Magda mirror

Magda Spiegel as Ortrud in Lohengrin (1929)

Stumbling block for Magda Spiegel at Holzhausenstrasse 16 in Frankfurt am Main

Stumbling block for Magda Spiegel in front of the Hamburg State Opera in Hamburg-Neustadt

Magda Spiegel (born November 3, 1887 in Prague , Austria-Hungary ; died probably on October 20, 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German concert and opera singer.

Life

The classical contralto made her first appearance in her hometown when she was just under 20 . She moved to Germany and received appearances in the Düsseldorf State Theater (1911). She lived for several years in the city on the Rhine, but she was repeatedly obliged to give guest performances at other opera houses. Richard Strauss brought her to Berlin , in 1917 she had a huge success at the Frankfurt Opera as Brangäne in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde . It was there, in Frankfurt , that she received her first permanent engagement and from here she continued to be requested at home and abroad to interpret all the well-known roles in her field. With her dramatic alto voice, Magda Spiegel was considered a talent of the century.

When the National Socialists began cleaning up the cultural sites in 1933, Magda Spiegel, who was of Jewish origin, also caught the eye. Although she converted, she received fewer and fewer offers and was ridiculed in the press. The part of Ortrud in Lohengrin was in 1935 their last performance. She withdrew and lived in Frankfurt for seven years until she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 .

She was deported to Theresienstadt on September 1, 1942. She still performed at camp concerts, among other things she was one of the alternating contraltos in Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem . On October 19, 1944, she was transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp , where she was probably murdered immediately upon arrival. Stumbling blocks in front of the house at Holzhausenstrasse 16, where she lived from 1936 to 1941, and in front of the Hamburg State Opera remind of the artist.

literature

• Claudia Becker: Magda Spiegel. 1887-1944. Biography of a Frankfurt opera singer (= Studies on Frankfurt History No. 52). Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-7829-0547-4 .
• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 320.
• Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens , Hansjörg Rost (eds.): Großes Sängerlexikon , Volume 6. Third edition, Saur, Berlin / Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-598-11418-2 , pp. 23060f.

Web links

Commons : Magda Spiegel  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Ruth Sandhagen: Historic homes of well-known women of the Düsseldorf cultural scene: Magda Spiegel . From: Towards oblivion. Women in the intellectual history of Düsseldorf. Life pictures and chronicles. Documentation of an exhibition in the women's culture archive. Ahasvera-Verlag, Neuss 1989, ISBN 978-3-927720-01-5 ; published on the website of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Düsseldorf (with photo by Magda Spiegel)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Spiegel, Magda . Personal description on the website of the City of Frankfurt, accessed on February 22, 2020.
2. ^ Stumbling blocks: Frankfurt: Holzhausenstrasse 16 . Website of the City of Frankfurt, accessed on Feb. 22, 2020.