Sara Oppenheimer

Sara Oppenheimer (born October 4, 1844 in Esens , † December 15, 1906 in Mainz ) was a German opera singer .

Life

She was the daughter of the butcher, cattle dealer and light puller David Oppenheimer and his wife Regine nee. Son of Abraham. The father played in the music corps of the Esens rifle company, in which he was accepted as a musician despite his Jewish origins . Despite the restrictions imposed by her religion, the talented daughter received music lessons.

The extraordinary voice caught the eye and in 1863 she came to Frankfurt am Main , where she was initially engaged for guest roles. Music director Ignatz Lachner from Frankfurter Stadttheater gave her more than ten years of engagement at the Stadttheater, where she shone in many prime roles in stage productions, such as Marriage of Figaro (Countess Almaviva) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Giuseppe Verdi's Troubadur (Azucena) and Carl Maria von Webers Freischütz (Agathe). Even Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman (Mary) and Lohengrin (Ortrud) belonged to their roles, as well as French and Italian operas. She also performed outside of Frankfurt.

Large opera houses soon became aware of Sara Oppenheimer, but she resisted attempts to poach them from the Vienna Court Opera House in 1872 and the Berlin Opera. A concert that she was supposed to give in Esens in 1864 was promptly canceled due to objections from anti-Semitic Lutherans. Richard Wagner, who was also anti-Semitic, paid her his respect in public and wanted to win her over to the Bayreuth Festival Theater in 1874, which Sara Oppenheimer also refused.

On December 31, 1874, she married the Mainz businessman Bernhard Wolf and, after an impressive final performance in Frankfurt, withdrew into private life and lived in Mainz, where she then died.

Honors

In 2014 a street in Esens was named after Sara Oppenheimer.

swell

• Report in the Anzeiger für Harlingerland from 23 August 2014 (with photo)
• Gerd Rokahr : Sara Oppenheimer in the online library of the East Frisian landscape