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

Performance

The play was first performed on 19 January 1893 at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, with Emanuel Reicher as Solness. It opened at the Trafalgar Theatre, London on the 20th of the following month, with Herbert H. Waring in the name part and Elizabeth Robins as Hilda. Productions in Oslo and Copenhagen were coordinated to open on 8 March 1893. In the following year the work was taken up by Théâtre de l'Œuvre, the international company based in Paris, and they mounted productions in Paris, London and other European capitals. The first U.S. performance was at the Carnegie Lyceum, New York, on 16 January 1900, with William Pascoe and Florence Kahn.

Characters

Halvard Solness, master builder.

Aline Solness, his wife.

Doctor Herdal, physician.

Knut Brovik, formerly an architect, now in Solness's employment.

Ragnar Brovik, Knut Brovik's son, a draftsman.

Kaia Fosli, a book-keeper.

Hilda Wangel, a character introduced earlier, in Ibsen's ''The Lady from the Sea''.

Plot summary

Halvard Solness, the master builder, comes to be the most powerful builder in his home town by fortunate coincidences that he had conceived of in his mind, had wished for, but never acted upon. His wife's ancestral home burned down, from a fire in a clothes cupboard, but he had already imagined how he could cause such an accident in the wooden building, and then profit from the destruction by dividing the land on which it stood into plots and covering it with homes for sale. From this chance occurrence, and the misfortunes of his competitors, he comes to imagine that he only has to wish for something for it to come to pass. This he rationalises as a particular gift from God, bestowed so that, through his unnatural success, he can carry out his ordained work of church building. All this he confides to Hilda, a young woman whom he first met as a child ten years before while building a fine new church in her village, who unexpectedly visits Solness at his home after these ten years. Although to Solness these fantasies are indications of his own madness, Hilda dismisses them as no more than rationalisations to appease his uneasy conscience regarding the supernatural "helpers and servers" he believes he has summoned ("they came and obeyed my will") to help him to worldly success. Later, however, she plays upon these fancies to introduce in his mind the notion that his desire for her, supposedly still fresh from their encounter ten years previously, has brought her to him, even though they have not met in the interim. Solness warns that she may be the one with the mysterious power and that through her exaggerated memory of how she had once seen him at the top of her village church tower she may be the one whose secret desires are controlling events. The realistic interpretation is that Hilda has maintained a girlish, erotic obsession for her "ageless prince" and has arrived to claim the "magic life" he can offer. She concocts a fantasy of an "ecstatic erotic encounter" in order to entrap Solness through awakened desire, or guilt; all Solness can remember of Hilda is that she was "one of those little devils in white…screaming up at me".

Aline Solness was deeply hurt when she lost her two sons to an infection, contracted as a consequence of the fire, and the marriage has suffered since then. It is of little consequence to her that her husband is building her a fine house, with an imposing tower, for them to live in together. Since Hilda has come into his life Solness himself has lost his zest for the project: Hilda, and their plan to build a "castle in the air" together, now occupies his mind. It is not difficult for Hilda to persuade him to attach a garland to the highest point of the tower, as she had seen him do at her village church, although he now has an intense fear of heights. He falls to his death.

Realism

The setting and plot of ''The Master Builder'' can be taken as one of unrelenting, "frock-coated realism": the destructive outcome of a middle-aged, professional man's infatuation with a younger, teasing woman or, as critic Desmond MacCarthy prosaically 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, we take Solness's belief in his powers at their face value, the play can also be a lyrical and poetic fairytale, 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, although it is difficult to give equal weight to both meanings in the same production.

Autobiographical elements

At the time Ibsen was plotting ''The Master Builder'' he was holidaying in the mountain resort of Gossensass and spending much time with Emilie Bardach, an eighteen-year-old Viennese student with whom he found a temporary "high, painful happiness" in a brief affair. Not only did the relationship presage the age differences in the play but 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". After leaving Gossensass Ibsen carried on a correspondence with Bardach, but he continued to see Helene Raff, an acquaintance of Bardach's 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 ten-year-old child of friends and who, when she had reached the age of twenty-seven, became his constant companion. The autobiographical elements Ibsen includes go further than his relationship with Bardach and Raff: 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 translator, Edmund Gosse, was asked to explain the meaning of the work. "An allegory of Dr Ibsen's literary career", he replied.

Reception

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 himself, 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. At the end of the run at the Trafalgar Theatre run the two principals engaged a new supporting cast and secured a transfer to the nearby Vaudeville Theatre but, again, reviews were hostile.

Criticism

''The Master Builder'' was the first work Ibsen wrote upon his return to Norway from Europe in July 1891. It is generally grouped with the three other works written during this late period of Ibsen's life – ''Little Eyolf'', ''John Gabriel Borkman'', and ''When We Dead Awaken'' – as "symbolic plays" that lack the thematic clarity of such earlier works as ''Hedda Gabler''. Early reactions to the play by Ibsen's critics were mixed, probably due its heightened symbolism, much of which is unclear. Hilda, for example, seems to alternate roles between an inspiring force, urging Solness to temper his rampant ambition and pursue real happiness, and a temptress, pushing Solness to commitments he cannot possibly make. English critic William Archer, however, has suggested 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 Ibsen works that deal mainly with a retrospective look at a character's psyche.

Translations

''The Master Builder'' has been translated into other languages. B. Suresh has translated ''The Master Builder'' to Kannada as ''BaaLura Gudikaara'' meaning ''Temple Builder of BaaLuru''. Kannada play has been directed by B. Jayashree.

References

Quotations from the 1893 Gosse and Archer translation

External links

1960 TV version with EG Marshall as Solness and Lois Smith as Hilda

Category:1892 plays Category:Plays by Henrik Ibsen

cs:Stavitel Solness de:Baumeister Solneß fr:Solness le constructeur no:Bygmester Solness pt:Solness, o Construtor ru:Строитель Сольнес (пьеса) sv:Bygmester Solness zh:建築大師

Master Builder can refer to:

Master builder, a central figure leading construction projects in pre-modern times

''The Master Builder'', a play by Henrik Ibsen.

Master Builder (Atari 2600), a 1983 video game by Spectravision

''Master Building'', a song in the album You (Gong album)

Coordinates	54°39′6″N18°5′59″N
name	Masters Tournament
location	Augusta, Georgia, U.S.
establishment	1934
course	Augusta National Golf Club
par	72
yardage
tour	PGA TourPGA European TourJapan Golf Tour
format	Stroke play
purse	$8,000,000
month played	April
aggregate	270 Tiger Woods (1997)
to-par	-18 Tiger Woods (1997)
current champion	Charl Schwartzel
current	2011 Masters Tournament }}

The Masters Tournament, also known as The Masters (sometimes referred to as The U.S. Masters outside of the United States), is one of the four major championships in professional golf. Scheduled for the first full week of April, it is the first of the majors to be played each year. Unlike the other major championships, the Masters is held each year at the same location, Augusta National Golf Club, a private golf club in the city of Augusta, Georgia, USA. The Masters was started by Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones. Jones designed Augusta National with course architect Alister MacKenzie. The tournament is an official money event on the PGA Tour, the PGA European Tour, and the Japan Golf Tour. The field of players is smaller than those of the other major championships because it is an invitational event, entry being controlled by the Augusta National Golf Club.

The tournament has a number of traditions. A green jacket has been awarded to the winner since 1949, which must be returned to the clubhouse after a year. The Champions dinner, inaugurated by Ben Hogan in 1952, is held on the Tuesday before each tournament, and is open only to past champions and certain board members of the Augusta National Golf Club. Beginning in 1963, legendary golfers, usually past champions, have hit an honorary tee shot on the morning of the first round. Such golfers have included Fred McLeod, Jock Hutchinson, Gene Sarazen, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus. Since 1960, a semi-social Par 3 Contest, on a par-3 course on Augusta National's grounds, has been played on the day before the first round of each Masters Tournament.

Nicklaus has won more Masters Tournaments than any other golfer, winning six times between 1963 and 1986. Other multiple winners include Palmer and Tiger Woods, with four each. Gary Player, from South Africa, was the first non-American player to win the tournament in 1961.

Since the course first opened in 1933, it has been modified many times by different architects. Among the changes: greens have been reshaped and occasionally rebuilt completely, bunkers have been added, water hazards have been extended, new tees have been built, hundreds of trees have been planted, and several mounds have been installed.

Format

The Masters is the first acknowledged major golf championship of the year and since 1940 has been played so that the final round is always on the second Sunday of April.

Because the Masters has a relatively small field compared to other golf tournaments, the competitors play in groups of three for the first 36 holes on the first two days. After 36 holes have been played by all players, players are eliminated to reduce the field. To "make the cut", players must be either within 44 places of the lead (ties counting) or within 10 strokes of the leader's score. These rules have applied since the 1961 tournament; from 1957 to 1960 the best 40 scores and ties and those within 10 strokes of the leader made the cut. Before 1957, there was no 36-hole cut.

Following the cut a further 36 holes are played over the final two days. If there is a tie at the end of the 72 holes, all players who are tied enter a sudden death play off starting on the 18th hole and then playing the 18th and 10th until a winner is found.

Traditions

Awards

The total prize money for the 2008 tournament was $7,500,000, with $1,350,000 going to the winner. In the inaugural year, the winner Horton Smith received $1,000 out of a $5,000 purse. After [Nicklaus's first win in 1963, he received $20,000, while after his final victory in 1986 he won $144,000. In recent years the purse has grown quickly. Between 2001 and 2008, the winners share grew by $270,000, and the purse grew by $1,500,000.

In addition to a cash prize, the winner of the tournament is presented with a distinctive green jacket, formally awarded since 1949, and informally acquired by the champions for many years before that. The green sport coat is the official attire worn by members of Augusta National while on the club grounds; each Masters winner becomes an honorary member of the club. The recipient of the green jacket has it presented to him inside the Butler Cabin soon after the end of the tournament, and the presentation is then repeated outside near the 18th green in front of the spectators. Winners keep their jacket for the first year after their first victory, then return it to the club to wear whenever they visit. The tradition began in 1949, when Sam Snead won his first of three Masters titles. The green jacket is only allowed to be removed from Augusta National by the reigning champion, after which it must remain at the club. Exceptions to this rule include Gary Player, who in his joy of winning mistakenly took his jacket home to South Africa after his 1961 victory (although he has always followed the spirit of the rule and has never worn the jacket); Seve Ballesteros who, in a recent interview with Peter Alliss from his home in Pedreña, showed off one of his two green jackets in his trophy room; and Henry Picard, whose jacket was removed from the club before the tradition was well established, remained in his closet for a number of years, and is now on display at Canterbury Golf Club in Beachwood, Ohio, where he was the club professional for many years.

