The Master Builder

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Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer

In July 1891, Ibsen returned to Christiania after 27 years abroad and The Master Builder was written the following year, though he was influenced by his previous experiences with 18-year-old Emilie Bardach. Bardach inspired the character Hilde Wangel, though she is presented as far more calculating and coquettishly in the play than she was most likely to have acted towards Ibsen. A friend of the playwright once wrote of Ibsen’s encounter with Bardach: “Ibsen related how he had met in the Tyrol, where she was staying with her mother, a Viennese girl of very remarkable character, who had at once made him her confidant. The gist of it was that she was not interested in the idea of marrying some decently brought-up young man; most likely she would never marry. What tempted, fascinated and delighted her was to lure other women’s husbands away from them. She was a demonic little wrecker; she often seemed to him like a little bird of prey, who would gladly have included him among her victims. He had studied her very, very closely.”

On August 9, 1892 Ibsen began work on what was to be the final version of the play, published by Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag in Christiania on December 12th and in Copenhagen on December 14th 1892 in an edition of 10,000 copies. The play had a mixed reception, though it received on the whole a more positive response than with the preceding plays. The first public performance of The Master Builder was a reading in Norwegian at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket in London on December 7th 1892, five days before the play was even published, as part of William Heinemann’s strategy to secure the copyright for himself. The first professional staging of the play was on January 19, 1893 at the Lessing-Theater in Berlin, with the director Emanuel Reicher playing the title role.

The action concerns Halvard Solness, the master builder of the title, who has become the most successful builder in his home town by a fortunate series of coincidences. He had previously conceived these events and wished for them to come to pass, but never actually did anything about them. By the time his wife’s ancestral home was destroyed by a fire in a clothes cupboard, he had already imagined how he could cause such an accident and then profit from it by dividing the land on which the house stood into plots and covering it with homes for sale. Between this fortuitous occurrence and some chance misfortunes of his competitors Solness comes to believe that he has only to wish for something to happen in order for it to come about. He rationalises this as a particular gift from God, bestowed so that, through his unnatural success, he can carry out His ordained work of church building. The plot also concerns the destructive outcome of a middle-aged, professional man’s infatuation with a young and flirtatious woman.