The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen:

Not so much to explain what we are about to attempt on stage before you, but rather to point to the sources of the art of eurythmy, I would like to say a few words to introduce our attempt at a eurythmic performance. For it goes without saying that an artistic endeavor would not be truly artistic if what is presented first requires explanation. Art must speak for itself through direct perception. What is at issue here is that this eurythmic art, I may say, draws from new artistic sources and that it also makes use of the special tools of the human being in a way that has not yet been done in art. Just as everything for which this building, the Goetheanum, represents a kind of representation, ultimately leads back to Goethe's world view, so our eurythmy also leads back to Goethe's view of art, Goethe's artistic and in such a way that the view of the living world that Goethe made his own and which is truly still far from being sufficiently understood and appreciated, is taken as the basis for the training of a special art of movement.

This art of movement or eurythmy cannot be confused – or at least should not be confused – with all kinds of similar things such as dance, sign language, facial expressions and the like. Because everything that is sign language and facial expressions is basically avoided in our eurythmy. This eurythmy is a real silent language as a form of expression.

The poetic arts, they initially use the spoken language. But the spoken language is a confluence of two elements: from the side of the intellect, what flows into the spoken language is what is conceptual and imaginative. But anyone who is able to follow the linguistic, especially when it is poetically or artistically shaped, in terms of feeling, will become aware that language is permeated by a will element from within the whole human being, so that the element of imagination and the element of will come to expression in spoken language even when the poetic art makes use of this spoken language.

Now, however, one can say: artistically, it is not that which is grasped by the imagination, by the idea, by the thoughts of man. Artistic impression arises only from the fact that we immerse ourselves, so to speak, in the creative weaving of the world, to the exclusion of the abstract, the intellectual element, so that we have, in the language that art in particular must use, so to speak, the necessity not to appear entirely artistic. The truly artistic person therefore also feels that there can only be so much that is truly artistic in language if, on the one hand, a musical element flows into it and, on the other, a plastic, formative element flows into it.

One could say that our age is not a very artistic age, that our age also perceives poetry in a prosaic way, in terms of content. Other ages, which, through a certain naivety of the people, are more involved in the artistic conception, did not see the literal content in poetry, but rather the rhythmic, the metrical, the melodious element, which underlies the literal content, as the essential - or also the plastic, the formative element.

In eurythmy, an attempt has been made to study – through what could be called, in the Goethean sense, a sensory-supersensory observation – everything that is present in the human larynx and its neighboring organs in the way of movement patterns when a person utters speech sounds. In the case of spoken language, however, it is the case that the human being directly communicates to the air waves what he can reveal from the movement systems of the larynx and its neighboring organs. But if one studies the real organization of the human being through spiritual science, then one comes to the conclusion that the larynx and what surrounds it for the development of speech is, in principle, a repetition on a small scale of the whole human organism. And if we can work out which movement patterns flow into the movement of the air – which is present when we make use of phonetic language – then we can express not the movement itself, but the movement patterns through the whole human being. And so you will see – without there being anything arbitrary about it – the whole human being or groups of people on the stage before you, so to speak, become the larynx, so that in what the human being expresses through his limbs or in what the groups express through their positions, through their movements in relation to one another, the same thing is struck that otherwise radiates from the larynx into the air vibrations.

For those who have an understanding of such things, I would like to say: just as light, as a small vibration, relates to the larger, more widespread vibrations of vibrating electricity, which underlies wireless telegraphy, so that which takes place in the larynx relates to that which is developed for the whole human mobility in eurythmy. It is not, therefore, a case of trying to express something by random gestures or some kind of mere mimicry, but rather, in the same way that sound follows sound in the human spoken language, movement follows movement in the silent language of eurythmy. But because the element of thought is excluded, because only the will element is set in motion, the perception of what is being presented eurythmically is artistic from the outset. The thought element, the ideal element, is excluded. And by using the human being himself as an instrument for the eurythmic performance, one can see how all the riddles of the world can be seen in this human being, in his possibilities of movement. That is the important thing, that the riddles of the world can be seen in the movements that are performed here in eurythmy.

Therefore, however, it is really the case that either musical elements, which you will hear on one side, can be accompanied, illustrated, I would say, by the eurythmic elements, or that you can receive the poetry recited in the accompaniment of the eurythmic presentation at the same time as the recitation. Through the recitation, the poetry comes to life in the spoken language. But poetry is already based on the plastic or musical element – if the art of recitation is not practised as it is often practised in the present day, where it is not at its height, but in such a way that it achieves artistic results from the outset. Not in the way that recitation is practised, where attention is paid to the literal content, but to the melodious, rhythmic element. This is the basis of eurythmy, and this must be brought to bear in the recitation that accompanies the sequence of sounds. Just as the sequence of tones is accompanied by the musical element, so the silent art of eurythmy must be accompanied by the art of recitation of what is heard on the other side as poetry.

All that eurythmy can offer today is actually only a beginning, and in this regard I ask you to be lenient with the presentation, because we know full well that of what we have in mind as a eurythmic art, today we can only offer a beginning. It will be seen particularly when the things that are poetically shaped are rendered through eurythmy that this eurythmic rendering is particularly suitable for those poems - such as, for example, the 'Quellenwunder' which you will see today – which are not formed from the outset on the basis of the literal content, but on the basis of the rhythm, on the rhythm of the thoughts that follow one another, on the rhythm in relation to the meaning. This lends itself particularly well to eurythmy expression, which is, so to speak, eurythmy felt in that it is written down.

And so you will see how, by using the human being as an instrument for this silent eurythmic language, Goethe's artistic spirit is truly fulfilled. This artistic spirit is particularly beautifully expressed when Goethe says in his book on Winckelmann: “When man's healthy nature works as a whole , when he feels himself to be part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when a sense of harmony gives him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult in having reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” In fact, this is what is attempted in eurythmy: to overcome all subjective arbitrariness, which of course must permeate our speech, so that what is expressed is expressed with an inner necessity, as if the human being were an expression of the whole of nature itself, in which he is interwoven.

That is why, when performing eurythmically, one feels something particularly strongly, as we will try to express after the break in the second part of the program. There we will try to reproduce in eurythmy what we call a choir of gnomes and sylphs. Today it is believed that the truth of nature is revealed only in abstract thoughts and in abstract laws of nature. The time will come when we will know that nature in itself, creating nature, is much richer, much more inwardly meaningful than what abstract thought and abstract natural law can give, and that there is indeed a deep truth in a saying such as Goethe's: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, that person feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” This cannot come merely from abstract thought, from experiment, from natural law. What is needed to understand nature is something that must be felt gradually: one's understanding of nature must develop from mere abstract thought to real comprehension, to artistic comprehension, to artistic insight into the riddles and secrets of nature. Then one finds oneself in that dialogue between man and nature, as I have tried to express it in the choir of gnomes and sylphs.

But as everything that is presented here through this work is actually a matter for the future, I would like to emphasize once again that I ask you to take our presentation with indulgence. For we know full well that today we can only make a beginning, perhaps only an attempt at a beginning of our eurythmic art. But we are also convinced that if what underlies this desire for eurythmic art is further developed, then, especially if contemporaries take an interest in the matter, either either we ourselves or probably others will develop these eurythmy attempts into a complete art, which can then be presented alongside the other art forms as something truly justified and equal.

“Song of the Spirits over the Waters” by J. W. v. Goethe
The Fairy Tale of the Miracle of the Spring by R. Steiner with music by Walther Abendroth
From the Davidsbündlertänzen by Schumann
Saying from Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul (44)
“To Brother-in-Law Cronos“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul (45)
“Poems” from “Parabolisch” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Metamorphosis of Plants” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Fisherman“ by J. W. v. Goethe, followed by a piece from ‘Poissons d'or’ by Claude Debussy
From ‘The Awakening of the Soul’ by Rudolf Steiner
“Professor Palmström” by Christian Morgenstern
“The Skirt“ by Christian Morgenstern
“The Mouse Trap” by Christian Morgenstern
“The Authority” by Christian Morgenstern
“The Oste“ by Christian Morgenstern
“A Modern Fairy Tale” by Christian Morgenstern

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As I always do before these performances, allow me to say a few words today as well – certainly not to explain the performance, that would be a very unartistic undertaking. Artistic things must work through their own impression and need no explanation. But since this is a new art form, created from special new artistic sources, it may be permissible to say a few words about this new artistic source. What you will see on the stage will consist of all kinds of movements, which will be performed by the limbs of the human body itself, movements of individuals or movements in groups, which will then be in a certain relationship to the relationship of the individual persons in the groups, and so on. What is all this that appears as movement of the human being and of groups of people? Well, it is nothing other than a kind of silent language, a real language, but one that is not arbitrarily constructed, not constructed in such a way that random gestures or pantomime have been taken to form a more complicated kind of sign language. No, that is not the case. Rather, it is a matter of creating something that is completely in the character of the human inner movements, in the sense of Goethe's view of art and Goethe's artistic attitude. So that the eurythmy you are about to see here actually uses the whole human being, indeed groups of people, as a means of expression, just as spoken language is otherwise used as a means of expression by the larynx and its neighboring organs.

If we gain knowledge in a suitable way, through, to use this Goethean expression, sensual-supersensible observation, provided, of course, that we can apply this sensual-supersensible observation, if we thereby gain knowledge of the movements, the movement tendencies that are present when speaking in sound and also when singing in the larynx and its neighboring organization, if one acquires knowledge of these, as I said, mainly movement tendencies through sensory-supersensible observation, then one can transfer these movement forms, which one can study in this way, to the whole human being. So that you will actually see how, in a sense, the whole human being, even the group of people in front of you, becomes a moving larynx. The movements that you see performed here are not arbitrarily invented, but are entirely modeled on the impulses of movement, the driving forces of movement, which can be found in the larynx and its neighboring organs when speaking in tones.

It is the same as the great, powerful Goethean view of the metamorphosis of all living things, applied here to the artistic. Goethe rejects the notion that, for example, the whole plant is nothing more than a complex, developed leaf, so that anyone who understands the whole plant in its form sees in it a complex, developed leaf, and in the leaf only an elementary, simple plant, but a whole plant.

But it is the same with all living things. One can say: precisely in the moving larynx - its movements are, after all, the basis of the movements of the air that occur here as I speak to you - in the moving larynx, one has, in miniature, everything that the will can conjure up from the moving human organism. By transferring these movements, which one obtains by studying the natural movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, to the whole human being, one really does get something that corresponds much more to the artistic than our ordinary spoken language. Even when it is artistically shaped into poetry or song, two elements are mixed into our ordinary spoken language: one is the element of thought, I would even say that it comes from the head. In our civilized languages, this element of thought is something that is already inclined towards the conventional, something that has gradually lost more and more of its elementary origin in human nature and therefore has little artistic value left in it. For the artistic is based precisely on the exclusion of the rational, the conceptual, the imaginative, on immersing oneself directly in the secrets, in the riddles of the moving existence, without concepts, without ideas. This can be done by using the human being himself, as we are doing here, as an instrument, as a means of expression. This can be done if one has a language that strips away all thought and uses only the element of will for its revelation.

But that is not the only thing we achieve. When do we learn our spoken language? We learn it in early childhood, that is, at a time when we are not yet fully aware of ourselves as human beings, at a time when we are, so to speak, still waking up to life. And in the same way, humanity learned its language at a time when consciousness was not yet as bright as it was in historical times. Learning to speak, insofar as language is interspersed with thoughts, definitely falls back into unconscious stages of human development, and as a result there is something dream-like, something unconscious, about spoken language. After all, the unconscious is popular today. But here in eurythmy we strive for the opposite: we strive for the fully conscious, indeed the superconscious, in human movement.

If you reflect on the dream, you will tell yourself, there are confused thought forms in the dream. But movements, at least when a person does not dream morbidly and rages in his dreams, movements in dreams are also only imagined. One imagines that one is making these or those movements, that one is moving; but one does not really move in dreams, one only has ideas in dreams, not real movements.