By tradition, the winner of the previous year's Masters Tournament puts the jacket on the current winner at the end of the tournament. In 1966, Jack Nicklaus became the first player to win in consecutive years and he donned the jacket himself. When Nick Faldo (in 1990) and Tiger Woods (in 2002) repeated as champions, the chairman of Augusta National put the jacket on them.

There are several awards presented to players who perform exceptional feats during the tournament. The player who has the daily lowest score receives a crystal vase, while players who score a hole-in-one or a double eagle win a large crystal bowl. For each eagle a player makes he receives a pair of crystal goblets. The winner of the Par 3 competition, which is played the day before the tournament begins, wins a crystal bowl.

In addition to the green jacket, winners of the tournament receive a gold medal. They have their names engraved on the actual silver Masters trophy, introduced in 1961, which depicts the clubhouse. This trophy remains at Augusta National; since 1993 winners have received a sterling silver replica. The runner-up receives a silver medal, introduced in 1951. Beginning in 1978, a silver salver was added as an award for the runner-up.

In 1952 the Masters began presenting an award, known as the Silver Cup, to the lowest scoring amateur to make the cut. In 1954 they began presenting an amateur silver medal to the low amateur runner-up.

Other traditions

As with the other majors, winning the Masters gives a golfer several privileges which make his career more secure. Masters champions are automatically invited to play in the other three majors (the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship) for the next five years, and earn a lifetime invitation to the Masters. They also receive membership on the PGA Tour for the following five seasons and invitations to The Players Championship for five years.

Because the tournament was established by the amateur golfer Bobby Jones, the Masters has a tradition of honoring amateur golf. It invites winners of the most prestigious amateur tournaments in the world. Also, the current U.S. Amateur champion always plays in the same group as the defending Masters champion for the first two days of the tournament.

Since 1963 the custom in most years has been to start the tournament with an honorary opening tee shot at the first hole, typically by one of golf's legendary players. The original honorary starters were Jock Hutchison and Fred McLeod; this twosome led off every tournament from 1963 until 1973, when poor health prevented Hutchison from swinging a club. McLeod continued on until his death in 1976. Byron Nelson and Gene Sarazen started in 1981, and were then joined by Sam Snead in 1984. This trio continued until 1999 when Sarazen died, while Nelson stopped in 2001. Snead hit his final opening tee shot in 2001, a year before he too died. In 2007, Arnold Palmer took over as the honorary starter. Palmer also had the honor in 2008 and 2009. At the 2010 and 2011 Masters Tournaments, Jack Nicklaus joined Palmer as a co-honorary starter for the event.

The Champions' dinner is held each year on the Tuesday evening preceding Thursday's first round. The dinner was first held in 1952, hosted by defending champion Ben Hogan, to honor the past champions of the tournament. At that time 15 tournaments had been played, and the number of past champions was 11 (including Hogan). Officially known as the "Masters Club", it includes only past winners of the Masters, although selected members of the Augusta National Golf Club have been included as honorary members, usually the chairman. The defending champion, as host, selects the menu for the dinner. Over the years, one of the most notable dishes was haggis, served by Scotsman Sandy Lyle in 1989. Frequently, Masters champions opt to serve finely-prepared cuisine by the Masters chef from their home regions. Notable examples have included bobotie, a South African delicacy served at the behest of 2008 Masters Tournament champion Trevor Immelman. Previous examples also include German Bernhard Langer's 1986 Wiener Schnitzel feast, Brit Nick Faldo's Fish and Chips, Canadian Mike Weir's elk and wild boar, and Vijay Singh's Seafood Tom Kah and Chicken Panang Curry. Prior to the 1998 Champions Dinner, 1979 Masters Champion Fuzzy Zoeller created a media firestorm when he suggested that Tiger Woods refrain from serving collard greens and fried chicken, dishes commonly associated with Afro-American culture, at the traditional clubhouse feast. 1991 Masters Champion Ian Woosnam has asserted that Angel Cabrera's "asado," prepared diligently by Chef James Clark, Jr., represented the finest interpretation of Argentine cuisine known to a Masters chef.

The Par 3 Contest was first introduced in 1960, and was won that year by Snead. Since then it has traditionally been played on the Wednesday before the tournament starts. The Par 3 course was built in 1958. It is a nine-hole course, with a par of 27, and measures in length. There have been 73 holes-in-one in the history of the contest, with a record five occurring in 2002. No Par 3 Contest winner has also won the Masters in the same year. There have been several repeat winners, including Pádraig Harrington, Sandy Lyle, and Sam Snead. The former two won in successive years. In this event, golfers may use their children as caddies, which helps to create a family-friendly atmosphere. In 2008, the event was televised for the first time by ESPN.

Before 1982 all players in the Masters were required to use the services of an Augusta National Club caddy, who by club tradition was always an African American. Indeed, club co-founder Clifford Roberts is reputed to have said, "As long as I'm alive, golfers will be white, and caddies will be black." Since 1982, players have been allowed the option of using their own caddy. The Masters requires caddies to wear a uniform consisting of a white jumpsuit, a green Masters cap, and white tennis shoes. The surname, and sometimes first initial, of each player is found on the back of his caddie's uniform. The defending champion always receives caddy number "1": other golfers get their caddy numbers from the order in which they register for the tournament.

History

Augusta National Golf Club

The idea for Augusta National originated with Bobby Jones, who wanted to build a golf course after his retirement from the game. He sought advice from Clifford Roberts, who later became the chairman of the club. They came across a piece of land in Augusta, Georgia, of which Jones said: "Perfect! And to think this ground has been lying here all these years waiting for someone to come along and lay a golf course upon it." Jones hired Alister MacKenzie to design the course, and work began in 1931. The course formally opened in 1933, but MacKenzie died before the first Masters Tournament was played.

Early tournament years

The first "Augusta National Invitational" Tournament, as the Masters was originally known, began on March 22, 1934, and was won by Horton Smith. The present name was adopted in 1939. The first tournament was played with current holes 10 through 18 played as the first nine, and 1 through 9 as the second nine then reversed permanently to its present layout for the 1935 tournament.

Initially the Augusta National Invitational field was composed of Bobby Jones' close associates. Jones had petitioned the USGA to hold the U.S. Open at Augusta but the USGA denied the petition, noting that the hot Georgia summers would create difficult playing conditions.

Gene Sarazen hit the "shot heard 'round the world" in 1935, holing a shot from the fairway on the par 5 15th for a double eagle. This tied Sarazen with Craig Wood, and in the ensuing 36-hole playoff Sarazen was the victor by five strokes. The tournament was not played from 1943–45, due to World War II. To assist the war effort, cattle and turkeys were raised on the Augusta National grounds.

1960s–1970s

The Big Three of Palmer, Player, and Nicklaus dominated the Masters from 1960 through 1978, winning the event eleven times among them during that span. After winning by one stroke in 1958, Palmer won by one stroke again in 1960 in memorable circumstances. Trailing Ken Venturi by one shot in the 1960 event, Palmer made birdies on the last two holes to prevail. Palmer would go on to win another two Masters in 1962 and 1964. Jack Nicklaus emerged in the early 1960s, and served as a rival to the popular Palmer. Nicklaus won his first green jacket in 1963, defeating Tony Lema by one stroke. Two years later, he shot a then-course record of 271 (17 under par) for his second Masters win, leading Bobby Jones to say that Nicklaus played "a game with which I am not familiar." The next year, Nicklaus won his third green jacket in a grueling 18-hole playoff against Tommy Jacobs and Gay Brewer. This made Nicklaus the first player to win consecutive Masters. He won again in 1972, again by three strokes. In 1975, Nicklaus was locked in a duel with Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller. In one of the most exciting Masters to date, he claimed the victory by one stroke over his two challengers.

Player became the first non-American to win the Masters in 1961 beating Palmer, the defending champion. In 1974 he won again by two strokes. After not winning a tournament for four years, and at the age of 42, Player won his third and final Masters in 1978 by one stroke over three players. Player currently shares (with Fred Couples) the record of making 23 consecutive cuts, and has played in a record 52 Masters.

A controversial ending to the Masters occurred in 1968. Roberto DeVicenzo signed a scorecard (scored by playing partner Tommy Aaron) which incorrectly listed a 4 instead of a 3 on the 17th hole. This extra stroke cost him a chance to be in an 18-hole playoff with Bob Goalby, who won the green jacket. DeVicenzo's mistake led to the famous quote, "What a stupid I am."

In 1975, Lee Elder became the first African American to qualify for the Masters, doing so 15 years before Augusta National admitted its first black member.

1980s–2000s

Non-Americans collected 11 victories in 20 years in the 1980s and 1990s, by far the strongest run they have had in any of the three majors played in the United States since the early days of the U.S. Open. Nicklaus became the oldest player to win the Masters in 1986 when he won for the sixth time at age 46.

During this period, no golfer suffered from the pressure of competing at Augusta more than Greg Norman. In 1987, Norman lost a sudden-death playoff to Larry Mize. Mize holed out a remarkable 45-yard pitch shot to birdie the second playoff hole and win the Masters. In 1996, Norman tied the course record with an opening round 63, and had a six-stroke lead over Nick Faldo entering the final round. Norman shot a 78 while Faldo scored a 67 to win by five shots (for his third Masters championship). Norman also suffered in 1986 when after birdieing four straight holes, and needing only a par to tie Nicklaus for the lead, he badly pushed his 4-iron approach to 18 and missed his par putt for bogey.

In 1997, Tiger Woods won the Masters by twelve shots at age 21, in the process breaking the tournament four-day scoring record that had stood for 32 years. Woods completed his "Tiger Slam" by winning his fourth straight major championship at the Masters in 2001. The Masters was his again the next year, making him only the third player in history to win the tournament in consecutive years, as well as in 2005 when he defeated Chris DiMarco in a playoff for his first major championship win in almost three years.

Recently, the club was targeted by Martha Burk, who organized a failed protest at the 2003 Masters to pressure the club into accepting female members. Burk planned to protest at the front gates of Augusta National during the third day of the tournament, but her application for a permit to do so was denied. A court appeal was dismissed. In 2004, Burk stated that she had no further plans to protest against the club.

Augusta National Chairman Billy Payne himself made headlines in April 2010, however, when he commented (at the annual pre-Masters press conference) on Tiger Woods' off-the-course behavior. "It's not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here," Payne said, in his opening speech. "It is the fact he disappointed all of us and more importantly our kids and grandkids."

The 2003 tournament was won by Mike Weir, who became the first Canadian to win a major championship, and the first left-hander to win the Masters. The following year, another left-hander, Phil Mickelson, won his first major championship by making a birdie on the final hole to beat Ernie Els by a stroke. Mickelson also won the tournament in 2006 and 2010. In 2011, the tournament was won by South African Charl Schwartzel, who birdied the final four holes to win by two strokes.

