Шебер Салынушы (Bygmester Solness)

Play by Henrik Ibsen

The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness) is a play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was first published in December 1892 and is regarded as one of Ibsen's more significant and revealing works.

The play was published by Gyldendal AS in Copenhagen in 1892 and its first performance was on 19 January 1893 at the Lessing Theatre in Berlin, with Emanuel Reicher as Solness. It opened at the Trafalgar Theatre in London the following month, with Herbert H. Waring in the name part and Elizabeth Robins as Hilda. The English translation was by the theatre critic William Archer and poet Edmund Gosse. Productions in Oslo and Copenhagen were coordinated to open on 8 March 1893. In the following year, the work was staged by Théâtre de l'Œuvre, the international company based in Paris. The first U. S. performance was at the Carnegie Lyceum in New York on 16 January 1900, with William Pascoe and Florence Kahn. Halvard Solness, the master builder, has become the most successful builder in his home town by a fortunate series of coincidences for him which were the chance misfortunes of his competitors. He had previously conceived these fortunate coincidences in his mind, powerfully 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 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 only has 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 God's ordained work of church building.

This play contains realistic and symbolic elements fused together. It represents a movement from his earlier realistic plays, such as A Doll's House, into a more symbolic style. It begins with realistic characters being presented, and then as the story progresses, it shifts into the inner world of the mind of the leading character. The setting and plot of The Master Builder can be taken as one of realism: the destructive outcome of a middle aged, professional man's infatuation with a younger, teasing woman or, as critic Desmond MacCarthy describes this concept of the work: the tragedy of an "elderly architect who falls off his scaffold while trying to show off before a young lady". If, however, one takes Solness's belief in his powers at their face value, the play also can be a lyrical and poetic fairy tale, in the manner of Peer Gynt travelling the Earth in his magical adventures while the faithful Solveig waits for his return. On stage, both interpretations are possible, but it is difficult to give equal weight to both meanings in the same production. The real life prototype of Hilda made no secret of her delight at stealing husbands. "She did not get a hold of me", Ibsen was later to claim, "but I got hold of her — for my play". Theatre director Harold Clurman notes that many interpreters of Ibsen's text have associated his frequent references in the play to Hilda as a "bird of prey" with Bardach's predatory behaviour. After leaving Gossensass, Ibsen carried on a correspondence with Bardach, but he continued to see Helene Raff, an acquaintance of Bardach whom he had also met that summer. It was Raff who told Ibsen the story of the architect of St. Michael's Church, Munich, who had cast himself from the tower as soon as it was finished. Ibsen took this tale, a common legend at many German churches, as evidence of a pervasive human belief that a man could not achieve success without paying a price. From Ibsen's inscription in the copy of the play he sent to Raff (he sent no copy to Bardach), she too can be regarded as an inspiration for the unequal affair between Hilda and Solness. An equally obvious influence is Ibsen's relationship with Hildur Andersen, whom he met as the 10 year old child of friends and who, when she had reached the age of 27, became his constant companion. He wrote of Hildur as "his bird of the woods", the phrase he initially uses to describe his character Hilda, but the character refuses this, accepting only that she is a "bird of prey", as was Bardach. The character of Hilda is a blend of all three women, but Hildur Andersen was the most significant. The autobiographical elements Ibsen includes go further than his relationships with Bardach, Raff and Andersen: In the character of Solness, Ibsen is drawing parallels with his own situation as the "master playwright" and the consequences in his own life. That Ibsen was offering a parable was noted in a review of the first London staging, when the joint translator, Edmund Gosse, was asked to explain the meaning of the work. "An allegory of Dr Ibsen's literary career", he replied.

Following the controversy attached to Ghosts, with its sensitive topic of inherited syphilis, the play's reception in London was not favourable. The more charitable reviews took Solness at his own assessment, as a madman, and decided the other two protagonists were mad as well. Some transferred the conclusion to Ibsen, his translators and his director. Even The Pall Mall Gazette, a champion of Ibsen's work, offered sympathy to the "daring" actors whose mediocre talents were unable to relieve the tedium of this lapse on the part of the "northern genius". The Daily Graphic, however, found the performances of Waring and Robins the "redeeming feature" of the production.

The Master Builder was the first work Ibsen wrote upon his return to Norway in July 1891 after many years spent elsewhere in Europe. It is usually grouped with Ibsen's other works written during this late period of Ibsen's life such as Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken, and Hedda Gabler. Early reactions to the play by Ibsen's critics were mixed, possibly due its heightened ambiguities. Hilda, for example, seems to alternate roles between an inspiring force, urging Solness to temper his rampant ambition and so find real happiness, and a temptress, pushing Solness to commitments he cannot possibly fulfill. English critic William Archer (the play's original translator) suggests that the play is not as completely symbolic as some have maintained, interpreting it instead as "a history of a sickly conscience, worked out in terms of pure psychology". He notes that, in this regard, the play is similar to earlier works that deal mainly with a retrospective look at a character's psyche. with David Schofield as Solness, Siobhan Redmond as Aline and Laura Aikman as Hilda.