The opposite is the case with eurythmy. There, thoughts are suppressed and movements occur. Precisely the will element - in contrast to the thought element - occurs. Therefore, I would say that while everything that wants to delve more deeply into the spoken language leads back to the dream-like element, here in eurythmy there is a complete awakening, an over-awakening. Therefore, there is nothing more to be fought in this eurythmy than any tendency towards the mystical, the hazy, the dreamy. The opposite of the dreamy, the fully conscious movement in artistic forms is what is striven for here. There must be nothing arbitrary about it. So that you do not think, for example, that what you see as the silent language of eurythmy when a poem is recited here are randomly invented forms or gestures. When two groups or two individuals perform the same thing in eurythmy in different places, the individual differences cannot be any different than when the same sonata is performed in different places. Nothing is based on arbitrary pantomime, nothing on arbitrary gestures, but just as music has a lawful sequence in its melodic elements, so here everything is in the sequence of the movements. It is a silent, moving music, this eurythmy.

Therefore, I ask you to pay particular attention to how we work our way out of the beginning. But today we are actually still at the beginning, even if we have come a little further than we were six months ago. At the beginning, there was still something mimic here or there in our performances. Now you will see for yourselves in the grotesques that we present how all mime in our performances is avoided, how the forms are actually found out of similar soul impulses as any text to harmonious or melodious music is even found.

I ask you to take this into account especially when reciting the words accompanying the eurythmy. On the one hand, you will see how one can accompany eurythmy musically. But mainly you will see how what you encounter in the silent language of eurythmy is simultaneously presented by us in recitation. Today, the art of recitation is actually in a state of decadence. We seek to lead the art of recitation back to Goethe's view of art. Goetheanism [and Goethean artistic attitude] is misunderstood in many ways today. Just yesterday I received another letter in which the writer, a lawyer, was annoyed about the expression Goetheanum. He claims that something like that is not German, and that at least this building should not be called Goetheanum because it is not German. It should be called the Goethe Building or the Goethe Temple – the Goethe Temple will be particularly German! This is the suggestion made by the gentleman in question. You come across the strangest things in the present day. But people act very self-confidently in the present day, especially if they have been a choir student or a reserve lieutenant. You see, my dear audience, the art of recitation must indeed become something again, something like it was when Goethe, for example, rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with his actors like a conductor with a baton. That is to say, it is not the literal that is important in recitation; the literal is not the actual artistic element in poetry. What is truly artistic is either the musical or the plastic, the formative. Schiller never had the literal content in his mind first when writing his most important poems; that came later, he had a melodious, indeterminate melodious structure from which he started. And there is actually only as much of the artistic in a poem as is there, apart from the literal content, as inner rhythm, inner beat and musicality. Or one could say: the musical element is more present in Schiller, the shaped, plastic element is more present in Goethe. Whereby one feels tempted to look through the words at very specific forms. When poetry is not oriented towards the literal, the literal content, but towards meter, rhythm, and form, then eurythmizing is particularly easy.

In the fairy tale poem 'Quellenwunder' you will see how a poem that is already conceived in eurythmic terms from its very origin - albeit in an inner soul rhythm that repeatedly returns to the same motif - inwardly forms each individual paragraph, so that the forms of eurythmy can then also be added to the matter as a matter of course. But it can also be done with something like Goethe's poem about the metamorphosis of plants and animals, where everything is based on the observation of plastic natural forms, and everything can be translated into eurythmy as a matter of course.

In the second part, after the break, we will show you an attempt I made to depict something pictorially in a choir of gnomes and sylphs, which is otherwise only found in nature through abstract concepts, through ideas. What we are dealing with is something that still seems paradoxical to humanity today: nature in its becoming and essence, in its weaving and being, is so inwardly rich that our concepts, as we express them in natural laws, are far too poor to express what nature's richness is. Only gradually will it be understood that we must move from concepts to images, to images that also take in the emotional element, where, in wanting to understand the becoming and weaving of nature, we must also take in what takes place in the human soul as humor, as comedy, alongside the serious. The abstract laws of nature, which are of course far from all comedy and humor, which do not even touch our innermost being, they only represent the poorest becoming and weaving of nature. But the upward surge to the artistic, to plasticity, the upward surge to the musical, also leads us deeper into the riddles of nature.

Of course, what you will see here is nothing more than a beginning, because the eurythmic art is still very much in its infancy. But we are convinced that if our contemporaries show a certain interest in this beginning, it will be capable of ever greater perfection. For indeed, the human arbitrariness that works through our speech ceases in eurythmy, and it can be that by using the human being himself, the movements inherent in his entire organism, as an instrument, it can be that thereby fulfill the Goethean artistic spirit in the way that Goethe expressed in the beautiful words with which he sought to characterize the great Winckelmann: “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” Such an artistic attitude can best be fulfilled if one does not use the abstract, but the human being itself, who is a microcosm, as a means of expression, as a tool for the artistic. But, as I said, this is only the beginning. If our contemporaries and future generations take an interest, our conviction that our eurythmy can become more and more perfect will be fulfilled. At the moment I must ask you to be lenient with us in this area, because it is really only a beginning, perhaps only an attempt at a beginning. But this beginning will either be developed further by ourselves or probably by others, the latter probably more so, so that eurythmy can establish itself as a fully-fledged art form alongside the other fully-fledged, but older art forms.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As always, I would like to say a few words today for those of you who have not yet been to a performance of this kind. Please do not think that I am doing this to explain what is to be artistically presented. That would, of course, be a thoroughly unartistic approach from the outset, because everything that aspires to be art must make an immediate impression. But here, in this eurythmic art, it is a matter of opening up truly new sources of art and, I would say, using a new artistic tool. And some information about these two things must indeed be provided in advance in order to understand the presentation itself.

What is being striven for here will be seen on stage in the form of all kinds of seemingly incomprehensible movements, which are performed by individual people by moving their limbs - namely the arms and hands, moving as a whole, and also movements that are performed by groups of people put together and so on. All that is being attempted here is not just a further development of a sum of, let us say, random gestures, not something pantomime-like, but it is actually about the artistic expression of a very specific kind of lawfulness that is rooted in the human organism itself.

Like everything that should proceed from the movement that this structure represents, our eurythmy also goes back in its intention to the Goethean worldview, to the Goethean view of art and to the Goethean artistic ethos. However, ask you not to understand my reference to Goetheanism as if Goethe were the only thing we have to consider, insofar as he lived in the 18th century and the first third of the 19th century. For us, Goethe is a living cultural factor that continues to have an effect. And the Goethe who is alive for us today everywhere, the Goethe of 1920, is something quite different from the Goethe who died in 1832.

What is at issue now is that all arbitrariness is excluded from the development of our eurythmic art. If I may use Goethe's expression, I would like to say: through sensual and supersensory observation, it has first been investigated which movement systems – I say expressly movement systems – are present in the human larynx and its neighboring organs when the outer air is set in motion through this human larynx, palate, tongue and so on, and phonetic speech is created. Here we really make the remarkable discovery that everything that is attached to the larynx as an organ of expression for speech is, in a sense, a metamorphosed repetition of the organization of the whole human being, in the sense that Goethe developed his theory of metamorphosis, which is really still not properly appreciated today, as a method of understanding the living. He said: the whole plant is basically nothing more than a complex leaf, and each leaf is an elementary whole plant. So you can say: everything that is a function of the larynx is actually a metamorphosed function of the whole human organism.

What can be shaped as the movement system that, when excited, moves the air in the speech sounds, can be transferred to the whole person. So here on stage, you have, as it were, the individual person or whole groups of people with everything that goes with them, like a large walking larynx in the silent language that this eurythmy speaks. Eurythmy is therefore a silent language that is formed according to the same laws as spoken language. However, it must be taken into account that when the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs are transmitted to the air, the movement impulses are converted into movements at the lowest speed, so that the individual movement is not perceived. Strangely enough – one can, of course, find a more fortunate word for what I want to say – strangely enough, one can now find that the volitional element that works in man behaves in such an agitating way towards the movements of the individual limbs of the human organism, which of course naturally offer greater resistance, and therefore have to move more slowly – and not, in a manner imperceptible to the eyes, to cause only audible movements, but visible ones. of the human organism, which naturally offer greater resistance and therefore have to move more slowly – and not, as is imperceptible to the eyes, to evoke only audible movements, but to evoke visible movements. This transformation, this metamorphosis of what takes place in the human speech organs into movements of the whole human organism, that is our eurythmy.

Therefore, there is nothing arbitrary about this eurythmic art. On the contrary, everything can be found in the regular, lawful succession of movements, just as everything can be found in the musical element itself in the lawful succession of the melodious element. It is music that has become visible or language that has become visible, especially.

One can say that precisely by striving for this, one achieves a stronger artistic effect than through the spoken language when this spoken language becomes the expression of poetry. In our civilized languages, poetry, in terms of its artistic element, already suffers from the fact that, to a large extent, a conventional element flows into our languages, that which only serves for social communication from person to person. Of course, the poet must use all of this, but it is an unartistic element of language formation, and it becomes particularly unartistic to the extent that the thought element, the element of ideas, mixes with the linguistic element. In the linguistic element, the thought element and the will element, which both reveal themselves from the human soul, flow together. But now one can say: something is all the more artistic the more the thought element recedes. The more we are able to empathize with an object or process in such a way that we do so to the exclusion of the ideal, to the exclusion of the abstract, to the exclusion of the thought element, the more the impression is an artistic one, which is particularly achieved in eurythmy by the fact that the thought element is completely excluded and only the will impulses that otherwise accompany the thought element are transferred into the movements of the limbs.

I could also characterize the matter from a different perspective. You just need to think about how our thinking life is structured. It is the case in our time that in our ordinary [dreams] images play a role. Our ordinary [dreams], if one is not directly pathological, are accompanied by images of movement. We move in our dreams, but the movements are only images. The element of movement recedes completely into the element of the dream. The opposite is the case with eurythmy. There the element of thought recedes completely and the element of will comes to the fore. Therefore one can say: in an ordinary dream there is a consciousness that is tuned down; in eurythmy there is an over-consciousness, a stronger waking up than the everyday waking up of consciousness. That is the essential point: there is absolutely nothing dream-like in the language that is given as a silent language in eurythmy.

You know that [humanity actually developed language at a time when people had not yet awakened to full consciousness] – people developed the element of language in their childhood period, and the individual also develops language with a still dream-like childlike consciousness before the actual abstract awakens. Thus, language really does grow out of a kind of subconscious. This can also be seen from the fact that it is not the civilized languages that have the most developed logical grammar, but precisely the less civilized languages. Thus we can see how the organization of language reveals itself out of the unconscious, just as eurythmy reveals itself as a visible, thoroughly conscious, and no less artistic element.

Therefore, I ask you to appreciate the fact that eurythmy excludes all pantomime, all gesticulation, all dance-like movements, and that it is therefore a real, silent language, developed in accordance with its own inner laws. That is why this eurythmy is accompanied on the one hand by musical instruments, which basically express the same thing by different means as is presented on stage on the other hand, and on the other hand why eurythmy is accompanied by the art of poetry.

In doing so, you will see that when we have what is presented on stage in eurythmy accompanied by recitation and declamation, we are obliged to fall back on the old, better forms of recitation and declamation as were customary in a less unartistic age than our own, where people worked out of rhythm, out of tact, not only everyday craftsmanship but also almost all artistic perception of nature and the world. One can feel and sense how a form of eurythmy was already at the root of everything artistic in primitive cultures.

With truly great poets, let us say with Schiller, for example, we find that with his most significant poems he did not have the literal content in his soul first – that only came later – but rather a kind of indeterminate, melodious element that was there like a ladder, to which the words then joined. And as we know, Goethe rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with his actors himself, baton in hand like a conductor.

This artistic sensibility has been completely lost today. Today we know very little about the fact that there is only as much art in poetry as there is musicality in it, or as there are echoes of beat, rhythm and melody in it – everything that is literal is basically inartistic – or even [that] the formative element is to be thought of as already shaping movement, just as it is presented to us in eurythmy, by the way.

