Teo Otto

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Teo Otto (born February 4, 1904 in Remscheid , † June 9, 1968 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German set designer .

life and work

He studied from 1923 to 1926 at the Kassel Art Academy , in Paris and at the Bauhaus in Weimar . His equipment for Gustaf ' Faust - production , Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage , Karajan's interpretation of Rosenkavalier , the world premieres of pieces of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch at the Schauspielhaus Zurich dominated the international theater history.

Teo Otto worked for more than 800 productions in the course of his life.

"Teo Otto - a name to remember" wrote the critic Alfred Kerr in 1930 about the young set designer of the legendary Kroll Opera in Berlin. As an assistant to Ewald Dülberg , he got to know important representatives of the European avant-garde, who were invited as set designers in Otto Klemperer's opera experiment. Teo Otto worked with Giorgio de Chirico , László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer , got to know Igor Stravinsky and Bertolt Brecht and met Else Lasker-Schüler . In 1930, when he was only 27, he was head of the Prussian State Theater . In 1933 the National Socialists fired him because Teo Otto was their avowed political opponent. He emigrated to Switzerland and became the set designer responsible for the legendary Zurich theater , where he stayed until his death in 1968. Here he also designed sets for several world premieres by Bertolt Brecht, for example in 1941 for Mother Courage and her children . At Brecht's invitation, he also took on work for the Berliner Ensemble . Brecht wrote the poem Theo, don't waver for him in 1956.

After the Second World War , he was the most sought-after stage designer in German-speaking theater, and worked for the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna Burgtheater , among others . He has also worked for international theaters in New York, Paris, London, Milan, Israel and Syracuse. He worked with Gustav Lindemann , Günther Rennert , Fritz Kortner , Kurt Hirschfeld , Oscar Fritz Schuh and Giorgio Strehler . His work for Harry Buckwitz was decisive for the West German reception of Brecht. His classic outfits for Karl-Heinz Stroux and Leopold Lindtberg took new, fascinating paths . He also designed stage sets for opera productions by Herbert von Karajan (e.g. for Il trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi , Salzburg Festival 1962, later Vienna State Opera ). He was professor and head of the stage design class at the Kunsthochschule Kassel from 1953 to 1958 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as the successor of Walter von Wecus from 1959 until his death (his students included Jörg Immendorff and Georg Klusemann , for example ). In addition to his stage designs, he left an important artistic work as a painter and draftsman.

An obituary said about him: “There are aesthetic and soberly abstracting ones, there are lavishly painterly decorations by Teo Otto that revel in dark silver or dark gold Baroque. He poured a veritable cornucopia of figures and images over our theater ”.

The " Teo Otto Theater " Remscheid, named after him since September 30, 2001, and the gallery of the city of Remscheid carried out an extensive retrospective on Teo Otto's work in 2000/2001 together with the Theater Museum of the State Capital Düsseldorf and the Kulturbüro Wuppertal.

Teo Otto married his long-time partner Berta in 1933, and their daughter Eva was born a year later in Switzerland. Teo Otto was married to Berta Otto until his death.

He was u. a. For 13 years he was in a relationship with the Austrian chamber actress Gusti Wolf (1912–2007), who after his death looked after parts of his artistic estate and made it accessible to the public. For the last few years he has lived with the Frankfurt designer and gallery owner Renate Höhmann, with whom he also has a daughter. During this time he began to paint again. The Höhmann family's Teo Otto archive contains, among other things, his oil paintings and central stage sets from his last creative years. A large number of his designs can also be found in the theater studies collection of the University of Cologne.

Otto's grave is in the Protestant cemetery in the Remscheid district of Bliedinghausen .

Quotes

Friedrich Luft wrote about Teo Otto in his review of the 1949 performance Wassa Schelesnowa about the stage design at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater :

"The persuasive, inconspicuous stage design by Teo Otto"

- From: Friedrich Luft: Berliner Theater 1945-1968 . Erhard Friedrich Verlag Hannover, 1961, pp. 100-101

Luft wrote about the stage set The Robbers at the Schillertheater in 1959:

"Teo Otto: He gives baroque allusions to the interior, as a precaution he pushes the game forward on this hard-of-hearing stage, and he has set up a gloomy, overcast forest backdrop that communicates greatness with beautiful restraint"

- From: Friedrich Luft: Berliner Theater 1945-1968 . Erhard Friedrich Verlag Hannover, 1961, pp. 311-313

Filmography

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ana Kugli, Michael Opitz (ed.): Brecht Lexikon . Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, p. 203
  2. ^ Theater today , 1968
  3. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Teo Otto
personal data
SURNAME Otto, Teo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Otto, Theodor Karl (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German set designer
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Remscheid
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1968
Place of death Frankfurt am Main