Adolphe Appia and G. Craig
Carl Van Vechten's essay "Adolphe Appia and G. Craig" examines the vexed question of priority between two pioneering figures of modern stage design, opening with the curious episode in which Gordon Craig, in the first edition of "On the Art of the Theatre" (1911), mistakenly wrote of Adolphe Appia as though he were dead. Craig later corrected this in a footnote added to the 1912 edition, calling Appia "the foremost stage-decorator of Europe" and explaining that he had been misinformed of Appia's death by a friend, only learning of his error after viewing Appia's designs in a portfolio belonging to Prince Wolkonsky. Van Vechten uses this anecdote as a springboard to investigate how little Appia's pioneering work was actually known, even among theatre specialists who might have been expected to recognize it. He traces the publication history of Appia's writings: the well-known German volume "Die Musik und die Inscenierung" (Munich, 1899), translated from Appia's original French by Princess Elsa Cantacuzène and illustrated with eighteen plates of the author's own designs for Wagnerian stagings, and a far rarer and earlier French pamphlet, "La Mise-en-scène du Drame Wagnérien" (Paris, 1893, reissued 1895), a fifty-one-page work that Van Vechten owns a copy of but which he could find in no public library, including the New York Public Library. He notes that this earlier pamphlet is referenced almost nowhere except in a footnote by Houston Stewart Chamberlain in his 1897 study of Wagner—Chamberlain being the dedicatee of Appia's later German book. Van Vechten argues that this obscure French pamphlet already contains, in embryonic but essentially complete form, the principles that would later be credited to Gordon Craig and to the broader "new movement" in stagecraft. He lays out Appia's central theoretical insights: that stage decoration should actively participate in revealing the inner meaning of a drama rather than merely furnish decorative background; that painted-perspective scenery is fundamentally inconsistent with a living, three-dimensional actor; and that lighting should serve not simple illumination but as the unifying element binding actor and setting together—a theory Appia articulated before any lighting technology existed capable of realizing it. Van Vechten stresses, following Hiram Kelly Moderwell and Loomis Taylor (then director of German productions at the Metropolitan Opera House), that Appia had diagnosed a paradox in Wagner's own work: though Wagner invented an entirely new dramatic form, the "Wort-Tondrama," he had no real conception of how to stage it. Appia distinguished the conventions of opera, where the music dictates action and the singer may simply plant herself near the footlights, from the freer mimicry of life found in spoken drama, arguing that Wagner's music occupies a third, hybrid category: it dictates exact duration and rhythm to the actor's movements without specifying their content, as seen in the wordless interludes after Tristan and Isolde drink the potion, or Brünnhilde's greeting to the sun in "Siegfried." Appia concluded that a single controlling artist-director must therefore coordinate scenery, lighting, and action down to the finest detail to fulfill the music's implicit demands, and that he himself had gone so far as to produce seven separate lighting/staging drawings for a single act of "Die Walküre" to show the setting's evolution—an idea Loomis Taylor called among the most beautiful conceivable in theatre design, yet one nobody had ever attempted to realize on stage. Van Vechten presents Appia as a strangely neglected innovator: a man who developed not only a comprehensive theory of production but exhaustive practical instructions for executing it, and yet found no one, decades on, willing to follow those instructions. He notes that before the war Appia had moved beyond conventional stage-decoration into collaboration with the Dalcroze eurhythmics school at Hellerau, developing still newer, more abstract theories involving cubic forms. Van Vechten poses the essay's central provocative question: whether, given this evidence, Appia should be recognized as the true originator of the modern theatrical movement, such that without him there would have been no Gordon Craig and perhaps no Stanislavsky. To support the claim of direct influence, Van Vechten juxtaposes parallel passages: Appia's description of "Das Rheingold" as unifying three elemental settings—water, air, and fire—compared with Craig's celebrated verbal sketch for a "Macbeth" setting built around a steep rock shrouded in mist, a place for warlike men and phantoms alike. He further quotes at length Appia's analysis of the final tableau of "Die Walküre," in which Wotan's fire encircling the sleeping Brünnhilde is shown to carry deep dramatic significance beyond mere spectacle, since its recurrence across "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung" both unifies the trilogy visually and continually redirects the audience's attention to Wotan's central struggle between will and renunciation. Van Vechten closes by summarizing Appia's guiding principle—that the stage director or designer functions essentially as a clairvoyant instrument serving the author's underlying text—and observes that this principle was fully embraced by the leading figures of the modern theatrical movement, even as Appia himself remained comparatively unknown and uncredited for having originated it.
By Carl Van Vechten · First published 1915 · Genre: Theatre History, Art Criticism, Academic Essay