Marita Gunther's vital role in safe keeping the Wolfsohn heritage
presented by Paul Silber
"Before I play you this recording of Marita's introduction to Alfred Wolfsohn's disc "The Human Voice", I would like to tell you a few things about her and her life. She came over from East Germany in 1949, aged 21. She had studied English and had qualified as a translator of the two languages. She managed to get out of East Germany with aid of her distant relative - Alfred Wolfsohn! She had never met him before and it was some months after her arrival in England that she finally did come to meet him. Some very powerful chemistry took place between her and Alfred in those first moments, as the rest of her life has testified to and to which she refers in the following recording.
She worked with Alfred throughout his life and although she subsequently worked with Roy Hart until his death in 1975, she remained "Awe's student" all her life. She together with Roy Hart, Sheila Braggins and Kaya Anderson nursed Awe through the final days of his life. She inherited all of Awe's worldly goods which, of course, included his manscripts. She then devoted much of her time and energy to translating them from the original German into English. She tried to get the works published, this sadly never happened. Interestingly now, thanks to much additional work from Sheila Braggins, his first manuscript, "Orpheus or the way to a Mask" has been edited and is closer to being published.
When Roy stopped teaching individual lessons in 1970, we all had to be assigned to other teachers and I had the good fortune to have Marita as my singing teacher. She remained my teacher for a further ten years. Much later, in the last years of her life when I had already started my work on the theatre's archives, she often used to assist me by giving me further information about various aspects of the theatre's past. Whenever I asked her to record anything for the archives she would always take it very seriously and made extensive preparations and rehearsals to get it right, which as you are about to hear, she managed to do with great efficiency.
Ladies and Gentlemen here she is - Marita Gunther!"
