Marcel Horace Frydmann, Ritter

Ritter

Ritter is a designation used as a title of nobility in German-speaking areas. Traditionally it denotes the second lowest rank within the nobility, standing above "Edler" and below "Freiherr"...

 von Prawy (born 29 December 1911, 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...

 – 23 February 2003, in Vienna) was an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n dramaturg, 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...

 connoisseur

Connoisseur

A connoisseur is a person who has a great deal of knowledge about the fine arts, cuisines, or an expert judge in matters of taste.Modern connoisseurship must be seen along with museums, art galleries and "the cult of originality"...

 and opera critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

.

Prawy was born into a Jewish Austro-Hungarian noble

Austrian nobility

Historically, the Austrian nobility was a privileged social class in Austria. The nobility was officially abolished in 1919 after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Former noble families and their descendants are still a part of Austrian society today, but they no longer retain any specific...

 family.

He studied law, but his life belonged to the opera. As secretary of the tenor Jan Kiepura

Jan Kiepura

Jan Wiktor Kiepura was an acclaimed Polish singer and actor.-Biography:...

, he emigrated to the USA when persecution of the Austrian Jews became unbearable in the late 1930s. With the help of his confidante Mártha Eggerth he became acquainted with American musicals and music in general. After the end of the Second World War, Prawy returned to Vienna and brought with him the musical

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 Kiss Me, Kate

Kiss Me, Kate

Kiss Me, Kate is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is structured as a play within a play, where the interior play is a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The original production starred Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang.Kiss...

. It was received by the Viennese with great reservation as they feared the arrival of the American-style musical would spell the end of the traditional Viennese operetta

Operetta

Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...

. Nonetheless, Prawy succeeded and was considered henceforth as the one who made German language musicals acceptable and popular.

From 1955 on Prawy served as dramaturg at the Vienna Volksoper

Vienna Volksoper

The Vienna Volksoper is a major opera house in Vienna, Austria. It gives about three hundred performances of twenty-five productions during an annual season running from September through June....

 and from 1972 as chief-dramaturg at the Vienna State Opera

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...

. Between 1976 and 1982 Prawy was a professor at the Viennese College of Music (Wiener Musikhochschule, today Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) and lecturer in the field of theatre science at the University of Vienna

University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

. He also spoke as guest professor at numerous American and Japanese universities.

He became widely known and highly regarded because of a television and radio broadcast series produced by the ORF

ORF (broadcaster)

Österreichischer Rundfunk, ORF, is the Austrian national public service broadcaster.Funded from a combination of a television licence fees and revenue from limited on-air advertising, ORF is the dominant player in the Austrian broadcast media...

, where he introduced his viewers and listeners to the world of opera and operetta with outstanding knowledge of the subject matter and marvelous humor. Marcel Prawy maintained close friendships with many prominent singers, composers and musicians, such as Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...

 and Robert Stolz

Robert Stolz

Robert Elisabeth Stolz was an Austrian songwriter and conductor as well as a composer of operettas and film music.- Biography :...

. He was awarded numerous awards and honours by the nation and internationally, including becoming honorary citizen of Vienna and Miami. Hardly anyone succeeded in picturing opera to his audience as impressively as he did. And thus Prawy became an institution of the Viennese opera as the National Guide to Opera (Opernführer der Nation).

In his final years, Prawy was quite frank about his unique, and rather eccentric, method of archiving his enormous collection, gathered over many decades, of theatre programmes, recordings, letters, photographs, personal notes, and similar loose sheets. While Prawy himself had rooms at the Hotel Sacher

Hotel Sacher

The Hotel Sacher is a five-star hotel in the Innenstadt district of Vienna, Austria, next to the Staatsoper. It is famous for the specialty of the house, the Sachertorte, a chocolate cake with apricot filling. There is also an art gallery in the hotel with works from the 19th century...

, he invited journalists into the private apartment he was still keeping, which contained thousands of plastic shopping bag

Plastic shopping bag

Plastic shopping bags, carrier bags or plastic grocery bags are a type of shopping bag made from various kinds of plastic, and are common worldwide. These bags are sometimes called single-use bags, referring to carrying items from a store to a home...

s, each of which was carefully labelled so that he could in no time access any information he needed.

On his 90th birthday in 2001, a special celebration was held for him in the Vienna State Opera. Prawy's death in 2003 of a lung embolism was regarded as the passing of one of the last witnesses of an old time gone by and greatly mourned by the public.

External links

• Marcel Prawy at the aeiou Encyclopedia
  Aeiou Encyclopedia
  AEIOU is a free online collection of reference works in both German and English about Austria-related topics.-Background:...
  
  
• Jewish Music Institute | A tribute to Marcel Prawy
• Marcel Prawy's Profile at The Remington Records Site

Literature

• Marcel Prawy. The Vienna Opera. Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  Weidenfeld & Nicolson
  Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. It is a division of the Orion Publishing Group.-History:...
  
  , London. 1970. ISBN 0-297-00134-5
• Marcel Prawy. Richard Wagner: Leben und Werk. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Munich. 1982.
• Marcel Prawy. Johann Strauss. Ueberreuter
  Ueberreuter
  Ueberreuther is an Austrian publishing house. Founded as Verlag Carl Ueberreuter in 1946 by Thomas F. Salzer , today the company is Austria's biggest publisher of non-fiction literature.- External links :...
  
  , Vienna. 1991. ISBN 3-8000-3393-3
• Marcel Prawy. Marcel Prawy erzählt aus seinem Leben. ...und seine Vision der Oper des 21. Jahrhunderts. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna. 2002. ISBN 3-218-00690-2
• Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz, Thomas Trabitsch. Marcel Prawy: Glück, das mir verblieb. Christian Brandstätter, Vienna. 2002. ISBN 3-85498-174-0