英语文摘:Drama "Fear" makes debut at Salzburg Festival

VIENNA, July 29 (Xinhua) -- "Fear" dramatized from Stefan Zweig's novella premiered at the Salzburg Festival on Wednesday.

At the State Theater of Salzburg, stage director Jossi Wieler designed a bright and abstract stage to tell his audience the story about the ambiguities that a marriage may possess, including luck and abyss, tenderness and aggression, lies and play, merriment and underhanded warfare.

Leaving the apartment of her young lover, the wife of a wealthy lawyer is seized by a sudden sense of foreboding. At the bottom of the stairs a woman is waiting. The woman will stalk, blackmail and intimidate her into a state of suicidal despair. That is the very beginning of Irene Wagner's special period of her life.

"Fear," a 1920 novella that charts every fluctuation of its heroine's inner turmoil and ends with an ingenious twist. The story is typical of Zweig's fiction, which intently examines a single obsession in a narrow social milieu.

Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and earned a doctoral degree in 1904. He was a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s, and was best known for his novellas, novels and biographies.

The Salzburg Festival, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, is a prominent festival of opera, concerts and drama. This year's festival runs from July 25 to Aug. 30.