Heinrich Becker (actor)

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The Weimar Court Theater around 1800

Heinrich Becker (* 1770 in Berlin ; † 1822 in Weimar ) was a German actor and director whose family was ennobled in 1861 with the name of Blumenthal .

Live and act

Heinrich Becker was born in Berlin in 1770. As a very young man he got a job at the court theater in Weimar when it was already under the direction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . Goethe recognized his talent, appointed him director, entrusted him with a number of leading roles in his plays and turned to him on all questions relating to the roles to be performed.

Heinrich Becker was the first actor on the Weimar stage for many years and although he was the best in the comedic field, he played the role of Vansen in Egmont, to the great satisfaction of Goethe . He also played the leading main roles in the plays by Friedrich Schiller to the highest degree; especially outstanding in the roles as Burleigh in Maria Stuart , Karl Moor in Die Räuber and as Antonio in Torquato Tasso .

Heinrich Becker and his women

His first wife Christiane Becker-Neumann

At the time of his greatest success, he married his fifteen-year-old, successful actor colleague Christiane Neumann in 1794 . Their first daughter was born in the same year, a second died shortly after birth in 1796. During a guest performance, his wife fell ill with tuberculosis in the summer of 1797. She died on September 22, 1797 at the age of 18.

In 1803 Heinrich Becker remarried the nineteen-year-old actor Amalie Malcolmi, but the marriage was unhappy - their characters were too different to lead a harmonious relationship. The spirited Amalia Becker divorced him just a year later, only a few months later on December 26, 1804 , to marry her colleague Pius Alexander Wolff , a successful pupil of Goethe, who was only one year older . Both newly married couples had more and more exciting successes while Heinrich Becker's star was falling.

In 1810 he married Karoline Ambrosch , but this marriage was divorced in 1812.

Farewell and return to Weimar

In the spring of 1809 Becker left Weimar to play in Hamburg under Friedrich Ludwig Schröder , who had been to Weimar in April 1791, and at the end of the year as a member of the Breslau Theater under the direction of Streit. In Breslau he married the singer Minna Ambrosch. He stayed in Wroclaw for a few years, but then led the life of a wandering actor and joined numerous traveling theaters. Afflicted in health and abandoned by happiness, he returned to Weimar in 1820, where Goethe received him warmly. After two years of performing with varying degrees of success, he died mentally deranged in Weimar in 1822.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ludwig Eisenberg : Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century . Verlag von Paul List , Leipzig 1903, p. 74, ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).

Remarks

  1. ↑ Eisenberg mistakenly referred to Becker's second marriage.
personal data
SURNAME Becker, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blumenthal, Heinrich (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor and director
DATE OF BIRTH 1770
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1822
Place of death Weimar