Bernhard Sends Kaut a Telegram [1]
President Kaut, the Salzburg
With a cool head I must
describe today’s Festival administration-penned public diatribe against Claus
Peymann and his ensemble as an infamy and its circumstances as revolting on every
level. You, the Festival administration,
accuse Claus Peymann and his ensemble of breach of contract and you yourself
broke your contract with Claus Peymann when you first of all broke your promise
at the dress rehearsal—same reality in the première as in the dress
rehearsal—at the last minute and [with great] devious[ness] and thereby
imperiled the entire première and falsified the conclusion of the play through
your scandalous intervention. You
yourself admitted in a conference with me after the première that you had
deceived Peymann in order to safeguard the première. Via your ambush of an intervention—and quite
apart from the fact that the set designer Karl-Ernst Hermann was beaten up by
unknown parties behind the scenes, a criminal act from which you have so far
not distanced yourself—you have categorically inculpated yourselves of breach
of confidence and [also], via your arrogant cancellation of future performances,
of breach of contract.
The breach of contract is
entirely on your part and not on the part of the ensemble, whom I advise to
insist [on undertaking] all future performances at the state theater. We are dealing here with the austerity and
the incorruptibility of a nerve-racking art and its principl[es] and not with
the common [subject-matter] of some unsavory human-interest daily. If you should actually cancel the
performances, you, and hence the Festival administration, [will be] guilty of
breach of contract, and with respect to everything—even the damages previously
incurred. [It is] not the ensemble, but
rather you who are responsible for the hoaxing of the public. In these horrible circumstances it is only fitting for the director and the cozened performers to lodge a legal
complaint against the Festival administration, because Peymann and his actors,
whom I stand by a hundred percent, are categorically in the right, a fact that
you personally through your false and, I must say it yet again, infamous
braggadocio, are slyly endeavoring to conceal.
Thomas Bernhard
[1] Editors’ note: First printed in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten
[Upper-Austrian News], 9 August 1972 . The
editors of the paper prefixed the reprint of the telegram with a note:
“At about 5 p.m. on Monday, after the withdrawal of his drama The
Ignoramus and the Madman from the program of the current season of the
Salzburg Festival, Thomas Bernhard, the author of the play [sic on the
redundant attribution (DR)] transmitted to the president of the Festival, Josef
Kaut, the following telegram, which was also delivered to the Austrian Press
Agency verbatim and with permission to circulate.”
The editors appended to
the telegram this remark: “We shall address the entire affair again in more
detail upon the subsidence of the waves stirred up by this initial altercation,
whose full legal repercussions remain to be seen.”
Thomas Bernhard refers to
the “emergency lighting scandal” at the July 29, 1972 Salzburg Festival
première of his play The Ignoramus and the Madman (directed by Claus
Peymann, set designs by Karl-Ernst Hermann), during which, in defiance of the
author’s stage directions for the conclusion, “total darkness” failed to
prevail: the emergency lights remained switched on. Thereupon the director and performers
declined to give any further performances unless the emergency lights were
switched off. As a result, on August 2,
1972, Bernhard wired the following message to the president of the Festival: “a community
that cannot bear two minutes darkness stop can get by without my play stop my
commitment to director and actors one hundred percent stop they make
uncompromising decision re future performances.” Kaut refused to bear the cost of any fines
and so the first performance remained the only one (although one further performance was recorded for broadcast on television). Thereupon the Festival sued the director and
performers for damages resulting from breach of contract; the defendants in
turn lodged their own complaint against the Festival.
THE END
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur. Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons. Herausgegeben von Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth. Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles. Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt : Suhrkamp, 2011).
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