“One might be seated in the Piazza del Popolo at Rome with one’s back to the gate. There is the same vast intervening space, and the same three branching streets (the central closed by an inner theatre for tableaux), with marked buildings at the entrance. Only here those buildings are the houses of Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate, and the streets are those of Jerusalem, lined with Eastern houses, domes, and here and there a palm-tree, and they melt far away into lovely ethereal mountain distances, the real mountains of the Bavarian Alps. The performance begins when the spirit-chorus of eighteen persons, male and female, in many-coloured tunics and mantles, advance in stately lines from either side of the stage, and in a chaunt, weird but most distinctly audible, explain what is coming, and urge those present to receive it in a humble spirit of reverence and adoration of God. Then, on the central stage, begin the strange series of types and antitypes, and, as the veil falls the second time, the vast Hosanna-procession of five hundred men, women, and children, singing, shouting, and strewing palm-branches, appears down the distant streets, and, as it draws nearer, and the mountains resound with jubilant shouts and the whole air is ablaze with life and colour, the serene, rapt, stately figure of the Christus, riding upon the ass, but even then spiritualised into absolute sublimity by the sense of his divine mission, comes for the first time before us. Afterwards, through the long eight hours of thrilling tension which follow, overshadowing the endless, almost wearisome, series of Old Testament scenes, drawing every heart and eye nearer to himself through the agony of the trial, the cross-bearing, the crucifixion, does that sublime figure become more familiar; never again can the thought of the God-man be severed from it. And in the great drama itself one sees all the rest, but one feels with, one lives for, the Christ alone; and the dignity of his lofty patience, unmoved from the holy calm which pervades his whole being even when four hundred savage Jews are shouting and jibing round in clamorous eagerness for his death, must be present with one through life.
“I cannot tell it all. Words fail and emotions are too much. Through that long day—oh! is it that day alone?—one knows how to live with, to suffer with Christ: one is raised above earth and its surroundings: one dies with Him to sin and suffering: one is raised with Him into heavenly places. After some hours, England is forgotten, Germany is forgotten. You are a Jew. Jerusalem is your home: all, all your interests are centred there: nothing earthly is of the very least importance to you except the great tragedy that is being enacted before your eyes. It is perhaps the humanity of Christ which is brought most forcibly before you; but oh! how divinely human, how humanly divine!
“Could one wonder that Mr. Vanderbilt, the American millionaire, said that he owed everything—everything for this world and the next—to Ober-Ammergau? it had unveiled and explained religion for him: it had made the Bible a living reality.
“I think of the Old Testament scenes, the Fall of the Manna is the most beautiful. More than four hundred Israelites, including a hundred and fifty children, are seen—groups of the most exquisite and harmonious colour—with Moses and Aaron in the desert; and between you and them, and amongst and around them, falls mysteriously the soft vaporous manna; whilst the chorus in sweet, wild, lingering monotone chaunt the beautiful hymn beginning—
‘Gut ist der Herr, gut ist der Herr.’
“Of the New Testament scenes, the leave-taking with the family of Bethany is perhaps the most pathetic. It is an exquisite sunset scene. Huge olive-trees stretch their gnarled boughs overhead and are embossed against the amber sky, in the distance the village of Bethany stands out in the soft blue mists of evening. Through the sunset comes the Christ in lingering last words with the sisters and Lazarus, and there, under the old trees, is their last farewell, touching indescribably, after which the weeping family return to Bethany, and he goes away, a solitary figure upon the burnt hills in the twilight, to his death at Jerusalem.
“At Ober-Ammergau one for the first time realises the many phases of the trial—in the house of Caiaphas, of Annas, of Pilate, of Caiaphas again, of Pilate again; and all is terribly real—the three crosses, for instance, so really heavy, that none but a very strong man can support them. One thinks better of Pilate after the performance, through which one has watched his struggles—his weary, hopeless struggles to save the life of Christ. Almost every act, nearly every word, is directly taken from the Gospel history. Amongst the few touches added is that of Mary the mother, accidentally arriving at Jerusalem, meeting the other Marys in one of the side streets and talking of the condemnation of a Galilean which has just taken place. Then, as the street opens, suddenly seeing the cross-bearing in the distance, and thrilling the whole audience with anguish in her cry of ‘It is my son: it is Jesus!’ The Last Supper is an exact reproduction of Leonardo’s fresco, and many of the other scenes follow the great masters.
“How thrilling were the words, how almost more thrilling were the silences, of Christ.[490]