The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,

Allow me to say a few words before this eurythmic presentation today. In this eurythmic art, of which we want to show you a sample here today, the aim is to create something from certain new art sources and from certain means of expression, which in a sense can be called a new art form. And anyone who takes into account the striving for new art forms among today's artists will perhaps see it as a possible and necessary attempt when special artistic sources are opened up. The point is that through this opening up of special artistic sources in the human being in eurythmy, as it is meant here, a kind of silent language is presented through movements of the human limbs or also through movements of the human being in space, through alternating movements of people who belong to groups.

I would just like to point out how such movements, which are by no means arbitrary gestures in eurhythmy, and are by no means gestures invented in an instant, can come about as equally lawful forms of expression of the human soul experience, just as speech or song, the musical itself, creates means of expression for what can be experienced by human beings.

It can be said that the more artistic elements there are in a person's language, the more these elements express this language as a basis, as revelations of the poetic, the more one goes back in the development of language. It is indeed a peculiar fact that the more advanced the languages within human civilization become, the more they develop into a conventional means of expression for external human intercourse, and that to the same extent as the artistic perception of language loses its power for truly artistic, poetic expression. And we must arrive at the cause of this peculiar phenomenon, which can only be penetrated through the artistic. When searching for this cause, one will find that the further back one goes in the development of language, the more the language, by filling it, takes up the whole person, and the sound language takes up the whole person in such a way that one can say: in different ways, the sound language takes up the whole person.

The less prosaic spoken language has become as a mere language of communication, as a mere language of everyday life, the more, the further one goes back to even more primitive language elements, the more it engages the whole person, and the more it unites in the phonetic language, in its vocalic, in its self-sound element, a musical, and in its consonantal, in its consonantal element, a plastic, an image-forming capacity of the human being. So that in languages – it was clearly noticeable in the Central European languages, in German, until the 17th and 18th centuries – so that in the original languages there is a confluence of the musical and the pictorial-sculptural.

The musical element, which lies primarily in the vocalization of speech, is now intimately connected with the spiritual element in the human soul. When the human being, as it were, grows together with his spirit and experiences within himself that which can make an impression on him outside in nature, then in the vocal-musical expression, an inner experiencing of the human being with the outer process or the outer thing comes about. One need only recall how certain external experiences evoke the a through wonder, the o through admiration, and so on, in the soul, and one will feel the musical, vocalizing tendency of human speech. On the other hand, we have the consonantal element, that element

where the human being is less introspective and more immersed in and devoted to external processes and external things. This is the plastic, the inwardly pictorial element. In fact, two unconsciously creative artistic elements in the human being flow together in speech.

Eurythmy is the shaping of what is experienced by the human being through the image itself. Again, one can say, my dear audience, how writing originally emerged from the image. We have pictographic writing where writing still has an inner relationship with the things that the human being perceives; then writing becomes more abstract and intellectualized. It becomes a mere sign. And today's writing has little more in what it presents to the immediate view of the experience that one can have when one considers pictographic writing in its relationship to the environment.

Now, in terms of writing, we civilized people are actually at an impasse. We started from the experiential relationship of the human being to the external senses in picture writing and arrived at prosaic, inartistic, abstract writing, and there is something tortured and unnatural about wanting to go back – anyone who has tried it themselves can judge for themselves – about wanting to go back to some kind of artistry in today's form of writing.

But with regard to language, we are not at an impasse. We can grasp the word, the phoneme, the sentence, in short, everything that is expressed through spoken language, in such a way that what is otherwise expressed through phonetic language is silently expressed in the movement of the whole person. I would say that something flows into speech that is like subconscious movement, like subconscious feeling. But the more language is transformed by the era of civilization, by communication, the less one feels the whole person resonating and resonating with the things in language. And if we use what Goethe calls sensuous-supersensible observation to listen to the movements tendencies of the larynx and all the organs involved in the production of speech, we begin to understand what movements are contained in the larynx and its neighboring organs in the production of speech. And if we then transfer this to the human being as a whole, to his limbs, and to his outer spatial movements, then we arrive at the mute language of eurythmy, which is just as necessarily lawful as spoken language.

Therefore, on the one hand, the musical element that has been incorporated to some extent into the vocalizations - into the eurythmy and into the spoken language - can be brought out more fully through the accompaniment of the recitation, and on the other hand, through the accompaniment with the recitation, one can, we say, bring out more fully what is expressed in the silent language of the eurythmy. So you see on the stage the silent language of eurythmy, which, as I said, is not arbitrary, but a lawful expression of vocalization and consonantization, of sentence formation, of grammar. But it is the case that it does not arise through intellectual understanding, but comes forth from the impulsive will element of the human being, so that one asserts the I in the means of expression itself, one has an expression of the whole human being in eurythmy.

This becomes understandable – or at least one is helped in understanding by the musical accompaniment, the recitation. Recitation, however, must be practised somewhat differently today than usual. Today, recitation is actually prosaic; eurythmy, which goes back to what underlies the actual artistic, to rhythm, to the beat, to the emphasis of the actual artistic, beat, rhythm, in contrast to the mere prosaic expression in recitation, would not tolerate this.

In this way, eurythmy attempts to create a kind of language that is not abstract, that is, that does not contain the unartistic, but that can be shaped into artistic effects precisely because it does not yet contain thought, and thus contains only the artistic.

At the same time, this eurythmy has another side, an essential pedagogical-hygienic side for children. Ordinary gymnastics for children can be imbued with soul. Whereas gymnastics is simply derived from the laws of the human body, and is based on physiology, children's eurythmy — a sample of which you will see after the break in the second part of our program — is intended to create soul-inspired movement. This will be recognized one day, when we think about these things more objectively: that through this soul-filled exercise, which is also artistic, the will of the child is strengthened at the moment of life when it needs to be strengthened, if it is not to experience a weakening throughout its whole life.

Therefore, on the one hand, eurythmy is to be understood as an art, but on the other hand, its important educational and pedagogical-didactic side must be taken into account at the same time. This evening we would like to present something from this side, where poetry itself is felt and viewed in a eurythmic way, as in the piece that will be performed for you today, where we try to capture the processes of the world in images that are otherwise only grasped through abstract concepts. Here eurythmy shows itself to be a particularly useful instrument for artistic expression. And only then will we understand how necessary it will gradually become for the human understanding of the world to grasp the whole of nature and also the supersensible in images, not in abstract concepts. One can philosophize at length, saying that yes, the human being must think discursively, the human being must analyze, the human being must explore the laws of nature in logical abstract judgment. Nature eludes this kind of investigation! We cannot get close to nature. We only believe that we can get close to nature with today's knowledge of nature; in truth, the more we satisfy this modern abstract drive for knowledge, which has triumphed in natural science, the more we distance ourselves from nature. Nature can only be understood if we grasp it pictorially, as is generally the case with cosmic processes. But then we see how man is a true expression of such a pictorial grasp of nature and the supersensible.

This really helps us to understand Goetheanism again, which sometimes expresses itself in very short sentences in Goethe, as when Goethe says: “To whom nature reveals her secret, feels the deepest longing for her worthy interpreter, art.” And for Goethe, art was in a sense a means of knowledge, not a physical-prosaic one, but an artistic means of knowledge. In this way, Goetheanism will also take such things into account as we train eurythmy. But the way we can present it to you today is just a first attempt, a beginning.

But one can also be convinced that it is based on the genuine sources of the most artistic instrument, the human being itself, that it will either be further developed by us or by others in the future, and that then, in fact, the older art forms, which, if I may say so, are already running in well-worn tracks, will be joined by a fully-fledged new art in this eurythmy, which may still be met with suspicion today. We ourselves are our own harshest critics; we know that what we are able to give today is only a beginning, but we also know that it can be perfected and that one day it will be truly recognized as a fully-fledged art form that can stand alongside other, older art forms.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to begin today, as I always do before these eurythmy performances, with a few words about the significance of the eurythmic art. We have here an attempt at this eurythmic art, a beginning, one might say, of an attempt at a kind of silent language. You will see this silent language performed on stage in movements that are carried out by the human limbs - also through movements of the whole person in space - or through the alternating movements, through the alternating positions of personalities in groups and the like.

All of this could initially be seen as a mere art of gestures, where an attempt is made to express a poetic content, which is the underlying basis and is also recited during the performance, or to express a musical piece, which can also be the basis of the presentation and which is played or sung at the same time – it could look as if movement is used to add gestures or a certain facial expression to the poetic, literal or musical content that forms the leitmotif. It is not so, but with this eurythmic art, we are in fact trying to open up a new source of art and also to bring very special means of artistic expression. Here, the source is the human being itself. And the source opens up through a special training of what one can call in the sense of Goetheanism: the striving for the sensual-supernatural element in art.

We see, my dear attendees, today the most diverse efforts to get out of the old traditional art forms, to get out of the old artistic language, and to find something new as a means of artistic expression. We see this in the fields of sculpture, painting, and also in the field of poetry; in the field of music it has been noticeable for a long time and so on.

It is always the case, when a certain period of time has been fulfilled, that the forms for the art of this time become too intellectual. What is still intuitive and instinctive at the beginning of an artistic epoch, what arises from the most elementary emotions of the human being, is studied in the course of time, analyzed by the human intellect, and becomes artistic technique, but one that is imbued with intellect. And then it increasingly appears as imitation art, as something that a young generation will then use [reject].

Today, we see attempts to arrive at a new artistic formal language, particularly in Impressionism and Expressionism. However, despite the fact that nothing should be said against some extraordinarily significant beginnings in this direction, it must also be said that the most serious artists and connoisseurs in this field are somewhat dissatisfied. Take the field of painting, for example. It is not possible to merely conjure up certain elementary experiences - I would say half-servants of human nature, which are to be brought onto the canvas - and really express them properly in colors and lines. The special difficulty that exists in every art is that the intellectual element has a deadening, diluting effect on everything artistic to the extent that thoughts, ideas, and the intellectual in general enter into the artistic. The artistic is killed. This is why Goethe believed that the expression 'sensual-supersensory' is particularly appropriate for the artistic. There must be something immediate that can serve as a means of expression in the external world. But the moment any idea is impressed upon this means of expression, artistic enjoyment ceases. And I have the feeling that it is easiest to achieve something sensual and supersensual when one uses the human being himself as a tool for artistic expression.

