Walter Jockisch

Walter Max Guido Jockisch (20 February 1907 – 22 March 1970) was a German pedagogue, dramaturge, librettist, and opera director.

[8][9][10] His wife had been married before, then an actress, in 1924 to the merchant Heinrich Max Franz Westphal (born 1900) from Słupsk in Pommerania, who lived in Charlottenburg's Schlüterstraße 12.

Since he, who had become an opera director, had never left Germany, he had a large circle of friends, which soon became mine as well.Jockisch grew up for about thirteen years initially at Heiligenbrunner Weg 6 in Gdansk-Langfuhr,[26] where he attended school until his family moved to Frankfurt in about 1920 to Holbeinstraße 19 in the Sachsenhausen district.

Jockisch, who after 1933 did not intend to submit to the Nazi dictates, consequently reoriented himself professionally and found a politically largely neutral field of activity.

[23] Between 1935 and 1937 Jockisch worked as assistant stage manager for Walter Felsenstein and Oskar Wälterlin [de] at the Oper Frankfurt.

[20][23] At the end of the war and in the immediate post-war period, Jockisch worked again in Frankfurt (1947: Igor Stravinsky / Charles Ferdinand Ramuz' L'Histoire du Soldat), at times probably also at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.

[43] From 1946 to 1948, Jockisch was artistic director of the Landestheater at the Orangerie in Darmstadt,[44] at which he had previously guest directed (1943: Capriccio by Richard Strauss; 1946 Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice).

During this period and thereafter, he guest-directed productions at the Bühnen in Kiel, again at the Landestheater Darmstadt and at the Niedersächsisches Staatstheater Hannover [de] (1951: Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,[48] 1952: world premiere of Henze's Boulevard Solitude, for which Jockisch had written the libretto together with Grete Weil after Abbé Prévosts Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut).

There, between 1960 and 1968, under the direction of Horst Gnekow [de], he staged around twenty music theatre productions, including Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer in 1960, 1961 Orfeo ed Euridice and the Swiss premiere of Brecht/Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, 1962 Mozart's Die Hochzeit des Figaro, Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore and Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, 1963 Verdi's La forza del destino, 1964 Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, 1965 Flotow's Martha and Carl Millöcker's Gasparone, 1966 Busoni's Arlecchino and L'Histoire du soldat as well as 1968 Zeller's Der Vogelhändler.

[52] Correspondence with Walter Jockisch is preserved in the estate of the stage designer and theatre director Wilhelm Reinking [de] in Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA),[53] also in the private archive of Dr. med.