The Rudolf Steiner Archive

“Symbolum” by J. W. v. Goethe with musical addition by Leopold van der Pals
“Zueignung“ by Novalis
“From the Song of Solomon” by an unknown poet from the Middle Ages
Opening “We want to search...” with music by Max Schuurman
“The last word” by Fercher von Steinwand with musical accompaniment by Max Schuurman
Prelude ‘We are looking for...’ with music by Leopold van der Pals ‘Reconciliation’ by J. W. v. Goethe
From ‘Chinese-German Years and Times of Day’ by J- W. v. Goethe
“Er ist's“ by Eduard Mörike From the collection of poems ‘Der Tag’ by Hans Reinhart Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
“Der Tanz”, “Die beiden Esel”, “Philanthropisch”, “Die Wald geiss”, “Die Fingur”, from: “Die Galgenlieder ”by Christian Morgenstern
“Gretchen in the Cathedral” scene from ‘Faust I’ by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words to introduce our eurythmy presentation. This eurythmic art is not meant to be a dance art or any other art that could be considered a neighboring art. It should be something that presents itself as an independent art movement alongside that which currently exists as a dance art or similar. What we recognize here as the eurythmic art was conceived and born out of the Goethean worldview, out of Goetheanism. We shall only understand what we understand by Goetheanism here if we think not of Goethe, who died in 1832, but of the Goethean genius, which lives on and must be felt anew by each generation, and whose artistic and world-view intentions can be taken up by each generation and developed in one direction or another.

In a limited area - just as otherwise in the large the whole building and everything that we represent here comes from Goetheanism - in a limited area, our eurythmic art is also born out of a Goethean artistic and Goethean world-view attitude.

I do not wish to theorize, but to point out the source of this eurythmic art. Of course, everything that is artistic must make an aesthetic impression when seen directly. But the things make an aesthetic impression precisely because they have been brought forth from those sources of the existence of nature and the world, which the most rational mind does not penetrate, but which, as it were, come out of the infinite depths of the nature of things. And so, without becoming theoretical, I may point out how this eurythmic art is born out of the whole spirit of Goethe's world view. That is the significant thing about Goethe's artistic attitude: it does not present itself as something quite separate from the rest of human perception. Rather, Goethe is imbued with the conviction that what what is to be created artistically is connected with the most intimate powers of cognition, with nature and the essence of things, insofar as we are able to perceive them through the eye or through other organs. Goethe sees only a developed leaf in the individual plant, which is intricately designed. For Goethe, a single plant leaf is an entire plant, only in an elementary, primitive form. The whole plant is a more complicated leaf for Goethe.

This view, fully developed, will mean much, much more for the human world view than it does today. For in such a view we shall find the foundation for everything that can go out from our science of the dead to knowledge of the living. But what Goethe initially applied only to forms in terms of view can also be applied to movement.

Our eurythmy art should be a movement art that uses the whole human organism with its movements as its means. And so one can say: the human larynx with its neighboring organs is the organ of expression for audible speech. But for someone who can see the movement pattern in the human larynx, who can see what is not seen in ordinary life when we listen to someone speaking, for such a person there is a possibility of saying: a movement pattern of the human larynx and its neighboring organs is connected with every sound, with every sequence of sounds. What is present as a movement system in the human larynx and its neighboring organs can be transferred to the whole human organism. We can set the human limbs in motion in such a way that they precisely imitate what is present in the larynx for the purpose of human speech. Then, as the whole human being becomes a living, moving larynx on the stage before us, a visible language arises before us. And since the human being is an extract of the whole world, a real microcosm, this language, this visible language, is indeed an expression of the deepest secrets of the world.

What I am now going to explain, I would say in the abstract, must be felt aesthetically in the movements that come to view. And so what the individual person makes of the movement of his limbs becomes the expression of vocalization, of the sequence of sounds. While everything that flows against language, from inner warmth of soul, from joy and suffering, from enthusiasm and from everything else that vibrates in our language, while that is expressed in the movements that an individual makes in space or that a person makes in relation to other people in group movements. The movements thus become the expression of the soul in language, but at the same time they also express the artistic transformation of language: they become the expression of rhyme, the expression of rhythm, the expression of meter. So everything that lies in language is also expressed in this visible language. This is the art of eurythmy.

In our work, it is accompanied on the one hand by recitation and on the other by music. For what music puts into the tones is expressed by us through the movements. And the two arts appear as parallel arts.

Likewise, what is presented in the recitation is also expressed through the eurythmic art. However, for this to happen, the art of recitation must return to what it once was. Today, the art of recitation is in decline. Even that which is most admired in the art of recitation today is actually the most inartistic. That which is prosaic in language, the content of language, the narrative, is what is attempted today in the emphasis on the form of expression of the art of recitation. What we must attempt here is what, behind the mere content, should only be recognizable as a kind of register, lies behind this content in the treatment of language, in the actual artistic aspect of language. That is what we are concerned with here. Therefore, those who particularly love the art of recitation today will find something paradoxical in the way that recitation sometimes has to be done, especially in the art of eurythmy. Recitation cannot be done differently for eurythmy. And anyone who knows what ancient recitation was will also perceive this return to true recitation as a renewal, a reinvigoration of the artistic.

I need only remind you that when Goethe rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, he rehearsed with a baton, as he says, so that he emphasized the musicality that lies behind the outwardly prosaic. Goethe would have been horrified by what is called recitation today. I need only remind you that Schiller, before he had the content, the word content of a poem in his soul, first had something melodious in his soul, something wordless and melodious, felt the musical aspect first, only then found the words for it.

All these things must be taken into account if we want to go back to what ultimately still came from the time in which we recreated in the dance movements, but also in the human poetic language, that which is a universal law. And we would like to point this out again with our eurythmic art.

I would only ask you to be lenient with the presentation itself. For everything I have discussed here is more of an ideal towards which we are striving. We are more or less only at the beginning with what we have developed. But I must add that nothing in this eurythmic art is arbitrary. If you were to believe, for example, that any movement has more than a momentary connection with the inner soul movement, then you would misunderstand the eurythmic art. Everything that appears in this eurythmic art has an inner lawfulness, just as the lawfulness of tones in music is itself. The succession of eurythmic movements is such as the succession in melodious song is inner lawfulness.

If you see some pantomime, some gestures, some facial expressions, it is because we have not yet achieved the full perfection of our art that it should have. There should be no pantomime, no facial expressions, no gestures. When two people or two groups of people in completely different places perform one and the same eurythmic content, it is only as different as when two pianists play one and the same Beethoven sonata. Otherwise, what you will see on stage and what you will hear through the art of recitation is one and the same.

In this sense, I ask you to understand what we want to develop as a kind of Gesamtkunst, because if what is organically possible for a person to move can really be artistically developed, then it is truly the case that what can be applied to it is what is so beautifully expressed in Goethe's saying as a Goethean artistic attitude: When man has reached the summit of nature, he in turn produces an entire nature, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together, in order to finally rise to the production of the work of art. And if Goethe was of the opinion that art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it, then it must be said that if one artistically embodies and reveals what is inherent in man himself in terms of secret natural laws, then a kind of summary, a kind of synthesis of the various arts, is indeed given. In eurythmy, one can perhaps feel what is so beautifully expressed in another of Goethe's words: “When nature reveals her secrets, one feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Those who want to penetrate the secrets of the human organism – that is how one could describe it – feel a certain inner yearning to artistically reshape the range of movements in the human body.

These are all intentions. And I ask you to look at what you can already find developed in these intentions today with the same tolerance with which one looks at a beginning. Perhaps not everything has yet been understood in the way it should be understood. But if this artistic trend is taken into account by contemporaries, then there will certainly be the incentive to develop it. And we hope – we are our own harshest critics and we know full well that what we can offer at present is not yet completely satisfactory – but we hope that this art can be developed, either by us or probably by others, to such an extent that it can one day stand alongside other fully-fledged art movements as something fully legitimate.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

When you read or hear about those cultural endeavors that connect with or join our building, this Goetheanum, then you can actually always assume in this case that the opposite of what is said in the world is being striven for here. In fact, the aim here is to strive for that which is fundamentally the longing, the unconscious, instinctive longing of many people, in the most diverse branches of contemporary civilization and culture.

What we are able to present to you today is only a small, narrowly defined part of the whole of our cultural and spiritual endeavors of our time. Eurythmic art should not be seen as a dance art alongside other things that look similar to what is done here, but our eurythmic art should be something completely independent. It is, like all our striving, actually based on what I would call Goetheanism, Goethe's artistic attitude, Goethe's world view. Only we are not dealing with the Goethe who died in 1832. We leave it to those who want to deal with it more in a scholarly way. We are dealing, I would say, with the genius of Goethe, how he lives on and how he also lives in the early 20th century.

And what is to be presented here in our eurythmic art - albeit only in its beginnings, in first attempts - is the realization of Goethe's artistic view in a very specific field, in an artistic field that makes use of the human being's own movement potential as its means of art. An art of movement of the human organism in space is what underlies this. And if I am to express what the sources of this particular art form are, I will speak at first in seemingly theoretical terms, but only seemingly so.

Everything artistic should be immediately comprehensible to the aesthetic sense. All theorizing has no justification in the face of art. In direct observation, the beauty of some art must reveal itself. But what Goethe said, based on his artistic and ideological convictions, is true, deeply true: when nature begins to reveal its secrets to someone, they feel the deepest yearning for its most worthy interpreter, art.

And what is to be presented here directly through the human organism itself can best be explained by reminding you of the comprehensive idea of Goethe's metamorphosis. This idea of Goethe's metamorphosis is something that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by our school of thought, by our intellectual life. This Goethean idea of metamorphosis will enable us to move from the science of the dead, in which we now find ourselves, to a real science of the living.

What can be called the Goethean idea of metamorphosis still appears simple today. The whole plant with all its complications, with all its complicated structures, whether it is a tree or a green foliage plant: for Goethe, everything that is a plant is a transformed leaf; whether it is a colored petal or a green leaf, for Goethe it is a whole plant. As I said, it still sounds very abstract and primitive today; but there is an enormous amount in this view that the organism in its complexity is a transformation of a single link in the organism, an enormous amount of future world view is in this.

Now, Goethe initially applied this only to the forms of the organism. We want to apply it to the artistic thought and the spiritualized one by applying it to human movement; and we assume that what the human larynx and its neighboring organs do when we listen to a person speaking, especially an artistically speaking person, that these are actually invisible movement patterns.

The one who is able to see such things, who is able to look at what does not reveal itself externally, but only to a spiritual faculty of perception, knows that there are movement patterns in the human larynx and its neighboring organs. We do not see them in ordinary life – we listen as these movement patterns produce the words and word combinations, the sounds and sound combinations. But it is possible to really see the movement systems of the larynx. You just need to remember the physical fact that when I speak here, the air is set in motion.

Imagine this movement being grasped and looked at, and you have a visible language. We try to reveal this visible language through our eurythmy by making the whole human being the larynx, that is, by moving the limbs in space as the limbs of the larynx want to move. And when we speak in the spoken language, it goes into the audible.

We want to place the person on the stage so that they move their arms and hands in the same way that the larynx is designed to move, or how the air is moved when we speak. That is to say, we try to make the whole person move in such a way that the larynx is transformed, just as Goethe looks at the whole plant as a transformed leaf. That is the source of our eurythmic art. So that everything you will see here in the movements of the individual person is the same movements that remain invisible only when one speaks. But other movements still come into consideration.

That which lies in human language is ensouled: joy and suffering, delight and pain, sorrow and enthusiasm, warmth of soul, and everything else that the soul contains, resonates through and vibrates our language. Rhythm and meter, artistic form – that is what the poet immerses language in. Just as language is artistically shaped in song, just as the human capacity for suffering is artistically shaped in song, so the poet artistically shapes language in a different way. Everything that runs through our speech as pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, warmth and enthusiasm, everything that vibrates through our speech from the soul, everything that sounds through our speech artistically, is expressed in the movements that the human being now makes in space, either alone or in relation to each other, when groups perform dance-like movements here on stage. What the human being does in relation to these movements of people in groups or alone is the basic principle.

I am only saying this to give you an indication of the source from which this eurythmic art draws. For everything that is performed in movement should have an immediate aesthetic effect. And this only comes about when we truly reveal the inner workings of nature in this way, when we seek it out, and then, by revealing the formative regularity of the world, the artistic and beautiful is truly expressed.

All arbitrariness is avoided in this eurythmic art. While you otherwise see all kinds of similar arts today, which connect a momentary gesture with some kind of soul movement or the like, there is no question of such pantomime or mime or such momentary gestures here, but everything is inwardly lawful as in the metamorphosis idea itself. Just as in music it is the moving tone and in language the moving sound, so here it is the moving of the human soul itself, that human soul that constantly wants to move in this way, only becomes still when it hears the tone of music, the tonal shaping, or when it hears the artistically shaped language.

So that one can say: There is so little that is arbitrary here that when two people or two groups of people in different places perform one and the same piece of poetry or one and the same piece of music in eurythmy, there is no more individual difference than when two pianists play one and the same Beethoven sonata in two different places, because the arbitrariness here is only individually limited. But there is an inner lawfulness in this visible language, which is eurythmy, just as in music, even in melody and harmony, there is an inner lawfulness that wants to be shaped, that wants to be grasped, that cannot be shaped arbitrarily in the moment.

If you therefore see something pantomime-like or mimetic in our performances today, it is only for the reason that today it may still be present - we are our own strictest critics - because our eurythmic art is only just beginning. Once it is fully developed, all that is arbitrary and mimic will be out, just as everything that is musically picturesque, all tone painting and the like, must and will be out as something dilettantish.

Now you will see, on the one hand, my dear audience, what is presented in the visible language of eurythmy, which you will simultaneously hear as pieces of music or also simultaneously hear as the recited poem. But it must also be considered that the art of recitation itself, which is supposed to accompany our eurythmic performances, that this art of recitation and declamation must go back to earlier good forms of recitation and declamation. It can be said, even if many people do not like it: the actual art of recitation is in decline today. The person reciting today actually only tries to bring out the prose element in many ways. He tries to express what lies in the content of the words through emphasis or warmth or the like.

One need only recall the better days of the art of poetry to feel that recitation must nevertheless take a different path, that today, to a certain extent, it has gone astray. I would like to remind you that Schiller, in most of his poetry, especially in those that speak most warmly to our souls, did not initially have the meaning of the words in his soul; the meaning of the words was not there at all at first. He had something melodious, something musical, and only to the music that lived in his soul did he find the meaning of the words to go with it. And then I would like to mention something else: when Goethe rehearsed his “Iphigenia” - even a dramatic poem - with his actors in Weimar, he rehearsed it with a baton like a conductor, just as one rehearses a piece of music.

So it was important to these true artists to seek the poetic, the recitative, not in the content, but in the form, in the rhythm, in the beat. This must also be the basis of recitation. Anyone who knows how the art of recitation was in primitive ages and still is among primitive people, at least quite recently, knows how justified this is. In such primitive ages, when this or that was recited in a simple way before villagers, one would like to say that , in a primitive eurhythmy, with a primitive movement of his entire human organism, the reciter walked up and down and expressed what lies in the form of language, on the one hand through the sound itself, on the other hand through the movement with which he accompanied it.

We shall only return to such things when we take a deeper look at the actual essence of culture, of intellectual culture and its connection to material culture. How many people today still know that in more primitive times, work was accompanied by rhythm; everything that was done, the work, was accompanied by rhythm. Everything that was done was accompanied by rhythm. In the culture of the past, work and rhythm belonged together.

We will try to do this first by bringing the present into relation with consciousness, by presenting poetry and recitation to accompany eurythmy, because we cannot do it any other way. We could not present our visible language of eurythmy and have it accompanied by poetry and recitation if we did not shape it in such a way that we do not arrive at the literal literal content of the prose, which is mostly popular today in the art of recitation, which has gone astray, but which is only the starting point for the actual artistic element. Instead, the main emphasis is on meter, rhythm, that is, on the truly artistic, on that which the poet lends to his language as a melodious element. The content is only the opportunity to express this actual artistic element.

So you will see – as I said, on the one hand, but central to our presentation – the art of eurythmic movement on the one hand accompanied by music, on the other hand the accompanying recitation and declamation. All three should only be the expression of one and the same. For this very reason, it is hoped that a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk can be achieved with this eurythmic art, because the human being is a kind of extract, a kind of essence of the whole universe in its conformity to law.

If we do not look at the laws of the world with our minds, but look at them with our capacity for contemplation, then we grasp the world artistically. But the human being is a real microcosm, a small world in itself. That which lives in him as a basis for movement, that which metamorphoses into art, must also have a truly artistic effect in the highest sense on any unbiased person. Therefore one can say: this eurythmy fulfills Goethe's artistic spirit. Goethe once put it so beautifully when he said: “For man, having been placed at the summit of nature, sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit within itself. To do this, he rises by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, harmony, order and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.”

And when man not only proceeds to produce another work of art, but elevates himself and makes himself a work of art, then the deepest secrets of the world must come to revelation in direct contemplation. And that must, in a sense, summarize what the most diverse arts in their various fields seek.

However, what we are able to offer you will have to be judged with leniency, my dear attendees, for we are only at the beginning of everything I have outlined here; perhaps it is only the attempt at a beginning. We are our own harshest critics and we know that what we have already developed must be taken further and further. But if our contemporaries have an understanding for new phenomena – but for real, not merely apparent new phenomena – if our contemporaries have an understanding for new phenomena, as this eurythmy is supposed to be, then we hope that – perhaps no longer through ourselves, but through others who will take our place – this eurythmic art will be developed to ever greater and greater perfection.

Much as we realize that today we can only give what we actually want to give inadequately, by leaning on Goethe's artistic attitude, which does not separate cognition and artistic perception completely, but sees something of real cognition in the artistic - the apprehension of things in visible and tangible forms - as we know that we can only give something very elementary in comparison to this progress today, but we do believe – and it is our deepest conviction – that something will develop from what has been started in our time with this eurythmic art, which will be able to stand alongside other fully justified arts as a fully justified newer art. In this sense, I ask you today to accept this attempt at a eurythmic presentation of something that is to be developed more and more fully.

Dear attendees!

The art of eurythmy, of which we are once again presenting a small sample to you today, is something that we ask you to receive in such a way that what we are able to offer is a beginning, an attempt that must lead in the future to what we actually envision as an ideal for the renewal of a certain field of art.

It is not based on the opinion that we want to present something equal to other, similar art forms, which are actually only seemingly similar art forms – dance arts and the like. What we call the eurythmic art here has been fully thought out, or perhaps I should say felt and sensed out of the Goethean world view. Indeed, when one speaks of the Goethean worldview in such a context, one must not think in a scholastic way of the Goethe who died in Weimar in 1832, but of that which lived and lives on as a spirit in Goethe and can be taken up anew by each generation.

It is an artistically defined area, an artistic area that is to be developed out of Goethe's world view as a eurythmic art. I do not wish to theorize, but I would like to say a few words about the sources of this eurythmic art.

Particularly when such an art form first appears in cultural development, it is important to realize that - especially in the Goethean sense, it is intended that way - what we enjoy artistically, aesthetically, is actually there in terms of the mysterious depths of things, that we also try to reveal this through our knowledge. Goethe had the peculiarity that for him art and science were not strictly separate fields. It is a very characteristic expression of Goethe's when he says: one should not actually speak of the idea of truth, of the idea of beauty, of the idea of goodness; for Goethe thought that the idea is one and everything, and it reveals itself sometimes as the goodness of man, sometimes as beauty, sometimes as truth. In saying this, Goethe had in mind something much more alive and spiritual than the abstract idea that many people today have in mind. He had in mind the idea of what is alive and animates nature itself, and what man in turn finds in himself if he only descends deep enough into the depths of his own being.

But we must enter into that which is most significant and characteristic of Goethe's world view if we want to see through what is actually meant here with eurythmy. The essence of Goethe's great view of nature, which is also an artistic view because it reveals itself artistically, is something that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated. Our science is basically a science of the dead, and we strive more and more, if we want to be true natural scientists, to understand the living as a dead thing, to think of the living as composed of the dead. Goethe wanted to look at the living directly. He called this looking at the living directly his metamorphosis doctrine.

Once this doctrine of metamorphosis has been extended to cover the entire field of the human world view, something powerful will emerge from this expansion of our view of nature, from the transformation of all human views of nature and the world. It may look primitive and theoretical to explain the simple basic principle of Goethe's world view, which he advocates in his doctrine of metamorphosis. But when it is fully developed, it is something great and powerful that leads us deep into the essence of things and also of man.

Goethe imagines that in every single plant organ, namely in every single plant leaf, be it a green leaf or a colored petal, a whole plant should be contained in a simple way. In turn, Goethe imagined that the whole plant, however complicated it grows, is just a transformed leaf. Each individual plant leaf can become a whole plant, and the whole plant, each individual organ, can in turn become a plant. And this is how Goethe imagined all living things, especially the living human organism.

