peril of death to leave her husband alone.

Hummel wants revenge, however, and has bought up all the Colonel’s promissory notes. The Colonel is a fake: His lineage is extinct, his military title is only honorary, and his hair and teeth are false. Hummel exposes him as actually a kitchen servant. The Student enters and joins the Young Lady in the Hyacinth Room. Once the Aristocrat, the Fiancee, the Colonel, and the Mummy are seated for the ghost supper, Hummel accuses them of lies and deceptions and announces that he will settle accounts. Just as the clock strikes, he also will strike. Grabbing the pendulum of the clock, the Mummy admits that they are sinners doing penance for their sins, but she accuses Hummel of being a self-righteous leech and a hypocrite. She calls in Bengtsson, who exposes Hummel as a kitchen boy and a murderer who drowned a milkmaid because she had seen him commit a crime. The Mummy gives Hummel a rope with which to hang himself in the closet. The Japanese death screen is put next to the door. The Student sings the “Song of the Sun” calling for patience and endurance; the song segues into scene 3.

Scene 3 takes place in the Hyacinth Room, which is filled with multicolored hyacinths and accentuated by a large statue of the Buddha. The Young Lady wants the Student to sing to the hyacinths, their favorite flower. He loves the flowers, but they stab at his heart. He sees the bulb as earth and the stalk as reaching toward the heavens. For both of them, Buddha will transform earth into a paradise. Since they have created the symbolism of the flower together, he considers them married, but she says they must pass a test. Into this paradise comes the Cook, a grotesque, obese, uncontrollable monster who sucks the nourishment out of the food and controls the house, punishing the inhabitants for their sins. The paradise is revealed as less than perfect: The desk wobbles, the inkstand is messy, and the chimney is clogged. The maid dirties the house, and the Young Lady has to do the cleaning and washing. The Young Lady tells the Student that she cannot bear children and that they can never be married. As he sees his paradise slipping away, he reflects on the world of duplicity and illusions and notes that his father was put in a madhouse for telling the truth to his friends. Finally, he begins an elegiac monologue in which he envisions earth as an inferno where madmen crucified Christ and freed robbers. He beckons the Young Lady to sleep and awake in a paradise beyond this world. Bathed in light, the Young Lady dies behind the death screen, and the Student pleads for God’s mercy as a vision of the Island of the Dead comes into view.

August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata makes use of both spatial and temporal metaphors to create theatrical effects. Strindberg sees all humanity as linked by a common network of guilt and sin; the house becomes a symbol, then, for humanity and the social system. The Consul, the upper class, lives on the top level; the Colonel, the middle class, lives on the ground level; and the Superintendent, the lower class, lives below. The poor are found outside the house, clamoring at the doors.

Hummel is old enough to know all the inhabitants of the house and understands how they are linked by a chain of guilt and betrayals. The Consul (upper class) has slept with the Superintendent’s Wife (lower class); their daughter, the second generation, perpetuates the chain, for she is having an affair with the Aristocrat (upper class), who is married to the Consul’s daughter. The Aristocrat links all the classes in their sins. He has married the Consul’s daughter (upper class), slept with the Colonel’s wife (middle class), and is having an affair with the Lady in Black, the daughter of the Superintendent’s Wife (lower class). Thus, all generations and social classes are interconnected in a house of sin.

The play is also a journey. It begins on a sunny Sunday morning, with steamship bells announcing a voyage. The bright sunlight shines on the Student’s dream house. As hidden sins are revealed and ominous pacts are planned, however, the sky clouds up; eventually, it rains. As the Student enters the house, the atmosphere becomes gloomy and claustrophobic. The Mummy lives in a closet, and the ghost supper provides an eerie scene. As Hummel dies in a closet behind a death screen, the Student symbolically invokes the light with his “Song of the Sun.” The hope soon proves futile, however, as the presence of the ogre Cook dominates the next scene. Finally, the Young Lady, bathed in radiant light, dies as the vision of the Isle of the Dead appears. Having begun on a Sunday with a Sunday’s child seeking resurrection from a night of death, the play ends in a transcendental vision of the dead. The subtle interplay of light and dark intertwines with the play’s themes.

