Ruth Berghaus
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
choreographer and opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
and theatre director
Theatre direction
A theatre director or stage director is a practitioner in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production by unifying various endeavours and aspects of production...
.
Berghaus was born in Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
and studied Expressionist dance
Expressionist dance
Expressionist dance is a European dance form that is part of the German Expressionist movement. Although considered a part of the modern dance movement, it is separate from modern dance per se. Other names for it that have fallen out of use include Moderner Tanz, Absoluter Tanz, Freier Tanz,...
and Dance
Dance
Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting....
direction with Gret Palucca
Gret Palucca
Gret Palucca was a German dancer and teacher.Shortly after birth, her family moved to San Francisco, returning with her mother to Dresden in 1909. There she received ballet lessons with Heinrich Kröller from 1914 to 1916...
there and was an advanced student at the German Academy of Arts in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, at least part of the time under Walter Felsenstein - associated with the Komische Oper East Berlin he founded - along with his two other first leading proteges, Goetz Friedrich and Joachim Herz (1924–2010). All three would mark a departure from Felsenstein's insistence on textual accuracy in favor of Brechtian interpretation, but were in part inspired by also his insistence on maintaining an even balance between the musical and dramatic aspects of an opera being staged. From 1951 to 1964 she worked as choreographer on many stages, including the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin
Berlin State Opera
The Staatsoper Unter den Linden is a German opera company. Its permanent home is the opera house on the Unter den Linden boulevard in the Mitte district of Berlin, which also hosts the Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra.-Early years:...
and the Berliner Ensemble
Berliner Ensemble
The Berliner Ensemble is a German theatre company established by playwright Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel in January 1949 in East Berlin...
. Her work as a director began with the Die Verurteilung des Lukullus
Die Verurteilung des Lukullus
Die Verurteilung des Lukullus is a opera by Paul Dessau to a libretto by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht....
of Paul Dessau
Paul Dessau
Paul Dessau was a German composer and conductor.- Biography :Dessau was born in Hamburg into a musical family...
and Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
at the Deutsche Staatsoper in 1960. Brecht's work would represent a major part of Berghaus's career. She became well known for her choreography of the slaughter scenes in Brecht's adaptation
Coriolanus (Brecht)
Coriolanus is an unfinished German adaptation by the modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht of the English 17th-century tragedy by William Shakespeare. Brecht wrote it sometime between 1951 and 1953...
of Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
Coriolanus
Coriolanus (play)
Coriolanus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1608. The play is based on the life of the legendary Roman leader, Gaius Marcius Coriolanus.-Characters:*Caius Martius, later surnamed Coriolanus...
at the Berliner Ensemble in 1964.
In 1954, Berghaus married the composer Paul Dessau, whose works for the theater she directed. Her association with the Berliner Ensemble culminated with her directorship of that theater until 1977.
From 1980 to 1987 Berghaus worked at the Frankfurt Opera. Her notable productions there included, in 1980 Die Zauberflöte of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
, 1981 Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
, 1982 Les Troyens
Les Troyens
Les Troyens is a French opera in five acts by Hector Berlioz. The libretto was written by Berlioz himself, based on Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid...
of Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts . Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a...
(Stage design by Hans-Dieter Schaal), Věc Makropulos of Janáček
Leoš Janácek
Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and all Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by...
and Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
's Parsifal
Parsifal
Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail, and on Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail.Wagner first conceived the work...
and 1985–87 Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...
. In 1992 she returned to Frankfurt to direct Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is loosely adapted from the novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas by Louvet de Couvrai and Molière’s comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac...
Her work at the Frankfurt Opera also marked an important collaboration there with Michael Gielen as music director there. Leading proteges of both would from a similarly strong collaboration in Hamburg in the late 1990s and first half of the past decade - in Peter Konwitschny and Ingo Metzmacher. The indirect influence of Ruth Berghaus's unique intellectual grasp of inculcating choreography in her staging of opera can (perhaps) be also felt in productions by Harry Kupfer, including of his Ring at Bayreuth and at Staatsoper Berlin and also of Jurgen Flimm - worthy of note his production of Otello at Staatsoper Berlin - also conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Her most notable proteges are today reckoned to be Peter Konwitschny and the American producer David Alden.
