Wenzel Scholz
He made his debut in 1811 at the age of 24 in his mother's theatre troupe in the role of Harlequin in Friedrich Schiller's Turandot, Prinzessin von China and then appeared predominantly in Laibach and Klagenfurt.
In March 1815 he was engaged for several weeks at the Hofburgtheater in Vienna, his debut was as Traugott in August von Kotzebue's play Bruderzwist oder die Versöhnung.
When Scholz realized that he was destined to be a comedian in the local business, he left the Burgtheater in September 1815 and gave a guest performance at the Theater in der Leopoldstadt.
In 1826 Scholz achieved the final breakthrough to the popular folk comedian in the role of Klapperle in Karl Meisl's Die schwarze Frau, a parody, in which he brought the audience to frenzy with a grotesquely drastic appearance with a bloated neck and "no voice" and according to contemporary witnesses after a nonsens-Wiener Couplet [de], he had to appear up to ten times on stage.
Scholz's outward appearance, a stocky figure, a round, mostly motionless face with nimble, lively eyes and his mostly phlegmatic temperament, which stood in contrast to Nestroy, mainly contributed to the comic effect of his play.
The combination Scholz/Nestroy can be compared with the famous double acts like Arlecchino and Pantalone in the Commedia dell’arte and later Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt and also Laurel and Hardy.
He reserved to himself the role of the seemingly simple-minded boy Natzi, who was a forerunner of Willibald in Die schlimmen Buben in der Schule [de].
A humorous painting from 1848 shows Scholz and Nestroy as an "unequal 4848" National Guard pair, a militia set up by the revolutionaries in Vienna at the beginning of the 1848 Revolution.
Nestroy's farce in one act Die Fahrt mit dem Dampfwagen was premiered on 5 December 1834 at the Theater an der Wien for the benefit of his friend Scholz.
It was not until Scholz's late period that the drastic comic means were reduced in favor of a stronger internalization and psychological deepening, as in the role of the idealistic country doctor Gabriel Brunner in Nestroy's late work Kampl (1852), who wants to bring matters of love and inheritance from the high nobility to the locksmith into balance with brilliant one-line jokes, metaphors and raisonnements and as an ordering authority fights on the side of loyalty and good character.
Contemporaries report of a daring leap, a pirouette, which Scholz still performed at an advanced age in Nestroy's farce Der Unbedeutende and which prompted the audience to ovations and applause.
He can repeat the most bland things three and four times - they never get boring, on the contrary, he recites one and the same idea or remark so differently in his keys that the laughter is always increased".
On 28 March 1856 the anonymous one-act play Wenzel Scholz und Die chinesische Prinzessin was performed in the Carl-Theater on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
