Maria Elsner

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Maria Elsner (born June 10, 1905 in Leipzig ; died on or before November 7, 1983 in Windermere ) was a German-Hungarian opera singer ( mezzo-soprano ).

Life

Maria Elsner came from a Jewish family; she had a brother. She made her debut in 1928 as a singer and actress at the Freiburg City Theater . In 1931 she moved to the Semperoper in Dresden and had her brilliant role as soubrette with Adele in Die Fledermaus , which she also gave in 1931 at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and in 1934 at the Vienna State Opera and in Max Reinhardt's production in Paris . In Berlin she sang in the musical The Student Prince in the Großes Schauspielhaus and in La Périchole . In 1932 she sang Robert Stolz's operetta When the little violets bloom in the Viennese premiere of the main hit of the same name. 1932-33 she performed several times at the Theater an der Wien , including as Princess Elizabeth in Nice is the world of Lehár and Jean Gilbert's The Lady with the rainbow .

She received feature film roles and appeared in four films in 1930 and 1931, for example in 1930 on the side of Richard Tauber and Lucie Englisch in Das luring goal .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , she refused to sign the resolution of the National Socialist employees of the Dresden Opera against the artistic director Fritz Busch and was dismissed on July 31, 1933. She went to Prague and performed there in the Deutsches Theater .

As a German Jew, Elsner was no longer allowed to appear in Germany, which also prompted her brother to look for a solution. On December 27, 1933, Elsner and the German-Hungarian writer Ödön von Horváth married after living together for several months in a Viennese apartment, probably Csokor's apartment , with the best witnesses being the writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia and the historian Karl Tschuppik . She pushed for marriage. A week earlier, Horváth had surprised his long-time friend Hertha Pauli with this news at a meeting in the Viennese Café Museum , to which she responded with a suicide attempt. But already on New Year's Eve, Maria von Horváth, b. Elsner, according to the later divorce protocol, "that she loved someone else and only married him in order to obtain Hungarian citizenship and the name of her husband through marriage", whereupon he "touched the wife, shook it and maybe hit it". Horváth, visibly shaken, agreed to the divorce on February 21, which was pronounced on September 2 and confirmed on October 16, 1934. Ödön von Horváth met the actress Wera Liessem at a Berlin party from László Moholy-Nagy in September and reoriented himself.

Elsner then went to Prague temporarily before returning to Vienna in May 1935. It can be traced there until the beginning of June 1945. Immediately after the war, Maria Elsner went via Berlin to London, where she settled down and received her own radio program (vocals) on the BBC.

She also appeared in various musical productions in London . She ended her artistic career after she married the 13 years older British industrialist Sir John Fisher, head of James Fisher & Sons plc, based in Barrow-in-Furness , under the name Maria Pless on January 24, 1947 . Fisher had gained fame in 1940 when he organized the retrieval of British soldiers trapped in Dunkirk with an armada of small ships . Together with him, she set up the charitable Sir John Fisher Foundation in 1980. On November 7, 1983, both were found dead in their home in Windermere. Both left farewell letters.

Filmography

  • 1930: The linden landlady
  • 1930: the tempting goal
  • 1931: The big attraction
  • 1931: A greyhound

Recordings

literature

  • Hannes Heer , Jürgen Kesting , Peter Schmidt : Silent voices: the expulsion of the “Jews” and “politically intolerable” from the Dresden theaters 1933 to 1945; an exhibition. Semperoper Dresden and Staatsschauspiel Dresden May 15 to July 13, 2011. Berlin: Metropol, 2011 ISBN 978-3-86331-032-5 , short biography p. 125. Picture also available from Staatsschauspiel Dresden
  • Elsner, Maria . In: Large song dictionary . 2000, p. 6866
  • Karsten Brandt: The dissociation of a writer in the years 1934–1936: Ödön von Horváth and HW Becker. Five theses on Horváth's entry into the Reich Association of German Writers on July 11, 1934 . Diss. HU Berlin 2004. edoc
  • Traugott Krischke: Horváth Chronicle: data on life and Plant . 1st edition, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-38589-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b J. Shields: Heroism and dedication from an unassuming son of Barrow  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , News & Star, December 18, 2007@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.newsandstar.co.uk  
  2. ↑ Date of death: J. Shields names November 7, 1983 as the day she was found dead
  3. ↑ a b c Hertha Pauli: Break of Time , Hawthorn Books, New York, NY, 1972, pp. 45f
  4. ↑ Hannes Heer, Jürgen Kesting, Peter Schmidt: Silent voices: the expulsion of the "Jews" and "politically intolerable" from the Dresden theaters 1933 to 1945 , p. 125
  5. ↑ Traugott Krischke: Horváth Chronicle . P. 105
  6. ↑ Traugott Krischke: Horváth Chronicle . P. 106
  7. ↑ Traugott Krischke: Horváth Chronicle . P. 108
  8. ↑ Traugott Krischke: Horváth Chronicle . P. 111
  9. ↑ Theater archive Kay Less , length of stay in Vienna is confirmed by the registration office there
  10. ↑ Media archive Less
  11. ↑ James Fisher & Sons see English Wikipedia en: James Fisher & Sons
  12. ↑ Sir John Fisher Foundation website with photo of Sir John and Lady Maria Fisher
personal data
SURNAME Elsner, Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Hungarian opera singer (mezzo-soprano)
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH before November 7, 1983
Place of death Windermere