Biography|John Neumeier — Fifty-One Seasons Began on This Stage

August Everding, the new intendant of the Hamburgische Staatsoper, invited John Neumeier to the Dammtorstraße house in 1973.

The American was thirty-four. He came as director and chief choreographer of the Hamburg Ballet, after four seasons running Ballet Frankfurt.

The first months were ugly. He declined to renew sixteen dancers.

Local papers made a noise. Hanseatic audiences had been warned that the new man would be cold.

The temperature changed on 6 January 1974.

That night he danced Romeo in his own production of Romeo and Juliet, opposite Marianne Kruuse, a colleague he had brought from Frankfurt.

It was the first full-length story ballet of the Hamburg years.

The Prokofiev score and the Shakespeare plot were familiar. The attack was not.

From this stage he built a company that exported a Hamburg style rather than importing Paris or New York.

He invented the public Ballett-Werkstatt in 1973, an open rehearsal that treated the audience as students. In 1975 he added the Hamburg Ballet Days, the festival that still closes the season.

In 1996 the title changed to Ballettintendant. The work did not.

More than 170 creations carried his name here, from the Mahler symphonies to the St. Matthew Passion danced in the Michel, from Nijinsky to The Little Mermaid.

On 14 July 2024 he took the last bow as director at the 49th Nijinsky Gala.

Demis Volpi succeeded him. The tenure had lasted fifty-one seasons, among the longest of any Western arts director.

The present façade on Dammtorstraße is Gerhard Weber's 1955 reconstruction.

The 1827 Stadt-Theater burned in the 1943 raids. Neumeier's entire Hamburg career happened in the rebuilt house.

Photo: Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons