"All who have witnessed the imperial stage-manager at work agree that he has a remarkable flair for the dramatic. Very often one of his suggestions about the entrances or exits, a piece of 'business' or a pose, will be found on trial to enhance the effect of the scene. A story is told of the Emperor's insistence on accuracy and the minute attention he pays to detail at rehearsal. After his visit to Ofen-Pest some years ago for the Jubilee celebration, which had included a number of Hungarian national dances, the Emperor stopped a rehearsal of the ballet at the Berlin opera while a Czardas was in progress and pointed out to the balletteuses certain minor details which were not correct.
"In his attitude to the Court actors and actresses he displays the charm of manner which bewitches all with whom he comes in contact. He calls them 'meine Schauspieler,' which makes one think of 'His Majesty's Servants' of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. This practice sometimes has amusing results. Once when the Theatre Royal comedian, Dr. Max Pohl, was suddenly taken ill the Emperor said to an acquaintance, 'Fancy, my Pohl had a seizure yesterday;' and the acquaintance, thinking he was referring to a pet dog replied, commiseratingly: 'Ah, poor brute!' After rehearsal the Emperor often goes on to the stage and talks with the actors about their parts.
"A Hohenzollern must not be shown on the stage without the express permission of the Emperor, and in general, if politics are mixed up in an objectionable way with the action of the drama, the play will be forbidden. Above all the Emperor will not tolerate indecency, nor the mere suggestion of it, in the plays given at the royal theatres. An anecdote about Herr Josef Lauff's Court drama 'Frederick of the Iron Tooth,' dealing with an ancestor, an Elector of Brandenburg, and on which Leoncavallo, at the Emperor's request, wrote the opera 'Der Roland von Berlin,' shows the Emperor's strictness in this respect. Frederick of the Iron Tooth is a burgher of Berlin who leads a revolt against the Elector. In order to heighten Frederick's hate, Lauff wove in a love theme into the drama. The wife of Ryke, burgomaster of Berlin, figured as Frederick's mistress and egged on her lover against the Elector, because the latter had hanged her brothers, the Quitzows, notorious outlaws of the Mark Brandenburg. The Emperor cut out the whole episode when the play was submitted to him in manuscript. The marginal note in his big, bold handwriting ran: 'Eine Courtisane kommt in einem Hohenzollerstück nicht vor' (A courtesan has no place in a Hohenzollern drama)."
The Emperor's constant change of uniform is often said to be a sign of his liking for the theatrical, and writers have compared him on this account with lightning-change artists like the great Fregoli. Rather his respect for and reliance on the army, a sense of fitness with the occasion to be celebrated, a feeling of personal courtesy to the person to be received, are the motives for such changes. The Paris Temps published the following incident apropos of the Emperor's visit to England in November, 1902. When, on arriving at Port Victoria, the royal yacht Hohenzollern came in view, the members of the English Court sent to welcome the Emperor saw him through their glasses walking up and down the captain's bridge wearing a long cavalry cloak over a German military uniform. When they stepped on board they found him in the undress uniform of an English admiral. They lunched with him, and in the afternoon, when he left for London, he was wearing the uniform of an English colonel of dragoons. Arrived in London, he left for Sandringham, and must have changed his dress en route, for he left the train in a frock-coat and tall hat.
Perhaps the most notable theatrical event of the reign hitherto was the production at the Royal Opera in 1908 of the historic pantomime "Sardanapalus." The Emperor's idea, as he said himself, was to "make the Museums speak," to which a Berlin critic replied, "You can't dramatize a museum." The ballet, for it was that as well as a pantomime, engrossed the Emperor's time and attention for several weeks. He spent hours with the great authority on Assyriology, Professor Friedrich Delitzsch, going over reliefs and plans taken from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum or borrowed from museums in Paris, London, and Vienna, decided on the costumes and designed the war-chariots to be used in the ballet. The notion was to rehabilitate the reputation of Asurbanipal, the second-last King of Assyria, whom the Greeks called "Sardanapalus," who reigned in Nineveh six hundred years before Christ, over Ethiopia, Babylon and Egypt, and whom Lord Byron, accepting the Greek story, represented as the most effeminate and debauched monarch the world had ever known.
Professor Delitzsch, with a wealth of recondite learning, showed, on the contrary, that Sardanapalus was a wise and liberal-minded monarch, who, rather than fall into the hands of the Medes, built himself a pyre in a chamber of his palace and perished on it with his wives, his children, and his treasure. The whole four acts, with the various ballets, gave a perfectly faithful representation of the period as described by Diodorus and Herodotus, and as plastically shown on the reliefs discovered at Nineveh by Sir Henry Layard and subsequently by German excavators. Over £10,000 was spent upon the production, and the public were worked up to a great pitch of curiosity concerning it. But it was a complete failure as far as the public were concerned. "Heavens!" exclaimed one critic, "what a bore!" This, however, was not the fault of the Emperor, but was due to want of interest on the part of a public whose enthusiasm for the events and characters of times so remote could only be kindled by a genius, and a dramatic one. The Emperor is no such genius, nor had he one at command.
XI.
THE NEW CENTURY (continued)
1902-1904
King George V has hardly been sufficiently long on the English throne for a contemporary to judge of the personal relations that exist between his Majesty and the Emperor as chief representatives of their respective nations. The King of England was, until June, 1913, hindered by various circumstances from paying a visit to the Court of Berlin, and rumours were current that relations between the two rulers were not as friendly as they might and should be. There is now every indication that though the relations of people to people and Government to Government vary in degrees of coolness or warmth, the two monarchs are on perfectly good terms of cousinship and amity.