But for this to happen, human speech must also be studied in a sensual and supersensible way. When a person makes himself audible, not only in poetry but also, for example, in song, through his vocal organs, through his speech organs, then the expression of these speech organs is always based on movements whose tendencies can be examined if one has the opportunity to rise above mere sensory observation through hearing and penetrate into that which is not directly heard but which underlies it as a movement, a movement of the larynx, a movement of the other organs involved in speaking or singing. The soul of human speech is based on the fact that the human being localizes his muscular system on the larynx and can use it to produce movements that then become speech simply through their peculiarity. These movements can be studied sensually and supersensibly. One must study the large course of what is organized by the larynx and the other speech organs into vibrations in the air, or, I should say, into the separation of many small vibrating movements. One must intuitively grasp the underlying tendencies of the movements.

Then what can be studied, what underlies speech in a completely lawful way, can be transferred to the whole human being, to the movement of all his limbs. So that in eurythmy, through such a transference, you can, as it were, make the whole human being function on the stage like a human larynx, I would say. One could say: if the movements that are performed for vowels, consonants, sentence contexts, for the inner character, for the structure of the sentence, to which these movements correspond, were not the whole human being, but if what one sees were to be placed directly into the larynx, then nothing else would be expressed in the larynx than what you hear as the accompanying recitation.

However, this does not make the art of eurythmy something arbitrary, but something as internally lawful as the melodic or harmonic element in music is internally lawful. If something is initially based on gestures or facial expressions, then it is something that has not yet been overcome, [because] something as lawful as in music itself lives in eurythmy. And in what is heard at the same time, there is something like a harmonic element in music. [But this is only possible if] one also goes back to what is actually poetic in poetry. Poetry is not an art through its literal content, in a sense through the prosaic that underlies it, but poetry is poetry through rhythm, through beat, through everything that is incorporated into the literal content as form.

This is what is expressed through eurythmy. But it must also be expressed in the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy. Therefore, in order to be able to accompany the eurythmy with recitation, we must go back to the good old forms of recitation, which are avoided today precisely where one believes one is reciting well: to the rhythmic, to the not on the emphasis of the prose content, on which so much emphasis is placed today in what, especially in our very unartistic time, is called good recitation. Here too, it must be borne in mind that this recourse to eurythmy for a new artistic element makes very special demands on the art of recitation. Through the fact that this eurythmy attempts to impress upon the human being himself that which is otherwise impressed upon him through hearing in speech, the human being himself becomes the means of sensory expression of art. And because the movements are not intellectually shaped into gestures, but because the movements unfold in such a way that they are natural to the human being, like the movements of the larynx itself, the mere abstract thought, the intellectual, is bypassed and one sees directly for the artistic impression on the stage in the silent language of eurythmy something sensual and supersensory: the soul-filled movements of the human being.

You will therefore see that this eurythmic art is particularly suitable for the experiment I have tried to carry out in my 'mystery dramas', where the spiritual itself is to be expressed in many places. What is actually meant here will, of course, be misunderstood for a long time yet, because people do not yet realize that nature and thus man, through his intellect, is being forced into abstract natural laws. We will just have to learn to understand nature in line with what Goethe means when he says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To do this, he rises to the challenge by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking number, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. Thus man creates within himself a new, significant summit and then rises to produce the work of art.

What must this work of art be like? We can only imagine it as an ideal. Perhaps we may say that when the human being regards himself with his whole organism as a tool, as the instrument for producing this work of art, it is indeed the case that, through the fact that this eurythmy appears in this particular form, something is present that perhaps – I am not saying that it is already this ideal art – but that it provides something from which one can see how one must create forms in order to arrive at the sensual-supersensible.

That is the essential thing: neither the sensual nor the supersensible alone, but the sensual-supersensible – the sensual-supersensible that appears to us as if the forms of the idea or of the ideational had already lived in us, and that appears to us with such vividness that we find the idea itself as something taking place in the sensory world. To bring the idea to the sensual, or to present the sensual world in the form of the idea: this is what can be brought about most vividly, precisely through this particular art form of eurythmy.

But I also ask you today to be lenient with what we can bring to you today, because, as I said, we are only just beginning. Those of you who have attended our performances more often may have noticed how we have been trying to make progress recently, but it must continue to happen more and more. Either we or others will be able to develop what is in its infancy today to a greater perfection. Be assured, my dear audience, that with eurythmy a beginning has been made to something that will surely one day be able to stand alongside other, older art forms as a complete art.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

As usual, I would like to say a few words before the eurythmy performances today about the way in which we are trying, within this eurythmic art, to seek first of all a kind of new artistic form, to seek new means of expression, and then, in a certain way, to go back to the source of artistic activity in human nature itself.

On this stage you will see movements of the limbs and of the whole human being in space, changing movements and changing positions of people in groups. All of this is meant to be a kind of silent language. But not a mute language that consists of random gestures, so that one would have to search for gestures to accompany the poetry that is recited at the same time, or for the song-like, musical elements. Nor are random gestures sought here for what is to be expressed, just as the sound of speech itself or the word is something that is added “by chance” to the meaning, as it is something that connects itself through the human organization with the meaning that the sound is to express.

To create such art, it was truly necessary to make use of what, according to Goethe, can be called sensuous-suprasensuous intuition.

When we follow human speech, we first turn our attention to the spoken sound or the sequence of sounds. We do not become aware – this is inherent in the whole organization of language – of the fact that our organs, which have something to do with the production of speech, carry out movements. These movements are, of course, small rhythmic movements, but they are based on movement tendencies. Those who are able to follow speech in a certain sense can really see these movement tendencies. They can get a picture of the movement tendencies present in the larynx and its neighboring organs, while speech sounds phonetically to us.

What we observe in speech, whether it is a single organ or a system of organs at work during speech, can be applied to the human organism as a whole. However, as I will explain in a moment, this is not as simple as it may seem, but requires a certain metamorphic transformation. Just as Goethe arrived at his view of metamorphosis as that which must underlie a true organicity, so too must we strive for such a view of human functions that allows us to recognize how a single group of functions — that is, underlying speech movement — can be connected to a possible movement of the whole person, just as Goethe saw the whole plant only as a more complicated, metamorphosed leaf or petal [or] also as stamens. This view, which Goethe applied only to the morphological, can be extended to the functional; it can be permeated artistically. But just as one can follow the larynx's main tendency, in that it comes into direct contact with the external air when speaking and is transformed into small rhythmic movements, , another element comes more to the fore in this transmission of the movement of the sounds to the whole person than it comes to the fore in the movement of the sounds, namely the element of will, also the element of willing feeling.

In our language, thought, imagination, and will, feeling, willing feeling, and feeling will all flow into each other. We do not need to distinguish these things, because in fact only the imagination and the will are actually juxtaposed. And in the artistic contemplation, we always have to fight, I would even say, against too much of what is the perception, what is the idea, flowing into the artwork in the direct perception of the image – but not in the image as we otherwise perceive it in nature, but rather in the spiritualized image. That is what should actually work in the perception and creation of art.

Now, when we look at nature in ordinary life or even in science, we transform the image through thought into what it then is as a spiritualized image. In this way, we lift it out of the sphere of the merely artistic. In the artistic, the image should have an immediate spiritual effect. In a sense, as an image it should already affect us in the same way that thought otherwise affects us. But as soon as thought affects us as thought, the artistic aspect ceases, the artistic is paralyzed, and in our language there is actually less and less possibility for artistic expression – even in poetry – as civilization advances. It becomes more and more conventional as a spoken language, it becomes a form of expression for that which we want to present in an abstract, intellectual way. As a result, our poetry actually becomes impoverished in terms of its means of expression. But basically, there is only so much that is truly artistic in poetry, as there is music on the one hand or imagery on the other.

Pictorial, plastic is meant here in such a way that, by listening to language, to poetically shaped language, one immediately perceives a kind of image in sound as well. We then rid the poem of everything that flows from the thought into the poem when we begin, as we usually begin, to transfer the tendencies of movement that the larynx and its neighboring organs carry out to the whole person. By undertaking this metamorphosis of the function of speech and now looking at the whole human being – of course it cannot come to phonation because we are considering the macrocosmic movements, the movement tendencies instead of the microcosm – that which we extract from the spoken word is the will element, that will element that is bound to the whole human being. Therefore, if the human being as a whole appears, so to speak, like a larynx in lively motion, we have expressed that, the form of expression given by the human being himself.

But at the same time, we also have the opportunity to perceive what confronts us in the human being as an image, without philosophizing about it, by first spiritualizing it. The spiritualized image arises from the fact that the human being, who is spiritualized in his movement, becomes this image, so that we can have the spiritualized image directly in our perception. Through this inspired image, which can become a means of expression in poetry in an equally natural way through a silent language, we have actually achieved much of what art must strive for: to create the inspired image without having to take the detour through the intellect, through thinking, which has a deadening effect on art.

Of course, the recitation that accompanies the eurythmy must then take care to extract precisely what is actually artistic, not the prose content of the poem. Today, because we live in an unartistic time, reciters actually attach the greatest importance to the prose content, to the convention of the literal. The artistic person does not feel the essence in this emphasis on the literal of the poetry, but in the emphasis on the rhythms, the cadences, the musical or even the pictorial-sculptural, formative. Therefore, recitation, in so far as it is to accompany eurythmy, must return to the good old forms of recitation, to which Goethe naturally felt himself bound. He, who felt artistically, rehearsed his 'Iphigenia' with his artistic personnel, like a conductor with the baton in his hand, with an eye to form rather than content. And Schiller always had, before he had the literal content in his soul – at least with many of his poems – an indeterminate melodious connection that hummed within him, and then he sought out the literal text, the content.

If you look at the one hand at what is brought forth from the human being as a mute language, just as arbitrarily as the spoken language, you will find it accompanied on the other hand by the music. It is only a different side of what appears in these two arts. Furthermore, I believe that one can only create something that actually presents itself as a kind of new art form alongside our older art forms in eurythmy.

When we turn to the visual arts, we need, as it were, to first calm the things that are moving within us. The musical and the poetic, which are indeed moving, must work at the same time with such a strong power of internalization that the external sensory impression often recedes. Even in purely musical, absolutely musical works, the external sensory impression is juxtaposed with an internalization. But it is precisely because music, when it appears as pure music, can still speak to the pure senses that it retains the purely artistic. By contrast, we do not find what I would call plastic movement in those areas of art that are considered traditional. Sculpture that is artistically formed and does not depend on standing simply in repose, in form, in calm shape-shaping, but sculpture that can take human movement as its starting point: this simultaneously becomes eurythmy, which is based on listening to the movement tendencies of the human speech organs and applying them to the whole human being.

You will see from the experiment that I have just carried out, with the presentation of what underlies the world spiritually, which is then connected with the essence of the human being - which is already conceived poetically in such a way that one counts on there being more in reality than is provided by the mere, abstract laws of nature formulated in intellectual form — that this can most easily be represented in eurythmy.

