Ernst Rosmer

Elsa Bernstein (née Porges; pseudonym, Ernst Rosmer; 27 October 1866 – 2 July 1949) was an Austrian-German writer, dramatist, and literary figure.

Life

Elsa Porges was born in Vienna, a daughter of Heinrich Porges (a close friend of Richard Wagner). At the age of ten, at her own insistence, she attended the first complete, four-opera performance of The Ring Cycle in Bayreuth in 1876, for which her father served as Wagner's special documentary-archivist. In opera tradition, Elsa is considered to have been the cycle's youngest audience member.

With her marriage to journalist Max Bernstein, she became hostess to one of the most notable musical and literary salons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At various times, attendees included Gerhart Hauptmann (whose son married Bernstein's daughter, Eva), Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Engelbert Humperdinck, Henrik Ibsen, Annette Kolb, Hermann Levi, Alma and Gustav Mahler, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, and Max Weber, among many others.

She was educated at Munich and for a short time, also was on the stage. A degenerative affliction of the eyes forced her to retire. Thenceforth she devoted herself to dramatic literature. Shortly after her marriage in 1892 to Max Bernstein, she wrote her first play, Wir Drei (English: "We Three"), which created considerable discussion; some saw it as a dramatization of the matrimonial and sexual views of Taine and Zola. (Although written under the pseudonym of Ernst Rosmer, her identity as the author of the play was never secret.) Her next few plays fell short of exciting the same public attention: Dämmerung ("Twilight", 1893); Die Mutter Maria, 1894; Tedeum (1896); Themistokles (1897); and Daguy Peters.