William Tell

On Saturday, August 11th, after breakfast, it was decided that while Andreas continued his work, Eva, Mary Joy and I would go do some on-site research relating to William Tell.  Eva drove us to Hohle Gasse, an old, deep-cut road on the edge of the Rigi mountain near Kuessnacht.  According to the legend, this is where Tell killed the tyrant Gessler.  This is the story, if you don't know it: Gessler, as the Emperor's viceroy in the region around Lake Lucerne, had set his hat upon a tall pole in the center of Altdorf, commanding everyone who passed to bow down to the hat, as if it were Gessler himself.  William Tell, a hunter from the countryside came to town with his son Walter to visit his father-in-law.  Not knowing of the decree, Tell failed to bow to the hat and was arrested.  A riot was about to break out, when Gessler himself arrived, with his escort of soldiers.

"I hear that you're a great marksman with the crossbow, Tell," said Gessler.

"He can hit an apple at eighty paces," bragged young Walter.

"Is that true, Tell?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Then I will release you if you demonstrate this feat for me--but the apple will be sitting on your son's head!"

Tell refused, but Gessler said that if he didn't attempt and make this shot, both father and son would die.

Everyone around was shocked and pleaded with Gessler to relent, but in vain.

Walter, the apple on his head, bravely encouraged his father.  Tell took two crossbow bolts out of his quiver, put one in his belt and set the other up on his bow.  He trembled, his hand shook, but once he released the bolt it went true and straight and split the apple in two, without harming Walter!

"Well done," said Gessler.  "I noticed that you put a second bolt in your belt.  Why was that?"

"That my lord, was for you, in case I killed my son."

Gessler had Tell thrown in chains and promised to put him in the deepest dungeon of his castle in Kuessnacht, so that Tell would never again see the light of day.  The fastest route from Altdorf to Kuessnacht led across Lake Lucerne.  So Gessler and his entourage got into a boat, with the heavily chained Tell, and headed up the lake.

But soon a storm came up, and the boat was in serious danger of being thrown against one of Lake Lucerne's famous rocks.  Tell, who was renowned not only as a shot but as pilot and boatman on the lake, was released and given the tiller.  He had the oarsmen row until the boat was level with a flat-topped rock jutting into the lake.  Then he threw aside the tiller and suddenly jumped onto the rock, with his crossbow in hand!  The boat drifted back onto the raging lake, and for a while, it looked like Gessler and all the others would go down to a watery grave.  But somehow they managed to bring the boat to shore and continued on land around the Rigi toward Kuessnacht.

Meanwhile, Tell, knowing that they would have to come through the wooded ravine of the Hohle Gasse, set himself in ambush there, and when Gessler came down to the end, he soon found the crossbow bolt that Tell had saved for him, sticking out of his own chest.  The three cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden rose up and tossed out their Hapsburg oppressors, leading to the founding of Switzerland, billions of tons of cheese, millions of clocks and watches, the invention of milk chocolate, the arrival of banking Gnomes in Zurich, the settlement of Green County, Wisconsin, and the birth there of my beloved.

Until the 1930s, the Hohle Gasse was just part of the highway from Immensee to Kuessnacht, and had been widened, graded and paved.  There was a plan to improve it even more, for modern automobile traffic, but in 1935 the schoolchildren of Switzerland collected their pennies to pay for a highway bypass around the Hohle Gasse.  A foundation took over the land and tore everything up, completely rebuilding it to look like what they thought it must have looked like in the late thirteenth century.  Now there is a short audiovisual presentation in a pavilion there, telling the history of the Hohle Gasse and the legend of William Tell.  For a legend it apparently is.  The first mention of Tell and his adventures appeared in 1470, nearly two centuries after he supposedly lived.

We walked up the Hohle Gasse to the seventeenth-century Tell Chapel at the top.  A mural at the back of the tiny church shows how Tell met his heroic end: saving a child from a raging river, while he himself drowned.

We drove along the lake and Eva pointed out the Ruettli meadow, a patch of light green in the middle of an expanse of dark green, above the blue-green lake.  This is the place where, in 1291, the Forest Cantons swore a bond together that today is treated as the beginning of Switzerland.  Then we stopped at a restaurant above Tells Platte, the rock where Tell supposedly leaped from Gessler's boat.  There we had a coffee and viewed he lake as the ferry crossed from the Ruettli and put in below, much more easily than Tell had.

We returned to Zug, picked up Andreas, and headed for Interlaken.  Along the way there were several tunnels and the twisting climb over the Brunig Pass.  One German driver ahead of us was having some sort of trouble, perhaps vision problems in the dark tunnels.  He seemed to have difficulty keeping his car within the lines and slowed down dramatically when there were oncoming headlights.  Eventually, he pulled off, to cheers and clapping from our car.  Another German driver ahead of us appeared to be intimidated by the Brunig, and eventually he pulled off, too.

We went down the other side, into the valley of the Aare, then along the Brienzersee (Lake Brienz), then into the very familiar tourist crowds of Interlaken.  We dropped our luggage off at the apartment that we were renting, then went back to the Brienzersee, to Boenigen, where Kathi, the friend of Eva's father, Albert, was having a pre-theater apero--wine, gazpacho, hors d'oeuvres.  There, along with Albert and Kathi, were Eva's sisters, Silvia and Irma, and their husbands, Kurt and Heinz.  Also there were Jochen and Miriam, young German friends of Eva and Andreas, living in Zug.

It was a nice party, with very pleasant company, but we were together for a different purpose.  We went to Matten, checked Eva, Andreas, Jochen and Miriam into the Hotel Sonne, and walked from there to the nearby grounds of the Interlaken Tellspiele, where we would watch a grand, outdoor production of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell.  Once we were on the grounds, we had and took an opportunity to take a picture of William Tell himself, along with his son Walter.  They somehow looked amazingly familiar.

We went up to our seats and waited for the play to start.  The set had several houses, a castle in the process of construction and a wooded area that could be (and did become) a Ruettli or a Hohle Gasse.

It was a lot of fun, though it was a good thing that I had read an English version the day before, on the train from Colmar, and Mary Joy had read the original German version around the fourth of July.  As it was very faithful to Schiller (Kathi, who goes every year, said that this was because this year was the hundredth anniversary of the Interlaken Tellspiele), we knew who these people were and what they were doing.  The shooting of the apple, as Schiller had written it, happened very quickly, while everyone (except me) was distracted.  I have it on video on my camera, and will have to analyze it to see how it was done.  The incidental music, of course, was taken from the overture to the opera that Rossini wrote based on Schiller's play, the curtain calls being made to the famous finale of that overture ("Hiyo, Silver!  Away!" immediately comes to the mind of any American child born before 1960 or so).  

 We then went over to the bar at the Hotel Sonne and drank beer and talked for quite a while.  Then Eva drove us back to our apartment, and we went to bed.