Leopoldstadt – Footnotes
The Footnotes to our episode on Tom Stoppard’s majestic play Leopoldstadt include observations on the origins of its title, the metaphoric resonances of the child’s game, Cat’s Cradle, and how Gustav Klimt’s art is an apt choice to help paint the play’s story.
The title of the play
In our conversation Patrick revealed that Leopoldstadt had not been the original working title of the play, but it was an appropriate title. The checkered history of the Leopoldstadt area of Vienna certainly reflects the historical vicissitudes of Jews in Austria. It’s association with the Jews goes back to 1625 when Jews were banned from living within the city walls, and huddled together in a ghetto on the other side of the Danube. They were evicted again in 1669 by Emperor Leopold 1, and the site of their synagogue was cleared to make way for a church dedicated to St Leopold. The area was named Leopoldstadt by the Christian population in gratitude to the Emperor.
After Emperor Joseph issued his Edict of Tolerance in 1782, Jews began to return to Leopoldstadt, although they were still generally banned from the city itself for another century. By the late 19th and early 20th century the area was again associated with the Jews, particularly following the first world war by the poorest people.
In the Reichskristallnacht pogrom of 1938 the area was once again the focus of persecution when six synagogues and thirty-one prayer houses were destroyed. Today, the Leopoldstadt area of Vienna is no longer Jewish: following the 20th century wave of expulsions only 3% of the population is Jewish.
So the origin of the name Leopoldstadt represents a bitter irony in its association with the Jews of Vienna. The title of the play is a short-hand for targeted discrimination, but it is also a definition of community; a place where people of a kind live together whether by choice or necessity. It’s history also testifies to the way that the identity and interpretation of a place and people can change almost arbitrarily through the currents of history. As the play itself asserts, it is important not to forget the realities of the past that can be lost or obscured over time.
Emperor Leopold 1st 1640-1705
The Leopoldstadter Tempel – the largest synagogue in Vienna
Destroyed on Kristallnacht 10 November 1938
Cat’s Cradle
The string game that Nathan and Leo play with Ludwig in 1938, and which they remember together when they meet again in 1955 is not only a poignant personal touchstone; it also has metaphoric resonance in the themes of the play. In typical fashion Stoppard gives us a few clues to these thematic reverberations, such as Ludwig’s observation that there seems to be “no rhyme or reason” in the progress of the game, but in fact “each state comes from the previous state”, as do the events that follow in the flow of history. There is actually a pattern in the game, a mathematical order that is hard to discern underneath the apparent randomness, as the mathematics professor likes to believe there is in nature, despite the chaos of the world they are living in.
Ludwig also points out that the knots in the string in the game “always stay the same distance from each other”, because they never cut the string – a metaphor I think for the fixed links in the family tree that cannot be broken. The individual knots are “not allowed to show up anywhere they like”, just as Leo cannot disown his ancestral origins no matter how far away he travels.
The Cat’s Cradle is a small but glinting example of Stoppard’s art, in that it adds beauty and emotional depth to the personal stories, at the same time as it elaborates on the largest questions in the play.
Gustav Klimt
In the play Gretl is having her portrait painted by none other than Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), one of the founders of the Viennese Seccesion movement and most famously the painter of The Kiss (1907). His work is renowned for its symbolist imagery as well as for its eroticism, which adds an appropriate frisson to Gretl’s choice of artist. Klimt painted a number of portraits of women from the highest ranks of Viennese society, including two illustrious portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of wealthy Austrian industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Bloch-Bauer who was one of Klimt’s most important patrons, and a respected member of fin de siecle Viennese society. Although Adele’s portraits post-date Gretl’s sitting, they may have partially been a model for the story of her painting. Like Hermann Merz, Bloch-Bauer was Jewish, and in 1938 he fled Austria and his art collection was subsequently seized by the Nazis. After the war the Bloch-Bauer portraits became the subject of a long-running dispute over their ownership, which was only finally resolved in 2006 when the family reclaimed and sold them.
As we learn in the last act of Leopoldstrasse, Gretl’s portrait was also the victim of Nazi pilferage, and Rosa is embroiled years later in a determined battle to recover it from the Austrian state. The fate of the painting is symbolic not only of the lost possessions and lives of the Jews, but of the erased identities of the individuals of the past, one of the running themes of the play. As Nathan tells us, the painting was originally titled “Portrait of Margarete Merz”, but it now hangs in the Belverdere gallery in Vienna known only as “Woman with a Green Shawl”.
