Program Notes

• A Note from The artistic director
• A Towering Playwright: HENRIK IBSEN
• Dizzying New Heights
• MASTER BUILDERS AND MISTRESS-MUSES
• HENRIK IBSEN TIMELINE

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MASTER BUILDERS AND MISTRESS-MUSES

 

Reaching for the sublime, artists have always found inspiration in shapely, female forms. Like the nine goddesses of Greek mythology, Hilda Wangel is a muse, stirring her “Master Builder” with her youth and spirit. Just as she pushes Solness to build his “palaces in the sky,” three women achieved their own form of immortality as muse to great architects in the early twentieth century.

The building of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed summer estate in Wisconsin, was in part inspired by his liaison with the free-thinking suffragette Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney. The married Wright, commissioned to design a house for the electrical engineer Edwin Cheney, fell in love with his client’s wife and fled with her to Europe in 1909. There, the lovers listened for what Wright called “the song in the deeps of life.” When they returned to America, Taliesin offered a retreat from intense public censure. The romance ended terribly in 1914 when Mamah and her children were murdered by a servant, who set fire to the house.

Evelyn Nesbit became the unwitting central figure to another tragic scandal. The teenaged chorus girl was the muse to Stanford White, a titan of Gilded Age architecture who designed such landmarks as Madison Square Garden, and she also stoked the fires of artists like Charles Dana Gibson. Though married himself, White kept a second apartment, outfitted with strategically placed mirrors and a red velvet swing, where he entertained young women. In 1906, Nesbit’s millionaire husband Harry K. Thaw—driven crazy by the thought of his young wife posing on the swing—fatally shot the architect.

German architect and Bauhaus school founder Walter Gropius dazzled fin-de-siècle Vienna when he fell for Alma Mahler, the beguiling “serial muse.” Alma, a gifted composer, was better recognized for her magnetic allure to artists. Also famed for a tempestuous affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, she married Gropius, the composer Gustav Mahler, and the writer Franz Werfel (who called her his “guardian of the flame”). While the Gropius union was to prove unhappy for both, Alma gave vital encouragement to the architect at the start of his career—and burnished both of their legends.

—MAYA CANTU, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG