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Director Hans Neuenfels (at the Komische Oper in Berlin 2005)
Photo:
DDP
He was a sex maniac, a hooligan and a great stage dreamer. It was not uncommon for his works to also show wonderful wit, for example when he placed the Greek hero Icarus in the theater as a half-naked crashed pilot in the debris of a glider. Among the theater and opera directors in the German-speaking world, Hans Neuenfels was a man who was not only called "controversial." But also someone who liked to argue himself and argued intelligently and passionately. About the teachings of Sigmund Freud, for example, about the books by Robert Musil, about the painting of the surrealists.
Looking back on the most beautiful scandal of his working life, a Frankfurt "Aida" production in 1981, in which the enslaved Ethiopian king's daughter scrubbed Egyptian floors as a cleaning lady and the choir members threw fried chicken during the triumphal march, he said in an interview with SPIEGEL editor Joachim Kronsbein: »One evening when we received a bomb threat, the theater was searched and the performance took place under police protection.
And afterwards we had heated discussions.
That's the way it has to be in a democracy.«
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Most likely there is hardly any stage artist who has been booed as intensely and as often as the director Neuenfels.
Again and again, critics and individuals from the audience found his productions scandalous.
He proudly wore the professional title of »director provocateur« attributed to him by many media.
Temporarily removed from the schedule for fear of Islamist attacks
He managed to have a production of Mozart's »Idomeneo« at the Berlin Deutsche Oper temporarily withdrawn from the schedule in 2006 for fear of Islamist attacks - because he saw the statues of Poseidon, Christ, Buddha and Mohammed in one scene, to which the heads were cut off. He was fired as a young director by a theater manager in Trier in 1966 – because he advertised his own work with cheeky leaflets, which included the following: »Are you helping to tear down the Trier Cathedral?« And he made the Wagner fans mad, when in Stuttgart in 1994 he presented »Meistersinger von Nürnberg«, a work that was particularly pampered during the Nazi era, as a wild swan song to German history, including racist riots. So grandiose that SPIEGEL critic Klaus Umbach praised it at the time:»Only now, as a macabre revue, have the ›Meistersinger‹ finally been denazified.«
Neuenfels, born in Krefeld, grew up as the son of an opera-loving mother and a senior government councilor in a fairly art-loving environment and was enthusiastic about literature, painting, film and music.
He began as a highly gifted, irrepressibly expressive writer of poetry at an early age and, at the age of 18, published a volume of poetry entitled »Ovar und Opium«.
In Paris he served as secretary to the painter Max Ernst for a while.
He studied acting and directing at the Folkwang School in Essen and at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.
In the theaters in Krefeld and Heidelberg, he had his first spectacular successes with Edward Bond's scandalous 1960s play »Berettet« and with Peter Weiss' revolutionary drama »Marat/Sade«.
Hans Neuenfels claimed in his 2011 memoir called »Bastardbuch« that he fell into directing as a youngster while observing two soldiers masturbating in a laundry room.
It was then that he first understood the principles of voyeurism and the pleasure of the viewer's position, »but this also triggered a stimulus, a tickle in me.
A condition that should become my profession.
Director!
A most dubious vocation, but inescapable, compulsive.”
In his memoir, Neuenfels also praised the love and work relationship that connected him to the actress Elisabeth Trissenar for many decades – as actually impossible happiness that made him embarrassed.
Sensual, boldly associative, highly educated understanding of theater
Among the important men and women of German directorial theatre, Neuenfels remained a loner alongside Ruth Berghaus and Andrea Breth, Peter Zadek and Peter Palitzsch, Frank Castorf and Claus Peymann.
He did not found a school and found no imitators for his sensual, boldly associative, highly educated understanding of theater.
But he was a pioneer who made room for a kind of individual pursuit of happiness in the directing profession, which some people are suspicious of today because they see it as the self-aggrandizement of a – male – artist who considers himself a genius.
In the case of von Neuenfels one can say: it was not he himself who behaved ingeniously, it was his admirers who often thought they recognized an unearthly inspiration in his works.
As loud and angry as the protests against his productions often were, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin now says that Neuenfels “always remained the sovereign grand seigneur”.
He presented himself to the audience without any trace of defiance or being offended.
»His serenity in these moments may also have been due to the certainty that the audience would change their judgment sooner or later.«
Neuenfels, who has now died at the age of 80, once said about his work as a writer, director and music fanatic in an interview he conducted with KulturSPIEGEL in the 1990s: »If you have found something, then you have to go there stay tuned too.
My dream is to find out something about myself through art.
This dream will not end, even if I should no longer be successful.«