As with all eurythmy in the present day, one will probably have to encounter misunderstandings and hostility in our time because it is simply believed today that what essentially underlies things must be able to be grasped in an intellectual form. But nature creates in images, and therefore we can only approach nature in its actual creation and weaving of the world if we engage with images. And so what Goethe meant will come true when he said: “To whom nature reveals its secret, longs for its most worthy interpreter, art.

For Goethe, art was something that combined – I would say in continuous metamorphosis – with mere scientific knowledge. So that one might truly find the truest truth in the moment when the whole human being is set in motion, in lawful motion, which is at the same time the expression as is speech itself, that one might find the truest truth in the Goethean saying: in the artistic one has a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without this artistic manifestation.

That is one side, the artistic side, which is initially more important for the outside world. However, it should be noted that, beyond the artistic aspect, there is also an important hygienic-therapeutic aspect to this eurythmy, the soul-inspired movement. And that this soul-inspired movement has also been added for children, in their education, so that this soul-inspired movement is added to gymnastics, which is actually based solely on the physiological view of the human being. When we are able to judge more impartially, we will recognize that gymnastics, while it makes the muscles strong, does not at the same time help to bring the initiative out of the soul and to shape the will. Therefore, I believe that once this eurythmy can be introduced into the teaching plans, as we have already done at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which is based on these important educational principles, it will turn out that the children will take with them into life a very essential, a certain culture of the will, the cultivation of which is so important in the present day: a soul-inspired culture of the will, a culture of the will that is not merely a child of the physiological view of the human being, but a child of the psychological view of the human being.

That is why we will also show you something done only by children after the break, so to speak also a sample of children's eurythmy. But please be aware that our performances must still be viewed with leniency. We are our own harshest critics in these early days, because it is only a beginning. It is an experiment. But just as those of our esteemed audience who have been here before will probably be able to see that we have tried hard and really improved from month to month, we will continue to try to turn this beginning into something more complete. And we can be convinced that although we are still at the very beginning of this eurythmic art, it is capable of such perfection that it will be able to present itself as a young art alongside the older arts - as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged art forms.

“However” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Epirrhema“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Antepirrhema” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (52.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (1.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Arielszene“ (Charming Area, ‘Faust II’) by J. W. v. Goethe with musical accompaniment by Jan Stuten
“The Swallows” by Christian Morgenstern
Saying from the soul calendar (2.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (3.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Hymn to Nature“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Narrative of an Antique Gem” by J. W. v. Goethe
“You revile my poetry“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“One thing after another” by J. W. v. Goethe
“To the originals” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Life is a game of tag“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Barker” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten

But now it can no longer be denied that all that appears in these fields today as a striving for a new artistic formal language, that most of it still leaves us unsatisfied, simply because, for example, what one wants to express in a new way cannot be achieved with a brush and paint today. Sculpture is equally unsuccessful in expressing what is intended through its forms. If I were to use a word for what many people today may be striving for more or less unconsciously, I would use Goethe's word for the sensual-supersensory. Because in art it is indeed the case that the means of expression must be used to bring the sensual to representation. For that which cannot be perceived by the senses, which can only be grasped in an idea, cannot be considered artistic in any way, not even in terms of an external sign. Therefore, everything symbolic is inartistic, and everything allegorical is inartistic. The artistic must present itself to people in a sensory way, but at the same time, the sensory must appear as supersensory. One must receive such an impression from the sensual as one otherwise only receives from the supersensible. Schiller, in a magnificent way that has not yet been appreciated, expressed this view, which is also that of Goetheanism, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race.

Now, if we start from the language of man, then in language there flow together, firstly, the phonetic element, produced by a certain part of the human body organization, with the mental element, which in poetry is permeated by the phonetic element; in song less so, but still the human soul also strives for expression through song and music. And just as there is a sensual element here, so it is true that especially in poetry, by having to use language, the more advanced a language is, the more difficult it becomes to create poetic and artistic expressions , simply because the civilized languages gradually approach the conceptual element, also approach the conventional element – they become lingua franca, they serve human social coexistence and so on, and so on. The more language becomes a means of expression for social coexistence, the more it becomes a means of expression for thoughts, the less it is suitable for the revelation of the truly poetic.

The truly poetic is that which one experiences in one's soul either with the character of the musical, or with the character of the plastic-pictorial. When thought intrudes – as it always does in art – when thought intrudes, the rhythm, the meter, the form that is to be expressed in poetry becomes overgrown with thought. And then a piece of poetry will no longer have an effect through the purely artistic from the outset. As paradoxical as it sounds, ladies and gentlemen, it must be said that the essential artistic quality of a piece of poetry can actually be felt, felt quite artistically, when it is presented in a language that one does not understand literally, that one does not even master. Because the artistic element is not found in the literal content. Of course, you need it in the literal content to have a kind of ladder to climb up in a poetic way.

But it was not entirely foolish, even in the time when, about a century ago, people were really striving again, especially in Central Europe, to really feel the artistic in poetry, it was not at all foolish for people to sit down together and listen to beautiful poems in languages they did not know, just absorbing intonation, rhythm, meter and so on – in other words, the formative, pictorial, musical element of language. But it is precisely that which underlies the linguistic as the actual artistic that can be brought out of poetry through this silent language, which we are striving for here with eurythmy and which does not consist of arbitrary gestures invented to what is musically based, but is based on a careful study of what happens in the separate organs of the larynx, the palate, and so on when speaking. Of course, the small tremors that are transmitted to the air and then form the basis of tone hearing cannot be expressed in any other way than through speech itself; but the tendencies that lie within, the tendencies of movement, can be transferred to the whole person according to the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis.

You can let the person move in his arms or as a whole body or even groups of people in their mutual interrelations in such a way that the movements represent the movement tendencies that otherwise only come to expression in the speech organ. $o becomes on the stage here in front of you the whole human being to the larynx. Nothing is arbitrary. Just as one can hear oh or oh wherever speech is spoken, and as one can perform nothing but the lawful movements of the larynx instead of o or /h], one can essentially perform nothing but the lawful movements of the larynx here when performing something else – of course one can also shape the sound and so on individually with speech – but essentially, no other movements can be performed than those movements that are read from the speech sounds and transferred to the whole person, so that even if the same thing is represented eurythmically in two different places, the individual difference cannot be greater than if, for example, two different pianists perform the same sonata in their own individual way.

Now eurythmy is actually an art that uses the whole human being as a means of expression, that is, it creates through the formal language of the whole human organization and can thus advance to the very sources of the sensual and supersensible. For we have the human being before us as the most perfect sensual form, and we have speech in such a way before us that the soul is expressed everywhere. By taking the soul as our basis, you will see this person, or groups of people, on stage, accompanied by recitation or music, which are, after all, only a different expression of the same thing, an expression in a different form.

However, the art of recitation must return to what it actually was in more artistic times than our own. In our time, great importance is attached to emphasising the content and stressing the literal meaning when reciting. This is called “introspection” in recitation. This is a deviation from the actual artistry of recitation, which must be based on meter, on musicality, on pictorial imagery. We must return to this ancient art of recitation, which Goethe, for example, used when he rehearsed his “Iphigenia” like a conductor with a baton in his hand – focusing on intonation, iambs, and so on.

In the first part of today's program, you will see a performance of the first scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust” with the help of eurythmy. This first scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust” has been misunderstood many times. It was objected that Goethe had made the transition from the first part of Faust to the second part far too easy for himself. Faust has incurred a heavy guilt, has brought people into the deepest misfortune, must have infinitely heavy pangs of conscience. And so he leaves us, if I may say so, in the first part. Now he stands before us again. He is supposed to continue on his path through life. The way Goethe presents it, it is not actually meant symbolically, but rather, it is meant that, indeed, when a person finds himself in such a terrible situation as Faust in this case, he must heal from within. This healing from within cannot, of course, be presented in any other way than by referring to the relationship between the human being and the spiritual world. It is a complete misunderstanding when some people have said in response to this first scene in the second part of Goethe's Faust: Yes, Goethe made things easy for himself. All you have to do is take a refreshing morning walk towards the rising sun after you have incurred a serious guilt, and you are restored to humanity. This is not, however, what is meant by this first scene of the second part of Faust; rather, what is meant by this scene is that a person, when he has so thoroughly ruined his conscience, can actually only recover it through a special connection to the spiritual world.

Of course, this can only be portrayed by depicting the spiritual world itself and its effect on the human being. This is what Goethe tried to do. But something like the penetration of the spiritual world into the sensual world can be well portrayed in eurythmy. And wherever the supersensible world must enter into human life in the dramatic [poetry] — otherwise we present lyric poetry, and you will also see today how we will present lyric poetry — but in the dramatic world, the eurythmic art is particularly suitable. I have not yet succeeded in finding a corresponding eurythmic form for the rest of the drama, but I am working on it and it must be found. It must also be possible to present the dramatic process as the actual artistic element of the dramatic and the tragic in eurythmy.

Until now, when we have attempted such dramatic representations, we have always presented that which simply depicts human life in the physical world in the same way as it is otherwise presented on stage. We depict the intrusion of the supersensible by using eurythmy, as you will see today. But we will also succeed in achieving something for the inner structure of the drama, for the plasticity and musicality of the dramatic action itself, as the eurythmic art develops. For we are still in the early stages of this eurythmic art. I ask you to bear this in mind today. We certainly do not imagine that we are already offering something complete; but those honored spectators who may have been here before and saw something months ago will notice how we have tried in recent months — namely, by forms over larger sentence structures over the construction of a poem, to include the inner form of poetry in the spatial form of movement - how we have in turn made progress in this eurythmic art as a result.

We should always strive to move forward. But then it is our conviction, however strict critics we are in relation to it, what we can already offer, that either through us, probably through others, this eurythmic art, when it is further developed, will become something that can actually lead the way into the other arts, for example into painting: one tries to express the inner life of the human being with color. Here a path is opened up where the human being is used as a means of expression, as a tool. The human being is the most perfect tool that can be developed in art.

Therefore, this eurythmic art will come so far that it will be able to present itself as a fully-fledged art alongside its other, older sisters, who, after all, have the advantage of age over it. But it has, in my opinion, the advantage over the other, older arts that it can really make use of everything that is inherent in the human organization itself as a means of expression. And it is still true what Goethe said: that when “man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To do this, he rises to the challenge by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally

to the production of the work of art.” And how can order, measure, harmony and meaning not best be combined in rhythm and tact, to give, as it were, moving sculpture and silent music, silent poetry, when one uses man himself as a tool for artistic formation? From this point of view, I ask you to accept with indulgence what is, however, only in its infancy, but is heading towards perfection, even in its present form.

There will now be a short break. After the break, the program will include Goethe's “Hymn to Nature.” Goethe's prose hymn “To Nature” is like a prefiguration of his worldview. One could say that Goethe conceived of it around the beginning of the 1780s. And it came about in the following way – I tried to describe the entire genesis in the seventh volume of the journal of the Goethe Society many years ago – it came about in the following way: Goethe did not write it down immediately, but he had the thoughts in his soul and discussed them with the Swiss Tobler, who was then living in Weimar. Apparently, while walking with Tobler in the open air, Goethe spoke this prose hymn, and it can be found in Tobler's writing in the Tiefurter Journal in Weimar, which still exists today. Tobler then wrote it down directly from the conversation. I tried to prove that this is the genesis. As I said, you will find a discussion of it in the seventh volume of the writings of the Goethe Society. And I could not be shaken in this recognition of the genesis by anything, not even by what has been written here recently. Goethe himself acknowledged that he proceeded from what he wrote in this prose hymn by then developing everything that is contained in his metamorphosis and so on. And he called everything that came later a kind of comparative of his world view, in contrast to the positive. So we can say that this prose hymn contains everything that is then met by us in the most highly metamorphosed form as the Goethean world view.

In this second part, then, we shall have something else to present besides this prose hymn by Goethe, namely Goethe's – including some in which, as I believe, the truly magnificent humor of Goethe's world view, in which everything is truly experienced with the deepest soul, can reveal itself.

Dear attendees,
As always, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few introductory words about our eurythmic art before these rehearsals. We are not dealing here with something that is already complete, but with the beginning of a new kind of art, so to speak, with an attempt to work artistically with the most perfect tools that one can have for art in general – with the human being himself and the laws of his organization. It is a matter of going back to the artistic sources in a very special way in order to also take into account those aspirations that are so often encountered today, especially in artistic circles – the aspirations to take elements from old art forms, an old formal language in art, which has certainly been taken to the highest level. But it is also recognized by many that this formal language must be overcome today. We see, however, how attempts are being made, whether in painting, sculpture or music, to follow the most diverse artistic paths, but also how much of what is being attempted today out of completely honest intentions can be categorized under the name of expressionism, futurism, as it were, in broader circles. [Lückes]

Now, with eurythmy, something is to be created that - like everything here with us - is born out of a truly Goethean worldview and artistic attitude, out of real Goetheanism. I need only point to a single word used by Goethe, and it is the one word that, I would say, characterizes the whole essence of artistic creation and artistic urge. It is the concept, the word sensual-supersensible [contemplation]. Art must certainly strive to work through the sense image or through the audible sense, and not only must that which is directly sensuous work in art, but the supersensuous must one day speak through the sense, hence Goethe's word for everything artistic can be used: “sensual-supernatural”. The source of the sensual and the supersensible is what this eurythmic art seeks to rediscover in its originality, and in the following way: you will see on the stage how the individual performers express movements of their limbs, how movements are performed by the whole person, how movements are performed by groups of people. These movements could very easily be mistaken for arbitrary gestures, for an arbitrary mimicry that has been invented in addition to what is encountered musically on the one hand and rhetorically on the other. But there is nothing arbitrary in our eurythmic art. It has really come about through careful study of human speech and singing itself. To make it clear how people do this, I would like to refer to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, the principle by which Goethe dared to bring something into the science of the living, into the knowledge of the living, whereby one can really come closer to understanding it. Despite all efforts, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis is still far too little appreciated today, even in scholarly and artistic circles. It looks simple, but there is a lot in the impulse that Goethe describes, when he says: If I look at a plant, then every single leaf, whether it sits [in a simpler form] deep down on the stem or sits in a complicated way on a normal part of the stem, is thought to have emerged directly from the other through a metamorphosis. amorphous, to think that each individual leaf, whether it is [of a simpler form] and sits low down on the stem or is intricately arranged at a normal point on the stem, has emerged directly from the other, but also that the colored petal or even the stamen and pistil are only metamorphosed, transformed leaves and the whole plant is a complete [leaf], just as each individual leaf is a simplified whole plant.

But this is not the only way in which we can perceive the form of living things; we can also perceive the [movement] of living things in this way.

When a person speaks, their larynx and the neighboring organs of the larynx move.

Therefore, there is no arbitrariness to be found in such a representation, but rather, when two or three people at completely different times and in completely different places perform the same eurythmy, the different interpretations are unavoidable, just as when two pianists play the same sonata at two different places or at different times. In eurythmy, everything is built up in accordance with inner laws, like a series of successive movements of music in motion: just as the musical lives in the laws of melody and harmony, so this mute language expresses itself fully and lives in the moving forms. Of course, today we have to accompany what is being presented eurythmically – at least for a time – although we also present silent forms that one only has to feel. We have to do it accompanied by recitation and by the musical element. But these are only different expressive powers of one and the same thing. Therefore, you will particularly appreciate, when reciting, how we have to go back to the good old forms of recitation here, which have more or less already been lost to an unartistic world like ours. I would like to remind you of this, which is an indication of what is actually artistic in poetry. It is not what the literal text says. For example, Goethe himself rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with a baton, like a conductor.

Not on what one particularly looks for today when reciting, when /unleserliches Wort] declaiming, that the prose content comes out with the so-called correct internal emphasis, but that rhythm, tact, that the formal impression, that the, so the actual artistic, comes out in the correct manner. The age of romanticism, when, for example, Rückert and his friends devoted themselves to poetry, this time had much more artistic sensibility for [many] than today. People would sit together and also listen to poems in languages they didn't understand; even if it sounds paradoxical to people today, they actually took pleasure in the tone, the sound, the vivid imagery and the musicality – that is, in the actual artistic quality of the poetry. And Schiller always had a kind of general melody in his soul first, only then did he grasp the words, at least in the case of a large number of his important poems. Today, the literal, the prose content, is regarded as the most essential thing in poetry. In this case, we do not have to strive for the intellectual element to be expressed through our silent language of eurythmy; in the accompanying recitation, we listeners only have to grasp the rhythmic, the formative, the pictorial. Therefore, the art of recitation itself will have to undergo a reform by acting as a companion to the eurythmic.

You will see various units of eurhythmicized [illegible word]. I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that today's performance attempts to present a scene from Goethe, the first scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. While we have otherwise shown lyrical or epic representations, [...] [illegible word] we venture to present art dramatically. Now, I think that is something that I have not yet succeeded in doing, that eurythmic forms still arise that are suitable for the actual dramatic structure, for dramatic composition. The eurythmic art is just at the beginning - it will be perfected over time.

But we have repeatedly tried with Goethe's “Faust” to use what we already have in eurythmy in such a way that where the poetry touches on the inner law of development, where the spiritual-supersensory in a dramatic poetry, in any drama, appears, we call on eurythmy for help. All scenes that take place, I might say, in the physical world, we have them presented like other scenes in the theater, but what points to the supersensible world is particularly suited to eurythmic presentation. You will see this in this first picture from the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. It is the one scene in which Goethe wanted to express himself by leading from the sensual into the supersensual. Faust has already lived through his life to the point that is presented to us at the end of the first part as a person who has incurred the most serious guilt. [...] [unclear passage, see notes]

What must come to someone who is so burdened with guilt is the intrusion of the spiritual world and [a] healing from the spiritual world. This is what is needed, not a symbolic or allegorical representation, which would be inartistic. Goethe did not do that either, but he did depict what it is to have the supersensible world intrude in this Ariel scene with the elves, how the human being can strive for something new – even if they cannot thereby eradicate the guilt within them – when they come into right contact with the supersensible world. This is particularly suitable for eurythmic performances. Goethe wanted the second part of his “Faust” to be particularly suitable for the stage - and as far as the supersensory is concerned, if the eurythmic means of artistic expression had already existed in his time, he would undoubtedly have these [eurythmic means of artistic expression] /illegible passage] and would have presented that which otherwise, when the second part of “Faust” is presented on stage, always remains unsatisfactory.

Eurythmy really brings out the full inwardness of the [illegible word], while Goethe [gap:] meant: In something like? [illegible word] the second [part] of “Faust” I can with [illegible word] this first scene, which we are presenting here today in the first part before the break. So even the esteemed audience who have been here before will see how we are endeavoring to arrive at a [--] [unreadable passage] mode of presentation. We can say that we have made a great deal of progress in the last few months, particularly in the development of the forms of presentation. But we are well aware that the whole of eurythmic art is only at the beginning of its development and we are therefore convinced, although the strictest criticism comes from ourselves, that there is still room for improvement in this eurythmy. perfection [illegible word] [in] this eurythmy, that others or we ourselves, without [illegible word] [space], will still bring it to [a] higher form.

It is precisely this eurythmic art that shows how the human being, when used as a means of expression, can itself be the most perfect expression. It is Goethe again who says: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to him, he feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.” And art, when it uses man himself as an instrument, satisfies that which Goethe says so beautifully in his artist book about Winckelmann: By placing man [at the summit of nature, he in turn produces a summit within himself, taking measure, harmony and meaning together and finally elevating himself to a work of art].

[The rest of the speech is very fragmentary and difficult to decipher, see notes.]

This performance was specially organized for visitors to the Swiss Trade Fair in Basel. Pastor H. Nidecker-Roos reported on it in the Christlicher Volksbote für Basel (No. 23/1920) on June 9, 1920: “On large posters, visitors to the Mustermesse in Basel were invited to visit the sanctuary of the so-called Anthroposophists, which was nearing completion, and to attend the subsequent ‘Eurhythmic Games’. [...] In front of the large main entrance, the approximately 300 visitors gathered around the striking figure of Dr. Steiner, who vividly resembled a priest. He had not only designed the building down to the last detail, but, to use his own words, had also “felt” it. The explanation of the building was at the same time an introduction to the main ideas of anthroposophy. [...] This was followed by the 'Eurhythmic Games' ('eurhythmic' can be translated as 'in well-measured time'). The idea is as follows: when speaking, the human larynx performs certain movements in which the will that is expressed in language is revealed. These movements are to be transferred to the whole body through a more serious form of individual dance, and so the whole person is to be a single expression of the spoken word. About thirty daughters, dressed in white and wearing colored veils, danced in this way, among other things, the first scene of the second part of Goethe's Faust, recited by Mrs. Steiner, as well as various poems by Goethe, Morgenstern and Steiner. The attempt was very successful in several numbers. There is nothing theatrical about the dances. They are serious attempts to express speech and soul processes through the movements of the body. The impression of the plays is one of seriousness, of a thoroughly spiritual nature.

