Berghaus, Ruth

(1927-1996)

   Director, intendant. Berghaus began her career as a choreographer, having studied dance in Dresden. She moved to Berlin in the late 1940s to study at the Academy of the Arts there, which had been reconstituted in the aftermath of Germany's defeat and Berlin's destruction. There, she encountered Bertolt Brecht and began to work for him as a choreographer with the Berliner Ensemble. She worked in a similar capacity at the Deutsches Theater and with the East German State Opera, located in the Karl Friedrich Schinkel-designed house on Unter den Linden. For that institution, she collaborated with Brecht on the staging of Paul Dessau's The Sentencing of Lucullus in 1951, the first of several collaborations she completed with Dessau (whom she married in 1954). Berghaus garnered substantial attention for her stage combat choreography in the 1964 Berliner Ensemble production of Cori-olanus, and thereafter she worked regularly with the company in numerous capacities. That work culminated in her assuming the duties of intendant when Helene Weigel died in 1971. Berghaus remained in that post until 1977, after which she began directing operas in Frankfurt am Main, Dresden, Prague, Brussels, Vienna, Hamburg, and shortly before her death, Leipzig.