There is another reference to Klimt in the play, specifically to his paintings of ‘Philosophy’, Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’, which he was commissioned to produce for the great hall of the University of Vienna. The paintings were greeted by outrage because of their allegorical imagery which many deemed pornographic, and they were never displayed at the university. The painting of ‘Philosophy’ has been described as illustrating an idea prominent at the time that the “purposeful progress of history was ultimately governed by incomprehensible and uncontrollable cyclical forces of nature.” A meaning that sounds particularly fitting for the cycles of persecution and devastation that we witness repeated in the play and over the history of the century. Are these uncontrollable, destructive forces part of our fundamental character as human beings? As Ernst says about the meaning of the paintings: “The rational is at the mercy of the irrational. Barbarism will not be eradicated by culture.” As if to highlight his point, a postscript to the story is that Klimt’s three university paintings were deliberately destroyed by the Nazis on their retreat from Vienna in 1945. Barbarism indeed.
Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907)
Philosophy (1900, 1907)
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063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – March
Before the theatres went dark this month I was lucky enough to see Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Bridge, and spend more than seven hours in thrall to Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota at the National. Plus, some thoughts on what we miss when there is no theatre.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – February
Another great mix of shows this month, from Tom Stoppard’s new play, to Ibsen, Beckett and newer plays in smaller London venues.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – January
The January roundup included both classic plays, such as The Duchess of Malfi, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, as well as recent musicals Dear Evan Hansen and Girl from the North Country …
I especially enjoyed this podcast because I was born in Vienna in 1936, left for Derry, Northern Ireland in 1938 and come from a family background very much like that of the protagonists.
My grandfather, Leopold Schenkel, not only kept the suitcases packed but made sure that there was some money in the UK before the Anschluss. Some of us were very lucky.
Thank you Eva.
Although the play “Leopoldstadt” is somewhat autobiographical of Tom Stoppard, I would like to know if the painting mentioned in the play initially as “Portrait of Margarete Mers” then change to “Woman with a Green Shaul” attributed to Klimpt is fictional or was there in fact, a Nazi stolen Klimpt artwork involving Stoppard’s family.
Hello Leonard
I am not aware of any autobiographical source for the story of Gretl’s portrait in the play. In fact as I suggest in the Footnotes I published about the play, I believe that Stoppard modelled the story on the real-life fate of Klimt’s first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which he painted in 1907. That painting was likewise stolen by the Nazis and sold to the Belvedere Gallery, where it was initially displyed under the anonymous title of “Golden Portrait” and later “The Lady in Gold” to hide the fact that the woman in the painting was Jewish. This portrait of Adele was also the subject of a landmark legal battle in which Adele’s niece finally successfully reclaimed ownership of the painting in 2006, as Rosa seeks to do in the play. The story of Adele’s portrait is the subject of the 2015 film “Woman in Gold”.
Thanks for reaching out, and for listening.
Douglas
PS FYI the Footnotes that I publish after each episode of the podcast are available to Patrons of the podcast. Visit http://www.patreon.com/theplaypodcast for more information.
So many more assoications and allusions.
1. Reigen a shnitzler play, which has ten acts, each of a man and a woman, each carrying over one person from the previous act and a new person. It has a lot in common with the merry-go-round of meetings between gretel, hanna, herman and fritz. Shnitzler was a doctor, great writer and playwright. Look it up.
2. Freud wrote the interpratation of dreams, which figures in leopoldtstat in many ways, in 1899, but asked the publisher to write 1900 on the title page because he wanted it to be a book to open the new century. May be this too is reason why there is only one year between the two opening scenes.
Paul witgenstein, pianist, scion of the witgestein family of faboulously rich jewish converts, brother of ludwig, lost his right hand in the first ww, and there is a piano sonata-for-the-left-hand written for him.
These were the first to come to my mind. Am sure there are many many more.
Fascinating connections, thank you.
Thank you for reminding me about Arthur Schnitzler. I studied La Ronde as apart of a Masters of Modern Drama course I did in university many years ago. I’ll go back and look at his work.
That’s also a fascinating footnote about the date of Freud’s publication. Stoppard’s setting the play at the turn of the century is very telling. We can’t but think poignantly when the characters express their hopes for the future, given our knowledge of what is to come in the 20th century.
Thanks very much for sharing your comments, and for listening.
Douglas