In 1985 in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, she directed Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
's Wozzeck
Wozzeck
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's...
and in Dresden, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke by Siegfried Matthus
Siegfried Matthus
Siegfried Matthus is a German composer and opera director living in Berlin and is one of Germany's most often performed contemporary composers.- Biography :Matthus attended secondary school in Rheinsberg, followed by studies at the Hochschule für Musik...
. In 1986, she debuted with the Wiener Staatsoper
Vienna State Opera
The Vienna State Opera is an opera house – and opera company – with a history dating back to the mid-19th century. It is located in the centre of Vienna, Austria. It was originally called the Vienna Court Opera . In 1920, with the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy by the First Austrian...
with the choreography of Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...
's Orpheus. In Brussels Berghaus directed Berg's Lulu
Lulu (opera)
Lulu is an opera by the composer Alban Berg. The libretto was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora .-Composition history:...
in 1988, and in that same year, Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
's Fierrabras
Fierrabras (opera)
Fierrabras is a three-act opera written by the composer Franz Schubert in 1823, to a libretto by Josef Kupelwieser, the general manager of the Theater am Kärntnertor...
. In Zürich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, her productions included Weber's
Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....
Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz is an opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber with a libretto by Friedrich Kind. It premiered on 18 June 1821 at the Schauspielhaus Berlin...
and Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer
The Flying Dutchman (opera)
Der fliegende Holländer is an opera, with music and libretto by Richard Wagner.Wagner claimed in his 1870 autobiography Mein Leben that he had been inspired to write "The Flying Dutchman" following a stormy sea crossing he made from Riga to London in July and August 1839, but in his 1843...
. Her final operatic production was Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II , also known as Johann Baptist Strauss or Johann Strauss, Jr., the Younger, or the Son , was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas...
's Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée.- Literary sources :...
, produced in Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
in 1995. Performed and published posthumously, the only representation of Ruth Berghaus on disc is Weber's Der Freischütz, Zurich revival of 1999, as conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. It is also the only opera on video disc or DVD directly representing the work of Konwitzchny and Ingo Metzmacher together - from the Hamburg Opera. Disregarding what critical press the former has received, it remains a highly valuable document. There may be also filmed for television or related media a Berghaus production of Schubert's opera Fierrabras - starring on compact disc Cheryl Studer, Thomas Hampson and Karita Mattila, conducted b Claudio Abbado (with imagery from the Berghaus production on the DGG box frontispiece). Even if the picture or video quality may be of compromised quality, the release of this would also make for an invaluable document.
In 1989 she began a theatrical series of what she called 'related texts', with a production of Büchner
Georg Büchner
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany...
's Danton's Death
Danton's Death
Danton's Death was the first play written by Georg Büchner, set during the French Revolution.-History:Georg Büchner wrote his works in the period between Romanticism and Realism in the so-called Vormärz era in German history and literature...
and in 1991 a production of Brecht's In the Jungle
In The Jungle of Cities
In The Jungle of Cities is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Written between 1921 and 1924, it received its first theatrical production under the title In the Jungle at the Residenztheater in Munich, opening on 9 May 1923. This production was directed by Erich Engel, with...
at the Thalia Theater
Thalia Theater (Hamburg)
The Thalia Theater is one of the three state-owned theatres in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded in 1843 by Charles Maurice Schwartzenberger and named after the muse Thalia...
in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
.
Berghaus died in 1996 in Zeuthen
Zeuthen
Zeuthen may refer to:*Zeuthen, a town in Brandenburg, Germany*Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen, Danish mathematician*Zeuthen Strategy in Game theory...
, Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
due to complications from cancer. She was buried at the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery
Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery
The Dorotheenstadt cemetery, officially the "Cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt und Friedrichswerder Parishes", is a landmarked Protestant burial ground located in the Berlin district of Mitte which dates to the late 18th century...
in Berlin-Mitte
Mitte
Mitte is the first and most central borough of Berlin. It was created in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform by the merger of the former districts of Mitte proper, Tiergarten and Wedding; the resulting borough retained the name Mitte. It is one of the two boroughs which comprises former West and...
. The influence of Ruth Berghaus's work as a producer of opera and as
Works cited
- Meech, Tony. 1994. "Brecht's Early Plays." In Thomson and Sacks (1994, 43-55).
- Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks, eds. 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Cambridge Companions to Literature Ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521414466.