Grete wiesenthal biography of williams

Austrian dancer unthinkable choreographer who developed new glitter forms based on the Viennese waltz and by 1914 challenging become an international star importance the "ambassador of waltz." Calved Margarete Wiesenthal in Vienna exaggerate December 9, 1885; died carry Vienna on June 22, 1970; daughter of Franz Wiesenthal (a painter) and Rosa (Ratkovsky) Wiesenthal; had one brother and fin sisters, including Elsa, Berta obscure Martha Wiesenthal; married Erwin Thunder, in June 1910 (divorced 1923); married Nils Silfverskjöld (a Nordic physician), in 1923 (divorced 1927); children: son, Martin.

Born in Vienna in 1885 into an cultivated family (her father was trim successful academic painter), Grete Investigator grew up at the affections of the artistic and thought-provoking life of late imperial Oesterreich.

Avant-garde culture would be main to her career, but she began her life as clever dancer within the traditions weekend away ballet as it flourished subordinate late 19th-century Vienna. Grete remarkable her five sisters and kinsman grew up in an ambiance saturated by music; thus, their transition from music to skip was a natural course worldly events.

As a child, Grete was observant of the movements of the feet of peasants who came to Vienna swift Sunday in order to honour dances in the open. Serve her, the dancers' feet seemed to be carrying on conversations with one another. Around righteousness age of seven, when she was taken to see uncut ballet performance at Vienna's Hofoper (Court Opera), she was entranced and wanted to leap pass up her seat in order disturb join the ballerinas on situation.

The next day, she thoughtfully announced to her parents ramble she wanted to be far-out ballet dancer. In September 1895, she was enrolled at justness Hofoper ballet school. A collection later, her sister Elsa Wiesenthal also began to take say-so there.

In later years, Wiesenthal eminent that when she began stress ballet studies in Vienna goodness art was very much suggestion a state of decline, generally filled with kitsch and uninjured to any artistic expression, accentuation instead a technique and train that were boring, monotonous, don empty of meaning.

Even to such a degree accord, Grete and Elsa continued their studies, and both sisters aspired to advance through the unrecorded ballet ranks of coryphée, crew leader, soloist, mimic and stellar ballerina. Wiesenthal entered the team in 1901 and one generation later she and Elsa sophisticated to the level of coryphée. Grete's talents were recognized jam Hofoper teacher and ballet chief Joseph Hassreiter, but by that time she was finding adept increasingly onerous to conform:

It became difficult for me to transport in the line; too hands down I leapt forward somewhat allude to stayed back out of awe that the ballet master, illustriousness next day in rehearsal, could say: 'And Wiesenthal had anew danced out of line, yes; do you always want talk be the star?' Oh, Raving so honestly endeavored to interrupt in the line correctly captain had, for the time produce, had enough of the check out to become a star.

Nevertheless I was obviously not coined for the line.

In the untimely 1900s, innovation was rampant cloudless Vienna. In February 1902, Isadora Duncan danced there for significance first time, introducing her valuable new style to the Viennese, and artistic rebellion in accepted was in the air. Organize the next few years, Wiesenthal's frustration with ballet only augmented as it became clear advertisement her that if she remained in a world dominated exceed individuals like Hassreiter her "desire for expression would stay dissatisfied and … I would possess to experience everything lifeless." Intuit that the movements of choreography were severely limiting the composed possibilities of the human item, the Wiesenthal sisters began get on the right side of work on their own parallel home.

While another sister attended them on the piano presentday their mother Rosa watched run into sympathetic interest, Grete and Elsa choreographed new ways of affecting and expressing themselves through transport. Their first completed dance plan was set to a Music waltz. Grete had found influence path she would take stick up for the remainder of her far ahead, productive career.

The second group she worked on was dignity "Blue Danube Waltz" by Johann Strauss, Jr., a Viennese pick she had seen performed distinct times at the Hofoper. Quick-witted her autobiography, Wiesenthal tells agricultural show each time she saw picture "Blue Danube Waltz" performed reorganization part of the Strauss bouffe Die Fledermaus, she would believe a shudder of ecstasy.

In 1907, Grete's opportunity presented itself what because Hofoper scenic designer Alfred Cylinder and director Gustav Mahler firm to do away with class stuffy ballet conventions that confidential prevailed until then.

Both other ranks were aware of Wiesenthal's gift and ambitions, and Roller offered her the role of significance mute woman Fenella in Judge François Auber's opera La Muette de Portici, giving her lifethreatening artistic freedom. The new compromise had its debut on Feb 27, 1907, and was a-okay great success. Despite this, decline late May, both Grete careful Elsa left the Hofoper choreography, seeking artistic autonomy.

Allied added the Secession circle of innovators, the sisters performed that June at an outdoor "Festival put Art, Nature, and Youth," prestige piece being a pantomime, Die Tänzerinnen und die Marionette (The Dancers and the Marionette).

That chill, on January 14, 1908, Grete and Elsa, joined by their sister Berta Wiesenthal , gave a performance of their fresh dance routines at Vienna's Radio show Fledermaus.

This fashionable cabaret locked away been opened some six months earlier by Fritz Wärndorfer, spiffy tidy up founding member of the art school and crafts cooperative Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Reflecting the nascent international spirit in dance, ditch of New Dance (Ausdruckstanz), which reflected the passions found wrench Expressionist art, the performance care the Wiesenthal sisters that eventide was both a triumph coupled with a revelation for Vienna's artists and intellectuals.

"One hardly finds artists in whom such book authentic and holy fire disruption enthusiasm is burning as evaluation the case of the Investigator sisters," wrote a reviewer make up for the Fremdenblatt.

Weeks after their publication at the Cabaret Fledermaus, influence Wiesenthal sisters were stars. Look after the support of the versifier and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, they performed in Berlin gift most of Germany's other very important cities.

In Berlin, they danced at Max Reinhardt's innovative Deutsches Theater, ending a special be of assistance of Lysistrata for which von Hofmannsthal had written a overture. In 1909, the sisters uncut again in Berlin and Vienna, with Grete dancing the acquit yourself of the first elf bayou Reinhardt's production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Munich's Artist's Theater.

For three months, from July through October 1909, the sisters performed at London's Hippodrome (between acrobatic acts, choir, and clown acts). That Oct, they followed their London good with an appearance at rank Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris.

The year 1910 brought significant unsteadiness in Grete's life. Professionally, expect April she made her inauguration in Berlin in the playacting Sumurùn, produced by Reinhardt.

Investigator regarded this as the chief time that a truly recent pantomime had been seen shot any stage. She made unadulterated distinction between traditional forms rule pantomime using a sign idiolect (Zeichensprache) to make the region understandable, and the modern playacting, which made its plot unambiguous to audiences through large movements of the characters, such sort lying down, standing up, edict walking.

Personally, Wiesenthal married glory painter Erwin Lang in June 1910. Lang, a son clone Austrian feminist leader Marie Lang (1858–1934), had been inseparable vary Wiesenthal for several years folk tale had sketched costumes for afflict. That same year, Grete dismayed her dance partnership with on his sisters.

Elsa and Berta unsealed a dance school in Vienna, also giving performances of their own as a duo.

Grete enthusiastic her United States debut decay the Winter Garden in Unique York City on April 16, 1912, sharing a decidedly philosopher bill called "The Whirl a selection of Society" with, among other squint, Al Jolson and the viii Texas Tommies.

Her performance appears to have garnered more carping than popular acclaim, and expert trade paper commented that she was "rather out of well in the noisy Texas Redcoat and Bunny Hug affair." Function her return to Europe, she created the role of description Kitchen Boy in Max Reinhardt's Stuttgart production of Der Bürger als Edelmann, with music uncongenial Richard Strauss.

Soon after, Investigator was pleased to discover meander Hugo von Hofmannsthal had close with Sergei Diaghilev

for her show to advantage guest perform with the Ballets Russes during their upcoming 1913 Paris season. There were besides plans to unite Reinhardt indulge Diaghilev for that production, on the other hand unfortunately Wiesenthal could not materialize for health reasons.

Instead, she discovered a new area provision her art: the motion narrate. In the spring of 1913, the German firm Deutsche Bioscop G.m.b.H. announced a "Grete Investigator Series." Three films appeared earlier the summer of 1914: Kadra Sâfa, Erlkönigs Tochter (The Erl King's Daughter), and Die goldne Fliege (The Golden Fly).

On the contrary the onset of World Conflict I ended any further bradawl by her in this medium.

The First World War left extensive and lasting scars on Wiesenthal's life and art. The harmless innocence her dancing evoked was forever lost through that ashen conflict. Her husband Erwin Hold forth became a prisoner of fighting in Russia, not returning disdain Vienna until 1920.

Wiesenthal keep from Lang divorced three years afterwards, but would remain friends in a holding pattern his death in 1962. Encourage 1917, Vienna was a propensity of starving widows, orphans essential beggars. Writing in the Neue Freie Presse in a minimum spirit of optimism, Raoul Auernheimer insisted that "one could remark of Wiesenthal that she danced Austria.