Therefore, we must also refrain from the art of recitation, which is still so popular today, and which places the main emphasis on the prose content of the poetry, on its emphasis and its form, but we must place emphasis on overcoming this in the art of recitation and to return to the understanding of rhythm and meter in recitation and declamation – the actual artistic element that underlies the literal content and which, in reality, is the aesthetic element in poetry.

From this point of view, it will also be quite understandable to you, dear attendees, that both our art of recitation and declamation, as we must use it here in the company of eurythmy, and our eurythmic art itself, are still met with misunderstanding today. But that is, after all, the case with every new cultural phenomenon – especially with spiritual cultural phenomena. These misunderstandings will be overcome in time.

In the first part of the program, we will present you with all kinds of nature imaginations. First you will see how something that has already been thought mainly in eurythmy — even if it is eurythmically conceived in the soul process —, and that is how it has already been thought in eurythmy, can be automatically translated into eurythmy. This is the case with the “miracle of the source” from my “mystery dramas”, which will be presented afterwards.

In the second part, I will show how to present in eurythmy what I have tried to express as a kind of chorus of gnomes and sylphs, to show how necessary it is – this is an extract from one of my 'mystery dr » – if we really want to understand nature, we must go beyond the abstract concepts that are the only ones provided by today's method of knowledge and which are actually far too limited to encompass the full richness of nature's being and becoming. This still sounds paradoxical to most people today, but in the course of time it will have to be recognized that the inner weaving and essence of nature cannot be grasped with the abstractions of the intellect, which then find expression in the laws of nature.

Of course, in our eurythmy performance today, something like this is still very, very imperfectly portrayed, as it is, for example, in the form of a choir of sylphs and gnomes. But instead of merely abstractly presenting the laws of nature, we will see things in the living artistic realm, and we will see that they can then also be portrayed. And as paradoxical as it may still appear to modern man, especially to the scientific man of today, that in order to fully comprehend nature, one must strive to transform abstract ideas into artistic, pictorial conceptions of natural and other world events, it will still have to happen.

And so you see that the instrument for eurythmy must be the human being itself. Just as one instrument or another is used in the other arts, eurythmy uses the human being itself as an instrument. And today we will still accompany that which appears as a silent language in music and recitation. But we use the human being in such a way that through him, who is in fact a microcosm, that which, I would say, the world itself wants to express as its riddles, as its secrets, and which can never be expressed through mere ideas or abstract understanding. In this way one achieves what I believe to be a Goethean artistic attitude, which he expresses in his beautiful book on Winckelmann when he says: “When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.” And indeed, if we truly bring to expression what man, placed at the summit of nature, can achieve by transforming his otherwise artistic nature, then we have attained something of that can be said to be the case when the individual human being does not express himself in his egoistic unity, but makes himself into a tool, a means of expression for what nature and the world want to convey to us. In this sense, eurythmy can indeed be considered the beginning of something promising, in the Goethean sense of art. Goethe says so beautifully: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him, man feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Real art cannot be sought in the merely arbitrary, but real art can only be sought in representations of what has been overheard from nature's riddles. But all that we can offer you today through our silent language, which we call eurythmy, I ask you to take with indulgence. Because it is only a beginning, perhaps even just an attempt at a beginning. Everything still needs to be further developed. But we are convinced that if our contemporaries take an interest in the matter - we are our own harshest critics and can only see it as a weak beginning today - and if, based on this interest, suggestions can be received for further development , then through us, or probably through others, this eurythmic art will be developed to such an extent that it can stand fully justified, perhaps only after a long time, alongside other fully justified but older art forms.

As I said, we are our own harshest critics, and we know that what we are able to offer of this art form so far is just a beginning. This is not just a figure of speech, but something we say in all honesty and sincerity.

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Dear attendees,

Anyone observing the development of art in our time will find that a whole series of young people aspiring to art are striving towards certain new goals for the development of art, and you are of course aware that these new artistic endeavors appear under the most diverse slogans. If you look for the reasons, the deeper reasons for these often extraordinarily questionable endeavors, you find that in fact in all areas of art, artistic natures themselves feel today: The means of expression that the arts have used in the most diverse epochs are actually exhausted, and a new source of artistic inspiration must be sought in various fields; in a sense, there must be a renewed appeal to the elementary, to the primitive artistic experience of man.

But when such an endeavor arises, then one must at least start from a very specific perception of the artistic. Now, as far as it can be seen in world development, everything artistic has two essential sources. One is external observation. This external observation can only provide art with something that it can process if it does not first pass through concepts, ideas, or images as an observation of nature. In more recent times, attempts have been made in various artistic fields to create something artistic from the immediate first impression that, let us say, a landscape can make. It was found that the old methods of painting had also been exhausted in this respect, that people had painted far too much from ideas, from impressions of nature that had already been processed, that they had, I might say, captured the moment before they had time to reflect, what was revealed to them in nature through light and air and so on. In short, the underlying aim is to present something artistically that is the result of external observation, but an observation that does not make it to the thinking grasp, because the thinking grasp is the opposite of everything artistic, is actually the death of everything artistic. Where there is a lot of symbolizing, a lot of spinning, a lot of concocting ideas, where one is supposed to arrange forms and colors and the like, art is killed. That is why people have tried to capture immediate impressions. They called these “impressions” and strove for an impressionistic art.

But for the time being, an important obstacle stands in the way of painting and sculpture. It is difficult for us to find in the present – here in this building it has been attempted – to capture form and color so directly, in sculpture and painting, to the exclusion of everything symbolic, everything conceptual, that one can let the artistic take effect with the exclusion of everything ideal, with the exclusion of everything conceptual. And once this building is finished, it will be seen that no complicated mystical ideas were sought to be embodied here through sculptural or pictorial forms, at least not in the main, that no symbols , but that the impression – both the architectural-sculptural and the sculptural-pictorial – should be sought directly in form and color, skipping the conceptual.

On the other hand, another source of the artistic is the inner experience of the human being, the artistic that rises to inner contemplation, and this source of the artistic has also been appealed to again from various sides in the [present-day] era, in the present. One tried to bring to expression that which one can only feel inwardly, experience inwardly. They tried it, for example, in the field of painting. But one can say: in the circles of younger artists who have endeavored in this direction, only questionable forms have been expressed up to now – for the simple reason that everything that is line, that is color, that is form, in a truly extraordinary way, if one wants to handle it technically, is opposed to that which is inner human experience.

Now there are two arts that seek to express inner human experience directly: music and poetry. But even in these arts, it is apparent that the source that the newer sense of art seeks to open up cannot yet be found in broader circles, wherever it is sought. The musical, that is in its form in the harmonic, in the melodic element, is not designed to directly express the full inner life as experienced by man, so that the musical is extremely reluctant to be expressionistic, to be visionary, and even something unhealthy enters into the musical when it wants to move towards the visionary.

On the other hand, poetry is terribly dependent on the development of human language. And here we have to say that our civilized languages have already come so far that they have an extraordinary amount of conventional thought elements. So that the poet today is obliged to express himself literally, actually at the expense of the original elementary artistic feeling, but in so doing enters into the element of thought, which from the outset is the death of all that is truly artistic. So that one can say that a large part of the poetry that is being created today does not actually promote art, but rather represses and kills it. And this can be seen particularly in what people like about poetry today. They often accept poetry as if it were prose, as if it were something that should have an effect through its literal content. But the truly poetic is only to be found in the musical and formal-plastic elements.

Now, if we really delve into the source of our spiritual movement, for which this Goetheanum building is the external representative, if we really delve into it, we come to the development of Goetheanism. In Goethe's entire artistic work, there is one striking thing, ladies and gentlemen. I believe I may say this, for I myself worked for seven years in the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar, and took part in all that, which more or less remains unknown to a larger public, although it is the best of the present. One can say that what has been published from Weimar makes Goethe an extraordinarily effective writer today. Today, we learn a great deal about Goethe from what he did not do. I was most impressed by everything Goethe undertook in the course of his life, not by what he brought to such perfection as his [dramatic] works, such as “Iphigenia”, “Faust” and so on, but by what was left behind, what got stuck in the early beginnings. This also proves outwardly that in Goetheanism one does not have something that died with Goethe himself, but in Goetheanism, my dear audience, one can have something that is still effective in our time and can be made fruitful in our time. Goethe simply had such great artistic intentions that he himself, as a mortal human being, was no longer able to bring these things to anything other than fragments, so that the unfinished actually plays an enormously important role in Goethe's work. That is why today one always has the feeling that there is still a lot to be gained from Goetheanism. Well, this eurythmy, which uses the human being himself as a new artistic instrument and which wants to open up a special new source of art, is taken out of Goetheanism.

One can say that everything you will see performed on stage here, executed by movements of the human arms and other human limbs, performed by groups of people, is by no means arbitrary, these are not random gestures that are invented to accompany some invented for some poem or musical motif; it is something that is inwardly composed and built upon such laws, just as music itself is when it lives out in harmony or reveals itself in the sequence of time in melodious elements. Just as there is nothing arbitrary in music, but everything is inwardly lawful, so it is also with this visible but mute language of eurythmy, which particularly allows itself to be artistically revealed, to be revealed through the most perfect artistic instrument: through the human being himself.

So, you will see a silent language here on stage through the movements of the human limbs or the movements of groups of people. And this silent language has come about through what I call a Goethean expression: sensual-supersensory observation, through a supersensory observation of what actually happens when we reveal the spoken language that underlies ordinary poetry and use it as a means of human expression. Something very peculiar is at work here. This spoken language is a confluence of that which comes from the human thought and that which comes from the human will.

Now, the larynx and its neighboring organs are such that, when the impulses for movement are carried out, they do not come into contact with muscles, but are directly communicated to the outer element of air. The wonderful thing about our larynx is that its cartilaginous structure is directly adjacent to the external element of air. Only this makes it possible for the impulses of the thought element to flow through what the human will exerts on the larynx and its neighboring organs. But this means that something inartistic comes about, especially in poetry, which has to make use of language. The thought element comes in. But at the bottom of this thought element is the will element, coming from the whole human being. I would like to say: the thought, in speech, swims on the waves of the will.

Now in eurythmy, the thought element is completely suppressed. Only that which underlies poetic language as meter, as rhythm, as form, in short, as a plastic and musical element, is transferred into the movements. And this can be done by not speaking phonetically, but by having the whole person or groups of people perform those movements, which are otherwise only present in the larynx and its neighboring organs, as regularly as the larynx otherwise transmits them to the air, so that one then has the will element - opposing it, the muscular organization of the human being.

It is a different matter whether the movement patterns of the larynx and its neighboring organs are transmitted to the air when the mental element is received, and thus cause the movements of the air corresponding to the phonetic language, or whether the will of the person, coming from the whole person, directly impacts the muscle apparatus and sets the limbs in motion. This causes something quite different. The small vibrations that underlie speech, which are no longer perceived as movement, come about because the muscular element is not opposed by the larynx. But in the mute language of eurythmy, the will addresses the muscular element directly, the entire human element of movement, the muscular and skeletal system. And in the mute language of eurythmy, the whole human being, who becomes the larynx, brings forth what otherwise only spoken language brings forth.

In this way, eurythmy becomes an artistic element that always consists of rhythm and meter and arises particularly from the poetic and the musical, and presents a new artistic element to the present.

Therefore, the recitative element – which often alternates with the musical element, but mainly accompanies the silent speech – must be handled differently than recitation is often handled today. And if what is actually intended with the eurythmic element is already misunderstood, then it will be possible to misunderstand the accompaniment of the recitation in many cases today because it cannot go to the literal content – eury thmy would not be accompanied by recitation), but must go to the actual artistic element, which in our present, unartistic time is no longer felt in poetry: to the rhythmic, the metrical, which underlies the literal content. The art of recitation itself must return to the good old forms of recitation, which are still little understood today.