But Goethe's observations were limited to the form. This was due to the time in which he lived. By translating Goethe's observations into artistic expression through our eurythmy, we do not want to stop at the forms, but move on to human activity. And here it becomes possible, with a certain intuitive higher perception, with a real seeing, to bring to mind in a different way what one hears from one's fellow human beings through the sense of hearing as one's fellow human being speaks or sings. In particular, by shaping language in a song-like way, that is, in a musical or poetic way.

In our daily lives, we direct our attention to what we can hear, to the activity of a single organ, the larynx and its neighboring organs. But he who, with a higher, supersensible gaze, looks through what happens in man as it reveals itself through a single organ, the larynx and its neighboring organs, can also , just as Goethe saw the individual leaf in the whole plant, so the one who has the gift of seeing can see the fine movements that are only potential in the larynx and its neighboring organs as movements of the whole human organism. And so what is presented to you here on the stage is, in essence, what language is, language made visible. What otherwise takes place invisibly in the human larynx is revealed here from the human organism as a whole, from all its limbs.

In this way we can create an art that can go hand in hand with the musical art. What is happening on stage will be accompanied by the person himself, who is like a large, living larynx, accompanied by music on the one hand, and on the other hand by the recitation.

However, it then becomes necessary, especially when what the whole person presents as a visible language is accompanied by recitation and by artful poetic language, to return to the good old forms of the art of recitation. The art of recitation today has basically gone astray. As much as people today dislike hearing it, it still has to be said. The art of recitation today has become more prosaic. What lies in the content of a poem is expressed through the art of recitation. This was not the case with the art of recitation in earlier times. The further back we go, the more the poetic artist was aware that rhythm, beat, the form of speech, the formal aspects, are the main thing.

I need only remind you that when Schiller set about a poem, he did not first feel the content of the words of the poem in himself, but something like a melody, an indefinite melody, something musical. This, which lies in the language, apart from the thought, the content of the image or the word, is actually the most important and significant thing artistically. This is what must also be particularly expressed in the art of recitation. Goethe, when he rehearsed his “Iphigenic”, even a drama with his actors, rehearsed it with the baton in his hand, seeing everywhere less what the word content is. This is basically only the prosaic ladder by which the actual poetic art climbs up. He looked at the poetic power of creation, at the formal.

In our art of recitation, which accompanies the eurythmic, you will see that essentially there is an inner rhythm in inner harmony of movement. What is really recitation art must also be expressed in recitation. Now, if you take the word as it is artistically designed, or even as a word, it is expressed in our visible language, which represents eurythmy, through what a person can initially reveal in his limbs as possible movements. But what we express, especially when we shape it musically or poetically, is imbued with inner warmth of soul, with joy and sorrow, with delight and pain. All this can also be presented in eurythmy.

In the movements that are less attached to the individual limbs of the human being, but which the whole person performs or which he performs in space or in the circumstances in which he enters when we give group performances, in addition to the other performances of the groups, in these movements, in the more spatial movements, and in the temporal, that which shakes and vibrates through our speech, our audible speech, as soul warmth, as desire and suffering, as joy and pain, as enthusiasm and so on, is then expressed. But there is nothing arbitrary about it. And this is precisely how our eurythmy differs from certain neighboring arts, which could easily be confused with it: everything is always lawful. Not a momentary gesture is taken to express anything in the soul. Just as music itself consists of a lawful succession of notes in its melodies, so eurythmy consists of a succession of movements. If two people or groups of people perform the same thing in eurythmy, it is just as if two pianists perform the same Beethoven sonata. Individual expression plays no greater a role in eurythmy than it does, for example, when playing a single note or a piece of music.

If you still see in our beginnings, in our first attempts, pantomime and mime, then this is still an imperfection that will also be overcome in the future. For it is precisely the pantomime, the facial expression, the gesture of the moment, that which otherwise inspires the art of dance, that is just as little included in our art as musical sound painting is included in real music. For us, it is not about somehow expressing moments through a gesture, through facial expressions, but rather about revealing these outwardly in accordance with an inner law that is inherent in the human organism, and thus, in reality, to fulfill in a particular limited area that which Goethe so beautifully expressed when he said: “To whom nature reveals her secret, longs for her most worthy interpreter, art.” For, since the human being is the synthesis of the laws of the harmonies of the whole universe, it is possible to artistically represent, in fact, something - one can say: of the laws of the whole universe - that is inherent in the human organism. While our knowledge presents the concept before that which is the secret of the world, art should express the secrets of the world directly.

If I give an explanation of what is presented in eurythmy, it is only to point to the source; because it is self-evident that everything artistic must be felt directly in aesthetic contemplation and must reveal itself as sympathetic to the soul.

But with Goethe, in particular, you see, esteemed attendees, one has the feeling that the art of eurythmy can pass the test. We have tried to present certain scenes from the second part of Goethe's “Faust” in eurythmy, namely the earlier performances here. You may know how difficult the second part of Faust is to present on stage. Yes, you may also know how many people say that the second part of Goethe's Faust is a late effort that no longer contains the power that Goethe expressed in his art in the first part.

Those who speak thus are very much mistaken. In the second part of his Faust, Goethe did indeed reveal as art that which, after a mature life experience, had opened up to him as the sources of art. But when you represent in eurythmy that which enters completely into the forms, which no longer has anything to do with the content of prose but has become pure art, you arrive at the subtleties. But starting from that, we then came to the point of, I would say, going through the Goethean poems to see to what extent that which lived artistically in Goethe's soul can be expressed through the special art of eurythmy, that is, through a visible language. And more and more it turns out that in the moment when Goethe's artistic thinking passes over into the supersensible, into that which does not live in ordinary outer life, that then the eurythmic art enters into its full right.

Of course, it is a daring statement to say today that Goethe's artistic thinking was such that, where he rises above the sphere of the everyday, one feels the necessity to move on to something that also goes beyond ordinary artistic representation and into eurythmic representation. But perhaps one can say something like this when one has gradually, over a long period of time, worked one's way up to that Goethean insight, which I believe is necessary, and which also takes Goethe seriously. When a lot of people, out of philistinism – Vischer and other people were, after all, also German aesthetes in a certain sense – when certain people feel they have to reject what Goethe created later – it's so hard to to grasp what one does not immediately understand, to struggle to understand, one much prefers to blame the poet for presenting it in such an incomprehensible way.

Goethe once made a harsh statement about people who also appeared during his lifetime, who, for example, appreciated his “Iphigenia” and his “Natural Daughter” less than, say, we might say, those parts in the first part of Faust, which ultimately welled up from his soul in an elemental way and are less artistic than what Goethe first achieved as an art form in the course of a long life. Goethe was angry with those who valued what he produced in his youth – including the parts of Faust, for example – more highly than what he later produced after he had developed a more mature view of art. It was this kind of anger that led to Goethe's remark, found in his estate, where he says in reference to the audience that no longer understood him:

They praise my Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much,
[It means] the pack of ragamuffins
One would no longer be.

I am convinced, my dear attendees, that Goethe would express himself in a similar way about the understanding of Goethe, the presumed understanding of Goethe, that is spreading today.

But precisely when one encounters what Goethe has achieved, then one also feels the necessity to advance to new forms of art in order to express what Goethe presented in his early works.

Today, after the break, we are dealing with the beginning of the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, which is an early work. But we will try to do just those parts where what is otherwise ordinary life is led up into a higher sphere - where the human soul rises to a higher, supersensible one - [we will try to do that] just in the first part of “Faust” by means of eurythmy, so that one can get a sense of how the human being in his physical, sensual, earthly existence is connected to a higher existence.

In this way, we would like to use eurythmy to bring to revelation everything in the human being that lies deeply hidden as the actual secret of the world. But you will only do justice to this eurythmic art if you see it, as we are already able to offer it today, only as a beginning, as a weak attempt at what is to come. We are our own harshest critics and we know what is still lacking. But we believe that if our contemporaries show interest and attention to what is being attempted, it will be possible to bring this beginning to ever greater and greater perfection.

In short, we are convinced that the art form that we are in the process of creating in eurythmy will perhaps be developed further by ourselves, albeit weakly, but by others it will be developed more and more and that it will then be recognized as a fully-fledged art form alongside other fully-fledged art forms.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

The art of eurythmy, a sample of which we would like to present to you this evening, is something that is still in its infancy. Therefore, I ask you to be indulgent in your reception of today's attempt. It is a matter of developing an art movement that seeks to make use of the means of movement of the human organism itself. And it is about continuing this art movement in such a way that it is in line with a worldview and artistic attitude that can be traced back to Goethe's worldview and artistic attitude. It is not meant to be said that something similar to what Goethe himself gave to the world up to the year 1832, but it is about thinking of Goetheanism in a much broader sense. It is a matter of understanding that Goetheanism is the revelation of a certain artistic and ideological direction that has, so to speak, an eternal value. So that one can speak of a conception of Goethe that nevertheless goes back to Goethe's own individuality, but which is definitely from 1919.

If I would like to address a few words to you for the very reason that we are dealing with a first attempt, it is truly not to give a theoretical explanation, to interpret this attempt in terms of art history, but to point to the actual source of this eurythmic art. For it is self-evident that everything artistic must immediately prove itself to the senses. Art that had to prove its right to exist through theoretical explanation would not be art at all.

But that is not the point. The point is that, in the Goethean sense, art has been brought forth today from the deep secrets of the existence of nature and the world itself, and that Goethe considers art and knowledge to be closely related. In one of his most significant sayings about art, he says so beautifully that style is based on a kind of recognition, on becoming aware of the deeper secrets of life and things, insofar as we are able to grasp them in visible, tangible forms, and that Nature begins to reveal its apparent secret, he feels the deepest longing for its interpreter in art, he points out that one should penetrate into the secrets of the world through art, which is also the point of knowledge. But knowledge seeks to give here that which rests below in things, up to the concept, up to the idea. Wherever something is worked up to the point of being conceptualized, conceptualized, there is nothing that we could call art.

Now, in the spirit of Goethe's worldview, we want to bring out what can be sensed as the essence of the human being; we want to work out the inner possibilities of movement of the human organism and bring them to direct perception. I may illustrate the principle whereby this comes about by pointing out the significance of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, that part of Goethe's world view that will certainly continue to play a major role in the spiritual development of humanity. For Goethe, the whole plant in its complexity is only a transformation of a simple plant leaf, and in turn, for Goethe, a plant leaf is an entire plant, only more simply formed. And every single organ of an organism is a transformation of some other organ that looks quite different to the senses. You just have to look at things very clearly to recognize the metamorphic character of organisms.

