- Avant-garde culture would be central to her career, but she began her life as a dancer within the traditions of ballet as it flourished in late 19th-century Vienna.
- Born in Vienna in 1885 into an artistic family (her father was a successful academic painter), Grete Wiesenthal grew up at the center of the artistic and intellectual life of late imperial Austria.
- Grete's talents were recognized by Hofoper teacher and ballet master Joseph Hassreiter, but by this time she was finding it increasingly onerous to conform:
It became difficult for me to dance in the line; too easily I leapt forward somewhat or stayed back out of fear that the ballet master, the next day in rehearsal, could say: 'And Wiesenthal had again danced out of line, yes; do you always want to be the star?' Oh, I so honestly endeavored to stay in the line correctly and had, for the time being, had enough of the effort to become a star. But I was obviously not created for the line. - Weeks after their appearance at the Cabaret Fledermaus, the Wiesenthal sisters were stars. With the support of the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, they performed in Berlin and most of Germany's other large cities. In Berlin, they danced at Max Reinhardt's innovative Deutsches Theater, ending a special performance of Lysistrata for which von Hofmannsthal had written a prologue.
- As a child, Grete was observant of the movements of the feet of peasants who came to Vienna on Sunday in order to perform dances in the open. To her, the dancers' feet seemed to be carrying on conversations with one another.
- In the early 1900s, innovation was rampant in Vienna. In February 1902, Isadora Duncan danced there for the first time, introducing her influential new style to the Viennese, and artistic rebellion in general was in the air. Over the next few years, Wiesenthal's frustration with ballet only increased as it became clear to her that if she remained in a world dominated by individuals like Hassreiter her "desire for expression would stay unsatisfied and ... I would have to experience everything lifeless." Feeling that the movements of ballet were severely limiting the expressive possibilities of the human body, the Wiesenthal sisters began to work on their own at home.
- Grete and her five sisters and brother grew up in an atmosphere saturated by music; thus, their transition from music to dance was a natural course of events.
- The first completed dance routine of Grete and Else was set to a Chopin waltz. Grete had found the path she would take for the remainder of her long, productive career. The second piece she worked on was the "Blue Danube Waltz" by Johann Strauss, Jr., a Viennese favorite she had seen performed many times at the Hofoper. In her autobiography, Wiesenthal tells how each time she saw the "Blue Danube Waltz" performed as part of the Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, she would experience a shudder of ecstasy.
- Gustav Mahler was responsible for giving her the role of 'Fenella' in La Muette de Portici in 1907. This caused a great scandal and eventually led to Mahler's resignation, as in doing so, he had undermined the ballet master, Hassreiter.
- From 1945 until 1952, she held the post of director of the artistic dance section of the Academy for Music and the Performing Arts.
- After 1945, Wiesenthal's work enjoyed a renaissance in Austria, especially the dances she created for various Salzburg Festival productions.
- She was a member of the corps de ballet of the Hofoper in Vienna.
- In 1909, the sisters performed again in Berlin and Vienna, with Grete dancing the role of the first elf in Reinhardt's production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Munich's Artist's Theater. For three months, from July through October 1909, the sisters performed at London's Hippodrome (between acrobatic acts, singers, and clown acts). That October, they followed their London success with an appearance at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris.
- On January 14, 1908, Grete and Elsa, joined by their sister Berta Wiesenthal , gave a performance of their new dance routines at Vienna's Cabaret Fledermaus. This fashionable cabaret had been opened some six months earlier by Fritz Wärndorfer, a founding member of the arts and crafts cooperative Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Reflecting the nascent international spirit in dance, that of New Dance (Ausdruckstanz), which reflected the passions found in Expressionist art, the performance of the Wiesenthal sisters that evening was both a triumph and a revelation for Vienna's artists and intellectuals. "One hardly finds artists in whom such an authentic and holy fire of enthusiasm is burning as is the case of the Wiesenthal sisters," wrote a reviewer for the Fremdenblatt.
- In later years, Wiesenthal noted that when she began her ballet studies in Vienna the art was very much in a state of decline, routinely filled with kitsch and indifferent to any artistic expression, emphasizing instead a technique and drill that were boring, monotonous, and empty of meaning. Even so, Grete and Elsa continued their studies, and both sisters aspired to advance through the traditional ballet ranks of coryphée, corps leader, soloist, mimic and prima ballerina.
- Around the age of seven, when she was taken to see a ballet performance at Vienna's Hofoper (Court Opera), she was enthralled and wanted to leap from her seat in order to join the ballerinas on stage. The next day, she solemnly announced to her parents that she wanted to be a ballet dancer.
- In 1907, Grete's opportunity presented itself when Hofoper scenic designer Alfred Roller and director Gustav Mahler decided to do away with the stuffy ballet conventions that had prevailed until then. Both men were aware of Wiesenthal's talent and ambitions, and Roller offered her the role of the mute woman Fenella in Daniel François Auber's opera La Muette de Portici, giving her considerable artistic freedom. The new production had its debut on February 27, 1907, and was a great success. Despite this, in late May, both Grete and Elsa left the Hofoper ballet, seeking artistic autonomy. Allied with the Secession circle of innovators, the sisters performed that June at an outdoor "Festival of Art, Nature, and Youth," the piece being a pantomime, Die Tänzerinnen und die Marionette (The Dancers and the Marionette).
- In September 1895, she was enrolled at the Hofoper ballet school. A year later, her sister Elsa Wiesenthal also began to take instruction there.
- While another sister accompanied them on the piano and their mother Rosa watched with sympathetic interest, Grete and Elsa choreographed new ways of moving and expressing themselves through dance.
- She had 5 sisters (including Elsa, Berta and Martha Wiesenthal, dancers too) and 1 brother.
- In August 1939, because of her close ties to Richard Strauss she was able to create the dances for the Salzburg Festival production of the Hofmannsthal-Strauss adaptation of Der Bürger als Edelmann. Within weeks, Europe was once again at war. For the next six years, Wiesenthal's career was in limbo. During the Nazi period, she presided over an informal salon that brought together artists of various shadings of anti-Nazi sentiments, allowing her to play a role, if only a modest one, in traditional Austria's cultural resistance to fascism.
- After Grete Wiesenthal died in Vienna on June 22, 1970, critics and audiences alike began to rediscover and reevaluate her remarkable legacy, a process that is still underway.
- Grete Wiesenthal will be remembered for having transformed the Viennese waltz from a monotonous one-two-three movement, performed by fixedly smiling dancers laced into corsets, into an ecstatic experience, performed by dancers with unbound hair and swinging dresses. For her, waltzing was bliss, but it could also represent suspicion and menace-something that George Balanchine would later embody in his choreography.
- The First World War left deep and lasting scars on Wiesenthal's life and art. The youthful innocence her dancing evoked was forever lost through that ghastly conflict. Her husband Erwin Lang became a prisoner of war in Russia, not returning to Vienna until 1920. Wiesenthal and Lang divorced three years later, but would remain friends until his death in 1962.
- In January 1938, only a few weeks before the Anschluss that permitted Adolf Hitler to enter Vienna in triumph, Wiesenthal danced in public for the last time, partnered by Toni Birkmeyer, at a gala Festabend (evening of celebration).
- In 1919, soon after the end of a war that deprived the world, including Wiesenthal, of affluence and elegance, she opened her own dancing school in the "Hohe Warte," in Vienna's upscale suburb of Döbling. Despite postwar inflation and political chaos, she trained promising students, and soon went on tour with the best of them and her male partner Toni Birkmeyer.
- In 1923, she married a Swedish physician, Nils Silfverskjöld, but the union ended in divorce in 1927. That year, Wiesenthal triumphantly returned to the Vienna stage at the Staatsoper (State Opera House), in the lead role of her ballet Der Taugenichts in Wien (The Ne'er-Do-Well in Vienna).
- Her legacy was a new method of dancing whose primary goal was to overcome the static quality of classical ballet, and, in an endless flow of movement, to dissolve all traces of posing. "Effortlessness, flying and swinging movement, rapture, and the capacity to be deeply moved by music were the characteristics of Grete Wiesenthal," writes Maria Josefa Schaffgotsch . "She specialized in translating into dance the flowing, wavelike quality of three-quarter time as embodied in Strauss waltzes.".
- A slightly revised edition of her autobiography, first published in 1919 as Der Aufstieg (The Way Upwards), appeared in 1947 under the title Die ersten Schritte (The First Steps). She even ventured into creative writing, publishing a novel, Iffi: Roman einer Tänzerin (Iffi: Novel of a Dancer), in 1951.
- Her last creative effort was her production of the dances for Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Salzburg Festival in July 1953.
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