This chapter describes the relationship between Luigi Pirandello and the Austrian stage director Max Reinhardt as a drama in three acts. The first act, “The Comedy of a commedia da fare,” addresses how Pirandello’s Six Characters made the author popular in German-speaking countries despite misunderstandings of the text created by arbitrary translation and Reinhardt’s interpretation of the play in a Calderónian manner as the drama of humans after the death of God. The second act, “The Tragedy of Misunderstanding,” shows how Pirandello’s Berlin years ended in a gigantic failure in 1930 when Tonight We Improvise was booed by the audience, an event for which the author blamed “the Reinhardt group.” However, the third act, “A Slow and Mild Process of Disentangling,” recounts an eventual reconciliation, which culminated in the project (ultimately unrealized) for an American film of Six Characters during Reinhardt’s exile in the United States.

Wagner’s immersion in the literary culture of Spain is seldom examined. This chapter explores his fascination with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón in particular, as borne out by his private correspondence, public essays and via Cosima’s diaries. Here, Wagner’s personal characterisation of their literary value bears scrutiny as a facet of his self-understanding of drama within Opera and Drama, even if the role of Spanish culture within Wagner’s works is paltry. Canonical works such as Don Quixote testify to a shattering of the hero myth, the decadence of the ‘Christian romance of chivalry’, while the auto sacramantales of Calderón served as a counterpart to Parsifal, reversing its path from art to religion.

Having accepted a measure of truth in all the religions discussed, and sometimes that the greater truth lies elsewhere than in present Christian conviction, this final chapter considers what implications might follow. The first section develops a model for revelation that parallels certain philosophical approaches to ethics and aesthetics, arguing that cultural constraints are enriching in the way they ensure beliefs arise at the most effective period and place. The central section discusses the two areas where eastern and western religions appear most opposed. The claim that the divine is both personal and impersonal is defended, while some challenges to the reality of the world within Christianity are found to parallel eastern ideas. A final section then contends that the history of religion can be seen to be concerned with creative transformations both in the past and in the future. As examples from the past Buddhism’s move from no-self to interdependence is considered, alongside Christianity’s from hierarchy to kenosis