Eleonora Duse

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Eleonora Duse (1896) Eleonora Duse signature.png

Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse (born October 3, 1858 in Vigevano , Lombardy , †  April 21, 1924 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) was an Italian actress .

Along with Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, “Die Duse” is one of the great theater actresses of her time. Her playing was subtle and not very theatrical and is considered to be groundbreaking for modern theater. She embodied mostly suffering, but strong-willed female characters.

life and work

Childhood and early years

The child role of Cosette from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was one of the Duse's first stage appearances. Portrait of Cosette by Emile Bayard from the original Les Misérables , 1862.

Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse was born into a family of actors. The parents Vincenzo (called Alessandro) Duse and Angelica Cappelletto had a traveling comedy troupe that moved from place to place. Her grandfather Luigo Duse was an actor and appeared in Padua in a self-made theater setting ; each of his sons founded their own ensemble.

Little Eleonora was already on stage at the age of four and played children's roles like Cosette in a dramatization of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables . At the age of twelve she stood in for her mother Angelica, who was ill with consumption ; at fifteen she played the leading role in Romeo and Juliet in the Verona Arena . In 1876 her mother succumbed to years of lung disease.

Around 1878 Eleonora Duse joined the theater company of Enrico Belli Blanes and Francesco Ciotti. The following year she was discovered by Giovanni Emanuel for the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples . She had her first major successes in two Shakespeare tragedies: as Desdemona in Othello and as Ophelia in Hamlet . Enthusiastic about the young talent, Emanuel engaged her for further guest tours of the theater. She had her breakthrough as an actress at the side of Giacinta Pezzana as Thérèse Raquin in Émile Zola's stage adaptation (1873) of his novel of the same name.

Back in Naples she met the journalist and bon vivant Martino Cafiero, with whom she had a short but intense love affair. Just under a year later, the now pregnant 21-year-old was abandoned by Cafiero; her child died in childbirth and, a short time later, Cafiero too.

In 1880 she joined the cast of Cesare Rossi, who were on one of their many tours through Italy. On September 7th, 1881 Eleonora Duse married her fellow actor Tebaldo Marchetti, known as "Checchi". Exactly four months later, on January 7, 1882, their daughter Enrichetta was born.

Soon after, the actress suffered a hemorrhage that seriously affected her health and temporarily confined her to the bed. In the meantime, their little daughter had to be placed with a foster family. Nevertheless, Eleonora Duse managed to witness a performance by the already world-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt in Turin . Bernhardt impressed with her exalted temperament on stage and polarized the public with her amoral private life. Despite a certain amount of admiration, the ambitious Duse saw the fourteen-year-old French woman as a rival and quickly strived to translate the roles of Bernhardt into Italian:

“I'm going to study Adrienne . I was wrong when I refused to consent to perform them. But if I want to succeed, I need the French original, as I did with 'Frou-frou' and 'Baghdad' and the 'Lady of the Camellias' ... "

Developing your own style

Eleonora Duse. Undated etching by Franz von Lenbach

When Eleonora Duse finally insisted on taking on the glamorous role of Bernhardt as the lady of the camellias in the eponymous drama by Alexandre Dumas the Younger , acting director Cesare Rossi initially refused because he feared the possibility of comparison with the great French tragedian. Nevertheless, Eleonora deliberately disregarded all reservations and managed to give her interpretation of the lady of the camellias a remarkably modern form by creating the figure more reduced than her competitor and avoiding the exaggeratedly frivolous gestures of Bernhardt. So she celebrated on January 10, 1883 in Turin with her first appearance in the controversial role a respectable success.

