Reicher, Emanuel

(1849-1924)

   Actor. Reicher spent 16 years on provincial stages playing young heroes, then bon vivants, and finally character parts before he made his Berlin debut in 1885 at the Residenz Theater, as Emperor Justinian in Anton Anno's staging of Victorien Sardou's Theodora. Anno hated Reicher's depiction of the emperor as a lazy coward, but audiences found his highly detailed an-tiheroism extraordinary. Before Reicher, German actors had played such roles as German-speaking duplicates of their French originals. Reicher had what many critics called the most "resplendent organ" among his contemporaries, that is, the most resonant voice, and Oskar Blumenthal hired him in 1892 to play realistic character parts. He remained with Blumenthal until 1894, when Otto Brahm hired him likewise to play character parts, mostly in Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Schnitzler plays. Brahm had cast Reicher in the male lead in the Freie Bühne world premiere of Hauptmann's Before Sunrise in 1889 and thereafter Reicher became closely identified with several Hauptmann parts, most notably the preposterous Wehrhahn in Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat). Reicher had a substantial career in New York from 1915 to 1920, reprising many of the hits he had enjoyed in Berlin, though in New York he performed in English and also worked as a director.