| dc.description.abstract | The research deals with the activity of theatre critic Otto Brahm (1856-1912), a German man of
letters and man of the theatre, mostly known, within the theatre studies, for being founder and
animator of the theatre association FreieBühne (1889), director of the Deutsches(1894 - 1904) and
of the Lessing Theater (1904 - 1912) in Berlin. The study identifies the cultural lines that
contributed, through the instrument of theatre criticism, to the diffusion of the naturalist movement
in Germany and to the definition of identity of German theatre life in the years between 1881 and
1892. The direct sources used, mainly journalistic articles, essays and letters written by Brahm - and
found in Berlin at the Akademie der Künste, the Staatsbibliothek and the Humboldt Bibliothek - are
essentially in German. Brahm's thought, which springs from the analysis of the sources, absorbs a
series of instances which include the doctrines of evolution and deterministic randomness, the
denial of the limits of art, a certain literary antidogmatism which cooperate in the name of progress
identified as inevitable and which the critic has a duty to support. The journalistic activity, in an
extensive analysis carried out year by year for each newspaper, has proved to be a priceless treasure
trove of the principles of a complex figure of man of letters and theatre director whose aim is to
guide the public, theatre directors and actors at the end of the 19th century in the distinction
between the purely speculative phenomena (the translations and re-elaboration of French
piécesbienfaites) and the nascent dramaturgy, embodied in the exemplary cases of Henrik Ibsen and
Gerhart Hauptmann. The research work is completed by a documentary appendix consisting of
German translations of a significant sample of reviews based on the dramas of Ibsen and
Hauptmann, together with a considerable exchange of letters between Brahm and Hauptmann. [edited by Author] | it_IT |
