Margarete Wallmann was a German and Austrian dancer, choreographer, and teacher, a leading exponent of expressionist dance in pre-Hitler Germany, who later became the first woman to achieve international acclaim as an opera director. She is known for her work on Anna Karenina, Regina della Scala and La donna più bella del mondo.
Background
Wallmann was born as Margarete Burghauser. Her birthplace or birthdate cannot be determined. She appears to have been born in either Vienna or Berlin on the 21st of June in 1904 or earlier, on the 22nd of July in 1901. The daughter of a Viennese leather-goods manufacturer.
Education
Margarete Wallmann trained at the Vienna State Opera before going to Paris to study with Olga Preobrajenska. She also studied at the ballet school at Berlin State Opera, where she was taught by Eugenia Eduardowa and at Munich State Opera (now Bavarian State Opera) with Heinrich Kröll and Anna Ornelli in the 1920s. From 1923, she studied in Dresden with Mary Wigman at her school (now Villa Wigman für TANZ eV).
Career
Margarete Wallmann began her career as a member of the touring dance company of Mary Wigman in the 1920s. In 1927, she founded a dance school at which she taught the new style pioneered by Wigman, and the next year traveled to the United States to introduce the Wigman approach. In 1928, she lectured in New York on the Wigman Technique and the nature of Expressionist dance. Beginning in 1929, she headed the Wigman School in Berlin. In 1932, Wallmann closed her dance school in Berlin, after an accident ended her active career as an expressionist dancer.
In 1930 Wallmann formed her own company, the Dance Collective (Tänzer-Kollektiv), in which she was dancer and choreographer and already engaged in grappling with the pluralist style of dance. It was in Munich in 1930 that she performed with her dance ensemble a "movement drama" entitled Orpheus Dyonisos, to the music of Christoph Willibald von Gluck, with the American dancer Ted Shawn.
From 1931 on she worked on productions by Max Reinhardt for the Salzburg Festival. Wallmann would be a regular guest at the Salzburg Festival until 1937, serving that prestigious institution as its chief choreographer. In 1933, she also made her debut in Salzburg as an opera producer with Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice. That same year at Salzburg she choreographed Max Reinhardt's acclaimed version of Goethe's Faust.
From 1933, Margarete served as a choreographer and ballet director at the Vienna State Opera, where her first work was The Last Judgment. On February 26, 1938 her contract as balletmaster was renewed for one year, but following Hitler’s entry into Austria on March 11, 1938, the contract was canceled as part of the “Cleansing Operation” that ousted all Jews from official positions. As ballet director of the Vienna State Opera, Margarete created a repertoire of a specifically Austrian nature, which displayed the classical schooling of the ensemble in works such as Fanny Elssler, Osterreichische Bauernhochzeit, and Der Liebe Augustin.
During her years in Vienna, which were marked by growing political tensions, Wallmann began to display her extraordinary versatility as an artist. While working full time at the State Opera, as well as at the Salzburg Festival every summer, she also began to take foreign assignments, including work at Prague's New German Theater and Milan's fabled La Scala Opera House. Her La Scala achievements in the 1930s included choreographing operas by Boïto, Gluck, and Verdi, and ballets by the contemporary Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (The Birds and Ancient Airs and Dances). Wallmann's growing fame even brought her to Hollywood, where among other projects she choreographed the Greta Garbo film Anna Karenina in 1935.
In 1938, Margarete succeeded in getting an appointment at the Teatro Colón Ballet in Buenos Aires, where she was an affiliate and was able to create a ballet ensemble until 1948. During the war, Wallmann became a leading figure of modern dance in Argentine while she worked at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.
After returning to Europe in 1948, Wallmann concentrated her career energies on opera direction. In 1949 she moved to Milan, where she worked with ever-increasing success at directing opera of La Scala. From that time, she devoted herself mainly to directing operas. In 1954 she returned to the Salzburg Festival.
Wallmann's artistic relationship with the French composer Francis Poulenc would turn out to be a particularly fruitful one, for in 1957 she directed the world premiere of his great opera Dialogues des Carmélites at the Paris Opera as well as at La Scala.
In 1958, she directed Tosca at the Vienna State Opera under Herbert von Karajan. Until the 1970s she was in great demand as a director of the opera at the world’s major opera houses.
Besides working at such opera houses as Vienna's Staatsoper, where Margarethe directed imposing and long-lived productions of Don Carlos and Turandot under Herbert von Karajan's baton, Buenos Aires' Teatro Colón, and London's Covent Garden, Wallmann also directed operas in the United States at New York's Metropolitan Opera, Ponchielli's La Gioconda in 1966-67, and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor from 1964 through 1976, and at Chicago's Lyric Opera, Bizet's Carmen in 1959-60.
From 1972 she was the director of opera productions in Monte Carlo, Monaco. In 1988, Wallmann directed one final opera in her long and remarkable career, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, also at Monte Carlo Opera. As the author, under name Margarita Wallmann, she wrote "Les balcons du ciél" in 1976.