Bereczky Erzsébet (szerk.): Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man. Essays about the ideas and the directing of the Drama (Budapest, 1985)

dr. Antal Németh: A Generation under the Spell of the Tragedy of Man

solution, one which conveyed Madách’s vision with monolithic effect even for the deathdance that closes the London scene.

Collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Aurél Millos guaranteed inimitable effect to this production. Millos was by this time well-known in Europe, for with his adoption of the choreographic achievement of post-Djaghilev systems of dancing, he had revolutionized traditional ballet. I new him and invited him. He was able to express any aspect of any emotion or mood through his dancing, and he was absolutely incomparable in his portrayal of whatever was demoniaclly macabre. He not only composed the choreography for the production, but himself danced the figure of Death in the London dance-macebre scene, as the Reaper appeared in top-hat and tails in the teaming multitude of the fair. The solo figures and groups, which imitated the movement of life with mechanical reflexes, seemed like ghostiy puppets as they froze or fell at a wave of Death’s arm. When, during his chilling dance, he came close to some figure speaking Madách’s lines, the music stopped for a moment, the couplets of each figure were spoken, and he or she fell dead. From the Flower Girl, for instance, Death bought her last violets, three coins clinked on her collection plate as she said:

I sold my little flowers long ago:

Now on my grave new violets will grow.

— and already life had fled from her. All the seven episode figures died like that in such fleetingly brief pantomime scenes. And then, with the music breaking into fortissimo, Death danced its triumphal dance, frolicking through the London fair, amidst stray bodies and mounds of corpses until his fiance meets the only living person — Eve wrapped in her veils, from whom at the end of her words a sharp white light tore off her last shrowd - to stand there in her triumphal nakedness: eternal Woman who is victorious even over Death.

It was in the London scene that Madách depicted the most sharply the woof and the warp of the human life program of which Adam cought a glimpse, the positive and negative aspects of

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