Convinced that the art of acting cannot be learned, but rather innate, “the Duse”, as it has meanwhile been called by contemporary critics, increasingly developed its very own method of acting. The rather petite-looking dark-haired woman relied exclusively on her expressive face, her power of representation and gestures and largely dispensed with artificial intonation , masks, props and make-up. She completely ignored the “handbook of stage poses”, a stereotypical guide on how to theatrically implement every emotion, which was in use at the time. The Duse initially met with incomprehension from the audience. This new "modern" way of portraying it irritated its critics and justified its way of playing in numerous letters. In a letter to the theater critic Icilio Polese Santarnecchi, she complained:

“Is it art that I should speak to you about? I think so ... if my successes in Rome haven't clouded my mind. - I think so ... but do you think you can talk about art? It would be the same as trying to explain love. […] There are so many ways to love and there are just as many revelations of art. There is love that elevates and leads to good: and there is love that paralyzes every will, every force, every movement of the mind. It seems to me that this is the truest, but certainly also the most disastrous [...] Whoever pretends to teach art understands absolutely nothing about it [...] Tear up this stupid letter; but don't think I'm stupid. "

First international successes

Eleonora Duse in Antony and Cleopatra (ca.1888)

Towards the end of 1883, the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga Cesare Rossi offered the staging of the popular play Cavalleria rusticana ; Verga's novella Cavalleria Rusticana later served as a model for the opera of the same name by Pietro Mascagnis (1890). In contrast to the conservative Rossi, the progressive Eleonora Duse was immediately enthusiastic about it and spontaneously took on the role of the peasant girl Santuzza. The premiere on January 14, 1884 in Turin was a great success for the ensemble and the Duse. On May 11, 1884, the group made a guest appearance in Milan .

During a meal with the mayor of the city, Eleonora Duse first met the famous playwright , composer and theater critic Arrigo Boito . In 1885, the actress went on her first foreign tour to South America . Although the actress only played in her mother tongue, thanks to her expressive play, she was also noticed by audiences outside of Italy. In Rio de Janeiro she noted:

"The newspapers only stated that I had an I-don't-know-what impressed them, but that they heard only a faint scant half of my voice - apart from the difficulty of the language (my soft Italian and that hard Portuguese with the even harder Brazilian! "

In South America she fell in love with her stage partner Flavio Andò and quickly separated from her husband Tebaldo Checchi. At the same time, she announced to Cesare Rossi that she was leaving his ensemble in order to found her own theater group together with her new partner in 1886, which she called Compagnia della Città di Roma . In letters to Rossi, she tried to alleviate her self-doubt about this decision:

“I beg you to forgive me if I send you a piece of paper in the form of a letter; maybe quite inappropriate, but your words did me so good! You have taken a great doubt of my conscience, something that has racked my mind [...] there is a certain goodness that does not save such weaklings like me! I like you, Rossi, I like you. "

A few years later she was to ask Rossi in another letter to be allowed to play in his ensemble again: “Please, Rossi, understand me, that I am not presumptuous to offer myself like this; the audience may not be interested in the matter, but I would like to be back in the ranks under the old flag. "

Arrigo Boito

The liaison with Andò did not last long: on February 11, 1887, the Duse and her new ensemble appeared in a comedy by Carlo Goldoni at the Manzoni Theater in Milan . Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito sat in the audience . Boito, whom the Duse later called “the saint”, translated the Shakespeare works Antonius and Cleopatra and Macbeth into Italian for her. The 28-year-old and the sixteen-year-old poet soon fell in love. This was the beginning of a long and complicated affair, because both were married and a divorce was out of the question in strict Italy: The Duse would have lost custody of her daughter to Tebaldo Checchi, who refused to divorce, and the reputation of the honorable writer Boito would be ruined been. So the meetings of the two always took place in secret. For Eleonora, the former artist's child who grew up without regular schooling, the well-read and eloquent Arrigo Boito represented a fatherly lover who imparted her literary knowledge. The Duse was also improving artistically: In the following years, further guest appearances took her to Egypt , Spain , the USA , England , Austria and Germany ; they were the beginning of their international careers.

Eleonora Duse in La Locandiera (1891)

On February 9, 1891, in the title role of Nora, Duse performed a play by Henrik Ibsen for the first time in Italy and received great applause. This was followed by the role of Mirandolina in Goldoni's La locandiera .

