The Affairs Of Anatole

The Mercury Theatre on the air! The Columbia Broadcasting System welcomes you to the seventh program in the distinctive series of weekly productions featuring Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the air.

In addition to the coast-to-coast audience reached by the regular CBS stations, tonight's performance is being carried to our friends in Canada through the facilities of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This evening the Mercury Theater brings us the affairs of Anatol by Arthur Schnitzberg with Orson Welles in the part of Anatol.

And here is the director, star and producer of these broadcasts, Orson Welles. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Arthur Schnitzberg died in 1931, six years before Austria was finally erased off the map of Europe. He said once, speaking of a friend's death, but a man is not really dead until all those who knew him and loved him are dead too.

In a much deeper sense, this is true of a city. Vienna still lives today in the music and the words of the man who knew her and loved not the city of ghosts and shadows that she had become since the war, but the flashing imperial Vienna that she was at the turn of the century.

One young Arthur Schnitzler, as a young man, gave up his medical practice to become her favorite writer. The affairs of Anatol is Schnitzler's first and most popular work. Subsequently, he wrote, plays, novels, and short stories.

And almost every word he wrote is about the city in which he spent the 70 years of his life. The streets of Vienna, the parks, the Viennese woods. These are the places where Schnitzler is most at home.