Amalie Beer

Amalie Beer. Painting by Carl Kretschmar , around 1803

Amalie Beer ; Hebrew אסתר יהודה בעער, Esther Jehuda Beer ; (* February 10, 1767 in Berlin ; † June 27, 1854 there ) was a German-Jewish salonnière in Berlin and mother of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer .

Life

Amalie Beers grave to the left of that of her son Giacomo Meyerbeer in the Jewish cemetery Schönhauser Allee in Berlin

Born as the daughter of the Prussian court factor Liepmann Meyer Wulff (1745-1812) and his wife Esther, née Bamberger (1740-1822), she grew up in the environment of the educated, wealthy Berlin Jewry of the 18th century, whose history was marked by the Enlightenment and The emancipation of the Jews stood. In 1788 she married the Jewish sugar manufacturer Jacob Herz Beer (1769–1825). She achieved fame with her literary salon, which can be seen as a typical example of bourgeois, enlightened sociability of the Biedermeier period . Resided in Berlin all her life, she died there at the age of almost ninety in 1854. Her grave is in the Jewish cemetery Schönhauser Allee in Berlin.

salon

The salon of Amalie Beer, next to the salon of the Mendelssohn Bartholdy family, the only significant musical salon in Berlin in the 1820s, stands out because it did not really flourish before, but after the wars of liberation (1813/15), albeit at the beginning from musical and literary conviviality in the Beer house back to 1800. From a sociological point of view, the bourgeoisie clearly predominated in his audience. Nevertheless, it attracted important representatives of the nobility and the political elite: the personal friends of the hostess included the future King Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his brother Prince Wilhelm , who later became the first German emperor, both of whom also attended their funeral . Almost all of the great composers and virtuosos of the early Romantic period , including her own son Giacomo Meyerbeer , as well as actors, singers, writers and scholars, were among their habitués . She was in contact with two other great salons of the time, Rahel Varnhagen and Hedwig von Olfers .

Awards

Amalie Beer was awarded the Louisen Order for her commitment to caring for the wounded during the Wars of Liberation . However, the process of awarding the medal dragged on over a year and a half. It was proposed three times, and King Friedrich Wilhelm III rejected it twice . from. He took offense that a Jewish woman should carry the cross, but ultimately approved the award of the order “in the different form of the circular general badge of honor”. The "kosher cross" was felt by the Berlin Jews as humiliating, especially since the monarch, despite his anti-Jewish attitude, flirted with wanting to spare the Jew Beer from the cross.

family

Marriage and offspring

Amalie Meyer Wulff and Jacob Herz Beer married on September 4, 1788 in Berlin. They had four sons:

• Jacob Meyer Beer / Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), composer,
• Heinrich Beer (1794–1842),
• Wilhelm Beer (1797–1850), businessman and astronomer, and
• Michael Beer (1800–1833), writer.

Other relatives

Amalie's granddaughter, who followed her tradition as a salonnière, was Cornelie Richter (1842–1922), daughter of her son Jakob.

Famous habitués

David Alopaeus Karoline Bauer Michael Beer (Author) Wilhelm Beer Georg Benda Archibald Campbell (?) Angelica Catalani Muzio Clementi Johann Ladislaus Dussek Eduard Goose

Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (?) Henriette Hendel-Schütz Karl von Holtei Alexander von Humboldt Johann Nepomuk Hummel August Wilhelm Iffland Karl Immermann Friedrich Kalkbrenner Franz Liszt

Mendelssohn family Giacomo Meyerbeer Ignaz Moscheles Konrad Engelbert Oelsner Hedwig von Olfers Niccolò Paganini Konrad Engelbert Oelsner Gottfried Schadow August Wilhelm Schlegel Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient

Henriette Sontag Louis Spohr Rahel Varnhagen Bernhard Anselm Weber Carl Maria von Weber Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein Carl Friedrich Zelter

literature

• Petra Wilhelmy: The Berlin Salon in the 19th Century . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 1989.
• Sven Kuhrau (ed.): Jews, citizens, Berliners. The memory of the Beer - Meyerbeer - Richter family . Henschel, Berlin 2004 (exhibition catalog).
• Heinz Becker (Ed.): Giacomo Meyerbeer - Correspondence and Diaries . 8 vols. De Gruyter, Berlin 1960–2006.
• Amalia Beer (1767-1854). Salonnière . In: Ekkehard Vollbach: Poets, Thinkers, Directors. Portraits of German Jews , Leipzig: edition chrismon, ISBN 978-3-96038-243-0 , pp. 27–41.

Web links

Commons : Amalie Beer  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Website on the Meyer-Beer family

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sven Kuhrau, Amalie Beer. Salon lady, benefactress and patriot. The program of an individual acculturation , in: Sven Kuhrau, Kurt Winkler (Hrsg.): Juden-Bürger-Berliner. The memory of the Beer-Meyerbeer-Richter family, Berlin 2004, p. 62
2. ↑ Kuhrau, pp. 60f and 63