Dear guests!

As I always do before these eurythmy performances, I would like to say a few words by way of introduction. These introductory words should never be used to comment on or explain the art of eurythmy in any real sense; that would be unartistic from the outset. For everything that is truly artistic must justify itself through itself before the act of beholding it, before the direct impression. But with eurythmy, as it is cultivated here, something new is being attempted, both in terms of artistic sources and in terms of artistic formal language, which cannot be directly compared with any neighboring arts, dance arts and the like. And so it is necessary to say something in advance about the sources and the particular way of expression of this eurythmic artistic experiment.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen, all kinds of movements performed on stage by individual people through their limbs – mainly through arms and hands, but also with the other physical limbs – and you will see movements of the individual human being in space, movements and mutual positioning of groups of people, and so on. These are not arbitrary gestures, invented in the moment out of some random fantasy. What underlies the eurythmic presentation always includes something poetic or musical, especially in what you encounter as eurythmy, where you are really dealing with a silent language, a language that uses only different means than our ordinary spoken language. Nothing arbitrary is expressed in it.

If I wish to characterize what has been attempted here, I may truly speak of Goetheanism, for everything that is connected with the spiritual current that is renewed by this structure is Goetheanism in its further development. For I need only recall a word that Goethe often used and that is particularly apt for the kind of artistic nature that underlies eurythmy: I would like to recall Goethe's words about sensuous-supernatural vision. It is through this sensuous-supernatural vision that the forms of movement of the mute language of eurythmy are gained.

You know that in our ordinary lives, even when enjoying poetry or song, we turn our attention to the tone and the sound of speech or song, and that we naturally have no idea of the movements that the larynx and the other speech organs carry out in order to produce speech. Now, the first thing to be considered is that, through sensory-supersensory observation, one can indeed obtain clear images of what takes place as movement while we turn our attention to the sound. But that is not what underlies eurythmy directly. Instead, all these movements, which are small vibrational movements that are transmitted through the special arrangement of the larynx and the other speech organs to the air, all these small vibrational movements are based on movement tendencies, and these movement tendencies can be observed. These tendencies, which are by no means arbitrary but are connected with our organism in a lawful way, in that it is a speech organism, these lawful movements can be transferred from the localized speech organ to the whole human being.

Goethe's principle of metamorphosis – although individual thinkers as early as the 19th century were trying to get to the bottom of this idea of metamorphosis, it is still not sufficiently incorporated into our intellectual life. For it will be seen that while it is still more or less accepted today as a formalistic principle, it will be seen how a true realization of the principle of metamorphosis opens up an understanding of the living world and how one can then transfer directly into the artistic that which underlies the principle of metamorphosis underlies the metamorphosis principle, which Goethe expressed not as a mere image but as a profound natural principle of formation, that the whole plant is an intricate leaf, that each plant is a transformed, a metamorphosed form of another form, the leaf form.

Transposing these forms into art shows that the whole person carries out movements that are otherwise movement tendencies in the individual organs of the larynx and its neighboring organs; in a sense, what you see on the stage would be the whole person as a moving larynx, I would say. Nothing arbitrary, nothing pantomimic, nothing mimetic - just as little as language itself is mimetic or pantomimic. Of course, in detail it passes over into one or other; but just as little as it is mimetic or pantomimic as a whole, so little is that which presents itself here as eurythmy something pantomimic or mimetic or consists in random gestures. Just as music, even in its melodious element, is a lawful succession of sounds and sound images, so here everything consists in the lawful succession of movements.

However, one must look a little into the artistic striving of the present, into the strange artistic search, if one wants to find what is being striven for with this eurythmy. In a sense, it goes back to the very origins of artistic creation, in that the human being himself - but the whole human being - is called upon as a means of artistic expression, a truly artistic means of expression. The human being himself becomes the artistic tool, and the movement possibilities inherent in him become the artistic language of form.

Today, because much that is artistic has become conventional, people are seeking to return to the original, elementary artistic sources. In poetry, there is a tendency – very, very much so, actually, can be felt already (?), and especially the civilized languages have to transfer the linguistic element more and more into the prosaic, we need the conventionality of language as a lingua franca, we need our other insights and so on – [there is a tendency] to express the forms of our technology. We need the conceptual and the ideational in language – precisely because language continues to develop, it becomes more and more the vehicle of ideas, thoughts, and conceptions, and in so doing, it distances itself from the artistic. For the death of everything artistic is the ideational, the conceptual. The artistic must be felt directly – admittedly as something profound, but not as something conceptual – from the image in human language. As it emerges from the larynx, the thought element and the will element unite out of the human being, but now, if I may use the trivial but apt expression, what shoots out of the whole human being is what the larynx accomplishes, there united as a will element with the thought element.

When we now turn to eurythmy, we leave the conceptual element, even of poetry, only as a companion. And in what is presented on stage, only the movements of the individual and the groups of people express the will element. The whole human being is transformed into movement. Anyone who has a sense of how our individuality must develop in language – I would say it becomes something rigid. We all feel, when we speak, if we have a sense for it, we all feel, when we speak, that we have to speak ourselves into a language that does not just come from our individuality. What arises individually from us must travel on the waves of the vernacular and so on. You feel that. You feel how the individual does not always want to be included. And anyone who does not feel that is not a whole person, at least not an artistic nature; because the artistic nature wants to shape the individual.

In a sense, by reproducing in eurythmy what is to be presented artistically, we stop what lives in the human being earlier than phonetic language can stop it. For example, Schiller always had a melody or an indefinite, nebulous sequence of melodies in mind first when writing his most significant poems, and only then did he add the actual words. This shows how he perceived the musical element, which is actually the artistic element of language. Or you could say: the plastic quality that lies behind speech is what is artistic.

Today, in an unartistic age, we actually place a great deal of value on the literal, including in poetry. In the age of German Romanticism, people liked to sit down together and listen to poems that had very precisely formed verses in languages that they did not understand, or at least found it difficult to understand, because in those days, in a more artistic age, people were more sensitive to rhythm, meter, to everything that is actually artistic in language. And Goethe was still there with the baton like a conductor when he rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, placing much more value on the correct speaking of the iambs and so on than on the literal content. These things are lost on us today.

In eurythmy, one seeks precisely this plastic and musical element behind the spoken word and thereby arrives precisely at the artistic element, thus going back, as it were, to the source of artistic creation, seeking particularly not into the abstract, into the abstract, watered-down, tonal, but seeks to enter into the rhythmic-tactile, into a way of speaking that we find more and more the more we penetrate to the original epochs of any language.

There is, of course, a great deal to be said about this. I will just add that, on the one hand, our eurythmy performances are accompanied by the musical element or, on the other hand, by the recitation element. And in the art of recitation, in particular, we are in the process – as you will hear – of once again moving away from what is cultivated in the art of recitation in today's unartistic age: the literal, the prosaic content. We are compelled to go back from the prosaic content and the literal to the rhythmic, the one that is actually artistic in poetry. And so it may well be said: there is so little arbitrariness in this eurythmic art that when two people or two groups of people present one and the same thing, the individual expression will not be more different than when a Beethoven sonata or something else is presented by two different performers.

You will see, dear attendees, that even drama can be supported by eurythmy today. You will find lyricism and epic, humor, satire and so on presented; everywhere, excluding pantomime, an attempt is made to recreate the content through artistic expression. Those who have visited us often will see how hard we have worked, especially in the last few months, to anticipate something in the formation of form.

Although we are our own harshest critics and we know that we may not even be at the beginning of an attempt today, but only at the beginning of an attempt, we still think that one day it will be possible - I have not yet been able to do so, but it is something we should work on. We should also be able to conquer the dramatic in an artistic eurythmic way, so that the dramatic forms themselves can one day be transformed into eurythmic forms. Until now, we have only tried to help the dramatic through the eurythmic in our recurring rehearsals of scenes from Goethe's “Faust” by depicting them in eurythmy. We do this wherever Goethe – as he does so often in his “Faust” and in his other poems, wherever he points to the supersensible in what takes place only in the physical realm — where he presents these scenes, which shows us the connection between the human soul and the supersensible, as is the case with this first scene from the second part of 'Faust', in which Goethe has indeed been attacked so often.

It would be interesting if I could explain – but there is not enough time – how much this particular scene from “Faust” has been misunderstood. It is indeed difficult to understand, when Faust – and this is the result of the first part – is standing there with the most severe pangs of conscience, apparently laden, with terrible guilt on his soul, he is supposed to live life, he is supposed to strive “to the highest existence forever”. Yes, it is necessary to point out in the most intimate way what can enter the human soul from the spiritual world and heal it. This is what Goethe attempted in this scene, which we want to present here with the help of eurythmy.

Until now, we have always presented the actual scenes taking place in physical life dramatically, as is usually the case. Where the sensual passes over into the supersensual, we must resort to the eurythmic art. We hope that we will eventually succeed in translating the drama, the actual dramatic form into eurythmy. But, as I said, the eurythmic art is still in its infancy, and I would ask you to consider what we have already rehearsed as a beginning. We are, however, convinced that this beginning can be perfected – probably by others, in part we ourselves will still be able to do it – but we are of the essence of this eurythmic art believe that this eurythmic art will one day be able to stand as a full-fledged art alongside the other full-fledged sister arts.

Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (3.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Antepirrhema“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the Calendar of the Soul (5.) by Rudolf Steiner
“To the New Year” by Eduard Mörike
Musical prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“The Journey through the Harz in Winter“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Music from the 4th symphony by Anton Bruckner
“Primeval Words, Orphic” by J. W. v. Goethe
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Flames“ silent prelude
“Napoleon in the Kremlin” by C. F. Meyer
“The Divine“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Mailied” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Like and Like“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Five Things” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Five Things“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Five Other Things” by J. W. v. Goethe
Humorous prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Problem”; “The Guineafowl”; “To the Originals”; “A Modern Fairy Tale”

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to say a few words today, as always, before these eurythmy performances. It is not done to explain the content of the performances themselves, because artistic work must of course be effective through direct impression and sending an explanation in advance would actually be somewhat inartistic. However, an attempt is being made with what we call eurythmy here to find new possibilities for artistic work, new possibilities for movements, [namely] that eurythmy strives for a kind of real mute language. On the stage you will see movements of the individual human being and of groups of people in relation to one another. What is expressed by the individual human being or by groups of people is not meant to be a play of gestures or pantomime or anything else of a mimic nature, which has been found by chance to express the poetry or music that is accompanying it. Rather, what is presented here as movement is derived from the whole organization of the human being as logically as speech sounds are derived. Just as the individual sound cannot be interpreted through mimicry, so too the individual gestures that appear in eurythmy cannot be interpreted through mimicry or dance. Rather, the aim is to use sensory-supersensory observation, to use a Goethean expression, to discover the laws of phonetic language, so to speak.

