Otto Schelper

Portrait of Otto Schelper around 1880

Otto Schelper, portrait relief by Max Lange , 1907

Otto Schelper's grave

Otto Schelper , actually Peter Johann Christian Otto Buck (born April 10, 1844 in Rostock , † January 10, 1906 in Leipzig ) was a German opera singer ( baritone ).

Life

At the age of eight, it was already clear for the son of a musical court clerk to embark on a stage career. After graduating from elementary school , he initially trained as a businessman. However, all of his affection belonged to acting and singing. When the Rostock theater director Heinrich Behr moved to Bremen in 1860 , Schelper went with him to the city theater there and was trained by the first tenor Joseph Eichberger . During this time he performed as a choir singer. Schelper made his debut with the opera Martha von Friedrich von Flotow . Stations of his singing career were Cologne (1864), Bremen (1867), the Berliner Hofbühne (1870/71) and again Cologne.

In 1876 he was hired for the Leipzig stage and remained loyal to it until his death. According to his motto: “A man has to sing manly!”, He celebrated great success as a hero-baritone who could easily take on bass parts. With his energetic mastery he made a name for himself especially as a Wagner interpreter in the tragic-pathetic subject, but he also mastered the quieter, lyrical parts. His acting skills were particularly praised, with which he was able to breathe life into his roles.

In 1878 he sang Wotan and the Wanderer under Angelo Neumann in the Leipzig premiere of Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen . In 1881 he performed this role in Berlin. In 1882 Schelper sang as a member of Neumann's wandering Wagner ensemble during a European tour at the premiere of the Ring Cycle in London . In 1884 he shone under Victor Ernst Nessler in the role of Kirchdorfer at the acclaimed premiere of the opera Der Trompeter von Säckingen at the Carolatheater . In the Munich prototypes of 1894 he sang the Alberich and the curve with great artistic success. Schelper was also able to celebrate successes as a concert singer. In 1875 he joined as bass soloist at the German premiere of Verdi - Requiem in Cologne. A few days before his death, the singer was on stage in Leipzig. Otto Schelper was buried in the Südfriedhof in Leipzig. In 1907, friends and admirers donated him an artistically elaborate tomb with a portrait medallion, which was created by the sculptor Max Lange. His wife, the coloratura soprano Anna Schelper nee Marek, was also buried there.

Reviews

“A character among the German baritones, like Reichmann born in Rostock, was Otto Schelper, hero baritone who had been adored for over a quarter of a century, baritone hero, as a newspaper there liked to call him, of the Leipzig Opera. Even today one exposes oneself to the indignation of the ignorant when one points out the fundamental difference between the nature of other first masters and his own. Expertly speaking, one cannot say that he played his part in the traditional sense; he stood above her, played with her, played himself in the adventure of the stage process in question, while those lived in and transformed into their role. Countless details revealed this. E.g. Rossini's barber in the stretta of his entrance chant; when Schelper is in the Presto with amazing agility, 'Ah, bravo, Figaro!' sang down, he stood like a statue, 'legs closed, hands on the seams', nothing moved on him, just the loosely held jaw with uncanny speed, which of course stood out all the more as an adventurous contrast. When old Bartolo then walked slowly around the corner from his house, Figaro, bending down low, followed the yapping of a dog close behind him, so that the dog hobbled away with a clumsy leap in a funny hurry. Schelper did not make a mask in the sense of actual transformation, nor could it; for the eye, as is commonly said, or rather what is meant by it, the facial muscles surrounding it, was so expressive that beard, wrinkles, hairline, headdress, did little to help. This constant screening of the strongly emphasized personality could be dangerous for fellow players of the traditional kind, without their own note. If he and Fanny Moran-Olden represented the dark principle in the counterplay at Lohengrin, the whole blonde light album company (Sthamer and Lederer) together with the cozy King Heinrich (Grengg) was completely pressed against the wall with the long-established cast. When Schelper wasn't having one of his movement-inhibiting attacks of gout, he could be extremely agile. As slipway he danced, believing that he had fatally injured Konrad, laughing scornfully like a real goblin on one leg, and nothing is more significant than the utterance of an old Leipzig man when Perron sang the game for the first time in his deeply melancholy way: 'Good is the platform ( Pärrong ) too, but it's not so ' bestial '! In addition to the hero subject, Schelper often represented that of the play baritone, and here the outdoorsmen were his specialty, like the funny Ambrosio in Weber-Mahler's Three Pintos. Whenever there was a weaker passage in the text, Schelper slowly unfolded a handkerchief with four differently colored donkeys, which helped the cheerfulness get back on its feet. Most of all, he lived out his happy mood, which was so often completely clouded by the life of the day, in the magic flute. Nobody resisted laughing when he ironically subservient to the white-cloaked old Isis priests 'Reverend Pastor!' titled or the one who got Papagena out of his company, it was an artist who began his later so great career on a small scale - exclaimed with irresistible naturalness: 'Please don't get mixed up in my family affairs, dear Knüpfer! You better make a marriage between me and this young lady! ' - It would be difficult to give the right concept from no matter how many details of the stage effect that was characteristic of Schelper's personality. And most of them were just not aware of its peculiarity as such; one got used to viewing this rendering, which was often outside the usual art of playing, simply as the highest level of such. Schelper's stage person was what school psychology calls a sthenic nature, that is, all of his affects expressed themselves on the active, powerful side, even despair and external brokenness. He always stayed in the middle of life and doing. As a convicted Pizarro, he went off with the expression on his face: Damn it, next time I'll do it smarter! One was convinced of his crumpled Alberich: he'll start the thing from the beginning! As for his bright, highly metallic organ, the force of which he reinforced with a pronunciation chiseled in ore, but without any chopping of the melodic line, some spoke of a 'dumpling'. That it was far removed from such in the true sense of the word was already proven by his indefatigability and the easy response of the pure head tone in the mezzo-soprano, which he used extensively as the 'bride' in the three pintos' buffet. "

- Max Steinitzer : Master of Singing

Web links

• Otto Schelper at Operissimo  on the basis of the Great Singer Lexicon

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Neue Musik-Zeitung, 1895, vol. 16, no.3
2. ↑ Eugen Segnitz in NMZ 1906 p. 229.
3. ↑ Katrin Löffler, Iris Schöpa, Heidrun Sprinz: Der Leipziger Südfriedhof, Edition Leipzig, Leipzig 2000, p. 72
4. ↑ Max Steinitzer: Master of Singing. Schuster & Löffler, Berlin 1920, pp. 144 ff.