The firing of a cannon announces the moment of beginning. Slow, swelling strains come from the orchestra; the stately chorus enters on the stage; the music stops; the leader gives a few words of prologue or argument, and immediately the chorus breaks into song.
From this moment to the end, eight long hours, with only one hour's rest at noon, the movement of this play is continuous. It is a wonderful instance of endurance on the part of the actors; the stage being entirely uncovered, sun and rain alike beat on their unprotected heads. The greater part of the auditorium also is uncovered, and there have been several instances in which the play has been performed in a violent storm of rain, thousands of spectators sitting drenched from beginning to end of the performance.
How incomparably the effects are, in sunny weather, heightened by this background of mountain and sky, fine distances, and vistas of mountain and meadow, and the canopy of heaven overhead, it is impossible to express; one only wonders, on seeing it, that outdoor theatres have not become a common summer pleasure for the whole world.
When birds fly over, they cast fluttering shadows of their wings on the front of Pilate's and Caiaphas' homes, as naturally as did Judæan sparrows two thousand years ago. Even butterflies flitting past cast their tiny shadows on the stage; one bird paused, hovered, as if pondering what it all could mean, circled two or three times over the heads of the multitude, and then alighted on one of the wall-posts and watched for some time. Great banks of white cumulus clouds gathered and rested, dissolved and floated away, as the morning grew to noonday, and the noonday wore on toward night. This closeness of Nature is an accessory of illimitable effect; the visible presence of the sky seems a witness to invisible presences beyond it, and a direct bond with them. There must be many a soul, I am sure, who has felt closer to the world of spiritual existences, while listening to the music of the Oberammergau Passion Play, than in any other hour of his life; and who can never, so long as he lives, read without emotion the closing words of the venerable Daisenberger's little "History of Oberammergau:"—
"May the strangers who come to this Holy Passion Play become, by reading this book, more friendly with Ammergau; and may it sometimes, after they have returned to their homes, renew in them the memory of this quiet mountain valley."
University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications.
RAMONA: A Story.