Trailin Clouds of Glory?Alan F. Keele

BAD DRAMA MAY BE BLASPHEMOUS

R ECENTLY a number of musical plays based on theMormon belief in the premortal existence ofspirits--Saturday’s Warrior, My Turn on Earth, Star

Ch-ild--have been widely attended and commerciallysuccessful. Of course, anyone who has heardWordworth’s line, "Our birth is but a sleep and aforgetting," quoted in sacrament meeting will know thatMormons are not the only ones who have used thistheme. But few may realize that the idea of thepreexistence is very old and has been dealt with manytimes in Western art. Looking at some of theseexamples, particularly an exquisite opera by Austrianpoet Hugo von Hofmannsthal--The Woman without aShadow (music by Richard Strauss)--will help locate theMormon musical plays in broader historical andartistic context. Such comparisons may highlight the

School, the concept was still discussed by Origen,Plotinus, Philo, and the Christian bishop Clement. Butwhile Clement taught that the soul was created at thetime of the body’s creation, Origen and Plotinus believed(as did Philo until he reconsidered) "that the concreteand individual human mind had descended into the bodyfrom the choir of aerial souls.., having lived earlier livesand bringing with it the qualities and a nature which ithad acquired by its conduct."2

Those in the early church who believed as Clement dideventually won the debate, and the concept of thepremortal existence of the soul became a heterodox,"underground" idea, punishable by excommunication,ban, and bull, often with fatal consequences. In ahandbook of early heresies, the Enchiridion Symbolorum, anofficial condemnation of this doctrine by the Emperor

Always the unspeakable mysterium--novel, esoteric, and sacred--the idea of the preexistence hastraditionally been treated with respect in Western art forms.

strengths and/or weaknesses of the Mormonproductions and graphically delineate the challenges forfuture LDS artists.

The premortal existence of spirits is related to ancientEastern ideas like reincarnation. The first Westernthinker known to suggest the concept was Socrates.After he was condemned to die for his unpopular ideas,Socrates tried to cheer his followers by proving that lifeis eternal and that he would live after he died just as hehad lived before coming to earth. "Then, Simmias," hesays in’the Phaedo, "our souls must also have existedwithout bodies before they were in the form of man, andmust have had intelligence.’1

Socrates’ idea, transmitted through his student Plato,seems to have fared quite well in the ancient world. Afull 700 years later, in the "neo-platonic" Alexandrian

Justinian, speaking against Origen (543 A.D.) reads: "Hewho says or thinks that the soul of man preexists, mayhe be anathema!" In 561, a certain Priscillianus wascondemned for teaching that human souls originallylived "in caelesti habitations" (in a celestial habitation). In1329 a German mystic, the monk Meister Eckehardt,was excommunicated for saying that soul is "’increatum etincreabile’" (uncreated and uncreatable).3

More recently, artists--not theologians--haveexplored the idea. William Wordsworth wrote in hisfamous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality fromRecollections of Early Childhood":

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,

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And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God, who is our home:4

Though asked by the state church and his friendColderidge to retract the verse, Wordsworth refused.And by so doing, he gave the preexistence idea a greatboost upward out of the esoteric "underground" andinto the consciousness of millions of ordinary people.5

A century later another artist, the Belgian MauriceMaeterlinck, made this idea central to two dramas, TheBlue Bird (1908) and its sequel The Betrothal (1922). In thefairy-tale setting of these plays, Tyltyl and his sisterMytyl are assisted by a good fairy and a magical jewel.They travel forward beyond the veil--where theyconverse with their brothers and sisters andgrandparents who have died--and backward to the

falcon, which flies away with blood dripping from itsnicked wing. The emperor takes the lovely woman as hiswife, though she is not yet mortal and casts no earthlyshadow.

Neither the emperor nor his wife realizes that theemperor will be turned to stone after twelve months ofmarriage if the empress still casts no shadow (or in otherwords is not expecting a child). Three days before theend of this probationary period, the emperor, unawareof his impending doom, returns to the Seven MoonMountains to search for his red falcon. But the same daythe falcon comes to the empress at the palace. It fliesoverhead, drops something from its talons, and alightson a nearby tree, its wounded wing still dripping blood.The empress recognizes the magic talisman slqe had beenwearing on that day a year before. Its powers hadenabled her to change herself into gazelles, birds, andother animals. Engraved on the talisman: "The woman

In architecture as in music or literature, the artistic style or form must agree with and contribute to thecontent and the purpose as a whole.

premortal state. Here they meet and are advised by theirown unborn children in such important matters as theproper choice of suitable future mates.

