Luigi Malipiero Biography
Luigi Malipiero (1901 - 1975) was a German theater director and artistic director, actor, set designer, book illustrator and painter. Malipiero was born in Trieste and grew up first in Vienna and then in Berlin, where he attended elementary school and became a self-taught painter, actor, director and set designer. Especially in the 1920s he illustrated numerous books. Although today he is best known for his theatrical activities, an essential focus of his work is on the visual arts, particularly his early drawings, of which large parts of the originals burned in Berlin in 1943. In 1934 the director of the Nordmark-Landestheater in Schleswig-Holstein he hired him as second set designer for 65 Reichsmark, although Malipiero had never seen a stage from behind. However, his ingenuity, his imagination and his diligence made up for his lack of knowledge, so he was soon entrusted with the sets and costumes of the most important productions. In 1940 he returned to Berlin. Here he worked as a set designer at the State Opera until the destruction of the building in 1943. He wanted to settle in this city, which at that time still shone in its former glory, but did not find accommodation. The advice of his friends to go to Sommerhausen, on the outskirts of the city, decided his future life: in 1944 he settled there. Here he organized cultural days on an improvised stage, which were so successful that he founded the Torturmtheater in 1950, one of the smallest theaters in Germany with 50 seats. He worked at the Torturmtheater simultaneously as an actor, director, set designer and painter and over the years performed in seven plays, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust and William Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
