Ernst von Possart

Ernst von Possart - portrait by Georg Papperitz , 1909

Ernst Possart as "Narcissus", approx. 1880

Ernst Heinrich Possart, 1867. Graphic by Adolf Neumann.

Ernst Heinrich Possart , since 1897 Ritter von Possart (born May 11, 1841 in Berlin ; † April 8, 1921 there ) was a German actor and stage manager.

Life

Possart was the son of the Berlin businessman Johann Christian Possart and his wife Wilhelmine Angelica Göhren. The later painter Professor Felix Possart was his brother.

He completed a three-year apprenticeship as a bookseller and then became a student of the Berlin court actor Wilhelm Kaiser . At the age of twenty, Possart made his successful debut at the Urania Theater in Breslau in 1861 in the role of "Siegfried von Mörner" in The Prince of Homburg ( Heinrich von Kleist ). His first engagement in Breslau began in 1861 with second character roles, and he was able to move to Berlin the following year, where he also played leading roles until 1863.

In 1863 he was appointed to replace Karl August Görner as a director at the Hamburg City Theater. From 1864 he was the first character actor at the court theater in Munich and had his artistic breakthrough as "Franz Moor" in The Robbers ( Friedrich Schiller ). There he met Anna Deinet , who was later appointed chamber singer , and whom he married in 1868. He had four children with her, including Anna, the singer Ernesta Delsarta , later known under the pseudonym , and Cornelia, who became known as a pianist after their marriage under the name Rider-Possart. In 1883, Possart and Deinet divorced and then remarried five years later in New York .

From 1873 he was chief director at the Hofbühne in Munich , and in 1878 he advanced to acting director. At the same time as this promotion, Possart was also appointed professor. Numerous guest performances, as well as the overall guest performances that he organized in Munich in 1880, made his name known in wider circles. In 1887 he resigned from the Munich Court Theater Association to give guest roles in America; from 1888 he was director of the Berlin Lessing Theater .

In 1893 Possart returned to Munich and became general director and artistic director of the royal court theaters, which marked the beginning of one of the most glamorous periods on this stage. He continued to appear there as an actor and director. In recognition of his work, which was judged very positively in the press, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown by Prince Regent Luitpold in 1897 . Associated with this was the elevation to the personal nobility status and he was allowed to call himself Ritter von Possart after his entry in the nobility register . In 1903 he received the Commander's Cross for this order.

In addition, he wrote a modern play "The Law of the Heart", which was performed in Cologne at the end of 1898 and in Nuremberg at the beginning of 1899. In 1897 an intensive and very successful collaboration began with Richard Strauss as the declamator of his melodrama “Enoch Arden”, which they both performed on several concert tours in Germany this year and the next, and from March 1899 also Strauss's second melodrama “Das Schloß by the sea “1). Between 1900 and 1901, through his intensive public relations work, he played a key role in the realization of the Prinzregententheater , which was designed with the architect Max Littmann . In 1904 his second drama text "Our Father" was premiered in the setting by Hugo Röhr at the Munich Court Theater. At the age of 64, Possart retired from his offices at the court theater in 1905, but was still very active as a reciter. He celebrated special triumphs with the performance of the texts of Wagner's operas in several cities in 1907. When his wife died in 1919, Possart settled in his hometown of Berlin that same year. There he died on April 8, 1921, at the age of almost eighty.

Grave of Ernst Possart in the old southern cemetery in Munich location

The tomb of Ernst Possart is on the old southern cemetery in Munich (burial ground 31 - Series 1 - Place 30) location .

As a character actor, his best roles were “ Hamlet ”, “ Jago ”, “Mephisto”, “Franz Moor”, “ Nathan ”, “ Richard III. "," Shylock "u. v. a. Some phonograph recordings by Possart are available in the German Broadcasting Archive in Wiesbaden.

Possart is considered one of the most influential theater officials in the 19th century and a typical representative of court theater in German-speaking countries. I.a. he was instrumental in the discovery and promotion of the famous actor Josef Kainz .

Possart was also a decisive figure for the opera and musical life of his time. As general director of the Munich court theaters, he performed new German translations of Mozart's operas in collaboration with the conductors Hermann Levi and Richard Strauss . With sumptuously furnished performances of Richard Wagner's works in Munich, he had great success and made great competition for the still young Bayreuth Festival under the direction of Cosima Wagner .

In addition, Possart repeatedly appeared as a reciter of melodramas . After the portrayal of the title role in Robert Schumann's melodrama Manfred had been an important milestone in Possart's career in 1868, his musical recitation style in the fin de siècle inspired a number of composers to compose further melodramas. Both the melodramatic first version of The Königskinder by Engelbert Humperdinck (1897) and the melodrama Das Hexenlied by Max von Schillings (1902), which became one of the most popular works in Wilhelmine Germany, would not have been made without Possart's melodramatic preferences.

With his fellow actor Emil Rohde (1839–1913), who belonged to King Ludwig II's personal circle of friends , Possart had a lifelong friendship.

Ernst Possart was also very close to the Volkstheater poet Arthur Müller (born June 26, 1828 in Namslau near Breslau ; † April 10, 1873 in Munich through suicide) , who was 13 years his senior . In his plays he opposed state and church repression as something dishonest and despicable. At Arthur Müller's funeral on April 12, 1873 in the old Südfriedhof in Munich, Ernst Possart, in his capacity as court actor and director, but above all as a friend, gave the farewell speech to the deceased , not far from his own later grave. Hermann von Schmid wrote in the garden arbor in 1876 under the title A runaway apprentice :

“One of the first plays staged by Possart in Munich is said to be 'Yellow Roses' by Arthur Müller, the talented poet of so many popular stage plays ('Gute Nacht, Hänschen', 'The Conspiracy of Women'), who pinned the thread so early of his creations with his own hand. Possart was very close friends with Müller and took over the performance of this last work from him as a kind of legacy, which he intends to fulfill with rare loyalty that extends beyond death. "

Honors

• Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. Hc) from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich
• 1897 Elevation to the personal nobility status as a knight of Possart
• Awarded the satyr buttons as the most important actor of his time

Works

• The actor's course. In: Spemann's golden book of the theater. Spemann, Berlin and Stuttgart 1902, No. 871-885.
• The art of speaking. 1907.
• Experienced and strived for. 1916.

Student (selection)

• Amalie Cramer

literature

• Richard Crodel: The actor Ernst Possart . Mönchengladbach 1927.
• Hans Frahm: Ernst von Possart as a theater director. A contribution to the history of classic productions in the 19th century. Munich 1933.
• Christa Jost:  Possart, Ernst Heinrich von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , pp. 654 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Matthias Nöther: Live as a citizen, speak as a demigod. Melodrama, declamation and chanting in the Wilhelmine Empire. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20097-8 .
• Roswitha Schlötterer-Traimer: The "Mozart Renaissance" of the Munich Court Opera by Possart / Levi / Strauss. In: Musik in Bayern , issue 58, 1999.
• Ch. J .: Le chevalier Ernst von Possart. In: Musica , issue 24, 1904.

Web links

Commons : Ernst von Possart  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ernst von Possart in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bavarian State Statistical Office (ed.): Court and State Manual of the Kingdom of Bavaria for the year 1914. Munich 1914. p. 20.
2. ↑ alter-suedfriedhof-muenchen.online ( memento of the original from August 26, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ^ Hermann von Schmid: A runaway apprentice . In: The Gazebo . Issue 1, 1876, pp. 13, 15, 16 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).