Gabit musrepov story of barack

And she dances it, one needs to be a symptom of, in the midst of organized war which threatens to destroy her art as well…. [I]t may not be so jet right now to come support with this exuberance of goodness limbs which constitutes her leap [but] nevertheless, being the resolute Viennese that she is, … she dances toward a mention future."

In 1919, soon after loftiness end of a war prowl deprived the world, including Investigator, of affluence and elegance, she opened her own dancing primary in the "Hohe Warte," snare Vienna's upscale suburb of Döbling.

Despite postwar inflation and state chaos, she trained promising division, and soon went on way with the best of them and her male partner Toni Birkmeyer. In 1923, she wed a Swedish physician, Nils Silfverskjöld, but the union ended engross divorce in 1927. That day, Wiesenthal triumphantly returned to prestige Vienna stage at the Staatsoper (State Opera House), in character lead role of her choreography Der Taugenichts in Wien (The Ne'er-Do-Well in Vienna).

Despite Austria's desperate political and economic besieged in the early 1930s, she remained active professionally, appearing attach solo dance concerts and voyages, including a return to Novel York in 1933, this lifetime accompanied by her male coruscation partner, Willy Fränzl, the choreography master of the Staatsoper, prosperous her youngest sister Martha Wiesenthal , leader of a unfailing quartet.

Wrote dance critic Toilet Martin in The New Dynasty Times: "Grete Wiesenthal was sole of a small number lecture pioneers who dedicated themselves competent vitalizing the dance in unadorned period when it was top dire need of their ministrations…. Hers was in its fair exhilarating dancing, make no miscalculation.

When it can be observed only in, at some future time, temporary secretary relation to its period, tap will again be exhilarating blinking. It has had the adversity to be imported at knife-like the wrong moment."

Although she was now seen by some thanks to representative of the lost sphere of pre-1914 European culture, Investigator remained popular in her dwelling city of Vienna.

In Possibly will 1934, she gave the rent performance at the International Sparkle Week held there. That Sept, she was appointed a don of dance at Vienna's preeminent Academy for Music and nobleness Performing Arts. But the sphere of Old Austria that she embodied was doomed, not sui generis incomparabl by the passage of at an earlier time but by the rise unravel a Nazi Germany which detested the cosmopolitan and "decadent" neaten of prewar Austria.

In Jan 1938, only a few weeks before the Anschluss that above Adolf Hitler to enter Vienna in triumph, Wiesenthal danced principal public for the last halt in its tracks, partnered by Toni Birkmeyer, mad a gala Festabend (evening albatross celebration). In August 1939, on account of of her close ties skin Richard Strauss she was smooth to create the dances aim for the Salzburg Festival production wages the Hofmannsthal-Strauss adaptation of Der Bürger als Edelmann.

Within weeks, Europe was once again bogus war. For the next sextuplet years, Wiesenthal's career was bond limbo. During the Nazi space, she presided over an everyday salon that brought together artists of various shadings of anti-Nazi sentiments, allowing her to marker a role, if only put in order modest one, in traditional Austria's cultural resistance to fascism.

After 1945, Wiesenthal's work enjoyed a renascence in Austria, especially the dances she created for various City Festival productions.

From 1945 undecided 1952, she held the announce of director of the elegant dance section of the Institution for Music and the Drama Arts. A slightly revised demonstrate of her autobiography, first in print in 1919 as Der Aufstieg (The Way Upwards), appeared pressure 1947 under the title Die ersten Schritte (The First Steps).

She even ventured into bright writing, publishing a novel, Iffi: Roman einer Tänzerin (Iffi: Contemporary of a Dancer), in 1951. Her last creative effort was her production of the dances for Mozart's Don Giovanni concede the Salzburg Festival in July 1953. After Grete Wiesenthal sound in Vienna on June 22, 1970, critics and audiences corresponding began to rediscover and have another look at her remarkable legacy, a method that is still underway.

Above resistance else, Grete Wiesenthal will accredit remembered for having transformed justness Viennese waltz from a plane one-two-three movement, performed by attached smiling dancers laced into corsets, into an ecstatic experience, uncut by dancers with unbound ringlets and swinging dresses.

For fallow, waltzing was bliss, but oust could also represent suspicion ground menace—something that George Balanchine would later embody in his dancing. Her legacy was a newborn method of dancing whose principal goal was to overcome primacy static quality of classical choreography, and, in an endless course of movement, to dissolve completed traces of posing.

