a little box, shaken them up, and taken them out at random and so compiled his book. So confused were all the thoughts—so little logical sequence—so little system was there in the book.

However unpleasing from this point of view, the book nonetheless expressed something of great significance, especially so for the close of the 19th century. People investigated in all directions to discover who the unknown author might be. He had at any rate succeeded in writing out of the hearts of very many people. He felt that the spiritual and intellectual life of men had lost connection, as it were, with the mother-soil of spiritual life. Human souls no longer had the force to penetrate to the heart and center of the Cosmic Order, to draw from thence something which could give them inner fullness and satisfaction. The anonymous writer was everywhere referred to as der Rembrandt Deutsche,—the Rembrandt—German. His desire was to bring the life of the human soul back again to an elemental and original feeling of what pulsates as the underlying heart of things—even in the phenomena of the great world. He wanted to bring them thoughts of an awakening—calling out aloud to mankind: “Remember once more what lives in the elemental depths of the soul! You have lost touch; you are trifling everywhere on the surface of things—in science and scholarship, and even in your cultivation of artistic taste. You have lost the Mother-Earth of spiritual life. Remember it once more!”

To this end he would take his start from the phenomenon of Rembrandt and he therefore called his book Rembrandt as an Educator. He found the conceptions and ideas of men floating about on the surface; but in Rembrandt he saw an individuality who had drawn from the very depths of elemental human forces.

If you look back on our lectures here at Dornach during the last few weeks, you will realise—what we cannot but realise—that the inner intensity of spiritual life had declined considerably in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century. In all directions it had become essentially a culture on the surface. Even the great figures of the immediate past were appreciated only in a superficial way. What, after all, did the late 19th century (I refer to wider circles, a few individuals always excepted) understand of such writers as Goethe or Lessing? They understood practically nothing of their greatest works.

The “Rembrandt-Deutsche” felt, as I have said, that the soul's power of perception must be brought to feel and realise once more all that is elemental, all that is truly great in human evolution. True, if we feel, perhaps, in a still deeper way than he, what was and still is needful for our age, we cannot go all the way with him. Indeed, his limitations—bowed themselves in the subsequent course of his life. There was a deep sincerity of feeling in the “Rembrandt-Deutsche;” yet, after all, he was too much a child of his age to realise that a renewal of all spiritual life was necessary by a discovery of those fundamental sources which we, in our movement of Spiritual Science, are trying now to bring before our souls. All people of that time passed by unheeding—passed by what was “in the air,” if I may use the trivial expression: the need for a spiritual-scientific movement. Most of them, after all, continue to do so to this day.

The “Rembrandt-Deutsche” made a brave beginning. “Look,” he said, “look what it means to wrest one's way through to such resources of humanity as Rembrandt reached!” Yet when all this had been living in his soul, he probably fell more and more into a kind of despair—despair of the presence of any such living sources in the evolution of mankind. Eventually he went over to Catholicism. Thus, after all, he tried to find in something from the past—in old tradition—a consolation for the vain quest on which he had so bravely started in his book. His impulse did not carry him far enough to reach that spiritual life which is needed to sustain the future. None the less, we cannot but feel with him what he felt about Rembrandt.

(I may add that the name of the “Rembrandt-Deutsche” afterwards became known; his name was Langbehn.)

Rembrandt is not at all dependent on that artistic movement which I have characterised in recent lectures as the Southern European stream. He is even less dependent than Dürer was. Truly, one might say that not in a single fiber of his soul was he in any way dependent as an artist on the Latin, Southern element. He stands on his own ground entirely, creating out of the Mid-European life—out of a source of life which he draws from the deep well-springs of the people. What was the time when Rembrandt lived and worked? It was when the Thirty-Years' War was ravaging Mid-Europe.

Rembrandt was born in 1606; in 1613 the Thirty-Years' War began. Thus we may say that while the more southern nations of Middle Europe were being massacred in this War, Rembrandt, in his North-Western corner of the land, was bringing forth the unique creations of his genius out of the very essence of Mid-European humanity. He never even saw Italy. He had no relation to any nature like the Italian. He fertilised his imagination simply and solely out of the Netherlands nature that surrounded him. He made no studies as other painters of his country did—studies of Italian pictures or anything of that kind. Rembrandt stands out as the arch-representative of those who felt themselves in the 17th century so completely—albeit unconsciously—as citizens of the new Fifth post-Atlantean age.

Let us pass in review before our souls what had happened from a certain moment onward until Rembrandt's time. Hermann Grimm, who undoubtedly had a feeling for such things, considered the creations of Art as the purest flowers that mark the historic evolution of mankind. From the aspect of artistic history, artistic evolution, he threw many a beautiful and brilliant search-light on the history of Europe—notably in that time when the Fourth post-Atlantean age was playing over into the Fifth. We ourselves, in recent lantern lectures, have brought before our souls the flowering of artistic life in that age. Hermann Grimm rightly says that to understand what took its start in that period we must go back to the Carolingian era. Nothing can teach us to understand so well what was living in the age of Charlemagne as the Song of Valthari, written by a monk of St. Gall in the 10th century, and relating how Mid-Europe was overwhelmed from Italy, telling of all the destinies that overcame Mid- Europe. (In style and form, however, the Song of Walthari—like many other works of Art which we have shown—betrays strong Latin, Roman influences.)

Then we come to the gradual emerging of a new age. We find, developing in Mid-Europe, the Latin element in architecture and sculpture. We find the gradual penetration of the Gothic. We witness the life of this Gothic and Latin Art in the time of the poets in Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. And we see how the Mid-European freedom of the cities—the culture of the free cities—comes to expression in the works—especially in the domain of sculpture—which we showed last time. At length we come to the Mid-European Reformation, expressing itself in the great figures of Albrecht Dürer, Holbein and others. Then, as we indicated when speaking of Michelangelo, there came the Counter-Reformation, spreading out over all Europe.

Once more, this is visible in the realm of Art. Hermann Grimm rightly remarks that throughout this period, when the powers of mighty States were overwhelming Europe, sweeping away the political individualities, in this period of the great Principalities, there arose what is made visible in the Art of Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez. With all their greatness, when we call to mind these names we cannot but find expressed in them something connected with the Counter-Reformation—with the will to break up the Mid-European people.

Rembrandt, on the other hand, is an artist who makes felt—as an artist—something that contains the highest and strongest assertion of human individuality and human freedom, and his creations spring from the deep originality of this same people.

It is wonderful to see how in Rembrandt has continued what I have already explained in the case of Dürer—the weaving in the elemental play of light and darkness. What Goethe afterwards achieved for Science (although Science to this day does not accept it, not having yet advanced so far—but it will become so in good time)—the discovery in light and darkness of an elemental weaving on the waves of which the true origin of color itself is to be sought—this, I would say, lights up in the realm of Art for the first time in Dürer and finds its highest expression in Rembrandt.

The greatness of the Italian Masters of painting lay in the fact that they raised the individual appearance to the sublime—to the typical. Rembrandt is the faithful observer of the immediate reality. But he observes it not in the spirit of Classical antiquity, for he belongs to the Fifth and not to the Fourth post-Atlantean age.

How does Rembrandt observe the reality? He confronts the object as an outsider—really and truly as an outsider. Fundamentally speaking, even Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, living as they did in the Fifth post-Atlantean age, could do no other than confront the object as men stand outside it. But they still let themselves be fertilised by what came over to them from antiquity. And thus, if I may say so, it was only half-outwardly that they confronted the object. Rembrandt confronted it altogether outwardly, and yet in such a way as to bring it—albeit from without—all his own full inwardness of soul. But to bring inwardness to the outer object in this way is not to carry all manner of things into it out of the egoism of one's human personality. It is, rather, to be able to live with that which works and weaves in space.

Rembrandt was a man who wrestled on and on for decades,—we might almost say, from period to period of five years, and his pictures bear witness to his continual wrestling and his constant progress. This wrestling essentially consists in the ever more perfect working out of light and darkness. Color to him is only that which is born, as it were, out of the light and the darkness.

What I said of Dürer—that he looked not for the color which wells forth from within the object, but for that color which is cast on it from outside—applies in a still higher degree to Rembrandt. Rembrandt lives in the surging and weaving of the light and dark. Hence he delights to observe how the play of light and dark brings forth its remarkable plastic painting effects in a crowd of figures. The Southern painters took their start from composition. Rembrandt does not do this, though in the course of his life, because of the elemental forces working in him so strongly, he rises to the possibility of a certain composition. Rembrandt simply sets down his figures; he lets them stand there and then he lives and weaves in the element of light and shadow, tracing it with inner joy as it pours itself out over the figures. And as he does so, in the very life and movement of the light and darkness, a Cosmic, universal principle of composition comes into his pictures.

So we see Rembrandt (if I may so describe it) painting plastically but painting with light and darkness. And by this means, although he only directs his gaze to the outer reality—not to be the sublimer truth like the South-European painters, but to the actual reality—he still lifts his characters to a spiritual height. For that which floods through the realms of space as light and weaves in them is the element we must always seek in Rembrandt; by virtue of it he is the great and original spirit that he is.

You will recognise this if you let pass before your mind's eye the whole succession of these pictures. Rembrandt is first of all an observer, trying faithfully to reproduce what Nature puts before him.

Then he gets nearer and nearer to the secret of creating out of the light and the darkness, until at length his figures only provide him with the occasion, as it were, to reveal the working of the pure distribution of light and darkness in the realm of space. Then he is able to reveal the mysterious fashioning of sublimer forms out of the light and darkness. The plastic forms of outer reality only provide him with the opportunity. We see emerging more and more in Rembrandt's work as time goes on, the boldest imaginable distributions of light and dark. When we stand face to face with his creations we have the feeling: all these are no mere figures that stood before him in space, as models or the like. The essential thing is altogether different; it is something that hovers over the figures. The figures only provide the occasion for what Rembrandt was essentially creating. He created his great works by using his figures, as it were, to catch the light. The figures give him the opportunity to seize the light. The essential is the play of light and darkness which the figures enable him to grasp. The figures merely stand there as a background; the real work of Art springs from this intangible element which he attains by means of the figures.

To look in Rembrandt's works for the particular subjects which the pictures represent, is to look past the essential work of Art. It is only when we contemplate what is poured out over the figures that we see what is essential in Rembrandt. The figures are no more than the medium for what is poured out over them.

Of such a nature is the delicate, intimate quality of the creations especially of his middle period. Unfortunately we cannot show this, because the reproductions are in black and white; but it is most interesting to see in the middle period of his work how really the colors in his pictures are created out of light and shade. The colors are everywhere born out of the light and the darkness. This artistic conception becomes so strong in Rembrandt that towards the end of his life's work, color recedes, as it were, into the background, and all painting becomes for him a problem of light and darkness.

It is deeply touching from a human point of view, to witness what wrestles its way through to outward existence from decade to decade in Rembrandt's work. For it is undeniable—great as was his talent, his artistic genius from the very first—he was not yet profound; he could not yet reach into the depths of things. What he created to begin with is great in its way, yet it somehow is lacking in depth.

Then about 1642, he suffered a grievous loss—a loss for his whole life. He lost the wife whom he loved so tenderly, and with whom he was so united that she was really like a second life to him. But this loss became for Rembrandt the source of a great, an infinite deepening of soul. Thus we see how his creations gain in depth from this time onward—grow infinitely richer in soul-content than before. Henceforth it is no longer merely Rembrandt, the man of genius—henceforth it is no longer merely Rembrandt, the man of genius—henceforth it is Rembrandt deepened in his own inner life and being.

Considering Rembrandt comprehensively, we must say that here at last we have the painter of the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch in the fullest sense of the word. For as you know, we describe the basic character of this epoch when we say that the Spiritual Soul, above all, is now wrestling its way into existence. What does this signify for Art? It signifies that the artist must stand over against his object from without. He lets the world work upon him objectively, yet in such a way that there is still a universal spirit in his contemplation, for otherwise he would be creating merely out of human egoism. The very fact that he confronts the world, and even man himself, as an outer object, gives him the possibility of seeing infinitely much that could not be seen in former ages.

What, after all, would be the meaning of Art if it were only to produce the reality as human beings see it in ordinary life? It is the very purpose of Art to reproduce what is not seen in the everyday life.

Now it is natural in the epoch of development of the conscious Spiritual Soul that man should turn his attention, above all, to man himself and to all that is expressible through man. The artist of the Fourth post-Atlantean age, as I have so often told you, created more out of an inner feeling of himself—out of an inward experience of his own being. The artist of the Fifth post-Atlantean age—and this is true in the highest degree of Rembrandt—creates from outward, contemplative vision. But this signifies for man an artistic process of self-knowledge. And I think we are pointing to no matter of chance when we recall the fact that Rembrandt painted so many portraits of himself. I think there is a deep and significant meaning in the fact that he had to seek again and again for self-knowledge as an artist. His own form was not merely the most convenient model at his disposal—certainly it was not the most beautiful, for Rembrandt was not a handsome man. No, for him the important thing was to become progressively aware of the harmony between what lives within and what can be observed from without—to become aware of this harmony at that very place where it can best be studied—in the self-portrait.

Undoubtedly there is a deeper meaning in the fact that the first great painter of the Fifth post-Atlantean age painted so many portraits of himself.

We might continue for a long time, my dear friends, making one observation or another about Rembrandt. The result would only be to make us realise more and more how he stands out as an isolated phenomenon through his age, though in this isolation he creates out of the very fountain-head, out of the well-spring of Mid-European spiritual life. For Rembrandt creates out of the spirit which is characteristic of Mid-Europe. To create, to look at the outward reality, not merely seeking to observe it realistically, but with a gaze that fertilizes itself with that by which man's gaze can, indeed, be fertilized—with the surging, weaving, elemental world. And for the painter, this signifies the light and dark, surging upon the waves of color, till the outward reality is merely the occasion to unfold this living and weaving in the light and dark and in the world of color.

