The personnel files of Johanna Geisler

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In the book Die Personalakten der Johanna Geisler , published in 1983, Lotte Klemperer , daughter of the internationally famous conductor Otto Klemperer, describes the unusual life of her mother, the opera singer Johanna Geisler , before she married the conductor.

Lotte Klemperer's book

The 142-page book Die Personalakten der Johanna Geisler, published in 1983 by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag , is based on the document from the archive of the Staatstheater Wiesbaden Personal files pertaining to the chorister Miss Geisler . The document had survived eighty years and two world wars before it was tracked down by Lotte Klemperer, the daughter of the internationally known conductor Otto Klemperer after the death of her mother - his wife Johanna Geisler. In addition, she comments " Sometimes there is something to bureaucracy ...". In order to get a picture of her mother, about whose life and personality she did not know anything, she researched many other facts: about the birth of her mother - an orphan - and her foster parents, then contemporary testimonies such as newspaper clippings and other things about her career and engagements in life as a singer. How she got started singing and what the young girl, who never really studied music, experienced in the theater. From sober details, the author developed an idea of ​​her mother's arduous path as a choir singer under the patriarchal-bureaucratic administration of the Hanover , Dessau and Wiesbaden opera houses from 1903–1911 up to their solo successes in Mainz and Cologne from 1912 onwards Introduction How it came about, she writes that nothing in this book is forged . Her interim texts are only the connection between the researched documents, which show the "hardly everyday" life of her mother, the singer Johanna Geisler and then Ms. Otto Klemperer "in samples".

Appreciation

Lotte Klemperer (1928–2003), the daughter of the singer Johanna Geisler and the conductor Otto Klemperer, describes herself as the “editor” of this “documentation in samples”, which is much more than that. As a daughter, due to family ties, she deals with the societal and social situation of her mother as an orphan and a talented, independently growing artist and single mother. While at the same time withdrawing personal concern, the author opens up a “not everyday” fate of women and artists from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century and at the same time a musical cultural epoch.

Johanna Geisler's unknown life until 1919

When Johanna Geisler married the Cologne opera conductor Otto Klemperer in 1919 , she was already engaged there as an opera soloist.

Johanna Geisler's living conditions until then, from an early age, her illegitimate birth, the “horse trading” with the baby via newspaper advertisement (which is printed in the book) into the hands of a poor couple (the handover was in a stable) and her self-sufficient others Development were tapped by her daughter Lotte Klemperer. The daughter's meticulous research into the life of her mother - that of a great artist, about whom she had no idea during her lifetime - reveals the reason: the mother had stood in the shadow of her famous father. The author reports on her mother's employment as a 10-year-old saleswoman and finally on the discovery of her beautiful voice in the church choir, which paved the 14-year-old's contract as a volunteer in the opera choir. Then from the first step into independence, moving out of the foster parents' apartment into a separate room, which (as she later realizes) is in the house of a brothel, but whose residents feel human warmth for the first time. There she met an admirer, an officer from a good family, who impregnated the 18-year-old but “couldn't” marry her. How she keeps her pregnancy a secret to the very end during uninterrupted performances at the theater, declares her absence there for childbirth as an "illness" and then - at the encouragement of the child's father - quits so that no "gossip" can arise (which he fears), is based on the - as for all events - detailed details immediately documented. Under similarly desperate conditions, she soon had a second child who died four days later. Lotte Klemperer's comment on all these researched facts is: "The documentary [...] should speak for itself".

Johanna Geisler's extraordinary vocal range developed, not least through talent and persistent diligence, from Alt II, the lowest female vocal range in the choir, to the highest coloratura soprano range of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute . She became a sought-after soloist at the Mainz Opera and then at the Cologne Opera . In 1919 Otto Klemperer conducted Beethoven's opera Fidelio there , in which she sang Marzelline . They married that same year. The musicologist and author Eva Weissweiler dedicates her book to Otto Klemperer. A German-Jewish artist life of the wife of the internationally traveling musician - an extra chapter and numerous other pages.

And then

Johanna Geisler shone at Klemperer's side for ten years. Her illegitimate daughter Clara, who participated in the Klemperer's family life, was joined by two legitimate children, Werner and (the author) Lotte Klemperer. Johanna Geisler had to give up her life as a singer because Klemperer, as a Jew , had to emigrate with his family during the National Socialist era in 1933; Before that they had moved several times: to Berlin, Vienna, Zurich and finally Los Angeles (USA). Klemperer fell ill with a brain tumor there and, after a successful operation, turned to another woman for three years. Then they lived together again. On one of his concert tours that she accompanied, she died in Munich in 1956, 17 years before him.

Lotte Klemperer's collection

The daughter of the Geisler / Klemperer couple Lotte Klemperer took over her mother's job of looking after her father, the physically ailing musician. She decided not to go to university and never married. Lotte Klemperer did not know that her mother was a great artist. It was only revealed to her through her research after her death. She researched, stored and organized the material about her parents, the singer Johanna Klemperer and the conductor and composer Otto Klemperer. This is now stored in the music department of the Zurich Central Library (NL 144) together with a printed catalog by Eva Hanke (2006).

literature

See also

Main article → Johanna Geisler

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ Lotte Klemperer (Ed.): The personal files of Johanna Geisler. Documentation in samples. Fischer TB Verlag, Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-596-25626-7 .
  2. ↑ Preface How it came about , Personalakten 1983, pp. 5–7, here p. 6.
  3. ↑ Lotte Klemperer (Ed.): The personal files of Johanna Geisler. Documentation in samples. Fischer TB Verlag, Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-596-25626-7 .
  4. ↑ Klemperer 1983, pp. 24-32.
  5. ↑ Lotte Klemperer: Die Personalakten , 1983, p. 7.
  6. ^ Eva Weissweiler: Otto Klemperer. A German-Jewish artist's life. Cologne 2010, pp. 128–133 and many more pages.
  7. ↑ Described in Eva Weissweiler's book.
  8. ↑ Weissweiler p. 242.
  9. ↑ http://www.zb.uzh.ch/Medien/spezialsammlungen/musik/nachlaesse/klemperer.pdf