Oberufer Christmas Plays are a cherished tradition in Waldorf Schools and anthroposophical settings. But are they really a Waldorf thing?
This brief history of the origins of the Oberufer Christmas Plays explores their background by answering a number of questions that come to mind.
How many Oberufer Christmas plays are there?
There are three Oberufer Christmas Plays in total:
- The Paradise Play depicts Adam and Eve’s original sin of disobedience to God, their fall from grace and the resulting exile from Paradise.
- The Shepherds Play tells of Christ the Redeemer, born to save the earth from Adam’s fall.
- The Kings Play describes how this holy birth attracts three wise rulers and scares an evil one, who orders the Christ Child’s assassination.
Historically, a satirical play followed these performances in Lent.
How old are the Oberufer Christmas plays?
Religious plays of this kind developed in the early Middle Ages. Surviving source material dates from the 16th century, when Protestant tribes fled the Counter-Reformation and formed new settlements among Magyars and Slavs in the highlands of Hungary.
Such a Germanic enclave was Oberufer, a ferry station on a Danube island near Bratislava. Its refugees may have come from around Lake Constance, and the most treasured possessions in their “spiritual escape baggage” (1) were the old mystery plays.
On foreign soil, the Oberufer Christmas Plays gained new importance as a permanent spiritual home.
Because they were performed by simple peasants for their own community, no one else took notice. The local intelligentsia considered them childish nonsense, not worth bothering with.
Meanwhile, similar plays elsewhere were adapted, mostly by Church authorities, to suit the changing tastes of the times.
These modernisations eliminated the authentic appeal of medieval plays in the course of centuries, but in Oberufer they continued to be performed unaltered.
Are Oberufer Christmas Plays Catholic or Protestant?
Neither catholic nor protestant, they were tolerated by all Church authorities. And their permission was needed to perform a play in those days.
The Oberufer Christmas Plays brought strictly segregated people of both confessions together and had a harmonising influence in an age of religious conflict.
What was the purpose of such plays?
Their purpose was to illustrate biblical stories for an illiterate congregation who did not understand the Church Latin of the liturgy and the clerus.
There was not much in the nature of visual entertainment then, and so everyone flocked to see any kind of performance.
By the Renaissance, attending religious plays on ‘holy days’ (Old English hāligdæg, later: holidays) had become a popular tradition throughout the old nations of Europe.
What is special about the Oberufer Christmas plays?
Their style is solemn and far removed from contemporary acting. Lines of text, proclaimed rather than spoken naturally, are interspersed with psalmodic singing to rhythmic strides.
No stage sets are used, just a few simple props: a big fir tree hung with apples for the Paradise Play, a manger and a star on a pole for the other two.
All the actors’ positions are defined, their interactions and gestures prescribed by a medieval template – a venerable vessel to be filled anew each year with the soul-substance of present-day performers.
And so this historic ritual was passed down through the generations, practically without changes.
How were the Oberufer Christmas plays produced?
Having inherited the script, the head of a respected family was in charge. After the harvest he chose a group of male actors, as was customary in those days. The youngest men played Eve, Gabriel and Mary.
During rehearsals from October to Advent, the company had to lead a blameless life. The rules were strict: Sobriety, chastity, no raucous songs, no fighting, absolute obedience to the Master.
Fumbling lines in dress rehearsals and performances was fined with small coins whose lack was keenly felt.
It was a great deal to ask of hardworking peasant fellows, and not every year a cast suited to a mystery play could be put together.
Who published the Oberufer Christmas plays?
Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900) was professor of literary history at the Technical University in Vienna. His hometown, however, was Bratislava, and so the plays at the nearby village of Oberufer came to his notice.
With a linguist’s passion for folk drama, Schröer made it his personal mission to save these plays from oblivion.
In the course of his research he put together dictionaries of dialect expressions, and 1858 published his compilation of annotated texts as German Christmas Plays from Hungary.
Why are they performed in Waldorf Schools?
As a student in Vienna, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) became Schröer’s friend and absorbed his professor’s enthusiasm for the peasant folk’s way of performing old religious plays with fervour and devotion.
After Schröer’s death, Steiner wanted to honour his friend and teacher’s work by keeping these plays alive.
“As is the case with many a significant person, he found very little acknowledgement,” he stated in 1917, and described the Oberufer Christmas Plays as “indirectly related to our cause” and “an attempt to revive old memories of European culture.”