We will now consider a few of Rembrandt's characteristic pictures, and see how these things can be traced in his works:

Here you see at once how what I indicated just now shows itself in actuality. In Rembrandt's work, even when we stand before the colored paintings, we have the feeling that what lives in color is already there potentially in the light and shade. This must always be borne in mind.

When we let this or any other pictures of Biblical history by Rembrandt work upon our souls, we are struck by a peculiar difference between him and Rubens, for instance, or the Italian Masters. Their presentations of the Biblical figures are always somehow connected with the sacred Legends. Rembrandt's are quite obviously the work of a man who reads the Bible for himself.

We can remember that the time of his creative work was near the climax of that period when Roman Catholicism, and, above all, Jesuitism, was waging an inexorable war on all Bible-reading. Bible-reading was anathema; it was forbidden. Meanwhile, on this Dutch soil which had just freed itself from Southern influence and Southern rulership, there arose the strong impulse to go to the Bible itself. They drew their inner experience from the Bible itself—not merely from Catholic legend and tradition. Such was the inspiration of the scenes which Rembrandt treats so wonderfully with his rays of light and dark.

Even the dress is arranged in such a way as to express his favorite element of light and shadow. He even liked to use a metal collar on which the light could glisten.

This portrait will certainly confirm what I said just now, and it will show you another thing at the same time. Under the influence of his artistic way of feeling—although the reality is by no means lifted into realms of fancy—the life of the soul comes to expression with great depth.

The purest study in light and darkness. Here you will feel what I tried to characterise briefly in the introduction. All that you see here—the architectural and all the other features—merely provided the occasion for the real work of Art, which lies in the distribution of the light itself.

Here we have a picture of Rembrandt and his wife; they are both looking into a mirror:

It is interesting to hear of an experience which Hermann Grimm relates. He introduced the use of Lantern-slides in University lecturing. It is evident on other occasions, also, how much can be gained from the use of lantern slides and projectors in familiarising ourselves with the world of Art. But once when Hermann Grimm was lecturing on Rembrandt, the slides arrived a little late. He had not time to go through them beforehand, and saw them for the first time during the lecture, which thus became a kind of running conversation with his hearers, among whom there were always older people as well as students.

Now I need scarcely remind you that in lecture halls, which are generally well lighted, a more or less wide-awake attention prevails—occasionally more, generally less: But the customary condition was changed in as much as the hall was darkened. And through the darkness and the effect of the Rembrandt pictures thrown upon the screen, people in the audience again and again had a peculiar impression, as Hermann Grimm himself relates. In effect, through the extraordinary vividness which Rembrandt can achieve, one really has the feeling that such a character is present here, among the people in the room. He is there—and if you imagined all the paraphernalia removed—if there were only the light-picture by itself—it would be all the more vivid. The number of people in the room is simply increased by one, so vividly does this figure live among us.

Rembrandt attains this effect because he places his figures into that element in which man always lives—though he is unconscious of it—the element of light and dark. This light and dark which is common to us all, Rembrandt pours out over his figures, and so places them into this living interplay of light and darkness, thus endowing them with a common element—in which the onlooker himself is living. That is the wonderful thing in Rembrandt.

Here you see there is a decided attempt at a composition. Yet the composition, as such, it must be admitted, is not a great success; at any rate it is by no means equal to what is called so in the Southern Art. But look at the characteristic Rembrandt quality once more. Infinite mysteries speak to us out of this picture, simply through the distribution of the masses of light. The composition is truly not very great, and yet I think the picture makes an extraordinary deep impression upon us.

I should really have shown the next two pictures before this one, but I have purposely chosen the reverse order. I beg you to compare this picture with the two next, which most probably preceded this one in time. There is probably an interval of about two between this picture and the next but one. Showing the pictures in the reverse order, I wish to illustrate how Rembrandt perfected himself. He was constantly wrestling and striving. Compare this picture with the next but one—that of the Ascension—and you will see how he advanced. Compare them with respect to depth and inwardness. The next is the Resurrection.

And now we come to:

With the “Entombment,” which undoubtedly represents a considerable advance on this, we come near the year 1640—or, at any rate, the close of the 1630s.

Now for an example of a landscape by Rembrandt:

And now we come to some of the most famous of his pictures:

The Amsterdam Citizen's Guard gathered round the drummers in the night—a whole host of individual figures. Rembrandt was not the only artist of his time to paint such pictures as this. Only he did so with an unique perfection. Such a picture shows us especially how this artist is rooted in the people. Look at this whole collection of men. Some Guild or other—people of one and the same class or calling, men who belonged together—ordered the picture jointly; each one paying his share. This man here, of whom only half the head is visible, made a great fuss. He was very angry and Rembrandt got into trouble because he did not find himself portrayed in his full glory.

“The Night Watch” shows us in the most beautiful way how Rembrandt had progressed. Look at the wonderful distribution in this picture of the light and darkness. This is, indeed, the very time of the great deepening of Rembrandt's life. The picture dates from 1642, the same year that he lost the wife whom we saw in the portrait just now, and in the portrait of the two together.

I think you will feel in these pictures a greater clarity, a more sublime quality than in the former ones.

Now we would like to show a series of “self-portraits”:

Then we have an “Adoration”:

With all its simplicity, this is surely one of his most characteristic pictures. To show the reader in the light, the light itself is made of the subject-matter, as it were—the subject of the story the picture tells.

A picture of great tenderness. We have now come to the year 1648.

I may remark that in the vast majority of Rembrandt's pictures, the Christ is by no means beautiful.

And now we come to that most beautiful picture:

You would realise what Rembrandt is if you could see side by side with this picture the picture of a horse by Rubens, for example. Then you would see the whole difference in the conception of these two pictures.

This horse is really moving; it is really a living horse. No horse by Rubens, ever really moves. Please do not think that this is unconnected with the artist's peculiar conception out of the element of light. He who aims at what is merely seen, he who merely tries to reproduce the “reality,” will, after all, never be able to produce more than the frozen form. However great his work may be, it will always contain just a little of what we might describe as a kind of cramp, or paralysis, poured out over the whole picture.

But the artist who holds fast the single moment in the weaving, ever-moving element that plays round the figures—the artist who does not work merely “realistically,” but places his figures into the true reality which is the elemental world—he will achieve a real impression of movement.

Look at this old woman. Is she not really cutting her nails?

Here, again, we have a picture painted by special command of these great gentlemen. Yet it is one of his greatest masterpieces. See the wonderful simplicity with which they are presented here—the dignitaries of the Guild whose task it was to test the finished cloth and set their seal upon it as a sign that it was good. They are the Presidents of a Clothmakers' Guild—the Stall-Meisters. Of course, they club together to pay for the picture, but as these were especially high lords and masters, Rembrandt must see to it that this time no single face is eclipsed. Every face must come out properly in full relief. And with the high artistic perfection of this picture this is attained. These gentlemen did not go quite so far as the Professors of Anatomy with their half-dissected corpse; one of them holds in his hand a piece of paper on which their names are recorded.

And now the work of a very old Rembrandt:

And now I wish to show you the well-known picture of Faust.

When we see this picture, we are reminded of what I said in one of our last lectures—how Goethe himself in his “Faust” portrays the figure of the 16th century in this weaving of the light.—But Rembrandt had revealed it before Goethe.

I must not leave it unsaid that to know Rembrandt fully it is most necessary to be acquainted with his art as an etcher. The especial love for this Art is, indeed, characteristic of that stream to which Rembrandt wished, above all, to devote himself. He is no less great as an etcher co, than as a painter.

Etchings by Rembrandt:

This is the so-called Hundred Guilder Print: “Come unto me all you who labor and are burdened you ...”

We see in it the real beauty of Rembrandt's art, especially in how these characteristic figures around the Christ figure are expressed.

And now we want to add to the self-portraits we have shown you as a final scene, another etching:

How different is Rembrandt from the other artists whose works we have seen during these lectures: It was only in Dürer that we saw the first lighting-up of what appears so wonderfully in Rembrandt. Rembrandt is a unique figure; he stands alone and isolated. In the continuous study of the history of Art, it is especially fascinating to dwell upon what is really characteristic in the creations of single individualities. Rembrandt, above all, makes us aware of the immediate individual presence of a strong and forceful, mighty personality, lighting forth in the seventeenth century.

At a time like the present it is not without importance that we should turn our gaze to an epoch in which, beside all the devastation that was taking place in Europe, there was this immediate and original creation out of a human soul—a human soul of whom we may, indeed, believe that he was connected directly with the prime sources and elements of world-existence.

I hope it will be given to us while we can still be here together to show some other aspects also of the continued development of Art.

This performance took place in the Goetheanum building – including the last, cheerful part. This was the first complete eurythmy performance there; previously, only individual eurythmic performances had been shown there as part of larger celebrations. From the next performance on April 24, 1921, the first parts of the performance took place in the Goetheanum building, but during the break for the last, cheerful part, the audience moved to the carpentry workshop.

“Charming Region (Ariel Scene)” from “Faust II” by]. W. v. Goethe
“Proemion“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (2.) by Rudolf Steiner
“With a Painted Ribbon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3rd) by Rudolf Steiner Music (with the curtain closed)
Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Among Times”; “Twelve-Eleven”; “The Guineafowl”
Two presentations by the children's

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

I do not wish to use these introductory words to explain the presentation, for artistic matters must speak for themselves. But the art of eurythmy, as we practise it here, and of which we would like to give you a presentation today, draws on special artistic sources and expresses itself in a special artistic language of forms that is less familiar to the present day. What is being striven for here should not be confused with any kind of pantomime or facial expression or even dance-like performances. It may appear to you to be a representation of the moving human being, of the human being moving in his limbs, especially his arms and hands, and also the movements between groups of people in space and so on – an art of movement. But the movements are not meant to convey an immediate facial expression or other expression taken from the moment from something in the spiritual or psychological, but rather they are meant to convey something that is based in reality on a, I would like to say, visible language.

This visible language came about through the observation of human speech. The inner formation of movement that occurs when a person sings was also observed. It does not fully emerge, but it is present in the larynx and other speech organs, in everything that can be observed in speaking and singing in humans. And that which can be overheard through sensual and supersensual observation and research in the human organism in relation to one of its organ systems when speaking [for example], is then transferred and transformed into mere movement in the whole person. So that one has before one, so to speak, in a certain sense a kind of visible larynx, visible speech. Just as the soul-spiritual expresses itself through speech, so it can also do so through this visible speech. Of course, we have to bear in mind that what is initially the eurythmic language is just a form of expression, that it has to be transformed into something artistic, just as, depending on the treatment of language, on the shaping of language, on the forming of language, it depends on whether something that is pronounced succinctly becomes a real work of art, something artistic. So the artistic element must first be drawn out of what underlies this eurythmic language.

But now we can see that the artistic element can indeed be expanded if we try to translate the human form itself into movement; and we arrive at the sources of movements that are naturally and elementarily present in the human organism. One can see, as it were, how the human form moves out of its own forms into certain forms of movement. And one can perceive these forms of movement as a natural revelation of the human being, just as one perceives it as a natural revelation of the human being when he expresses what lies in the soul through the language of sounds or tones. On the other hand, however, one can also see how the artistic element in eurythmy lies not in the individual movement, but in the lawful sequence of movements, in the way one movement emerges from another, in the way the individual movement makes each of the others visible. individual movement. And so, as it were, what is essential and artistic in poems must be substantiated by the prose content of language, so it must also be the case with this eurythmy.

And it must be said in advance that what is expressed, in terms of its impression, in terms of its aesthetic impression, can be completely independent of the interpretation of the individual movement. In the artistic shaping of this visible language, there is a definite transformation into such movements that are immediately comprehensible for the sensory impression. In ordinary spoken language, the following actually work together as a human speech sound: the mental element, which, as it were, flows through the sound, and it works into the sound, which is particularly evident in artistic, poetic language; it works into the sound and into the sequence of sounds, into the inner sound formation, the feeling and the will element. And one can say: the more the intellectual element lives in the poetry, the less artistic the poetry becomes. The more formative-volitional element there is in the poetry, but which is expressed in the evenness of the form, the more artistic it is.

Now, when the whole human being is expressed through this eurythmically visible language, one appeals to the whole human being, to the full human being. In this way, the abstract element of the mere thought is overcome and what is revealed is more that is the will-feeling element. One also sees how in the eurythmic embodiment of a poem, those things come to light that express the actual formal artistic element in the poem. That which is first secreted into language by the real poet, but that is seen to be expressed in a eurythmic form.

Therefore, even if you have accompaniment, as is to be done here, you cannot recite in the way that is popular and considered good today, since one particularly emphasizes, so to speak, the prose side of poetry in recitation or declamation. This leads to a prosaic effect, and an unartistic age like the present will have much to object to in the way recitation and declamation are done in the way that is being challenged by eurythmy – that is, to bring out the rhythmic, the melodious, the sense of meter in the treatment of speech – and to bring this out in recitation as well, so that the recitation in the recitation eurythmic element contained in every true poem. So on the one hand you can see here how what can be recited and declaimed comes to light in this visible language. On the other hand, the musical element will accompany what then becomes visible language. Just as one can sing with the larynx and the other vocal organs, one can also sing visibly. This is what can be visibly presented as a singing revelation through the art of eurythmy.

It is important that this eurythmic art can also be used to present dramatic material, such as we are about to show you today. This dramatic element is initially revealed in such a way that eurythmy is particularly suited to depicting those parts and dramas where certain poets rise from the representation of the external physical-sensual into the supersensible, where the inner life of the human being is also depicted in an external visualization. And you will see in the one [representation] of a Goethe scene that is being presented today how that which, so to speak, plays into the sensual world from the supersensible, how it is brought out through the eurythmic element. Of course, today we still have the necessity that everything that is, so to speak, a realistic representation of human beings, that is, the actual realistic drama, must also be given in the ordinary theatrical form. But there is hope, and I give myself up to this hope in the expectation that, after we have already succeeded in eurythmically presenting the non-sensuous, we will also succeed in progressing to a dramatic stage style, again starting from the element of movement, for realistic scenes as well. However, further work needs to be done on this. Today we are not yet able to shape the eurythmic-dramatic in a eurythmic way. What it [gap in the shorthand]

made possible was to find a way, through eurythmy, to create a kind of [a] representation that truly corresponds to the subject. In the scene from my Mystery Dramas that is to be presented today, you will see the supersensible human element, that which works in people in such a way that it cannot be portrayed in such realism. This is where we are dealing with what a person from a soul-spiritual world does in actions, what lives in him from a soul-spiritual world. Then one must use eurythmy to reveal this soul and spiritual reality. That which is already working eurythmically, such as a scene from my “Mysteries Dramas”, can most easily be presented in a theatrical form, although what is realism in the presentation must also be taken into account. What is in people and what is the main thing that we form today.

