Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (40 page)

There are thus three principal versions of the play whose differences will be described in what follows. The first is the German version whose earliest typescript was entitled
The Earth Moves
and which was originally written in November 1938. What appear to be early sketches lay down a structure as follows:

Life of Galileo

1.   
PADUA
/Welcoming the new age/Copernicus’s hypothesis/authoritarian economy in Italy.

2.   
SIGNORIA
/Landscape.

3.   
RESEARCH
/Danger of the truth/speech about reason and its seductions.

4.   
DEMONSTRATIONS
/The addicts of authority exhorted to see.

5.   
PLAGUE
.

6.   
COLLEGIUM ROMANUM
/The Copernican system ridiculed.

7.   
THE DECREE
/On the church’s responsibilities/the ch. system too all-embracing.

7a.
CONVERSATION
/The monk’s parents/Horace.

8.   
THE SUNSPOTS
/On science/Keunos.

9.   The new age without fear/strict research/hope in working people.

9a.
BALLAD

10.   
THE INQUISITION’S SUMMONS
.

11.   
INQUISITION
/Condemnation of doubt.

12.   
RECANTATION
/Praise of steadfastness.

13.   
THE PRISONER
/Passage from the
Discorsi/On
the scientist’s duty/On expropriation/The new age, a harridan.

14.   
SMUGGLING
.

It did not take long to complete. On November 17 his secretary-collaborator Margarete Steffin wrote to Walter Benjamin:

Ten days ago Brecht began getting
Galileo
down in dramatic form, after it had been plaguing his mind for some while. He has already finished nine of the fourteen scenes, and very fine they are.

A mere six days after that, according to his diary, he had completed it, commenting that

The only scene to present difficulties was the last one. As in
St. Joan [of the Stockyards]
I needed some sort of twist at the end to make absolutely certain of the necessary detachment on the part of the audience. At any rate, now even a man subject to unthinking empathy must experience the A-effect in the course of identifying
himself with Galileo. A legitimate degree of empathy occurs, given strictly epic presentation.

On January 6, 1939, the
Berlingske Tidende
published an interview in which he said that the play was ‘really written for New York’; this referred no doubt to his discussions with Ferdinand Reyher. A few weeks later he carefully revised it under the title
Life of Galileo
and had a number of duplicated copies run off, of which Walter Benjamin and Fritz Sternberg each appear to have been given one. This was also to all intents and purposes the version sent to Zurich and staged there on 9 September 1943.

But already Brecht was dissatisfied with it:

Technically,
Life of Galileo
is a great step backwards, far too opportunistic, like
Señora Carrar’s Rifles
. The play would need to be completely rewritten to convey that ‘breath of wind that cometh from new shores’, that rosy dawn of science. It would all have to be more direct, without the interiors, the atmospherics, the empathy. And all switched to planetary demonstration. The division into scenes can be kept, Galileo’s characterisation likewise, but work, the pleasures of work, would need to be realised in practical form, through contact with a theatre. The first thing would be to study the
Fatzer
and
Breadsbop
fragments [two unfinished plays dating from before 1933]. Technically those represent the highest standard.

So he noted on February 25. On the 27th he heard a Danish radio interview with three of Niels Bohr’s assistants, one of whom, Professor C. Møller, knew Brecht and later recalled discussing Galileo and the
Discorsi
with him early the previous year. This interview described the splitting of the uranium atom, which (so Ernst Schumacher suggests) may have prompted the passage in the revised text about ‘the greatest discoveries … being made at one or two places’. The revision, however, certainly did nothing to change the play ‘technically’. Though an early but undated note speaks of a
Life of Galileo
version for workers, there appears to be no indication that a start was ever made on this.

The second or American version dates from April 1944, when Brecht took up the play again as a result of a meeting with Jed Harris, the producer of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
. A translation of the first version had already been made by Desmond Vesey; in addition Brecht now got a rough interlinear translation made by one of his own collaborators, followed by a new acting version by two of Orson
Welles’s associates, Brainerd Duffield and Emerson Crocker. The two last-named had been recommended to him by Charles Laughton, who seems to have become interested in the play some time that autumn and to have used their version for his own work with Brecht on the adaptation. ‘Now working systematically with Laughton on the translation and stage version of
The Life of the Physicist Galileo
’ said a diary note of December 10. In the course of this activity, which lasted off and on until December 1945, Brecht redrafted many passages in a remarkable mixture of German and English; thus his sketch for the beginning of scene 4 runs:

Rede des Mathematikers

Das Universum des göttlichen Aristoteles mit seinen

mystisch musizierenden Sphären und Kristallnen Gewöl-

circles                                 heavenly bodies

ben sowie den Kreisläufen seiner Himmelskörper,

obliquity of the eclyptic

seinem Schiefenwinkel der Sonnenbahn/den Geheimnissen

Sternen

der Table of Cords, dem/Reichtum des Catalogue

inspirierten

for the southern hemisphere/der/construction of a

celestial globe is ein Gebäude von grosser Ordnung

und Schönheit.

The Universe of divine Classics.

For the New York production, which took place after Brecht’s return to Europe, there were, according to its director Joseph Losey, ‘Different words, thanks in part to the collaboration of George Tabori in rewriting with Laughton and me from notes left behind in New York by Brecht.’

The text as we reproduce it in the appendix (p. 333 ff.) was published by Indiana University Press in 1953 in
From the Modern Repertoire, Series Two
, edited by Eric Bentley, then in
Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht
, Grove Press, New York, 1961, and separately by Grove Press again in 1966. The play still struck Brecht himself as formally conventional, to judge from a note of January 1945 which found that

with its interiors and atmospheric effects the construction of the scenes, derived from the epic theatre, makes a singularly theatrical impact.

He also told an interviewer somewhat apologetically that summer that ‘
Galileo
is anyway interesting as a contrast to my parables. Where they embody ideas, it extracts ideas from a subject’. And on July 30 he noted that ‘I wouldn’t go to the stake for the formal aspects of this play’.

In 1953, he got Elisabeth Hauptmann and Benno Besson of the Berliner Ensemble, with some advice from Ruth Berlau to draft a third version in German, using the best parts of the previous texts. This he himself revised to form the play which was given its German première at Cologne in April 1955, published as
Ver suche 14
and subsequently rehearsed by him for some three months with his own company. With minor amendments it is the text of the
Gesammelte Werke
on which our edition is based. It differs substantially from the second version, not least by being very much longer.

From Brecht’s first completed typescript, dating presumably from 23 November 1938, to the text used for the Zurich production of 1943, the play remained essentially the same, the only changes of real substance being those in the last scene but one, which define the nature of Galileo’s crime. The general structure of this first version was already very similar to that of the text which we have followed, and certain scenes, or large parts of them, were taken into the latter without drastic rewriting, for instance the first half of scene 1, scene 3, the start of scene 4, scene 5b (Plague), scene
6
(Collegium Romanum), much of scene 8, scene 11 (The Pope) and the last (Smuggling) scene. Even the carnival scene (10) had the same place, gist and purpose, though the ballad round which it centres was later rewritten. There were, however, some striking differences among the characters. To sum these up briefly:

Mrs Sarti originally died of the plague in scene 5b. The character in 9 was ‘the housekeeper’. This was altered after the first typescript.

Ludovico, Virginia’s fiancé, did not appear till scene 7 (The Ball). He was then called Sitti, and was not a member of the landowning aristocracy; indeed in scene 9 (Sunspots) he lamented that he had no fortune of his own. His function of introducing Galileo to the principle of the telescope (scenes 1 and 2) was performed by a sillyass character called Doppone, son of a wool merchant, whose only other appearance was, briefly, as a papal chamberlain in the ball scene.

Virginia was much less contemptuously treated by her father. Her relations with Andrea were friendlier, though her role in the penultimate scene was the same.

