Zemlinsky’s “Der Traumgörge”. A Post-Wagnerian Pentecost Play or, on the Emergence of a Pogrom from the Middle of the Christian Community

“Fairy tales must come alive.”1 This line, sung repeatedly by the eponymous hero of Alexander Zemlinsky's Der Traumgörge (Görge the Dreamer), is widely interpreted as the leitmotif and theme of the work. Such an interpretation runs as follows: Görge is a solitary figure whose books and reveries are mocked by the inhabitants of his village surroundings, and in particular by Grete, the woman intended to be his bride. He departs from the village at the end of the first act to pursue a vision. He begins the second act, set three years later, a social outcast. By this time he has rejected the possibility of integration into an active, even powerful, place in society as the eloquent leader of rebelling peasants. Horrified by the violence revolt entails, he relinquishes the role, instead rescuing Gertraud, a woman accused of witchcraft, from a bloodthirsty mob attempting to burn her at the stake. Shortly after, she becomes his betrothed. A postlude, yet another year later, presents them in a petit bourgeois idyll: an economically successful and socially recognized miller and his wife, in whose lives, as it were, dreams have become reality.