In a scene like this, you will see in the eurythmic presentation, how it is from my “mystery dramas”, that it is indeed possible to present in full individual form that which, as it were, sees through the world of the senses as something supersensible, and that in this way one can enter into a certain working and essential nature of [nature], whereas today one does not really can see anything of the kind. Today, one only wants to have an abstract creation of natural events in natural laws. So we must say to ourselves: if nature does not want to give up her secrets to mere, abstract thought, if nature herself is a great artist whose secrets can only be surmised, if, when we shape, we must indeed resort to what we call knowledge of nature, then we must resort to what poets present dramatically. And it was from such a feeling that Goethe spoke the words: “To whom nature begins to reveal her open secret, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter: art.”

That is essentially what needs to be said about eurythmy as such, as art. You will see that even [introductions can be given before, without] accompanying words, which thus create the mood, can be formed eurythmically. [Incomprehensible sentence, see notes] Endings can be given where the mood is [represented] in a purely [eurythmic night act].

Another side of this eurythmy is – which I will only mention here – therapy and hygiene. Since the movements involved here are taken from the full human being and his creative powers, they can also be developed in such a way that they actually become a kind of eurythmy therapy, because they are healing movements. They are taken from the organization of the whole human being, which is fully formed. This is something I only want to mention.

I would like to point out a third element in this eurythmic endeavor. This is the pedagogical-didactic element: at the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run, eurythmy has been introduced as a kind of soulful gymnastics, as a kind of compulsory teaching subject, and one can clearly see how the children find it, the self-evident fact that the full human being is not only based on the external physical nature, this point of view but on body, soul and spirit [is based] on this expression as a full human being. I would say that even the child feels this as something quite natural. It grows into those healing forces that are particularly also healing forces during growth, namely in the transition from the human, resting form to the moving human form, which [demands] nature of the human form. The child demands such movements and such movement exercises in such a way that it has an inner, implicit idea of them. [Sentence difficult to read, see notes.] Initiatives of the will are thus trained in the right way through what the child can live out in these eurythmic movements, in this soul-filled gymnastics.

What needs to be said about artistic eurythmy to characterize it can be summed up by recalling what Goethe said about the artistic human being and their relationship to the world: “When man is placed at the summit [of nature, he perceives himself as a whole of nature again], takes measure of nature, harmony, meaning and sense together and finally rises to the production of the work of art work].” - There is now another: When man uses external instruments, he has to express what he experiences artistically within himself differently than when he has the tool in his own organism, the tool that is, firstly, an imprint of the whole world, really a kind of microcosm [gap in the shorthand, see notes], but that, on the other hand, is also something that man lives entirely within himself, so that in what he expresses he expresses his own innate tool, so that man, not only when he is placed at the summit of nature to produce a work of art, but that he tries to let the artistic experience within him be revealed through himself. In this respect, those who have a true artistic feeling can see the eurythmy experiment and the artistic endeavor. The artistic goal is certainly not to depict abstractions.

On the other hand, let me repeat once again, dear audience, that the new eurythmy art is still in its infancy, and that we must therefore always ask for the indulgence of our esteemed audience. It is the case that we are our own harshest critics, but we are also convinced that we will find opportunities for development in our artistic endeavors, and that we will be able to fully develop some of these opportunities, probably through others and no longer through ourselves. Then the time will come when this art of eurythmy, even if it is the youngest, will be able to stand alongside the older sister arts as a fully justified sister art.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum auditorium, the second, more cheerful part in the Carpentry.

Part I (Goetheanum)
Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Seventh picture from the Pforte der Einweihung by Rudolf Steiner
“Prooemion” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3.) by Rudolf Steiner
“With a painted ribbon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
From the ‘Chymischen Hochzeit’ by Valentin Andreae with music by Max Schuurman

Part II (Joinery)
“The Three Gypsies“ by Nikolaus Lenau
“The Castle by the Sea” by Ludwig Uhland “Erlking” by J. W. v. Goethe with “Elven Prelude” “Good Night” (children's group)
“Guests at the Beech” (children's group)
Humorous poems by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The Sniffles’; ‘Under Times’; ‘The Priestess’; ‘The Dog's Grave’; ‘Moon Things’

Distinguished attendees!

When a person speaks, they leave to the air what is happening in their throat, which they evoke through their speech organs. Certain tendencies of movement lie in these speech organs. These tendencies can be studied by means of sensory and supersensible observation, and in this way we can, as it were, discover the foundations of the human organism when it reveals its soul and spiritual nature through one of its organ systems.

We can now say that the human being is actually concentrated in such an organ system at the moment when the person speaks through it. Perhaps the best way to express what is involved in terms of the human being is to recall Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, that work of Goethe's that is still far too little considered today, but that will one day, when we see these things more impartially, play a great role in our understanding of the living. In the individual plant leaf Goethe sees an entire plant, only simply formed. And in the whole plant he sees a more complicated leaf. What Goethe so fruitfully applied within his view of the living in the plant world can be extended to all living and also to all soulful, spiritualized things, and one gets the following as knowledge for that which can then be of interest here for the human being.

In a language organism, the whole human being is, as it were, concentrated during the activity of speaking – just as the whole plant is in the individual leaf. This can certainly be noticed in the experience of speaking. When we speak, we are, so to speak, immersed in what we are saying with our whole consciousness, with our whole soul life. But just as Goethe sees in the whole plant only a more intricately formed leaf, so too can what we see through sensory-supersensible observation as the actual, essential inner activity of the human speech organs be transferred to the whole human being. One can bring the whole human being into movement in his limbs and his movements, and also in space, so that he becomes, as it were, a speech organ that expresses itself visibly – not audibly, as with the ordinary speech organ.

That, dear attendees, is what has actually happened to shape our eurythmic art. It is not based on some kind of random gestures, or on arbitrary pantomime or facial expressions — or even dance movements — in connection with an experience of the soul. Rather, it is based on the fact that a visible language has been gained through research into what goes on invisibly in the human speech organs when we speak audibly. This has been applied to the human being as a whole. And now you will see, so to speak, a whole human being here on the stage in eurythmy – larynx, other speech organs – and you will hear a real visible language, shaped just as much by inner laws as spoken language.

What appears in recitation, in declamation, and in poetry in general – and our presentation will be accompanied by recitation and poetry – can be portrayed by the visible language of eurythmy, without there being anything arbitrary in the individual movement. as one can arbitrarily utter speech sounds in order to reveal something that is formed by the soul through language. In eurythmy, as in other arts, the main thing is not the individual movement but what emerges when the individual movement accompanies the formed word or sentence, when these movements unfold. Just as one can accompany the spoken word, one can accompany music. Just as one can sing through the speech organs, one can sing with this visible language of eurythmy. It can accompany the musical work just as well as the audible tone itself. So here we have what makes the whole human being an expression of what is experienced spiritually and mentally, like tone and speech or like singing itself.

When we direct our gaze to another person in life – perhaps we do not always notice it in our busy lives, but it is there – when we direct our gaze to another person, when we become aware of this human form: we feel our own inner being in the sight of the other person, and that is, after all, what makes us feel connected to other people. It is something like a glimpse of the self when you see another person. And if the other person expresses what moves his soul through speech, then there is an intimate absorption in the being of the other person.

The same can now be achieved by looking at, perceiving this visible language of eurythmy. It is, so to speak, absolutely that which we can feel in the shaping of the poet, the real artistic poet, in his poetry; there is really something in these lawful movements of eurythmy which, in a different way from our speech sounds, enriches our whole observation and can express poetry and the musical. And anyone who can feel joy at an expansion of the field of art will certainly not oppose the attempt to seek precisely such an expansion of the field of art through a particular artistic medium, which consists in setting the human form itself in motion, and in a particular artistic formal language.

You will then also see, dear attendees, groups of people in motion in their mutual relationships in space. What is expressed is also the inner emotional experience in groups of people in relation to one another, not only in the individual. In a sense, we see ourselves and our own emotional life. This emotional life is actually such that it is also a reflection of the whole external world: what people experience with each other, how people can be in harmony or disharmony with each other, all this is reflected, if I may put it this way, at the bottom of our emotional life. All this can in turn be expressed through poetry and music. And then it is better if we express this inwardly moved soul life, which lives in its relationship to a majority of people, if we want to express that, that we use the human groups. The human group has something more natural in itself for eurythmy. You will see that, without the accompanying speech or music, it is possible to speak or sing, as it were, in introductory and concluding forms, through what has been found as the eurythmic form itself. In the introductory form, we will have to strike the mood of a poem or a piece of music, or we will breathe out the mood in a silent form. This means that there are certain possibilities for developing our eurythmic art that we have so far only exploited to a very limited extent.

Today, you will perhaps be able to see from the first part of our presentation how the eurythmic art can be used for drama, not just for lyric and epic poetry. Admittedly, so far we have only succeeded in expressing in eurythmy the right way that which, so to speak, presents itself in the drama as supersensible, as a revelation of the inner human soul. For example, it is really possible to express those scenes in Goethe's “Faust” where the supersensible is drawn upon by Goethe, where the representation rises from the earthly-sensual to the spiritual-supersensible, to express this intrusion of the supersensible into the sensual in such a way through eurythmic forms that the dramatic progression is particularly enlivened. I do hope, however, that we can also find special forms for the realistic-dramatic, which we still have to present today as if it were ordinary realistic stagecraft, with mere gestures to accompany the words, these things must be presented.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is one aspect of eurythmy. That is one side. There are two others. The first is the therapeutic and hygienic aspect, which I will mention only briefly. The movements that are drawn from the human form are entirely in keeping with the same currents that lie in the human powers of growth and creativity, in which lies everything that is contained in human circulation and human breathing as normal movements, as health-promoting, health-preserving movements. Therefore, by expanding the paths that are artistically expressed here, by further developing the movements, one can also develop a therapeutic-hygienic eurythmy. And it will be developed. There is no doubt that it will be able to enter our lives as a healing factor.

The third aspect is the educational-didactic side. At the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is led by me, we have introduced the art of eurythmy as a compulsory subject. There it is a factor within pedagogy and didactics that can be called an inspired, spiritualized form of gymnastics. One day people will think about these things more impartially than they do today. Gymnastics is purely shaped by physiological rules. It is that which relates to the laws of the human body. In contrast, what is represented in this soulful gymnastics - eurythmy - is a meaningful and natural movement of the whole person, body, soul and spirit. This is why we see – and this is clearly demonstrated by Waldorf school eurythmy lessons – that we see that the child perceives it as something completely natural to live out their entire humanity in these eurythmic movements. Every movement is imbued with meaning, carried by the soul. The child feels this, it knows that it does not need to hold back the soul and spirit as it would in gymnastics.

Above all, one sees that one element in particular is developed in an educational way: this is the initiative of the will, which will be so necessary for our generation and the next. And many other things can be achieved if eurythmy is introduced at the earliest stages of education and teaching. No other educational method can achieve the same degree of inner mobility in the living out of the spiritual, the same skill in the organism, and so on.

The main thing here is, of course, the artistic expression of eurythmy. And in this respect, I would like to say that the fact that the human organism, with its range of movement and its inner laws, is the tool of this eurythmic art justifies it in itself. Goethe says so beautifully: “To whom nature reveals her manifest secret, longs for her deepest interpreter, art.” The deepest secrets of the existence of the world are contained in the human being, this microcosm. But the human form, which expresses so much, so infinitely, does not express the whole, the full human being. When we see a human hand in its resting form, we do not have it in its fullness. We have it only in its fullness when we consider every shape of the individual finger of the arm and so on, and see how the shape is tinged to merge into the movements, how the shape is, so to speak, the main movement that has come to rest, how the movements that are carried out by the hand or arm are driven out again from the particular shape. And so in the whole person. Truly, it is so that in the truly artistic one sees the deepest secrets of nature, which is why, according to Goethe, it is the deepest yearning of man to look at these secrets in the artistic sense.

Then, at another time, Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn regards himself as a whole nature, takes in order, harmony, measure and meaning through appearances and rises to the production of the work of art. This work of art will be a truer one if the human being does not use external instrumentation, but uses himself in his inner lawfulness, his inner essence, in such a way that he seeks order, harmony, measure and meaning from his own form and movement and thereby rises to the production of the work of art.

In all this, I must also today, as always, ask my dear audience to consider what we call the eurythmic art in such a way that there is always a beginning. It will be further developed, and we are only just beginning today, but our strictest critics know what possibilities for development lie in it and what can be expressed further and further. What has already been thought in eurythmy in a certain respect – the individual scenes from my mystery drama – will show you that eurythmy arises as if by itself. In all that is really artistically shaped in the poetry itself, it flows as if by itself, as it were, over what is poetry, into the eurythmic movement. Therefore, one cannot recite or declaim in the way that is popular today for this eurythmic performance, but it must be emphasized not only the literal prose - as it is today as audible when reciting - but it must be the voice, the tone when reciting the eurythmic, the pictorial, which is already in the poetry, the rhythmic, the beat-like, the rhythmic, that which is actually artistic and subtle in a real, true poem - not that which is literally prosaic - must be emphasized.

All this must be taken into account, because it is actually a new field that we are entering with this eurythmic art. If we take all this together with what I have said, that we are only at the beginning, but that we will continue to develop the eurythmic art further and further, then we can perhaps also sense what possibilities for development are available and that it is to be hoped that this eurythmic art will be further developed - not so much by us, but by others - so that one day it can establish itself as a fully valid younger art alongside the older sister arts.

