Steiner's craft of forming public speech for anthroposophy, shaping each talk from the audience's soul mood rather than from fixed notes.
The Art of Lecturing is Rudolf Steiner's name for the craft of speaking publicly about anthroposophy and the threefold social order. Given as a course at Dornach in October 1921 and printed as GA 339, it teaches the lecturer to build each talk from a felt sense of the listeners' inner state, since spiritual science resists the habitual, descriptive speech of the materialist age and asks instead for speech formed out of will and feeling.
In Steiner's Own Words
And without this feeling that it is difficult to be understood, we will hardly be able to cope in a satisfactory way as speakers for anthroposophical spiritual science and everything connected with it. For if we are to speak properly about anthroposophy, we must actually speak in a completely different way than we are accustomed to speaking about things in general according to the traditions of speech. People have often become accustomed to talking about anthroposophical matters in the same way they have been accustomed to talking about other things, especially in this age of materialism. But this tends to obstruct understanding of anthroposophy rather than opening the way to it.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not let this discipline rest as theory. The speech-forming impulse of GA 339 grew, alongside his work with the actress and editor Marie Steiner-von Sivers, into Sprachgestaltung, the art of speech formation that he set out fully in the 1924 Dornach course on speech and drama (GA 282). Where the 1921 lectures taught the anthroposophical speaker to compose a talk from the audience's soul condition, the later work added the bodily craft: the consonant as a sculptor of air, the vowel as the soul's gesture, the whole larynx trained as an instrument of meaning rather than mere volume. That training did not stop with Steiner.
It still runs at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, where the Section for the Performing Arts carries speech formation forward, and in independent schools such as the Persephone training in Britain and the speech work woven through every Waldorf teacher's preparation, since a teacher, like a lecturer, must reach the listening soul before the listening intellect. Thalira synthesis: the art of lecturing is best understood as the will-pole of eurythmy, for where eurythmy makes speech visible in moving limbs, the art of lecturing makes the same formative forces audible in the trained larynx, both asking the speaker to shape sound out of inner activity rather than habit. A practitioner working with this today does one concrete thing first, before writing a single line: sits with the particular people who will listen and asks what soul-question they actually carry into the room.
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