Paul Hager (director)

Paul Hager (born November 15, 1925 in Remscheid, † April 12, 1983 in Dortmund) was a German opera director and theater director .

Life

His mother, Emmy Hager, b. Tillmanns was a pianist, his father Franz Paul Hager was general director of the Remscheider Alexanderwerk , both regular visitors to the Bayreuth Festival . Music and theater, but also the responsible entrepreneurial behavior of his father ( global economic crisis ) shaped his childhood. Determined by his father to be his successor before his premature death, after returning from the front, he completed a business degree at Cologne University, which he completed with a thesis on the organizational principles of German cultural theater.

He completed his "apprenticeship years" at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich under Rudolf Hartmann , Heinz Arnold (direction), Georg Solti , Eugen Jochum , Ferenc Fricsay (conductor), Carl Orff (composer) and at the Bayreuth Festival under Wieland Wagner (direction) , Hans Knappertsbusch , Herbert von Karajan (conductors). After his first own productions in Nuremberg, he became Germany's youngest artistic director in Heidelberg in the 1953/54 season.

In the fall of 1954, the production of Puccini's La Bohème for the festival season ("Fall Season") of the San Francisco Opera began his collaboration with this house, which was to last 30 years. In addition to the established opera repertoire, his productions also included American premieres: 1954 Arthur Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher ; 1958 Carl Orffs Die Kluge (title role: Leontyne Price ) and Carmina Burana (conductor: Leopold Ludwig ), (set design: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle ); 1959 Richard Strauss' The Woman Without a Shadow ; 1960 Dmitri Shostakovich's Ekaterina Ismailova . In 1973 he received the San Francisco Opera Medal for his services.

From the 1957/58 season, Paul Hager was also a regular guest director at the Stuttgart Opera , where, alongside Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier (1964, conductor: Ferdinand Leitner ) and Elektra (1971, conductor: Carlos Kleiber ), he performed a new production of Carl Orff's Antigonae in 1967 brought out, which was invited to the theater festival in Athens.

In 1958 Herbert von Karajan brought him to the Vienna State Opera as senior director , which he left when he left in 1964. Of his productions at this house, Ruggero Leoncavallos Pagliacci was played 150 times by 1982 and Charles Gounod's Faust 54 times by 1977. His directorial work for the Salzburg Festival also fell during this “Viennese” period : in 1961 the premiere of Rudolf Wagner-Régeny's Das Bergwerk von Falun (conductor: Heinz Wallberg ) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Idomeneo (conductor: Herbert von Karajan).

In 1964 Erich Schumacher signed him to Essen as senior director of the opera. In addition, guest appearances have taken him to the Nationaltheater Mannheim ( Salome with Gloria Davy in the title role), to Stuttgart, Cologne, Lyon, to La Scala in Milan (Pietro Mascagnis Cavalleria rusticana ) and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires ( Der Rosenkavalier with Sena Jurinac , Christa Ludwig , Walter Berry , conductor: Erich Leinsdorf ).

After a crisis-ridden time in which the continued existence of the Dortmund Opera was dramatically called into question, Paul Hager took over the artistic direction of the newly established Städtische Bühnen Dortmund as general director in 1975 together with the administrative director Karlheinz Engels. At the time it was a three-part theater, which also included a children's and youth theater. In 1976, with Siegfried in Richard Wagner's great house under the conductor Wilhelm Schüchter , the Ring des Nibelungen, begun with the Walküre , was brought to an end. In 1977/78, following the Wagner tradition, the Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Parsifal followed . Here, too, he succeeded in realizing his particular fondness for modern musical dramas with Alban Berg's Lulu (1977/78) and Wolfgang Fortner's Blood Wedding (1975/76).

Paul Hager is best known as a man of opera, music, musical drama and as a theater director, as an organizer. But he was also a comedian. Already early in 1949 he liked to appear on stage in Munich in small roles (as in Tobias Wunderlich ), in Heidelberg he saved an evening performance by taking the title role in Molière's The Imaginary Ill . During a rehearsal for Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades , he collapsed on stage in 1983 and died a short time later in hospital. Paul Hager left two children.

literature

• Franz Feldens: 75 years of Essen Municipal Theaters . History of the Essen Theater 1892–1967. Rheinisch-Westfälische Verlagsgesellschaft, Essen 1967.
• Jürgen Dieter Waidelich : Essen plays theater . 1000 and one hundred years; for the 100th birthday of the Grillo Theater. tape 1 . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, ISBN 3-430-19452-0 .
• Jürgen Dieter Waidelich: Essen plays theater . 1000 and one hundred years; for the 100th birthday of the Grillo Theater. tape 2 . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-430-19454-7 .
• Walter Erich Schäfer : The Stuttgart Opera . Günther Neske, Pfullingen 1972, ISBN 3-7885-0023-9 .
• Directorate of the Dortmund Municipal Theaters: 75 years of the Dortmund Municipal Theater . Wulff Verlag, Dortmund, ISBN 3-88090-067-1 .
• The festival management: Bayreuth Festival 1951 . Wagner bookstore Georg Niehernheim, Bayreuth.
• Artistic director of the Bavarian State Opera: sheets of the Bavarian State Opera . J. Gotteswinter, Munich.
• Peter Dusek : Opera Houses of the World, The Vienna State Opera . Orpheus-Verlag, Berlin.
• Arthur J. Bloomfield: The San Francisco Opera 1923-1961 . Arthur Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York.

Web links

• Hans pupil. The estate of the Mannheim theater principal. Mannheim City Archives, accessed on August 18, 2013 (correspondence with Paul Hager under the numbers 343 and 384). 
• John: What can you expect of directors? In: The time . Weekly newspaper for politics, business, knowledge and culture. Zeitverlag Bucerius, November 27, 1958, ISSN  0044-2070 ( Zeit Online [accessed August 18, 2013]).