Today we will present the first part here – up to what will take place as a “Chymical Wedding” – in this room. Then there will be an intermission, and the second part after the intermission will take place over there in the provisional hall of the carpentry workshop, where the eurythmy performances have usually been held up to now.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanumban, the second, more cheerful part in the carpentry.

Part I (Goetheanum)

Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
“The Nile Delta” by Wladimir Solowjow (Russian) ‘Mighty Surprise’ by J. W. v. Goethe
Quote from the soul calendar (4.) by Rudolf Steiner “The little bird” by Edward Grieg
Quote from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner “Forest Concerts” by Christian Morgenstern with music by Max Schuurman

Part II (joinery)
Music played by Louise van Blommestein
“The Castle by the Sea“ by Ludwig Uhland
“Erlking” by J. W. v. Goethe with “Elven Prelude”
“Poems are painted window panes” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘Among times’; ‘The priestess’; ‘The dog's grave’; ‘Moon things’

Dear attendees!

The eurythmic art, of which we would like to give you a sample, is based on a kind of visible language. You will see the movement of the individual human being in his limbs, namely in those limbs that can most actively and expressively reveal the soul, movements of the arms and hands. Or also: you will see movements of the whole human being in space or of groups of people and so on.

All that which presents itself as a kind of visible language could be understood as pantomime, mime art or even as dance art and the like, but should not actually be confused with these neighboring arts. For what underlies this eurythmic language is observed – to use this Goethean expression – through sensual-supersensory observation of everything that, as movement tendencies, as movement intentions, underlies, so to speak, the emergence of phonetic language and song. Song and phonetic language emerge from the human speech organ. It is not so much about what comes out with the movements of the air, but rather about what it is about, to observe what movement patterns prevail in the larynx and the other speech organs. These movement patterns are not directly expressed as such, but are transformed and converted into what can then reveal itself as speech sounds. But if one observes this system, one comes to the conclusion that, in relation to what a person reveals when speaking, one can recognize and artistically apply the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis.

Goethe sees in the individual plant leaf a simpler whole plant that simply grows on the rest of the plant, and in turn he sees in the whole plant a more complicated plant leaf. What Goethe applied to the formation of plant life, he later wanted to extend to all living things. This is an extraordinarily fruitful direction and maxim for observation, and it can also be applied to the method of observing living beings. In this way, we come to the conclusion that, when a person speaks, when he causes his speech organs to reveal something by speaking or singing, then what is being expressed in a partial part of the human organization is actually the whole. And just as one can see a more complicated leaf in the shape of the whole plant, so one can now extend to the whole human being that which lives there as a tendency to move in a partial part of the human organization, so that one can thus allow the whole human being to express himself - now for visible observation - as for the soul observation invisibly the possibilities of movement underlie the sound language and the singing .

In this way, one has a means of expression that is based on an inner lawfulness of the human organism - just as speech itself is not made by arbitrarily inventing some gesture or facial movement and making it an expression of something of the soul. Rather, what the human organism is in its essence is actually brought out of it.

And we can say something like the following: That which the human being is as a gestalt reveals itself to the senses and the supersenses in such a way that it always seeks to become movement, to become a gesture. We need only observe a human hand. Of course, we can consider the gestalt. But the shape of the human hand has no meaning if it is not thought of as the motion of the fingers and the rest of the hand coming to rest. How one grasps with the hand, how one can touch with the hand, and how, in other words, one can move the hand, is expressed in the hand that has come to rest. And so one can observe the whole human organism, the whole human form. One can find the lawful starting point for setting the organism in motion in this form, and one then makes the discovery, which can indeed be extraordinarily striking: that by revealing something of the soul and spiritual life through movements derived from this form, one has something like a self-evident, visible language that can be transformed, artistically shaped, giving rise to the art of eurythmy. This visible language can be used to express poetry or music in the same way as spoken or sung language. Therefore, here too you will find what appears as the eurythmic art for the eye, from recitation and from the musical.

Both are just another revelation of the same thing, which comes through the visible language of eurythmy to revelation. When poems, which are the expression of the soul, are recited or declaimed, we see that the declamation or recitation must be guided by the artistic element in the poem. In our unartistic times, there is a tendency to prefer the prosaic, to focus on the literal content of the poetic. And today, when reciting, people particularly appreciate the pointization, the highlighting of the word, the literal, and thus actually the prosaic in poetry. But such an art of recitation actually leaves the special artistic field. The essence lies in the shaping that the poet does with the language. The true poet already has a eurythmy, sometimes a vividly designed one in pictures, as is the case with Goethe, or an expression through the language of a musical element, as is the case with Schiller, so that in Schiller there is already a eurythmic element in the language itself and so on, in Goethe in the creation of images, which must then also be brought out in the recitation that eurythmic art.

So you will see that what is performed on the one hand musically is expressed, I would say, through the moving human being. Just as one can sing audibly with the speech and singing organs, one can also sing with the eurythmic movement. And just as you can find a revelation in what is revealed in a poem, you can find a revelation in what is expressed by a person or group of people in motion.

One can present lyric, epic, dramatic works in this way; in doing so, the style must be particularly adapted to the poetic art. And you will see, especially those of the honored spectators who have been here more often, that we are indeed trying to make progress in the development of the forms, that we have been working on the development of such forms in recent months. For example, we are trying – which has not been done before – to introduce certain moods of a poem or a piece of music through silent forms, that is, forms that are not accompanied by music or poetry, so that the moods are prepared in the pure spatial formation of the movements, which are then expressed in the poem. Or we try to allow this mood to fade away by following a poem with such silent forms.

This makes it particularly clear how, in fact, this is a language with an inner, inherent movement, the peculiarities of which cannot be grasped by thinking, for example, about what this gesture means or that gesture. Such thinking does not lead to the essence of the eurythmic art. Just as one does not have to relate the individual note to something in music, but only to the lawful sequence or harmony of the notes, so too in the eurythmic art one has to consider the lawful sequence of movements or the harmony of the movements as they are performed by the individual people in a group and the like.

What actually constitutes the eurythmic art lies in this lawful sequence of movements, not in the individual arbitrary facial expressions. In particular, when the eurhythmic is already present in the conception of the poetry, one can see how this eurhythmic art can become, I would say, a natural expression of what is experienced when a piece of poetry comes into being. Thus it turns out, for example, that those parts of a dramatic poem that lead from the sensual-physical life into the supersensible realm become particularly theatrical through the application of the eurythmic art. We have tried this in the case of those scenes from Goethe's 'Faust' in other performances that go beyond ordinary realistic experience, that embody soul states through forms and so on. Wherever the dramatic is led out into the supersensible, the application of the art of eurythmy makes the stage-like element an artistic revelation. It is to be hoped — although I have not yet succeeded — that the underlying principles of other dramatic poetry, that is, of realism in drama, will also be able to find their eurythmic expression.

Today you will be shown a rehearsal, a scene from my mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul”. The aim is to bring to dramatic expression that which plays into the human soul from the life of the world. It is necessary to see how abstractly that which we usually call the laws of the world actually affects the real observer.

You see, dear attendees, the thing is that today we say: natural laws, that is, that which should also play a role in human life, must be grasped according to the rules of abstract logic. Yes, but if the matter were such that the law of the world simply does not reveal itself when one applies only abstract logic to it, namely human life. It is impossible to understand it if one wants to stick to abstract laws, for example abstract historical laws, if one does not move on to a pictorial understanding of what plays a role in human life. All manner of arts are being applied today that actually arise from a dilettantism of the time; psychoanalytic arts and the like are used to get to the soul life. These arts are dilettantish for the reason that they basically have no insight into the fact that only in images can the full extent, the whole saturation of life, reveal itself to one.

And so, in one of the scenes of my drama “The Awakening of the Soul”, an attempt is made to reveal, on the one hand, certain forces that emerge from the whole of the world and are presented as figures that are not intended as symbols but as realities that emerge from the whole of the world, so that they express certain aspects of the world that approach the human being and then play into his soul , so that they make it present in the soul.

Likewise, an attempt is made to illustrate human life, soul and spiritual life in its course through the human life cycle by choosing, for example, that which always stands before the reasonably discerning human being: childhood that has become objective, youth that has become objective. We look back on our youth when we have reached a certain age. And it is often the case with sensitive self-reflection that one says to oneself: this youth, it actually stands before the soul like a foreign human life; but it is in the soul again. This cannot be portrayed with abstractions, nor with the means of ordinary drama; one must try to move on to sensual-supersensory images, as I have tried to portray the 'spirit of Johannes' youth'. Johannes is the hero of these 'mystery dramas', including this one, from which today's scene is taken from 'The Awakening of the Soul'. So I have tried to imagine this Johannes, how he has already objectified his youth to a certain extent, how this youth, this childhood stands before this dramatic hero Johannes. When we look back on our youth in this way, it is something that now, in turn, works within us, that belongs to us, but has been alienated to a certain extent. What plays into our entire soul life, this strange feeling of being both a stranger and ourselves, is what makes us feel as if what we have lived ourselves has been given over to foreign powers.

Thus one sees in this juxtaposition the old Johannes, the spirit of Johannes' childhood, to whom is even spoken by another personality, by the real personality of Theodora. But one also sees the influence of the spirit, how spirits play an objective role in the laws of the world – I have summarized them here and called them Lucifer – how they work and how these forces can come into a concrete spiritual-soul vision, artistically shaped, of the human being and his relationship to the world.

Such things can best be grasped if, I would like to say, one can transfer ordinary language into the theatrical language of drama, which appears in eurythmy, which, more than is usually the case with ordinary language, where thought predominates in speaking, brings more of the will, the whole, the full human being to revelation. In this language, one can adequately present that which looks more deeply into the whole surging and undulating concrete soul life of the human being. It is therefore almost natural to turn to eurythmy in such a dramatic undertaking. The will, the spiritual will in the human being, can be expressed much more fully and intensely in eurythmy than in ordinary spoken language.

That is the one, the artistic side of our eurythmy. But this eurythmy, which derives these natural, self-evident movements from the human form, from the whole inner laws of the human organism, also has a therapeutic-hygienic side. This hygienic-therapeutic side should also be developed within our anthroposophical spiritual science by bringing out those movements from the human organization that can have a particularly healthy effect in this or that direction.

A third aspect is what I must call the pedagogical-didactic aspect. In the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is run by me, eurythmy has been introduced as a compulsory subject since its foundation. We begin teaching the children as soon as they enter the school at the age of seven, and continue throughout their school years.

And it really does show how this soulful gymnastics - one could say - this spiritualized gymnastics affects children. Firstly, a certain spirit of truthfulness is cultivated in them. Of course, in spoken language – since convention has already taken hold today – one can say phrases and lies, but one cannot lie in eurythmic movements. Thus, when used as a pedagogical-didactic teaching tool, this eurythmic art is truly an education for children in truthfulness, but then also in will initiative. Gymnastics, ordinary gymnastics, is basically only based on physical laws. Eurythmy gymnastics, on the other hand, is something that works with the whole, full human being, with body, soul and spirit. And the child feels this as something thoroughly natural. That is why children accept this teaching, because they feel that here they are being led into a living element that allows them to live their whole being. It is a teaching method of an extraordinary and significant kind and will certainly be judged differently in the future, when people will be able to judge these things more impartially, than it is by many sides today.

With regard to the artistic aspect, which is what really matters, I would just like to say how Goethe was thoroughly imbued with the view – he, who always worked according to the relationship, according to the organic relationship between knowledge and artistic design – how he was imbued with the view that art must penetrate into the true, real basis of existence and that it is from there that it must be created. When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one feels the deepest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art – thus speaks Goethe. And in another place, he speaks of how it is actually man who shapes nature into art, saying: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself again as a whole nature, he repeats nature in a spiritual-secluded way, as it were, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together and rising to create the work of art.

Eurythmy has certainly not yet reached the point of fully realizing its ideal, but ideally it can be envisaged that the human being not only places himself at the pinnacle of nature in his art, but also regards his own organism as a tool for this art, as the tool that contains all the details of natural secrets as a microcosm, which are otherwise spread throughout the wide cosmos . It is to be hoped that this eurythmy will develop into an art that, precisely because the human being uses himself as a tool and does not use external tools or instruments, will be able to develop into a means of expressing the deepest secrets of the world.

We are certainly our own harshest critics and know that we are only at the beginning with this eurythmic art and that it must be further developed. Therefore, I would like to ask you, as I usually do at the end of these introductions, to take this presentation with a grain of salt. For we are indeed at the beginning, but we are also convinced that this eurythmic art holds possibilities for development which, once fully realized in the distant future, will establish eurythmy as a more recent art form that can stand alongside the older art forms with dignity.

We will perform the first part here in this domed building today, then there will be a break, and the second part will be performed in the temporary hall where the performances usually take place.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum, the second, more cheerful part in the carpentry workshop. There is no program for this performance. Among other things, the seventh scene from the first mystery drama “The Portal of Initiation” was performed.

Dear attendees!

The eurythmic art, of which we would like to show you a sample, is based on a visible language that expresses itself in the movements of the human limbs, especially the arms and hands, which make it possible to reveal the greatest amount of soul expression through them. Thus it is a visible language, but one that is not based on arbitrariness. It does not come about in the same way as mimicry, pantomime or dance. Rather, these eurythmic forms, this visible language, come about through observing, through sensuous and supersensuous vision, what lies at the basis of human speech and song as inner movement tendencies of the speech and everything that belongs to the speech organs. Just as phonetic language and song express nothing arbitrary, so this eurythmic, visible language represents nothing arbitrary either, but something that arises entirely lawfully from the nature of the human organism.

If we study speech, which then finds its other expression in song, I would say, we see that the laws of the world of thought, which in turn arise out of the life of the senses, flow into speech. Everything that flows into human speech from the world of ideas and thoughts is actually the inartistic element of speech. For art is actually killed by the conceptual, by the imaginative. But in addition, the will and the feeling flow into language from the whole human being. This will and feeling is now just as much an expression of the inner human being as the conceptual is a result of the human being observing his surroundings.