When I speak to you here, the movement is transmitted through the air. These movements are, however, initially small tremors. They are only the continuation of the movements that speech sounds produce in the larynx and the other speech organs. But these initial real movements of the larynx and the other speech organs are based on movement tendencies.

We can summarize, as it were, the movements that underlie phonetic language in terms of movement tendencies, in the same way that we can summarize the coils of a helix, by taking the axis of the helix as a movement tendency.

This is the unique feature of eurythmy: it has not grown out of some random flights of fancy, but out of a lawfulness that contains just as much inner necessity as the lawfulness of speech or song itself. So when we hear eurythmy accompanied by recitation and the spoken language expresses the recitation, the poem – or something musical is expressed through the instrument or also through singing, the eurythmic presentation is just another form, just another language. But it is a language that can be said to bring about, in many respects, those artistic aspirations that are sought by a large proportion of those who are artistically striving today.

Today, all kinds of artistic endeavors are being explored. Many of them are quite insignificant, because even today, as a painter or sculptor, one is not yet able to discover the forms from colors and shapes that can approach the elementary sources from which art flows for people in a new way.

In eurythmy, we have the strange fact that we use the human being himself as the tool through which it is expressed. And just as the human being appears to the world as a whole as a microcosm, as a small world, so when we use the limbs, which otherwise arise out of the satisfaction of the egoistic or social will, as a means of means of expression for what the human soul experiences, for example through poetry, through music, then the fact that the human being himself is a means of expression in this representation, in which one focuses one's gaze on the human being himself, one obtains a sensual image.

And this sensuous image is through and through, because it is formed by the human being himself, is inspired, spiritualized. Indeed, a sense-perceptible and supersensible reality appears immediately: a physical reality – the human being in motion – at the same time in such a way that we know that what is depicted in space is animated by soul and spirit. This makes it possible to unfold the sensual and the supersensible before us. And the sensual and the supersensible must indeed be the content of all true art. When art is saturated with ideas, with thoughts, it becomes inartistic. The more the element of thought is present in art, the less artistic the art is.

Therefore, language, spoken language, precisely because it is developing more and more, is becoming less and less suitable for poetry. And much of what one feels today about poetry is actually only the feeling of the literal content of prose. The time is already behind us when, in the early 19th century, in certain Romantic circles people found pleasure in listening to poetry that they did not understand literally, but only delighted in the rhythm and meter, in what is actually artistic in poetry.

We must even, by allowing the eurythmic to accompany the recitation, lead the recitation back to its good old forms. Today, people see perfection in recitation when the content is delivered in the right way, as they say, quite inwardly, from within the person. Goethe himself still rehearsed his “Iphigenia” with his actors with a baton like a conductor, placing much more emphasis on the iambic meter and verse than on the literal content. Today, we have more or less abandoned this purely artistic approach.

Now, you see, you feel this too if you want to let the individual human being work. You feel it in language when you are to pour that which is the content of the will into the word forms. Perhaps it seems paradoxical to many of the honored listeners, but it is nevertheless the case: for those who have a certain fine empathy for what one can feel today at an advanced stage of human development, what one can experience inwardly when one wants to express it in conventional language, then it is as if what one experiences more or less gets stuck in one's throat. Only people who have a certain talent for merging into the conventional, even if they are poets, find satisfaction in the phonetic language as a whole. One can say: this spoken language compels us to become inartistic everywhere, because it enters into the thought element, which becomes more and more conventional as civilization advances, because it favors the thought element. This conceptual element is only present in the accompanying recitation, but this must also go back to the artistic element, otherwise it would not be able to keep pace with the eurythmic performance. In contrast, in the eurythmic performance, we have the human will of a poem or a musical element, and we have the possibility to express the purely artistic.

Therefore, eurythmy, which is initially a mute language, has the very possibility of becoming artistic in the most direct of representations, in that what is represented is completely sensual and at the same time completely spiritual. This is the requirement for something that is to be truly artistic.

Thus we believe that our eurythmy is particularly helpful in an area that has been sought after in a wide variety of artistic fields for some time now. Through eurythmy, we can go back to the deepest human feelings, which cannot be expressed through language but can be expressed very individually through the silent language of eurythmy.

One might say: When a person dreams, they are, to a certain extent, in a sub-human consciousness. When a person dreams, they are at peace as a whole human being. They do not carry out movements. Only images fill the dream, and we only imagine movements in our dreams. Eurythmy play is the opposite pole to dreaming; it is a stronger awakening of the human being. Just as in dreams movements are suppressed and only the imagined shoots into the picture, so in eurythmy play the imagined recedes and the movement comes out. This is a stronger awakening, an elevation of consciousness. This is something our time must strive for. It is truly not right in a serious spiritual movement to lull people into a mystical dream. That is an aberration. All dream-like mysticism is an aberration from what must be willed today out of the true tasks of the time. And it is precisely out of the true tasks of the time that this art form of eurythmy has been brought forth. It is not a muffling, not a damping down of human consciousness into dreaming, it is an upward development of human consciousness into a strong waking. Therefore, it will have a significance for education.

This eurythmy, as children's eurythmy, of which you will also see samples today, has a direct educational effect on the initiative of the human will, which is not the case with ordinary, purely physiological gymnastics. And so, in the future, this didactic moment will be judged differently in relation to eurythmy than it is today.

But we are our own harshest critics, and today, as always, I ask for your forbearance. We are only at the beginning of a development and we know full well that there is still much to be done. Those of our esteemed listeners who were here months ago and saw our performances will be able to see how we have progressed, particularly in the development and artistic design of the forms. Little by little, all mimicry will disappear and the artistic will come to the fore. Nothing symbolic must remain, as it may have happened in the beginning and may not have disappeared completely even today. But we will find a way to eliminate symbolism and allegory altogether and to express the creative awareness that is the moving language of eurythmy artistically. Then it will be seen that, although this eurythmy is still in its infancy, as those in the audience who were there earlier will see, it has already progressed, and that we are convinced that what is still imperfect today is capable of greater perfection. So that eurythmy as an art will one day stand in such a way – perhaps it will no longer be developed by us, but by others in this way – that eurythmy will be able to present itself as a complete art alongside its older, fully-fledged sister arts.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

We are not attempting to provide an explanation of what is to be presented here in the form of eurythmy rehearsals. That would be unartistic. Art must work through itself in direct impression. It is much more a matter of pointing out the sources and means of expression from which this particular eurythmic art is created.

In fact, the attempt is made to open up the sources of artistic creation in a special way by applying the human being himself as an artistic tool, the sources of artistic creation in a special way through this. If we want an expression for what we should strive for as art, we can use the expression that Goethe himself coined: sensual-supersensible seeing. All artistic activity must be based on sensual-supersensible seeing. This already implies that abstract thought or idea, conception, must not play a significant role in the perception of art. But it would, of course, be completely wrong to believe that the spirit should not play a role in art for that reason, that the supersensible should not be the content of art. Art must simply work in such a way that everything in it arises out of the directly sensed vision. But the sensed vision itself must work as a spiritual reality without the mediation of the idea, without the mediation of the concept.

Now we have poetry, which makes use of the spoken word in order to have a means of expression in this spoken word. But precisely when language advances in the course of civilization, it becomes, I would say, more and more reflective and reflective, language. That which is the content of language becomes more and more dependent on the conventions of human intercourse or it becomes a means of expression for what we have to communicate to each other in science and in other human intercourse. But in this way the phonetic language is increasingly deprived of its possibility to be a real, direct revelation of what can arise artistically out of the human soul.

Now you will see movements, movements on the stage that are performed either by a single person, namely by human arms and hands, but also by the other human limbs. You will see the movements of groups of people, forms of groups of people, formed by their positions in relation to one another, and so on. These are not arbitrary gestures, but a silent, real language that has come about through movement. And it comes about through sensory-suprasensory seeing.

We can discover how the human speech organs, larynx, palate and so on, lips, have movement tendencies while we utter speech sounds. Then, through the sound they produce, through the tone, these movement tendencies, which only come to expression while we speak, can be transmitted to the whole human being. And this does not result in a collection of arbitrary gestures, but in a real language, the only language that - instead of adhering to the movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs - is transformed into small tremors that are transmitted to the air. This corresponds directly to the will's tendency to move, which a person releases into their limbs by making movements that make these movement tendencies immediately visible. Eurythmy is a visible language. And there is just as little arbitrariness in eurythmy as there is in language itself when two people or two groups of people in different places present poems or musical content in eurythmy. Just as there is no greater difference when two pianists play one and the same Beethoven sonata in two different places according to their subjective interpretation, so too what emerges in eurythmy lies not in the individual sequence of gestures, but in the succession of gestures.

Those of our honored audience who have been here before will see that we are making progress. In our early attempts there was still a lot of pantomime, mimicry. These are the teething troubles, so to speak, of eurythmic performances. On the other hand, in the forms we are now developing, more and more of what the poet or composer brings into the artistic creation, into the rhythmic, rhyming creation of the poetic — that is, into the artistic aspect — or, for the musicians, into the succession of the melody and so on, will come to life in eurythmy.

The point is that we cannot get at the how, through which the poet artistically achieves what makes a prose content a poem, through the ordinary prose content of language, through eurythmy, to express it. In this way we have, firstly, the human being as the artistic tool instead of the violin, instead of the piano, instead of any form of instrument; we have the human being itself. But we have the ensouled human being. The human being in all his movements is directly sensual and descriptive; but no movement is without being ensouled and spiritualized, so to speak, in the greatest immediacy.

However, precisely because this eurythmic art, as I have described it, is being tried out, it will only gradually acquire a larger audience, perhaps very slowly, in our time. Why? Because our time actually loves to passively surrender to everything that is an enjoyment of art, and generally prefers to passively accept everything artistic.

You see, I was once invited to give a lecture on Goethe's “Faust” at a social gathering. People listened to these lectures on Goethe's “Faust” quite willingly. But afterwards some people - they believed themselves to be practical people because they belonged to a so-called practical profession - said: Yes, but Goethe's “Faust” is not actually a stage work! Because a stage work is a comedy, Blumenthal and so on. Or they said something like this: Goethe's “Faust” is a science, you have to think when you listen. You don't want that, you've been thinking all day at work. If you go to the theater in the evening, you don't want to think. You don't want to participate, you just want to enjoy yourself, even if you are already indulging in some intellectual pleasure in the evening. You don't want to be alert, you don't want to think, you just want to see. When you go to lectures, you prefer them to have slides, just don't think. You want to be able to passively watch everything, you don't want to participate inwardly.