What Goethe applied to the form of living things should be applied to human movement and transformed into a true artistic vision.

When we listen to a person speaking, we do not pay attention to what is happening at the same time as the person is speaking: the movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs. But these movements of the larynx can only be seen with supersensible vision. Through the movement of the speech organs, the audible word enters the air and is represented by them.

These possibilities of movement of the larynx can be transferred to the whole human being by going back to what is inherent in his limbs, by bringing to sensory perception what the larynx invisibly performs. In this way, a visible language comes into being that is brought to view through the whole human being. When the whole human being becomes a larynx through the same thing that lives as rhythm, rhyme, warmth of soul, and tact in poetic language, then a real art comes into being that becomes a vessel for expressing what is mysteriously hidden in the whole human being. That is what we want. What is otherwise suppressed in the human being – must be suppressed because, when speaking, more of the imaginative enters into our word connections – that which is actually suppressed by the will, should be made manifest through the eurythmic art.

So one can also say that this eurythmic art cannot be compared with any neighboring arts. It does not want to compete with other neighboring arts either. It is not a matter of an arbitrary, momentary attunement of a gesture or the like with the content of the soul, but of a very definite lawfulness that lives in the successive movements just as a lawfulness lives in the successive tones of music. The eurythmic art is modeled on this musical art, only it moves in a different realm. The lawfulness of this art is parallel to that of music. If, for example, two different groups in different places were to present a particular piece of eurythmic art today, there would be as little difference in the presentation as there is between a piece of music played by two artists.

Eurythmic art should be a language or music that has become visible through the whole human being. The development of this art is not yet so far advanced that we can present eurythmic art in its own right to a larger audience. We still use recitation to present eurythmy art, but we are trying to go further than modern recitation art does today. Recitation art has reached a certain decadence today. Today, the recitation particularly emphasizes what is not actually artistic in the poetic language, and recites poetry like prose, while the actual musicality of the artistic language is suppressed. It would not be possible to present eurythmic art in parallel with this modern way of reciting. We must go back to that art of recitation which did not primarily consider the content of the words in the artistic language, but which above all tried to express the musicality of the poetic language. The justification for such an art of recitation could easily be demonstrated from the development of the arts themselves. One need only consider the way in which the work of great poets of the relatively recent past was presented, for example Goethe, who, with the baton in his hand, not only rehearsed the most beautiful of his lyrical poems but also rehearsed his Iphigenia with the baton.

In this way eurythmy will also become a signpost for other arts, pointing the way to and leading back to the essential nature of the arts.

If you should see some mimicry even today, consider it an imperfection. This imperfection will gradually disappear. We ourselves are the strictest critics in this. As I said, today's performance is only an experiment. From this point of view, I would like to ask you to watch the performance. We are also convinced that this experiment is only a beginning, but that, if our experiment meets with some interest, it should be continued by us or others. And we are also convinced that eurythmy, once it has reached a certain level of perfection, will be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged contemporary arts.

After a short break, we will attempt to perform a small scene from Goethe's “Faust”, part two, with the help of the eurythmic art. This attempt to perform such scenes from the second part of “Faust” with the help of the eurythmic art is, so to speak, an experiment for this art. For anyone who has seen the whole range of attempts to bring the second part of Goethe's “Faust” to the stage knows how extraordinarily difficult it is to really present this most mature expression of Goethe's art and world view in such a way that, through the artistic means of representation, everything that is in the poetry according to Goethe's own expression comes out in reality. If, for example, one takes Wilbrandt's extraordinarily charming production or refers to Devrient's performance, it becomes clear how extraordinarily difficult it is to do justice to this great work of poetry in an artistic performance. This has led to a failure to recognize what lies in Goethe's development, and it has led – and even people as sensitive as the Swabian poet [Friedrich] Theodor Vischer went so far as to say – to finding Goethe's youthful art, that is, the first part of Faust, but could not follow him to what Goethe himself had secretly included as his most mature work in the second part of Faust. And as people are: what they cannot find, they attribute not to a deficiency in themselves, but to a deficiency in the work of art or in the artist. Goethe himself had to recognize something similar during his lifetime, when he had to see how people went along with their understanding until the time when Goethe experienced a rebirth of his poetic being through his Italian journey. And he felt a certain annoyance at the fact that his youthful works were preferred at the expense of his more mature works.

So, in order to do justice to Goethe's mature art, we have tried to present those scenes, or parts of scenes in the second part of 'Faust', in which Goethe rises to represent that which cannot be represented by ordinary everyday means, which does not live in the ordinary world of the senses but plays into life, through the art of eurythmy. Where such magnificent tragedy is expressed, it shows that one can achieve many things that would otherwise be impossible. And perhaps it also makes clear how the means of eurythmic art can be used where the means of expression popular today fail.

The program was the same as for the performance in Zurich on October 31, 1919, see p. 194. However, in keeping with the character of the day (All Souls' Day), without Christian Morgenstern's “Galgenlieder”.

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

Today we would also like to present a sample of our eurythmy art. This eurythmy art should be kept entirely in line with everything that is connected with this building of ours, with all that we call Goetheanism in connection with this Goetheanum of ours, in terms of world view and artistic endeavors. In this connection, I would ask you to bear in mind that we are dealing here with the very beginnings of this eurythmy art movement, with a first attempt that for the time being must be treated with forbearance. What we are striving for is not meant to compete with neighboring arts, dance-like arts and the like. We know very well that these are much more complete in their way than what can be achieved here. But it is something completely different. And I would not like to give these few words as some theoretical introduction, but rather to point out the sources from which this particular art form is drawn, which uses the human limbs themselves and the human possibilities of movement in space as artistic means.

So it is a kind of movement art that we are striving for in this eurythmy. And we will most easily understand how what we are striving for here has been brought forth out of Goethean sentiment and Goethean world view if I remind you of what is known as Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe achieved something with it that is still far, far from being appreciated enough. In the future, it will become a basis for an understanding of the living. Because the view that we have precisely through our so-glorious science – I mean this quite seriously, because for these areas to which it is applicable, this science is glorious – what we have through contemporary science, that basically only relates to the dead mineral, not to the living. Goethe tried to grasp the living. And as simple as it still looks today, it will one day lead deep into life: what Goethe saw, that the whole plant in all its complexity, even if it is a whole tree, is only a complicated, transformed individual leaf, and the individual leaf is in turn only a primitive whole plant. And again, if we look at an organ of the plant, for example, the colored petal of a flower, and compare it to the green leaf of a plant, for Goethe it was essentially the same, one and the same, only different in its outer form.

What Goethe applied to form and shape in this way could now be applied to the whole human being and his or her potential for movement if it is imbued with artistic sense at the same time. And that is precisely what the eurythmic art attempts to do. When we listen to a person, we direct our attention through the ear to what is spoken or sung. But then we do not perceive what is also present: the movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs. All of this vibrates - larynx, palate, tongue, lip and so on - by itself. And in turn, the ability to move, which is expressed in the larynx, extends to the lungs and their wings and so on. And we only need to remember from the physical that, while I am speaking here, the air is in motion. And each sequence of movements expresses something of the sound and so on.

What is expressed in the larynx in a single organ and its neighboring organs, what cannot be seen, can be perceived by those who have supersensible vision. And then one can express the way in which a word or that which is expressed in the word is connected: just as it is audibly expressed through the larynx, through which one hears the sound and does not see the movement, so one can express it through the movement of the human limbs, the hands, the feet, the whole body. Then what the whole person does becomes a visible language, then the whole person becomes a part of the artistic expression, the artistic revelation. A person would be very surprised if they were to see, especially when speaking poetically or artistically, the wonderful movements – which are largely just movement efforts – in the larynx and neighboring organs for rhyme, for rhythm, and so on. This can be seen and transferred to the arms, to the feet of the person, to the head, and so on. And one can create something that fully corresponds to Goethe's artistic ethos, which Goethe once expressed with the beautiful words: 'Style is based on a kind of recognition, on a becoming visible of the essence of things, insofar as we are able to approach it in tangible and visible forms.

And especially that which is the mystery of human nature itself comes out when we want to reveal these secrets of human nature in eurythmy. In another context, Goethe has so beautifully drawn attention to the human being's relationship to artistic apprehension of the world. For him it was always clear that whoever nature - as he once said - reveals its manifest secret to, feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. Wherever we sense the secrets of nature, without going to concepts, ideas or the abstract, but in direct devotion to what lies in the lawfulness of natural things, we perceive art, art form, artistic design. We will be able to perceive this most when the human being becomes a means of art. For here too, Goethe says so beautifully: When the human being is placed at the summit of nature, he finds himself again as a whole nature, taking number, measure, harmony and meaning together, in order to rise to the production of the work of art by bringing forth a new summit. How much more must this be said when man himself becomes the means of art and expresses the secrets that lie in his own organism through the movements of his limbs, whereby a living language is brought to view.

However, that which is artistic must be perceived in direct aesthetic contemplation. It does not need to be explained. But it is precisely by taking a deeper sense of the lawfulness in things, which is not grasped conceptually but is directly contemplated, that one arrives at the artistic.

And this is to be done with that which lies within the human being, by bringing its limbs into a visible language, everything that otherwise expresses itself only through the laws of the larynx and its neighboring organs. Whether it is the individual moving their limbs, forming groups of people or the individual moving in space, relationships between people in groups are presented – everything that is otherwise expressed through speech in terms of warmth of soul, joy and sorrow, happiness and pain and enthusiasm, but also in terms of rhythm, rhyme, meter and so on, is incorporated into the language that has become visible. All of this is expressed through the movement of the person in space or is expressed through the movement of groups, while the word itself is expressed through the movement of the individual person, who, as it were, remains calm.

Now it is important to realize that this offers a new art form. There is nothing directly arbitrary between the gesture of the limbs and what the soul experiences or wants to express. Rather, just as music itself consists of the lawful succession of tones, of melody and so on, so the successive movements that you see here on stage are based on a very definite lawfulness. And if two people were to perform the same thing in eurythmy, there would be no arbitrariness in the movement, but these two representations at different places, by two people at completely different places, could only be as a Beethoven sonata is performed by two different people at the piano, each with their own individual interpretation, but in principle, of course, they must not differ.

All pantomime, all mimicry, all mere momentary gestures are avoided here. If any of this still seems to be the case, it is because we are still at the beginning of our work. All that is still pantomime and the like will be left out altogether later on, and the pure, natural laws of the human being speaking through its limbs and their possibilities of movement will emerge in the eurythmic art.

Today, the eurythmic is still accompanied on the one hand by the musical, because that is just another expression. So you will see on the stage the visible language of the human limbs, and at the same time hear how it is presented musically. On the other hand, you will see how it is presented by way of recitation, although it will become clear that we must return to the older art form of declamation and recitation. Today, people have more or less lost the actual artistic aspect of language. One could say that speaking artistically is in a state of decline, of decadence. Not only do many people think that speaking artistically is not art at all, that anyone can do it, but also the professional reciters, the professional actors themselves, they only emphasize in their present art of recitation the prose content, the literal meaning or that which is the content of the prose, not that which is the real art, what the poet actually has in mind – the rhythm of the language, the beat, the inner structure of the language. Schiller, I need only mention this, always had a melody, or at least a melodious tone, inside him before he had his poem literally written down. Only then did he find the words for it, because what mattered to him was the rhythm, the beat, the inner shaping of the language. And Goethe stood with his “Iphigenia”, although it is a drama, he stood with the baton and studied the iambs.

This is what leads back to the healthy old art of artistic recitation or declamation, where the shaping of language is in the foreground, not the prose content of the language, which underlies today's art of declamation. One could not accompany eurythmy, which has the task of revealing and expressing the inner art of movement, with today's art of declamation, but rather one must allow eurythmy to be accompanied by the right and good art of declamation, which looks less at the content than at the rhythm, at that which underlies the shaping of language.

All in all, I would ask you to view this presentation with some leniency, for we are just beginning in all areas, and I would ask you to consider what we are able to present today as an experiment that will certainly be continued, either by ourselves or by others, if our contemporaries give the necessary attention and interest to such an endeavor. The flourishing of the artistic depends on this, on the interest of our contemporaries. But if the interest of our contemporaries is present, if one will understand how a total work of art is striven for here through the evocation of that which lies hidden in the human being himself, who feels this will be able to be convinced that once the weak beginning that now exists is perfected by us or others, this eurythmic art will be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside other art forms.

[After the break:]

We will now present a scene from the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. The second part of “Faust” was only written in Goethe's old age and arose from the pinnacle of his artistic development. The manuscript was only discovered after his death and only then given to the world after Goethe's death, the manuscript of the second part of “Faust”. But Goethe would undoubtedly have been extremely annoyed, artistically speaking, if he had still been able to judge it, just as he was annoyed by the way in which some of his works from his youth, which he published in his youth without artistic maturity, were treated. There is a beautiful quatrain, which – I already mentioned it here the other day – Goethe left behind and in which he expressed how his early works, his “Iphigenia”, his “Tasso”, his “Natural Daughter” had been received, how people seem to reject what Goethe created from a state of maturity because they did not understand it. The words arose out of a certain annoyed mood.

But they praise my Faust
and what else

— he means the first part of his “Faust”

In my works roars
In their favor

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much,
And then the riffraff believes
They would no longer be.

Goethe would undoubtedly have judged the same way if he had thought of it about some of the things that otherwise quite clever people, for example the Swabian Vischer, whom I otherwise esteem very much, this V-Vischer, who, as I said, is a great esthete, he has written a tremendous work about aesthetics – nothing can be said to his disadvantage in his own field. But he understood nothing of the mature art of Goethe. He praised the first part at the expense of the second part, so he was one of those of whom Goethe said: “The old Mick and Mack, / That pleases them very much.” The great esthete also praised that very much, and that is why he also belonged to the “bunch of ragamuffins” of whom Goethe says: And there the bunch of ragamuffins believes that they are no longer! Vischer then wrote a third part of Faust himself – it is also after him! And the Faust that Goethe left behind, he called a cobbled-together, glued-together concoction of old age.

But, my dear attendees, there are artistic possibilities in there that lead from the ordinary, lowly existence of man into the supernatural, not by some kind of artistic use of an unhealthy mysticism or obscurantism, but by the fact that what man really experiences in his inner being when he goes beyond what is represented in everyday life.

And so we see how a scene like this one at “midnight”, where “Faust” also faces the four enemies of human life at the end of his life, namely worry, lack, guilt and need, and how everything that happens in “Faust” reflects this whole relationship to the supersensible world, how Goethe tries to express it in language. But if you take everything that has been tried so far to present the second part of 'Faust' on stage, you are always left unsatisfied. I myself have seen a lot, everything, for example, that came from the second part, especially in the 80s of the last century at the Vienna Burgtheater with the lovely Wilbrandt adaptation and direction, to the performances that then took music as an aid, for example, the Devrient's mystery play of “Faust”, part two, there was always something unsatisfactory about it, because Goethe had just discovered the deepest secrets of life in his mature years, and because he had incorporated these deepest secrets of life into the second part of “Faust”. Nevertheless, for those who understand it, this second part of Goethe's 'Faust' is a thoroughly artistic work. It contains not some kind of symbolic or abstract allegory, but life, but the life of the spirit. And I am convinced that this cannot be brought out by ordinary theatrical means; it can only be brought out by eurythmy. And such figures, which otherwise only look like allegorical or symbolic ones - want, guilt, sorrow, need - only come to full revelation through eurythmy when they mean what they are for human life.

Please also consider this presentation as a first attempt. But I do believe that if one turns to eurythmy as an aid – of course only where the everyday rises into the supersensible – you will see how we set this eurythmy in the dramatic art, where it is undoubtedly suitable when it is necessary to go beyond the ordinary human and enter the universal and the spiritual.

First public performance in Bern at the Kursaal Schänzli. The program was the same as that of the performance in Zurich on October 31, 1919, see p.194.

Dear attendees, Among the endeavors in the field of spiritual science, as outwardly represented by the Goetheanum, which is being built as a Free University for Spiritual Science in Dornach near Basel, there are also scientific and artistic endeavors in a wide variety of fields. Among the artistic endeavors, I would say that the endeavor that I call eurythmic art endeavor occupies a very specific place. This eurythmic art endeavor can very easily be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts, but actually should not be confused with them. We know very well that everything that appears today as spatial movement arts, dance arts or the like is sometimes so highly developed that what we are able to offer here would not want to compete with it. But here we are dealing with something quite different: it is a completely new artistic endeavour. And because we do not really have more to offer at present than a beginning, which certainly wants to be perfected but is still just a beginning, I would like to say a few words about the test that we want to offer you today – for the first time in this city – of our eurythmic art. Everything that we present as the eurythmic art has been thought out and worked out from the Goethean worldview and the Goethean spirit of art. It is self-evident that every art must work for immediate perception and aesthetic impression through itself, and that every interpretation, every explanation, every theoretical discussion is superfluous when it comes to art. This also applies to the art of eurythmy, of course. But because it is an art that is in its infancy, it will be necessary to say something about the sources from which this new art movement draws.

And here I may – not in order to present a theoretical discussion, but to make understandable the form of expression in which eurythmy appears – I may recall a few simple facts from Goethe's world view, namely from Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, from that theory of metamorphosis , which, despite being quite old, is still not fully appreciated, as it will be when we try to replace the science of the dead, the inanimate, which is all we really have, with a science of the living.

What is presented as the basic principle of Goethe's metamorphosis theory looks very simple and primitive today. Goethe thought that the whole plant - even if it were a complicated tree - is nothing more than an upturned single leaf, in all its complexity. And in turn, the leaf in its simplicity is an upturned whole plant. If one sees spiritually, as Goethe put it, or in terms of ideas, if one sees sensually and supernaturally, as he also said, then one sees in a single leaf a whole plant, in the whole plant only one more intricately endowed leaf - and in turn in every organ of any living being only the transformation of every other organ.

What Goethe thought about the form of living things can also be thought about the activity of living things. And if we apply this to the activity of the most highly developed living being, the human being, and to that which is a particular expression of human perfection – language and the speech organs – then we arrive at what we call the eurythmic arts.

When we listen to a person speaking, we first turn our attention from the sense of hearing to the audible. But while a person is speaking, the larynx and its neighboring organs are in mysterious motion. One could even depict it physically by saying: While I am speaking here, the air is in a perpetual motion, which is only an impression of the motion of the larynx and its neighboring organs. In our ordinary lives, we pay attention to what we hear, not to the movements that are only an imprint of the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs. In our ordinary lives, we pay attention to what we hear, not to the movements that are only an imprint of the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, but to what we hear. But if one has the gift of supersensible vision, of seeing the invisible movements that underlie the audible, then one can project the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, which do not come to external manifestation, onto the human being as a whole. And in a sense, each limb of the human being can be moved in such a way that the movement is an imprint of the movement patterns that the larynx and its neighboring organs undergo when any sounds come to be revealed in speech.

If one then penetrates that which one lets one's limbs perform in terms of movement, just as artistically as it is penetrated in poetic language or song, that which the larynx accomplishes - in terms of rhythm, meter and so on - then an artistic instrument of the very first order arises in the moving human being himself.

And so what you are seeing this evening, dear audience, I would say the whole human being as a larynx moving, visible language, performed the linguistic sounds in motion by the whole person. This brings out of the human being that which is contained in his or her deeper nature.

We do justice to an artistic view such as Goethe's by creating such a new form of art from within the human being itself. Goethe says so beautifully, in expressing his view of art: When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, that person feels the greatest yearning for her most worthy interpreter: art. And the human being is indeed an imprint of the whole universe; he has the deepest secrets within him. If you try to get them out of him through special artistic design, by making the whole human being the expression of the moving larynx, just as the whole plant is a perfect, a complicated expression of the individual leaf, then the secrets of the world are expressed that would otherwise remain hidden.

But this also brings art closer to the real penetration of the secrets of the world, as it is in Goethe's sense when he says: Art is based on mysterious natural laws, on the essence of things, insofar as it allows us to represent this essence of things in tangible or visible forms. So that what the individual person presents on the stage is language that has become visible.

But in language, especially in artistic language and in song, in the musical, everything that our soul experiences as warmth, everything that our soul experiences as joy and suffering, is also effective. What the poet brings into language by shaping it into rhyme and rhythm can all be expressed in the spatial-movement art of eurythmy. We find that people initially work together in groups, expressing warmth of soul, joy and love. But what moves in the individual person is only a translation of the individual parts of the larynx movements into movements of the whole person.

In this way an art comes into being that is imitative, I might say, but endowed with its own inner laws, the inner laws of music itself. Just as in music it is not tone painting that is the actual artistry, so in the eurythmic art it is never mimicry, pantomime, the mere facial expression that is artistic. If you see pantomime, mimicry or mime in the so-called 'humorous' part of the performance, it is only because of the imperfection of our eurythmic art. This will gradually disappear. It is not that we are seeking some momentary connection between a movement, a gesture, and what passes in the soul, but rather, all this is inwardly lawful. And in the moving gesture, as in the moving tones, lies the connection, the lawful connection of the musical, in the succession of tones.