If you observe language as it develops into the whole of educated civilization, you will find that, as the conceptual predominates more and more in the actual language, that there are original sensations of the sound, of the tone, and that these original sensations are killed by what is poured into the language by the conceptual element. The mental element pours into language the grammatical and prosaic. The poet, in turn, seeks to overcome this when he shapes language artistically, and then, the true poetic artist seeks to approximate language to what it is as an expression of the whole human being, as an expression of sympathy and antipathy, as feelings, as an expression of joy, pain and suffering, of the intensification of feelings and so on. In this way, the poet works his way out of the abstractly prosaic-dramatic and works his way into that which is actually artistic in language, but which is basically a volitional act. The poet works his way into the euphony of the tone, of the sound; he works his way into that which is a kind of religious-grammatical /] summarizing of sounds; he works his way into the rhythm, meter and so on, alliteration and so on. These are all formations, revelations of language. And only with the fact that this element, this ungrammatical, one might say anti-grammatical and anti-conceptual element, comes into the formation of language, is language in turn led back to its actual artistic element.

In singing, we have the attempt of man to shape the tones in the same way: that one actually leaves the sound unconsidered, that that which makes language into language is completely taken out of language itself and that only the tone figures in it. So here we are dealing with a withdrawal of the human being from the actual sound. This is what makes singing a possible companion to music, which is precisely an outwardly unformed, an outwardly ideal-spiritual, spiritual formation, as is also the basis of singing.

Now one can say: Nevertheless, it can be clearly perceived, especially in the original languages, that a certain ability is present in man to inwardly experience the sound itself. By practicing in a musical and vocal way, one withdraws from the sound to the mere tone. And the question arises: how can we bring to external manifestation that which does not flow from the external world into language and kills the tone, the sound, pushing it into the grammatical?

There is no doubt that what the poet can only find halfway, namely this return to the artistic element with language, can also be made visible. And this is indeed achieved through what is attempted with eurythmy. What the musical element alone cannot achieve is indeed made possible: the revelation of the emotional and volitional experience of the human being in the tone itself, in the sound itself, the experience of that which has already been completely effaced and lost in the grammatically prosaic treatment of language; so that the truly poetic element of a poem can indeed visible language, as eurythmy is, can particularly express the actual poetry of a poem.

And so, by observing what lives in language as a volitional element, by being able to extract this from the human form in a completely lawful way, one can create a visible language that is as directly based on the outer human form as, I would like to say, the tongue, palate and lip movements are based on what flows from the head and heart in ordinary language. And this is precisely what happens in eurythmy. In eurythmy, we are dealing with a visible language that, by its very nature, can express what flows from the whole being of the human being in the poet.

I would like to say: in this eurythmy, the human form is transformed into soul-inspired movement, just as the harmonious proportions of the whole human being live in the resting human form. The human being thus makes himself the tool of what he experiences soulfully through the artfully eurythmically shaped movement. And just as he himself is an expression of his whole being in his resting form, so in eurythmy one has a means of presenting to the eye what is in the poem.

But one can just as easily sing with this visible language as one can sing with the larynx, with the chest. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see our eurythmic performances of the recitation or declamation of corresponding poems, which are to be brought to revelation through this visible language, and on the other hand, you will see the musical element, which is accompanied, so to speak, by a visible song, by a eurythmically visible song.

Only someone who has no interest in expanding the means of our artistic expression can actually rebel against such an attempt at a new language, a new artistic means of expression. Those who have an 'open heart and an appreciation for the expansion of the field of art can only greet it with joy if we can succeed in expanding the field of artistic means to include a wider area.

You will see, my dear audience, that it is also possible – we have tried this more and more in recent months, as our esteemed viewers will remember from our earlier, more primitive performances – to present it alone in eurythmy. And you will see this in the introductory formations and in the final sounds at the end of a poem or a piece of music, which are presented to you in eurythmy, how they introduce the mood of a poem – or you can also let this mood fade away, so that eurythmy can speak for itself in a certain sense. It then speaks in an outwardly visible form, in a moving sculpture, what is felt through the poem or through the piece of music.

In earlier times, in earlier weeks, we tried to bring those scenes from Goethe's “Faust” to dramatic stage representation that lead away from the ordinary life of the senses, into supersensible regions, where that which plays out of the spiritual world into the human soul is to be represented. I hope that we will also succeed in finding a real stage style for realistic scenes from eurythmy. So far, we have not yet succeeded in doing this. But everything in Goethe's “Faust” – and one often has the opportunity to observe such things – that stands out from the usual realism of the physical world, can be brought to the stage particularly through this silent language of eurythmy.

You will see that in the scene from one of my “Mysterienspiele” (mystery plays) that is being performed today, where a person's spiritual processes are described, that eurythmy can be used as a particularly dramatic means of expression on stage. This scene is one of those in my Mysteries where it is intended to show how, in the ordinary fullness of life and in ordinary cognition, not only abstract soul processes take place in the human being, but how soul processes take place in the human being that change his entire relationship to the outer world, change it in the way that growing conditions, that is, real processes of becoming, change it. The fact that one is compelled to present such things, which thus present something quite real spiritually in the human being, means that one must present the human being's relationship to the world in a more intimate way than is otherwise the case in realistic drama. After all, you can't explain a compass needle, for example, just by looking at it; you have to explain it by relating it to the whole of the earth's magnetism. In the same way, we have to relate the human being to the whole spiritual world. We cannot do this by means of abstract laws; we have to enter into the concrete and pictorial. We have to present natural processes in such a way that they also represent a moral development.

This is the case in the scene that is to be presented today and in which the eurythmic means of expression is used in particular. It shows how John undergoes such inner psychological processes. But it would only give a pale picture if, for example, John were to express them or if they were to be depicted symbolically. That is not real art, but one must see things in a concrete, pictorial way, one must go into the concrete and pictorial, so that what takes place between Mary and the soul forces - which appear as real spiritual powers, not merely as natural forces, but as real spiritual powers - is a revelation of that which is really present spiritually. Thus the presentation becomes something that really concerns people, something that plays into people from the spiritual world, just as earth magnetism plays into the magnetic needle.

It is then necessary to rise with this theatrical, dramatic aspect of art and gesture to what is given through eurythmy, where one can actually express the whole human interior more adequately through the shaping of human movements than is otherwise possible through ordinary everyday gestures. The stylized gesture, which is no longer a gesture but a continuation of what is present in the static form, moves into movement; one forms, one represents that which plays into the supersensible world.

One consequence of the fact that the truly poetic and artistic is challenged by eurythmy is that recitation or declamation must also depart from what is particularly valued in our inartistic age as the art of recitation. Today, in fact, everything recited or declaimed tends to emphasize the prosaic element, that is, the inartistic element in the poem. You find that on the outside [artistic?]. But here we must go back to the actual form that the poet gives according to rhythm, meter, rhyme, imagery, and so on.

It is strange: one could recently read in a particularly laudatory review about contemporary stage and recitation speaking that someone has recently succeeded, has succeeded with language, in presenting something in such a way that one no longer noticed the rhythm and rhyme and so on. So they particularly praised the fact that the person in question was especially successful at killing the poetry in the prose. Today, this is considered particularly outstanding. But this is something that is quite characteristic of an unartistic age. Something that is really looking for artistic means must be introduced. We have to go back to recitation and declamation in rhythm, we have to achieve more and more eurythmy even in speaking. And in many other ways, eurythmy will be able to lead us back to a truly artistic experience, which is often very far removed from our present time, more than most people actually realize. This is about the artistic element of eurythmy.

Eurythmy also has another side, which is already being cultivated here. Above all, it has a therapeutic-hygienic side, which can also be carried out through eurythmy, because through the eurythmy movements that follow from the healthy human organism, polar opposites are juxtaposed to healing processes in contrast to everything that enters the human organism through illness. In certain cases, therefore, what we may call eurythmy therapy can serve therapeutic and hygienic purposes. I only mention this because I believe it has a certain significance.

The third element of this eurythmy is what must be called the pedagogical-didactic element, which has already been introduced and tried out at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by me. We have introduced eurythmy into the Waldorf School in Stuttgart as a compulsory subject, like a form of gymnastics that is imbued with soul and spirit. It has been shown that from the earliest childhood, the pupils experience this soul-inspired gymnastics as something in which their organic laws can truly be lived out as a matter of course. This is what eurythmy can do in terms of educational didactics. And one can say: it is also an extraordinary pedagogical tool. While ordinary gymnastics, which is based entirely on physiology, only trains the body, the soul-inspired gymnastics that comes to light in eurythmy involves training the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. And the child feels that very deeply.

But it also has a particularly strong effect on the will initiative, which is so urgently needed in our time, because it works deep within the human being. I would like to say that it is precisely in the child - it is less evident in the adult - that truthfulness is brought to bear. For one can lie in a language that has become conventional, especially at a civilized stage of human development, one can say empty phrases. But with what wells up out of the whole human being from a visible language of eurythmy, one cannot fall into phrase. The child therefore learns truthfulness, a sense of truth through this eurythmy.

All these things will one day be able to be viewed more impartially than today, when ingrained prejudices stand in the way on the one hand. In terms of art, this eurythmy really does something that can be characterized by a Goethean word that Goethe himself said about the visual arts: When man stands at the summit of nature, he sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce another summit within itself. To do this, he rises by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.

He can rise all the more to the production of the work of art, the more he uses his own organism with the wonderful laws within it as a tool, if he does not use external instruments, but uses his own organism as a tool for artistic expression. Then it becomes apparent how, basically, a kind of small world, a microcosm, is also contained in the possibilities of movement of the human organism. There are tremendous secrets to be drawn from this human organism. And so, in such a development of eurythmy, one senses the truth of Goethe's words: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him who is open to them, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.”

And art must come into being when the human being takes themselves as a means of expression for what they experience spiritually and intellectually. That, dear assembled guests, is what I wanted to say by way of introduction. I would just like to ask the honored audience for their forbearance, as I always do before these performances; for we know that what can be called eurythmy is still only a kind of ideal, that we are only at the beginning of what eurythmy should become. But we also know what possibilities for the development of eurythmy lie in this striving for a eurythmic art that can be further and further developed, to the extent that this presentation in visible language will one day be able to present itself as a worthy, younger art alongside the older, recognized and established art forms.

So that is what I have to say, as I said. I would now just like to add that we can only present the first part in this room. There will then be an intermission after the first part, and during this intermission, the honored audience is requested to go to the provisional hall of the Goetheanum.

The first part of the performance took place in the domed room of the Goetheanum, the second, more light-hearted part in the “provisional hall” of the carpentry workshop.

Part I (Goetheanum building):
Mercury prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Seventh image from the Portal of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner
“Evening Feeling” by Friedrich Hebbel
“L'aurore s'allume“ by Victor Hugo
“Prooemion” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Spring“ by Rudolf Steiner
“Forest Concerts” by Christian Morgenstern

Part II (Joinery)

Evoe
“Kennst du das Land“ (Mignon I) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Erlkönig” by J. W. v. Goethe with “Elven prelude”
Prelude “Look around you”
“The posy” by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: ‘The prayer: The little deer’; ‘The leopard’; ‘From the suburbs’
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

Dear attendees!

The eurythmy art, of which we want to present a sample to you here today, is not to be confused with related art forms that make use of the human being itself and [work with all kinds of artistic means of expression –] such as sign languages, mimic arts and the like. It is least confused with any form of dance art, although it is a kind of spatial movement art, whereby movements are performed by the human being themselves, by their limbs, especially the hands and arms, which allow the soul to be revealed best; but also through movements of groups of people in space, in the positional relationship of groups of people in space and the like

This eurythmic art attempts to arrive at a completely different way of shaping human movement than a mere art of gesture or mimic art. And it is precisely through this that it will be able to move away from all that is inauthentic in these related artistic attempts and arrive at an artistic form of expression. For it may be said that what is usually attempted through the human being and his movement forms is, when considered in relation to the original culture, something that is actually, fundamentally, originally and essentially human. In older epochs, one always had an accompanying gesture for that which was to work as a kind of song or, better said, as a kind of recitative in the human being as an artistic form. The older languages even had a single word for this accompanying gesture and for that which came about through the sound, through the tone, a single word that indiscriminately designated both. In the course of human development, what was expressed as belonging together was then split, as it were, by the sound gesture, gesture-sounds: into speech without gestures or singing without gestures and into everything that has passed over into mime, into pantomime, into gestures.

Eurythmy wants nothing to do with the latter, in that it really wants to be a kind of visible speech, drawn out of the human organization according to the same laws as speech and song are drawn out of this human organization.

Perhaps the nature of this eurythmic art is best understood by looking at what this eurythmic art seeks to achieve as a form of movement, in contrast to what our spoken language has gradually become. Of course, we accompany our speech with gestures and facial expressions, especially when we are full of enthusiasm or liveliness. But basically our speech is actually nothing more than a kind of invisible gesture, in that the outwardly visible gesture has gradually receded and what the person has experienced in this visible gesture has receded into the particular nuance, into the interpenetration with feeling and so on, which he gives to speech. In earlier times, the fact that the older, more monotonous, more consonantal language was based on and supported by the gesture, gave the gesture its special nuance. We have, as it were, taken this back into the sound in the course of human development. Those who have a sense for such things can certainly feel and sense the gestural quality that underlies language, even if that language is not accompanied by gestures.

We can say that our language has become an audible gesture, and we can clearly feel the remnants of the old gestures in what we hear. If we now move [back to the gesture] today - without turning the art of eurythmy into a mimic, a gestural expression, as sometimes happens - then we have the gesture, which is a further development of the natural gesture that a person uses when they speak particularly vividly or when they want to put something special into their language. But what kind of gesture is that? But what kind of gesture is this? We will not be able to use a gesture [in the usual sense] in eurythmy, because this is added retrospectively to what has gradually split off in our language.