“Not only do we have before us the product of linguistic scholarship, but also something that was collected with an awareness of what lives [in these plays] as their spirit. And that is why it is so satisfying to revive them.”
“One may say that these plays belong to things that were sadly lost, that disappeared; things one would very much like to see revitalised; because through them one remembers that which is intimately connected to the development of our spiritual life.”
“For the very reason that something of the spiritual life of former times can appear before those living now, we are making it our special task within the Anthroposophical Society to bring these plays before the public.” (2)
In 1910 the plays were put on in Berlin at Steiner’s suggestion, 1911 followed a performance in Vienna. 1915, in Dornach, Steiner directed the first production at the Goetheanum’s building site. In these war years, the plays were also performed at the local military hospital and for prisoners of war.
In 1921 Karl Schubert staged the first two plays at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart from Steiner’s reworked script. Ever since, this version is part of Advent as Christmas Plays in Waldorf Schools, and also in anthroposophical institutions such as Camphill Communities.
What changes did steiner make?
He changed the order in which they were performed, separated the Kings Play from the Shepherds Play, moved the company of actors from the middle of the room to a stage and made alterations to the text and its pronunciation.
Having grown up with a similar dialect in Austria enabled Rudolf Steiner to make some obscure phrases comprehensible.
Convinced that it must once have existed, he also wrote an introductory scene for the Paradise Play to match the Shepherds Play’s beginning.
In effect, his was a completely new production, and this departure from tradition was criticized by purists like Wendelin, Klein and others.
Who wrote the music?
Unlike the wording of the Oberufer Christmas Plays, their music was not preserved faithfully and was subject to change.
Rudolf Steiner asked his friend Leopold van der Pals to compose the music for his reworked script.
Leopold van der Pals (St Petersburg, 4 July 1884 – Dornach, 7 February 1966) was the son of Danish and Dutch parents. He developed a personal and lyrical style in composing by involving elements of late romanticism, expressionism and impressionism. (Wikipedia)
From childhood he expressed himself in music and wrote over 50 works before reaching maturity. Having studied piano and cello, his debut as a composer took place with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1909. It led to a tour of performances in Europe and America that was cut short by WWII. His 252 works consist of eight operas, nine cantatas and 650 lieder, orchestral works and chamber music. He was in contact with authors, musicians, artists and poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Lienhard, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Serge Koussevitzky and Alexander Scriabin. As an early Anthroposophist, Van der Pals followed Rudolf Steiner to Dornach and took part in the ongoing work on the first Goetheanum.
Leopold van der Pals welcomed Steiner’s proposition. He based his score for the Oberufer Christmas Plays on medieval melodies, added contemporary accents and included pieces of old choral music.
who translated the Oberufer Christmas plays?
Alfred Cecil Harwood (1898-1975) translated the plays to English in 1944, blending the style of Shakespeare and the Bible to achieve a language that approximates the old dialect. He, his friend Owen Barfield, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien formed the writers’ group The Inklings.
Daphne Olivier, Harwood’s wife, introduced him to Rudolf Steiner in 1924, and the couple founded the first Waldorf School in England, now called Michael Hall.
Are they performed elsewhere?
Oberufer Christmas Plays have long been performed in Germany, Austria and Hungary as emblems of a common heritage that spans a thousand years.
These unique symbols of cultural identity found determined guardians in the Oberufer play director Michael Wendelin (1861-1930), Hans Klein and his son Ferdinand, Karl Eugen Fürst and others.
Hans Klein (1892–1973), a teacher in Bratislava, first witnessed the Paradise Play in 1926. He saw it as an “act of worship, a solemn ministry. One immediately felt transported to the cradle of dramatic art and saw the young drama grow out of the primordial part of the religious.”
Like Schröer before him, Klein made it his mission to keep the Oberufer plays alive, and in the Benedictine Abbey of Rohr in Lower Bavaria found a community that staged the plays in their traditional form.
Karl Eugen Fürst (1907–1997) helped with the Oberufer Christmas Plays until 1942/1943. What they must have meant to actors and audiences in those terrible war years is worth reflecting on.
By the 1960s the plays were staged in several West German churches, and more than 200 performances followed up to 1974 in Central Europe.
What is their relevance today?