What is presented on stage through eurythmy is accompanied, on the one hand, by music, which is just another form of expression for the same thing that is expressed through the art of eurythmy, and on the other hand, by recitation and declamation. But here attention must be drawn to the fact that the art of recitation will in turn have to return to its old, good channels if it is to accompany eurythmy, which reveals the same thing as poetry but in a different form. For it must be emphasized that the art of recitation is in many cases decadent in the present day. We need only remember that today the most perfect art of recitation is considered to be that which emphasizes the prosaic, the literal content of the poem, I would say the novellistic, not the truly artistic aspect.

But what is in the background as rhythm, as the musicality of language, is the main thing in art, not the literal content. I need only remind you that Goethe, for example, rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, which is a dramatic poem, with a baton. This shows that it is the lawful progression that is important, not the emphasis of the prose content. Schiller did not have the literal content of the best of his poems in his mind at first, but rather something melodious, a kind of melody. And it was only by developing this that he found the literal content. It is the shaping of the content of the language that matters. We must go back to this with today's recitation and the art of declamation. For with today's art of recitation and declamation, it will not be possible to accompany what is to be expressed in the art of eurythmy. - So we will try to present to you on the one hand on stage a certain musical or poetic side, which will, however, be accompanied by the art of recitation and declamation, as it could be described here.

With these words I wanted to characterize the underlying sources. What is presented must make an impact through the aesthetic impression itself. For only that which leads not in some easy way but into the secrets of the existence of the world, without this leading to ideas or external concepts, is art.

If one attempts to approach human beings and their deeper secrets with such art, one fulfills what Goethe meant when he said, “When man is placed on the summit of nature, he beholds himself as a whole nature, but one that is in itself the source of all phenomena.” To repeat what he said, because everything we do want to do is supposed to be Goetheanism. —, one attains precisely all that he means when he 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 do this, he improves himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally elevating himself to the production of a work of art. He will be all the more uplifted when producing the work of art if he makes his own organism, with its inner possibilities of movement, into an instrument. This is the one side, the actual artistic side, that is most important to us in our eurythmy.

But we are also concerned with the pedagogical side, and we are convinced that what we call the pedagogical side of eurythmy will gradually find its way into schools when people begin to see the value of such things. What is presented today as gymnastics is more or less something that is significant in the physiological realm for outer physicality, outer corporeality. What is presented here as the art of movement is the human being's lived and spiritualized movement, and it will be able to stand alongside pedagogical gymnastics in the same way as it will be able to stand alongside other fully-fledged art forms. I would ask you to be lenient in this regard.

We are the strictest judges of ourselves, but we know very well that this eurythmic art is developing. And we ourselves will continue to develop it - if not through us, then through others, when our contemporaries turn their attention to this eurythmic art out of a certain culturally progressive interest. However much it is still in its infancy today, we believe, dear attendees, that it is so capable of perfection that it will one day be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged arts. From this point of view, I ask you to take today's presentation with indulgence.

[After the break, for the second part of the public eurythmy performance]

Dear attendees!

We will now attempt to perform two short scenes from the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. In these representations of the second part of Goethe's “Faust” – we have already tried a whole series of these in other places – it has become clear to us how eurythmy can serve in the presentation of such dramatic creations as those in the second part of “Faust”. I believe that the esteemed audience will be aware of the major obstacles that arise when the second part of “Faust” is to be staged. Perhaps one recalls various attempts at staging this second part of “Faust” using a wide range of directorial skills. One need only think of the charming direction and staging by Wilbrandt or the mystery play staging by Devrient with Lassen's music and numerous other stagings, and one will always find that these performances do not bring out anything of what is in Goethe's “Faust”.

Nevertheless, one should still have the feeling that this poetry expresses precisely that which reveals itself as so powerful in the whole rich development of Goethe's life. - After all, one is dealing here with all phases of human artistry, from the age of youth to the highest maturity of old age. And anyone who is not prejudiced in any way will follow the development of this rich Goethean artistic life with great inner satisfaction.

Of course, even during his lifetime, Goethe had to experience some things that annoyed him, one might say. The first part of Faust, which is certainly easier to understand than the second part, in which Goethe, in his own words, has hidden much - much of what he has recognized and experienced through a rich life - the first part of Faust found a large audience even in Goethe's time. And Goethe himself thought that with his Iphigenia, his Tasso and later, as he believed, with his Natural Daughter, he had come far beyond the art form that he had carried out in the first part of Faust. Because in the second part, which was only published after Goethe's death, he certainly reached a very special level. But what annoyed him during his lifetime was that people kept saying: Yes, Goethe has grown old. In his “Tasso”, you no longer see the same bubbling youthful energy that is expressed in his youthful works – and so on. He became annoyed about it. And he would certainly have thought many a thing if he had been able to live to see that not only the common philistine, but, as they also say, higher daughters, higher philistines, were upset about the fact that the second part of “Faust” would only represent a decline in Goethe's art. For example, the Swabian Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, not only felt compelled to write a large number

of treatises on the failed second part of “Faust”, he even tried to write something better, to write a second part of “Faust”. He also became ill afterwards. He repeatedly emphasized that the second part of Goethe's “Faust” was a cobbled-together, glued-together work of old age.

As I said, Goethe took artistic revenge, and not only on the second part of “Faust” but also on many other works that were still incomplete. One can say that he took revenge quite severely. There is a beautiful quatrain in his estate. He wrote it down precisely with such things in mind. It reads:

They praise my Faust,
And what else

— he means the “Faust” of the first part, which was finished.

They praise my Faust,
and what else
In my writings roars
in their favor.

The old Mick and Mack,
that is very pleased;
The pack of ragamuffins thinks:
They would no longer be!

Goethe would undoubtedly have said the same if he had been able to experience what great aesthetes like V-Vischer have said about the second part of his “Faust”. There is a great deal in the second part of 'Faust' where Goethe rises to truly transcendental, spiritual experiences of the human soul. And precisely those scenes in which Goethe has so much of what only he could experience in his rich life, that was presented to us in such a way that it can be extracted from the poem with the help of the art of eurythmy.

And so this evening we would also like to give you a small sample – the scene around 'midnight' – where the four forces that gnaw at human life appear before 'Faust': want, need, worry, guilt, and where 'Faust' experiences everything that one can feel, live and learn in the face of these four forces, which here call themselves worry, need and so on. What Goethe has put into the poem through the way it is presented is revealed precisely through this moving language, through this silent language, expressive language, through the possibilities of movement of the whole human being; it comes out precisely through this.

So perhaps a performance of this kind, where eurythmy is used, can be seen as a kind of experiment. What is human and everyday is, of course, presented in the ordinary sense; but what rises into the supersensible world should be presented with the help of eurythmy. In this way, something like this can be considered an experiment, and we believe that by using eurythmy to help us present something that cannot be presented by any kind of stage direction, we are able to present something in a narrower field that could not otherwise have been brought out.

Automated Translation

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

We would like to take the liberty of presenting a sample of our eurythmic art to you today. This eurythmic art is in the early stages of its development and is in great need of further refinement. So we will have to present a kind of experiment to you. Therefore, you will allow me to say a few words in advance.

Of course, the aim of the eurythmic art is not to be understood through any kind of theoretical prediction. Every artistic activity should be grasped directly through the aesthetic impression itself. However, I do not wish to speak these few introductory words in order to provide theoretical discussions about what is to be imagined, but rather to explain to you how an attempt is being made here to create a new art form from certain sources. This new art form should not be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts that seemingly want something similar - such as dance art and the like - but it is an art form that is taken entirely from the Goethean worldview, from the inner possibilities of movement of the human individual himself. If I am to express in a few words what this eurythmic art actually is, I would have to say: it attempts to reveal itself through the whole human being in a toneless language, in the same way as a person would otherwise speak through the larynx and its neighboring organs. The possibility for this is derived from a psychology, from a soul science, which is based entirely on the principle of Goethe's world view. Let us just consider, my dear audience, what human speech actually is. We still do not give sufficient account of this today. And that is why such attempts as the eurythmic art - which reveals a different artistic language from the other art forms - will be more difficult to understand because we are not yet accustomed to understanding.

Human speech is such that human will works together with the whole human organism. However, this human will is, as it were, toned down by what pours in from the other side of the human organization, from the side of the thought organization. In ordinary human speech, human volition, which mobilizes forces that we can describe as muscular and other forces, and everything that otherwise works in thinking, but which is discharged through organic transmission to the larynx and its neighboring organs, really do flow together. That which is the thought form of speech, that which pours out of the thought side into speech, brings us together with our fellow human beings in life, and brings us together with the outside world in general. This is also the element in which the outside world is mirrored.

Now, in this eurythmic art, an attempt is made to bring about such a metamorphosis of language that the sounding of the thought is eliminated and only that is brought out of the possibilities of movement of the human organism, which pulsates from the will into language. In this way, this silent language, which expresses itself through the limbs of the whole human being, this eurythmy, is made an expression of the human being himself in a much more intense sense than ordinary language, into which, because it is also the means of communication for the human being, much that is conventional must flow.

Thus it comes about that we are able to bring to manifestation in eurythmy, through the possibilities of movement given in the human organism, precisely that which is subject to language from the soul of man.

When man speaks, I would like to say that he is always willing to make the same movements that come to manifestation in eurythmy. Particularly when listening to something spoken, the human being would like to make these movements. He suppresses them because the thought element dulls and paralyzes that which lives in the whole human being. In this way, the thought element is completely suppressed. Then it no longer paralyzes that which comes from the will element: the whole human being becomes an expression of the will, which is suppressed in ordinary language. But through this, my dear audience, the bridge is created over to the musical element, which is also a kind of language that expresses the depths of life, and on the other side, but also to poetry.

In poetry, the main thing is not the content of the words, but rather what is actually suppressed in ordinary life when speaking: In poetry, the main thing is rhythm, meter, everything that underlies the spoken word as its form. Hence you will see how, on the one hand, in certain pieces, the eurythmic element - which is a silent language spoken by the whole human being - is accompanied by the musical element, which in this case expresses the same thing as that which is expressed in the movements of the human limbs on stage. On the other hand, you will see that the truly poetic in poetry must be expressed when poems are recited at the same time, which on the one hand work through the word itself, but on the other hand but also through the silent language, the language of the will, which is presented on the stage and says the same thing as is spoken from the mouth in poetry, through the spoken word.

