In the developed Western world we seldom come face to face with the tap-roots of our artistic traditions. This is particularly true of the drama, which has come a long, long way from its origins in the Eastern service of the medieval Catholic Church. But this summer visitors to the Bavarian village of Oberammergau were able to see the most famous direct descendant of that first tiny Easter play. Nominally staged at the beginning of each decade, the Oberammergau Passion Play was actually last presented here in 1984, to mark the 350th anniversary of the first performance.
In 1633 Bavaria was revenged by the Black Plague, which claimed several victims in Oberammergau. Two councils in the village, one of six and one of twelve, met and prayed for divine protection. They promised, if it were granted, that the village would perform a play every ten years depicting the Passion of Christ; "from this time on, not a single person died."
Original Latin Dialogue
Such a drama was not unique, either in Europe or elsewhere. Passion plays had developed in the Eastern Mediterranean under the Byzantine Empire, centuries before they were known in the West. Later, in the tenth century, Western drama began with a trope in the Easter mass, a little dialogue during the Alleluia, between the three Marys and an Angel at Christ's tomb:
Angel: Quem quaeritus n sepulchro, O Christicolae?
(Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, O Christicolae?)
Marys: Jhesum Nazarenum, crucifixum, O caelicola.
(Jesus of Nazareth who is crucified, O heavenly one.)
The Angel told the three Marys that Christ had risen, showed them the cloths that were used to wrap the cross, and they sang the Alleluia as an anthem of resurrection.
By the seventeenth century the original Latin dialogue had expanded into full vernacular accounts of the Passion, played in and out of churches all over Catholic Europe. These were encouraged by the Counter-Reformation, and in Bavaria between the mid sixteenth and nineteenth century some 250 are on record.
The first play at Oberammergau was modest. Using a compilation of sixteenth century texts, the villagers staged their 1634 performance in the village graveyard, "in order to manifest the victory of life over death through the resurrection of Christ." Until 1860 the play remained more or less a village affair, with a new text composed in 1811 by a monk from the nearby village of Ettal, and music by a local teacher, Rochus Dedler. By the end of the century new railway facilities were bringing tourists, especially the British, to Oberammergau and especially to see the decennial Passion Play. In 1890, the Times described what had happened to the village:
The hamlet has now the look of a rising spa. Advertisements of famous champagne brands, English soaps and cycles, American sewing machines and tobaccos hang everywhere about; there is a bookseller with Tauchnitz volumes and French novels in his window; there are shops full of the wood knick-knacks familiar to tourists in
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