Recommendations
Books Like The Master Builder
Best books to read after The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's 1892 most symbolically rich late play — the architect Halvard Solness haunted by the younger generation, the arrival of Hilde Wangel demanding he climb to the top of his tower — is widely read as his self-portrait and as his most personal exploration of the relationship between artistic creativity, aging, and the woman who sustains and destroys the artist. These recommendations extend the experience through Ibsen's other late plays, through the European theatrical and literary tradition of the artist in late career, and through fiction that investigates the relationship between creativity, desire, and destruction.
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Hedda Gabler
by Henrik Ibsen
The companion late play and immediate predecessor — the complex study of will and destruction. Hedda Gabler (1891) and The Master Builder (1892) are companion explorations of the exceptional person who cannot live within conventional constraints: Hedda destroys others and then herself; Solness is destroyed by the demand he places on himself in response to Hilde's vision of him. Both plays are organized around a figure whose willfulness the play neither endorses nor condemns.
- 2Buy
When We Dead Awaken
by Henrik Ibsen
The final Ibsen play and the completion of The Master Builder's argument — the sculptor Rubek and his model Irene on a mountain as the avalanche approaches. When We Dead Awaken is explicitly a reckoning: Rubek has sacrificed his model's humanity to his art, as Solness sacrifices his wife's happiness to his buildings, and both plays end with the artist and the woman who sustained him on a height from which there is no descent.
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Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Mann's 1912 novella companion in the tradition of the great artist in late career encountering a beauty that destroys him — Aschenbach's obsession with Tadzio in cholera-ridden Venice. Death in Venice and The Master Builder are companion investigations of the relationship between artistic creativity and desire, and of the artist's willing surrender to what destroys him: Solness's fall from the tower and Aschenbach's death on the beach are both chosen as much as suffered.
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Rosmersholm
by Henrik Ibsen
The companion in the tradition of the Ibsen play organized around a man and a woman who destroy and liberate each other simultaneously — Rosmer and Rebecca West. Rosmersholm is the Ibsen play that most directly anticipates The Master Builder: the man of will and vision, the woman who enables and destroys him, the ending that is simultaneously tragedy and liberation.
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The Wild Duck
by Henrik Ibsen
The companion from the middle period — the play in which Ibsen most directly interrogates idealism. The Wild Duck and The Master Builder are companion explorations of the consequences of a dominating vision: where The Wild Duck's Gregers destroys others through his idealism, The Master Builder's Solness is partly destroyed by the idealistic vision that Hilde forces him to attempt. Both show the cost of insisting on the ideal over the real.
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The Seagull
by Anton Chekhov
The Russian contemporary companion — the play in which an artist (Konstantin) is sustained and destroyed by the relationship between artistic ambition and desire. The Seagull (1896) and The Master Builder (1892) are contemporary explorations of the relationship between the male artist and the woman who represents both his inspiration and his destruction: Hilde Wangel and Nina are companion figures in the European tradition of the muse who ends by destroying what she enables.
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Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw
Shaw's comic companion in the tradition of the male creator who transforms a woman and is then transformed by her. The Master Builder and Pygmalion are companion explorations of the relationship between the male artist/creator and the woman who is simultaneously his creation and his challenger: Hilde Wangel demands that Solness climb; Eliza Doolittle demands that Higgins treat her as a person. In both cases, the woman has the last word.
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Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
The Russian companion in the theatrical tradition of the play organized around an unfulfilled desire — the sisters' impossible dream of Moscow. Both Three Sisters and The Master Builder are organized around a central desire that is reached only in the moment of destruction (Solness's climb to the top of the tower; the sisters' fantasy of Moscow that is never abandoned even as it recedes forever), and both use this unfulfilled desire to investigate the gap between what we imagine and what we can actually live.
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