International breakthrough

A few weeks later Eleonora Duse made a guest appearance in Saint Petersburg , and further appearances followed from November 1891 to 1892. In letters to his sister, the playwright Anton Chekhov was enthusiastic about the diva and wrote: “What a wonderful actress! I've never seen anything like it before. "

The Viennese writer Hermann Bahr also saw a performance of the play La femme de Claude together with the two actors Friedrich Mitterwurzer and Josef Kainz in St. Petersburg . He was so impressed that years later he counted this experience as "one of the strongest impressions" of his life. As a review, Bahr sent a hymn of praise to the Frankfurter Zeitung and thus made Duse really well known in Central Europe. His text was included in the guide through the guest performance of Eleonore Duse (1892), which served to enable the German audience "to fully understand and enjoy" the pieces performed in Italian.

Thereupon a Viennese theater agent hired Duse to Vienna. Kainz also got her an engagement at the Lessing Theater in Berlin . Shortly after the Russia tour, she received an invitation to Vienna and gave her first guest performance in Austria on February 20, 1892 in the Carl Theater with Dumas' Lady of the Camellias : “... on the first evening she played in front of an empty house, the next day she is world famous. ”In 1893 she performed in London and Berlin.

Gabriele D'Annunzio

1894 she met five years younger poet and writer Gabriele d'Annunzio in Venice know and love. From this point on, Duse devoted all her strength and capital to d'Annunzio and tried to make his plays known, spending a fortune on the productions. She now played his pieces almost exclusively, although the roles were not right for her and they were not well received by the audience.

Eleonora Duse autograph
card in New York 1896 . Photography by Aimé Dupont

In 1896 Eleonora Duse made her second trip to the USA; in Philadelphia she began an initially formal, and later lively, friendly correspondence with the poet and translator Adolfo de Bosis, a brotherly friend of d'Annunzio. Adolfo de Bosis and his wife Liliana were to remain close friends with the Duse until the end of their lives. In the same year Arrigo Boito's wife died and the relationship between Boito and Duse started again.

The self-loving d'Annunzio soon became unfaithful and cheated on the actress; he shared private details and later relentlessly compromised them in his work Il Fuoco (Eng. Das Feuer , 1900), which is about an aging diva who adorns herself with younger lovers. He also transferred his tragedy La città morta to her long-time rival Sarah Bernhardt. Nevertheless, in 1897 she accepted Bernhardt's invitation to make her debut at their Paris “Renaissance Theater” with d'Annunzio's play Il sogno d'un mattino di primavera .

At the turn of the century Gabriele d'Annunzio dedicated even more pieces to the Duse, including the tragedies La Gioconda (1898) and Francesca da Rimini (1901) about the unhappy love of Francesca da Rimini , with clear allusions to her own failed love. Eleonora Duse plunged into severe depression over the hopeless connection with d'Annunzio:

“One must forget such days, so difficult for the mind. I regret it so much! So much. I have been so happy [...] and the person who receives my soul was so generous and good that my grief is truly only to be forgiven for - the too great bliss that seems to me lost today. "

Gabriele d'Annunzio played a significant role in Italian fascism in later years as a political activist for Benito Mussolini .

Late years and death

After separating from Gabriele d'Annunzio, the Duse concentrated more and more on the plays by Henrik Ibsen , whom she admired. During a tour of Scandinavia in the spring of 1906, she intended to meet the seriously ill Norwegian writer, but that never happened. Ibsen died on May 23rd.

In 1907, the American dancer Isadora Duncan , with whom Eleonora Duse was friends, introduced the theater star to the English set designer and theater theorist Edward Gordon Craig . The designer, who was influenced by the symbolist concept of the style stage , was known for his modern architectural stage decors and furnished several Ibsen productions of the Duse. The collaboration, however, only lasted for a short time: There were artistic differences and soon a break between the two eccentric artists, because Duse Craigs constantly changed sets without prior consultation.

Transfer of the body to Italy on board an Italian cruiser (1924)

In 1908/09, the Duse embarked on a world tour and once again made guest appearances at the stations of its long career. At the age of fifty, the Prima Donna had reached the peak of her success. The news of her departure from the theater, which she announced on January 25, 1909 after a performance of Ibsen's Rosmersholm in Berlin , was all the more surprising . She made this decision both for health reasons and out of the desire to renew herself internally.

