Biography|John Neumeier — Germany's Youngest Ballet Director Took This House

In 1969 Ulrich Erfurth, intendant of the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, made a thirty-year-old American the director of Ballet Frankfurt.

German newspapers later called him the country's youngest ballet director. The number holds if you use the 1939 birth year he later confirmed.

The company danced in the Oper Frankfurt on Untermainanlage, at today's Willy-Brandt-Platz, the postwar house that replaced the bombed nineteenth-century opera.

Neumeier was due to start on 1 December 1969. Cranko kept him in Stuttgart a little longer for The Taming of the Shrew, then Frankfurt got him.

What he did here was not a polite refresh of the classics.

His Nutcracker, premiered in the 1971–72 season, moved the story off Christmas Eve and onto a girl's twelfth birthday. Marie watches a rehearsal instead of a battle with mice.

Romeo and Juliet and Daphnis et Chloé followed. New York Times critic Clive Barnes, writing from Frankfurt in July 1972, found a little-known troupe suddenly counted among Europe's chief companies.

Ray Barra, once of American Ballet Theatre, was his assistant. A large American contingent in the ranks made the Frankfurt pit sound, for a few seasons, like a midwestern outpost.

The job lasted four seasons. In 1973 August Everding called from Hamburg.

Many of the Frankfurt dancers went with him, among them Marianne Kruuse and Max Midinet. Alfonso Catá took over the Frankfurt company.

The building on Untermainanlage is still an opera house. The ballet that Neumeier ran here later passed to William Forsythe and then closed as a municipal troupe in 2004.

What remains of the Frankfurt chapter is the method: take a title everyone thinks they know, strip the magic machinery, and leave the human plot standing.

Photo: Gerda Arendt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons