Berliner Ensemble
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...
theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
company established by playwright 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...
and his wife, Helene Weigel
Helene Weigel
Helene Weigel was a distinguished German actress. She was the second wife of Bertolt Brecht, and together they had a son Stefan Brecht and daughter Barbara Brecht-Schall .The daughter of a Jewish lawyer, she became a Communist Party member from 1930 and Artistic Director of the...
in January 1949 in East Berlin
East Berlin
East Berlin was the name given to the eastern part of Berlin between 1949 and 1990. It consisted of the Soviet sector of Berlin that was established in 1945. The American, British and French sectors became West Berlin, a part strongly associated with West Germany but a free city...
. In the time after Brecht's exile, the company first worked at Wolfgang Langhoff
Wolfgang Langhoff
Wolfgang Langhoff was a German theatre, film and television actor and theatre director.-Early career:...
's Deutsches Theater
Deutsches Theater
The Deutsches Theater in Berlin is a well-known German theatre. It was built in 1850 as Friedrich-Wilhelm-Städtisches Theater, after Frederick William IV of Prussia. Located on Schumann Street , the Deutsches Theater consists of two adjoining stages that share a common, classical facade...
and in 1954 moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm
Theater am Schiffbauerdamm
The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm is a theatre building at the Schiffbauerdamm riverside in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany, opened on November 19, 1892. Since 1954 it is home to the Berliner Ensemble theatre company, founded in 1949 by Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht.The original name of the...
, built in 1892, that was open for the 1928 premiere of The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera is a musical by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, in collaboration with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann and set designer Caspar Neher. It was adapted from an 18th-century English ballad opera, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and offers a Marxist critique...
(Die Dreigroschenoper).
Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble
His students Benno BessonBenno Besson
Benno Besson was a Swiss actor and director. He had great success as director at Volksbühne Berlin, Deutsches Theater and Berliner Ensemble in East-Berlin, where he went by an invitation of Bertolt Brecht in 1949...
, Egon Monk
Egon Monk
-Biography:Monk was born in Berlin, Germany and grew up in Berlin-Wedding. He served in the German Air Force in World War II . After the war he became an actor. Later he worked for RIAS Berlin and for the NDR...
, Peter Palitzsch, and Manfred Wekwerth were given the opportunity to direct plays by Brecht that had not yet been staged. The stage designers Caspar Neher
Caspar Neher
Caspar Neher was an Austrian-German scenographer and librettist, known principally for his career-long working relationship with Bertolt Brecht.Neher was born in Augsburg...
and Karl von Appen, the composers Paul Dessau
Paul Dessau
Paul Dessau was a German composer and conductor.- Biography :Dessau was born in Hamburg into a musical family...
and Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler was an Austrian composer.-Family background:Eisler was born in Leipzig where his Jewish father, Rudolf Eisler, was a professor of philosophy...
as well as the dramaturge Elisabeth Hauptmann were among Brecht's closest collaborators. After her husband died in 1956, Weigel continued managing the Berliner Ensemble until her death in 1971.
The Berliner Ensemble achieved successful theater through long and meticulous rehearsals, often spanning several months. Each production was documented with a Modellbuch or preview album containing 600 to 800 action photographs.
Die Dreigroschenoper and Happy End
Happy End (musical)
Happy End is a surrealistic three-act musical comedy by Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht which first opened in Berlin at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on September 2, 1929. It closed after seven performances...
premiered in Berlin in 1928 and 1929 respectively. Brecht wrote no new plays for the Berliner Ensemble, but remounted previously staged plays, premiering with Mother Courage and Her Children
Mother Courage and Her Children
Mother Courage and Her Children is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin...
in 1949. Brecht also directed The Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. An example of Brecht's epic theatre, the play is a parable about a peasant girl who rescues a baby and becomes a better mother than its natural parents....
, and with Erich Engel, Life of Galileo
Life of Galileo
Life of Galileo , also known as Galileo, is a play by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. The first version of the play was written between 1937 and 1939; the second version was written between 1945–1947, in collaboration with Charles Laughton...
. After Brecht's death, 3 plays, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a play by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, originally written in 1941...
, Schweik in the Second World War
Schweik in the Second World War
Schweik in the Second World War is a play by German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht. It was written by Brecht in 1943 while in exile in California, and is a sequel to the 1923 novel The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek. It is set in Prague and on the Russian Front during World War II...
and The Visions of Simone Machard
The Visions of Simone Machard
The Visions of Simone Machard is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Written in 1942, the play is the second of three treatments of the Joan of Arc story that Brecht created...
, had their premieres with the Ensemble.
