The director, who was born in Krefeld, began his acting and directing training in Vienna and has been directing there since the mid-1960s. He worked at the Theater Heidelberg, the Stuttgart State Theater and the Schauspiel Frankfurt, among others. At the end of the 1980s he was director of the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin.
Neuenfels also became known as an opera director with productions of Verdi and Mozart operas in Frankfurt, Berlin, Bayreuth and Vienna. In 2005 and 2008 he was named Opera Director of the Year, and in 2016 he received the German Theater Prize “Faust” for his life’s work. In addition to his theater work, he made films about poets such as Kleist and Robert Musil. Neuenfels was married to the Viennese actress Elisabeth Trissenaar. The couple lived in Berlin and have a son, cameraman Benedict Neuenfels, who has won the German Camera Award multiple times and the German Film Award in 2019.
“With him, the world of culture loses one of its most important and original protagonists, a theater inventor who, despite all his contradictions, always followed an unconditional artistic idea,” reacted the director of the Salzburg Festival, Markus Hinterhäuser.
Source: Nachrichten
