DAS KONZERT

Das Konzert: translation

(The Concert) by Hermann Bahr.

   Premiered 1909. Bahr's most popular and successful play makes dual use of the word concert in its title. The first is a rendezvous the pianist Gustav Heink makes with a female admirer in a secluded mountain cottage; the second describes what happens when Heink's wife and the admirer's husband discover their spouses in the cottage. The dialogue Bahr creates for the foursome is analogous to a string quartet: there is a predictable amount of dissonance at first, but everything ends harmoniously. At one point, the pianist's wife appears ready to leave with the cuckolded husband. She discovers, however, that, like her husband the pianist, the other man is a 48-year-old child. Men simply never grow up, she observes, "and that is why a woman must get wiser every year." The pianist realizes he cannot live without such wisdom from his wife, and the aggrieved husband forgives his wife; she did not really betray him, he realizes, but was simply "overcome" with the pianist's celebrity and star status.