The human being of prehistoric times had a living sense of the interior of the sound itself. He developed a feeling, a sense, in the a, in the i, in the f, in the r, in the s; he had thus brought his humanity into connection with the sounds. That was also what was expressed in the primal gestures, what the human being experienced in the sound. But the sound is developed through language – and that is the case, insofar as language belongs more and more to civilized cultures. But the gesture has gradually lost its connection with the development of sound through the development of language. Language itself has developed from a revelation of the sound, of the tone, in which one has one's inner joy, one's inner experience, into that which now lives more abstractly, more logically in the context of sounds, in the context of words, of sentences. In this way, language has discarded the original sound that it had, in which its true artistic quality lay, and has become meaningful.

And so if we were to try today to accompany language in eurythmic art with gestures and facial expressions, we would have gestures of meaning that are actually connected to what a person experiences inwardly in thought, in feeling, in will, but that are no longer connected to what a person can experience in sound. Eurythmy, on the other hand, goes back to the inner essence of the sound and the tone itself. And it seeks the gesture that comes naturally when one feels and experiences the inner essence of the sound and the tone, so that eurythmy, in contrast to meaningful gestures, consists of gestures of sound. A visible language, a visible singing, is thus created.

Therefore, what is attained in this way through sensual and supersensory observation can certainly be regarded as an independent artistic accompaniment and revelation of what, for example, a poem presents to us. In shaping language in today's civilization, the poet goes back to the actual artistic element of language in phonetic speech itself and its formation through rhythm, meter, rhyme, and so on. Schiller, for example, always had a kind of rhythmic melody alive in his soul before he grasped the literal meaning of the poem in its fullness. And so the poet must either go back to the musicality of language or to the plastic and pictorial, as was more the case with Goethe. But he must, I would say, go back one layer further in the shaping of language, so that the artistic may enter into language beyond the merely meaningful.

But in poetry it still remains hidden. I would like to say that in people there is the temptation to place too much value on the meaningful, the thought-like. And the analogous, the conceptual, is actually death, the paralysis of every truly artistic activity. What is artistic is basically language – which is composed of the conceptual element and the will element in the human being. What is artistic in language is only to the extent that it comes not from the human head, but from the full human being, from the will nature of the human being. In [eurythmy], the possibility is created of making this visible eurythmic language an expression of the fully human, of the will, by going back to the experience of the sound, to the gestural experience of the sound and the tone. In this way, the whole human being reveals himself, so to speak, not just a single organ or organ system in language, but the whole human being reveals himself as a whole human being.

If we accompany our eurythmic performance with recitation or declamation, these performances of appropriate poetry, which are to be revealed through eurythmy, then the declamation and recitation must also be different from the way we are accustomed to today. We need only remember that people who have really lived in art, like Goethe, placed such great value on form and on the shaping of language that Goethe himself rehearsed his iambs with his actors very dramatically, like a conductor, using a baton. So he placed the greatest value on the treatment of language. Today, it is considered particularly praiseworthy when, when reading, when there is a recitative form, the sense of verse, rhyme and meter is completely suppressed. This is inartistic. And in an age that will be more artistic than ours, it will be recognized as unartistic to place the greatest value on the prosaic and the literal.

This could not be done if one accompanies the [poems] with eurythmy. One has to go back to the actual artistry, to the artistic design of the poem, to the rhyme, rhythm, and beat, to the inner, melodious and pictorial element. Just as one can now accompany the poem with eurythmy, one can also do so with music. Since eurythmy is a truly visible language, it can be sung through in the same way as through the human speech organs. And you will also be able to see rehearsals where the eurythmy accompanies the music, as this eurythmy is a possible art in itself.

Apart from the other thing, which I do not want to mention today, it can be seen from this that in certain cases one must resort to this eurythmy, I would like to say as a matter of course, if one wants to do full justice to the dramatic. For example, in Goethe's “Faust” there are scenes where the drama arises from the mere realistic representation of the phenomena. One need only recall the moment in Faust when the drama rises to depict something of the supersensible world that plays into the human soul. For example, if one considers the Arielle scene at the beginning of the second part of Faust, which represents something that does not take place in the real, outer, sensory world, but plays into the human soul from a spiritual reality human soul. If you want to depict that, you cannot get by with the usual realistic stage settings. But the moment you move on to what the eurythmic art gives not in terms of meaning but in terms of sound, when you introduce a special language that is not the language of ordinary contemporary life, you move beyond the very ordinary drama into the drama that can also be presented supersensibly.

And so you will be able to see in a scene from one of my “mystery dramas” that is being performed today that what is intended is thoroughly supersensible, but intended dramatically and not symbolically, as can be represented by the art of eurythmy alone. In this case, it is about the development of a human being, about the kind of development that does not, I would say, proceed in the usual way in which human life develops in everyday life, but rather one that brings about real transformations in the human being, where he really becomes a different person inwardly, in his soul, where he experiences something in his soul that can be compared to the great transitional points in outer growth. If you want to depict something like this, which is absolutely real but does not take place before the outer senses – as here, where John is standing before us, undergoing an inner soul development – then you have to do so pictorially, not symbolically, but pictorially, to make accessible to the sensual and supersensible gaze what is passing through the human soul.

And this is precisely what is to be shown in this scene, as we present it: that what takes place in the human being, but takes place in him in such a way that he has a purely spiritual world around him – as otherwise through the eye and ear a sensual world – that this is represented through the outer form by the three soul forces, as it is expressed through Mary, the ruler of these three soul forces . However, this cannot be realistically portrayed on stage if one wants to reveal it in a meaningful way. Instead, one must resort to eurythmy.

You will also see how eurythmy can work on its own. For in recent times we have moved towards creating forms that, so to speak, indicate the mood from the mere visible language of eurythmy, which is then continued and developed in a corresponding musical [performance] or in an artistic poem. Even the fading away of a mood can be captured in such a silent form.

In addition, eurythmy also has a hygienic-therapeutic side, which, however, basically draws what is expressed in this eurythmy from the inner laws of the human organism itself. Thus, the movements, which on the one hand are an artistic revelation, can also be shaped in such a way that they have a healing effect on certain pathological formations in the human organism. I just wanted to mention that.

The third thing that eurythmy offers is the didactic-pedagogical side. At the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and is now under my direction, we have introduced eurythmy as a kind of soul-filled gymnastics, one after another, as a compulsory subject alongside other gymnastics. And it has already been shown how children, from as early as compulsory school age, find their way into these movements with great ease, movements that are thoroughly rooted in the human organism. Ordinary gymnastics – in the future, people will judge these things more impartially – are based solely on the physiological laws of the human organism. But what appears here as inspired gymnastics is based on the whole human being, on the human being as body, soul and spirit. Every movement is inspired. The child takes this for granted as it performs these movements. This is why these movements have such a life-giving and developmental effect on the child. It is an important educational tool in many other respects as well, for it contains a special power of the will. Above all, this eurythmy exercise fosters the initiative of the will and, in children, even a sense of truthfulness. In ordinary speech we can say things that become hardened into lies. But we cannot lie in these speech sounds, for when the whole human being is expressing himself, he cannot lie or indulge in empty phrases. What is given in this way means a development towards truthfulness for the child.

These are only isolated aspects. Much could be said about this theme. If we consider that the human being uses himself as an instrument, but in such a way that the forces at work within him are brought out, and the form itself is transformed into movement, then we can say that this eurythmy really does embody an ideal.

Then, before each performance, I must again ask for your forbearance. We are our own harshest critics, we know that we are at the beginning of our art form; it must develop further, but it has the potential to develop. These possibilities for development can be convincing when one considers what is gained by man using himself as a tool, as an instrument for his artistic formation, not just any external instrument, but himself. When Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To this end, he improves himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. One must add that he rises most significantly to the production of the work of art when he seeks choice, order, harmony and meaning from this own organization and transforms it into movement, into living sculpture. So that one can indeed entertain the hope that eurythmy, which is now at the beginning of its development, will continue to perfect itself more and more, so that one day it will be able to stand alongside the other fully-fledged art forms as a fully-fledged art form in its own right.

The first part of the performance will take place here in the building; the second part in the carpentry workshop.

The performance on 15 May 1921 (Whitsunday) took place entirely in the domed auditorium of the Goetheanum. Only the first part of the performance on 16 May was shown there; for the second part after the break, the performance was moved to the carpentry hall.

Program for the performance in Dornach, May 15, 1921

Recitation by Dr. Steiner
Second scene from the mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul” by Rudolf Steiner
“Evening Feelings” by Friedrich Hebbel
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (6.) by Rudolf Steiner “Spring” by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (7) by Rudolf Steiner ‘Daffodils’. Music by Henry Zagwijn

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

The presentation that is about to take place will consist of recitation, eurythmy and music. It has been organized in such a way that the second scene from my fourth mystery drama, from 'The Awakening of the Soul', can be presented today in the following way: Firstly, Dr. Steiner will recite the first part of this second scene. Perhaps I may therefore be permitted to say a few words about these “mystery dramas” for the reason that only one scene is to be presented here and perhaps a few words are necessary to place this scene in the context in which it is presented. For these “mystery dramas” are in fact a presentation of the soul processes within, not in a symbolic or allegorical way, but in such a way that the soul — insofar as it is as real for the human being and his development as the sense world around him — is presented in a thoroughly idealistic way, if I may use the paradoxical expression: idealistic-realistic.

The four “mystery plays” depict the inner psychological development of a series of people who are socially and psychologically connected to one another. In a sense, the fate, the psychological and spiritual fate of the personality named Johannes, is the central focus that runs through all four “mystery plays”. Johannes is a painter, but one who, in his artistic striving, aims for a spiritualization of the artistic, for such a spiritualization that can then bring a supersensible reality to manifestation in a thoroughly realistic way, even in the painterly.

Through the vicissitudes of his life, John comes into contact with various personalities who, while he is undergoing his own spiritual development, are also undergoing theirs. And then it can be shown in dramatic images how the various supersensible powers intervene in the development of those people who are truly undergoing an inner, spiritual development. We see how, in particular, Maria is placed alongside Johannes Thomasius as a personality who, while Johannes himself is still at the starting point, one might say at the beginning of his development, has already attained a certain maturity of development; so that a kind of spiritual confrontation takes place between the still undeveloped Johannes Thomasius and the more mature personality of Maria.

Then other personalities join the circle. Above all, the antagonism of fate that arises between the two personalities - Professor Capesius and Dr. Strader - is portrayed.

Strader is a personality who, by nature, is actually quite suited to direct practical life, who has only been brought up by parents and educational prejudices into a different life path, but at the same time a personality who cannot be within practical action without this practical action being illuminated by a spiritualized worldview. And at the same time, he is a personality who does not want, on the one hand, to have practical work, like the sober, realistic life to which one pays tribute, and, on the other hand, devotion to the spiritual world in an abstract, mystical form, but rather, in Strader, a personality should be portrayed who, from the point of view of humanity, from reality, wants to weave the spiritual and the practical into one another .

In Capesius, we see a personality who is more immersed in the scientific life and who also finds some satisfaction in this scientific life, but only in the general scientific life as such, not in the particular scientific field of the present in which he is immersed. Therefore, Capesius feels particularly drawn to the revelations that can come to him from fairy tales, from the presentation of myths, in fact from all that which, in an imaginative, folk-like way, finds its way into the secrets of existence. What such people can experience in terms of mutual spiritual interaction is now presented in the first three “mystery dramas” to the point where personalities can connect a specific idea with what it means to be part of the spiritual life.

Because, dear attendees, this must be a spiritual experience, a spiritual event. Something that can only be expressed approximately in abstract formulas, something that is called “standing within the spiritual world”, which can be characterized in such a way that for the one who stands within the spiritual world, this spiritual world is really like the outer sensory world, so real that he must speak not only of some abstract spiritual beings, but of concrete spiritual entities that are not symbols and allegories, but that interact with human nature — which itself is spiritual and soul-like on one side — just like the beings of the external sense world. And it is intentional, according to the scenic images that already characterize this standing within the spiritual world with the decisive personalities of the “mystery dramas”, it is intentional the transition into practical life afterwards, after the drama that I have named the “Threshold of the Spiritual World” [The Guardian of the Threshold], after that the drama is set, [whose events] present themselves as a further development, [ the drama] which the personalities on whom it depends are now to place in practical life.

We should be able to use the course of these dramatic events to draw attention to how a spiritual world should not be approached as a Sunday pleasure, as something that runs alongside life, but how it should be approached as a spiritual reality that is directly connected to the outer, very real everyday life. The spiritual world should not be sought as a cloud-cuckoo-land, but as something that can be approached through each of the individual powers of the material life, to have a spiritual effect.

The first scene of this mystery drama, “The Awakening of the Soul”, therefore shows how one of the personalities of the four dramas, Hilarius Gottgetreu, comes to organize his very practical, namely industrial, enterprises in such a way that he includes Johannes Thomasius and Dr. Strader in this practical enterprise, so that they can actually bring about the realization of what that is, what connects abstract technology, in which it has been brought to a certain perfection in recent times, with that which, at the same time as the actions of technology, promotes everything that places man in this community in such a way that everyone can find their human existence in this community.

If this is to be realized, then the machine must begin to think differently than it has been thought in the past, especially in modern life; then the spirit must indeed be invoked and called upon to explain in a fully human way that which has so far only been explained in abstract mechanics, so that it can be carried directly into practical life - for the good and further development of humanity - that which is looked down from the spiritual world. Thus, spiritual personalities with a certain development are to be placed in practical life, and practical life is to be placed in the service of spiritual activity.

This gives rise to prejudices in those who have hitherto been involved in such an undertaking merely out of, I might say, abstract practice – like the office manager in the first picture of Hilarius Gottgetreu's practical enterprise. And we see the whole opposition with which so-called practice is confronted with that which alone can bring salvation to humanity: in a spiritual conception of life that is convincing to humanity.

What we are now attempting to a certain extent in practice, albeit in the very first, elementary stages, is fully contained in these “mystery dramas”. And when in 1913 the fourth drama, 'The Awakening of the Soul', was performed, initially it could only be brought to the world - which actually only means the world, namely the world of the stage - but which is thoroughly conceived in a thoroughly real sense, albeit in the sense of a spiritual-physical reality. However, when you see something like this, you soon realize how not only the so-called practical, physical world presents its prejudices against that which wants to exert its influence from the spiritual, which it wants to penetrate spiritually, but also how sometimes those who now strive for the spiritual heights, who want to undergo a certain spiritual development and also undergo it, how these can also absolutely can also completely fail at the right moment. And this failure from the other side is artistically attempted to be demonstrated in the second picture, which we now want to present.

In the first picture, which is not to be presented here, the resistance of external practice against the spiritual is shown, so to speak. In this second picture, the resistance of spiritual people is to be shown, so to speak. First of all, there is John himself, who, in the course of many events in his life, has gone through a lot, and who has risen to a certain view of the spiritual world, so that he could already be guided through the event of crossing over into the spiritual world. But then he suddenly feels uncanny] about this whole spiritual world into which he has come: He is confronted with the spiritual world, he feels like he has no footing in this spiritual world. But he wants to resort to direct nature and, above all, to what emerges in him as his own childhood memories. This inner tragedy, which actually grows ever greater the more a person advances in the spiritual world, this inner tragedy of a person developing in this way, is to be depicted in this picture. One would like to say: Through such a spiritual development, a person, when he has reached a certain age, becomes more alien to his earlier epochs of life than otherwise. He looks at his earlier epochs of life as if, one might say, childhood, the first childhood, were standing there as an independent person, as another person, and then youth, one might say, as another person. One becomes stranger through such a spiritual development. And one must again find one's way back in a more intense way than otherwise occurs.

We see Johannes Thomasius depicted as his childhood appears before him, as he wants to go back to that childhood because he cannot yet grasp what he is looking at, because he has not yet learned [to shine a light into] the spiritual world. Just at the moment when he had been called to be useful in the world, one might say, he becomes a burden to himself. You see him standing there in all his tragedy, first facing Maria, as he is to be led back to what he once was. But we also see how another personality connected with him, Capesius, has taken a certain step forward in his development, has gone through it, and cannot find his way back into reality, how he wants to remain in abstract spiritual worlds, in those that cannot penetrate reality. He, who has only been educated by science, I would say - not by practice like Strader - can more easily be tempted to stay inside the abstract spiritual world. We therefore see him, so to speak, temporarily falling away in the course of this picture.

And all this is meant to represent nothing other than the way in which the power appears – I need only remind you of Johannes Thomasius – not in a mystical and mysterious way, when I use the term 'Ahrimanic' for this power, when one sees how the Ahrimanic reaches into this life, wanting only to chain him to the outer, spiritless practice, to all that that only ties people to the physical and mechanical. This Ahriman does not appear in this [picture]. But on the other hand, one sees that which now wants to lead the human being beyond himself, so to speak, which works in the human being so that he wants to mystically or, in the bad sense, theosophically rise above himself by half a human length. You are well aware, ladies and gentlemen, of this kind of theosophy, which consists in those concerned always saying: I have the higher human being in me, I have the higher self in me. And then they feel as if they had grown beyond themselves by half a person and could grow beyond all other people. This is bad mysticism, this is bad theosophy, this is what wants to dissuade man from standing firmly on a secure ground of practical-physical reality, but which must be permeated by the spirit.

These forces, which want to alienate man from himself into an abstract spiritual world – I refer again to Thomasius – should be called Luciferic forces. They appear here; but the whole thing is not meant symbolically, but quite dynamically as forces present in the world, such as electricity and magnetism, which cannot be seen, but which are nevertheless present forces. We see how, through everything that is at work, Johannes Thomasius is led not to see his youth in delusion and dream and to long for it, but to see it in front of him, real. The struggle of his Scelenkräfte - Philia, Astrid, Luna and the other Philia - is presented to you. The spirit of Johannes' youth is presented to you. It is Johannes himself, but something that has become alien to him, which is juxtaposed with the older Johannes Thomasius as a perceivable personality – so to speak, the young Johannes Thomasius with the older Johannes Thomasius. The soul forces work together so that Johannes Thomasius, at the age at which he can recognize himself, no longer dreams himself back to his youth in delusion, but can prepare himself in this way to really intervene in practical life, as it should be in the real, right relationship between the spiritual world and the physical world.

The first part will be recited. The second part – where the gnomes and sylphs appear and the soul forces and where the drama itself demands a kind of eurythmy, as noted in the drama – the recitation will then transition into a stage presentation through eurythmy, through that eurythmic art that is based on a visible language that is brought forth from the human organization just as lawfully as human phonetic language or singing.

But precisely that which is to be presented supernaturally, which plays into the supernatural, cannot actually be presented with ordinary stage realism. We have made the attempt with the scenes in which Goethe, for example, transfers his “Faust” drama into the supernatural: we have used our eurythmy, this visible language, to help us. And you can see how everything that Goethe weaves into a higher world of reality can, precisely because of that, find its way into the language of the stage.

What appears here as visible speech is intended to enable the inner movement tendencies of the human larynx and speech organs to be studied as they are employed in speech or song. Then what is observed there as the inner lawfulness of speech is transferred to the whole human being or to groups of people, so that, as it were, the human being or groups of people appear on the stage like a visible larynx, like a speech organ. Eurythmy is not mere gesturing or mimicry, nor is it ordinary dance, but eurythmy seeks to represent something quite different at its root.

When we accompany our speech with gestures today, these are arbitrary gestures. It is interesting that in the early days of human development there was a single word for the gesture that was still connected to the sound. Our gestures today are gestures of meaning that arise from what we actually want to express and have already gone through in our thoughts. What occurs in our eurythmy is what is experienced in the tone and sound. What is experienced when a person experiences the individual sound in their soul is already abstract in outer speech. But in eurythmy we must lead back more and more from the gesture of meaning to the gesture of the sound. And that is the point: how speech in sound and song itself can evoke something that is again a real language, not just an accompaniment. In this way we can go back to the elementary form, to the artistic feeling of expression.

This, however, also leads to a different relationship to the other arts, namely declamation and recitation. This is an experiment. And one could, by accompanying the eurythmy - not in the sense of wanting to particularly emphasize the content of the prose and let everything that is rhythm, meter, rhyme and so on, verse foot and so on, recede in the declamation, thus suppressing the actual artistic element, [one could] not accompany the eurythmy with this art of recitation at all. Therefore, we fall back on what, for example, Goethe, the true artist, still felt very much when he himself rehearsed the drama with his actors, what he had to rehearse with the baton, thus seeing the main thing in the treatment of language, in the formation of the linguistic-phonetic-tonal basis of the actual literal content. For that is the truly artistic, whereas it is an unartistic approach to focus particularly on the content and to want to emphasize only what is often considered the greatest in the art of recitation and declamation today. We then apply this art of recitation and declamation, if recitation and declamation is used at all, by always going back to the artistically shaped, which actually only makes use of the literal content in order to express something much deeper than can be expressed by the abstract literal content, thought-filled content.

In this sense, the first part of the picture should be recited; then the transition will be made immediately to the eurythmic presentation of the second part of the second picture of my mystery drama “The Awakening of the Soul”. There will be no break. The entire performance will take place in this space without a break. The presentation of this mystery play will then be followed by other types of eurythmy performances, and there will also be a musical interlude.

Part I (Goetheanum)
“Graceful Region (Ariel Scene)” from ‘Faust II’ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Nile Delta“ by Wladimir Solowjow (Russian) ‘World Soul Spirits’ by Rudolf Steiner
“Laurore sallume” by Victor Hugo
“Spring“ by Rudolf Steiner
“Proemion” by]. W.v. Goethe
From the “Chymischen Hochzeit” by Valentin Andreae with music by Max Schuurman

Part II (Joiner's workshop)
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Heiß mich nicht reden“ (Mignon II) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (Mignon III) by J. W. v. Goethe
“Erlkönig“ by J. W. v. Goethe with ‘Elven prelude’
Prelude ‘Look around you’
“The little bouquet” by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Prayer: The Deer”; “The Lion”; “The Priestess”; “From the Suburbs”

Dear attendees!

We will be giving you a eurythmy performance here today, and I will take the liberty of saying a few words in advance about the nature of our eurythmic art. This art is based above all on a real, visible language. You will see gestures, movements, performed by individuals, groups of people and so on here on stage. What is presented here is not intended to be some kind of mimic or pantomime performance, or even something dance-like, as we understand these things today. Rather, it is about exploring, through sensual and supersensory observation – if I may use this Goethean expression – which movement tendencies underlie our speech organs when phonetic language is produced or when singing is produced . In this case, however, it is more a matter of movement tendencies that, I would say, are still disappearing as they arise and then transform into that which, as a movement of the air, underlies the tone, the sound.

These movements, which only half arise, but which as such lie quite clearly, I would say in the will of the human being, in the unconscious will of the human being, are carefully studied and are now transferred according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphic view of the whole human being, namely to that part of the human being that can most directly reveal the soul's inner being: to the human arms and hands, which are then supported, admittedly, by movements of the rest of the human organism.

When I say, according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphic view, it means that, as Goethe saw in the individual leaf of the idea a whole plant and in turn in the whole plant a more intricately designed leaf, so in the processes that take place in an organ system, one can see something like an expression of the whole human being. This is indeed the case when a person makes use of the activities of his speech organs. What we otherwise feel as the content of our full humanity is expressed, so to speak, through this one organ system. And so, like Goethe, we can look at the whole plant as a more complicated leaf, and in a sense we can make the whole human being an organ of expression for his soul and spirit. And then something like a visible language emerges, which is the basis of our eurythmy.

It is therefore important to bear in mind that the movements that are performed are not random gestures that would be added at random to one or other expression of the soul, but that everything that is done in terms of the smallest and small movements here is subject to strict inner laws, just as the formation of language itself is.

Anyone who has an appreciation of the eurythmic quality of the way language is treated by the true poet, something of what one might call the pictorial, painterly or musical representation of language, will also have to approve of an extension of the artistic formal language into this eurythmic quality, for artistic reasons, I think. For anyone who is interested in art at all is also interested in expanding artistic means.

What the poet actually wants is based on something that, I would say, is one layer deeper than what we reveal through language in ordinary prosaic expression. When we reveal ourselves in ordinary prosaic expression through the literal, then basically it is the thought that is embodied in our language. And it is quite certain that all thought kills what is actually artistic.

The actual artistry of poetry makes use only of thought, of the literal content. But what is truly artistic about poetry is the special formation of language, the relationship between one sound and another, between high and low tones, and so on and so forth. It is that which presupposes that the human being not only has an understanding of the meaningful that is expressed through his language, but also has an understanding of the phonetic, of the sound itself.

For what appears here as eurythmy is not the same gesture that we use to accompany our speech today. The gestures we use to accompany our speech do, to a large extent, come from the unconscious, but they are connected to the meaning of what we are saying. And the details of the eurythmic movements performed here are essentially connected to the sounds and tones themselves.

So we can say that when we see one or other of these movements performed, it is the reaction of the human soul, not to the meaning expressed by some sequence of sounds, but to the sequence of sounds themselves, which produces sympathetic, antipathetic, joyful, sorrowful impressions and so on, albeit in a finely nuanced way. Nuances of the soul and its inner movement, which are brought about by the sound itself, are to come to light through eurythmy. Therefore, precisely that which is actually volitional, that is, emotional, in the artistic can come to light through this eurythmy, that is, that which has already stripped away the thought, the inartistic. And those who can immerse themselves in this way of looking at eurythmy will probably find that the very thing the poet struggles with in order to express it in language can be expressed particularly well in the visible language of eurythmy. These are a few words that point to the essence of eurythmy in an artistic sense.

This eurythmy has another side, a hygienic-therapeutic side. The gestures and movements that are made here initially appear to us as something like a visible pronunciation of what is recited here in the poetry, or are intended to be a visible song, a musical element. This eurhythmics is therefore presented as musical and recitative, accompanied.

But at the same time, these movements are such that they follow from the inner laws of the organism itself. Anyone with an appreciation of the human form will know that the outer limbs, as you know, extend into the most intimate structures of all the organs. When the human form is at rest, it is in a constant state of transition into movement. We cannot, my dear attendees, look at a head, for example, which is intended to be at rest [gap in shorthand], or at each finger, which is intended to grasp, in its resting form [gap in shorthand], or at how it looks in motion, how it must appear at rest.

In this way, however, it is possible to extract, as it were, the forms of movement from what man is as an organized being, which are thoroughly healthy forms of movement of the human being. And in this way it is possible to extract certain forms of movement from healthy people, but also from sick people (this is only hinted at), which can also be applied to the medical field (this is only hinted at).

The third [area of eurythmy is] didactic and pedagogical. We introduced [eurythmy as a subject] in the Waldorf School, founded by [Emil Molt], from the very beginning. It represents a kind of soulful gymnastics. And it must be said that one day we will think about these things more impartially and without prejudice than is already possible for people today. One day we will see that our present-day gymnastics are actually only taken from the laws of the human body, so that children derive great joy and devotion from this soulful gymnastics from the very beginning. They feel that they are entering into a life of movement that has been drawn from the nature of the human being itself. It can be said that it is quite possible to perceive in children that the soul forces can also be cultivated in this way through eurythmy, namely the initiative of the will, which is not really expressed through ordinary gymnastics. I would say that a certain efficiency and a certain courage come from ordinary gymnastics. But it is the inner initiative that comes from the soul, and this is what can be cultivated in children through eurythmy.

And so this eurythmy has three sides. But what is artistic for us here is [illegible word]. And this artistic element is indeed only just beginning today. I must therefore ask again and again to be lenient with what [gap in shorthand]. We ourselves are the strictest critics of what we have dared to begin with this eurythmy. But one must consider that eurythmy uses that [illegible word] as its means of expression, its tool, which summarizes all the secrets of the world, which is a real microcosm: it uses the human organization itself.

