Haase, Friedrich

(1825-1911)

   Actor. Haase was a first-rate actor by 1846 at the Court Theater of Weimar. His father was a chamberlain for Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II, and as one of the king's godsons, Haase grew up in the presence of actors at Berlin's Royal Theater. He studied under Ludwig Tieck, learning a great deal about Shakespearean staging, and he put those lessons into practice by the time he was a theater manager in Gotha, where he patterned his 1866 production of Hamlet on Tieck's ideas about Elizabethan staging. He ran the Leipzig City Theater from 1870 to 1876, after which he embarked on several profitable tours throughout central Europe, Russia, and America. His presence in New York resulted in a series of sold-out houses, especially when he played Mephisto in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust on Broadway. At the Neues Stadttheater in New York, Haase starred in plays by Karl Gutzkow and August von Kotzebue. On a second tour of New York in 1881, Haase did a season at the Neues Germania Theater in plays by Karl von Holtei, Friedrich Schiller (as Philipp II in Don Carlos), Shakespeare (as Shylock in The Merchantof Venice), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Marinelli in Emilia Galotti). He returned to Germany having earned an enormous amount of money in America, hoping to form a company along the lines of the Meininger troupe.

   In 1883 Haase accepted Adolph L'Arronge's offer to join a consortium at the newly renamed Deutsches Theater, with the goal of devoting care and preparation to productions in emulation of the Meininger. The attempt foundered on the inability and/or unwillingness of Haase and other cofounders to commit enough time in Berlin to produce Meininger-like detail in production. L'Arronge maintained that Haase was so used to being a star on tour that he never did become a contributing partner. Haase earned a paltry RM2,000 as a partner; to him, "that was a sacrifice. In five months' touring during 1881 alone he earned 137,440 Reich Marks" (L'Arronge, Deutsches Theaterund deutsche Schauspielkunst [Berlin: Concordia, 1896], 73). Haase claimed that he was interested in ensemble acting, but he was too steeped in 19th-century traditions of virtuotistic display; Theodor Döring had bestowed upon him the Iffland Ring in 1878, and his star status proved ultimately too difficult a barrier to overcome—especially when it meant playing smaller roles with younger actors in the roles for which he had once been famous.