Course adjustments

As with many other courses, Augusta National's championship setup has been lengthened in recent years. In 2001, the course measured approximately from the Masters tees. It was lengthened to for 2002, and again in 2006 to ; longer than the 2001 course. The changes attracted many critics, including the most successful players in Masters history, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Tiger Woods. Woods claimed that the "shorter hitters are going to struggle." Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson was unperturbed, stating, "We are comfortable with what we are doing with the golf course.". After a practice round, Gary Player defended the changes, saying, "There have been a lot of criticisms, but I think unjustly so, now I've played it.... The guys are basically having to hit the same second shots that Jack Nicklaus had to hit [in his prime]".

Originally, the grass on the putting greens was the wide-bladed Bermuda. The greens lost speed, especially during the late 1970s, after the introduction of a healthier strain of narrow-bladed Bermuda, which thrived and grew thicker,. In 1978, the greens on the Par 3 course were reconstructed with bentgrass, a narrow-bladed species that could be mowed shorter, eliminating grain. After this test run, the greens on the main course were replaced with bentgrass in time for the 1981 Masters. The bentgrass resulted in significantly faster putting surfaces, which has required a reduction in some of the contours of the greens over time.

Just before the 1975 tournament, the common beige sand in the bunkers was replaced with the now-signature white feldspar. It is a quartz derivative of the mining of feldspar and is shipped in from North Carolina.

Broadcasting

United States

CBS has televised the Masters in the United States every year since 1956, when it used six cameras and covered only the final four holes. Tournament coverage of the first eight holes did not begin until 1993 because of resistance from the tournament organizers, but by 2006, over 50 cameras were used. USA Network added first- and second-round coverage in 1982, which was also produced by the CBS production team. The Masters is broadcast each year in high-definition television, one of the first golf tournaments to ever hold that distinction, and the early round coverage previously aired in that format on USA's sister network, Universal HD. In 2008, ESPN and ESPN HD replaced USA and Universal as the weekday coverage provider, with coverage continuing to be jointly produced with CBS.

In 2005, CBS broadcast the tournament with high-definition fixed and handheld wired cameras, as well as standard-definition wireless handheld cameras. In 2006, a webstream called "Amen Corner Live" began providing coverage of all players passing through holes 11, 12, and 13 through all four rounds. This was the first full tournament multi-hole webcast from a major championship. In 2007, CBS added "Masters Extra," an extra hour of full-field bonus coverage daily on the internet, preceding the television broadcasts. In 2008, CBS added full coverage of holes 15 and 16 live on the web. In 2011, "Masters Extra" was dropped after officials gave ESPN an extra hour each day on Thursday and Friday.

While Augusta National Golf Club has consistently chosen CBS as its U.S. broadcast partner, it has done so in successive one-year contracts. Due to the lack of long-term contractual security, as well as the club's limited dependence on broadcast rights fees (owing to its affluent membership), it is widely held that CBS allows Augusta National greater control over the content of the broadcast, or at least performs some form of self-censorship, in order to maintain future rights. The club, however, has insisted it does not make any demands with respect to the content of the broadcast.

There are some controversial aspects to this relationship. Announcers refer to the gallery as ''patrons'' rather than as ''spectators'' or ''fans'' (''gallery'' itself is also used), and use the term ''second cut'' instead of ''rough'' (however, the second cut is normally substantially shorter than comparable "primary rough" at other courses). Announcers who have been deemed not to have acted with the decorum expected by the club have been removed, notably Jack Whitaker and Gary McCord. There also tends to be a lack of discussion of any controversy involving Augusta National, such as the 2003 Martha Burk protests. However, there have not been many other major issues in recent years.

The club mandates minimal commercial interruption, currently limited to four minutes per hour (as opposed to the usual 12 or more); this is subsidized by selling exclusive sponsorship packages to three companies. In the immediate aftermath of the Martha Burk controversy, there were no commercials during the 2003 and 2004 broadcasts, although international commercial broadcasters continued to insert their own commercials into the coverage. The Players Championship began imposing the same rule in 2007 and some of the other major championships have tried to follow suit in their most recent TV contracts.

The club also disallows promotions for other network programs, with the sole exception of an on-screen mention of ''60 Minutes'' should the final round run long or right before the coverage ends. Other broadcast material not allowed include sponsored graphics, blimps, and on-course announcers. There is also typically no cut-in for other news and sports, either from CBS or its affiliates. CBS uses "Augusta" by Dave Loggins as the event telecast's distinctive theme music. The CBS broadcasts also maintained a modified version of their previous graphics package from the 1990s until 2009 for the broadcasts, updated in 2008 to adopt a glossier dark green and silver color scheme similar to their standard golf graphics. A new graphics package debuted for the 2010 edition. ESPN's broadcasts have also shared the same graphics and music since their displacement of USA Network.

Significant restrictions have been placed on the tournament's broadcast hours compared to other major championships. Only in the 21st century did the tournament allow CBS to air 18-hole coverage of the leaders, a standard at the other three majors. Only three hours of cable coverage is scheduled for the early rounds each day. International broadcasters do not receive additional coverage, although they may take commercial breaks at different times from CBS or ESPN.

Radio coverage

Westwood One has provided live radio play-by-play coverage in the United States since 1956. This coverage can also be heard on the official Masters website. The network provides short two- or three-minute updates throughout the tournament, as well as longer three- and four-hour segments towards the end of the day.

International

The BBC has broadcast the Masters in the UK since 1986, and it also provides live radio commentary on the closing stages on Radio Five Live. With the 2007 launch of BBC HD, UK viewers can now watch the championship in that format. BBC Sport held the TV and radio rights through to 2010. The BBC's coverage airs without commercials because it is financed by a licence fee. From the 2011 Masters, Sky Sports began broadcasting all four days, as well as the Par 3 Contest in HD and, for the first time ever, in 3D. The BBC will only have highlights of the first two days' play but will go head to head with Sky Sports, with full live coverage on the final two days of play. In Ireland, from 2008 Setanta Ireland will broadcast all four rounds live having previously broadcasted the opening two rounds with RTÉ broadcasting the weekend coverage.

In Canada, the broadcast rights are held by a marketing company, Graham Sanborn Media, which in turn buys time on TSN (early rounds and weekend rebroadcasts), Global (weekend rounds live), and RDS (French-language coverage) to air the broadcasts. Graham Sanborn also sells all of the advertising for the Canadian broadcasts. The TSN/Global coverage is identical to the CBS/ESPN feed; RDS uses most of the U.S. video feed but provides commentary in French.

In most other countries, including much of Asia, Latin America, northern Africa, and the Middle East, broadcast rights for the entire tournament are held by the ESPN International networks.

Ticketing

Although tickets for the Masters are not expensive, they are very difficult to come by. Even the practice rounds can be difficult to get into. Applications for practice round tickets have to be made nearly a year in advance and the successful applicants are chosen by random ballot. Tickets to the actual tournament are sold only to members of a patrons list, which is closed. A waiting list for the patrons list was opened in 1972 and closed in 1978. It was reopened in 2000 and subsequently closed once again. In 2008, The Masters also began allowing children (between the ages of 8 and 16) to enter on tournament days free if they are accompanied by the patron who is the owner of his or her badge.

The Masters website announced that a limited supply of tickets for the 2012 tournament will be awarded to the general public for both practice days and competition rounds.

Field

The Masters has the smallest field out of the major championships at around 90 players. It is an invitational event, with invitations largely issued on an automatic basis to players who meet published criteria. The top 50 players in the Official World Golf Rankings are all invited.

Past champions are eligible to play in any edition, but since 2002 the Augusta National Golf Club has discouraged them from continuing to participate at an advanced age.

Invitation categories (as of 2010):

#Masters Tournament Champions (Lifetime) #U.S. Open Champions (Honorary, non-competing after five years) #The Open Champions (Honorary, non-competing after five years) #PGA Champions (Honorary, non-competing after five years) #Winners of the Players Championship (Three years) #Current U.S. Amateur Champion (6-A) (Honorary, non-competing after one year); Runner-up (6-B) to the current U.S. Amateur Champion #Current British Amateur Champion (Honorary, non-competing after one year) #Current Asian Amateur Champion #Current U.S. Amateur Public Links Champion #Current U.S. Mid-Amateur Champion #The first 16 players, including ties, in the previous year’s Masters Tournament #The first 8 players, including ties, in the previous year’s U.S. Open #The first 4 players, including ties, in the previous year’s Open Championship #The first 4 players, including ties, in the previous year’s PGA Championship #The 30 leaders on the Final Official PGA Tour Money List for the previous calendar year #Winners of PGA Tour Regular Season and Playoff events that award at least a full-point allocation for the season-ending Tour Championship, from previous Masters to current Masters #Those qualifying for the previous year’s season-ending Tour Championship #The 50 leaders on the Final Official World Golf Ranking for the previous calendar year #The 50 leaders on the Official World Golf Ranking published during the week prior to the current Masters Tournament

Most of the top current players will meet the criteria of multiple categories for invitation. The Masters Committee, at its discretion, can also invite any golfer not otherwise qualified, although in practice these invitations are currently reserved for international players.

Winners

The first winner of the Masters Tournament was Horton Smith in 1934. He repeated his win in 1936. The player with the most Masters victories is Jack Nicklaus, who won six times between 1963 and 1986. Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods have each won four, and Jimmy Demaret, Gary Player, Sam Snead, Nick Faldo, and Phil Mickelson have three titles to their name. Player also became the tournament's first overseas winner with his first victory in 1961. Other notable winners include Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Tom Watson, Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, Ben Crenshaw, and José María Olazábal, who have all won the Masters twice.