Another artist, poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, knewWordsworth’s poem and Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird andperhaps a Scandinavian folk tale which was translatedinto German at about the same time or a ballad by theViennese writer Niklaus Lenau entitled "Anna" (whichwas based on that tale). All could have suggested certainaspects of Hofmannsthal’s own masterful treatment ofthe theme of premortal existence: The Woman Without aShadow (Die Frau ohne Schatten), set to music by RichardStrauss.

The Woman Without a Shadow tells the story of twocouples: the emperor and empress of the exotic"South-Eastern Islands" and a common dyer and hiswife. While out hunting, the emperor sees a beautifulwhite gazelle. The gazelle almost escapes, but a redfalcon, the emperor’s favorite, stops it by striking at itseyes. Terrified, the gazelle changes back into a beautifulwoman, the daughter of the powerful spirit rulerKeikobad. The emperor angrily throws his dagger at the

casts no shadow, the emperor must be turned to stone.’"Realizing for the first time her husband’s fate, the

desperate empress begs her nurse--a kind of satanicsorceress given to her by Keikobad--to help her get ashadow. Shuddering, the nurse tells her that onlyhuman beings have shadows. To acquire one she mustdescend from her ivory palace to the fetid lower realmswhere mortals live "as ugly to our eyes as toads andspiders. Their smell is frightful, they squirm and writhelike eels." The empress insists nonetheless, and thenurse admits she knows one woman who might bewilling to sell her shadow--the wife of the dyer Barak.

Barak’s wife is a shrew. She complains about herhusband’s brothers who live with them (one ahunchback, another one-eyed, another with one arm).She refuses to have children despite the wishes of hergood-hearted husband, who remembers his uglybrothers as beautiful children. After Barak leaves formarket (carrying his wares in order to save the cost of adonkey), the empress and the nurse bargain with hiswife, who agrees to forfeit her shadow, the visiblesymbol of her procreative powers, in return for riches,

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perpetual beauty ("No children will make of your body awell-trodden highway into life!"), servants, and suitors.

Because of the prolonged negotiations, no supper hasbeen prepared for Barak, so the nurse causes the fire toflame up, the pan to fly to the fire, and five fish to leapinto the pan. Then she and the empress leave. Suddenly,the terrified wife hears the ethereal voices of her unbornchildren, seeming to come from the fish in the pan:"Mother, Mother, let us come home" they lament,

The door is bolted, we cannot get in!We’re in the dark, and are in fear,Mother, Mother, O woe!O Mother, let us in,Or call our dear fatherThat he might open the door for us!Mother, O woe, alas your hard heart!

Near the end of the play, Barak and his wife areswallowed up into the earth and find themselves on

Now they are rushing into life,On dawn-red wings,To us, who were so nearly lost;These strong ones, like starshineHasten hither.Thou hast over come thyself, and now heavenly

messengers giveThee the father and the children. They have found

us and hasten hither.

Then the children conclude:Hark, we bid you, strive and suffer, that our day of

life may gloriously dawn.What ye have endured, steadfastly in trial, for us is

wrought into glittering crowns.

Barak and his wife also find and forgive each other.All, parents and unborn children, join in a song ofjubilation. The unborn children sing a final mysticalchorus:

When the artistic purpose is to treat eternal themes, the medium must be commensurate, even if weknow that it can only approximate and ultimately symbolize the absolute.

either side of a thick wall in a subterranean vault.Neither is aware of the other. She feels repentant forwanting to sell their unborn children. He laments theanger he had shown when she had boasted of herdecision. Above, in the palace, the empress leaves theevil nurse and enters the judgment hall where her fatherKeikobad presides. By this time, her husband sits in analcove, a stone statue except for his eyes, which pleadwith her to save him.

