Elsa Porges was born in Vienna, a daughter of Heinrich Porges. At the age of 10, 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. Elsa was 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 19th and early 20th centuries, whose attendees at various times included Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Engelbert Humperdinck, Henrik Ibsen, Annette Kolb, Hermann Levi, Gustav and Alma 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 on the stage. A degenerative affliction of the eyes forced her to retire, and she thenceforth devoted herself to dramatic literature. Shortly after her marriage in 1892 to Max Bernstein, she wrote her first play, "Wir Drei", which created considerable discussion; some saw it as a dramatization of the matrimonial and sexual views of Taine and Zola. Her next few plays fell short of exciting the same public attention: "Dämmerung" ; "Die Mutter Maria," 1894; "Tedeum" ; "Themistokles" ; and Daguy Peters. But unbounded admiration was elicited by Königskinder, a dramatic fairy-tale. Though its plot was simple, the beauty of the theme and its poetry were such as to class it with Ludwig Fulda's Der Talisman. Although Engelbert Humperdinck was dissatisfied with his first concert setting of Königskinder in 1897, an avant-garde melodrama which demanded an innovative "speak-singing" technique from its soloists, he persuaded Bernstein, in 1907 to authorize a traditional opera setting which debuted in German at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in December 1910. That version is still performed. Almost certainly at the instigation of Winifred Wagner, Bernstein was awarded an exit visa for the United States in 1941, but refused to leave her sister Gabriele behind. The two women were transported to Dachau arriving on 25 June 1942, where Bernstein was recognized as the author of Königskinder; as a result, the sisters were sent the following day to Theresienstadt. After her liberation in 1945 Elsa Bernstein wrote, on a special typewriter for the blind, a detailed account of her confinement in the camp's Prominentenhaus, or House of Notables. The typescript was discovered by accident and published in German more than five decades after her death.
Death
Bernstein died, aged 82, in 1949 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel. Although buried in the same grave as her husband, her name is no longer legible on their shared headstone.