But you will see that when something has already been conceived as poetry in eurythmy, it can be expressed particularly well in the silent speech of eurythmy. Today, in addition to a few other things, we will present a scene from one of my mysteries in eurythmy, in which the laws of the world are expressed in such a way that thoughts alone are not enough to penetrate these laws of the world, but that other means of expression must be used to express what actually lives and weaves in nature. In this way, man is much closer to nature and the world in general than he is in the mere abstract comprehension of the so-called laws of nature, which actually only ever express an external aspect of nature.

But the artistic, too, if it wants to express the inner experience, cannot get by in the present, because when we use colors, when we use forms - no matter whether we use the stylus or the brush - these means of expression still resist the inner experience with the utmost brittleness. And that is why the expressionist pictures of today's younger painters look so strange, because the means to express what is experienced internally, but not yet driven to the inner element, where it becomes thought, because it [then] becomes inartistic.

But on the other hand, nature cannot be interpreted impressionistically; nature itself makes it necessary, so to speak, when we face it humanly, that we do not exclude thought; it cannot be interpreted impressionistically. The actual impression of nature cannot be artistically reproduced. But if you take the human being as a higher instrument, then you have the inner experience that does not come to spoken language, and thus does not come to the thought element, and you take the human being himself, by bringing his movements - that is, what can be observed - to the contemplation of the inner experience, excluding the element of thought. Expression in the immediate impression, that is something that can certainly become a possibility in eurythmy.

Now I am not saying that eurythmy is the only art that should replace other art forms, but I am saying that eurythmy can make it clear what the other means of expression should strive for those who, today, out of a good but still imperfect, I would say childlike, feeling, are looking for new sources of art. That on the one hand. On the other hand, we know full well – we are our own harshest critics – that our eurythmic art is still in its infancy. But we are absolutely convinced that this beginning is capable of perfection. I therefore ask you to accept what we can offer today in our eurythmic art with indulgence. For everything in its infancy is very easily misunderstood. On the other hand, however, we are well convinced that something is offered by this still very imperfect beginning, which, if it is further developed by us or by others, more likely the latter, and if it finds interest among our contemporaries, will be able to stand as a fully-fledged young art alongside the older fully-fledged arts and join them in the future.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
Those who take the trouble to look around in artistic circles today will find that many creative artists have the feeling that the old artistic means have been exhausted in a certain way and that it is no longer possible to approach the original sources of artistic creation with the old artistic means.

All of you here today will have seen the sometimes extraordinarily dubious but, from a certain point of view, not uninteresting attempts by a younger generation of artists to express something new. Sometimes something comes out that a person who does not want to listen to the deeper vibrations of the times may see as something quite paradoxical, perhaps even crazy. And often it is. But today, especially among younger artists, there is something extraordinarily justified behind all this. There is the striving to get closer to the sources of human artistic creation than was the case in the immediately preceding period.

You are aware of the attempts at so-called Impressionism that were made for a time, which were aimed at something that a wider circle could accept. You also know how in the newer attempts, which manifested themselves in all kinds of strange naming, but above all in the expressionistic attempts, it can be seen how in these newer attempts - which also showed certain successes - it was striven to achieve something with new artistic means of expression.

Now, the eurythmy that we want to show you today is about striving in a healthy way for that which is being striven for in a morbid way with inadequate means and from many sides, even in the present day. What we are trying to do is create a new means of expression for art and a new instrument, a new tool. Our eurythmy is a new means of expression in that it is a real language, albeit a mute one. On the stage you will see a wide variety of movements of the arms and other limbs of the human body. You will see how the individual personalities, arranged in groups in relation to each other, move towards and around each other and so on. These are not random gestures. All this has been brought into such a law-governed order after careful observation of the human organization, as it is present, for example, in the harmonic and melodious elements of music itself as a law-governed order.

If we have to make use of spoken language in poetry, then something is entering into the art of poetry today that, when it enters into any art in abundance, actually disintegrates and paralyzes it: that is the element of thought. Our spoken language is the confluence of that which comes from the human mind, the thought element, and that which comes from the whole being of the human being – we like to say: from the heart as its summary: the will element. But in spoken language, the will element has to submit to the thought element. The thoughts swim, as it were, on the moving will element. This can be observed in a profound sense in human speech.

If we start from what should be the starting point for everything that this Goetheanum building represents, then, proceeding from the Goethean artistic ethos and artistic view of the world, we can draw from the possibilities of movement in the human organism something that is truly a eurythmic, mute language, that is not a random gesture, but something that is necessarily derived from the entire organization of the human organism, as phonetic language is derived from the larynx and its neighboring organs.

But when we apply what I would like to call, in Goethe's sense, sensory-supersensory observation, and of course also higher striving, we encounter a remarkable feature of the human body as a whole and of the human speech mechanism in particular. The human speech organs, the larynx and its neighboring organs, are arranged in such a way that the movement patterns that develop into actual movements directly encounter the external air and, by absorbing the thought element, cause air movements. When I speak here, the air moves in a regular way. But because the larynx and its neighboring organs come into direct contact with the external air, their energies and forces give rise to fine, oscillating movements that are perceived not as movements but as sounds.

Now, with the help of eurythmy, we try to switch off the thought element altogether and, drawing on poetry and music, bring forth only that which is the will element. Where the will does not act on the air through the mediation of the larynx, but where the will directly impacts the muscular system, there is resistance. The air does not encounter such resistance from the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs. This is how the small, delicate vibrations that can be heard come about. But when we allow the other expressions of the human being within us to have a direct effect on us, the organism offers resistance; and then, instead of the rapid, small movements, slow and full movements come about, which, however, express the same same thing – only it is easier to use in an artistic sense – [like] today's spoken language, which in the civilized world has essentially become something conventional, that is, unartistic.

That which is elementary and original in man and which in poetry works as rhythm, as beat, as melodious element, as plastic element, can be brought out of poetry through this mute language of eurythmy. But this makes the eurythmic art something that accommodates the dark, awkward, sometimes paradoxical striving of some artists in the present day. The artistic is based on the fact that on the one hand one can immerse oneself in nature in order to find artistic inspiration, but in such a way that one completely eliminates the abstract element of thought in this observation of nature, which underlies the artistic, that one grasps nature, so to speak, without first thinking about it. The moment you start thinking about nature, you lose art. You have to grasp nature in direct observation. You have to grasp it in images.

In more recent times, when, as I have indicated, one was looking for new means of artistic expression, one tried to achieve this to the highest degree in Impressionism, by tried to capture the immediate impression in a painterly, pictorial way, so to speak, the impression that nature makes, or the impression that the processes at work in it make, [the] colors, effects of air. And so quickly in relation to the act of observation that, in view of the speed of observation, one does not even think of processing the things intellectually first. Impression and its reproduction in painting or other art should be something that, with the exclusion of thought, brings about a revelation in an artistic sense. But when observing nature, it is very easy for the means to fall short of such ideals. For if we try to observe nature to the exclusion of thought, nature has too strong an effect on our lower human faculties. Nature itself makes it necessary, so to speak, if we want to face it humanly, that we do not exclude thought. That is why Impressionist art, which wanted to be based on the observation of nature and the immediate impression, was increasingly forced to powerlessness.

On the other hand, that which is artistic can be brought forth from the depths of the human being, from the experience of the inner human being. But even then, thought must be excluded. That is what contemporary expressionists are trying to do. But by using all kinds of means of expression, such as drawing and colors, they show that they have not yet been able to turn artistic means of expression and artistic technique into a means of expressing what is experienced inwardly. For this inner experience must be such that it has not yet developed into a clear, abstract thought, that it is still an experience devoid of thought. For the intellectual kills the artistic.

We are trying in the most diverse fields – and those of the esteemed listeners who have often seen this building in its individual parts will have seen it in the design, in the sculpture, in the painting – we are trying to achieve what is otherwise perhaps attempted out of a certain powerlessness by those who are striving for the best in the present day. But what is being attempted here with eurythmy will one day be able to develop into something that truly combines the expressionist element of art with the impressionist element of art in a healthy way. For only in this combination will we truly achieve what we are seeking to attain by setting the whole human body, the whole human organism, in motion in this silent language of eurythmy in such a way that it is not the thought that is active in speech sounds but only the human will. All that remains is still free from the thought.

But we call forth what we draw from the human soul life in a completely lawful manner from the organism, we place it in direct view. We place the person or the group of people themselves in such a way that the movements that are carried out do not involve the mental element, but at the same time, the direct impression of an inner human experience that is not permeated by thought does arise. This is what nature cannot give — thoughtless impressions. These are evoked by the fact that we place the inner human experience directly before our eyes in a silent language, visible language. The fact that the moving human being stands before us gives the impression that one seeks in vain in nature. And the fact that the human being

with the differentiated inner experience, at the same time, expression is given to present the inner experience as an external view.

I do not wish to imply, esteemed attendees, that this is the final word for the existing ideals of those who today, often out of such artistic impotence, are striving. But these examples can show you that if only this eurythmic art can develop further and proceed as one can proceed in other arts, some of it can be achieved. Of course, what we have to show today is only a beginning, in terms of the forms we have here at the Goetheanum and what its individual aspects are, and what has been achieved. And I ask you to take the artistic performances in such a way that we can now truly move on to new artistic sources, when we can present our attempts in this silent language of eurythmy here.

I would ask you, first of all, to bear in mind that everything we are trying to achieve with our eurythmy is still in its infancy. Those of you who have been to our performances before will have seen how we are trying to improve from month to month. But there is much potential for development in this eurythmy, and even though we definitely feel that we have come a lot further in the last five to six months, in that we have progressed to a composition of forms that we could not have mastered before, we know – we are our own harshest critics – that eurythmy is in its infancy and is therefore open to many misunderstandings.

Many misunderstandings will certainly arise. On the one hand, you will have accompanied this eurythmy with music, which then means a different form of expression for this silent language. But you will also get to see – or mainly hear – the poetic recitation and declamation that recitation and declamation that cannot be done in the way it is becoming popular today in an unartistic time, which is why our eurythmic art must be accompanied by a new form of recitation and declamation. There is only so much real art in the poetic element if the prosaic, literal element is not taken into account. Today, however, people want to emphasize the literal element in recitation. Instead, they take into account the underlying musical , rhythmic, and metrical, the melodious or the spiritual, that which, through the listening to the poetic word, conjures up the image before our inner eye. And so the recitation must also be carried out in such a way that the main emphasis is not placed on the particularly important word or a logical sentence structure, [that] the outward form with which one speaks today, which is actually is not emphasized, but rather that recitation is seen as a companion to eurythmy, taking into account the actual artistic element in poetry. So it is not the literal meaning that is emphasized here; rather, the main emphasis is on the formal element in the poetic art.

You will see in particular that those poems can be easily translated into the silent language of eurythmy that are conceived eurythmically from the outset, from the very inner feeling from which they originated. You will see this, esteemed attendees, in the attempt I have made to reproduce certain inner natural connections, certain inner world connections in a dramatic scene from one of my mystery plays. You will see that the eurythmic art can be an expression of what has already been thought in such movements.

Likewise, in the scenes that follow the intermission in the second part – the images of the gnome and sylph scene with what belongs to them – I have tried to convey something that is of this nature and is still widely misunderstood today. For in this age of intellectual culture, people do not realize that nature is so rich inwardly that it cannot be exhausted by the abstractions that lead to the laws of nature that can be conceived. It may still sound paradoxical to some today, perhaps more than you care to admit, when you are told: To fully grasp the secrets of nature, something will be needed that moves from abstract thought to a certain artistic form, to a rounding out, to a deepening of mere abstract thought, but where thoughts are then completely excluded. Something new must emerge. We will have to take help from elsewhere if we want to unravel the basis of the workings of nature, irony and humor.

In today's natural science, there is not much irony or humor in the contrasting of natural forces with what is being spoken of. That is why it is, I would say, an abstract web that is revealed to us today as knowledge of nature, as a view of nature. So if you want to understand nature completely – and Goethe wanted that – you will have to progress in the art of interpreting the real and therefore beautiful words: When nature begins to reveal its secrets to you, you feel the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. For Goethe, art is something that helps to unravel nature.

