Otto Krüger

Otto Krüger (* April 10th 1913 in Charlottenburg; † August 3rd 2000 in Hilden) was a German dancer, choreographer, ballet master, founder and head of the dance department of the Hanover Music Academy, the later Hannover University of Music, Theater and Media.

As someone born in “1913, the summer of the century” and endowed with the “formative power of these thirteen”, Krüger began his training as a classical dancer at the age of six Formerly the Royal Ballet School, which was affiliated with the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden and where normal school lessons also took place at the time. Victor Gsovsky, Rudolf von Laban and Max Terpis were later his most prominent dance teachers there.

The ballet students took on smaller appearances in opera productions, for example in “Rosenkavalier”, in which Krüger played the “Little Moor”, which was still quickly, before the curtain falls, a little towel slips off the stage, and was allowed to play. To thank him, he was personally given a bar of chocolate by Richard Strauss (1918–1919 also director of the Berlin State Opera) – an unforgettable encounter that left a deep impression on him has.

Also Harald Kreutzberg, who was hired as a solo dancer at the Berlin State Opera in 1924, was an important advisor to the young Krüger and a supporter of his further artistic development . In the years 1928–1931 Otto Krüger had a permanent engagement at the State Opera. From 1932 to 1934 he was in Paris – as a dancer and for further studies at the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the then very well-known Mogador Theater under hired him as the first solo dancer at the Städtische Bühnen Essen.Tatjana Gsovsky. After returning to Berlin, he founded a dance studio there. In 1935, the choreographer Mikhail Fokine.

In 1936 he also took over the direction of the ballet and choreographed its first ballet evenings; At the same time he was a dance teacher at the Folkwangschule in Essen (1936–1939). There he met the dancer Ursula Fricke, his future wife, with whom he had four children.

Before he had to go to war as a soldier, he was employed at the Wuppertal Municipal Theater (1939–1945). After the war he went to the Göttingen City Theater from 1946 to 1950 (intendant and general music director Fritz Lehmann). After the entire musical theater and ballet there was laid off for financial reasons, he ran an “Otto Krüger Dance School” in Dortmund-Brackel, his wife’s hometown.

In 1947, Walter Felsenstein opened his “Komische Oper” in East Berlin with the classic operetta “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss (son). Otto Krüger provided the ballet performances.

1951–1954 he was ballet master at the Hanover State Theater (director Kurt Ehrhardt). In his role as founder and head of the dance department of the Hanover Music Academy, he brought in Gundel Eplinius (1920–2007), a student of <, as a teacher for free modern dance /span>Josef Bayer” (music Puppenfee, to the Academy. After he stubbornly refused to play the “Mary Wigman

1954–1956 he was at the Vereinigte Städtische Bühnen Krefeld-Mönchengladbach (director Erich Schumacher), where his daughter was later (1963–1966) also engaged as an actress under the stage name Monika Krug (director Herbert Decker). Here, in addition to the usual ballet interludes, he also had to rehearse operetta interludes in various opera productions. This contradicted his high artistic standards just as the “Doll Fairy” in Hanover did before. On the other hand, in Krefeld he was also allowed to direct. There he very successfully staged Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera “Orpheus and Eurydice” .

A scandalous event, however, was the production of Béla Bartók’s “The Wonderful Mandarin “ in the then lower-middle-class city of Krefeld. The newspapers were outraged by the “shameless” content of the play: it takes place in the red light district and also shows the murder of a john, and the mayor of Cologne Konrad Adenauer personally had the immoral work banned from the schedule in Cologne in 1926 due to strong protests. The theater scandal was repeated in Krefeld 30 years later and Krüger’s children had difficulties at school because of it – in the prudish 1950s. The “decoy” in this piece was danced by the Düsseldorf prima ballerina Edel von Rothe; At the time she was married to Günter Roth, an influential director at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and, fortunately for him, Otto Krüger was

subsequently hired in Düsseldorf (1956–1959).

An exciting event, accompanied by a large press contingent, was his choreography for the European premiere of Stravinsky’s “Agon” on January 27, 1958, so it represented a great challenge for Otto Krüger.< /span>George Balanchine. Stravinsky had composed the ballet immediately beforehand for

Otto Krüger was a convinced representative of the neoclassical ballet founded by Balanchine. He preferred abstract works as opposed to story ballets. “What action appears arises entirely from the music itself in the conception. The choreography lives from the purely dance element”. Studies of contemporary composers such as Stravinsky, Hindemith, Fortner, etc. were his strength.

He also has the brothers Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky brought to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, where the premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Perspectives” (music for an imaginary ballet for two pianos) took place in 1957 .

After Düsseldorf (1956–1959), the stages of the city of Essen (1959–1963) were the last stop in his work as a choreographer. The Essen director Erich Schumacher lured Otto Krüger to Essen with incredibly good working conditions. The premiere of Wolfgang Fortner’s “Mouvements” on February 26, 1960 was significant in Essen (ballet version by Otto Krüger and Tatjana Gsovsky). He also staged two operas there, “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Christoph Willibald Gluck and “Madame Butterfly” by Giacomo Puccini.

At the end of the 1960s he was able to realize his dream of living on the Atlantic and moved into a house in the Algarve – the meeting place for his family for three decades. This time ended in May 2000, when Otto and Ursula Krüger had to be taken from Portugal back to Germany in an exciting rescue helicopter operation for health reasons. Otto Krüger died on August 3, 2000 in Hilden near Düsseldorf.

Source: Wikiwand