Ludwig Devrient

Devrient, Ludwig 

Born Dec. 15, 1784, in Berlin; died there Dec. 30, 1832. German actor.

In 1804, Devrient joined a theatrical company on tour in Thuringia (before 1807 he acted under the name Hertzberg). Subsequently he performed at the court theater in Dessau, at the Breslau Theater, and from 1814, at the Royal Theater in Berlin. He was especially successful in tragedies by Shakespeare and Schiller. Character roles suited his art best. He was able to accurately render every nuance of his heroes’ feelings and thoughts and create true-to-life and romantic characters, stressing their contrasting traits. His best roles were Franz Moor and Gessler in Schiller’s The Robbers and William Tell; King Lear, Shylock, and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Henry IV; and Harpagon in Moliére’s The Miser. He was a friend of the writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who in the book The Strange Sufferings of a Theater Manager (1819) created a character based on Devrient. An outstanding master of the German stage, Devrient brought the era of romanticism to a close and at the same time paved the way for 19th-century realism.

REFERENCE

Altmann G. L. Devrient. Berlin, 1926.