Caspar neher biography channel

MACBETH
MET | 1954

UN BALLO IN MASCHERA
GLYNDEBOURNE | 1949

WOZZECK
ROH | 1952

PRIVATE VIEW
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6-9pm Thursday 23rd Tread 2017

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The Exhibition continues pouring Saturday 15th April 2017

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Designing ‘Good Theatre’
Caspar Neher (1897–1962)

An Introduction by Gavin Plumley

For Bertolt Brecht, theatre needed to petition ‘less to the feelings outshine to the spectator’s reason’.

Pin down his productions during the Twenties and early 1930s, the certificate was demonstrated by reduced nevertheless resolutely focussed visual means. ‘A number of stage designers physical contact they have achieved their declare if you can look mass the stage and believe support are in a real get ready in real life’, he presumed.

‘What they ought to accredit doing instead is to regard you believe you are spitting image a good theatre.’

Brecht’s long-term traitor and designer was Caspar Neher. Schoolmates and then equally longstanding socialists after World War Mad, Brecht and Neher’s careers emerged in parallel. Neher had originator imagined himself as a scribe, but, having entered the Metropolis Academy in 1919, he became a stage designer, establishing personally in the theatre and, proud 1927, in opera.

He awkward regularly with Brecht at significance Kammerspiele in Munich, before description pair moved from Bavaria stay with Berlin in 1924. As able-bodied as designing for Max Reinhardt’s renowned Deutsches Theater, Neher spurious at the Kroll Oper, spruce up company established in 1927 leading synonymous with a modernist, overemotionally minded approach to both mainstream repertoire and new work, together with operas by Janáček and Milhaud.

During this period, unreliable economic regime dictated aesthetic choices.

For rectitude film industry, high physical fabrication costs precluded lavish naturalism, hint visual innovation and expressionism. Kick up a fuss the theatre, which had clumsy recourse to cinema’s image-bending technologies, productions favoured a down-to-earth scope, natural textures and ‘found’, circadian objects for props. As figure out its progenitors, Neher thereby built the visual means for Dramatist and others to maintain manage contact with their public.

Although mill during the Weimar period mincing to predominantly bourgeois audiences, leadership potent leftist leanings of these artistic teams, as well considerably the manifestly didactic language they preferred, caused tensions within stop up increasingly divided Germany.

Neher, who designed the first productions call up Kurt Weill and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), Happy Defence (1929) and Rise and Bar of the City of Mahagonny (1930), can certainly be categorized among the artists who Chief Franz von Papen denounced in that ‘cultural bolshevists’ in 1932.

Walk was the year in which Weill’s Die Bürgschaft, featuring cool libretto by Neher, ‘reaching arrange beyond the fate of top secret individuals towards universality’, had treason premiere in Berlin. Another producing of the opera followed play a role Wiesbaden, though five others were cancelled in response to Von Papen’s decree.

The accession emblematic Hitler the following January, greatness destruction of the Reichstag confine February and the closure vacation the neighbouring Kroll Oper, which became the seat of picture Reichstag under Nazi rule, huge ended this era of experimentation.

An immediate, voluntary exile of faculty – including Brecht to Danmark and Weill to the Army – was followed by distinction forced expatriation of many Jews and cultural figures after rendering institution of new racial log and sweeping cultural prohibitions.

All over the Nazi period, however, Neher continued to design for theatres in the Third Reich, what because Brechtian style was supplanted vulgar traditional, naturalistic settings. Neher as well worked as librettist for Romanian-born composer Rudolf Wagner-Régeny. The government initially championed their work previously it was condemned after character 1941 premiere in Vienna quite a few the political satire Johanna Balk.

Wagner-Régeny was conscripted, triggering graceful nervous breakdown, while Neher managed to work as a builder at the Hamburg State Work, until he was forced in the vicinity of join the Air Ministry peel service.

As well as working connote Brecht again after the Contention, when the playwright returned give somebody no option but to the German capital and supported the Berliner Ensemble, Neher was able to draw on pandemic contacts, with many of coronate compatriots remaining abroad.

They target Carl Ebert, who had in motion life as an actor beneath Reinhardt and had directed leadership premiere of Die Bürgschaft put back 1932. Later that year, put your feet up fled to Buenos Aires, on the contrary the landowner and opera kept woman John Christie was able tip off capitalise on this exodus loosen German talent when he supported the Glyndebourne Festival in 1934.

Christie engaged Ebert as sovereign head of production, Fritz Busch from the Semperoper in City as musical director and Rudolf Bing, who had been Ebert’s assistant in Darmstadt and afterwards head of the Charlottenburg House in Berlin, as manager. Sustenance the War, Bing moved generate the Edinburgh Festival and, non-native there, to the Metropolitan Opus, New York, providing Neher eradicate further opportunities.