And in view of all this, I ask you to be very indulgent. We know that we are at the beginning. But we believe that in this art, which uses man as an instrument, as a tool, and which at the same time uses man as a compendium of the entire works of nature, that something will be developed in this art to an ever greater degree of perfection than is already possible today, either by us or probably by others. If there is even the slightest possibility that our contemporaries will show some interest in this art, then there is no doubt that something significant can be achieved through this art in time. And so I ask for your interest, but also for your forbearance. For we are thoroughly convinced that, even if it takes a long time, there is something in this eurythmic art, which, as I said, is now in its infancy, that can be perfected so that this eurythmic art will one day be able to stand alongside the older established arts as a fully recognized art.

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“Wanderers Sturmlied” by J. W. v. Goethe
Music from the 4th Symphony by Anton Bruckner
From the 6th scene of “Guardians of the Threshold” by Rudolf Steiner
Music from the 4th symphony by Anton Bruckner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (46th) by Rudolf Steiner
Parabase by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (46th) by Rudolf Steiner
To the Cicada by J. W. v. Goethe
“St. Expeditus“ by Christian Morgenstern
“Cupid and Psyche” by J. W. v. Goethe
Satirical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Korfs Verzauberung”; “The Impossible Fact”; “The Shoes”; “The Aesthete”; “The Authority”; “The Mouse Trap”
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals “Seance” by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Joy“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Sorcerer's Apprentice” by J. W. v. Goethe

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

In eurythmy, a sample of which we would like to present to you here today, a special art form is cultivated, an art form that, in the way it appears here, relies on a new artistic instrument, a new artistic tool, namely the moving human being himself, with his inner organic possibilities of movement, and that draws from very special sources.

If one were to describe this art form externally, one would say that it is a kind of silent language. But even though you will see people moving – moving both their limbs and performing movements as individuals or as part of a group – if you also see that, you cannot say that the aim here is to achieve a kind of general sign language or a kind of mimic language that is widespread among people. Everything that the mere momentary gesture would give, or that pantomime or mimicry would give, is avoided here. Rather, the attempt is made to give a thoroughly lawful mute language, a mute language that is brought out of the whole human organism according to the same laws as spoken language itself, [as] audible language is brought out of a particular organ system, out of the larynx and its neighboring organs.

The whole of eurythmy has actually emerged from Goethe's view of art and Goethe's artistic ethos, but in such a way that nothing arbitrary is established, but that the essence, the nature of the human organism is carefully studied through what one can call with Goethe's expression: sensual-supernatural vision.

When one comes up with something like eurythmy, one must surely be inspired by those endeavors that are clearly visible in the present and that are directed towards new means of artistic expression. Today, when we look at contemporary artistic endeavors, we see everywhere that artistic natures in particular are striving to go beyond the old means of artistic expression. We see this in painting, even in sculpture. We can also see it, although it is less noticed, in poetry.

What is actually being striven for? What is the background to this striving? Take the example of painting. Those who, because they are so old today, have experienced that painting as a contemporary one, which did not yet know about the so-called “open air” and the like, they saw that the old artistic means of expression means of expression of painting consisted of, something that was traditionally present, simply to be processed with certain means that one could learn in school, in order to express that which had now also become more or less traditional. Now one got the feeling: these means of expression alone have actually already passed through human thought too strongly. If one still felt painting from the first half of the 19th century - at least the common, [which] was common practice -, one could say: something strongly processed by human thought was already present in the treatment of the means of expression. It is only natural that when one works with certain means of expression for a long time, human thought comes into it, and now knows how to do one thing better or less well. And then one notices in the way it works, in which human thought plays a part, that here thought has played a part.

But even if such a method of treatment may still be artistic in its starting-point, it will be felt to be inartistic after a certain time, when human thought has taken over the treatment of the means of expression. For everything that is actually conceptual, everything that has the quality of an idea, kills every artistic element at bottom. In the artistic sphere one must not start from the idea in creating, nor must one be induced or seduced, when enjoying art, to understand a work of art with the help of the idea.

Therefore, in painting, one strove for means of expression that did not actually give any space to thought, either in artistic creation or in artistic enjoyment. And one strove to capture the immediate impression of how some part of nature presents itself under the influence of light, air and so on. One tried to capture the moment so that one tried to give, so to speak, in a pictorial way, that which flits by so quickly that one does not even have time to think. This was tried for a while. But in time one realized that one could not actually achieve a satisfying result in this way, in any field of art. If you only want to capture what nature reveals to the exclusion of thought, then you do not get the full nature, you get something that does not stand like a solved puzzle, but like a question. In short, you get something unsatisfactory. You found that nature cannot actually be mastered artistically if you do not mix in the thought.

Now the opposite direction was taken. It was said: The artistic can also come from the immediate inner human experience, from that which man experiences in such a way that he does not yet think about it, that he does not let it come up into thought. So, in a sense, they worked with what remained more or less pictorial, not grasped by thought, but still an inner experience. They also tried to depict such things in painting, for example. Those who do not like to get involved in such artistic experiments perceive much of what is seriously striven for in the present as mere folly. Because when someone throws a few colors around or tries to capture something he has experienced inwardly, then the artist has perhaps tried to paint on a surface – let's say a liberating inner experience, an inner liberating sensation, a relief in the sensations. He considers that which arises as an image in his mind, without him engaging with the idea, to be this inner liberation, and he captures it with colors on some surface, throws it down, and the other person, who sees a decked-out ship or something like that in his painting, cannot find his way around in terms of what it actually means. One has not experienced any satisfactory results for the reason that one has felt, again, that the means of artistic expression – color and line – do not produce what one actually wants to experience inwardly.

Now one notices what this thing comes down to, especially in relation to poetry. Poetry, after all, has to struggle constantly with thought – especially in our civilized languages – in order to create artistically. If one goes back to the original state of languages, this is not the case: When someone said this or that, one still sensed in the language either the musical or the plastic element. I will give you an example. Suppose you take a very characteristic word of the Austrian dialect, that is, a word that is still close to the more original forms of speaking, which is found in the word “FHimmlitze[r],” the Himmlitzer. Anyone who pronounces this word as the Austrian farmer does will notice the three-pronged lightning flash. For Himmlitze[r] is also something that describes Werterleuchten and the [three] pronged lightning flash. You can still tell from the word that this is the case. But in our civilized languages, speaking, even the speaking of the phonetic, has taken on a thoroughly conventional character. We have organized our languages, especially the civilized languages, in such a way that they lead to understanding, to the most prosaic element of communication between people. But everything that is supposed to lead to this, to bring about understanding between people, naturally leads back to thoughts.

If the poet then has to use a formed language, as is of course the case, then the listener or the reader of the poems perceives the prose content. And that is why today the poetic sensibility - especially of those who enjoy it - is to a great extent highly unartistic. One goes into the content of the poems. But what is actually artistic about a poem is only what underlies it as rhythm, as meter, as inner form, what immediately arises in us as a musical or formative element when we listen to anything poetic. That is why one feels the lack of artistry of our age particularly in the face of contemporary poetry – of which, by the way, it can be said that today, of all that is written, ninety-nine percent is too much – one feels the lack of artistry of our age particularly in the face of contemporary poetry.

All these things lead to seeking something that does not need to give the immediate impression of nature, because that cannot be grasped without thought. Then one comes into the realm of symbolism or the like, which is even more clumsily inartistic. Or, however, it is not possible to capture with the usual artistic means of expression that which is grasped as an inner experience that has not yet become a thought. Expressionism tried to do this, but without as yet arriving at adequate artistic means of expression.

An attempt has been made to take account of this modern artistic striving in a very limited area, where it has, as it were, been derived, in our eurythmy. The movements you are going to see are not ordinary gestures. What a person performs as an ordinary gesture cannot really be done in our eurythmy. If we try to reproduce the gestures with which people usually accompany their speech, our conversation, we would get nowhere. We would only arrive at something very trivial that has no artistic meaning. But here in our eurythmy, we try to extract the will element from the flow of speech - which is derived from the thought element - and leave out the thought element entirely. By studying the movement patterns in the larynx and neighboring organs when speaking, we learn to recognize which movements are present in the larynx and neighboring organs in spoken language. Then we can transfer these movements, visible to the senses and the supersenses, to the whole person.

But then something very special comes to light. The larynx is in direct contact with the air. When we now tense the whole person, what flows out of him as a movement pattern first passes into the muscular organism. And if we do it in the transfer into external bodily movements of the groups, then it also goes into the external spatial movement. What is set in motion in the process is the human muscular system or the whole human being in groups of people. The person who causes these movements first encounters the muscular system. This muscular system initially forms a certain resistance. One must pay attention to this resistance. When the larynx begins to move in order to produce speech, it is directly related to the air through cartilage and the like. In this way, the movement patterns are communicated to the air in such a way that what is not actually pulsating in them, what the movement patterns are, is not expressed in the air, but is transformed by this special involvement of the larynx in the whole air circuit. what the centers of movement are is transformed into small, trembling vibrations that are not perceived, but one perceives the sound that is carried through the air on the waves of these vibrations and that strikes our ear.

On the other hand, if you do not take what happens directly in the larynx, but only what is present, and if you look at it through the whole person, then the rapid vibrations that are caused by the direct immediate movement of the larynx and its neighboring organs, [which] come about with the air, but rather slow movements, those movements that become slow precisely because the resistance of the entire muscular apparatus is there, so that we have intuitions, but in a completely different way. The muscular system is only the tool of the human will, and the whole human being is used for expression as the tool of that which is the will part in phonetic language.

In this way, you see, one gains the possibility of realizing the aspirations that I have characterized, which are not arbitrarily set up by me here, but which are actually taken from modern artistic striving, I would say, to a certain goal, to lead to a certain goal in the first place. By not allowing the movements to reach the larynx, but only as far as the muscular system, it does not reach the thought, but the things remain human soul experiences, but expressed in a form that the person performs themselves.

So you don't have the mental element in artistic revelation, which is the death of all real art. But at the same time you do have the experiences that are in the human being. Nature does not give us anything satisfying if we do not bring it to thought. That is why mere impressionism could not lead to any satisfying results. But when you set the human being in motion, you have an inner experience in what is presented; but at the same time you have the possibility to express this inner experience externally, bypassing the language of thought. So, by pointing to the artistic aspect of eurythmy, by enjoying the artistic aspect of eurythmy, one has an inner human experience, which can be grasped directly in what the moving human being is. One has an impression that is also directly an expression. And in this way, something is initially striven for in a specific, narrowly defined artistic field, which you can see in the most diverse ways in our building forms, and also in painting. For there, the aim is everywhere to gain precisely those artistic means that are actually being tried by the most modern artistic endeavors, but which have otherwise led to very little results.

Now I do not want to claim that what we can give here as eurythmy – where the immediate impression is only not raised to the level of thought, because what is given here as expression has not yet reached the level of thought – I do not want to claim that this eurythmy is in itself something that should take the place of the other arts. But I would like to point out that in this eurythmy something is given that can be studied, just as one can seek in other arts — painting and other arts today, including architecture , to present the means of artistic expression in such a way that, by avoiding the thought element that kills art, they truly represent what is being sought from the unconscious today. Therefore, we must also organize the recitation in such a way that we do not recite as is customary today – the prose content – but that we emphasize rhythm, beat, the melodious element itself in this recitation. One could not, as one tries to do today, find it beautiful in recitation when it accompanies eurythmy.

All that I have indicated to you is, therefore, created in a narrowly defined area and is initially an attempt to arrive at new artistic means of expression by first allowing the human being to reveal himself through his inner experiences as a direct expression of the human inner being. Nature cannot be grasped as completely as one can immediately grasp nature and the human soul at the same time in the external form, because the human soul can be naturally expressed in the artistic movement of eurythmy.

But all this is still in its infancy, and you will see that some of the things that try to make an impression on you here may leave you with a somewhat unsatisfactory feeling. But those of you who have been here half a year ago or who have seen our eurythmic art occasionally and have come back now, you will see, you will notice how we have striven in these last months to move forward, because today we already have the emphasis in the musically felt movements, in the whole forms.