!Year

|	Champion	Country	To par	Margin ofvictory	share (United States dollar>$)
align=center|2011||	Charl Schwartzel		−14	2	1,440,000
align=center|2010||	Phil Mickelson (3)		−16	3	1,350,000
align=center|2009||	Ángel Cabrera		−12	Playoff (3)	1,350,000
align=center|2008||	Trevor Immelman		−8	3	1,350,000
align=center|2007||	Zach Johnson		+1	2	1,305,000
align=center|2006||	Phil Mickelson (2)		−7	2	1,260,000
align=center|2005||	Tiger Woods (4)		−12	Playoff (2)	1,260,000
align=center|2004||	Phil Mickelson		−9	1	1,117,000
align=center|2003||	Mike Weir		−7	Playoff (2)	1,080,000
align=center|2002||	Tiger Woods (3)		−12	3	1,008,000
align=center|2001||	Tiger Woods (2)		−16	2	1,008,000
align=center|2000||	Vijay Singh		−10	3	828,000
align=center|1999||	José María Olazábal (2)		−8	2	720,000
align=center|1998||	Mark O'Meara		−9	1	576,000
align=center|1997||	Tiger Woods		−18	12	486,000
align=center|1996||	Nick Faldo (3)		−12	5	450,000
align=center|1995||	Ben Crenshaw (2)		−14	1	396,000
align=center|1994||	José María Olazábal		−9	2	360,000
align=center|1993||	Bernhard Langer (2)		−11	4	306,000
align=center|1992||	Fred Couples		−13	2	270,000
align=center|1991||	Ian Woosnam		−11	1	243,000
align=center|1990||	Nick Faldo (2)		−10	Playoff (2)	225,000
align=center|1989||	Nick Faldo		−5	Playoff (2)	200,000
align=center|1988||	Sandy Lyle		−7	1	183,800
align=center|1987||	Larry Mize		−3	Playoff (3)	162,000
align=center|1986||	Jack Nicklaus (6)		−9	1	144,000
align=center|1985||	Bernhard Langer		−6	2	126,000
align=center|1984||	Ben Crenshaw		−11	2	108,000
align=center|1983||	Seve Ballesteros (2)		−8	4	90,000
align=center|1982||	Craig Stadler		−4	Playoff (2)	64,000
align=center|1981||	Tom Watson (golfer)>Tom Watson (2)		−8	2	60,000
align=center|1980||	Seve Ballesteros		−13	4	55,000
align=center|1979||	Fuzzy Zoeller		−8	Playoff (3)	50,000
align=center|1978||	Gary Player (3)		−11	1	45,000
align=center|1977||	Tom Watson (golfer)>Tom Watson		−12	2	40,000
align=center|1976||	Raymond Floyd		−17	8	40,000
align=center|1975||	Jack Nicklaus (5)		−12	1	40,000
align=center|1974||	Gary Player (2)		−10	2	35,000
align=center|1973||	Tommy Aaron		−5	1	30,000
align=center|1972||	Jack Nicklaus (4)		−2	3	25,000
align=center|1971||	Charles Coody		−9	2	25,000
align=center|1970||	Billy Casper		−9	Playoff (2)	25,000
align=center|1969||	George Archer		−7	1	20,000
align=center|1968||	Bob Goalby		−11	1	20,000
align=center|1967||	Gay Brewer		−8	1	20,000
align=center|1966||	Jack Nicklaus (3)		E	Playoff (3)	20,000
align=center|1965||	Jack Nicklaus (2)		−17	9	20,000
align=center|1964||	Arnold Palmer (4)		−12	6	20,000
align=center|1963||	Jack Nicklaus		−2	1	20,000
align=center|1962||	Arnold Palmer (3)		−8	Playoff (3)	20,000
align=center|1961||	Gary Player		−8	1	20,000
align=center|1960||	Arnold Palmer (2)		−6	1	17,500
align=center|1959||	Art Wall, Jr.		−4	1	15,000
align=center|1958||	Arnold Palmer		−4	1	11,250
align=center|1957||	Doug Ford (golfer)>Doug Ford		−5	3	8,750
align=center|1956||	Jack Burke, Jr.		+1	1	6,000
align=center|1955||	Cary Middlecoff		−9	7	5,000
align=center|1954||	Sam Snead (3)		+1	Playoff (2)	5,000
align=center|1953||	Ben Hogan (2)		−14	5	4,000
align=center|1952||	Sam Snead (2)		−2	4	4,000
align=center|1951||	Ben Hogan		−8	2	3,000
align=center|1950||	Jimmy Demaret (3)		−5	2	2,400
align=center|1949||	Sam Snead		−6	3	2,750
align=center|1948||	Claude Harmon		−9	5	2,500
align=center|1947||	Jimmy Demaret (2)		−7	2	2,500
align=center|1946||	Herman Keiser		−6	1	2,500
align=center|1942||	Byron Nelson (2)		−8	Playoff (2)	1,500
align=center|1941||	Craig Wood (golfer)>Craig Wood		−8	3	1,500
align=center|1940||	Jimmy Demaret		−8	4	1,500
align=center|1939||	Ralph Guldahl		−9	1	1,500
align=center|1938||	Henry Picard		−3	2	1,500
align=center|1937||	Byron Nelson		−5	2	1,500
align=center|1936||	Horton Smith (2)		−3	1	1,500
align=center|1935||	Gene Sarazen		−6	Playoff (2)	1,500
align=center|1934||	Horton Smith		−4	1	1,500

''The number in parentheses indicates the number players involved in each playoff.''

Multiple and consecutive champions

This table lists the golfers who have won more than one Masters Tournament.

style="background: #FFFFCC"

{|class="sortable wikitable" |- !Country !Golfer !Total !Years |- | | style="background: #FFFFCC"|''' ‡ | align="center"|6 |1963, 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1986 |- | | | align="center"|4 |1958, 1960, 1962, 1964 |- | | style="background: #FFFFCC"|''' ‡ | align="center"|4 |1997, 2001, 2002, 2005 |- | | style="background: #DCDCDC"| † | align="center"|3 |1940, 1947, 1950 |- | | style="background: #DCDCDC"| † | align="center"|3 |1949, 1952, 1954 |- | | style="background: #FFFFCC"| ‡ | align="center"|3 |1961, 1974, 1978 |- | |''' | align="center"|3 |1989, 1990, 1996 |- | | | align="center"|3 |2004, 2006, 2010 |- | | style="background: #DCDCDC"| † | align="center"|2 |1934, 1936 |- | | style="background: #DCDCDC"| † | align="center"|2 |1937, 1942 |- | | style="background: #F5D0A9"| ∞ | align="center"|2 |1951, 1953 |- | | | align="center"|2 |1977, 1981 |- | | style="background: #DCDCDC"| † | align="center"|2 |1980, 1983 |- | | | align="center"|2 |1985, 1993 |- | | | align="center"|2 |1984, 1995 |- | | | align="center"|2 |1994, 1999 |}

Bolded years and player names means back-to-back wins and players who accomplished the feat.

Champions by nationality

This table lists the total number of titles won by golfers of each nationality. align=center align=center align=center align=center

!Rank!!Nation!!Wins!!Winners
align=center	1	|	56	34
align=center	2	|	5	3
align=center	3	|	4	2
align=center	4	|	3	1
align=center	5	|	2	1
align=center rowspan=5	T6	|	1	1
	|align=center>1
	|align=center>1
	|align=center>1
	|align=center>1

Records

Jack Nicklaus has won the most Masters and was old when he won in 1986, making him the oldest winner of the Masters. Nicklaus is the record holder for the most top tens, with 22, and the most cuts made, with 37. The youngest winner of the Masters is Tiger Woods, who was old when he won in 1997. In this year Woods also broke the records for the widest winning margin (12 strokes), and the lowest winning score, with 270 (−18). Matteo Manassero became the youngest player ever, and the youngest to make the cut at in 2010. Gary Player holds the record for most appearances, with 52. Player holds the record for the number of consecutive cuts made, with 23 between 1959 and 1982 (Player did not compete in 1973 due to illness). He shares this record with Fred Couples, who made his consecutive cuts between 1983 and 2007, not competing in 1987 and 1994. Nick Price and Greg Norman share the course record of 63, with their rounds coming in 1986 and 1996 respectively. This score is also a record for all major championships. The highest winning score of 289 (+1) has occurred three times: Sam Snead in 1954, Jack Burke, Jr. in 1956, and Zach Johnson in 2007. Anthony Kim holds the record for most birdies in a round with 11 in 2009 during his second round.

References

External links

Masters.com – official site

Augusta.com – coverage by ''The Augusta Chronicle''

GCSSA.org – superintendent's fact sheet – 2005

Category:Men's major golf championships Category:Economy of Augusta, Georgia

af:Meesterstoernooi ast:The Masters bn:মাস্টার্স টুর্নামেন্ট cs:Masters Tournament da:The Masters Tournament de:The Masters Tournament es:The Masters fr:Masters de golf ko:마스터즈 토너먼트 id:Turnamen Masters it:The Masters he:טורניר המאסטרס (גולף) hu:US Masters (golf) nl:Masters Tournament (golf) ja:マスターズ・トーナメント no:The Masters Tournament pl:Masters Tournament (golf) pt:Masters de Golfe ru:Мастерс (гольф) simple:The Masters Tournament sk:The Masters fi:The Masters Tournament sv:The Masters Tournament zh:美國名人賽

Coordinates	54°39′6″N18°5′59″N
name	Henrik Ibsen
birth name	Henrik Johan Ibsen
birth date	March 20, 1828
birth place	Skien, Norway
death date	May 23, 1906
death place	Christiania (Oslo), Norway
occupation	Playwright, poet, theatre director
nationality	Norwegian
genre	Naturalism Realism
notableworks	''Peer Gynt'' (1867)''A Doll's House'' (1879)''Ghosts'' (1881)''An Enemy of the People'' (1882)''The Wild Duck'' (1884)''Hedda Gabler'' (1890)
influences	Kierkegaard Brandes Jacobsen Strindberg
influenced	Chekhov Stanislavski Shaw Brandes Antoine Lugné-Poe Freud Joyce Miller Williams RayStrindberg||
signature	Henrik Ibsen's signature.png }}

Henrik Ibsen (; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father" of modern drama and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include ''Brand'', ''Peer Gynt'', ''An Enemy of the People'', ''Emperor and Galilean'', ''A Doll's House'', ''Hedda Gabler'', ''Ghosts'', ''The Wild Duck'', and ''Rosmersholm''.

Several of his plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theater was required to model strict mores of family life and propriety. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic play ''Peer Gynt'', however, has strong surreal elements.

Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as "a profound poetic dramatist—the best since Shakespeare". He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Eugene O'Neill. Many critics consider him the greatest playwright since Shakespeare.

Although most of his plays are set in Norway—often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up—Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years.

Family and youth

Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, a well-to-do merchant family, in the small port town of Skien in Telemark county, a city which was noted for shipping timber. As he wrote in an 1882 letter to critic and scholar Georg Brandes, "my parents were members on both sides of the most respected families in Skien", explaining that he was closely related with "just about all the patrician families who then dominated the place and its surroundings", mentioning the families Paus, Plesner, von der Lippe, Cappelen and Blom. According to Einar Ingvald Haugen, "there is more than a touch of pride in his bourgeois background in this enumeration of names whose very form associates them with the more or less foreign ancestry of the Norwegian upper middle class". Ibsen's grandfather, ship's captain Henrich Ibsen, had died at sea in 1797, and Knud Ibsen was raised on the estate of ship-owner Ole Paus, after his mother Johanne (née Plesner) remarried.

Knud Ibsen came from a long line of seamen (captains), but decided to become a merchant, having initial success. His marriage to Marichen Altenburg was "an excellent family arrangement. Marichen's mother and Knud's step-father were sister and brother, and the bride and groom, who had grown up together, were practically regarded as sister and brother themselves. Marichen Altenburg was a fine catch, the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the prosperous lumber town of Skien." When Henrik Ibsen was around seven years old, however, his father's fortunes took a significant turn for the worse, and the family was eventually forced to sell the major Altenburg building in central Skien and move permanently to their small summer house, Venstøp, outside of the city. His bankruptcy made Knud Ibsen a moody and embittered man who turned to alcoholism, and Marichen became a recluse who found solace in piety. Henrik's sister Hedvig would write about their mother: "She was a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the house, everything to her husband and children. She sacrificed herself time and again. There was no bitterness or reproach in her." Marichen Altenburg was "small, brunette, and dark-complexioned, and the only existing likeness of her, a silhoutte, bears out the tradition that she was beautiful". The Ibsen family eventually moved to a city house, Snipetorp, owned by Knud Ibsen's half-brother, wealthy banker and ship-owner Christopher Blom Paus.

His déclassé background would have a strong influence on Ibsen's later work; the characters in his plays often mirror his parents, and his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as moral conflicts stemming from dark secrets hidden from society. Ibsen would both model and name characters in his plays after his own family.

At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was age 18, a liaison with a servant produced an illegitimate child, whose upbringing Ibsen had to pay for until the boy was in his teens, though Ibsen never saw the boy. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy ''Catiline'' (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme", when he was only 20, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, ''The Burial Mound'' (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful. Ibsen's main inspiration in the early period, right up to ''Peer Gynt'', was apparently Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales as collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In Ibsen's youth, Wergeland was the most acclaimed, and by far the most read, Norwegian poet and playwright.

Life and writings

He spent the next several years employed at Det norske Theater (Bergen), where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period, he did not publish any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.

Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre. He married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only child Sigurd on 23 December 1859. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was as a noted, but controversial, playwright.

His next play, ''Brand'' (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was the following play, ''Peer Gynt'' (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in ''Brand'', it was not until after ''Brand'' that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read ''Either/Or'' and ''Fear and Trembling''. Ibsen's next play ''Peer Gynt'' was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.

With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.

left|thumb|170px|Ibsen photographed in Dresden ca. 1870Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, ''Emperor and Galilean'' (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published ''A Doll's House'' in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.

''Ghosts'' followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen's society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But his philandering continued right up until his death, and his vices are passed on to their son in the form of syphilis. The mention of venereal disease alone was scandalous, but to show how it could poison a respectable family was considered intolerable.

In ''An Enemy of the People'' (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In ''An Enemy'', controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. Contemporary society's belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In ''An Enemy of the People'', Ibsen chastised not only the conservatism of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. ''An Enemy of the People'' was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, ''Ghosts''. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of ''Ghosts''. The protagonist is a physician in a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water is contaminated by the local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor.

As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against society's mores, but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always an iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.

''The Wild Duck'' (1884) is by many considered Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.

Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.

Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society's moral values. In such later plays as ''Hedda Gabler'' (1890) and ''The Master Builder'' (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic or hackneyed, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. ''Hedda Gabler'' is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. ''Hedda Gabler'' and ''A Doll's House'' center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them, and while Hedda has a few similarities with the character of Nora in ''A Doll's House'', many of today's audiences and theater critics feel that Hedda's intensity and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.

Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. He had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates him in his early autobiographical novel "Stephen Hero". Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.

Death

On 23 May 1906, Ibsen died in his home at Arbins gade 1 in Christiania (now Oslo) after a series of strokes in March 1900. When, on 22 May, his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen spluttered his last words "On the contrary" ("Tvertimod!"). He died the following day at 2:30 P.M.

Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo.

Centenary

The 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death in 2006 was commemorated with an "Ibsen year" in Norway and other countries. This year the homebuilding company Selvaag also opened Peer Gynt Sculpture Park in Oslo, Norway, in Henrik Ibsen's honour, making it possible to follow the dramatic play Peer Gynt scene by scene.

On 23 May 2006, The Ibsen Museum (Oslo) reopened to the public the house where Ibsen had spent his last eleven years, completely restored with the original interior, colors, and decor.

Ancestry

The oldest documented Ibsen was ship's captain Rasmus Ibsen (1632–1703) from Stege, Denmark. His son, ship's captain Peder Ibsen became a burgher of Bergen in Norway in 1726. Henrik Ibsen has Danish, German, Norwegian and some distant Scottish ancestry. Most of his ancestors belonged to the merchant class of original Danish/German extraction, and many of his ancestors were ship's captains. His biographer Henrik Jæger famously wrote in 1888 that Ibsen did not have a drop of Norse blood in his veins, stating that "the ancestral Ibsen was a Dane". This, however, is not completely accurate; notably through his grandmother Hedevig Paus, Ibsen was descended from one of the very few families of the patrician class of original Norwegian extraction, known since the 15th century. Ibsen's ancestors had mostly lived in Norway for several generations, even though many had foreign ancestry.

The name Ibsen is originally a patronymic, meaning "son of Ib" (Ib is a Danish variant of Jacob). The patronymic became "frozen", i.e. it became a permanent family name, already in the 17th century. The phenomenon of patronymics becoming frozen started in the 17th century in bourgeois families in Denmark, and the practice was only widely adopted in Norway from around 1900.

{{ahnentafel-compact6 |style=font-size: 90%; line-height: 110%; |border=1 |boxstyle=padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 0; |boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; |boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; |boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; |boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; |boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; |boxstyle_6=background-color: #fcc; |1= 1. Henrik Ibsen |2= 2. Knud Ibsen (1797–1877),merchant in Skien |3= 3. Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg (1799–1869) |4= 4. Henrich Ibsen (1765–1797),ship's captain and merchant in Skien |5= 5. Johanne Cathrine Plesner (1770–1847) |6= 6. Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824),merchant and former ship's captain in Skien |7= 7. Hedevig Christine Paus (1763–1848) |8= 8. Henrik Ibsen (1726–1765),merchant in Skien |9= 9. Wenche Dishington (1738–1780) |10= 10. Knud Plesner (1731–1789),ship's captain and merchant in Skien |11= 11. Maria Kall (1741–1786) |12= 12. Diderik Altenburg,manager of Ulefos Saugbrug |13= 13. Marichen Johansdatter Barth |14= 14. Cornelius Paus (1726–1799),forest inspector of Upper Telemark |15= 15. Christine Falck (1723–1798) |16= 16. Peder Rasmussen Ibsen (–1765),ship's captain and merchant in Bergen |17= 17. Birgitte Holtermann (1692–1728) |18= 18. Giert Andersen Dishington (1706–1769) |19= 19. Margrethe Jansen Forman |20= 20. Johan Glüsing Plesner (1731–1790),merchant in Skien |21= 21. Karen Cathrine Hind (1708-1778) |22= 22. Nicolai Kall (1709–1774),merchant in Skien |23= 23. Elisabeth Marie Bomhoff (1707–1784) |24= 24. Jochum Altenburg (1684–1745) |25= 25. |26= 26. Johan David Barth,postmaster in Kragerø |27= 27. Dorothea Ruhland |28= 28. Paul Paus (1697-1768),procurator |29= 29. Martha Christophersdatter Blom |30= 30. Ole Falck |31= 31. |32= 32. Rasmus Ibsen (1632–1703),ship's captain in Stege, Denmark |33= 33. Eva Johansdatter Osterland |34= 34. |35= 35. |36= 36. Anders Andersen Dishington (1675–) |37= 37. Wenche Giertsdatter Meyer (–1748) |38= 38. Jan Forman (1662–1725) |39= 39. |40= 40. Bendix Jens Plesner (1668–1708),merchant in Kerteminde |41= 41. Anna Dorthe Bager (1680–1748) |42= 42. Knud Pedersen Hind |43= 43. |44= 44. |45= 45. |46= 46. Engebret Bomhoff |47= 47. Maria Brunn (1684–) |48= 48. |49= 49. |50= 50. |51= 51. |52= 52. |53= 53. |54= 54. |55= 55. |56= 56. Cornelius Paulsson Paus (1662–1723),district judge in Upper Telemark |57= 57. Valborg Jørgensdatter Ravn (1673–1726) |58= 58. Cristopher Fredriksen Blom (1651–1735),forest owner |59= 59. Johanna Margrethe Jensdatter Ørn (1671–1745) |60= 60. |61= 61. |62= 62. |63= 63. }}

Descendants

From his marriage with Suzannah Thoresen, Ibsen had one son, lawyer and government minister Sigurd Ibsen. Sigurd Ibsen married Bergljot Bjørnson, the daughter of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Their only child was Tancred Ibsen, who became a film director and who was married to Lillebil Ibsen. Their only child was diplomat Tancred Ibsen, Jr.

Works

1850 ''Catiline'' (''Catilina'')

1850 ''The Burial Mound'' also known as ''The Warrior's Barrow'' (''Kjæmpehøjen'')

1851 ''Norma'' (''Norma'')

1852 ''St. John's Eve'' (''Sancthansnatten'')

1854 ''Lady Inger of Oestraat'' (''Fru Inger til Østeraad'')

1855 ''The Feast at Solhaug'' (''Gildet paa Solhoug'')

1856 ''Olaf Liljekrans'' (''Olaf Liljekrans'')

1857 ''The Vikings at Helgeland'' (''Hærmændene paa Helgeland'')

1862 ''Digte'' - only released collection of poetry, included "Terje Vigen".

1862 ''Love's Comedy'' (''Kjærlighedens Komedie'')

1863 ''The Pretenders'' (''Kongs-Emnerne'')

1866 ''Brand'' (''Brand'')

1867 ''Peer Gynt'' (''Peer Gynt'')

1869 ''The League of Youth'' (''De unges Forbund'')

1873 ''Emperor and Galilean'' (''Kejser og Galilæer'')

1877 ''Pillars of Society'' (''Samfundets Støtter'')

1879 ''A Doll's House'' (''Et Dukkehjem'')

1881 ''Ghosts'' (''Gengangere'')

1882 ''An Enemy of the People'' (''En Folkefiende'')

1884 ''The Wild Duck'' (''Vildanden'')

1886 ''Rosmersholm'' (''Rosmersholm'')

1888 ''The Lady from the Sea'' (''Fruen fra Havet'')

1890 ''Hedda Gabler'' (''Hedda Gabler'')

1892 ''The Master Builder'' (''Bygmester Solness'')

1894 ''Little Eyolf'' (''Lille Eyolf'')

1896 ''John Gabriel Borkman'' (''John Gabriel Borkman'')

1899 ''When We Dead Awaken'' (''Når vi døde vaagner'')

See also

Problem play

Realism

Naturalism

Nineteenth-century theatre

Further reading

Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth ''A Commentary on the Works of Henrik Ibsen'' (New York: Macmillan, 1894)

Koht, Halvdan. ''The Life of Ibsen'' translated by Ruth Lima McMahon and Hanna Astrup Larsen. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1931.

