L'Arronge, Adolph

(Adolf Aronsohn, 1838-1908)

   Playwright, manager. L'Arronge had a spectacular career as a playwright and theater owner in Berlin, but he had conservatory training in music and a successful career as an orchestra conductor before he tried his hand at playwriting. His playwriting career was so lucrative that it enabled his unintended career as a theater manager to take shape and endure for more than 30 years. His conducting career began in 1860 at the Cologne Opera House after graduating from the Leipzig Conservatory; from there, he conducted orchestras in Stuttgart, Budapest, and Berlin before beginning to write plays in 1866. Most of his early efforts were failures, but with Mein Leopold in 1873 he established himself as one of the most capable playwrights in the new German Reich.

   L'Arronge's father, Eberhard Theodor L'Arronge (1812-1878), had been a popular actor in Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg, and as a teenager L'Arronge had witnessed his father's transformation from a tragic actor to a character actor specializing in comedy. The senior L'Arronge also began running theaters in the 1860s, initiating the first "Offenbach craze" in Cologne, which permitted him to pay for his son's conservatory training. From his father's experiences, Adolf learned that substantial money could be made in the theater business, particularly if one had audience-pleasing material at hand. Mein Leopold was the first step toward his status as one of the German theater's wealthiest men.

   L'Arronge followed Mein Leopold with a series of blockbuster hits: Hasemanns Töchter (Hasemann's Daughters, 1877), Doktor Klaus (1878), Wohltätige Frauen (The Lady Benefactors, 1879), Der Kompagnon (The Business Partner, 1880), Haus Lonei (The Lonei Household, 1880), and Die Sorglose (The Carefree Woman, 1882). Their success enabled him to purchase Friedrich Wilhelm Deich-mann's Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theater (where his father had frequently performed in the 1850s) for RM900,000 in cash, renaming it the Deutsches Theater. L'Arronge originally planned to organize the Deutsches Theater along partnership lines in the French manner; those plans went awry, but L'Arronge proceeded with his playwriting career, premiering his own and other popular works (particularly those of Oskar Blumenthal) at what was then his own facility.

   As a playwright, L'Arronge copied formulas of his own and others that had proved successful, though adding elements of Berlin local color and personality. His use of romantic entanglement was particularly effective because he avoided the unpleasant implications of adultery so characteristic of the French boulevard comedies he imitated. L'Arronge was skillful in the portrayals of the self-made man's downfall, supported in many cases by a true-hearted and wise wife or a naïve but loyal daughter. He was circumspect in his portrayal of social and economic conditions and how they affected his characters, but there was little ambiguity. The "German scrupulousness" that Max Martersteig said was so characteristic of L'Arronge characters became a source of warm, nonsatirical humor. L'Arronge's stupendous success with such formulas marked the victory of superficiality in the German theater. "Behind it, all originality, all concerns for social problems, and anything significant had to wait in line" (Martersteig, Das deutsche Theater im neunzehnten Jahrhundert [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1924], 637).