But no one feels what eurythmy actually is if they start from the premise that these forms are supposed to explain something, that these forms are one way or the other because they are supposed to be a mimic or pantomime expression. The large forms that you see are all formed from direct perception, excluding the conceptual element. You cannot say that they are so or so. And anyone who sees something contrived behind them, who cannot base it on purely artistic perception, but [gap in the text], is on the wrong track from the outset.

But I would still ask you to be indulgent in your judgment of our performances. We are our own harshest critics, and we know very well what we are capable of at this early stage. This is a beginning, and we must strive to improve. But you will see on the other hand that when something is already conceived in eurythmy, something that is already formed with the exclusion of the thought element, as it is the one scene that I have tried to do in my mystery drama with the two opposing forces: where on the one hand the forces are presented that are active in the human being and that influence him in such a way that he actually wants more and more and more to rise above his head in mysticism, fantasy, enthusiasm, theosophy; and on the other hand, how it leads him into deceit, the other things that oppose him, that continually push him down below, where the spirit of heaviness would like to move, where the sober, prosaically sober is expressed, and so on. Where this becomes everyday [...] man is always in the realm of balance when something like this, which is in harmony with the life of the soul, is overheard, performed and realized in eurythmy. Of course, in the future our attempts to present dramatic works will also gradually be developed more and more in eurythmy. There is little of this today; but attempts will also be made to develop eurythmy for the actual drama.

For today's performance, I ask that you take it with indulgence. Our attempt is a beginning. But all those who can respond to what is intended can still believe that this eurythmy will one day be recognized as a fully fledged art form alongside the other, older art forms, perhaps through completely different people than we are, who are now starting with it.

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

I do not wish to use these words as a preface to explain what we will attempt to present to you today in a rehearsal as the art of eurythmy; for an art that needs explaining would obviously not be an art at all. Art must work through direct impression and must also be understandable through direct impression. However, this is precisely what will be the case to a high degree with our eurythmic art, as I am convinced. This eurythmic art must not be confused with any of the seemingly related arts. It is not a dance art or something similar; it wants to be a completely new art form. And for this very reason, I would like to send these few words ahead as usual today during our performances.

[Eurythmy is] an art form that initially uses the human being as its means of expression and draws from very special sources. Like everything that is to come through the spiritual movement, of which this structure seeks to be a representative, the eurythmic art also arises from Goethe's view of art and, in particular, from his artistic ethos. You will see, ladies and gentlemen, all kinds of movements of the human organism itself, namely movements of the limbs of the human organism. But you will also see movements that the personalities, which are arranged in groups, perform against and with each other. All these movements, which in their totality should represent a kind of silent language, are acquired in a very special way, and I can perhaps only describe the nature, the laws by which this art is acquired, by pointing out that the basic impulse behind this eurythmic art is rooted in the endeavors of the most ambitious artistic elements of the present.

Anyone who familiarizes themselves a little with what is alive in every artistic endeavor today – which, incidentally, has been evident for decades – will have to say to themselves: Everywhere, one can see the conviction that it is no longer possible to continue in the old artistic ways in any field of art, that it is necessary everywhere to reach for new means of artistic expression, and that it is also necessary to seek the sources that represent the artistic in a new form. It was realized decades ago that painting, for example, could not continue in the old ways, even if they are Raphael's or Michelangelo's art. And why was that realized? Certainly, what emerged from Raphael, Michelangelo or any other epigone's time and was executed with their artistic means was something extraordinarily magnificent and powerful. But when any artistic direction, any artistic trend within human development lasts for a while, then the means of expression are somewhat depleted. Then, especially in artistic natures, the need arises for new means of expression. For the means of expression themselves are, after some time, thoroughly absorbed into the human world of thought, into the world of ideas.

Take painting, for example. The way certain painters painted in the 19th century, the use of colors, the way they handled the brush, and so on, was all embedded in ideas. They had the notion, the feeling that one had to paint in a certain way. All of that had already become conceptualized, intellectualized. Now, the conceptual is actually the death of any real art. One can say: the more thought, which always nuances something abstract, has penetrated the earthly into the artistic, the more unartistic there is in art. The artistic must be sought entirely by circumventing thought, by circumventing all abstract ideas and abstract notions. That is why, for example, in painting, the idea arose of capturing the immediate impression, as it was called, through color and form.

But now art has another requirement. If you want to express something through artistic means, it must be rounded off into a picture. Certainly, much that is extraordinarily meaningful has been achieved in so-called plein-air painting, in Impressionist painting. But on the other hand, it has been shown that when man places himself in such a way in relation to nature, as has been attempted there, nature does not ultimately surrender to the image. Namely, one has tried to capture the momentary impression, as one just said, the momentary vision, what the light flooding over the objects, the or the calm air, to capture that as an immediate impression, I would like to say to capture it so quickly that one does not have time to think about the matter, so that nothing of the thought flows into the artistic reproduction. - The difficulty arose, however, that the means of artistic expression, when one excludes the thought in this way, nevertheless fail. You can't get to grips with color and form so that color and form really come together to form a picture. And so Impressionism actually failed to achieve what it set out to achieve.

On the other hand, people have now tried to convey the immediate human inner experience, what one might call the inner human experience. Because I don't want to fall into false, fantastic mysticism, I don't want to say what a person experiences in a visionary way, but what a person always experiences emotionally, without processing it to the point of abstract clarity of thought. Something that can be called an expression has been tried to be rendered in color and form.

This has led to things that are extremely interesting for those who look at the matter artistically. For those who look at it in an amateurish or dilettantish way, or look at it according to the usual recipe with which unartistic natures often look at the artistic, by saying: What does this depict? What is the meaning of this? — which is the most unartistic way of looking at it —, in such people the feeling arose that with such newer attempts nothing was achieved, except that someone, let's say, wants to express an inner liberating, redeeming feeling through the medium of painting. And what he then brings onto the canvas, well, let's say it's somehow a rigged ship or it's pieces of laundry hung on ropes or something like that. As I said, the one who does not look at these things in the right light just asks: What does it mean? He does not let himself be carried by what is there into the inner experience. And so far, experience has shown that even the means of artistic expression, the treatment of colors in painting, for example, are not enough to immediately round off the inner experience into a picture, to present it as a picture.

You have to have felt all this at some point, this struggle for new artistic means and, above all, this struggle for access to the sources of art, for such access that represents something new in contrast to the old, well-trodden paths. Then you come to perhaps trying what we have tried here in the building, for example: to get out of the forms themselves and also out of the colors - without reproducing, without the idea of a model - what the picture should be. But I do believe that a kind of example, just one example of the use of particular artistic means, can achieve something that can express something that can possibly be expressed, and that this can be achieved through eurythmy, through this silent language that has emerged in the following way.

I may use Goethe's expression: sensual-transcendental vision. Those who are able to apply this sensual-transcendental vision can study the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs - that is, a single organ system of the human organism - when hearing ordinary spoken language or singing. And then, just as Goethe sees only a complex leaf in the whole plant, one can see in the whole human being something that is only a metamorphosis, a metamorphosed larynx organ. Only one must not look at these things abstractly, ideationally, but one must permeate them with artistic feeling.

Then the following possibility emerges: in the tonal language we always have the confluence of thought with human will. Anyone who is familiar with these things knows that from one side, from the whole human being, the whole human being, human will, flows into the sound language, especially when it is artistically shaped by poetry; but that from the larynx, on the waves, I would say, of the will, thoughts flow, swim. In all our civilized languages, thoughts themselves have now taken on a rather conventional character and show in their nature that they are actually only there to enable people to communicate with each other in their prosaic lives by forming words. That is why everything that flows into poetry from the realm of thought must be felt as something unartistic by an artistic nature. And the question arises: how can one detach the pure element of will, which otherwise only permeates poetry in meter, rhythm, melodic form, and plastic pictorial form, how can one actually capture that?

The following comes to our aid: the larynx and its neighboring organs, with their various cartilaginous and so on organs, are directly related, in direct proportion to the external air. As a result, the disposition to move is transformed into the small trembling movements that then pass into the air, which we do not see with ordinary looking, but which underlie what is heard of speech. The movement patterns that become active in the larynx and its neighboring organs can be observed with sensory-supersensory vision. And then, if I may use this paradoxical expression, one can see the whole human being as a transformed, metamorphosed larynx. So that the people who will be performing eurythmy for you here on the stage will actually be performing for you as whole human beings, like larynxes. But if you then let the other human limbs carry out the movement patterns that are otherwise found in the larynx and its neighboring organs, the result is not the same as what comes out of the sound language. Then, you do not have the outer air as resistance, but rather the muscular system to begin with. As a result, the tendencies and dispositions of the movements do not transform into the vibratory movements of sound, but these movements are slowed down. The muscles offer the appropriate resistance, and one arrives at something that looks like a sign language, but which, in the way it is formed, is not a sign language.

If one were to base it on facial expressions or pantomime, then only prosaic elements would actually be possible; nothing truly artistic would be able to be expressed through this eurythmy. But that is not what we are aiming for. All that is mere pantomime is excluded here. Everything is based on an inner law, just as the melodic element in music is based on an inner law of succession in time. It is music in motion, music that expresses itself in movements instead of sounds. So that if one had two different presentations in two different places and the same thing were to be presented eurythmically, there would be no arbitrariness in it, but just as much difference in the individual presentation as one and the same sonata could be played individually differently in two different places.

Therefore, you must also accept what we can really only offer as a beginning with a certain amount of forbearance. Those who have seen our performances more often, perhaps months ago, will be able to see today what we can offer today and will be able to tell themselves how we have striven to make some progress in the last few months. So we are only just beginning with this eurythmic art. And at this beginning you will have to take into account that everywhere, when we try – namely where the form that we are now introducing into eurythmy already exists, where these forms have been tackled – you will see that everywhere the thinking element is excluded and the forms are felt directly. And not in the way they are felt as forms of gestures, but as they are felt as forms of expression for the inner rhythm, for the musical and plastic quality of the poetry itself.

As I said, I do not want to present this eurythmy as an art that can now shed light on all other arts, on painting and the like, but only as an example of where perhaps what is attempted in spiritual artistic endeavors can be achieved most fully. For with this eurythmy one can really shape an inner experience, an inner experience that one shapes according to the poetry - just as music, for example, also appears on the one hand as a companion to eurythmy - but this inner experience is directly transformed into movements of the human organism itself.

So there is an immediate movement of the element, which is first taken from the poem, and this is transformed into inner human movements that round into a picture. Such movements can then be taken as impressions when one cannot manage in natural treatment with the usual means of expression to round into a picture artistically in the immediate impression. When one rounds into the image that which comes to light as an inner experience, at the same time transformed into inner meaning, an expression that is experienced but that works directly through impression, that is what is directly sought through this eurythmy, what has been attempted today and which, of course, as I very much understand, will still be subject to numerous misunderstandings. But that cannot be helped when we present such an attempt as we have made in our eurythmy performance. While we see what we present on the stage as a silent language accompanied by music, we see what is presented accompanied by recitation and declamation.

Especially in relation to eurythmy, the art of recitation and declamation must take on a special position. It must be remembered again and again that what is considered the art of recitation and declamation today does not really stand up to the accompanying recitation of eurythmy. Today, the emphasis is actually placed on the literal content in recitation, but this is inartistic. It is artistic to try to bring to the fore the rhythmic, formative, plastic aspects of language that go beyond the literal content, even in the art of recitation. This is also an attempt to return to the old form of recitation. I would just like to remind you that Schiller, when he allowed his most significant poems to emerge from his soul, did not have the literal content at first. That was not important to him at first; instead, he had the melodious form first, to which he then added the words. Or Goethe, for example, studied his “Iphigenia” with his actors with a baton in his hand. One had a feeling that the underlying rhythmic, melodious element or the plastic-pictorial element was the main thing, as if it were a revelation when the poetic forms were presented.

