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

Endre Gellért: "I hear, I hear the coming epoch's song"

there is complete lack of enthusiasm. A caesura offers itself in the dream sequence, and the direction considers it the best place for an intermission: between Constantinople and the first Kepler scene in Prague.

Kepler, in Prague, who wants to devote his life to pure science, has to draw horoscopes and „vain weather prophecies” to give his wife her „daily dress”, revolts against the society of his times:

I longed for such an age which has no strife,

That age has come. But everything’s in vain When in my chest, my sacred heirdom’s pain,

The soul that man has earned by God’s behest Is still alive and does not let me rest And wants to keep on fighting idle joys - Hey, servant! Bring me wine! I shiver so!

This world is frozen... let me make it glow.

One needs encouragement in this dwarf-age To be uplifted from its dusty cage.

Kepler who had fled to the world of the stars instead of science for the sake of science alone, which just a moment earlier had still seemed to him the only route of escape from the petty meanness of the times, exclaims:

On, will an apoch come to us to thaw This rigid apathy? A forceful law Which looks into our era’s senseless drift And as a judge will punish and pulift?

An age not frightened of by means unheard And not afraid to say the hidden word:

Which like a mighty avalanche explodes And keeps on rolling forth on fatal roads And also crushes him who said it first.

I hear, I hear the coming epoch’s song.

I found the word, the magic talisman

Which makes this aging earth both free and yound!

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