What the Oberufer Christmas Plays portray is in stark contrast to the preoccupations of our fast-moving age that is losing its connection to the spiritual world formerly manifested in organised religion.
But even as the distance between their origins and the present increases, their enduring relevance is the function of a spiritual homeland, and an ocular that grants vivid glimpses of European Christianity’s roots.
Should they be staged in other cultural settings?
Ferdinand Klein recalls that their performance was well received in China and Japan, where their stories were readily understood, just like plays by Shakespeare.
But such performances are lessons in foreign cultural history and cannot be equated with the loving maintenance of a national heritage.
Imagine it like the staging of the story of Diwali in European settings: interesting and moving, to be sure, but nevertheless a distant folklore’s treasure.
One sees no compelling reason why Waldorf Schools far from the medieval Christian sphere should be performing the Oberufer Christmas Plays.
Could they be staged in the holy land?
If they could be performed in the place of their story’s historic setting is a question explosive in all its aspects, and even angels may fear to tread …
In theory it ought to be possible, but in practice it appears otherwise, especially at present.
Though the only peace formula with a chance of success was first proclaimed on Middle Eastern soil, to “love thy enemy” and “turn the other cheek” has as little – or even less – chance there as in other parts of the world.
“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use and persecute you.” (Matthew 5:43–44)
A great calamity
One hundred years ago today, the first Goetheanum caught fire. The blaze lit up the New Year’s night of 1922/1923 as it destroyed Rudolf Steiner’s nearly completed project: a School for Spiritual Science with a stage for his cycle of modern mystery plays, conceived for the renewal of spiritual life he was working towards. (3)
After an exhausting night of watching the great fire that destroyed what was so dear to his heart and so important to his work, Steiner introduced the scheduled performance thus:
“My dear friends! The greatest pain knows to be silent. And you will understand why I shall say only a few words before we begin the Kings Play. The work that was done with so much love and devotion over the last ten years by many enthusiastic friends of our movement has been destroyed in a single night.
I would just like to say that the work which, for all too short a time, seemed as if it could become a work of salvation, and for which the most self-sacrificing work, even quite dangerous work, has been carried out by many of our friends, deserves the deepest gratitude that can be expressed in the spirit of our movement.
Since we presuppose that everything we do within our movement is a necessity in the present civilization of mankind, let us continue what was intended, as far as it is possible in the framework left to us. Even in this hour, when the flames that are causing us such pain are still burning outside, we shall perform the play that was promised for the end of this course, and which our course participants are counting on.
I will also give the scheduled lecture tonight at eight o’clock, here in the carpenter’s workshop. In this way we want to express that even the misfortune that has struck us, and which cannot be described in words, must not crush us; but that our pain should call us to continue to accomplish what we consider our duty, insofar as we have the strength to do so. (…)
These are just a few words I wanted to say to you before we begin our performance. It cannot be a showpiece, but it should show the art through which the people once elevated themselves to what they held most sacred. And if one takes this into account, it cannot be deemed inappropriate to let this holy solemnity appear before our souls, especially out of deepest pain.” (2)
(1) Ferdinand Klein, Erinnerung an die Oberuferer Spiele
(2) Steiner’s introductions of the plays, German PDF
(3) Christoph Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner – A Biography
The Oberufer Shepherds Play – Performer Edition, Text and Music, free PDF
Christmas Plays from Oberufer – The script of all three plays, with director’s indications, stage and lighting directions, and detailed costume designs.
As always, very informative and well written with so much background to help one grasp the full picture ♥️
Thank you, Corrie, that is so good to hear!
My husband Stephen Sheen, for many years a teacher at Michael Hall, Sussex, UK, acted in these plays every year and played many different parts, even the Angel in the Paradise play one year. Mostly he played the Red King but often took other parts in the other plays and one year was in all three. He recently wrote an article, basically saying that these plays should not be thought of as ‘productions’ in the modern sense of the word but Rituals and that is why all teachers were encouraged to be in them whether they had acted before or not. It used to be a tradition that the new class 1 and 2 teachers would play Mary and Joseph, if that was possible. When we went to America and were helping a young Waldorf school there, Stephen introduced the school community to the Oberufer plays. We often performed them in a local church as well as at the school and they were very well received.
Thank you for your contribution, Libby! I should like to read that article, if possible.