However, those people whose ideal is to sit in their chair and passively absorb what is poured out over them from the stage will never be a true audience for eurythmy. This is because eurythmy is like language itself – you have to learn the language. You learn it as a child, and you are more willing to do so than later on. But it must also be clear that eurythmy is not something that can be accepted immediately, like some kind of pantomime. Rather, eurythmy is something that works like a real language. But precisely because it pushes back the element of the intellect, the element of ideas, and comes directly from the whole human being, bringing the whole human being into movement, it is also rooted in the individuality of the human being. And everything artistic comes from that. Through it we are able to bring forth the artistic content of a poem in a much higher sense today through the silent language of eurythmy than through speech.

We are even obliged — because it is still necessary today — to accompany what is presented on stage in eurythmy with recitation on the one hand and with music on the other. But in recitation we are urged to go back to the good old forms of recitation. We could not accompany our eurythmy art with recitation in the way we love to do it today, where the literal content, the prose content, is important. This is because eurythmy is concerned with the artistic content of poetry, with the rhythmic, the metrical, the musical, the plastic, that is found in poetry. This must also be taken into account in the accompanying recitation. One must really understand why Goethe, with the baton, rehearsed “Iphigenia” like a conductor with his actors, paying less attention to the literal content of the prose than to the momentum of the poetry, to the rhythm of the iambic pentameter, everything that makes poetry appear as poetry, as a work of art, by the words flowing or sweeping along on the wings of the beat or rhythm.

This is what should come out through eurythmy: a genuine, true artistic element, as it underlies all genuine artistry. All this, however, means that eurythmy will perhaps only slowly become established. But those who do not approach it with prejudice will realize that when we listen to a poem in spoken language, we can also have a work of art before us. For what kind of art is this language? What artistic configuration of the larynx and the other speech organs does it presuppose?

If we accept what eurythmy unfolds as a second such work of art - not only part of the speech organs, but the whole human being is called upon - if we accept that the whole human being is, in a sense, made into a larynx, into a speech organ, then, if we surrender to it in this way, we will see: what you see before you emerges from the whole human being – everything that lies in a poetry of deeper feelings, everything that today lies in language that has already become highly conventional.

But everything you will see today is basically still in its very early stages. We are our own harshest critics and we know that our performance still needs a lot of work. We have already tried to avoid pantomime in the humorous-satirical piece, for example, which you will see in the second part after the break. This is even more difficult in the humorous-satirical than in the serious. We will see how we try to express not the prose content but that which comes from what the poet does when he builds verses, when he creates symmetry and congruity of feelings and thoughts, [how we try to extract this] from the mere prosaic content of the thought, in eurythmy forms. But all this is in its infancy. And so I must always ask the honored listeners and audience to treat what they see as a first attempt and to be lenient. But at the same time, we are convinced that this eurythmic art, which draws on the most original sources of all art in human feeling and in human soul experience, and at the same time uses the most comprehensive, universal tool, the human being himself, we are convinced that this eurythmic art will gradually be able to establish itself as a new creative art alongside its older, fully-fledged sister arts.

Saying from the soul calendar (4.) by Rudolf Steiner
“Limits of Humanity“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Opening ‘Look around you’
“To the Moon” by J. W. v. Goethe
Saying from the soul calendar (5.) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (6.) by Rudolf Steiner
Prelude “We want to search”
“The resin journey in winter” by J. W. v. Goethe
Prelude ‘Fate question’ with music by Max Schuurman
Elegiac prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
Silent prelude ‘Flames’
“Napoleon in the Kremlin“ by C. F. Meyer
“The Divine” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Mailied“ by J. W. v. Goethe
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Häschen” by Christian Morgenstern
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “The Unicorn”; “The Skirt”; “The Guinea Fowl”; “Karl's Enchantment”; “Northward”; “West-East”
Cheerful prelude with music by Leopold van der Pals

Dear attendees!

Allow me, as always before these eurythmy attempts, to say a few words today as well. Not to explain what is to be presented – art must speak for itself, otherwise it would be an inartistic undertaking – but because our eurythmy is an attempt to at least try something new, allow me to say a few words about the sources and means of expression of this eurythmic art. There is an interesting verse by Ludwig Tieck, which goes:

Sweet love thinks in tones,
For thoughts are too far away.
Only in tones may it dwell
And beautify all it wills.

Ludwig Tieck thus wanted to assert that what a loving person experiences cannot be expressed in abstract thoughts, but rather in sounds. He did not mean that it should be given only musically, but that it should be given through the whole form of poetry, through the tone of the poetry. The great poet Ludwig Uhland, who, in addition to being a great poet, was also an extraordinarily great pedant, responded to these Tieckian verses with the following:

If you, proud beauties, did not love
to mock even logic,
I would dare to prove
that it is nonsense to say:
“Sweet love thinks in sounds."

And a logician, I might say, of course, a logician, has tried to prove in a treatise that I have here that there is much more nonsense in Tieck's saying than just the contradiction in Uhland's quote.

Now, I would like to say, eurythmy must also assert that it wants to express what is experienced inwardly by human beings, but not through spoken language, but through a kind of moving language, through a language that consists of movements, movements of the human limbs themselves, movements of groups of people, the interactions, positions, that are evoked in groups of people, and so on.

But all that will appear on the stage before you is by no means just a hodgepodge of random gestures invented to fit a content, I would like to say. Rather, there is a lawfulness underlying this silent, visible language, just as there is a lawfulness underlying spoken language itself. If you have to express something you have experienced inwardly through spoken language, you cannot just make up random sounds for anything, but you have to adhere to the laws of language. Thus, what is presented here as a single case is based on a complete conformity to law, a conformity to law in the movements of human limbs that is as internally necessary as the conformity to law of spoken language itself is necessary. Everything that is carried out in detail in these movements is gained through sensuous-supersensible observation in such a way that it was established which movement tendencies the human speech organs have when they produce a sound or a sound context. What is otherwise merely performed by the speech organs, but now in such a way that the speech organs convert their movement tendencies into small undulating movements, is taken directly as a movement tendency and is performed by the human limbs themselves, so that there is nothing arbitrary in what you see performed. Every single movement is carried out in the way that the speech organs want to carry out the movement, if I may say so. So that the individual person that you see here on the stage and the whole group of people is actually nothing more than a kind of larynx that has come to life, a larynx that has come to life and its neighboring organs.

This makes it possible, above all, to express directly what is artistically felt and willed. In our civilized languages, phonology has become conventional. On the one hand, it has become that which serves human intercourse, but then also that which serves the expression of thoughts. But in art, thoughts are actually what suppresses all art. Art is based precisely on the fact that one already has the impression from the sensual given, which one otherwise only receives in a roundabout way from thought, for example from nature: what is seen with the senses must have an immediate spiritual effect.

Never has this been stated more beautifully and meaningfully than in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, where it is pointed out that everything artistic is based on the fact that a sensual thing is viewed in such a way that it is otherwise only the case with a supernatural thing. Sensual things that appear to be supernatural. This is what various new artistic endeavors are trying to achieve today, in the fields of painting and sculpture. We have not yet reached the point where we really have a kind of formal language.

In this building, much has been attempted to arrive at such a formal language. In a sense, I would like to say that eurythmy can serve as a kind of model for acquiring such a formal language, because the artistic tool in eurythmy is the human being itself, and the human being is already, by nature, completely ensouled and spiritualized. If we allow what the human being accomplishes as a whole human being to be inspired in the way that only the sounds of spoken language are inspired, then we can most readily achieve a direct revelation of the soul and spirit through the sensory impression itself.

This eurythmy, which is only a beginning, is perhaps called upon to serve the path that many artists are seeking today: to express the supersensible in the directly sensual. This cannot be found in the impressionistic or expressionistic way that is being tried today, but only through the union of impressionism and expressionism that is achieved through eurythmy. In eurythmy we have the expression of what lives in the human being, the soul experience. But we also have it so that this soul experience is presented in a way that is otherwise only used to present something in natural forms, where we first have to feel our way into the soul. With human beings we do not need to feel our way into it, because it is quite natural when it is inside, that it can be seen in the movements of the human being.

So it is possible to really stimulate art anew from such sources, and that is what we have tried to do first. Those who were here as spectators months ago will realize, when they see us again today, that we have at least tried to move forward since then. They will see that we do not want to become naturalistic, even in the bizarre things we do, but that we want to present, in a thoroughly artistic way, what the poem gives us. Just as the poet himself seeks to go beyond the merely linguistic, the literal, we seek here in our eurythmic forms not what should be the expression of the prose content of the poem, but what should be the expression of what the poet has made of the poem, from which he has artistically shaped the prose content.

Therefore, anyone who asks, in our eurythmic presentation, “Yes, is that really expressed directly through this or that gesture?” will not get along. The aim is never to express something directly, but to artistically shape the content that is artistically shaped, also in movement.

This is because, on the one hand, there must be a parallel between the music and, on the other hand, the recitation – for eurythmy is just another form of expression for that which is given poetically, for example. Today, by performing the recitation in parallel with the eurythmy, we must try to take up the good old forms of recitation again. Today, of course, prose content is actually recited. We live in an entirely unartistic age. Today's world no longer has any real idea of the times in which Ludwig Tieck, for example, wrote, in which people, the Romantics for example, came together and particularly liked to listen to poems whose literal content they did not understand because it was in a language they did not understand. They were guided by the musical element, by what lay in the rhythm and beat and especially in the theme. This is what underlies the truly artistic element in poetry. The literal content is actually only, I might say, the ladder by which the truly artistic element moves in poetry. Either it is the musical element that underlies the poetry, or it is the plastic element, which contains the directly felt images. But this is also the only thing that can be brought out through eurythmy, because in eurythmy the conceptual content disappears and the whole being of the human being comes to the fore, namely the will in the human being.

So, if the recitation is taking place at the same time, I would say that the eurythmic element in the recitation should also be brought to the fore. And we must remember how Goethe, when he himself practised dramatic works, such as his “Iphigenia”, for example, with his actors, he did so with a baton like a conductor, paying attention to the iambic meter and so on, not to the literal content.

