The two opposite poles of Steiner's speech art: recitation shapes measured metre and picture, while declamation carries the will through weight and accent.
Recitation and Declamation in Anthroposophy is the central polarity of Rudolf Steiner's art of speech-formation, set out in his 1920 to 1921 Dornach course Poetry and the Art of Speech (GA 281). Recitation is the measured, picture-forming mode tied to in-breathing, metre, and the representational element of epic verse, the calm, plastic pole Steiner linked with Greek poetry and Goethe's Roman Iphigenia. Declamation is the will-borne mode tied to out-breathing, weight, and accent, the dynamic pole he linked with Nordic poetry and Schiller. The whole course trains the reciter to feel and distinguish the two as they live in breathing and circulation. Marie Steiner-von Sivers developed this work into the discipline of Sprachgestaltung, still taught at the Goetheanum in Dornach as the foundation of anthroposophical stage speech.
Recitation and declamation are the two contrasting modes of the spoken word that Rudolf Steiner taught as a single art of speech-formation. Recitation brings out metre, measure, and the picture-quality of language, the calm Apollonian pole. Declamation works from the will, through weight and accent, the surging Dionysian pole. A trained speaker learns to sense which a given poem asks for.
In Steiner's Own Words
We can, then, clearly differentiate between Goethe's conception and experience of art as expressed and revealed in the Iphigenia of Weimar, and what is revealed in the Roman Iphigenia. Now something of this must naturally find its way into recitation and declamation. In the Weimar Iphigenia we are dealing with an art that is more in the nature of declamation, an art that must especially elicit the inner tone-element, the fullness of tone, and pour it out into words and sentences. In the Roman Iphigenia, we have to do with an art which is more recitative, which must bring out the metre and its even-measured flow.
What it Means Today
The living home of this polarity is the discipline Steiner's wife, Marie Steiner-von Sivers, built from the GA 281 course: Sprachgestaltung, usually rendered in English as speech-formation or creative speech. She gathered the practical method into the training still carried by the Section for the Performing Arts at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and it reached English readers through the manual Creative Speech: The Formative Process of the Spoken Word (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1978), compiled from her notes and the lectures themselves. A speech-formation student does not learn recitation and declamation as labels to apply afterward. The student learns to feel, in the breath and the pulse, whether a poem is asking for the calm measure of recitation or the willed accent of declamation, and to let the body follow that listening rather than force the voice mechanically.
Thalira synthesis: where most acting schools train the voice as an instrument to be adjusted from outside, Steiner's recitation and declamation treat the spoken word as the meeting place of breathing and circulation, so that the Apollonian and Dionysian poles a speaker chooses between are not stylistic preferences but two real currents already moving in the body. The German theatre lineage that runs through the Goetheanum still teaches actors to read a text first for which of these two currents it carries.
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