The empress learns that she need only drink thegolden wategs of life from a fountain. Then the shadowof the woman can be hers, and her husband restored.But her sorrow for the trouble she has caused Barak andhis wife is great. Finally she decides to forego herhusband and her shadow rather than deprive Barak ofhis children. She cries out, "I--will--not!" At this thetempting waters disappear and the temple becomesbrightly illuminated. The empress now casts her ownshadow. The emperor emerges from his alcove and thevoices of their unborn children are heard singing fromabove. The emperor greets them:

They are the unborn children,

Father, nothing threatens thee,Behold, Mother, that which worried thee is now

alreadyVanishing. Has there ever been a feast, at which weThe guests, were not also secretly the hosts.;’

Hofmannsthal struggled for some time to write thelibretto for The Woman Without a Shadow. As early as 1911he wrote to Richard Strauss, with whom he hadpreviously worked on Der Rosenkavalier, proposing theidea for another opera on a "grand and multifacetedscale." "It is a mag-ical fairy-tale," he wrote, "and thewhole thing is hovering with such force before my eyesthat it actually disturbs me at my work."6 All during theensuing months and war-torn years of collaborationuntil its belated premiere in 1919, Hofmannsthalreiterates in his correspondence the conviction that thisopera was a special idea, destined for realization, as heonce wrote, "under this fortunate conjunction ofpoetical and musical genius."7

It is difficult to convey the beauty of the lyricalGerman text in translation, but the opera is a

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masterwork. The idea has intrigued the poet anddemanded his finest talents. Not content to rely on hispoetry alone, however, he turned to the theatre and thefairy-tale, with all their magical possibilities, asMaeterlinck had done. The opera, with its lavish sceneryand costuming and grand music, was a veritable festivalof the arts, or, to use the Wagnerian term, aGesamtkunstwerk. Musicologist William Mann made thisevaluation:

It is the most pretentious of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas .... It is perhaps the mostpretentious opera in operatic history. And yet it ispossibly the most beautiful and moving of all ....Even the characters of Der Rosenkavalier, much morefamiliar through frequent performance, do not cutso deeply at the level where they invite us to becomedifferent people, to exercise the repentance of Greekmetanoia, which means a change of mind .... Die

they share little more than a common theme. But are therecent musicals bad just because they are different fromthe European works on the same theme? Not at all.There should be room on the artistic spectrum for worksof all types, from Grand Ole Opry to grand opera.

There is still a problem with the Mormon productions,perhaps a problem best illuminated using an examplefrom architecture or frozen music as it has been called.Some architectural styles, most people would agree, areappropriate for certain purposes and inappropriate forothers. A temple, for instance, the earthly dwelling placefor the Divine, is not designed and constructed the sameway as a dwelling for mortals or one for animals. Earthlymaterials are used in all three kinds of dwellings, sincewe have no other choice, but we select "finer" or"higher" materials for the temple. Whereas informalrooms in a home might be paneled in old barn lumber,who would think of using it to build a temple? The

The flaw of the recent musicals is that they allow divine ideas--like unauthorized temple ceremoniesheld in a barnmto become trivialized by the setting.

Frau ohne Schatten is possibly Hofmannsthal’s greatestclaim to immortality, but it was Strauss who justifiedthe claim.~

Certainly the opera in no way trivialized the theme ofthe premortal existence of spirits. Always theunspeakable mysterium--novel, esoteric, and sacred--theidea has traditionally been treated with similar respect inWestern art forms.

So what about the more recent Mormon musicaldramas on the theme of premortal existence likeSaturday’s Warrior, My Turn on Earth, and Star Child? Listento an excerpt from one of them, My Turn on Earth, adixieland/charleston number:

O...0...O...O, Everybody ought to have a body,A body is the only way to go . . .Everybody ought to have a body,Havin" a body really helps you to grow!

Certainly no one who has heard both works couldrationally disagree that this musical, artisticallyspeaking, is far from The Woman Without a Shadow. Indeed,

temple would typically be constructed of granite andmarble, the finest woods and metals, glass and fabric. Ina temple we demand the finest craftsmanship, not onlyto lift the eye and the soul towards heaven as Gothiccathedrals do but also to establish a bit of architecturalheaven here on earth. To these temples the Lordhimself, conscious of allowing the validity of thesymbolism, can and apparently has come.

Of course, the temple must still be practical, and ifneeds be even portable like the tent of the Arc of theCovenant. Style and materials can vary, from tent togothic revival to art noveau to Frank-Lloyd-Wright.9But even the tent must be made of "relatively divine"tent materials. The use of finer furnishings and finerappointments suggests that a temple represents thecelestial kingdom, though executed in terrestrialmaterial. Does this mean that barn lumber is inherentlybad, inappropriate for any use? Not at all. The point isquite simple: In architecture, interior or exterior, as inmusic or literature, the artistic style of form must agreewith and contribute to the content and the purpose ofthe whole.