You will now see that what is already conceived poetically, even if it is still imperfect, will appear here in a very imperfect presentation of what is taken from my 'Mysteriendramen', where the spiritual inner powers of the human being appear. [That this can already be presented quite well: On the one hand, those forces through which the human being wants to go beyond himself, the mystical, the fantastic, the enthusiastic, the theosophical, whereby he ceases to be human, where he would like to be an angel, which on the one hand means an urge beyond the human – when this is contrasted on the other hand with the earlier spiritism /?, the materialism. [You will see:] When contrasted with the already eurythmic thinking, and then, as a matter of course, it can be enclosed in a form that can be quite well represented. I have now succeeded in making the attempt.

One will have to admit that one can only grasp nature through imaginative images. Those who strive for the manifestation, the revelation of the deeper laws, the workings of nature, strive beyond the abstract to the imaginative shaping of the active imaginative forces present in nature and in the world, especially those forces in which human feeling is involved. I have attempted this in the scene in my “mystery dramas” where the soul forces appear – not as personifications, but as real people, but in such a way that the sensual-supersensible element is expressed directly in them. Here, too, nothing is symbolized, but rather, an attempt has been made to penetrate directly into the living.

Eurythmy is particularly suitable for that which underlies the living activity of all nature in the world. For the eurythmic art has the peculiarity that it can bring to view that which painting seeks when it wants to bring inner soul experiences to view, but for which there is still no means of expression today. I am not saying that this element cannot be found, but that it can be expressed well today by making the human being himself, with his movements and the whole structure of his organism, into a living larynx. In the silent language of the art of eurythmy, this is shown by the fact that the human being appears in their ensouled element, so that the sensory is also supersensory: the human being represents the sensory, but at the same time also the supersensory.

But it is not the case that we feel a dichotomy between content and form; because it is by investing it with inspiration that this inspiration is elevated, as is audibly expressed in the movements of the human being, which otherwise would be vocalized in speech. So one can say: Not something unnatural is evoked, but precisely what Goethe calls it: that one seeks out the higher in nature.

On the other hand, we will bring you children's performances after the break. Of course, it is not intended to polemicize [against ordinary gymnastics]; it has its significance for the physical body, but what comes into consideration is that this gymnastics is based solely on the physiological knowledge of the human organism and takes it into account, so that a certain strength is indeed , and a certain physical health is cultivated, but that the will can come out of the human being only if it is educated in such a way that not only the physiological but also the psychological movement is assessed in order to arrive at that which is soulful movement. Therefore, our pedagogy at the Stuttgart Waldorf School had to be supplemented by this soul-filled art for children, in addition to mere physical gymnastics. And we can already see that this soul-filled gymnastics, this soul-filled eurythmy, when applied to children's lives, because it is a soul-filled application of the body, also brings forth the initiative of the will. So that the body is not cultivated through gymnastics, but not the initiative of the will – this is only an illusion if you believe that. Through this soul-filled art, the art of education is truly greatly benefitted, and more and more can be shown.

It is true that we are only at the beginning of our eurythmy today. Those of our honored visitors who have been here often will be able to see for themselves that we have made good progress in recent weeks, particularly in the development of sentence structure, which is expressed here in terms of form - the artistic structure, rhythm, rhyme and so on, in the whole inner formation of the verses. We will make every effort to progress from month to month. But it is still in its early days. And so I ask you to bear with us as we present a sample of the eurythmic art today.

Nevertheless, we are convinced that what is emerging here as a sensory-supersensory art form is capable of a perfection that will come, either through us or, more likely, through others. And then this eurythmic art will present itself to the world as something that is truly artistic on the one hand, and has a very strong educational value on the other. And people will recognize that eurythmy has a certain task and will be able to stand alongside the other recognized sister arts and older arts as a worthy, fully-fledged art. — So I ask you, esteemed attendees, to take these few samples of eurythmic art today with indulgence.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

For those friends and today's participants who have not previously seen eurythmy, I would just like to say a few words very briefly, given that our participating children must not be made impatient for too long. I would just like to note that what we call the eurythmic arts are not just some kind of arbitrarily invented gestures, but that they are drawn from the movement systems of the human larynx and its neighboring organs, all of the organs that are otherwise active when speaking. So that what is tendency in the larynx and its neighboring organs is simply transferred to the rest of the human being. In a sense, the whole human being appears as, I would say, a larynx in this silent language of eurythmy, which is then accompanied by recitation or music. The whole human being becomes a larynx in what is presented to you. Likewise, groups of people become a larynx.

This is what makes it a little harder to get into this eurythmy – not because it is something arbitrary, not a compilation of momentary gestures, but because it is the continuation of what underlies spoken language as an unnoticed movement and that this is depicted, translated into a visible language. I would just like to say that, for the friends who have not yet seen it, for today, I would just like to mention that as justification for the art form of eurythmy that we cultivate here.

And I would still like to say that our doctors and lady doctors will hardly see what I referred to this morning as the hygienic side of our eurythmic art, because only a few things could be demonstrated that had been prepared when we arrived. However, Dr. Steiner was able to see some of what had been practised. And it was hardly possible to put together an objective program today, in the few days since we returned from Stuttgart.

So I ask those who want to know a little more about this eurythmy to be patient until later. I will give you a somewhat more detailed introduction to the whole nature of eurythmy when we have a performance of eurythmy in the near future. Today, I ask you to be content with the little that we can offer you after such a short time since we returned from Stuttgart. And so I do not wish to discuss anything further, but simply refer you to what I will say in the future about this eurythmic art.

Ms. Hollenbach has set herself the task of training children in choral singing while skipping the tones. You will be shown a sample of this. She has set herself this task as a children's eurythmy teacher. We will begin with a song “Frohsinn” [cheerfulness], [with music] by Hiller [based on a poem] by Löwenstein. [She taught the children the bouncing of the tones and the movements in eurythmy. It is a thoroughly soulful gymnastic art that will be able to stand alongside ordinary gymnastics. And the eurythmic art will not detract from ordinary gymnastics at all. But precisely because it is possible to teach the world of children soul-filled movements, it will be shown that this eurythmic art will also have a pedagogical-hygienic significance. If gymnastics strengthen the body, they strengthen the whole human being to a lesser extent. In particular, the will can be strengthened by this eurythmy. Added to the usual gymnastics is the child's play in soulful movements, which the eurythmic art can become.]

“Himmelsnähe” by C. F. Meyer with musical accompaniment by Leopold van der Pals
“To the Cicada” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Soul Calendar (48.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Soul Calendar (49.) by Rudolf Steiner
“The Journey through the Harz in Winter“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Huttens Kerker” by C. F. Meyer with musical accompaniment by Leopold van der Pals
“Howards Ehrengedächtnis“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Stratus, Cumulus, Cirrus and Nimbus” by J. W. v. Goethe
Drill exercises with musical accompaniment by Leopold van der Pals (children's group)
Ballen and Spreizen, with music by Max Schuurman (children's group)
“Gleich und Gleich” by J. W. v. Goethe (children's group)
Tactics (children's group)
“Frohsinn“ by Louise van Blommestein with music by F. Hiller (children's group)
“Die Freude” by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening “Question and Answer” with music by Max Schuurman
“The Divine” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (50th) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (51) by Rudolf Steiner
Hymn for the entrance of the Vespers on Palm Sunday by Friedrich Wolters with musical prelude Tiaoait by Leopold van der Pals

Dear attendees,

What is being presented to you today as the eurythmic art is not a collection of arbitrary, invented human gestures and movements, but is in fact the expression of a real silent language, a language that is revealed through movement. These movements, whether they occur as movements of the limbs of the individual or as movements of this individual in space or as movements of groups of people in relation to each other, are always strictly regulated by law, and so strictly regulated by law that they coincide with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way that the word sung or properly spoken coincides with a meaning, for example a poetic meaning or a musical content, in such a way

The basis for such a silent language can only be gained by what one could call a continuation of what Goethe calls sensual-supernatural vision. You know that when we produce spoken language, our larynx and neighboring organs move in a certain way. We turn our attention to what we hear and look away from the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs. But these movements are also transmitted to the air. They are clearly present in a room where people are speaking. Through sensory-supersensory observation, one can, firstly, become aware of these movements, but secondly, one can also perceive the potential for movement. And this potential for movement, according to the principle of metamorphosis – thought of in the Goethean sense – can now be applied; just as they are applied in phonetic language to the special organ of the larynx, they can be applied to the whole human being. Just as movements are effective in the speech-producing larynx and its neighboring organs, so in eurythmy, according to the same principle of language, we bring the whole human being into motion.

So, what you will see on the stage here, whether it be the movement of the individual human being within himself or in space, or movements that are performed alternately by the members of the individual groups: they are always such movements that they represent, as it were, the movements of a human being or a group of people as a larynx that has just become a human being or a group. You have a process that is completely analogous to the speech process, except that you observe this process with your eyes instead of your ears.

Usually, when I took the liberty of speaking these introductory words for the performances, I always emphasized the artistic side of our eurythmy. I will emphasize this artistic side again on another occasion. Today, when we have a number of doctors among us, I would like to emphasize the hygienic side of our eurythmy.

Of course, the artistic element is the main thing about it. Eurythmy represents a new art form and, as such, it will indeed be able to bear fruit in many ways that are being sought today by serious artists, but which are extraordinarily difficult to find. These are sought under the most diverse masks, expressionism and so on, which is always a kind of stammering because one initially works with inadequate materials or with inadequate means of expression. So the artistic element wants to have a fertilizing effect on the various longings that can be clearly perceived in artistic development today and allow a search to be perceived.

But there is also an important pedagogical and hygienic side to this eurythmy. From a pedagogical-hygienic point of view, one could say that this eurythmy is an animated game of movement for the human being, in contrast to the more physiological game of movement for the human being that exists in the most diverse types of gymnastics. Of course, it is still difficult today to argue that such moving, soul-filled movement games, as found in eurythmy, are preferable for the development of the whole person to mere physiological gymnastics.

But we must speak the truth, and we must not shrink back, nor allow ourselves to be held back, from actually putting into practice that which concerns people more. Even if it means creating many prejudices in order to get used to what has become so ingrained over long periods of time in our pedagogical art and also in our education and development of the people, just like ordinary physiological gymnastics. This physiological gymnastics is based essentially on the fact that it starts from the human body and that it brings the human body into such movements, postures and manipulations that correspond to physiology and its demands.

Now I certainly do not want what is only one-sidedly thought [gap in the text] - from this point of view, eurythmy should not replace gymnastics, but only stand alongside gymnastics, so to speak, also in schools, with what is aimed for through gymnastics. The aim should be to dedicate about half of the time that is currently devoted to gymnastics to what we give in eurythmy - so half of the time would have to be devoted to eurythmy. For eurythmy strives to ensure that every movement that a person, that a child, performs is inspired, that no movement is performed without the soul experience being incorporated into it. Just as spoken language cannot be spoken without the soul element being present everywhere in the sounds, producing the sounds themselves or configuring the connection between the sounds, and so on – the same must apply to this moving, silent language of eurythmy. Every single movement, every context of movement, in other words everything that constitutes a single movement, the articulation of movement, what the sentence is in movement, must be imbued with soul. Soul-filled experience underlies it.

If, for the human being, a detachment of his bodily movements from the soul experience is now sought, then, in purely physical, physiological terms, a strengthening of the human body is certainly brought about in many ways. However, this strengthening of the human body is not always a strengthening of the whole person. Strengthening the whole person means that the human being is able to create more and more expression of his own will in his movements, to be present in everything that lies in his movements.

