Henrik Ibsen: Bygmester Solness [The Master Builder]

Ibsen wrote The Master Builder in 1892. It thus belongs to the latter part of his dramatic career when he had moved away from the social realism of plays such as A Doll's House or Ghosts towards a more overtly symbolist form of drama in which social issues are displaced by themes of a philosophical or existential nature. The play is generally seen as strongly autobiographical. After Ibsen's death, letters were published which he had exchanged in 1889 and 1890 with a young Austrian girl, Emilie Bardach.They indicated that there had been some kind of relationship between Ibsen, then aged 61, and Emilie, aged eighteen, during the summer of 1889 in Gossensass in the Austrian Tyrol. They corresponded for a time before Ibs