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    A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata"
    A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata"
    A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata"
    Ebook53 pages43 minutes

    A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 3, 2016
    ISBN9781535836760
    A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata"

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      A Study Guide for August Strindberg's "The Ghost Sonata" - Gale

      1

      The Ghost Sonata

      August Strindberg

      1907

      Introduction

      The Ghost Sonata is one of August Strindberg’s Chamber Plays, a series of short, simple dramas he wrote for his 161-seat Intimate Theatre, which opened its doors in Stockholm, Sweden in 1907. The plays were inspired by the chamber music of composers like Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Strindberg created The Ghost Sonata with Beethoven’s Geistertrio, Opus 70, No. 1, in D Major in mind, and the play echoes the style of the music. It creates an atmosphere by repeating various themes, rather than developing a story through conventional portrayals of character and a linear plot. The themes of The Ghost Sonata mainly relate to secrets, illusions, and the disappointments and tragedies of life, and it is the revelation of these terrible details of the characters’ past lives that form the action of the play.

      The Ghost Sonata does not take place in the real world; or at least not in a world most people would recognize as reality. Strindberg originally subtitled his play Kama-Loka, the name of a mystical dream world through which some mortals have to wander before reaching the kingdom of death in the afterlife. Accordingly, the characters in The Ghost Sonata speak, move and act as if they are part of a dream—or a nightmare. One sees glimpses of the future, another embodies tragedies from the past. There are literal ghosts and vampires in the play, as well as a mysterious woman known as the Mummy.

      The world Strindberg created in The Ghost Sonata was one he found in his own tortured imagination. On stage, his vision of an alternate reality was a forerunner to later twentieth century experiments in non-realistic dramatic literature, such as Expressionism, popular in Germany in the 1920s, and the Absurdist movement of the 1950s, made popular by writers like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. When the play was originally staged at the Intimate Theatre in 1908, its strange, avant-garde style and grim view of the world made it unpopular with critics. It wasn’t until the famous director Max Reinhardt staged the play in Berlin in 1916, then toured it to Strindberg’s native Sweden in 1917, that it won acclaim from audiences and reviewers. Reinhardt’s production toured central Europe through the 1920s, and the play was produced by Eugene O’Neill’s Province-town Players in New York in 1924 and at the Globe and Strand Theatres in London in 1926. In 1930 it was turned into an opera with music by Julius Weissmann and performed in Munich, and the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a television production of The Ghost Sonata in 1962. Reviewer Maurice Richardson noted that, even though the television production was probably seen by fewer than a million people, it was probably a larger audience than the total number of people who had ever seen it before.

      Author Biography

      August Strindberg is now considered to be one of Sweden’s finest dramatists and among the most important contributors to the modern theatre. His life and career at the turn of the twentieth century, however, was a twisting path of minor successes and major public humiliations, of deep psychological and spiritual turmoil, and of a love-hate relationship with women that scarred his mind and inspired him to some of his best writing. Strindberg was an author whose life was an open book. Everything he experienced and felt, from unhappy memories of his childhood to

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