From teenage idol to a great stage personality
Cornelia Froboess plays Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night
It was a fantastic emergence into life. Cornelia Froboess swept away all clichés, portrayed a girl-like Minna von Barnhelm, in no way as if she were in full command of the situation but revealing the whole spectrum of mood changes and immaturities, a young rebel who fought with all her wit to achieve her life’s happiness with Major von Tellheim. “One of the most fascinating roles for a woman that could be seen in the last few years,” wrote one critic. That was almost thirty years ago. Now, as then, Dieter Dorn is the stage director, Helmut Griem is her partner when Froboess plays Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. In this play all hope has been abandoned. Mary is a disturbed person and in drug addiction finds refuge for herself and her dreams about life.
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Cornelia Froboess plays Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night partnered by Helmut Griem and directed by Dieter Dorn. |
In her artistic career Cornelia Froboess has repeatedly managed to achieve such astonishing links between completely contrasting roles. This began already at an early age when there was barely any indication that she was later to become a great actress. At the age of eight the little miss from West Berlin became a highly celebrated child star with the song Pack die Badehose ein (Pack up your swimsuit). She moved on almost without interruption to become a teenage idol, stormed the hit parades with Peter Kraus and Peter Alexander, played and sang in about twenty light-hearted films. However, then came the relatively abrupt change from being a star entertainer to becoming a creative, dramatic artist.
Minna von Barnhelm brought her initial sensational success in 1976 but this was by no means her first important artistic achievement. She had already made her debut in 1963 at the Salzburg Landestheater where she had been engaged by Hellmuth Matiasek (who was later to become her husband) in Franticek Langer’s Peripherie. In the following season she went to Germany with Matiasek and acted in Braunschweig, Berlin and Hamburg in plays by Molière, Lessing, Schiller and Chekhov. She was engaged at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1972 where her portrayal of Sonya in Erwin Axer’s legendary production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya convinced even hard-boiled sceptics.
The Munich Kammerspiele became her artistic homeland, Dieter Dorn and then later Thomas Langhoff her preferred directors. Her most beautiful characters are women engaged in tough struggles for a little bit of love, courageous, mutating between strength and imminent danger, often with the pitiful but unsentimental smile of one who has survived, always searching for truth of feeling.
She was Lotte in Dorn’s production of Gross und klein, his Viola, his Lulu; she was Langhoff’s Woman of the Sea, his Irene Herms in Schnitzler’s Der einsame Weg at the Salzburg Festival. She followed Dorn in 2001 to the Munich Residenz Theatre and in productions there by Thomas Langhoff conquered two extremely ambiguous women characters, Laura in Strindberg’s Father and Brecht’s Mother Courage.
Karin Kathrein
Eugene O’Neill
Long Day’s Journey into Night
New production
(performed in German)
Stage director Elmar Goerden
Sets Sylvia Merlo · Ulf Stengl
Costumes Lydia Kirchleitner
Lighting design Falk Hampel
Music Matteo Fargeon
Dramaturge Hans-Joachim Ruckhäberle
James Tyrone Helmut Griem
Mary Cavane Tyrone Cornelia Froboess
James Tyrone jr. Sohn Rainer Bock
Edmund Tyrone Jens Harzer
Cathleen Franziska Rieck
Premiere 14 August 2004, 7 p.m.
Further performances
16 and 17 August, 7 p.m.
18 August, 8 p.m.
19 August, 7 p.m.
20 August, 7 p.m.
22 August, 7 p.m.
23 August, 7 p.m.
25 August, 7 p.m.
26 August, 7 p.m.
Landestheater
Telephone +43 (0) 662 8045-500
Telefax +43 (0) 662 8045-555
info@salzburgfestival.at