The drama is also constructed as an interior journey, moving from the material, temporal world to a transcendent experience. The play begins on an exterior street, with a host of characters engaging in considerable movement. The Round Room, however, is in view; it becomes the setting for the next scene, which is more claustrophobic, deeper within the interior of the house. In this scene, the Hyacinth Room is in view, and it becomes the setting for the final scene. The play ends in the inner recesses of an Oriental chamber, which fades into a vision of the twilight world of the dead. Not only does one go deeper into the interior of the house, but also the space becomes more constricted, the characters fewer, and the action more static. The play opens in the exterior light of the sun and ends in an inner radiance of white light. The organ music of the opening scenes is transformed into the melancholy music of the finale. Thus, the play makes effective use of both aural and visual effects.

Dream Plays and Psychoanalysis

Strindberg launched his successful literary career in the 1880s, creating realistic dramas that gained popularity through playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. His works The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888) are celebrated as masterpieces of realism, portraying natural characters in everyday settings. However, by the turn of the century, Strindberg began to reshape reality on stage to reflect his own tortured, nightmarish view of life. In his "dream plays" such as To Damascus, a trilogy produced between 1898-1901, The Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907), time and place often become ambiguous and unpredictable. The characters represent personality types rather than individuals, and they are generally alienated, lost souls grappling with carnal sins while seeking spiritual fulfillment.

Strindberg's achievements in these plays foreshadowed significant avant-garde literary movements like expressionism and the Theatre of the Absurd. These works were influenced, at least in part, by his tumultuous relationships, battles with mental illness, and spiritual crises. Concurrently, Europe saw a growing interest in the human mind, partly due to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905), Freud aimed to describe the mind's structure, analyze its functions, explain human behavior, and propose treatments for mental illness. Freud emphasized the significance of the unconscious mind, suggesting that dreams could unlock suppressed desires. At its core, Freud's psychoanalytical theories aim to see past illusions to uncover underlying realities, a central theme in Strindberg's "dream plays."

Women's Rights

August Strindberg married and divorced three times in a society that neither favored women's rights nor took marriage vows lightly. Each time, he was likely mismatched with his partner. Strindberg professed to value domesticity and a "traditional" family life, yet each of his wives was outgoing and career-oriented. He met his first wife, Siri von Essen, while she was married to a nobleman, Baron Wrangel, whom he saw as a parental figure. Despite this, he fell in love with Siri and convinced her to leave her husband. In a highly publicized and scandalous move, she divorced the Baron and married Strindberg in 1877. They spent fifteen tumultuous years together, clashing over his increasingly eccentric behavior while she pursued a career as an actress.

They divorced in 1891, and Strindberg married Frida Uhl, an Austrian journalist, in 1893. She was twenty-three years younger than him. During their marriage, they spent only a few months together—just long enough to have one daughter. After avoiding the company of women for several years, Strindberg married for the final time in 1901. His relationship with Harriet Bosse, a renowned Norwegian actress 29 years his junior, lasted slightly longer than his marriage to Frida. They were married for three years, frequently separating, and had one child before divorcing in 1904.

In the nineteenth century, Sweden, like most Western countries, did not permit women to vote. In fact, it wasn't until 1919—a year before American women were first allowed to vote—that women in Sweden were granted suffrage. During Strindberg's lifetime, women's rights were significantly restricted, often tied to their marriage contracts. In many countries, women couldn't legally borrow money or own property without their husbands' consent. Although the industrial age brought many women into the workforce, the available jobs were mostly unskilled, menial tasks with long hours and low pay. Besides house-cleaning or repetitive, sometimes dangerous factory work, women could become teachers or clerical assistants, but opportunities were limited. The women Strindberg married—a journalist and two actresses—might have been seen as adventurous, even improper, for their era.

