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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Dizzying New Heights

 

It’s hard to miss. The Eiffel Tower looms over the streets, the daily traffic, the very psyche of Paris. The writer Guy de Maupassant said he enjoyed a daily lunch at the Tower’s summit restaurant because it was the only place where he didn’t see or feel its presence. Strangely enough, this structure that has become an icon, among the most readily identifiable silhouettes in the world, a shorthand that virtually means “Paris,” had a less auspicious beginning—it was a fairground attraction. Assembled in 1889, the Tower’s steel cage construction and exposed rivets—as though welded in the imagination of Jules Verne—looked like a vision of the future. The spectacle, however, wasn’t designed to last. Commercial engineer Gustave Eiffel built his Tower with the assumption that it would be dismantled after the fair. His project faced withering criticism, and he assumed personal responsibility for the construction risks to dissipate qualms about workers’ safety. There were no accidents, but artists and writers gathered to petition against the Tower’s “ridiculous, vertiginous height…belittling our works of architecture, which will just disappear before this stupefying folly.” Was this hubris? Paris already had its monuments.

Piercing the sky like a beacon, the practically useless Eiffel Tower remapped its Parisian landscape. And as it became the city’s central orienting feature, the Tower emerged as a lofty testament to the modern architect’s visionary genius.

Traveling in Europe until 1891, Ibsen might have identified with the ego of the modern architect, or “master builder,” a term that then applied broadly to great scientists, statesmen, or industrialists. His early poem “Building Plans” compares the artist with “immortal” ambitions to a master builder, someone whose work endures as a central part of people’s lives. When asked if he was interested in architecture, Ibsen replied embracing the metaphorical kinship, “Yes;
it is, as you know, my own trade.”

Years after the publication of The Master Builder, Ibsen admitted that Solness was “a man somewhat akin to me,” but his identification was not without reservations. Ibsen retained a critical distance, a kind of “double vision,” regarding his master builder’s ultimate goal. Is it magnificence or madness? A fault against God? Ibsen never quite decides. And the tone of this masterwork pulses thrillingly between moments of genius and folly.

—COLIN MANNEX, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG