Walter Jankuhn

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Walter Jankuhn

Walter Jankuhn (born July 14, 1888 in Königsberg ; † May 22, 1953 in Berlin ) was one of the well-known operetta tenors in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

Life

After training as a singer, Walter Jankuhn had various engagements at the Mellini Theater in Hanover, sang and then also played on theaters in Berlin. In the New Theater on Schiffbauerdamm, built in 1892, Max Monti took over the management of the drama theater in 1911 and converted the house into an operetta theater.

Already in the first season Monti brought out a successful world premiere: In February 1912 Der liebe Augustin von Leo Fall premiered. In the successful production, Fritzi Massary played the leading role, Walter Jankuhn the male leading role. Edison made recordings on clay rollers with excerpts from this operetta , the duet, the waltz song Where is that written? , sung with Mizzi Geissler as a partner, acted.

In addition, Walter Jankuhn had an engagement in Hamburg in 1912 at the New Operetta Theater in a production Was kost 'Hamburg . One photo shows him as a rooster in a basket among ten women who can be seen in the swimwear that was common at the time. The ingenious slogan "In this open-air swimming pool it is forbidden to swim under penalty" adorns the set at the top right. At this point in time, Walter Jankuhn was evidently a handsome man and already a sought-after operetta tenor.

The Weimar Republic

Queen among the operetta stars was Fritzi Massary , with whom Walter Jankuhn worked several times. Her glamorous career began before the First World War at the Berlin Metropol Theater . "Between her, who appeared very young in Wilhelmine Berlin and who enchanted the post-revolutionary era as a woman, and the German audience there was a love affair that lasted two decades," wrote Fritz Kortner in his retrospective Aller Tage Abend .

At the time of the beginning inflation in 1922, the operetta Madame Pompadour premiered at the Berlin theater on September 9, 1922, with Fritzi Massary in the lead role. The cocotte theme remained interesting for the operetta genre. The proven Leo Fall had written the music for a plot that this time was not about a modern cocotte, but about a historical one .

Walter Jankuhn made close acquaintance with this subject when Madame Pompadour was resumed , premiered on December 23, 1927, at the side of the Massary in the Great Theater and when it was made into a film in 1930. The revised version of the Pompadour by Erik Charell was a great success for the house and the protagonists of the performance, including Walter Jankuhn.

The press had cheered at the Pompadour performance, mainly because of the Massary, of course. Nevertheless, its zenith was reached, if not exceeded. The image of women she embodied, alternating between cocotte and grande dame, was increasingly in contrast with an androgynous type of woman, more in keeping with the zeitgeist, who aimed at equality and employment.

Erik Charell had the story of the Merry Widow rebuilt for the Massary and the lyrics to be changed. The premiere was on December 25, 1928 among the partners of the Massary: ​​Walter Jankuhn. This was followed in 1929 with recordings of the Merry Widow in the cast of Fritzi Massary and Walter Jankuhn as well as Walter Jankuhn and Uschi Elleot .

First film roles

While the film still had a somewhat disreputable image in its early days, more and more 'serious' actors were drawn to this profession in the course of the 1920s. With the introduction of the sound film, the protagonists of the singing art of acting were drawn to film, where more money could be earned.

Walter Jankuhn played the leading role of Harald von Lindenberg in the film Lotte in 1928 in a silent film production alongside the silent film diva Henny Porten . Carl Froelich was the producer and director of the film . Other roles included a. Adele Sandrock and Elsa Wagner can be seen.

In 1929 Walter Jankuhn got a leading role in the first sound film that was shot and produced entirely in a German studio. He played and sang as Otto Raney in the film You have loved me (premiere November 22, 1929), which was successful at the box office and was even exported to the USA. In the direction of Hans Conradi , well-known actors such as Hans Stüwe , Karl Platen , Trude Berliner and Hans Mierendorff played alongside Walter Jankuhn . Equally successful he was with the same name by Edward May and Bruno Balz composed Schlager loved you have I , who was a hit in the 1929th

In the white Rößl

In 1930 Erik Charell brought out the production Im Weiße Rößl in the Großes Schauspielhaus . The piece, written by Oskar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg , was a joyous success with the public at the turn of the century and has since been forgotten. The story of the head waiter in love, who tames the stubborn landlady and forces her to love, was also a hymn to Austria and the good old imperial era.

The piece has been given a radical makeover by Charell. Authors and composers were rounded up and went to work in a feverish hurry to transform the dusty original into a lively Singspiel revue by the time the theater started in autumn. Robert Gilbert , the son of the operetta composer Jean Gilbert, rhymed the lyrics. Ralph Benatzky took over the overall compositional direction and wrote several musical numbers, including the snappy title hit. He had helpers and suppliers. Eduard Künneke orchestrated the choirs, Bruno Granichstädten contributed to the community effort , Robert Stolz contributed the whole world is sky blue and my love song must be a waltz . The interpreter of the last two hits was Walter Jankuhn.