Divorce was an option (and Strindberg frequently utilized it), but only if both parties agreed and there was a compelling reason, such as infidelity, criminal behavior, physical incapacity, or insanity. Despite this, divorcees were stigmatized by society, and relatively few couples chose to separate. More often, unhappy couples remained together in misery, faithful to their vows but untrue to their hearts.

Realism

The Realism movement in theatre, which greatly influenced Strindberg's early works, owes much to Henrik Ibsen, the renowned Norwegian playwright. Ibsen created notable plays such as A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and Hedda Gabler (1890). Similar to other realists like George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky, Ibsen aimed to depict characters, actions, and settings realistically on stage. In contrast to the symbolic and open staging of Shakespeare's Renaissance plays or the flat, painted "realism" of the German Romantic theatre in the late 1700s, late-nineteenth-century realist writers focused meticulously on detail to recreate the real world for their audiences. Playwrights and designers went to great lengths to describe and construct intricate, three-dimensional rooms, complete with walls, doors, furniture, functional lights, and even ceilings. Characters in realistic dramas are shaped by both heredity and environment, reacting naturally to psychological and physical conflicts. Additionally, the themes explored by realist writers revolve around everyday issues that resonate with many people. Ibsen's works addressed marital problems, disease, poverty, inter-class conflict, and other relevant issues faced by his audiences in the 1880s and 1890s. However, just after the turn of the century, with the rise of a new entertainment medium called "movies," theatre began shifting away from Realism towards more experimental styles like Symbolism and Expressionism.

Sonata

The structure of The Ghost Sonata is inspired by a specific style of chamber music known as a "sonata." The concept of the sonata dates back to the fifteenth century, when it referred to various types of purely instrumental music for solo instruments, trios, or ensembles. However, its most recognizable form began to emerge in the mid-eighteenth century. During the Enlightenment period, sonatas evolved into three- or four-part compositions, often written for solo pianists or violinists.

A traditional sonata consists of distinct movements that differ in key, mood, and tempo. Typically, the first part of a sonata is the exposition. The exposition introduces a primary musical theme in the main key, known as the tonic, followed by a secondary theme in a different key, called the dominant. These themes interweave and transition into the second part, known as the development section. In the development phase, the themes from the exposition are explored in new ways, with variations and combinations that may include minor keys not present in the exposition. The final part, the recapitulation section, reprises the themes in their original order but solely in the tonic key.

Much like the traditional sonata form, Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata is divided into three distinct sections. In the first scene, which corresponds to the exposition stage, Strindberg presents the beautiful house and its inhabitants as they appear to be, introducing his two main themes: the Student's youthful idealism and desire for perfection, and the Old Man's cynicism, hatred, and thirst for revenge. The second scene, akin to the development phase, moves inside the house, where these themes intermingle as the facades and deceptions are stripped away, revealing the house as a dwelling for flawed individuals, sinners who have long been atoning for their misdeeds. In the third and final scene, the recapitulation, both initial themes are shown to be flawed and harmful. The Student, representing the tonic key, navigates through both themes and ultimately reaches a sort of coda. A new, hopeful theme emerges: the faint hope for humanity's ultimate salvation in an afterlife free from the sufferings and disappointments of the mortal world.

Expressionism

Strindberg is regarded as a significant influence on the avant-garde artistic movement known as expressionism, which gained popularity in Germany during the 1920s. While realist writers at the turn of the century aimed to create plots that reflected real-life events and characters who behaved like actual people, expressionist writers, much like expressionist painters, sought to depict life as they perceived it—shaped by intense inner emotions and altered by the artist's vision of reality. Consequently, expressionist plays often feature disjointed, nightmarish scenes that bear little resemblance to the real world.

Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata incorporates numerous elements that are also prevalent in later twentieth-century expressionistic dramas. For instance, his characters are archetypes rather than unique individuals. They are identified by labels such as “The Student” or “The Old Man,” and occasionally they lack distinct personalities. The play is replete with symbolic imagery, often reminiscent of dreams. Symbols such as the pendulum clock, the Mummy, the "vampires," the Old Man's wheelchair, and the house where the characters hold their "ghost supper" represent abstract concepts like time, fear, guilt, shame, power, and corruption.

Similar to a dream, the play does not adhere to a straightforward cause-and-effect narrative. Time is ambiguous and can be halted like the hands of a clock, and the characters behave in bizarre, unpredictable manners. Perhaps most significantly, The Ghost Sonata conveys the emotions and perspectives of its author through the dialogue and actions of his characters. Expressionism as a style aims to express the inner thoughts of the artist. Strindberg's own troubled mind is evident throughout the play. He admitted to being obsessively neat and needing a clean, orderly environment. It's no surprise then that the Girl in The Ghost Sonata is distressed by a housekeeper who creates more mess than she cleans. Strindberg reportedly feared cooks, often suspecting them of poisoning his food, which could explain the presence of vampire-like kitchen servants in the play.

Given the gloomy, depressing entries he left in his journals and letters, it is clear he speaks through the Student at the end of the play when he laments “this world of illusion, guilt, suffering and death, this world of endless change, disappointment, and pain.” The lesson Arkenholtz learns—that the world can be a harsh, unforgiving place—is one Strindberg seemed to experience personally and was eager to convey in The Ghost Sonata.

1907: Gustav V ascends to the throne of Sweden. Throughout his 43-year reign, the Social Democratic Party implemented numerous progressive reforms, including the expansion of voting rights, the establishment of an eight-hour workday, public child welfare initiatives, and state-supported housing.

Today: The Swedish Constitution of 1975 removed all royal powers, transitioning governance to a Prime Minister and Parliament. Like many industrialized nations, Sweden is currently engaged in deregulating its economy, privatizing previously government-owned industries and businesses, and reducing government spending on welfare programs.

1907: Many nations, including the United States, did not permit women to vote or hold public office.

Today: In 1994, Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson led a Social Democratic Party government where half of his cabinet and 41 percent of the parliament were women, the highest proportion of female lawmakers in any government worldwide.

1907: In most Western cultures, marriage was considered both a religious vow and a civil contract, making separations or divorces difficult to obtain. In countries like Great Britain and the United States, a separation decree required proof that one spouse had caused injury through actions such as adultery, habitual drunkenness, impotence, committing a felony, abandonment, or severe abuse. Divorced individuals were often seen as immoral and treated as outcasts. Out of nearly one million marriages conducted annually in the United States, fewer than 100,000 (less than 10%) ended in divorce.

Today: ''No-fault'' divorce laws in many states have simplified the divorce process. ''Irreconcilable differences'' is now a common and acceptable reason for separation. Annually, 2.5 million people marry in the United States, and nearly half of these marriages are expected to end in divorce.

1907: The early years of aviation: On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew a heavier-than-air craft under its own power for 12 seconds at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. A year later, he and his brother, Wilbur, had developed an "airplane" capable of sustained flight, turning, and banking.

Today: The use of airplanes in wartime accelerated advancements in transportation technology. By the 1950s, more people were crossing the Atlantic Ocean by airplane than by ship. In the 1970s, Britain and France developed the Concorde, a jet plane that allowed travelers to fly faster than the speed of sound, reaching the United States from Europe in just a few hours. By 1995, airlines worldwide were estimated to have flown 1.26 billion passengers.

1907: While "penny arcades" had been showcasing short films to individual viewers since Thomas Edison introduced his "kinetoscope" in 1894, it wasn't until photographer George Eastman and inventor Thomas Armat combined flexible film with a projector that large audiences could gather in one room to watch "movies" together. The first movie theater opened in 1905, and by 1909, there were 8,000 theaters, each seating around 100 people and offering short film attractions. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) demonstrated that this new medium could rival the realism popular in live theater, and soon the film industry surpassed theater as the world's preferred form of entertainment.

