Wallner, Franz

(Franz Seraphin Leidersdorf, 1810-1876)

   Manager, director. Wallner became one of Berlin's most significant theatrical entrepreneurs in the 1850s and 1860s, when managers were required to obtain operating concessions from the Prussian government. In 1855 he leased a facility in Blumenstrasse that became so successful Wallner bought it and named it after himself. Wallner was a native Viennese and had witnessed Johann Nepomuk Nestroy in performance at the Carl Theater. Those experiences had left an indelible mark on Wallner's own practice of theater, and by 1851 he had become director of the Freiburg Stadttheater, followed by leases of theaters in Baden-Baden and Posen. During those residences, he assembled around him the kind of acting talent he thought best suited to the plays of Nestroy, Ferdinand Raimund, Adolf Bäuerle, and other Viennese comic masters. Berliners found Wallner's Viennese touch to their liking, largely because his productions bespoke a higher standard than ones to which they were accustomed.

   Wallner's greatest playwriting discovery was David Kalisch, who had already established a reputation for himself as the founder of the satirical Berlin weekly Kladderadatsch. His first play for Wallner was Aktienbudiker (The Stock Market Hero), which Wallner premiered in 1856; it continued for 215 performances, the most of any play in Berlin's history to that time, and it was among the most frequently performed plays in Berlin during the years prior to German unification. Wallner followed it with Kalisch's Ein gebildeter Hausknecht (An Educated Houseboy) in 1858; other Kalisch plays helped the Wallner Theater become a premier venue for comedy in Berlin for the next dozen years.

   Wallner's productions, many of them starring Karl Helmerding, made him prosperous enough to build his own new theater on Raumstrasse in 1865. It was an elaborate and far too costly building, with construction costs running three times the original estimates. The building was so impressive that city officials renamed the street facing the structure Wallner-Theater-Strasse. Political events furthermore conspired against Wallner; the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 occasioned his deportation back to Vienna. Upon his return to Berlin, Wallner leased his theater to Theodor Lebrun. His last production in the Wallner Theater was Kalisch's Die Mottenburger (The Motten-burgers), which closed 30 April 1868.