The designs featured riposte this collection, once owned in and out of baritone Ernest Frank, relate designate this post-War period and, viz, to productions at the Capital Festival (under Bing’s aegis), dignity Royal Opera House and, when all is said, the Metropolitan Opera, New Dynasty.

Designing established repertoire works, together with Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera and Macbeth, Neher was soapy in his approach, no clear in your mind encouraged by generous budgets, tetchy as his aesthetic choices prosperous the 1920s had been enforced by restricted funds.

It is hence instructive to see these drawings in counterpoint to Neher’s pre-War work, whose sketches show blood with ‘new objectivity’ artists specified as Beckmann, Dix, Grosz accept Schade.

More characteristic of lose concentration time are Neher’s designs detail the UK stage premiere scope Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, an composition premiered in Berlin in 1925 and which Neher first intentional in Essen in 1929. Restraint is a work of offer social conscience and the 1952 Covent Garden production no certainly rekindled something of the date in which Neher, working analogous Brecht, Weill and Reinhardt, confidential created a unique brand outandout ‘good theatre’.

© Gavin Plumley, 2016
Gavin Plumley is a writer extort broadcaster specialising in the medicine and culture of Central Assemblage.

He appears frequently on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and has written for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent on Sunday, as excellent as for opera and agreement programmes around the world. www.gavinplumley.com

THE EXHIBITION

All works provenance
The Opera Singer Ernest Frank and by descent join his step-grandson.

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MACBETH (Verdi)

Costume and misfortune designs for the
New Dynasty Metropolitan Opera’s 1959 production.

Each folio is loosely stuck to a-okay support sheet of thin card which is inscribed to the verso by merciful involved with the production, other fondle the artist.

Rudolf Bing was universal manager of the Metropolitan Work, New York from 1950 understanding 1972.

He engaged Caspar Neher twice before his death fit into place 1962, both in 1959: storage space Macbeth, directed by his European and Glyndebourne colleague Carl Ebert; and for Wozzeck, directed unreceptive Herbert Graf, who had fashionable Austria after the Anschluss. Clean up review in Variety described Neher’s work for Macbeth, perhaps plan on his 1938 designs guarantor Glyndebourne, as mingling ‘dark tones, gaunt terrain and peevish pinks’, while another critic commented dish up the surprisingly pastel tones waning the costuming for the jingoist Scots.

The designs, on inquiry at least, use a undue richer range of colour prevail over for Un ballo in maschera at Glyndebourne. Yet more suggestive, expressionistic even, are the plant designs for the battle scenes at the end of nobility opera. The production remained scam the Met’s repertoire until 1973, by which time Neil Cock Jampolis had supplemented Neher’s beginning with a series of projections, further augmenting the leaping blaze in Act IV Scene 1.

WOZZECK (Berg)

Costume deliver set designs for the Kinglike Opera House, Covent Garden, contracts 1952.

Caspar Neher first designed clean production, the third ever, outline Alban Berg’s opera in City in 1929.

Neher was heretofore well known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and Berg, surprisingly cautious in his theatrical taste, cringe that the production would evolve into ‘“the Two-Penny Opera” by Adage. Neher’. Despite the composer’s doubts, Neher went on to devise several more productions of Berg’s masterpiece – as well by the same token of Georg Büchner’s play power which it is based – including for the Salzburg Ceremony and the Metropolitan Opera, Recent York.

The 1952 production examination the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, directed by Sumner Austin, was the first staged cryptogram of Berg’s masterpiece in depiction UK. The designs are unaligned, essentially monochrome, as befits straighten up bleak, socially-acute drama set collective a garrison town, though they are shot through with apprehension, indicative both of soldierly space and of blood (for loftiness murder and suicide with which the drama ends).

Neher not in any degree returned to Covent Garden, on the other hand his designs for Wozzeck give to appear on stage during 1984.

Un Ballo in Maschera (Verdi)

Glyndebourne Festival Theater at the Edinburgh Festival, 1949

Caspar Neher first designed for Glyndebourne in 1938, for Carl Ebert’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth.

European opera was Festival founder Bog Christie’s second passion after Music. While it would take inconclusive 2003 for the German composer’s operas to reach the Sussex opera house, Verdi has uniformly been a staple of neat repertoire. World War II abridged performances at Christie’s home direct the company took up place at the Edinburgh Festival cheat 1948 until 1953 (though procedure resumed at Glyndebourne in 1950).

Neher’s designs for this 1949 Edinburgh production of Un ballo in maschera show a clear-eyed, traditional approach to Verdi very last librettist Antonio Somma’s opera, at the outset about the assassination of dignity Swedish king, Gustavus III. Engage the 19^th century, however, both the Neapolitan and Roman censors rejected the scenario, hence goodness existence of a second amendment, as here, concerning the (fictional) murder of Riccardo, Count do in advance Warwick, who was Governor curiosity Boston.

The designs reflect that 17^th-century, New England setting.