Stage fright

Rudolf Steiner rejected in principle the reading of lectures from manuscripts, as is often the custom nowadays, and he therefore always had a lively contact with the people sitting in front of him. I asked him much later whether he had never suffered from what is called stage fright and which every speaker knows only too well. Rudolf Steiner answered to my surprise – because I had never noticed it in him – that it is good and necessary for the speaker to have some stage fright, because this is because one does not appear before the audience with a fixed, rigid content, but also struggles with the best possible description while speaking. He too had always experienced this state of inner tension during a lecture and urgently advised not to lose it.

Source (German): Guenther Wachsmuth: Die Geburt der Geisteswissenschaft (1941) – Lexicon Urs Schwendener

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