Goethe says that man arrives at art by taking order, harmony, measure and meaning from the whole of the rest of the world and expressing them in his production. When man borrows order, harmony, measure and meaning from the world through mystical vision and expresses them through his own intention, thus making himself, as it were, a work of art, then the artistic must come to expression in the best way. Therefore, one may also believe that, despite the fact that eurythmy is only just beginning today, it will have developmental possibilities in itself, so that one day, when it has been further developed, it will be able to present itself in a fully valid way as a younger art alongside the older, fully valid arts.

We will, honored attendees, have the first part of our presentation here in this room today. Then there will be an intermission after the performance of The Chemical Wedding. And for the following part, that is, for what comes after the intermission, I ask the honored audience to please go to the rehearsal hall.

The following words are from Karl Schubert, who only took down fragments of Rudolf Steiner's address in shorthand.

A visible language is expressed through the movements of the human body in space. These are not random gestures or facial expressions, but rather this visible language is truly brought out according to the same laws by which the soul and spirit of the human being reveal themselves in musical song or in spoken language. The aim is to explore, through sensory and supersensory observation, which movement tendencies are stimulated – not actual movements, as movement tendencies are transformed into sound vibrations. These are transferred to the movements of the whole person or whole groups of people.

This is based on Goethe's view. This Goethean view leads to seeing the whole plant in the individual organ, both super-sensibly and sensually. There is a whole plant in each individual leaf. What is seen in the forms can be applied to human activity. In the larynx and its neighboring organs, movement tendencies are generated during singing, in a closed human organ system. If one gets to know these movement tendencies and transfers these movements to the limbs of the whole human being, then one gets the whole human being on stage as a speech organ, and one can express the same thing that one can bring to light through singing or through poetry through the whole human being. In this way, one achieves an essential foundation for something artistic.

In our language, the content of thought appears as a particularly intrusive element. The thought pushes the artistic back. In language, will and thought meet. The thought comes from the head. It is an incomplete means of expression. Human will comes from the whole person, and so what comes from the will is what is effective and powerful in language when language is to be artistically shaped through poetry.

Those who have an organ for rejoicing when the field of art is expanded will welcome such an attempt as an attempt to expand the artistic. But the fact that these movements come about as I have described them does not make them tendentious. They arise from the whole inner lawfulness of the human organism. This inner lawfulness is something wonderful when one gets to know it. Consider the wonderful formation of the human hand. There we have the form as the sculptor reproduces it in a static way. One cannot understand a human hand without understanding one's own finger formation in such a way that it can move, without understanding the connection between the movement in the human being and the human form. The one who sees the eurythmic should have before him in direct contemplation that which can arise in the human organism in a completely lawful way in terms of movement. You can present a poem in such a way that you see how the whole human being comes into activity, into movement. Nietzsche knew what he said: He meant that what the human being wishes to reveal from the fully human can only be expressed in visible speech, whereas what is expressed in phonetic speech and song does not come from the fully human. Those who demand that the human being add pantomime to his movements would demand something grimacing.

We will hear something poetic. This declamation must become something different if it is to accompany what is being presented through eurythmy. We have indeed strayed far from what Schiller had in his soul when, before writing down the literal words of a poem, he wrote down an indeterminate melody. Goethe had more of a poetic-pictorial quality in his soul. It is not the prosaic that is at the root of it; we have to go back to the shaping of the sound, to where the linguistic expression becomes an image in the sounding. If you bring the eurythmic into the language in this way, then the declamation is able to accompany the eurythmic. Goethe therefore rehearsed the iambs with a baton. The poetic lies in the rhythmic, not in the literal.

Therapeutic-medical: Movements can be derived that have a healing and hygienic effect. The educational-didactic, which has proven itself in Waldorf schools. It can be clearly seen how the child, by immersing themselves in soulful gymnastics, feels that every single movement comes from the laws of the human being. The human being itself is taken as a means of expression.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum building, the second part in the carpentry workshop.

1. Part (Goetheanumbau)

“Symbolum“ by J. W. v. Goethe with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Weltenseelengeister” by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (10) by Rudolf Steiner
“Spring” by Rudolf Steiner with music by Leopold van der Pals
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (11) by Rudolf Steiner
“The posy“ by J. W. v. Goethe
A cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals ‘Highland’ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (12) by Rudolf Steiner
“World soul” by J. W. v. Goethe with music by Max Schuurman

Part two (carpentry)

Music by Leopold van der Pals
“Charon“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Mignon” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Zum neuen Jahr” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Three Gypsies“ by Nikolaus Lenau with music by Jan Stuten
“Anchovy Salad” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Barkers“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Satirical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Seance” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear attendees, Allow me to say a few words to introduce the performance, as I always do before these eurythmy performances. This is not done in order to somehow explain the artistic performance; that would be inartistic, the artistic must speak for itself. But in this eurythmy we are dealing with a special formal language that is unfamiliar, and with drawing from artistic sources that we have not yet become accustomed to. And I would like to say a few introductory words about these sources and this formal language. What you see on stage is either an individual moving person — moving in their limbs — or moving groups of people. None of the movements presented here are pantomime or facial expressions. If one still sees something of that kind in the performances, it is because eurythmy is still in the early stages of development. And everything dance-like, mime-like and so on must be overcome in this eurythmic art. What underlies it is a real, visible language. Every single expression is not taken from the momentary meaning of this or that word, which eurythmy accompanies, or this or that musical motif; rather, one is dealing with a real language that is drawn from the human organism as elementarily as the sound language, as the phonetic language itself.

It would, of course, be quite impossible to keep asking, 'What does this mean? What does that mean?' about the details of spoken language. This is also not possible with this real, visible language of eurythmy; rather, the forms of eurythmy are based on a real, if I may use Goethe's expression, sensual-supersensory study of spoken language and singing itself.

Our larynx and speech organs as a whole are designed as a part of the human organism in such a way that they want to carry out certain movements. I have to put it this way, because it is first and foremost the predispositions for movement that are involved. These predispositions do not come directly out of the larynx and the other speech organs during ordinary speaking and singing, but are transformed into vibrations of the air, and this is what gives us the sound of speech or singing. But if one really studies what is stored in the larynx and its neighboring organs, as I said, through sensory-supersensory observation, then one can transfer what is stored for a single organ complex to the whole human being, entirely according to the principle of Goethe's metamorphosis teaching, which of course then has to be implemented artistically. In particular, the expressive organs of movement, the arms and hands, can be used to convey the same effect as speech.

And in this way, with regard to human nature, one arrives at something more artistic than even speech or song can be. For in our words, even in poetically and artistically formed language, we have before us a combination of what takes place through the will of man and through the thoughts of man in connection with each other. But all thought, in essence, is inartistic. If our thinking is to be put into action, if one is to look for meaning, expression and so on in the syntactical or other sense, then, to the same extent that one has to do this, what wants to reveal itself becomes inartistic. The poet is always struggling between what is beauty of sound sequence, sound design, rhythm, beat, and what the whole inner movement of the linguistic is, and what is thought. The conceptual is, so to speak, only something that must necessarily be taken along if the sound is to be heard.

But if we go back to the actual element of movement, to the disposition to move in the speech organs, and transfer it to the whole human being, so that the whole human being or groups of people become, as it were, visibly moving larynx and speech organ, then we go back to the element of will. And that emerges from the full human being, the whole human being. It can be seen from this that, firstly, even in a primitive language, a single word is often used for movements that are carried out by the human being and for the sounds that accompany them when they are sung or recited. Primitive man moves when he abandons himself freely to his inner being, in the process of transforming language into art. Hence a word for human artistic movement and for the sung or recited word in primitive language.

On the other hand, we can say that everything that is a mental element in poetry recedes behind the purely formal, that is, the actual artistic element; this comes through as a will element, as a movement element – and movement is always a manifestation of the will – this comes through this eurythmic movement entirely.

Anyone who is able to study the human organism as a whole or in part will say to themselves: the human organism at rest has a certain shape. So now we see the shape, let us say of a hand. We cannot be satisfied with just looking at the hand at rest. Every finger, every surface on the finger, everything about the finger is such that it wants to move out of the shape into movement. If one discovers the laws, as must be the case for eurythmy, where the entire human form wants to pass over, in a very elementary, natural way, into movements that are inherent in it, then one comes to a pure expression of will, to a spiritualized expression of will, and is then able to detach the poetic, the truly poetic, from the literal and to express through the word and through this form of movement more and more that which underlies the actual artistic aspect of poetry in the real poet, in the real artist.

It is therefore important not to believe that one can directly indicate every single gesture in a mimic way in the poem without the accompanying movement. Just as in spoken language itself, the essential, insofar as spoken language is artistically formed, lies in the succession of sounds in the visualization of the sounds, so too here nothing lies in the individual gesture, which is not a gesture at all, but rather, as in music, it lies in the succession of sounds, in the shaping of the sounds - in the movement, the succession of movement, the actual element of the artistic in eurythmy is in the succession of movement. And just as little as one can say in the depths of one's being, when confronted with language, that one wants to bring it to some kind of understanding in the first immediate impression, [but] one simply grasps it in terms of feeling, just as little can one say of eurythmy: this gesture does not fit with this or that that is at its basis. Rather, the aim is to be able to feel the linguistically visible element in eurythmy as such. Eurythmy as such is not yet art. Only then must that which is drawn from the organism in the form of movement be shaped artistically.

Recently, we have endeavored to achieve a great deal in this direction, particularly in the shaping of movement. Those of you who have seen eurythmy before will notice how the forms that are usually more silent, with which we introduce or end a poem, express not only the moving people or groups of people, but also the mood, beat and rhythm of the poem. Thus you will see moving people or groups of people on stage; you will hear what is presented in the movement of eurythmy accompanied by recitation or music. However, it must be noted from the outset that the recitation that has to accompany this eurythmy must now return to the truly artistic element of recitation and declamation.

This artistic element of declamation has, of course, been much maligned in recent times. I use this expression for the reason that those insults that have occurred certainly did not arise out of mere ignorance, but out of ill will, which is connected with all sorts of things, and in particular arose out of an unartistic sensibility that is so widespread in the present day. We appreciate all too little in the present what it means that a true poet like Schiller did not start with the literal meaning of the most important of his poems, but rather started from an indefinite feeling of a melody and only then, I might say, lined up the literal meaning with this musical element. Goethe started more from a figurative-imaginative point of view. But [on this figurative] - which is also expressed in rhythm, beat and so on - and on the musical, the actual artistic of poetry is based, not on the literal content. Just because something is inartistic in our time, one cannot take that into account, because in the emphasis of the pure prose content, in the recitation or in the declamation, something special is being attempted. I would like to say that the inability to feel artistically about recitation today has led to these smear campaigns being unleashed in recent times, especially against recitation to accompany our eurythmy. And it is precisely this form of recitation that will have to prevail because it goes back to what is already eurythmic, namely also musical and imaginative, in language itself.

Just as eurythmy can be accompanied by recitation and declamation, since it is intended to be only a different expression of what is heard, so can eurythmy be accompanied by music. You can sing in these eurythmic movements just as you can reveal yourself through sound. And when music is accompanied by eurythmy, it can be understood as singing in visible motion, and nothing else.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the artistic side of eurythmy. I would just like to mention that eurythmy also contains two other elements. One is a hygienic-therapeutic element, because it can be drawn from the human organism – from that which is already within it, that which occurs in movements. Therefore, these movements can also be transformed into healing movements. A start has already been made on this recently. Now, this side of eurythmy, the hygienic-therapeutic side, will also be further developed.

The third element is the pedagogical-didactic element, which has already proven itself in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, where, in addition to gymnastics, this spiritualization of human movement in eurythmy is introduced to children as soon as they enter elementary school and then continued as a compulsory subject through all school grades throughout.

It may be said that every movement that a child has to perform is not merely carried out from the physical-physiological, but from the whole human being, who is spirit, soul and body. So that the child feels from the outset: it is making movements into which its soul-spiritual flows. The children feel this as something completely natural. And what is more, the fact that children feel so completely in their element is also based on the fact that this eurythmy is particularly suitable not only for developing the physical structure of the limbs and for evoking physical dexterity in movement, but also for evoking the will initiative that our time and probably also the next generation will so urgently need. What eurythmy offers children is education in the will initiative.

I will not go as far as a very famous contemporary physiologist – you would be amazed if I were to mention his name – who, after such introductory words, when he was watching a performance, told me that gymnastics, which are often overestimated today, are not a means of education, but a barbarism. As I said, it was not I who said it, but a famous contemporary physiologist. One could say that this gymnastics, which is based purely on external, physical considerations, this gymnastics that supports the physical, must be complemented by that which is then the spiritualized gymnastics for children, which can be given to the child through eurythmy. The child feels completely at home in its element.

These are the three sides of eurythmy. And here in our performances, it is of course the artistic aspect that comes into its own. And here it may perhaps be said again and again that this eurythmy, if further developed, is truly suited to fulfill that which appeared to Goethe as the highest artistic principle, in that he said: He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret longs for her most worthy interpreter, art - not for the abstract physiology of natural laws , but to the revelation in art.

Man is that which, in essence, he has in his organism as cosmic laws and cosmic secrets. If we set him in motion in such a way that what is grounded in his essence becomes visible in the movement, then we can say: human nature begins to reveal its essence to him who feels a deep longing to bring out this essential humanity in an artistic way from within the human being.

On the other hand, when Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn produces a summit within himself, takes harmony, order. and meaning together, in order to finally rise to create the work of art - so one may say: an art that does not make use of external instruments, but of the human organism itself as its instrument, as its tool, an art that brings out from this human organism measure, harmony, meaning and so on, such an art has within itself the germs to become more and more perfect.

We are our own harshest critics. I know very well that this eurythmy is only at the beginning of its development. Therefore, I must always apologize to the esteemed audience when such attempts are made. But those who are willing to engage with what is being developed will recognize that if it is properly developed, by us or by others, the eurythmic art will be able to join the other, older, fully-fledged arts.