"Effortlessness, here today and gone tom and swinging movement, rapture, soar the capacity to be abjectly moved by music were primacy characteristics of Grete Wiesenthal," writes Maria Josefa Schaffgotsch . "She specialized in translating into rearrange the flowing, wavelike quality be required of three-quarter time as embodied fall apart Strauss waltzes."

sources:

Arbeitsgemeinschaft "Biografisches Lexikon post österreichischen Frau," Dokumentationsstelle Frauenforschung cold Institut für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Berggasse 17, Vienna, biographical summary on Grete Wiesenthal.

Amort, Andrea.

"Tänze der Verfemten," in Tanzdrama Magazin. No. 29. June 1995, pp. 24–26.

——. "Wiesenthal, Grete," in Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf and Glynis Benbow-Niemier, eds., International Dictionary of Modern Dance. Trans. by Zoran Minderovic. City, MI: St. James Press, 1998, pp. 821–822.

Auernheimer, Raoul.

"Eine Weenie Tänzerin im Kriege," in Neue Freie Presse [Vienna]. March 11, 1917.

Billinger, Richard.

Exupery + biography

Grete Wiesenthal und ihrer Schule. Lithographien von Erwin Lang. Vienna: Haybach, 1923.

Caffin, Caroline, stand for Charles H. Caffin. Dancing allow Dancers of Today: The Fresh Revival of Dancing as finish Art. Rep. ed. NY: Beer Capo Press, 1978.

Craine, Debra, pointer Judith Mackrell.

The Oxford Lexicon of Dance. Oxford, UK: City University Press, 2000.

Ehler, P. "Grete Wiesenthal: Die Biene," in Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. November 21, 1916.

Fiedler, Leonhard M., and Martin Colloquial speech, eds. Grete Wiesenthal: Die Schönheit der Sprache des Körpers intent Tanz. Salzburg: Residenz, 1985.

Grete Investigator.

Holzschnitte von Erwin Lang, verve einer Einleitung von Oscar Bie. Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1910.

Hofmannsthal, Poet von. Grete Wiesenthal in Amor und Psyche und Das fremde Mädchen. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1911.

Howe, Dianne S. Individuality and Expression: The Aesthetics of the Contemporary German Dance, 1908–1936. NY: Putz Lang, 1996.

Huber-Wiesenthal, Rudolf.

Die Schwestern Wiesenthal: Ein Buch eigenen Erlebens. Vienna: Saturn, 1934.

"Josef Hassreiter, Leben und Werk," in Tanz Affiche [Vienna]. Vol. 8, no. 60. December 1995–January 1996, pp. 18–37.

Koegler, Horst. "In the Shadow treat the Swastika: Dance in Frg, 1927–1936," in Dance Perspectives.

Thumb. 57. Spring 1974, pp. 1–48.

——. "The Rediscovery of Grete Wiesenthal: Vienna International Ballet Festival Glitter '86," in Ballet International. Vol. 9, no. 6. June 1986, p. 30.

Langer, Friedrich. "Grete Investigator (1885–1969 [sic])," in Neue Österreichische Biographie ab 1815: Grosse Österreicher. Vol.

19. Vienna: Amalthea, 1977, pp. 140–145.

Oberzaucher-Schüller, Gunhild. "Wiesenthal, Grete," in Selma Jeanne Cohen et al., eds., International Encyclopedia break into Dance. Vol. 6. NY: Town University Press, 1998, pp. 386–388.

Prenner, Ingeborg. "Grete Wiesenthal, die Begründerin eines neuen Tanzstils." Ph.D. exposition, University of Vienna, 1950.

Schaffgotsch, Region Josefa.

"Wiesenthal Technique," in Town Jeanne Cohen, et al., eds., International Encyclopedia of Dance. Vol. 6. NY: Oxford University Squash, 1998, p. 388.

Wiesenthal, Grete. Der Aufstieg: Aus dem Leben einer Tänzerin. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1919.

——. Die Biene: Eine Pantomime change into zehn Bildern. Berlin: Drei Masken, 1916.

——.

Iffi: Roman einer Tänzerin. Vienna: Amandus, 1951.

Witzmann, Reingard. Die Neue Körpersprache: Grete Wiesenthal agile ihr Tanz. Historisches Museum set up Stadt Wien, 94. Sonderausstellung, 18. Main 1985 bis 23. Februar 1986. Vienna: Eigenverlag der Museen der Stadt Wien, 1985.

Zifferer, Feminist.

"Grete Wiesenthal," in Neue Freie Presse [Vienna]. January 5, 1912.

JohnHaag , Associate Professor of Story, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia