Mourning for Hans Neuenfels: radically brilliant

Created: 2022-02-07 18:19

By: Sabine Dultz

Hans Neuenfels (1941-2022) in Munich's Residenztheater, where he staged "Antigone" in 2016.

© Marcus sleep

The theater and opera director Hans Neuenfels died in Berlin at the age of 80.

Neuenfels was celebrated and cursed for his fundamentally new, unprejudiced view of the material he directed.

Our obituary:

"But, like in the first one, I'm always a stranger." A confession that encompasses everything that defines the great human artist Hans Neuenfels.

He used this quote from Goethe's Iphigenia as a motto for his autobiography, "The Bastard Book", published in 2011.

When thinking about his life in the face of his death, about his productions of plays and operas, his art films, his literary works, libretti and essays, that classic sentence once again clearly opens our eyes to this never-ending success story of the Hans Neuenfels.

So it is with each of his productions, whether they were grandiose, ingenious, outrageous or all together, they subverted and conquered the hearts and minds of the audience.

Neuenfels studied in Vienna and Essen

Born on May 31, 1941 in Krefeld, Neuenfels studied acting and directing at the Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and at the Folkwang School in Essen.

He brought his fellow student Elisabeth Trissenaar with him from the Danube.

A love that developed into an artist and life community until the end.

There is hardly a production in which the actress would not have played a formative role.

Hans Neuenfels worked in Paris for the painter Max Ernst

After the young Neuenfels had worked for the painter Max Ernst for a year and had lived with him in Paris, his stage career picked up speed.

Initially with small productions in the studio theater at Vienna's Naschmarkt.

Then we went to Trier, Krefeld-Mönchengladbach and the Theater im Zimmer in Hamburg.

Four to five productions per year.

Classics and the moderns, from Schiller to Bond, everything was there.

Bremen, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Berlin, to name just a small selection of the prominent theater cities in which Neuenfels perfected his mastery.

In which he was celebrated and also booed.

His radical approach to questioning the stories and his very different view of reality disturbed many viewers and critics alike.

Because they didn't find what they were used to or what they were familiar with on stage.

Also the mainspring of his art, which became particularly clear and crass in appearance when he began to work in music theater and achieved the most spectacular protests.

One was not used to such a precise and ruthless analysis.

In December 1974 there was a tumultuous revolt in the auditorium of the Nuremberg Opera House, so that the premiere was threatened with cancellation.

Such a "troubadour" had never existed before.

And not the kind of “Aida” that Neuenfels brought to the stage in Frankfurt in 1981.

Of course he had strong partners in all his ventures - whether in Stuttgart, Berlin or Vienna - in particular the conductors Michael Gielen, Lothar Zagrosek, Andris Nelsons, Ingo Metzmacher and Sylvain Cambreling.

His Bayreuth "Lohengrin" was a triumph in 2010

When the theater people got used to a fundamentally new, unprejudiced view of the millennia-old medium, Hans Neuenfels was also ready for Salzburg - "Così fan tutte" (2000), "Die Fledermaus" (2001), "Pique Dame" (2018) – and Bayreuth 2010: triumph for the director and his “Lohengrin”.

This “You shall never question me”, he writes in his autobiography, gave the team the idea of ​​an experimental arrangement, a model, a laboratory, which led to the scenic invention of the spectacular choir of rats.

Neuenfels noted the following about the cast of Annette Dasch and Jonas Kaufmann: "Both were young and beautiful that one wondered why they should still sing at all.

They did it anyway, and it became an erotic, even sexual, adventure for me.”

In Munich, Neuenfels last worked at the Residenztheater

It is questionable whether these were also the few works in Munich for Neuenfels.

But at least he also staged here.

In the 1990s at the Residenztheater, for example "The Maids" and "The Tattooed Rose", and most recently "Antigone" in 2016.

At the Bavarian State Opera it was “Medea in Corinto” in 2010.

He never felt at home artistically on the Isar, although he also staged Brecht's “Baal” on Brienner Strasse 25 years ago out of love for the play and for the unpretentious Munich Volkstheater.

"I'll go out on the street again for a moment," said Hans Neuenfels, who was sociable and liked to drink, to his wife.

"Elizabeth is silent.

Again and again she tries to tolerate the fact that a Rhinelander has to visit a bar several times a day.” Last Sunday evening, February 6th, Hans Neuenfels left forever.