Lucas, F. L. ''The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg'', Cassell, London, 1962. A useful introduction, giving the biographical background to each play and detailed play-by-play summaries and discussion for the theatre-goer (including the less well-known plays).

Ferguson, Robert. ''Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography''. Richard Cohen Books, London, 1996.

Meyer, Michael. ''Ibsen''. History Press Ltd., Stroud, 2004.

Moi, Toril. 2006. ''Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy''. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 9780199202591.

Haugan, Jørgen. '' Henrik Ibsens Metode:Den Indre Utvikling Gjennem Ibsens Dramatikk'' ( Norwegian: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. 1977)

Shaw, George Bernard. ''The Quintessence of Ibsenism'' (1891). The classic introduction, setting the playwright in his time and place.

English translations

''Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays'' (Rolf G. Fjelde, translator. Plume: 1978)

''Ibsen - 3 Plays'' (Kenneth McLeish & Stephen Mulrine, translators. Nick Hern Books: 2005)

Notes and references

External links

The Ibsen Society of America Official Website

Ibsen.net: http://ibsen.net/index.gan?id=11111004&subid;=0

Ibsen Studies The only international academic journal devoted to Ibsen

Online course by Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston author of ''The Ibsen Cycle'' and ''To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama''

Extensive resource in several languages from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Ibsen's Influence on Hitler

Peer Gynt Sculpture Park, Official Website

Works by or about Henrik Ibsen at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)

(plain text and HTML) (the biography by Edmund Gosse)

Henrik Ibsen - A Bibliography of Criticism and Biography, by Ina Ten Eyck Firkins, from Project Gutenberg

"Ibsen and His Discontents" - a critical, conservative view of Ibsen's works, written by Theodore Dalrymple

Ibsen Museum - Former home of the famous playwright is situated in Henrik Ibsen's gate 26, across from the Royal Palace

''Henrik Ibsen: Critical Studies'' Georg Brandes, (1899) Retrieved 201-0-16.

Henrik Ibsen Category:Norwegian dramatists and playwrights Category:Modernist drama, theatre and performance Category:19th-century theatre Category:1828 births Category:1906 deaths Category:Deaths from stroke Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in Norway Category:Paus family Category:People from Skien Category:Burials at Vår Frelsers gravlund Category:19th-century Norwegian people Category:Knights Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav (pre-1906 restructure)

af:Henrik Ibsen ar:هنريك إبسن an:Henrik Ibsen az:Henrik İbsen bn:হেনরিক ইবসেন zh-min-nan:Henrik Ibsen ba:Һенрик Йоһан Ибсен be:Генрык Ібсен be-x-old:Генрык Ібсэн br:Henrik Ibsen bg:Хенрик Ибсен ca:Henrik Ibsen cs:Henrik Ibsen cy:Henrik Ibsen da:Henrik Ibsen de:Henrik Ibsen et:Henrik Ibsen el:Ερρίκος Ίψεν es:Henrik Ibsen eo:Henrik Ibsen eu:Henrik Ibsen fa:هنریک ایبسن fo:Henrik Ibsen fr:Henrik Ibsen fy:Henrik Ibsen ga:Henrik Ibsen ko:헨리크 입센 hi:हेनरिक इबसन hr:Henrik Ibsen io:Henrik Ibsen id:Henrik Ibsen is:Henrik Ibsen it:Henrik Ibsen he:הנריק איבסן ka:ჰენრიკ იბსენი kk:Генрик Ибсен sw:Henrik Ibsen la:Henricus Ibsen lv:Henriks Ibsens lb:Henrik Ibsen lt:Henrik Ibsen hu:Henrik Ibsen mk:Хенрик Ибзен ml:ഇബ്‌സൻ arz:هينريك ايبسين mn:Хенрик Ибсен mrj:Ибсен, Генрик Иоган nl:Henrik Ibsen ja:ヘンリック・イプセン no:Henrik Ibsen nn:Henrik Ibsen nov:Henrik Ibsen ps:هنرېک ايبسن pl:Henrik Ibsen pt:Henrik Ibsen ro:Henrik Ibsen ru:Ибсен, Генрик sq:Henrik Ibsen simple:Henrik Ibsen sk:Henrik Ibsen sl:Henrik Ibsen sr:Henrik Ibzen sh:Henrik Ibsen fi:Henrik Ibsen sv:Henrik Ibsen tl:Henrik Ibsen ta:ஹென்ரிக் இப்சன் tt:Һенрик Ибсен tr:Henrik Ibsen uk:Генрік Ібсен ur:ہينرک ابسن vi:Henrik Ibsen vo:Henrik Ibsen war:Henrik Ibsen yi:הענריק איבסן bat-smg:Henrik Ibsen zh:亨利克·易卜生

Coordinates	54°39′6″N18°5′59″N
name	Robert Moses
birth date	December 18, 1888
birth place	New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
death date	July 29, 1981
death place	West Islip, New York, U.S.
death cause	Heart disease
occupation	Urban planner
spouse	Mary Sims Moses (1915-1966)Mary Alicia Grady Moses (1966-1981)
footnotes	}}

Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, Rockland County, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. He changed shorelines, built bridges, tunnels and roadways, and transformed neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.

Never elected to public office, Moses was responsible for the creation and leadership of numerous public authorities which he could control without having to answer to the general public or to elected officials. It is due to Moses that there are a disproportionate number of public benefit corporations in New York state, which are the prime mode of infrastructure building and maintenance in New York, and are currently responsible for 90% of the state's debt. As head of various authorities, he controlled millions in income from his projects' revenue generation, such as tolls, and he had the power to issue bonds to borrow vast sums, allowing him to initiate new ventures with little or no approval from legislative bodies, bypassing the usual power of the purse as it normally functioned in the United States, and the cumbersome process of citizen comment on major public works.

Moses's projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region's development after being hit hard by the Great Depression. During the height of his powers, New York City participated in the construction of two huge World's Fairs: one in 1939 and the other in 1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the United Nations' decision to headquarter in Manhattan as opposed to Philadelphia.

His works remain extremely controversial. His supporters believe he made the city viable for the 21st century by building an infrastructure that most people wanted and that has endured. His critics claim that he preferred automobiles to people, that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, destroyed traditional neighborhoods by building expressways through them, contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League baseball teams, and precipitated the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect.

Early life and rise to power

Moses was born to assimilated German Jewish parents in New Haven, Connecticut. He spent the first nine years of his life living at 83 Dwight Street in New Haven, two blocks from Yale University. In 1897, the Moses family moved to New York City, where they lived on East 46th Street off of Fifth Avenue. Moses's father was a successful department store owner and real estate speculator in New Haven. In order for the family to move to New York City, he sold his real estate holdings and store, and then retired from business for the rest of his life. Bella, Moses's mother, was a forceful and brilliant woman, active in the settlement movement, with her own love of building.

After graduating from Yale University and Wadham College, Oxford, and earning a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, Moses became attracted to New York City reform politics. At this time a committed idealist, he developed several plans to rid New York of patronage hiring practices, including being the lead author of a 1919 proposal to reorganize the NY state government. None went very far, but Moses, due to his intelligence, caught the notice of Belle Moskowitz, a friend and trusted advisor to Al Smith.

Moses rose to power with Smith and set in motion a sweeping consolidation of the New York State government. This centralization allowed Smith to run a government later used as a model for Roosevelt's New Deal federal government. Moses also received numerous commissions that he carried out extraordinarily well, such as the development of Jones Beach State Park. Displaying a strong command of law as well as matters of engineering, Moses became known for his skill in drafting legislation, and was called "the best bill drafter in Albany". At a time when the public was used to Tammany Hall corruption and incompetence, Moses was seen as a savior of government. Shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration, the federal government found itself with millions of New Deal tax dollars to spend, yet states and cities had few projects ready. Moses was one of the few local officials who had projects planned and prepared. For that reason, New York City could count on Moses to deliver to it Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and other depression-era funding.

Influence

At one time, one quarter of Federal construction dollars were being spent in New York, and Moses had 80,000 people working under him. Although he built playgrounds in vast numbers, almost none of those were located in Harlem. Similarly, the main aesthetic achievements of Riverside Drive and associated amenities were located south of 125th street, and a pattern of barriers to access for non-white citizens, whether steep stairs or busy highways, appears repeatedly in his public projects. Close associates of Moses claimed that they could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold. He actively precluded the use of public transit that would have allowed the non-car-owners to enjoy the elaborate recreation facilities he built. After much litigation by private landowners, his highway projects on Long Island followed a circuitous path so as not to cross the properties of wealthy landowners such as J. P. Morgan, Jr., while those same highways demolished numerous working class neighborhoods throughout New York City.

During the Depression, however, Moses, along with Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, was responsible for the construction of ten gigantic pools under the WPA Program. Combined, they could accommodate 66,000 swimmers. This extensive social works program is sometimes attributed to the fact that Moses was an avid swimmer himself. One such pool is McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, formerly dry and used only for special cultural events but now undergoing reconstruction.

Moses persuaded Governor Smith and the government of New York City to allow him to hold state and the city governments jobs simultaneously; at one point, he had ''12'' separate titles, maintaining four palatial offices across the city and Long Island, and actually holding control of all federal appropriations to New York City. For the city, he was Parks Commissioner, and for the state, he was President of the Long Island State Park Commission and Secretary of State of New York (1927–1928), as well as Chairman of the New York State Power Commission, responsible for building hydro-electric dams in the Niagara/St. Lawrence region.

During the 1920s, Moses sparred with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then head of the Taconic State Park Commission, who favored the prompt construction of a parkway through the Hudson Valley. Moses succeeded in diverting funds to his Long Island parkway projects (the Northern State Parkway, the Southern State Parkway and the Wantagh State Parkway), although the Taconic State Parkway was later completed as well. Moses is frequently given credit as the father of the New York State Parkway System from these projects.

As the head of many public authorities, Moses's title as chairman gave his entities the flexibility associated with private enterprise, along with the tax-exempt debt capacity associated with government agencies. The inner workings of the authorities were free from public scrutiny, allowing money to be freely allocated to expenses public scrutiny could not have sustained. Contrary to his public image, Moses horse-traded and dealt out patronage extensively, building support from construction firms, investment banks, insurance companies, labor unions (and management), and real-estate developers. Calling on these vast reserves of power, Moses quickly developed a reputation for "getting things done" and used his influence to fast-track projects in legislators' home districts, a tactic for which these same lawmakers repaid him by granting money for ever more ambitious projects. He dealt out enough spoils to both political parties to ensure he avoided unwanted attention to his patronage politics.