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When the artistic purpose is to treat higher, eternal, orabsolute themes (the divine love of God or the lofty idealof the premortal existence of the soul with God), themedium must be commensurate, even if we know inhumility that it can only approach, approximate, andultimately symbolize the absolute. The medium cannot bechosen from the common side of the aesthetic spectrumif it treats the subject of divine love; it cannot be jocularor whimsical, for example, even though these might beperfectly fitting styles to treat the subject of "muskratlove." Wordsworth, Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal, andStrauss clearly avoid this pitfall and choose appropriatestyles, materials, and workmanship. Consequently theyare successful in their aesthetic endeavors, and theirworks have earned the right to be called great art.

The tragedy of the recent musicals, however, is notmerely that they fail to become great art. That would beforgivable since it is the ultimate fate of most artistic

homes and farms. Just as inappropriate artistic mediumscan detract from celestial ideas, an ugly environment,the prophet apparently feels, is not a fit milieu forcelestial candidates either.

Not satisfied with a simple cleanup, the prophet wouldultimately have us continue to build Zion--whereJoseph and Brigham left off--erecting more Nauvoos("the beautiful"), for example, and settling for no lessthan the finest on all our aesthetic endeavors, fromtemple architecture to music, visual arts, poetry, anddrama. And though blue jeans will surely be theappropriate garb for some of our more terrestrial artisticenterprises--just as they would be in cleaning up ourhomes and farms--when it comes to artistic statementsabout celestial concepts like that of our premortalexistence, Zion must eventually follow the admonitionof Isaiah to "Awake, Awake ...put on thy beautifulgarments." /

The production of some works may in fact constitute aesthetic sin and perhaps even blasphemy.

endeavors anyway. (Nor is it the fact that these boxoffice successes have diverted our attention and ourresources away from more worth-while productions likethat of Maeterlinck’s plays or the Hofmannsthal-Strauss opera.) Their flaw is that they allow divineideas--like unauthorized temple ceremonies held in abarn--to become trivialized by the setting. For whenthey are trivialized and clad in styles which make amockery of their divinity, even divine ideas cannot ringtrue for very long and are likely to be rejected by anysensitive seeker of divine truth. These Mormonmusicals do not, therefore, have the lasting effect onhumanity of Wordsworth’s ode nor do they cause the"real repentance of metanoia’" of Woman Without a Shadow.The production of such works may in fact constituteaesthetic sin and perhaps even blasphemy.

One of the implications, after all, of Paul’s admonitionto "seek anything virtuous, lovely or of good report orpraiseworthy" is that we should be quick to recognizethose things which are not. This includes works of art.President Kimball reminds us of this problem ofaesthetic sin every time he urges the beautification of

Notes1. The Loeb Classical Library, Plato l, (Phaedo) (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1914), pp. 266f (paragraph 76C).2. Richard Bartram Tollinton, Alexandrine Teaching on the Universe (London: (3. Allen& Unwin, 1932), pp. 135, 137.3. Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Syrabolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus¯ Cidei et Morum (Freiburg: Herder, 1965), pp. 140f, 158, 294.4. William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works (New York: Oxford University Press,1933), p. 588.5. See for example Barbara Garlitz, "The Immortality Ode: Its CulturalProgeny," Studies in English Literature 6(Autumn 1966):639-649. Scholars haveshown that Wordsworth’s ode--especially in the English-speaking world--greatly affected popular attitudes about childhood, childrearing, and educationgenerally. Any child who "trails clouds of glory from God," people began tothink, must surely be treated and educated differently from one who is born exnihilo and "in sin."6. Willi Schu, ed., Richard Straus-Hugo yon Hofmannsthal, Brief-Wechsel (Zurich:Atlantis, 1952), pp. 112f.7. Ibid., pp~ 212f.8. William S. Mann, Richard Strauss, A Critical Study of the Operas (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1966), p. 190f.9. See for example Paul L. Anderson, "’First of the Modern Temples," The Ensign(July 1977):6-11.10. Isaiah 52:1.ALAN F. KEELE earned a Ph.D. in Germanic language and literature atPrinceton and is professor of German at BYU.

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