In the years that followed, the once restless diva became quieter. She retired to her property in Asolo . Her plan to make a career in the emerging silent film did not succeed; the veristic film Cenere (dt. Ash , 1916) based on a novel by Grazia Deledda (1871-1936), in which she had co-written the screenplay and played the main role of Rosalia Derios, was not a hit with the public despite her fame. Because Cenere is the only film with Eleonora Duse, it is considered a rare piece in cinema history among film buffs .

In a letter to the director of the film, Febo Mari , who also played the son role in the film, she wrote about her doubts about the success of the work:

"Put me in the shade [...] a film in full sun, even if only as a test, like yesterday, cannot work with me; I am sure of it. Yes, the 'au premier plan' frightens me. I would rather withdraw into solitude. - I've seen a few Griffith films - I saw certain penumbra, certain sketches that would be my cup of tea. "

After the First World War , Eleonora Duse visited her daughter Enrichetta in England in May 1919. Enrichetta, who had grown up with foster parents or in English, French and German boarding schools, had married a mathematics professor in Cambridge in 1908 and was now the mother of two children. The Duse actually wanted to stay in England for several months, but broke off the stay after a few weeks due to health problems and returned to Italy.

Grave in Asolo (Italy)

Due to financial difficulties, the Duse surprisingly returned to the stage of the Teatro Balbo in Turin on May 5, 1921 with the Ibsen play The Woman from the Sea . The audience celebrated her with flowers and gave her a standing ovation of applause. After brief guest appearances in Vienna and London she appeared on 29 October 1923 in New York once a scheduled five-week tour of the United States with stops in Baltimore , Philadelphia , Washington , Boston , Chicago , New Orleans , Los Angeles , San Francisco and Detroit on. On April 1, 1924, the badly health actress arrived in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , where she fell ill with severe pneumonia . After performing on April 5, she finally collapsed.

Eleonora Duse died in her hotel room in Pittsburgh at the age of 65. Her coffin was shipped to her home country, Italy. Accompanied by thousands of her compatriots, she was buried in the Asolo cemetery , where she had her estate.

reception

Adoration in lifetime

Eleonora Duse. Portrait of John Singer Sargent (ca.1893)

Because of her great ability, Eleonora Duse, like Garbo after her , was exuberantly called "the divine" during her lifetime. After George Bernard Shaw , himself a theater critic, had seen her interpretation of the Lady of the Camellias, he even put her above her rival Sarah Bernhardt .

She was immortalized by numerous painters, including Franz von Lenbach and John Singer Sargent , and admired by writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke , whom she met in Venice in 1912, and his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal .

In advance of her American tour, Time magazine dedicated a cover story to her on July 30, 1923. She was the first woman on the cover of Time after 21 men had appeared on the cover of the magazine since the first issue (March 3, 1923) (for example, the then US President Warren G. Harding and Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon or international greats like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Winston Churchill ).

The then director of the Union Square Theater in New York, Albert M. Palmer, said of the tour:

“Ms. Duse is the greatest actress I've ever seen, and I'm not excluding Bernhardt. [...] I didn't believe that one could achieve such a naturalness on stage. The nozzle conveys the perfect illusion, and it embodies the figures in breathtaking realism. "

aftermath

Teatro Duse in Bologna

Alongside her contemporary Konstantin Stanislawski (1863–1938), Eleonora Duse is often referred to as the forerunner of modern method acting . American stage actors, acting schools and theater workshops in particular , such as the Actors Studio in New York, made famous by Lee Strasberg , often refer to the Duse as an early protagonist of the purist stylistic device of articulating only with the body and without unnecessary props . The Duse thus increasingly disregarded the acting conventions of the time and developed its own method of acting.

The life and work of the Duse and primarily their love affairs, along with numerous biographies and documentaries, even provided material for theater productions. Canadian actor Nick Mancuso directed the play Duse , which was staged in Toronto, Canada in June 2004 . The choreographer John Neumeier staged the ballet Duse in Hamburg, which premiered on December 6, 2015.