In 1934, he ran on the Republican ticket for Governor of New York, but was routed by the incumbent Democrat Herbert H. Lehman. A measure of how badly he was defeated is seen in that the GOP held one or both houses of the New York state legislature in the period from 1912 to 1964, except in the wake of the Moses landslide defeat.

Triborough Bridge

Robert Moses had power over the construction of all public housing projects, but the one position above all others giving him political power was his chairmanship of the Triborough Bridge Authority.

The Triborough Bridge (now officially the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge), a cluster of three separate spans, connects the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. The legal structure of this particular public authority made it impervious to influence from mayors and governors, due to the language in the bond contracts and multi-year appointments of the Commissioners. While New York City and New York State were perpetually strapped for money, the bridge's toll revenues amounted to tens of millions of dollars a year. The agency was therefore capable of financing the borrowing of hundreds of millions of dollars, making Moses the only person in New York capable of funding large public construction projects. Toll revenues rose quickly, as traffic on the bridges exceeded all projections. Rather than pay off the bonds, Moses sought other toll projects to build, a cycle that fed on itself.

Brooklyn Battery Bridge

In the late 1930s a municipal controversy raged over whether an additional vehicular link between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan should be a bridge or a tunnel. Bridges can be wider and cheaper but tall ones use more ramp space at landfall than tunnels. A "Brooklyn Battery Bridge" would have destroyed Battery Park and physically encroached on the financial district. The bridge was opposed by the Regional Plan Association, historical preservationists, Wall Street financial interests and property owners, various high society people, construction unions (since a tunnel would give them more work), the Manhattan borough president, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and governor Herbert H. Lehman.

Moses, on the other hand, favored a bridge. It could carry more automobile traffic than a tunnel and would also serve as a visible monument. More traffic meant more tolls, and more tolls meant more money and therefore more power for public improvements. LaGuardia and Lehman, as usual, had no money to spend and the federal government, by this point, felt it had given New York enough. Moses, because of his control of Triborough, had money to spend, and he decided his money could only be spent on a bridge. He also clashed with chief engineer of the project, Ole Singstad, who preferred a tunnel instead of a bridge.

Only a lack of a key Federal approval thwarted the bridge scheme. President Roosevelt ordered the War Department to assert that a bridge in that location, if bombed, would block the East River access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard upstream. A dubious claim for a river already crossed by bridges, it nevertheless stopped Moses. In retaliation for being prevented from building his bridge, Moses dismantled the New York Aquarium that had been in Castle Clinton and moved it to Coney Island in Brooklyn. He also attempted to raze Castle Clinton itself, on a variety of pretenses, and the historic fort's survival was assured only after ownership was transferred to the federal government.

Moses was forced to settle for a tunnel connecting Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, now called the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. A 1941 publication from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority claimed that the government had forced them to build a tunnel at "twice the cost, twice the operating fees, twice the difficulty to engineer, and half the traffic," though engineering studies did not support this conclusion, and a tunnel may have held many of the advantages Moses publicly tried to attach to the bridge option.

Ultimately, this was not the first time that Moses tried to carry out the bridge option when a tunnel was already in progress. The same issue also occurred when the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was being planned, in which he also clashed with Ole Singstad and tried to upstage the Tunnel Authority. For the same reasons, Moses also preferred a bridge crossing, but with no luck since the bridge was not supported by many officials.

Post-war city planning

Moses's power increased after World War II, when, after the retirement of LaGuardia, a series of mayors consented to almost all of Moses's proposals. Named city "construction coordinator", in 1946, by Mayor William O'Dwyer, Moses also became the official representative of New York City in Washington, D.C. Moses was also now given powers over public housing that had eluded him under LaGuardia. Moses's power grew even more when O'Dwyer was forced to resign in disgrace and was succeeded by Vincent R. Impellitteri, who was more than content to allow Moses to exercise control over infrastructure projects from behind the scenes.

One of Moses's first steps after Impellitteri took office was killing the development of a city-wide Comprehensive Zoning Plan, underway since 1938, that would have restrained his nearly uninhibited power to build within the city, and removing the existing Zoning Commissioner from power. Impellitteri enabled Moses in other ways, too. Moses was now the sole person authorized to negotiate in Washington for New York City projects. He could now remake New York for the automobile. By 1959, Moses had built 28,000 apartment units on hundreds of acres. In clearing the land for high-rises in accordance with the tower in a park scheme, which at that time was seen as innovative and beneficial, he sometimes destroyed almost as many housing units as he built.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Robert Moses was responsible for the construction of the Throgs Neck, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Henry Hudson, and the Verrazano Narrows bridges. His other projects included the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Belt Parkway, the Laurelton Parkway, and many more. Federal interest had shifted from parkway to freeway systems, and the new roads mostly conformed to the new vision, lacking the landscaping or the commercial traffic restrictions of the pre-war ones. He was the mover behind Shea Stadium and Lincoln Center, and contributed to the United Nations headquarters.

Moses had direct influence outside the New York area as well. City planners in many smaller American cities hired Moses to design freeway networks for them in the 1940s and early 1950s. Few of these were built; initially postponed for lack of funding, projects still unbuilt by the 1960s were often defeated by the awakening citizen-led opposition movement. The first successful examples of these freeway revolts were in New Orleans. Original plans for Interstate 10 followed U.S. Route 90 through Uptown, but instead the Interstate through the western part of the city was routed along the Pontchartrain Expressway.

Following that adjustment was the blocking of New Orleans' Vieux Carré Riverfront Expressway, an elevated highway that would have sliced through the French Quarter, resulting in an even greater impact on the city's sense of history. Later, successful freeway revolts that saw highway projects either scaled back or cancelled outright also occurred in Portland, Oregon (see Mount Hood Freeway and Harbor Drive), San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Phoenix, Memphis, Toronto, and eventually even Los Angeles. Moses was more successful with some design elements of the Penn-Lincoln Parkway in Pittsburgh during the city's Renaissance Project, but wanted a beacon at Point State Park instead of the fountain that would eventually go there.

Car culture

Moses knew how to drive, but because he didn't have a license, many sources say that he did not know how to drive. His view of the automobile was shaped by the 1920s, when the car was thought of as entertainment and not a utilitarian lifestyle. Moses's highways in the first half of the 20th century were parkways, curving, landscaped "ribbon parks," intended to be pleasures to drive in and "lungs for the city".

Brooklyn Dodgers

Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley wanted to build a new stadium to replace the outdated and dilapidated Ebbets Field. O'Malley determined the best site for the stadium was on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn at the end of the Long Island Rail Road. O'Malley pleaded with Moses to help him secure the property in a cost effective manner, but Moses wanted to use the land to build a parking garage. Moses envisioned New York's newest stadium in Flushing Meadows on the former (and as it turned out, future) site of the World's Fair in Queens. O'Malley was vehement in his opposition, stating "we are the Brooklyn Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers!" Moses won this clash of egos and would not be moved on this issue. After the Dodgers left for Los Angeles and the New York Giants left for San Francisco, Moses was able to build Shea Stadium in Queens on the site he planned for stadium development. Construction began in October 1961 and the stadium opened in April 1964 to house the National League's New York Mets, who played there until the end of the 2008 season, when they moved to the adjacent Citi Field.

End of the Moses era

Moses's reputation began to wane in the 1960s as public debate on urban planning began to focus on the virtues of intimate neighborhoods and smallness of scale. Around this time, Moses also started picking political battles he could not win. His campaign against the free Shakespeare in the Park received much negative publicity, and his effort to destroy a shaded playground in Central Park to make way for a parking lot for the expensive Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant made him many enemies among the middle-class voters of the Upper West Side.

The opposition reached a crescendo over the demolition of Penn Station, which many attributed to the "development scheme" mentality cultivated by Moses although the impoverished Pennsylvania Railroad was actually responsible for the demolition. The casual destruction of one of New York's greatest architectural landmarks helped prompt many city residents to turn against Moses's plans to build a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have gone through Greenwich Village and what is now SoHo. This plan and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway both failed politically; to this day no superhighway goes through the heart of Manhattan. One of his most vocal critics during this time was the urban activist Jane Jacobs, whose book ''The Death and Life of Great American Cities'' was instrumental in turning opinion against Moses's plans; the city government rejected the expressway in 1964.

Moses's power was further sapped by his association with the 1964 New York World's Fair. His assumption of aggregate attendance of 70 million people for this event proved wildly optimistic, and generous contracts for Fair executives and contractors did not help the economics. His repeated and forceful public denials of the Fair's considerable financial difficulties in the face of the evidence eventually provoked press and governmental investigations, which eventually found accounting deceptions. In his organization of the fair, Moses's reputation was tarnished by his disdain for the opinions of others, his high-handed attempts to get his way in moments of conflict by turning to the press, and the fact that the fair was not sanctioned by the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), the worldwide body supervising such events. Moses refused to accept BIE requirements, including a restriction against charging ground rents to exhibitors, and the BIE in turn instructed its member nations not to participate. The United States had already staged the sanctioned Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962. According to the rules of the organization, no one nation could host more than one fair in a decade.) The major European democracies, as well as Canada, Australia and the Soviet Union were all BIE members and they declined to participate, instead reserving their efforts for Expo 67 in Montreal.

After the World's Fair, New York City mayor John Lindsay, along with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, sought to use toll revenues from the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority's (TBTA) bridges and tunnels to cover deficits in the city's then financially ailing agencies, including the subway system. Moses opposed this idea and fought to prevent it. Lindsay removed Moses from his post as the city's chief advocate for federal highway money in Washington.

But Moses could not so easily fend off Rockefeller, the only politician in the state who had a power base independent of him. The legislature's vote to fold the TBTA into the newly-created Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) could technically have led to a lawsuit by the TBTA bondholders, since the bond contracts were written into state law and under Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution states may not impair existing contractual obligations, and the bondholders had right of approval over such actions. However, the largest holder of TBTA bonds, and thus agent for all the others, was the Chase Manhattan Bank, headed then by David Rockefeller, the governor's brother. No suit was filed or even discussed. Moses could have directed TBTA to go to court against the action, but having been promised certain roles in the merged authority, Moses in turn declined to challenge the merger.

On March 1, 1968, the TBTA was folded into the MTA and Moses gave up his post as chairman of the TBTA. He eventually became a consultant to the MTA, but its new chairman and the governor froze him out - the promised roles did not materialize, and for all practical purposes Moses was out of power.

Moses had thought he had convinced Nelson Rockefeller of the need for one last great bridge project, a span crossing Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay. Rockefeller did not press for the project in the late 1960s through 1970, fearing public backlash among suburban Republicans would hinder his re-election prospects. While a 1972 study found the bridge was fiscally prudent and could be environmentally manageable, the anti-development sentiment was now insurmountable and in 1973 Rockefeller canceled plans for the bridge. In retrospect, NYCroads.com author Steve Anderson writes that leaving densely-populated Long Island completely dependent on access through New York City may not have been an optimal policy decision.

