Hans Curjel

Hans Curjel (born May 1, 1896 in Karlsruhe ; died January 3, 1974 in Zurich ) was a Swiss-German director, conductor, theater director and journalist.

Life

Hans Richard Curjel was a son of the Karlsruhe architect Robert Curjel and Marie Herrmann. His father died in 1925, his mother committed suicide in 1940 as a racially persecuted person, and his sister was murdered in 1943 in Auschwitz .

Curjel attended the Karlsruhe Realgymnasium (Humboldt School) and graduated from high school shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. His studies first of music, then art history in Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, Vienna and Berlin were interrupted by military service. He completed his studies in 1920 with a dissertation on Hans Baldung Grien . In 1923/24 he studied violin and conducting at the Conservatory in Karlsruhe and was engaged as Kapellmeister at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf in 1924/25 . From 1925 he held the position of deputy director of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and represented the sick Willy Storck . In 1927 Otto Klemperer brought him to work as a dramaturge and director at the Kroll Opera in Berlin. Curjel hired set designers like Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy and directors like Gustaf Gründgens and Jürgen Fehling and sharpened the avant-garde profile of the theater. Curjel himself directed Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly , Janáčeks From a House of the Dead with a stage design by Caspar Neher and Hindemiths Hin und zurück . In Berlin, he made friends with Arnold Bode . After the Kroll Opera was closed in 1931, Curjel worked as a guest director at the Städtische Oper in Berlin.

When power was handed over to the National Socialists in 1933, Curjel emigrated to Switzerland. There he became senior director at the Corso Theater in Zurich , where he was able to win Max Ernst over as a set designer for variety acts. From 1942 to 1949 he was director of the Zurich Theater and Touring Cooperative and, at the same time, from 1945 to 1948 headed the Chur City Theater , where Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher staged the world premiere of Brecht's Antigone in 1948 .

After 1948 he was a freelance director in Berlin, Paris, Rome and Zurich and in 1949 at the Salzburg Festival with Mozart's La clemenza di Tito . At the Venice Biennale in 1949 he staged the second version of Brecht / Weill's Mahagonny . Curjel was intended for the advisory body of the first documenta . In the Federal Republic of Germany he produced several radio programs on new music and in 1962 a program on the Berlin Kroll Opera on West German Radio.

Fonts (selection)

Syntheses (1966)

• with Adolphe Basler : Paris Chronicle . Biermann, 1922
• Around 1900: Art nouveau and Jugendstil; Art u. Decorative arts from Europe and America at the time of the style change . Exhibition. Zurich: Museum of Applied Arts, 1952
• Henry van de Velde : To the new style . Selected from his writings and introduced by Hans Curjel. Munich: Piper, 1955
• Henry van de Velde : History of my life Ed. And transferred from the manuscript by Hans Curjel. Munich: Piper, 1962
• Syntheses. Mixed scriptures to understand the new music . Hamburg: Claassen, 1966
• Experiment Krolloper 1927–1931 . From the estate, published by Eigel Kruttge. Munich: Prestel, 1975 (1962)

literature

• Curjel, Hans , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Art Historians in Exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, pp. 107–111
• Curjel, Hans , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 198
• Ingrid Bigler-Marschall: Hans Curjel , in Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Zurich: Chronos, 2005, Volume 1, p. 423

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Curjel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Hans Curjel in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Hans Curjel in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marie Curjel , at Memorial Book for the Karlsruhe Jews
2. ↑ Hans Curjel , at documenta archiv