And one can say, if one is unbiased enough and does not close one's mind to important facts that signify a social psychology, one can say: Certainly, in the modern era there has been a lot of gymnastics and a lot of similar activities have been practiced, but whether one can directly affirm that through this – even if perhaps individual has become physically stronger and perhaps also in a physiological sense, and perhaps some things have become healthier, but whether one can also affirm that as a result, the human being as a whole, as a physical, spiritual and mental being, has become stronger, is more equipped with initiative, is more involved in world affairs than in the first gymnastics-less times, that cannot be immediately asserted. This question will not be answered in the affirmative. For after all, our time shows that we live in the epoch of sleeping souls, that we have been driven by gymnastics, and also by many other things that go beyond gymnastics – what has not been produced by sport! But the fact that the result of all this would be a strengthening of the whole human being, namely a strengthening of the initiative of human beings, cannot be affirmed. For it is all too clear that people have become more and more closed in on themselves, more and more inwardly lethargic, and that this inward-closed-ness and this inward-lethargy, this sleepiness of soul, is connected with the misfortunes that have manifested themselves so horribly in the last five to six years. We will only emerge from this, to which we must point, when we strive to strengthen the human being not only through physiological gymnastics, but also through psychological eurythmy, through soulful movement.

Therefore, in addition to the artistic element, which I will come back to in a few introductory words tomorrow, we will include in today's presentation, in particular, children's eurythmy, through which you can see for yourselves how, through the presence of soul-filled movement, something is achieved in the child that can then be integrated into human development with full benefit for the whole human being.

Something that is healing for the human being comes to light through this eurythmy. I need only remind you that we find that, as at the starting point of all human work, there is rhythm. It is not disorderly, chaotic work that has this rhythm, but rather: primitive work is carried out in rhythm. Of course, in our hurried modern times, in the age of industrialism, this has been completely lost. This rhythm is now being reintroduced through human movement games.

Therefore, you will see that everything that comes out is already inherent in the human being, but is internally connected with the soul's predispositions, with inner rhythm, inner tact, and so on. If I may say so, In relation to the artistic conception, this is very clearly evident in the lack of an aesthetic conception of the present. For example, the present has developed a kind of art of recitation that places great emphasis on the prose content of what is being recited. This art of recitation, which is particularly popular at the present time, could not be used in eurythmy. Eurythmy must be accompanied by recitation, which in turn goes back to everything that is actually artistic, also in relation to poetry: to the rhythmic, to the musical or plastic in the poetic art. Today, however, in recitation too, the greatest importance is attached to making the truly poetic recede completely and to reciting according to the prose content, so that the form, which is what really matters in art, is not at all emphasized in today's recitation. So what eurythmy demands must also have an effect on the art of recitation.

All that we are striving for is, of course, only just beginning, as we are able to present to you today as a rehearsal; but those who, from time to time, observe what we are able to offer here as the eurythmic arts will see that we have actually made some progress compared to what we were able to achieve six months ago. Those observers who compare the two – what we presented six months ago and what we present today – may perhaps still find some progress. And we do believe that, although we are still at the beginning with this eurythmic art, it is a beginning of something that can stand alongside other, older art and educational impulses as an art and as an impulse for educating humanity. But I ask for your forbearance in treating our demonstrations, our rehearsals, with forbearance, because they are, after all, intended to be an experiment to begin with. When this eurythmic art is further developed – either by ourselves or, more likely, by others – it will indeed very likely be able to stand fully equal with other, older sister arts as a method of education and art.

Dear attendees!

Allow me to say a few words about the presentation we would like to give you. We are attempting to search for a new art form, and a new art form it is, for the simple reason that we are striving to shape this art form out of a very specific source. It is given by people and shown to people on the stage. These movements are performed either by the limbs of the human body moving or by the whole person moving in space or by groups moving and bringing each other into position. All that is sought in this way is not just a collection of random gestures or gestures that are momentarily sought for some kind of emotional feelings or inner experiences of the soul, but everything that occurs in movements is, in the truest sense of the word, a mute language, but a language that is as arbitrary as the language of sound in the spoken or sung word.

First of all, it is important to note how this mute language comes about. I may use the expression that Goethe often used. What comes about is that what occurs in movements comes about through sensory-supersensory observation, through observation that enables the human being to recognize the supersensible in the sensory in terms of its meaning, in terms of its essence. When developing this eurythmic silent language, one must have a sensory-supersensory power of observation for what actually happens when the speech sound comes forth in speaking or singing. We know, of course, how movement comes about, how all the vocal organs are involved in a particular movement and how this movement is then transmitted to the external air. However, when we listen to someone speaking or singing, we pay attention to what we perceive through the sense of hearing, and what is present in terms of movement escapes our perception. If you study it, you would not get anywhere if you only took what is present in terms of movement phenomena, of real movement phenomena, during speaking or singing, but you have to take the movement tendencies. Because the fact that in the larynx and in the other speech organs that come into play when speaking, the vibrating of the sound is directly connected with the external air, means that movements are produced in the quickest way. But all these movements, which quickly represent a vibration, are based on movement tendencies. And these main directions of movement – when making a sound or otherwise when speaking – can now be transferred to the whole human being according to Goethe's principle of metamorphosis.

For Goethe, the whole plant is nothing more than a more intricately designed leaf. There is something in this principle at Goethe that will still have a great significance for the future view of the world, which is still not sufficiently appreciated even by those who deal with Goethe intimately. But what Goethe saw for the forms, that is, let us say, for the whole plant in relation to the whole plant organ, that can now be extended to the activity of the living being, especially of the most perfect living being, the human being.

What is present in the larynx and its neighboring organs in terms of movement impulses can be transferred to people or groups of people, so that when you see movements of individual people or groups of people here, you are really seeing a true reflection of the movement tendencies present in the human vocal organs when speaking or singing. So there is nothing arbitrary about this eurhythmy; on the contrary, everything in it is as little arbitrary as what comes about in harmony and melody in accordance with musical laws.

Just as two pianists playing the same piece only within very specific limits of their individual conception and the piece comes into its own, so too, through the various performances at different places with special persons or groups, only in individual conceptions, within very specific limits of conception, that which is essential comes to the performance, and that is the same. For there is a rhythmic, tactful, full connection also in the succession of movements, which comes about through the fact that the whole is developed regularly according to the principle indicated.

Now, of course, this eurythmic art is only at the beginning of its development, and that is why it is still difficult to find one's way into it today. But this beginning can already be described as a solution to much of what is currently being sought in art in a certain field of artistic work. We see how people who want to be artistically active today are looking for new ways, for example, the expressionist, the impressionist way, how they produce many caricatures in this way. One does not have to look at what can already be produced by us today, but one must look at what is wanted.

We can see, however, that when we are presented with these new artistic endeavors in the fields of painting or sculpture, for example, the artists are still struggling with the fact that the means still seem unusable today, or that the forms of expression cannot be created immediately. It is important to realize that in every such period, when a new direction is being sought in the field of art in particular, there is a tendency to fall back on what must underlie all art, all real art, but what is somewhat lost to artistic creation when the epigone-like, the imitation in art compared to the epochs of genius, comes to the fore too strongly. All real art-making is based on our relationship to the world – whether we are aesthetic connoisseurs or artistic creators – all art-making is based on our perception, on our entire imagination. The conceptual, the ideational actually snatches art away; the ideational actually has a killing, paralyzing effect on everything artistic. If we want to look at nature artistically or recreate nature, for example, we have to turn our attention to nature in such a way that we do not yet progress from contemplation to comprehension in our thinking, but that we remain with our whole devotion to nature in contemplation, but look at the sensual forms so purely, as if they themselves were already thoughts.

For a time, Impressionism tried to do this. In the field of painting, it was not at all able to achieve appropriate forms of artistic expression. As expressionism, it then tried to grasp the other side of avoiding the ideal by simply trying to bring soul experiences that come into their own in a kind of powerfully visionary form in man, but which do not come up to the clear thought that guides everything artistic, by trying to bring such visionary artistic experiences into forms and colors. Those who are easily inclined to philistinism cannot appreciate this beginning. They see only something in what is being attempted, to hold on to inner experiences through colors and forms, and then they say: We cannot distinguish whether it is a matter of hung-out laundry or a ship's sail or something of that sort. The philistine mind refuses to admit that this is not the point. The point is not that you simply hang something on the wall that reflects an inner experience; but as I said, artistic means of expression were not yet available. Therefore, even when one approaches these things with all good will, one is often compelled to say, especially in the face of these attempts at painting today: Yes, it is based on something visionary, it is an illusion, it is an expression, but it is not yet a healthy expression, it is not yet that which the healthy soul can truly experience.

In eurythmy, at least a path has been opened up, albeit in a very imperfect way even today. It involves a different means of expression, in order to become both impressionistic and expressionistic in a different way. We are dealing here with the human being, with the moving human being, and so with something that can be observed by the observer with the senses, something that can be presented in the medium of the senses. But what is being presented, these movements, are not something that merely needs to be looked at, but rather can be observed in a certain way, just as one can listen to speech or sound, to song, and discern something of the soul in it. What the expressionist wants, for example, that the soul he has painted into his forms and form structures is inside them – can easily be achieved when presented in eurythmy. Because this eurythmic art that I have presented is, like human language, the expression of the soul, of the spiritual, everywhere.

And what the Impressionists sought to achieve by capturing the external image directly, before they had arrived at the thought, can also be expressed in eurythmy, because it is not something that is merely formed artificially. Not even the gesture is formed artificially, but the human organism is studied in terms of how it emits something through the natural movement of its arms, through the natural movement of its whole environment, which corresponds to the movement tendencies that are as natural as in the larynx when we speak.

Of course, something like this must be sensed in the right way, as it is given in the eurythmic art form. We must go back to the truly artistic feeling, also, for example, in poetry, which eurythmy should be accompanied by. You will see how it is accompanied today, how poetry on the one hand and music on the other accompany artistic eurythmy performances.

We must also go back to the example of poetry in recitation to what is actually artistic in poetry. In our unartistic times, we have often strayed from an understanding of the artistic in poetry. This artistic quality is found in rhythm, in plasticity, in form. Today, however, we first consider the prosaic aspect and then attach great importance to the fact that the reciter brings out with great feeling precisely those aspects that are not rhythmic or artistic but are in keeping with the meaning. As a result, our present-day art of recitation is a prosaic and not a truly artistic one. What is understood by the art of recitation in the outer life today would not be at all suitable for recitation to eurythmy, to the silent language of eurythmy. Recitation must go back to the old forms of recitation.

We must see a beginning in all these fields, but a beginning that must lead to a certain perfection. We need only remember that the human being must be the most perfect work of art. Goethe says so beautifully: When the human being is placed at the summit of nature, he in turn produces a summit within himself, taking measure, harmony and meaning together and finally rising to the work of art.

Those who place their own human organism at the service of this art of silent speech, of eurythmy, are well aware that everything must be dropped that is expressed only by the individual human being in spoken language, and that they must give themselves over to that which, in essence, nature expresses through the particular human organization itself. So that one can say: When an individual speaks or sings, when an individual engages in mimicry or gestures, there is always something of the individual human subjectivity in it, of human egoism. Here in eurythmy, we are striving for what Goethe regards as the highest summit of artistic revelation, saying: When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when man in the world feels himself in the world as a great and dignified totality, when harmonious comfort gives him free delight, he will consider nature as having reached its goal and admire the summit of its becoming and being. This is the language of nature itself, not that of the individual human being. It is the language that reveals itself through the movements of eurythmy, the language of nature itself, which can emerge when the whole human being is used as its instrument.

And so, if you have a true artistic sensibility, what can come to light through the art of eurythmy can truly seem like an unraveling of the mysteries of the world. What can be expressed in the moving forms of eurythmy cannot be expressed in ordinary spoken language. What is expressed in the movements of the individual human being on stage, or in the movements of groups of people, or even in their relationship to one another on stage, is thoroughly inspired by the laws of nature.

We can hope that this eurythmic element will continue to develop in a thoroughly beneficial way for the further artistic education of man.

In all this, however, I would ask you to bear in mind what I have said many times before: we ourselves are still thinking, with all modesty, about what we can offer today. We are at the beginning of this eurythmic art. But we also believe that, if time brings us its interest, what we want with this eurythmy will either be developed by ourselves, but probably by others in the course of time, into something that can be presented as a fully fledged, younger art form alongside its older, fully fledged sister arts.