''The Power Broker''

Moses's image suffered a further blow in 1974 with the publication of ''The Power Broker'', a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Robert A. Caro. Caro's 1,200-page opus (edited from over 3,000 pages long) largely destroyed the remainder of Moses's reputation; essayist Phillip Lopate writes that "Moses's satanic reputation with the public can be traced, in the main, to...Caro's magnificent biography." For example, Caro described how insensitive Moses was in the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and how he willfully neglected public transit. Moses's reputation today is in many ways attributable to Caro, whose book won both the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1975 and the Francis Parkman Prize, which is awarded by the Society of American Historians, and was named one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library.

Caro's depiction of Moses's life gives him full credit for his early achievements, showing, for example, how he conceived and created Jones Beach and the New York State Park system, but he also shows how, as Moses's desire for power came to be more important to him than his earlier dreams, he destroyed more than a score of neighborhoods, by ramming 13 huge expressways across the heart of New York City and by building huge urban renewal projects with little regard for the urban fabric or for human scale. Yet the author is more neutral in his central premise: the city would have been a very different place — maybe better, maybe worse — if Moses had never existed. Other U.S. cities were doing the same thing as New York in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Boston, San Francisco and Seattle, for instance, each built highways straight through their downtown areas. The New York City architectural intelligentsia of the 1940s and 1950s largely believed in such prophets of the automobile as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe had supported Moses. Many other cities, like Newark, Chicago and St. Louis, also built massive, unattractive public housing projects.

Caro argues that Moses also demonstrated racist tendencies. He, along with other members of the New York city planning commission, were vocal opponents against black war veterans moving into Stuyvesant Town, a Manhattan residential development complex created to house World War II veterans.

People had come to see Moses as a bully who disregarded public input, but until the publication of Caro's book, they had not known that he had allowed his brother Paul to spend much of his life in poverty. Paul Moses, who was interviewed by Caro shortly before his death, claimed Robert had exerted undue influence on their mother to change their will in his favour shortly before her death. Caro notes that Paul was on bad terms with their mother over a long period and she may have changed the will of her own accord. Caro suggested that Robert's subsequent treatment of Paul may have been legally justifiable but was morally questionable.

Death

During the last years of his life, Moses concentrated on his lifelong love of swimming and was an active member of the Colony Hill Country Club.

Moses died of heart disease on July 29, 1981, at the age of 92 at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, New York. The headings in his ''New York Times'' obituary package form both a found poem and a thumbnail sketch of his life and influence: ''"Robert Moses, Master Builder, Is Dead at 92; Robert Moses, Builder of Road, Beach, Bridge and Housing Projects, Is Dead; Associate of High Officials; The Grand-Scale Approach; Not a Professional Planner; Part of 'Our Crowd'; Into the Orbit of Power; Fur Coat or Underwear?; An Overwhelming Success; Long Court Fights; Drafted Park Legislation; Moses' Tactics Were Both Extolled and Criticized; Badly Beaten in Election; Built to His Own Tastes; A Sampler of Quotations by Moses; The Face of a Region; and How One Man Changed It."''

Moses was ethnically Jewish, but was raised in a secularist manner inspired by the Ethical Culture movement of the late 19th century. He was a convert to Christianity and was interred in a crypt in an outdoor community mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx following services at Saint Peter's Episcopal Church in Bay Shore, New York.

Legacy and lasting impact

The bridges of Robert Moses are a hotly disputed topic in the Social construction of technology, because Langdon Winner in his acclaimed essay ''Do Artifacts Have Politics?'' used Moses' bridges to make his point that artifacts do have politics. Winner uses Robert Caro's biography of Moses pointing to a passage where Caro interviews Moses' co-worker. The co-worker all but implies that Moses purposefully built 204 bridges on Long Island too low for buses to clear. Due to poorer minorities being largely dependent on public transit, this becomes a testimony to Moses’s racism. This allegation, however, has since been disputed by Bernward Joerges in his essay ''Do Politics Have Artefacts?'' On page 8 he writes that “at the time of the parkway building (beginning 1924), Long Island was already considerably well developed in terms of transport. The Manhattan-Long Island railway operated since 1877, and a rather dense system of ordinary roads was in place, parallel and across the parkways. The Long Island Expressway, a true Autobahn intended to relieve traffic congestion on the Island, was built by Moses alongside the Parkways.” Hence, as a segregationist measure, those bridges would be utterly ineffectual. Joerges goes on to give multiple reasons for the bridge’s nature, for example that “[i]n the USA, trucks, buses and other commercial vehicles were prohibited on all parkways. Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country.”

While the overall impact of many of Moses's projects continues to be debated, their sheer scale across the urban landscape is indisputable. The peak of Moses’s construction occurred during the economic duress of the Great Depression, and despite that era’s woes, Moses’s projects were completed in a timely fashion, and have been reliable public works since—which compares favorably to the contemporary delays New York City officials have had redeveloping the Ground Zero site of the former World Trade Center, or the technical snafus surrounding Boston’s Big Dig project.

Three major exhibits in 2007 prompted a reconsideration of his image among some intellectuals, as they acknowledged the magnitude of his achievements. According to Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon and assorted colleagues, Moses deserves better. They argue that his legacy is more relevant than ever. All around New York State, she says, people take for granted the parks, playgrounds and housing Moses built, now generally binding forces in those areas, even if the old-style New York neighborhood was of no interest to Moses himself. And were it not for Moses’ public infrastructure and his resolve to carve out more space, she argues, New York might not have been able to recover from the blight and flight of the 1970s and ’80s and become the economic magnet it is today, she suggests.

“Every generation writes its own history,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian of New York City. “It could be that ''The Power Broker'' was a reflection of its time: New York was in trouble and had been in decline for 15 years. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn’t been seen in half a century. And that causes us to look at our infrastructure,” said Jackson. “A lot of big projects are on the table again, and it kind of suggests a Moses era without Moses,” he added.

Politicians, too, are reconsidering the Moses legacy. In a 2006 speech to the Regional Plan Association on downstate transportation needs, Eliot Spitzer, who would be overwhelmingly elected governor later that year, said a biography of Moses written today might be called ''At Least He Got It Built''. “That’s what we need today. A real commitment to get things done.”

A testament to the enduring nature of his impact can be found in the various locations and roadways in New York State that bear Moses’s name. These include two state parks (one in Massena, New York, the other on Long Island), the Robert Moses Causeway on Long Island, the Robert Moses State Parkway in Niagara Falls, New York, and the Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam in Niagara Falls. There is also a hydro-electric power dam in Massena, New York which bears Moses' name. These supply much of New York City's power. Moses also has a school named after him in North Babylon, New York on Long Island; there is also a Robert Moses Playground in New York City. There are other signs of the surviving appreciation held for him by some circles of the public. A statue of Moses was erected next to the Village Hall in his long-time hometown, Babylon Village, New York, in 2003, as well as a bust on the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University.

The impact of Robert Moses on the Rockaway Peninsula was almost universally considered positive with his development of Jacob Riis Park and the Marine Parkway Bridge in the 1930s. However, Moses’s construction of the Shore Front Parkway and his large-scale introduction of public housing and large-scale demolition of the bungalow area along Rockaway’s beachfront provoked criticism.

See also

Car culture

Modernist architecture

Jane Jacobs

''The Death and Life of Great American Cities''

Transportation in New York City

Urban sprawl

Federal Power Commission v. Tuscarora Indian Nation

1964 New York World's Fair

References

Notes

Sources

http://www.qgazette.com/News/1999/0630/Feature_Story/ : "Moses is racist because of his designs where the highway passed through Harlem."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/nyregion/thecity/06hist.html?_r=1&ref;=thecity&pagewanted;=all : "That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower."

Further reading

Ballon, Hilary, ''Robert Moses and the Modern City:The Transformation of New York''(NY: Norton, 2007).

Caro, Robert A., ''The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York'', New York: Knopf, 1974. hardcover: ISBN 0-394-48076-7, Vintage paperback: ISBN 0-394-72024-5

Berman, Marshall, ''All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity'', New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.

Jameson W. Doig, "Regional Conflict in the New York Metropolis: The Legend of Robert Moses and the Power of the Port Authority," ''Urban Studies'' Volume 27, Number 2 / April 1990 pp 201–232

Kenneth T. Jackson and Hillary Ballon, eds. ''Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York'' (W. W. Norton, 2007)

Lewis, Eugene, ''Public Entrepreneurship : toward a theory of bureaucratic political power—the organizational lives of Hyman Rickover, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Moses'', Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Rodgers, Cleveland, "Robert Moses: An Atlantic Portrait", ''The Atlantic'', February 1939

Rodgers, Cleveland, ''Robert Moses, Builder for Democracy'', New York: Holt, 1952.

Krieg, Joann P. ''Robert Moses: Single-Minded Genius'', Interlaken, New York: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1989.

Moses Robert. ''Public works: A dangerous trade''. McGraw Hill. 1970. Autobiography

Vidal, Gore. "What Robert Moses Did to New York City" New York Review of Books, October 17, 1974. Also found in "United States: Essays 1952-1992" Gore Vidal, Random House, 1993.

External links

Robert A. Caro's Jan. 5, 1998 New Yorker article on Robert Moses and the writing of The Power Broker

New Yorker review by Paul Goldberger Feb, 5, 2007

Robert Moses's reply to The Power Broker

''New York Times'' Obituary

Online letters of Moses

Expansive Public Parks, Beaches and Travel Routes Created by Robert Moses for Long Island, New York. iLongIsland.com

1973 audio interview of Robert Moses by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio at Wired for Books.org

Robert A. Caro talks to Richard D. Heffner about Robert Moses on the Open Mind, 1998

"The Triborough Bridge: Robert Moses and the Automobile Age" exhibit at the New York Transit Museum (through April 2008)

"Robert Moses and the Modern City" exhibit February 2007 thru May 2007 at 3 New York City museums

"Looking Back at Moses" a trio of New York museums explores the voluminous works of controversial urban planner Robert Moses

Photographs from the Museum of the City of New York exhibit

nywf64.com - The 1964/1965 New York World's Fair website

Category:American urban planners Category:People from Long Island Category:People from New Haven, Connecticut Category:People from Westchester County, New York Category:Land owners and developers in Rockaway, Queens Category:History of the Bronx Category:Ethical Culture Fieldston School alumni Category:New York Republicans Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in New York Category:1888 births Category:1981 deaths Category:Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (The Bronx) Category:American people of German-Jewish descent Category:Converts to Christianity from Judaism Category:Secretaries of State of New York Category:Yale University alumni

ca:Robert Moses de:Robert Moses fr:Robert Moses ka:რობერტ მოზესი pt:Robert Moses zh:羅伯·摩斯