Federzoni the lens grinder did not figure in the play at all. Some of his lines were spoken by an ‘elderly scholar’.

Vanni the iron founder did not figure in the play either.

A stove-fitter and a doctor appeared in the penultimate scene.

In the first typescript the play was called
The Earth Moves
(Die Erde bewegt sich) and the scenes bore no titles. The title
Life of Galileo
, together with the individual scene titles, more or less in their final form, are to be found in the revised scripts of early 1939. The verses before each scene are absent from this version.

The following is a scene-by-scene account of it.

1

Galileo Galilei, teacher of mathematics in Padua, sets out to demonstrate the new Copernican system

Galileo’s long speech about the ‘new age’ (pp. 6–8) was about ten lines shorter, omitting inter alia the passages about the ships previously hugging the shores and about the masons in Siena, but taking in the lines about ‘those old constructions that people have believed in for the last thousand years’ which come at the close of the scene in the final text (p. 17). Andrea’s age was not originally specified, but the revised versions make him thirteen (as opposed to eleven in the final text).

The whole episode with Ludovico is absent. Instead Galileo
explains to Andrea the nature of a hypothesis. Copernicus, he says, knows that the earth rotates

only because he has worked it out. Actually he doesn’t know it at all. He’s assuming it. It’s simply what is called a hypothesis. No facts. No proofs. They’re being looked for. A few people in Prague and in England are looking for the proofs. It’s the greatest hypothesis there has ever been, but it’s no more than that. Hence the great flaw in the new system is that nobody who isn’t a mathematician
can
understand why it’s like that and can’t be any other way. All I’ve showed you is that it can be that way. There’s no reason why not, if you see what I mean.

ANDREA
: Can’t I become a mathematician and find out the reason why it should?

GALILEO
: And how am I going to pay the butcher and the milkman and the bookseller if I start giving you lessons for nothing? Off you go, now; I must get on with my work.

In the revised versions Andrea asks ‘What’s a hypothesis?’ and gets the answer which the final text puts at the end of the scene, down to ‘that can hardly see at all’ (p. 17), concluding ‘Copernicus’s hypothesis is the greatest hypothesis there has ever been, but it’s no more than that.’

ANDREA
: Then what about what the church is saying? What’s that?

GALILEO
: Oh, that’s a hypothesis too, but not such a good one. Lots of flaws that don’t explain very much. But the great flaw of the new system …

– and so on, as above.

The episode with the procurator of the university, which follows, is close to the final text, though the reference to the scientific implications of ‘the cry for better looms’ is lacking. Doppone appears
after
this, and is taken on as a private pupil for thirty scudi a month; his father wants him to become a theologian, since he likes arguing. Before leaving, he tells Galileo about the telescope, which Galileo then constructs from two lenses bought for him by Andrea. The scene ends with them looking through it.

GALILEO
: You didn’t eat the apple – which shows you’ve got the makings of a mathematician. A taste for unrewarding art. I’ll teach you. It won’t break me. This flimflam is worth five hundred scudi.

ANDREA
(
after Galileo has allowed him another look):
How clearly one sees. Here’s Signor Gambione the bailiff coming up to our house.

GALILEO
: Quick, shove those forty-five scudi in your pocket!

2

Galileo presents a new invention to the Republic of Venice

Federzoni and Ludovico do not figure in this scene, which is dated August 24, 1609. Nor does Virginia. The telescope is handed over by Andrea, who however has nothing to say. The scene starts with Galileo’s telling Sagredo that he has used it to look at the moon. Then his presentation speech is read for him by the procurator, including as Galileo’s own the emphasis on the instrument’s military usefulness; he adds a comment that Galileo hopes to continue serving the Venetians. During this speech Doppone appears and tries to catch the eye of Galileo, who is annoyed and embarrassed: ‘It’s one of my pupils, an unbelievable idiot. I can’t imagine what he wants.’ As the city fathers try the instrument Galileo goes on talking to Sagredo about its relevance to Copernican theory.