Ibsen on film and television

Törnqvist, Egil

doi:10.1017/ccol0521411661.012

Cited by 3 publications

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“…34 The goal was to present an audio/visual pageant as opposed to a text-driven, philosophical performance. 35 The reason behind this dependency on elaborate stagecraft and music involves the content of the play itself: the cultural and political references of Ibsen's original text do not translate easily into English. Consequently, new English translations and "modern" adaptations of the play continue to appear regularly; most recently, Robert Bly created a new version of Peer Gynt for the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2008.…”

Section: The American Peer Gynt On Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and the Adventures of Peer Gynt in America

Celenza¹

2011

Music and Politics

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In 1960 Duke Ellington and his Orchestra recorded an album for the Columbia label titled Swinging Suites by Edward E. and Edward G. 1 (See Figure 1.) This album paired two multi-movement compositions created collaboratively by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: The Peer Gynt Suites, which was an arrangement of five movements from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suites I & II, and Suite Thursday, a set of original compositions inspired by the similarly titled novel by John Steinbeck. 2 Until now, scholars interested in discussing "side one" of the Swingin' Suites album have focused on two topics: Who actually composed The Peer Gynt Suites: Ellington, Strayhorn or both? And how was the suite received by listeners when it was released in 1960? 3 With respect to the first topic, it appears that Ellington and Strayhorn composed their arrangement collaboratively, with Strayhorn serving as the lead creative force, a process that I will explain in more detail later in the article. As to the second topic-the work's reception-a straightforward assessment of this subject appears in an article by Mervyn Cooke titled "Jazz among the Classics, and the Case of Duke Ellington" in the Cambridge Companion to Jazz. 4 As Cooke explains, the Ellington/Strayhorn Peer Gynt Suites met with vehement protest from the Grieg Foundation in Norway and was consequently banned from public distribution via record sales, media broadcasts, and public concerts throughout Scandinavia for nearly a decade (figure 2). 5 The Grieg Foundation in Norway viewed the recording as an offensive attack on Grieg's musical reputation. In a debate published in the Oslo Aftenposten in 1964, the president of the Grieg Foundation called Ellington's Peer Gynt "ugly" and "uninspired," he even went so far as to say that "in Solveig's song" Ellington had made the Norwegian maiden "bray like a sow." 6 In the United States, the An earlier draft of this article was presented on 5 November 2010 as part of a session titled "Duke Ellington's Late, Extended Works: Some New Critical Perspectives" at the American Musicological Society's 76 th Annual Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. As I noted at that time, this project could have never progressed without the groundbreaking work of David Hajdu and Walter van de Leur. I thank the latter, especially, for his descriptions of the manuscript sources currently held in the Billy Strayhorn Collection in Pittsburg, PA, since I was unable to gain access to these sources during my research on this project. 1 Columbia (Cl 1597). In England, the album was released as a Philips LP (BBL 7470

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Section: The American Peer Gynt On Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and the Adventures of Peer Gynt in America

Celenza¹

2011

Music and Politics

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Stories of “Infidelity”: Nazi Ibsen Adaptations and the Norwegian Press

Holt

2020

Ibsen Studies

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Considering the shocking themes, feminism, and critique of idealism in Henrik Ibsen's plays, the fact that only adaptations of Ludwig Ganghofer's homeland novels premiered more often in the Nazi era presents puzzling paradoxes to film historians and readers of Ibsen alike (Drewniak 1987, 562; Holt 2020, 303). How did it come to be that this revealer of social ills and lies was used by a film industry notorious for its deceitful propaganda? Ibsen's independent women, like Nora and Lona Hessel, can hardly be imagined as role models for the 'Aryan housewife.' Minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who orchestrated film production in Nazi Germany, preferred Knut Hamsun and considered Ibsen outdated, according to his diaries. This Zeitgeist notwithstanding, a 'wave' of five Ibsen adaptations premiered in Germany between 1933 and 1945-a period that saw a marked decrease in Ibsen adaptations globally (Törnqvist 1994, 205).Despite starring the biggest male film stars of the era and being produced by some of the top talent remaining in the German film industry, the Ibsen adaptations in the Third Reich have mostly languished in film historical obscurity. One likely reason is the relative unavailability of the films, which for the most parts are hidden in archives, unavailable in official versions on the commercial market. In a recent PhD dissertation on Ibsen and Nazi cinema, I erroneously claim that none of these adaptations premiered in Norway (Holt 2020, xxvi). In fact, four Nazi era adaptations screened in Ibsen's homeland during the 1930s and 40s: Fritz Wendhausen's Peer Gynt (1934), Detlef Sierck's Stützen der Gesellschaft (Pillars of Society, 1935), Hans Steinhoff's Ein Volksfeind (An Enemy of the People, 1937), and Harald Braun's Nora (A Doll's House, 1944). 1 Whereas both the dissertation, most research on Nazi cinema, and previous research on Ibsen in this era is delineated spatially and temporally within the confines of the Third Reich, this article examines the critical reception of Nazi cinema's Ibsen adaptations in a transnational perspective. 2 In order to do so, I will present some relevant aspects of the Ibsen adaptations as analyzed in the dissertation: plot summaries, brief comparisons with Ibsen's plays, and merely the overt ideological projects of 1 The first Ibsen adaptation to premiere in the Third Reich was Hans Hinrich's Das Meer ruft (The Lake Calls, 1933), an adaptation of "Terje Vigen" (1862). It never screened in Norway and is not discussed in this article.2 Thanks to Øivind Hanche and the National Library of Norway for presenting clippings of 31 reviews from Oslo newspapers. Hanche has also provided important background information for this article. Moreover, I am grateful for excellent comments from two anonymous reviewers.

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Ibsen Studies and Adaptation

Holt

2023

Ibsen Studies

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Ibsen on film and television

Cited by 3 publications

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Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and the Adventures of Peer Gynt in America

Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and the Adventures of Peer Gynt in America

Stories of “Infidelity”: Nazi Ibsen Adaptations and the Norwegian Press

Ibsen Studies and Adaptation

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