There are theaters named after the actress in various Italian cities, such as Bari , Bologna , Genoa and Rome .

literature

Letters

Biographies (selection)

German:

  • Claudia Balk: theater goddesses. Staged femininity. Clara Ziegler - Sarah Bernhardt - Eleonora Duse . Stroemfeld, Basel / Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 978-3-87877-485-3 .
  • Hanno Lunin: Puah! Or Eleonora Duse: documents and dialogues . Orpheus, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-938647-19-6 .
  • Doris Maurer : Eleonora Duse, with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988, ISBN 978-3-499-50388-7 .
  • Olga Resnevic-Signorelli: Eleonora Duse. Life and Sorrows of the Great Actress . German publishing house, Berlin [around 1935].
  • Emil Alphons Rheinhardt : The Life of Eleonora Duse . S. Fischer, Berlin 1928.
  • Monica Steegmann, Ingrid Kaech (ed.): Women in the spotlight: life stories of famous actresses from Eleonora Duse to Marlene Dietrich. Insel-TB 3048, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3-458-34748-4 .
  • Stefanie Watzka: The 'persona' of the virtuoso Eleonora Duse during the cultural change in Berlin in the 1890s: “Italian type” or “homeless migratory bird”? , Francke, Tübingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-7720-8459-1 (= Mainz research on drama and theater , volume 45, also dissertation at the University of Mainz 2012).

English:

Web links

Commons : Eleonora Duse  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Eleonora Duse  - Sources and full texts

Notes, references and sources

Unless otherwise noted, the article is largely based on the differing biographies of Dieter Wunderlich and Ernst Probst as well as data and quotations from FemBio Frauen-Biographieforschung e. V., partly also on Italian websites. Quotes from the correspondence come from Eleonora Duse: Briefe , Bertelsmann 1952, second edition 1953 (see literature).

  1. According to a different biography of Ernst Probst , she was discovered by the director of the conservatory, Lauro Rossi (1810–1885). Ernst Probst: Super Women 7 - Film and Theater . Verlag Ernst Probst, 2001, ISBN 3-935718-09-8 , p. 153 f.
  2. As can be seen from her letters, Eleonora Duse had a poor health all her life and suffered from chronic lung problems.
  3. Request to Ernesto Somigli, director of the New Theater in Florence, later friend and advisor to Duse, September 1882
  4. ^ Letter from Eleonora Duse to the theater critic Icilio Polese Santarnecchi, editor of the magazine L'arte drammatica , Rome, October 15, 1883
  5. ^ Letter to the writer Matilde Serao , Rio de Janeiro 1885
  6. ^ Letters to Cesare Rossi, November 26, 1885 and May 1893
  7. ^ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: Letters 1879-1904
  8. Quoted from DG Daviau: The man of the day after tomorrow. Hermann Bahr 1863–1934 . ÖBV, Vienna 1984, p. 27, ISBN 3-215-05093-5
  9. ^ Hermann Bahr: Eleonora Duse , in: Frankfurter Zeitung , May 9, 1891, 1. Morgenblatt, 1–2; also in Hermann Bahr: Russian Journey . Pierson, Dresden 1891, pp. 116–125.
  10. ^ Hermann Bahr: Guide through the guest performance of Eleonore Duse. With an introductory study by Hermann Bahr. Berlin: A. H. Fried 1892, 1-10. The praised foreword ( Eleonora Duse. A study ) can be downloaded as a digitized version from Hermann Bahr: Texts, 1892 (PDF, 12 pages).
  11. ^ H. Kindermann: Hermann Bahr . Böhlau, Graz / Cologne 1954, p. 47.
  12. ^ Eleonora Duse: Letters , letters to Adolfo and Liliana de Bosis from 1896
  13. ^ Eleonora Duse: Letters , Letter to Adolfo de Bosis, 1904
  14. ^ Eleonora Duse: Letters. Bertelsmann 1952, introduction
  15. ^ Eleonora Duse: Briefe , Bertelsmann 1952, p. 67, letter to Febo Mari (1917)
  16. ^ Article in Time , July 30, 1923, cover picture
  17. a b Quoted from Dieter Wunderlich: Stubborn women . Piper, 2003
  18. Helen Sheehy: Eleonora Duse - A Biography , 2003, ISBN 978-0-375-40017-9
  19. Dieter Wunderlich
  20. FemBio
  21. ^ Biografia di Eleonora Duse , original text by Andrea Giampietro
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 25, 2007 .