The set designer Ernst Stern had transplanted the lush green forests of St. Wolfgang into the large theater and put the neat half-timbered building of the Seegasthof Zum Weißen Rössl on the boards. Camilla Spira played the landlady Josepha Vogelhuber, who, after all sorts of twists and turns, fell into love with Leopold, alias Max Hansen, her lover . Siegfried Arno as the beautiful Sigismund, Otto Wallburg as the bubbling and dissatisfied guest, Paul Hörbiger as the old Austrian Emperor himself and Walter Jankuhn as Dr. Siedler, Trude Lieske and Gustl Stark-Gstettenbauer were the actors in this performance.

More film roles

In 1930 the story of Madame Pompadour was filmed with Anny Ahlers in the role of Pompadour and new music by Eduard Künneke, Robert Stolz and Rudolf Nelson. Walter Jankuhn as Gaston de Meville, Wilhelm Bendow as Melange, Max Ehrlich as Court banker Cerf and Kurt Gerron as Ludwig XV. played in other roles under the direction of Willi Wolff . In the sign of the emerging sound film, the cinema screens were inundated by a flood of these high-spirited and pompous operetta and music feature films.

In one of the numerous film productions from 1930, Walter Jankuhn played the leading role alongside Maria Matray in the film Stormy the Night , which was shot in Hamburg. Curt Blachnitzky directed it. Walter Jankuhn played in the main role the broker Brandt, who was involved in smuggling business and who fell in love with the daughter of the police officer Peters. He is known for his beautiful voice and his favorite song is You are only lucky .

Political situation

Organized groups of visitors from the Nazis visited the performances of the theater more and more frequently and whistled and shouted down Jewish artists and actors with “Jews out!”. Political clauses were posted between those waiting at the stage entrance, shouting to the rhythm: “We don't want to see Jews on a German stage!” Fritzi Massary and her Jewish colleagues knew by now at the latest that it would hardly be possible to linger in Germany .

In November 1932, Eduard Künneke's Happy Journey was brought out in the Kurfürstendamm Theater in Berlin . It was to be his second great success (after the cousin von Dingsda ) after a series of weaker works by the composer . Lizzi Waldmüller was the name of the rousing, spirited soubrette, and Leo Peukert was the director. After the National Socialists came to power, the theater was closed so that the success could not really be enjoyed. Walter Jankuhn landed a big hit with a tango from the operetta Happy Journey .

Third Reich

During 1933 the Jewish part of the operetta scene was driven into emigration or banned from working. The non-“ Aryan ” composers Paul Abraham , Eysler, Kálmán, Oscar Straus , Leo Ascher, Granichstädten and Gilbert had to leave the country and their works were no longer allowed to be played. This ban even applied to the Leo case, who had been dead for 10 years . What remained of the operetta wasn’t too much.

In 1934 Walter Jankuhn was given another role in a feature film. He played with Adele Sandrock, Erik Ode and Georg Alexander in the film Gypsy Blood , directed by Charles Klein. The film was criticized but to be quite outdated story panned where best performers were shown only on their already known effective side. In the previous films, too, Walter Jankuhn got off well, especially when it came to assessing his singing abilities, while his purely acting abilities were viewed more critically. For these reasons, there were no further engagements as far as the film was concerned.

In the following years, Walter Jankuhn was mainly seen on stage again. In September 1937 the operetta bliss was left behind in the Admiralspalast . Revue operetta was the correct name for the novelty of the house. The singer Robert Dorsay had decided to counter the traditional, something that corresponded to his own ideas. So Dorsay wrote his own operetta with Walter W. Espe and the composer Victor Corzilius. The revue operetta Today I am in love emerged from an amusing, varied text book and lively, sometimes alarmingly weird music . The title hit, Come dance with me Swingtime , sang Robert Dorsay . Walter Jankuhn was among the actors in this play.

Walter Jankuhn survived Nazi Germany and the war . No information is currently available about his professional career in the 1940s. He lived on Münchener Strasse in the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin-Schöneberg , where he died in 1953.

Web links and CDs with recordings by Walter Jankuhn

literature

  • Otto Schneidereit: Berlin how it cries and laughs. VEB Lied der Zeit, Berlin 1968
  • Bernard Grun: Cultural history of the operetta. VEB Lied der Zeit, Musikverlag Berlin
  • Ulrich Liebe: adored, persecuted, forgotten. Actor as a Nazi victim. Beltz Quadriga Verlag, 1992
  • Illustrated Filmkurier 1286, 2127, 1513, 1450, 833a. Available in the archive of the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation , written material and photo archive
  • Christoph Funke: Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the story of a Berlin stage. Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1992

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Jankuhn, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German tenor
DATE OF BIRTH July 14, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1953
Place of death Berlin