Post- Brechtian Berliner Ensemble
Under the management of Helene Weigel's successor Ruth BerghausRuth Berghaus
Ruth Berghaus was a German choreographer and opera and theatre director.Berghaus was born in Dresden and studied Expressionist dance and Dance direction with Gret Palucca there and was an advanced student at the German Academy of Arts in Berlin, at least part of the time under Walter Felsenstein -...
the company expanded its selection to that of other European playwrights in the 1970s. Major German actors, including Therese Giehse
Therese Giehse
Therese Giehse , born Therese Gift, was a distinguished German actress. Born in Munich to German-Jewish parents, she first appeared on the stage in 1920. She became a major star on stage, in films, and in political cabaret...
, Lionel Steckel and Ernst Busch
Ernst Busch (actor)
Ernst Busch was a German singer and actor.Busch first rose to prominence as an interpreter of political songs, particularly those of Kurt Tucholsky, in the Berlin Kabarett scene of the 1920s...
appeared in Berliner productions. After German reunification
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
major changes took place at the theatre: in 1992 the Berlin Senate appointed a "collective" of five stage directors to serve as Intendanten (General Administrators): Peter Zadek
Peter Zadek
Peter Zadek was a German theatre and film director, play translator and screenwriter and is regarded as one of the greatest directors in German-speaking theater. He was the head of the Schauspielhaus Bochum, Bochum , the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg and the Berliner Ensemble from 1992 to 1996...
, Peter Palitzsch, Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
, Fritz Marquardt and Matthias Langhoff. In that same year, the internationally renowned conductor Alexander Frey
Alexander Frey
Alexander Frey is an American symphony orchestra conductor. He is also known as a virtuoso organist and pianist. Frey is in great demand as one of the world's most versatile conductors, and has enjoyed great success in the concert hall and opera house, and in the music of Broadway and Hollywood.In...
was appointed Music Director of the Berliner Ensemble. Frey was the first American to hold a position at the Berliner Ensemble, as well as being the theatre’s first non-German Music Director; his historic predecessors in that position include the composers Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
, Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler was an Austrian composer.-Family background:Eisler was born in Leipzig where his Jewish father, Rudolf Eisler, was a professor of philosophy...
, and Paul Dessau
Paul Dessau
Paul Dessau was a German composer and conductor.- Biography :Dessau was born in Hamburg into a musical family...
.
Under the new artistic management the Berliner Ensemble changed from a state-owned theatre into a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung
Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung
Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung is a type of legal entityvery common in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other Central European countries...
(limited liability company) subsidized by the city government. In 1993, the theatre company was privatized, but continued to receive $16 million in subsidy. Nevertheless the idea of a joint administration proved a failure and the board of managers finally broke up in 1995, leaving only Heiner Müller. The quarrels, however, did not affect the artistic development of the Ensemble: Young directors including B.K. Tragelehn and Einar Schleef and the stage designer Andreas Reinhardt questioned the traditions of Brechtian theatre and introduced more contemporary theatre styles. Müller's production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a play by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, originally written in 1941...
, with Martin Wuttke playing the title role, became one of the most successful in the history of the Berliner Ensemble. His program Brecht - Müller - Shakespeare remains the guiding legacy of the Berliner Ensemble.
The American director Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson (director)
Robert Wilson is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called "[America]'s — or even the world's — foremost vanguard 'theater artist'". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video...
premiered Brecht's The Flight across the Ocean
The Flight across the Ocean
The Flight across the Ocean is a Lehrstück by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, inspired by We, Charles Lindbergh's 1927 account of his transatlantic flight...
in 1998 to honor the hundredth anniversary of Brecht's birth. On April 30, 1999, the curtain came down on the final production of Heiner Müller's Die Bauern, an early end to the theatre's season that also marked the preliminary end of the Ensemble. After Müller had died in December 1995, the difficult decision about who would manage this highly symbolic cultural institution was now exacerbated by another problem: the theatre building itself was in the process of being bought by a nonprofit foundation in the hands of dramatist Rolf Hochhuth
Rolf Hochhuth
Rolf Hochhuth is a German author and playwright. He is best known for his 1963 drama The Deputy and remains a controversial figure for his plays and other public comments, such as his insinuation of Pope Pius XII's sympathies for Hitler's extermination of the Jews in the 1963 play The Deputy and...
, who seemed to have his own plans for the theatre. After the City of Berlin negotiated a settlement to everyone's satisfaction, the search for a new administration began. Claus Peymann, the provocative and successful manager of the Burgtheater
Burgtheater
The Burgtheater , originally known as K.K. Theater an der Burg, then until 1918 as the K.K. Hofburgtheater, is the Austrian National Theatre in Vienna and one of the most important German language theatres in the world.The Burgtheater was created in 1741 and has become known as "die Burg" by the...
in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
was finally appointed to the position and reopened the theatre in January 2000, after extensive renovations were completed. Peymann's efforts have stabilized the theatre's operations. He assumed his role with a commitment - like Brecht's - to producing political theatre for the public, but more broadly interpreted.