The basis of the art of eurythmy is not an arbitrary movement of the human limbs. Anything that is merely a gesture, merely facial expression, merely pantomime, is avoided. There is an inner lawfulness, as in the melodious element of music itself, for example. It is all based on the sequence of human movements. What the human will does with one sound follows, one might say, a melody of movement, what the other sound does. And so the inner connection is a lawful one. When two groups or individuals perform the same piece in eurythmy, the individual conception is no more at issue than it is for two pianists playing one and the same piece of music, such as a Beethoven sonata. Nothing arbitrary remains in the eurythmic art. Everything is in accordance with inner law.

Therefore, in the accompanying recitation, it must also be taken into account that, in poetry, the main thing is not the content of the words - which is particularly emphasized today when reciting; in this respect today - but rather it is actually the main thing. It would not be possible to accompany eurythmy with recitation in any other way than by making this the main thing: the underlying rhythm, the beat. Everything that is the formal expression of poetry must also underlie the recitation. Both are still poorly understood today. However, both should be the beginning of a new art form. And in the interaction of poetry, music and eurythmy, something should be created that truly corresponds to what Goethe felt: Art is based on the insight and visualization of the work of art by the human being, in visible and tangible forms to represent what has been seen through. Goethe once said, when he was writing his book about Winckelmann, where he delved particularly deeply into the essence of artistry: “Because man is at the pinnacle of nature, he in turn feels like a whole nature. He takes measure, order, harmony and meaning together to finally rise to the production of the work of art.

Is it not right, dear assembled here, when the human being's own deep conformity to law, which lies in every possible movement of his limbs, is brought forth into a mute language, which is, however, a fully valid form of expression for that which can also be speech? Must we not say that when something so deeply mysterious is drawn from the human instrument – for there is an imprint of the whole world in human nature, a microcosm – must we not say that something eminently artistic must emerge? As I said, there is nothing arbitrary about this eurythmy; it is simply the possibilities for movement that the larynx itself makes when we speak: These are captured in supersensible vision, are transferred to arms and hands and the other limbs of the human body, so that one might say that the human being itself acts like a large larynx, in order to create possibilities for expression that work through the mute movements, but which can be much richer, namely much more inwardly soulful, than what is achieved through conventional phonetic language.

If it is to be justified that something like this is possible, then it must be said that a bridge between poetry and such an art of movement, which is drawn from the human organism itself, is already given by the fact that the true poet does not feel the literal as the actual content of his creation, but rather that which formally underlies the poetry. In the case of Schiller, for example, in the best of his poems it was not the literal content that was first in his soul, but rather he had something musical, something melodious in his soul; only then did he add the literal content.

And Goethe studied Iphigenia with his actors, which is even a dramatic poem, with a baton like a conductor, so as not to emphasize the literal content, but rather what is based on the rhythm, the inner musicality of the matter. This inner musicality, we say, which we can otherwise express in language only partially, should be brought out of the human organism through eurythmy.

But all this, ladies and gentlemen, is really only at the beginning, and it is very necessary that this attempt at a eurythmic art be perfected more and more. To do this, it is of course necessary to find the interest of our contemporaries. If this interest of contemporaries turns to the art of eurythmy, as it has already partly turned to it, then the beginnings that have been made today will be further perfected, either by ourselves or, probably better, by others. And we are convinced that eurythmy will be able to create something that can stand alongside other art forms as a fully fledged art.

We are our own harshest critics when it comes to what we are able to offer today. We are well aware that it is a beginning that will gradually grow, but that it can already be presented because this art form, born out of Goetheanism, is something different, something that can be introduced as something new in our overall spiritual development. Therefore, because it is a beginning, we ask you to take the performance with indulgence. As already mentioned, we are our own harshest critics, but we do believe that what we can give today is worth the interest of our contemporaries.

[Before the break:] Since a wish has been expressed in this regard, we will present a scene from Goethe's “Faust”, part one, the scene that takes place in the study [night], with the Easter scene that follows. We want to present this scene with the help of the eurythmic art.

The many attempts that have been made to bring Goethe's “Faust” to the stage are well known. The difficulties lie in the fact that Goethe not only depicted what takes place for people and around people here on earth, but that in many places Goethe raised the scenes into the spiritual and supersensible. This is where the art of directing, the ordinary art of directing, very often fails. Anyone who has seen a variety of different “Faust” performances, for example the charming production by Adolf Wilbrandt, or Devrient's mystery play, which broke with the customary style and tried to present the matter in a more mysterious way, knows how difficult it is, especially with “Faust”, to bring to the stage that which is the transference of the plot into the supersensible, to bring truly shaped forces onto the stage.

Now, of course, we will present everything that takes place in the ordinary world of the senses on the ordinary stage; but where the situation involves raising the whole situation into the supersensible, we will use eury thmy, which is particularly suitable for dealing with these scenes, as it has already been shown in certain scenes of the second part of “Faust”, the mysterious depths of which cannot otherwise be fully explored.

So I think you will be able to see, if you let this experiment take effect on you – because it can only be an experiment – this scene in the study with the subsequent Easter scene, you will be able to see how, with the help of eurythmy, the supersensible aspects of this first part of “Faust” can easily be revealed in a way that is appropriate to the scene. Note 129, 5.56

Archduke Eugene of Austria, who was staying in Basel at the “Hotel Des Trois Rois” and was affectionately known to the people of Basel as “Erzi”, attended this performance. From time to time he came to Dornach to watch a performance.

Dear attendees!

We would like to take the liberty of presenting a sample of our eurythmic art to you. Since this eurythmic art is still in its infancy and can easily be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts, please allow me to say a few words before the performance.

In what we call the eurythmic art, we do not want to compete with any dance-like arts or the like, which we know to be more perfect in their way than what we can already present as the eurythmic art today. But in this eurythmic art, something is being attempted that can stand on its own alongside all the other arts.

Just as basically everything that is to be connected to this structure, and for which this structure is to be the external representation, is taken from Goethe's world view - and I would like to point out how I would like to point out how this has been done, because it shows the sources from which this eurythmic art actually flows – in this way, this narrow field of eurythmy is also taken from the Goethean world view.

Of course, everything that is intended to have an artistic effect must be perceived directly through the eye or through the senses in general, and any theoretical explanation that is given about an artistic work would not only be superfluous, but it would also have to be fundamentally mistaken. I would therefore like to preface these words not in order to say something about the artistic formalities themselves, but to show the artistic sources from which this eurythmic art draws. And I may begin with a few words – truly not to give a theoretical explanation, but to point out something that is at the same time most eminently artistic and also a form of knowledge within the Goethean world view – I may begin by pointing out in a very elementary way what is known as Goethe's metamorphosis theory. It is something that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the present, but which will play a major role in the spiritual life of the future.

We basically only have a science of the dead. That which is grasped by our knowledge is only that which is dead in all world phenomena and world facts. Understanding the truly living will only be reserved for a time when the Goethean worldview will play a greater role than it already does in the present. Today it looks simple, but it is not so simple when one only understands it in its full depth, what Goethe says, for example, about the growth and structure of plants. Goethe is of the opinion that the whole plant - and even if it is the most complicated tree - is only a complicated leaf. And each leaf is in turn a whole plant, only simple and primitively formed. But it is not only so with plants; it is so with all living things. The most important links of each living thing are a repetition of the whole living being.

Goethe initially developed this view only with regard to the formation of living things. He also extended it to humans, but only in terms of form. If we extend what Goethe did for form in his own way to human activity, then we can gain from it what we call the eurythmic art here, when we transfer mere observation into artistic creation. However, one must approach it in such a way that one grasps what would otherwise remain hidden from external impressions, from sensory impressions, in a kind of supersensible vision.

You see, my dear audience, when a person speaks, we listen to him; we listen to him with our ears, we grasp the spoken language. But while the person is speaking, the larynx and its neighboring organs are in a state of constant internal movement, at least by nature. Physically speaking, everyone is aware that when I speak here, I cause the air to vibrate, to move in regular waves. What is being done by the larynx and its neighboring organs is not seen when we listen to a person. But the person who is able to see supersensibly is also able to see what potential movements are present in the human larynx when the person speaks, especially when he speaks artistically or when he sings or when he wants to express something musical at all.

These inner possibilities of movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs can be grasped, imagined and then transferred to the human being as a whole. Just as Goethe imagines that the large plant is only a more intricately designed leaf, so can the movements that otherwise remain invisible be transferred to the movements of the limbs of the whole human being. Thus, on the stage, you will see the human being in motion. And what is revealed in these movements is not arbitrary, it is not something invented, but it is exactly the same as what happens invisibly when a person speaks audible language.

What is presented is a mute language, but a visible one. There is so little arbitrariness in it that one can say: all pantomime, all mere facial expression, all gesturing with the eyes are absent from eurythmy. So that it cannot be compared with any of the now familiar dance arts, for example. Just as what is truly musical does not consist in the mere painting of colors, so our eurythmic does not consist in the mere external expression of what is going on in the soul, but in the lawful succession of movements performed by the human limbs.

I could therefore figuratively say: when you see the human being moving here on the stage, the whole human being has become the visible larynx. It is indeed part of Goethe's world view that the artistic consists in the fact that we do not see the secrets of the world through our ideas, through our concepts, but that we see the secrets of the world without concepts, without representations, through direct observation. Eurythmy seeks to bring the movement possibilities, the secrets of movement possibilities that lie in the human organism, into a visible language.

If two people in different places or two groups were to perform the same thing in eurythmy, they would have to perform exactly the same thing. The individual interpretation is given only as much leeway as when two people in two different places play one and the same Beethoven sonata in their own personal interpretation.

Just as the melodious element in music moves forward in a lawful manner, so the possibilities of movement of the human organism move forward in a lawful manner here. It is a melody of movement that one should actually observe. If what lies in the individual sounds of the word is expressed through the human limbs, through the movement of the individual limbs, then what is expressed through the outer movement in space or through the relationships and mutual movements of the eurythmists united in a group is that which lies in the soul warmth, in what is joy and suffering, joy and enthusiasm.

You will see that the silent language of eurythmy is accompanied on the one hand by the eurythmic through the musical element, which basically expresses the same thing in other words, and on the other hand by the art of recitation and declamation. And it is precisely in this recitation and declamation that it becomes clear how the artistic element of poetry must be expressed through eurythmy.

Today, we are convinced that the most highly regarded and well-liked art of recitation has gone astray. Today, when reciting, the same thing is emphasized that is the literal content, that is, not the truly poetic, but the prosaic. The truly poetic element in poetry lies in the underlying musical elements – in the rhythm, in the beat, in the formal structure, in the rhyme – and all these elements will be expressed here in the eurythmy that parallels the recitation.

