Elisabeth Trissenaar died on the age of 79 | EUROtoday

FRough, tall and stylish, Elisabeth Trissenaar was the nice tragedian of the German theater. As a dream-dancing skilled for characters which might be incomprehensible, through which she might nonetheless lose herself and with whom she was capable of float past herself – at all times herself and but somebody fully totally different.

The dreamy, nonchalant aptitude of her hometown of Vienna, the place she was born in 1944, was a part of Elisabeth Trissaar’s voice, as was the smoky, velvety timbre that made her instantly recognizable together with her ears, no matter whether or not she had the emotional cosmos of a hot-cold Medea the scale of the stage or a typical brothel mom within the cinema. She, who tout le monde solely known as Sissy, did each with the identical depth and pleasure that accompanied her profession from the start. After graduating from highschool, she went straight to the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna after which to her first engagement in Bern.

Progressive Theater

From then on she performed by, largely the nice excessive dramas of world literature and ideally in – over seventy! – Productions by her husband Hans Neuenfels, whom she met as a pupil. They labored collectively in Krefeld, Heidelberg, Bochum, wherever progressive theater developed within the spirit of the 1968s.

From 1972 to 1978 they each formed the legendary co-determination mannequin on the Schauspiel Frankfurt. “I want to see thinking people on stage,” Elisabeth Trissenaar at all times emphasised, and she or he created precisely such cross-border crossers of rationality and extremists of ardour, analytically penetrated into probably the most profound twists and turns of the soul and mind: historical heroines resembling Medea and Elektra, Ibsen’s Nora and Hedda Gabler, Goethe’s Iphigenie, Wedekind’s Lulu and Franziska, Kleist’s Penthesilea, Martha in Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (with Klaus Maria Brandauer), Donna Isabella in Schiller’s “Bride of Messina”, most not too long ago in Vienna the Marquise de Merteuil from Heiner Müller’s “Quartet” (with Helmut Lohner) and because the Woman of Thebes, changing the refrain, in Sophocles’ “Antigone” in Munich.

You held your breath

When she appeared – stuffed with excitement-fevered grandeur and, regardless of all of the livid exaltation, at all times firmly on the philologically examined floor of the texts – one held one’s breath. With verve and virtuosity, Elisabeth Trissenaar was a radical challenger who demanded all the pieces from each piece, each director, each colleague and particularly herself. In the theater, alongside Neuenfels, she labored with Ruth Berghaus, Luca Ronconi and Peter Palitzsch, and in movie with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert van Ackeren, Agnieszka Holland, Doris Dörrie and Joseph Vilsmaier.

With her informal musicality, she additionally mastered the position of the frog in “Die Fledermaus” on the Salzburg Festival in 2001, one in every of Neuenfels’ productions that brought on a scandal, and requested in a superb temper to the agitated viewers: “Aren’t we all on the edge a nervous breakdown?”

She described herself as argumentative and quick-tempered, though not resentful, however when it got here to inventive reality she confirmed no quarter. Elisabeth Trissenaar died in Berlin on January 14th on the age of 79.