Today: Nowadays, multimillion-dollar blockbuster films can be purchased or rented, brought home, and watched on a television using a videocassette recorder (VCR) or a digital video disc (DVD) player. Many films are produced and released directly in tape or disc format, or broadcast on various cable television channels. The television has become the late-twentieth-century's private kinetoscope, and less than 10% of the population attends live theatrical events.

A television adaptation of The Ghost Sonata, translated by Michael Myer and directed by Stuart Burge, was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation on March 16, 1962. Subsequently, the same production was aired in the United States and Australia.

In 1930, the play was adapted into an opera with music composed by Julius Weissmann and performed in Munich. This operatic version of The Ghost Sonata was later staged in Duisburg and Dortmund in 1956.

Sources

Bandy, Stephen C. ‘‘Strindberg's Biblical Sources for Ghost Sonata,’’ in Scandinavian Studies, August 1968, Vol. 40, no. 3, p. 208.

Goodman, Randolph. Introduction to Drama on Stage [his English translation of The Ghost Sonata], Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, pp. 428-437.

Hampton, Wilborn. Review of The Ghost Sonata, in the New York Times, May 9, 1995.

Lide, Barbara. Review of The Ghost Sonata, in Theatre Journal, March 1992, pp. 109-111.

Nicoll, Allardyce. World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh, Harcourt, Brace and Company, revised edition, 1976, p. 563.

Richardson, Maurice. Review of the BBC television production of The Ghost Sonata, in the London Observer, March 18, 1962, reprinted in Drama on Stage, edited by Randolph Goodman, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, pp. 439-441.

Sinclair, Clive. Review of The Ghost Sonata, in the Times Literary Supplement, June 12, 1992, p. 18.

Strindberg, August. Letter to Edvard Brandes, circa June 12, 1885, excerpted in File on Strindberg, edited by Michael Meyer, Methuen, 1986, p. 51.

Strindberg, August. Letter to Anders Eliasson, July 11, 1896, excerpted in Strindberg, by Michael Meyer, Secker and Warburg, 1985, p. 341.

For Further Reading

Meyer, Michael. Strindberg, Secker and Warburg, 1985. A comprehensive biography of playwright August Strindberg, detailing his entire life, including his childhood, multiple marriages, 1884 trial for blasphemy in Stockholm, interest in the occult, and extensive writings, which encompass plays, novels, stories, and essays. The book also contains numerous photographs and illustrations from Strindberg's life and productions of his plays.

Meyer, Michael, ed. File on Strindberg, Methuen, 1986. A compilation of comments and critiques on Strindberg's plays, primarily sourced from theater reviews, letters from Strindberg's friends and colleagues, and Strindberg's own writings. It also includes a timeline of Strindberg's work and a bibliography of additional research sources.

Nicoll, Allardyce. World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh, Harcourt, Brace and Company, revised edition, 1976. This book traces the evolution of dramatic literature from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. Nicoll places August Strindberg alongside Ibsen and other Scandinavian contemporaries in an essay titled "Strindberg and the Play of the Subconscious."

Strindberg, August. The Son of a Servant, translated by Claud Field, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913. Strindberg's autobiography, which details his difficult childhood as one of eight surviving children born to a financially ruined father from an aristocratic background and a mother who was once a waitress.

Tornqvist, Egil. Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure, Humanities Press, 1982. Tornqvist notes that while many authors and critics have written biographies of August Strindberg and discussed the ideas in his plays and his place in late nineteenth-century theater history, little has been said about the actual structure of his plays. Strindbergian Drama examines ten of Strindberg's plays, from The Father to A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, highlighting the importance of imagery, plot, language, and borrowed forms in their creation.