That this is the case with real poetry can be seen if we go back to what was regarded in earlier times as the real art of recitation and as the basis of poetry. I would just like to remind you that Schiller, for example, did not first have the literal content in his mind when writing the best of his poems – not at all – but he did have a melodious element in his mind, an indeterminate melody or at least something melodious, and only then did he grasp the literal element, which he then clothed in. Goethe rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, which is a iambic drama, with his actors, with the baton, like a conductor. He did not place the main emphasis on the literal content, but placed the main emphasis on the art of verse, on the form of the poetry.

All of this must be brought out again – what underlies the poetry. It is precisely that which is actually artistic that is actually overlooked today, especially in the art of recitation. Those who still had the opportunity to see primitive recitation of simple folk poems, as they were practiced in villages in Central Europe until the last decades of the 19th century, for example, now increasingly less so, could, I would say, perceive a primitive eurythmy originating from the prehistory of mankind. The recitation was not just about the prose content of the poem, as it is today. Rather, to use a harsh expression, the ballad-monger who always recited his ballad went about gesticulating in very regular movements. So that one can study how the eurhythmic actually emerged from that deep element of the human soul, from which the art of poetry actually also emerged, in the development of mankind.

What underlies this is genuine Goethean psychology, Goethean soul teaching. When a person speaks, especially when they speak artistically, we can study this. Then, in speech, thoughts flow from one side, thoughts pour, so to speak – excuse me for putting it so crudely, but it could also be expressed in a very, very learned, scientific way – thoughts pour onto the larynx, and the will permeates from the whole human being that which lives in thoughts. Speech is the synthesis of what lies in man as will and of what emanates from the brain in thought forms. Both are synthesized in speech by the human mind. The human mind sends its waves through this element of thought, through the human mind. Here, we are attempting to omit that which can be conventional, that which serves to facilitate human communication in the external life, and which thus leads away from the artistic, and to make visible language only that which emerges from the whole human being as the element of will.

But as I said, what is being attempted here is only a beginning, and I therefore ask you to be lenient with this beginning. We are our own harshest critics. We know what this eurythmy art can become, but we also know that we are at the very beginning. And only that which is needed for art, my dear audience, is, I would say, the interest of contemporaries. Further perfection can grow out of the interest of contemporaries. And as much as we are fully convinced that we are now at the beginning of this eurythmic art, we ask for your forbearance. But on the other hand, we are fully convinced that something will develop from this eurythmic art - either through us or probably through others - that will one day be able to stand alongside the old, fully recognized art forms as a fully recognized art form in its own right.

The art of eurythmy, of which we would like to show you another example, is still in its infancy, and I would ask you to bear this in mind as we demonstrate it. It is the expression of the anthroposophical movement, born out of Goethe's world view. And so this narrow circle, for that is what it is in our overall work, has been brought out of the Goethean worldview and Goethean artistic ethos. This has made it possible to turn the human being himself, with his inner possibilities of movement, into a kind of artistic instrument. What you will see on stage is an attempt at a visible, seen language. The human limbs are used to express in the same way what is expressed by the human larynx in phonetic language, in the same way as a person otherwise expresses himself in his movements through gestures.

However, the fact that the human body produces these movements does not mean that they are in any arbitrary connection with what the human soul feels, or with what the human soul would otherwise express in words. Rather, that through a kind of sensory-supersensory seeing, the larynx and its neighboring organs have truly overheard the possibility of movement that becomes reality in them, revealing itself when they are spoken, when the sound is formed into speech. What we pay attention to when a person speaks is the audible. But the audible is based on an inner movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs, which is transmitted into the outer air, which we also set in vibrations, in wave-like movements. Those who, through a kind of seeing, are able to form an image of these movements that underlie spoken language can translate, in a lawful way, what would otherwise only express itself in audible sound, into the silent language that is eurythmy. This enables us to separate out everything in language that is based only on convention, only on the nature of human interaction, and which is therefore the inartistic part of language.

When we speak to one another as human beings, the formation of the sound and the content of the sound are based on the needs of human interaction. This is how prose enters our language. We must now study how language is actually based on two elements: soul and, as the soul expresses itself in the physical, body and physicality. When we speak, the expression of our thoughts, our ideas, first enters into speech. This expression connects with the expression of the will as we speak. The expression of the thought comes from the head, as we grasp the matter physically. But the expression of the will comes from the whole human being. When we speak, we actually draw out of our whole being that which then concentrates in the organs of will, which produce the audible sound.

Now this supersensible observation of the possibilities of movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs allows one to truly translate into that which is otherwise held back from the human being when speaking: the possibility of movement of the whole body, that which is otherwise heard. So for the eurythmic presentation, we start by leaving out what is the conceptual part of speech and only take up what comes from the human will element, but now take it up in the movements of the whole human being.

You see: in this way eurythmy, which is such a mute language, becomes the expression of something much more inward in the human being than can be revealed through speech. Through speech we transfer, as it were, what we experience inwardly more to the surface of the human body, indeed to the surface of the human being. Through the fact that we allow the whole human being to carry out the same movements, the same lawful movements that underlie spoken language, we involve the whole human being in what is otherwise the content of speech. And if you have a feeling for what is expressed and revealed through the inner possibilities of movement of the human body, you can truly present a silent but no less eloquent language as eurythmy.

This kind of soul science can certainly be derived from Goethe's world view. The whole human being becomes, as it were, a larynx and its neighboring organs on the stage in front of you. And what otherwise glows through speech as the soul's enthusiasm, as joy and suffering, as joy and pain, is expressed in the movement of the human being in space, in the movement of groups that relate to each other in such a way that the individual human being inner possibilities of movement, which are modeled on the movements of the larynx; while that which is presented to one in the group, or is revealed in the movements of the individual human being in space, expresses more the real soul content.

But nothing is a mere gesture or a mere pantomime. Anything that is mere pantomime, anything that is merely gestural is excluded. What you see is based on an inner, lawful sequence of movements. When two people or groups of people in different places express one and the same thing through the silent language of eurythmy, there is no more personality in it than there is in the personal interpretation when two pianists in two different places play one and the same Beethoven sonata. Just as in music the truly artistic element lies in the conformity to law of the succession of notes, so here the truly artistic element lies in the conformity to law of the eurythmic movements. It may be said that the artistic element always excludes the directly imaginative through ideas, which otherwise play their great part in knowledge. Where concepts are involved, there is no artistic element.

You see, here we consciously exclude the imagination and bring out what - like a secret of the human organs themselves - can be guessed in a mute language, I would say, directly in looking at it. To penetrate into the secrets of existence in direct observation without the mediation of concepts is a true art. That which can be expressed musically from the soul life of the human being on the one hand, and that which poetic speech brings forth artistically from speech sounds, is expressed in a different way through the mute speech of eurythmy, which has been developed into an art form. Therefore, on stage today you will see on the one hand the mute eurythmic language, or that which can be expressed musically; on the other hand you will hear certain contents recited, although you will have to bear in mind that with the emergence of a new art such as eurythmy, which is a different kind of language, it places demands that recitation should also be returned to the old, good way of reciting.

Today, in the art of recitation, more attention is paid to the prose element, to the purely content-related element of language; to bring out, by reciting, from the content of a poem that which corresponds more to the prose content of the poem. That is not the truly artistic element. What is truly artistic is the underlying meter, rhythm, rhyme, and so on. These, in turn, must be sought out and brought out. And so, the art of recitation must be led back to its good, old forms, away from the wrong path it has taken today. Goethe, who knew a great deal about these good old forms, took a conductor's baton and rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with the actors himself, in order to show how the real rhythm was at the core, not what is actually the prose in the artistic elements within.

Today we will present you with a piece from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, the study scene. You may know how hard people have tried to bring Goethe's “Faust” to the stage, and what directing skills and the like have been used to create a worthy performance of Goethe's “Faust”. When one thinks of a stage production of Goethe's Faust, there are two things to be considered above all: first, that Goethe, in writing his Faust (he worked on the poem for sixty years), first wanted to express through this world poem the deepest things that can take place in the soul of a striving human being. Goethe wanted to express the experiences of the human breast, from the most oppressive, tied to ordinary life on earth, to the highest spiritual striving. All this, as Goethe felt it at times in his younger years – often still immaturely – he put into the first parts; what he felt later, he put into the later parts of the first part of “Faust”. He then put the most mature into the second part.

How little Goethe himself initially thought of presenting “Faust” as a stage play can be seen from the following. When at the end of the 1820s a deputation headed by the actor La Roche went to see Goethe after they had decided to stage the first part of “Faust” in its entirety - parts had, however, already been performed earlier - Goethe himself thought it was somewhat impossible. And yet, with a number of esteemed gentlemen standing before him, he leapt from his seat after the matter had been explained to him, shouting angrily: “You fools!” Thus he had spoken to those who wanted to undertake the first part of his “Faust” on the stage. He saw best the difficulties that arise when one wants to present on the stage not what is sensual, earthly-physical in nature, but what is spiritual in nature. But the presentation of Faust has been recognized, and rightly so, as something that, one might say, meets the deepest artistic needs. And so a wide variety of approaches have been used to bring Faust to the stage, from Devrient's mystery plays to Wilbrandt's charming direction. But certain parts, which rise directly from the earthly into the supernatural, can, in our opinion, only be presented if the silent language of eurythmy is used. And so, in this little piece of “Faust” that we are presenting to you, we have called upon the eurythmic art for those parts where the spiritual world enters into the human.

After the break, we will also present a number of Goethe's poems, and it will be shown that where Goethe, in his magnificent “Cloud Poems”, describes wonderful cloud formations with wonderful natural intimacy, following the instructions of Howard, can be perceived in nature itself in accordance with his artistic and ideological view, can also be poetically realized, so that one can naturally feel what is otherwise shown by the transformation of cloud forms in nature itself in the forms that are performed, which are very similar to those in the poem. This inner transformative power, which Goethe describes as the metamorphosis of natural phenomena, which he observed in all living things, was revealed to him by observing the formation of clouds. And in these transformations of cloud formations, he saw something artistic, something that works like the power that the ancient Indian worldview perceived in the cosmos and called Kama Rupa. That is what he wanted to express in his beautiful cloud poems, which can best be recreated in the silent language of eurythmy.

With this, I wanted to show you the sources from which the forms actually arise that you will see as eurythmy. Once again, I would like to emphasize that everything that is intended with eurythmy is actually only just beginning and that further development will take place, either through ourselves or through others, if it meets with the interest of our contemporaries. However, we are thoroughly convinced that if this art can continue to develop, it will one day be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside other art forms.