Today, it is necessary to reopen sources of art that have been almost completely buried in our prosaic age. That is the one thing I ask you to consider when looking at such a presentation. Because, of course, it is very easy to say today: Yes, at first I don't understand anything about the movements that are being made. Oh, we will gradually understand! Just as when we hear a language for the first time, we do not understand it right away, we will learn to understand it. But the point is that it is precisely through this visible language that something artistic can be brought out of people, which cannot really be brought out of the sources of human feeling through spoken language, which has become very prosaic today.

So, I would like to say, this eurythmy relies on saying: human soul life also thinks in movements. Because thoughts initially lead into an abstract area; and one must then leave it to the pedants and philistines to want to have them clarified again in a presentation, which is actually the most popular element today, but which must be overcome by that which, in turn, transforms our sense perception and our understanding into an understanding through all the powers of the human being, not just through the powers of the intellect or through the powers of sensory perception. The aim is to find the spirit in the sensual. And the art of eurythmy would like to contribute to this, even if only in a small way.

Nevertheless, I would ask you, dear assembled colleagues, to regard what we are able to offer today as a beginning. I am already very busy trying to reproduce the inner form of the dramatic through eurythmy. However, this is proving so very difficult that it cannot be said to be a problem that has not yet been solved, or even a problem that has only just been touched on. We must first overcome all the stages here with great effort. However, we have now reached the point where we can attempt to incorporate even these bizarre works, such as those by Christian Morgenstern, into a form without resorting to pantomime or facial expressions, which should gradually be excluded altogether from our eurythmic practice. Perhaps everything should be seen as just a beginning, but we remain convinced that this eurythmic art, if it is further developed, probably not by us but by others, will one day be able to stand as a fully valid art form alongside its older sister arts.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me to introduce this eurythmy presentation with a few words, as I usually do. Perhaps this is permissible because this eurythmic art is concerned with the establishment of something truly new, which cannot be compared with all kinds of neighboring arts, dance or other movement arts, but which seeks to draw in a serious way from the most original, most elementary artistic sources and also to make use of a special artistic language of forms. However, it may perhaps be stated that it is precisely through this eurythmic attempt that many things, I would say, can be attempted on a trial basis, which lies in the will of contemporary artistic natures. It is well known that contemporary artists seek new paths in the most diverse ways, since there is a certain justified conviction that the traditional artistic language of form has died to a certain extent and can no longer produce anything new, and that new paths must be sought. Of course, some of the things being sought are grotesque, in the form of expressionism, futurism, impressionism and so on. But however much of this one rejects, and however much of it one approves of with extraordinary justification, the fact of this striving as such indicates that a sincere artistic mind is searching for new paths.

Now it must be said that all these attempts actually have in common the fact that the means - be it in the field of painting, the colors and forms that can be applied, or in the field of sculpture – everything that is tried suffers from the same deficiency, which can be characterized simply by saying that the correct way to use artistic means has not yet been found in a satisfactory way. In our culture, we have come to a point where a certain abstract, conceptual, ideal element is considered to be particularly decisive. But all that is conceptual, ideal is actually the death of every true artistic endeavor. Every artistic endeavor must, as Goethe said, proceed from sensuous-supersensuous contemplation. But sensuous-supersensuous contemplation can only be attained when that which makes the sensuous impression also works spiritually-supersensuously, without having to be translated into concepts first. Now, of course, poetry and music as such also strive for this; but especially in the field of poetry, the fact that in our time language is also permeated and interspersed with the abstract element is particularly true, and that one feels a certain longing to come to more original sources of artistic work than those that can be achieved with language today. And this is what we are attempting to do with our eurythmic art, at least in a limited way. This eurythmic art, which we will be presenting to you today, is a weak attempt. All attempts are still weak because the eurythmic art is at the beginning of its development. This eurythmic art will show you the movements of the individual human being, especially of the arms and hands, but also of the other limbs of the human organism. These are movements that are already present in the human organism itself, but then also movements of groups, positions of groups, and so on.

All this could initially be seen as arbitrary gestures. But anyone who has studied eurythmy will recognize that these are never arbitrary gestures, never something that could be mistaken for pantomime, facial expressions or random movements. Just as little can that which is conceived as movement in eurythmy be conceived as a random gesture, just as language itself cannot be conceived as a random sound or as a random combination of sounds. The point is that every time you try to use mere pantomime or facial expressions as a means of expression, you also need the subjective-personal aspect of the human being.

Now consider how the subjective-personal contains that which cannot make a real artistic impression, because the subjective-personal is precisely an arbitrary element. Language has only freed itself from the subjective-personal because we are forced to accept language as something given. Even if you have this or that experience that you want to express through poetry, you have to put yourself in a lawful linguistic context; you have to pour into the lawful linguistic context what you have as a poetic experience.

But our language has already become conventional. Our language has become very much the expression, the predestined expression for the prosaic, for the literal. But that is not the actual artistic element in poetry either. The actual artistic element is that which lives in the extra-intellectual and wells up directly from the extra-intellectual spiritual of the whole human being, from a certain element of will. In order to arrive at this eurythmy, an attempt was made to explore, through sensory-supersensory observation, the movement tendencies of the human speech organs, tongue, lips and larynx themselves, which movement tendencies then underlie the undulating movements in the tones, but are transformed. And these movement tendencies were now transferred to the movement of the whole human being in a completely lawful way, so that in a certain sense one can say: when you see the movements performed by people on stage, it is not the tremulous movements that underlie the tones, but movement tendencies, the directions of movement that are then assessed in the speech organs of the human being, that are applied to the whole human being. The whole human being and groups of people come to you as a kind of living larynx. Eurythmy is language made visible. But this means that by translating the lawful element that is present in the human organism into movement, one is able to overcome the personal and yet is an experience of the soul, to be drawn out of the whole human being, so that one has the human being before one as a sensual object, but at the same time every movement is imbued with soul; thus a supersensible element is present in every movement.

This eurythmy does indeed have a sensual and supersensible element, so that one can say: In a limited sphere, this eurhythmy fulfills a long artistic yearning. One need only recall how those who are more delicate and artistically sensitive have always felt the yearning to express that which is an inner experience in such a way that it is not poured into the conventionality of language. There is a beautiful verse by Tieck, which says that with regard to human feelings of love, one cannot actually express human feelings of love with the abstract elements of thought. The romantic Tieck expresses this very beautifully. He says very beautifully:

Sweet love thinks in sounds,
For thoughts are too distant,
Only in tones may she, Beautify everything she wills.

It is a verse that truly expresses the deepest human yearning, but which must naturally arouse the disgust of every philistine logician, every pedant. And Ludwig Uhland, who – and I do not underestimate him at all – was a great poet, but despite being a great poet was an even greater pedant, corrected Tieck by making the following verse:

Liebtet ihr nicht, stolze Schönen,
Selbst die Logik zu verhöhnen,
I would dare to prove
That it is nonsense to say:
“Sweet love thinks in sounds."

The pedant cannot imagine that something lives in the thinking element and is too original, too elementary, to be expressed in abstract language. This consideration – not of the poet Uhland, but of the pedant Uhland – was then taken further by a logician, of course a good one, who proved quite logically that it would be nonsense to think that something is thought in sounds.

Now, when it comes to making the demand to bring human experiences to revelation through such an art of movement as eurythmy, one must be prepared for the fact that, of course, pedantry and logic that walks on crooked paths will have all kinds of objections. On the other hand, however, it must be asserted that there are experiences of the soul that need something more original today than what can be given in literal language.

Today, eurythmy has simply responded to the longing for forms of expression that are so strictly and internally connected to the human being as the expression of the organized larynx and its neighboring organs. But while ordinary language has become more of an expression of thought, the point is that eurythmy becomes an expression of the will. Therefore, the recitation accompaniment must also return to the reality of the art of recitation.

Today, we live in an unartistic age, and so people feel that a recitation is particularly beautiful when the speakers draw from the content, as they say, and particularly internalize the content of the matter to be recited. But that means nothing other than bringing out the prose content. Then it is much more artistic in the sense that romantics some time ago found it particularly pleasing to even listen when they were presented with poems whose language they did not understand. They listened to the rhythm, to the musical element, to that which formed an image. That is the characteristic of an artistic age.

So too must recitation today – there is no other way to accompany eurythmy with recitation – return to rhythm, to meter, to what is musically and visually plastic at its core, to that which that is then needed, I would say as a ladder to hang the actual artistic element on, namely the literal content of a poem, which does not actually constitute the poem as a work of art, but constitutes its prose content. On the other hand, many elementary human elements can be traced back to eurythmy.

And finally, it is the case that if the feeling of the audience is intense enough, then - regardless of the language in which the recitation is performed - an international feeling is felt in eurythmy, a universal human language. This is also something that can occur with this eurythmy, a universal human language. Because what is actually spiritual in a poem, which does not lie in the literal content, which cannot be reduced to what lies in a national language, the truly artistic, that is something that, when it is particularly grasped in its inner mobility, can be felt as something completely international, I would even say precisely in mute language. And I believe that when the moment comes when people realize that what is actually artistic in a poem is not what its content resounds with, but rather what eurythmy can bring forth – apart from the literal content. Once we have realized this, we may yet see the importance of eurythmy for our whole development in a different light from the one we are looking at now.

Apart from the fact that there are many other sides to this eurythmy - including a hygienic side, it has a healing effect on the human body and it is particularly as children's eurythmy, of which we can only show you a small sample today , will acquire a certain significance in the pedagogical-didactic view, in that the purely physiological gymnastics, which starts from pure physicality, makes the human being strong in a certain way, but does not actually reach into his or her will initiative. On the other hand, soul-inspired gymnastics – and this is also what eurythmy is, in addition to being an art form – soul-inspired gymnastics, which we introduced as a compulsory subject for the youngest children at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, alongside ordinary gymnastics, will, at the right age, develop the right disposition for initiative of the will, for an inner soul activity. And this is certainly necessary for today's humanity, which tends to fall asleep so easily when the most important human matters are discussed.

In view of the fact that eurythmy has such lofty goals, we must always ask for forbearance with regard to what can be offered today, because we are still at the very beginning of the development of the eurythmic art. The honored audience who were here months ago may see how we are endeavoring to advance the matter, especially in the elementary artistic design, the form, in the emotional forms of movement. But much remains to be done. For example, I am trying, and will try harder in the near future, to somehow bring the course of dramatic art, the actual artistic aspect of drama, to eurythmic revelation, which is very difficult. But this eurythmic art will advance if contemporaries can show some interest in it. Of course, for what can be offered today, the forbearance of contemporaries must still be sought. Nevertheless, there is the conviction that something can be created with this eurythmy as a very young art, probably by others than us in later times, which will be able to present itself as a fully valid art alongside older sister arts.