Berliner Ensemble

Overview

The Berliner Ensemble is a German theatre company established by playwright, Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel in January 1949 in East Berlin. In the time after Brecht's exile, the company first worked at Wolfgang Langhoff's Deutsches Theater. In 1954, the company moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, built in 1928, that was open for the 1928 premiere of "A Threepenny Opera".

Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble

His students Benno Besson, Egon Monk, Peter Palitzsch, and Manfred Wekwerth were given the opportunity to direct plays by Brecht that had not yet been staged. The stage designers Caspar Neher and Karl von Appen, the composers Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler, and the dramaturge Elisabeth Hauptmann were among Brecht's closest collaborators. After Brecht's death (1956), Weigel continued managing the Berliner Ensemble until her death in 1971.

The Berliner Ensemble achieved successful theater through long and meticulous rehearsals, often spanning several months. Each production was documented with a Modellbuch or preview album containing 600 to 800 action photographs.

"Dreigroschenoper" and "Happy End" premiered in Berlin in 1928 and 1929 respectively. Brecht wrote no new plays for the Berliner Ensemble, but remounted previously staged plays, premiering with "Mother Courage" in 1949. Brecht also directed "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", and with Erich Engel, "The Life of Galileo". After Brecht's death, 3 plays, "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", "Schweyk in the 2nd World War" and "The Visions of Simone Machard", had their premieres with the Ensemble.

Post- Brechtian Berliner Ensemble

The company expanded its selection to that of other European playwrights in the 1970's. In 1992, major changes took place at the theater: the Berlin Senate appointed five stage directors to serve as its "Intendanten" (General Directors): Peter Zadek, Peter Palitsch, Heiner Müller, Fritz Marquardt and Matthias Langhoff. In that same year, the internationally renowned conductor Alexander Frey was appointed Music Director of the Berliner Ensemble. Frey was the first American to hold a position at the Berliner Ensemble, as well as being the theater’s first non-German Music Director; his historic predecessors include the composers Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau.Under the new artistic management of Matthias Langhoff, Fritz Marquardt, Heiner Müller, Peter Palitzsch, and Peter Zadek, the Berliner Ensemble changed from a state-owned theater into a private, limited company subsidized by the city government. Young directors including B.K. Tragelehn and Einar Schleef and the stage designer Andreas Reinhardt questioned the traditions of Brechtian theater and introduced more contemporary theater styles to the Berliner Ensemble. Major German actors, including Therese Giehse, Lionel Steckel and Ernest Busch appeared in Berliner productions. Heiner Müller's production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, with Martin Wuttke playing the title role, became one of the most successful in the history of the Berliner Ensemble. His program "Brecht - Müller - Shakespeare" remains the guiding legacy of the Berliner Ensemble.

In 1993, the theater company was privatized, but continued to receive $16 million in subsidy. The American director Robert Wilson premiered Brecht's "Flight Over the Ocean" in 1998 to honor the hundredth anniversary of Brecht's birth.

On April 30, 1999, the curtain came down on the final production of Heiner Müller's "Die Bauern" at the Berliner Ensemble, an early end to the theater's season that also marked the end of the original institution. When he died in December 1995, the difficult decision about who would manage this highly symbolic cultural institution was exacerbated by another problem: the theater building itself was in the process of being bought by a nonprofit foundation in the hands of dramatist Rolf Hochhuth, who seemed to have his own plans for re-opening the theater. After the city of Berlin negotiated a settlement to everyone's satisfaction, the search for a new director/manager began. Claus Peymann, the provocative and successful manager of the Burgtheater in Vienna was finally appointed to the position and opened the theater in January 2000, after extensive renovations were completed during the next months. Peymann assumed his role with a commitment - like Brecht's - to producing political theater for the public, but more broadly interpreted. [ News article on the controversy of Berliner Ensemble ownership: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5D7173DF93BA35751C0A965958260]

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