Grete Wiesenthal

Grete Wiesenthal was born on December 9, 1885 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary as Margarete Wiesenthal.

In September 1895, she was enrolled at the Hofoper ballet school. A year later, her sister Elsa Wiesenthal also began to take instruction there.

In the early 1900s, innovation was rampant in Vienna. In February 1902, Isadora Duncan danced there for the first time, introducing her influential new style to the Viennese, and artistic rebellion in general was in the air. Over the next few years, Wiesenthal's frustration with ballet only increased as it became clear to her that if she remained in a world dominated by individuals like Hassreiter her "desire for expression would stay unsatisfied and ... I would have to experience everything lifeless." Feeling that the movements of ballet were severely limiting the expressive possibilities of the human body, the Wiesenthal sisters began to work on their own at home.

Gustav Mahler was responsible for giving her the role of 'Fenella' in La Muette de Portici in 1907. This caused a great scandal and eventually led to Mahler's resignation, as in doing so, he had undermined the ballet master, Hassreiter.

On January 14, 1908, Grete and Elsa, joined by their sister Berta Wiesenthal , gave a performance of their new dance routines at Vienna's Cabaret Fledermaus. This fashionable cabaret had been opened some six months earlier by Fritz Wärndorfer, a founding member of the arts and crafts cooperative Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Reflecting the nascent international spirit in dance, that of New Dance (Ausdruckstanz), which reflected the passions found in Expressionist art, the performance of the Wiesenthal sisters that evening was both a triumph and a revelation for Vienna's artists and intellectuals. "One hardly finds artists in whom such an authentic and holy fire of enthusiasm is burning as is the case of the Wiesenthal sisters," wrote a reviewer for the Fremdenblatt.

In 1909, the sisters performed again in Berlin and Vienna, with Grete dancing the role of the first elf in Reinhardt's production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Munich's Artist's Theater. For three months, from July through October 1909, the sisters performed at London's Hippodrome (between acrobatic acts, singers, and clown acts). That October, they followed their London success with an appearance at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris.

She is known for her work on The Girl from Abroad; or, The Great Underworld (1913), Kadra Sâfa (1914) and Der Traum des Künstlers (1919).

In 1919, soon after the end of a war that deprived the world, including Wiesenthal, of affluence and elegance, she opened her own dancing school in the "Hohe Warte," in Vienna's upscale suburb of Döbling. Despite postwar inflation and political chaos, she trained promising students, and soon went on tour with the best of them and her male partner Toni Birkmeyer.

The First World War left deep and lasting scars on Wiesenthal's life and art. The youthful innocence her dancing evoked was forever lost through that ghastly conflict. Her husband Erwin Lang became a prisoner of war in Russia, not returning to Vienna until 1920. Wiesenthal and Lang divorced three years later, but would remain friends until his death in 1962.

In 1923, she married a Swedish physician, Nils Silfverskjöld, but the union ended in divorce in 1927. That year, Wiesenthal triumphantly returned to the Vienna stage at the Staatsoper (State Opera House), in the lead role of her ballet Der Taugenichts in Wien (The Ne'er-Do-Well in Vienna).

In January 1938, only a few weeks before the Anschluss that permitted Adolf Hitler to enter Vienna in triumph, Wiesenthal danced in public for the last time, partnered by Toni Birkmeyer, at a gala Festabend (evening of celebration).

In August 1939, because of her close ties to Richard Strauss she was able to create the dances for the Salzburg Festival production of the Hofmannsthal-Strauss adaptation of Der Bürger als Edelmann. Within weeks, Europe was once again at war. For the next six years, Wiesenthal's career was in limbo. During the Nazi period, she presided over an informal salon that brought together artists of various shadings of anti-Nazi sentiments, allowing her to play a role, if only a modest one, in traditional Austria's cultural resistance to fascism.

From 1945 until 1952, she held the post of director of the artistic dance section of the Academy for Music and the Performing Arts.

Her last creative effort was her production of the dances for Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Salzburg Festival in July 1953.

After Grete Wiesenthal died in Vienna on June 22, 1970, critics and audiences alike began to rediscover and reevaluate her remarkable legacy, a process that is still underway.

Avant-garde culture would be central to her career, but she began her life as a dancer within the traditions of ballet as it flourished in late 19th-century Vienna.