Actor, operatic director, educator; born 20 February 1887 in Berlin, died 14 May 1980 in Los Angeles.
Biography
Carl Ebert was born in 1887 in Berlin. At the age of 22 he joined the Deutsches Theater as an actor under Max Reinhardt, where he went on to become a leading actor in Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1927 he became an opera director in Darmstadt, a position he then held in Berlin between 1931 and 1934. There, he directed many operas including the premiere of Weill’s Die Bürgschaft in Berlin, 1932.
After 1933, when the Nazis came to power, he left to Buenos Aires for political safety. There he worked to plan the Mozart Festival at Glyndebourne.
In 1934, Ebert emigrated to the United Kingdom. Together with the conductor Fritz Busch, he co-founded the Mozart Festival at Glyndebourne. From 1936 he made regular visits to Ankara where he was instrumental in developing a state drama and opera school and a state opera, that had been partly instigated by Paul Hindemith at the request of the Turkish government. Ebert spent much of the war years there as head of the Department of the Performing Arts and played a decisive role in commissioning opera translations into Turkish for the school with educationalist, Hasan Âli Yücel.
After 1947 he returned to Glyndebourne, where he directed every year until 1959. He retired to Santa Monica in Los Angeles, where he died in 1980.
Links and sources
Carl Ebert’s Production History at Glyndebourne
Ebert, Peter. In This Theatre of Man's Life: The Biography of Carl Ebert. (Lewes Sussex: Book Guild, 2000).
Alaz Pesen, “CARL EBERT: THE PATRON BEHIND THE HISTORY OF THE STATE OPERA IN TURKEY,” Tradução Em Revista 2022, no. 34 (November 13, 2019): 123–41, doi:10.17771/PUCRio.TradRev.45917.
Balme, Christopher. "Theatrical Institutions in Motion: Developing Theatre in the Postcolonial Era." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 31, no. 2 (2017): 125-140. doi:10.1353/dtc.2017.0006.
