Margravial Opera House/ Markgräfliches Opernhaus (Bayreuth)

Markgräfliches Opernhaus (Bayreuth)

 

Opernstrasse 14

Tel. (0921) 759 69 22

Open: Apr- Sep: 9am- 6pm daily

Oct- Mar: 10am- 4pm daily

Adults: 5.50 Euro

Under 18: free admission

The Margravial Opera House/ Markgräfliches Opernhaus in the Upper Franconian city of Bayreuth is an 18th-century theater building. Since Bayreuth had become an insignificant provincial town after the margrave period towards the end of the 18th century, the building was able to survive the subsequent period as good as unchanged. Thanks to the artistic quality and the state of preservation, the Margravial Opera House is one of the two most important pre-French Revolution theater buildings that have survived, along with the Teatro Olimpico. On June 30, 2012, UNESCO declared the baroque building a World Heritage Site.

In Bayreuth it is only called the "Opera House", while the opera house built by Richard Wagner is called the "Festspielhaus". After the Principality of Bayreuth was sold to the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1810, the building was referred to as the "Royal Opera House".

 

In 1714, Margrave Georg Wilhelm had a Redoutenhaus and an “Operahaus” built next to it on what is now Münzgasse. The synagogue was built in 1759 on the site of the first Redoutenhaus – the current one was built four years later at the confluence of Münzgasse and Opernstraße. The arcades of the logenhaus of the old opera were still recognizable on the synagogue wall in 1946. The stage house was located between the old and the new Redoutenhaus directly next to today's opera house. However, this building did not meet the requirements of Margravine Wilhelmine (ruler of the Principality of Bayreuth with her husband Friedrich from 1735).

 

Building history

The Margravial Opera House was built between 1744 and 1750 and is one of the few original theater and opera buildings in Europe from that time. At that time, it was intended to convey to visitors the beginning of an age of wisdom and peace, which was initiated under the margrave couple Friedrich and Wilhelmine.

The building was designed by Joseph Saint-Pierre, the interior of the house was designed by Giuseppe and Carlo Galli da Bibiena in the Italian late Baroque style. Only the original stage curtain is missing - it was stolen by the troops of Napoleon, who in May 1812 moved through Bayreuth to Russia.

The box theater is made entirely of wood. The three tiers of boxes are assigned to the three classes of society. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that the princely box was almost never used by the margrave couple. In the middle of the first row there were golden armchairs from which the events on the stage could be observed from a short distance.

The ceiling painting Apollo and the nine muses was created by Johann Benjamin Müller from Dresden. The circular paintings on the ceiling frame depict mythological scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The roof construction, which is probably the work of the court carpenter Adolf Adam Feulner and the largest of its kind, is remarkable. The advisory organization ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) of UNESCO considered the roof to be particularly valuable and classified it as part of the world heritage.

With a span of 25 meters, the support-free roof is at the limit of the possible construction length. It is a baroque truss construction. For this, the maximum trunk lengths that were available were used. Some beams could not even be edged to the end in order not to endanger the stability. The daring approach was necessary because the Margravine expected a gigantic auditorium without any disruptive supporting structures and one of the largest stages of her time (180 square meters of playing space).

The wood for the roof structure was probably felled in the winter of 1746/47 in the Kulmbach and Sankt Johannis forest districts, the Creußen, Lindenhardt and Rohrenhof forest districts and the Himmelcron game management facility. After the outer walls had been raised, the court carpenters had to erect the roof as quickly as possible in order to allow Bibiena to finish the interior in a dry place. The imperfectly rectangular property forced irregularities to be concealed and made it difficult to erect a roof structure with a straight ridge. In order to compensate for the different widths of the house from front to back - the roof jumps by up to 40 centimeters - Feulner built four roof trusses according to the same principle and connected them with each other.

The rafted wood was installed wet. In order to finish faster, Feulner let two phases of the roof erection run parallel to one another: one coming from the stage in the direction of the middle of the building, the other from the front. Bibiena did not come to Bayreuth to install the lodge house until 1747, when the roof structure was in place and the building site was dry. At the opening, the street facade still had a straight end. The hipped roof on the street side was not built until 1750 when the vestibule was added.

 

History

The opera house was inaugurated at the end of September 1748 on the occasion of the marriage of the daughter of the margrave couple, Elisabeth Friederike Sophie von Brandenburg-Bayreuth, to the Württemberg Duke Carl Eugen. The facade was not yet finished when it opened. The Italian operas Artaserse and Ezio by the composer Johann Adolph Hasse were performed as part of a glittering festival. The construction of the building, for which the margravial subjects ultimately had to pay, plunged the Principality of Bayreuth into a debt crisis.

Margravine Wilhelmine, a sister of Frederick the Great, died ten years after the inauguration. She was a talented composer and librettist of operas and singspiels that were performed in Bayreuth. During her approximately 20 years as opera director (from 1737) she gave her musical theater a personal and independent face, which culminated in the construction of the Margravial Opera House. After her death, regular performances in the theater were reduced, and after the death of Margrave Friedrich five years later (1763), they were temporarily suspended altogether. Historians believe this is one reason this wooden opera house did not burn down like others of the time. There were fewer candles or lights that could have caused a fire.

From then on, Bayreuth no longer afforded its own ensembles, the costs and repertoire corresponded to what was possible in the provinces. In 1769, a traveling group moved into the building for the first time. Minna von Barnhelm, Romeo and Juliet and - now in German - Molière's The Miser were on the schedule at the time. In the late 1780s, Cabal and Love, with its report of soldiers sent to America, reopened what were believed to be festering wounds in the populace. In 1777, Margrave Karl Alexander forced more than 2,300 men from his Bayreuth and Ansbach territories into military service in the Thirteen Colonies under threat of summary death sentences; only 1,379 returned. At that time around 10,000 people lived in the city, the opera house was too big for the modest demands of the citizens and also could not be heated. That is why, from 1785 onwards, a smaller, heated theater was often used instead, which had been built in 1762 in the margravial riding hall.

In 1794, Mozart's Magic Flute was heard for the first time in the opera house, but the "crowd hits" were the operetta and Singspiel. The singers were often only actors with untrained natural voices, the orchestra also came from the theater troupe and the town musicians brought in to reinforce it. Preferred authors in the play were Kotzebue and Iffland, numerous farce producers brought funny things like the beautiful Bayreutherin in Vienna to the performance. In the years 1792/93, Franz Anton Weber and his troupe, including his son Carl Maria, made guest appearances in the Margravial Opera House. During the French occupation from 1806, gaming operations were discontinued.

After Bayreuth was sold to the Kingdom of Bavaria by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810, the opera house was managed by Bavarian officials, who not only used the house for cultural purposes. “There is no suitable place to dry the flour ground for the army magazine, and the opera house has to be used for 14 days,” says a government letter from 1814. During the war years, the building was primarily used as a resource for military purposes, and his condition worsened. A report by the Bavarian Building Authority pointed out: “The slate roof of the Royal Opera House is in poor condition. Rainwater penetrates through the cladding and forms whole pools on the ground floor, which can then be seen for days.”

 

Guest performances took on more stable forms in the 19th century. The opera house was regularly used by the fixed theaters of the neighboring cities of Coburg, Nuremberg and Bamberg, whereby topicality was not neglected. Plays by the fallen national hero Theodor Körner and Kleist's Käthchen von Heilbronn were performed, even for the pyrotechnic display The Fire in Moscow had to be used by the fire-endangered opera house. In 1822, just a year after the premiere, Carl Maria von Weber's Freischütz received thunderous applause. Beethoven's only opera Fidelio was on the program in 1834. In addition, there were also classical spoken theater performances in the 19th century. In the second half of the 19th century, a "court theater ensemble" put together for the respective season played operettas in the opera house. Stars of the up-and-coming entertainment industry also found their way there. Magicians, acrobats and athletes performed, trained monkeys showed their tricks. The Margravial Opera House was used as an everyday venue up until the 1930s, before the former Margravial Riding Hall (from 1965: Stadthalle), which was converted by the National Socialists, took over this function.

The Margravial Opera House was also an attraction for the composer Richard Wagner, who chose Bayreuth as the location for the festival. On June 30, 1860, there was a performance of his opera Tannhäuser by the Coburg Court Opera in the presence of the Bavarian King Maximilian II. This was the culmination of a three-day celebration of Bayreuth's 50th anniversary as part of Bavaria and the first performance of a Wagner opera in the city. During the visit of the "fairy tale king" Ludwig II in November 1866, samples from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were played in the building, which was illuminated for the first time with gas.

Wagner, who had already passed through Bayreuth once before in 1836, had become aware of the stage, which was unusually large for the time, around 1870 through a conversation dictionary. However, on his first visit to the city in April 1871 he found the size and shape of the auditorium unsuitable for his purposes. Nevertheless, he stayed with Bayreuth as a festival venue and decided to build his own theater there. On May 22, 1872, to celebrate the laying of the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus, Wagner conducted Beethoven's 9th symphony in the Margravial Opera House. In preparation for the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, with the permission of the royal authorities, he used the Margravial Opera House as an alternative rehearsal site.

After the Second World War, the building was initially confiscated by the US military government and was only released again in June 1947. Mozart Festival Weeks were already taking place in August of the same year: The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte were on the programme. In addition to a total of 24 opera performances, there were some festival and chamber concerts. Instead, since 1948 there has been a series of events, the Franconian Festival Week, with guest performances on Munich stages.

In the early 1950s, the opera house was the location for the films Trapped Soul, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, Lovesickness on the Moselle and Women around Richard Wagner. Scenes from the 1960 film Only a Few Are Chosen and the 1983 TV series Wagner - The Life and Work of Richard Wagner were also shot in the building. In 1994 the Belgian director Gérard Corbiau shot some of the scenes in Bayreuth for the film Farinelli, the castrato about the life story of the Italian baroque singer Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli.

On the site of today's upper balcony hall there was an apartment where the castellan lived with his family. It was used until 1968.

Under the title The Margravial Opera House and the Bayreuth of Margravine Wilhelmine - The ideal world of a woman between absolutism and enlightenment, the Bavarian Palace Administration, in cooperation with the city of Bayreuth, successfully applied for recognition of the opera house and the other original structural testimonies of Margravine Wilhelmine in Bayreuth (Hermitage , New Palace and Sanspareil) as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On June 30, 2012, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee decided positively on the application for the opera house.

The house has been closed since September 2012 and has been completely renovated. The stage opening was restored to its original size. Due to water damage in November 2014 as a result of a defective water pipe, the renovation lasted until April 2018. The costs are expected to have increased by 1.8 million euros to a total of 29.3 million euros. On April 12, 2018, the Margravial Opera House was ceremoniously reopened after five years of construction with a performance of the opera Artaserse, which had also been performed at the opening in 1748.

 

Museum

Some rooms in the New Palace are dedicated to the theater buildings of Margravine Wilhelmine and the Galli-Bibiena family of architects. It houses i.a. a model of the opera house in its original condition, i. H. before reducing the size of the stage portal, which had become necessary due to the installation of the iron curtain.

In September 2018, it was announced that a World Heritage Center and an opera house museum, which introduces visitors to the opera world of Margravine Wilhelmine, are to be set up in the neighboring Redoutenhaus. As part of a general refurbishment of the building, a barrier-free entrance and ticket office area for the opera house is to be created there, among other things.

 

Events

New Year's concert by the Old Viennese Strauss Ensemble
Bayreuth Easter Festival: Benefit concert for children with cancer at the Bayreuth Clinic
Musica Bayreuth
Bayreuth Baroque: This festival with performances of baroque operas, some of which have fallen into oblivion, has been taking place in the opera house since 2000. In 2006 Georg Friedrich Handel's opera pasticcio Giove in Argo with the first modern revival and Le Nozze di Dorina by Baldassare Galuppi were given. In 2007, Purcell's King Arthur and Reinhard Keiser's Fredegunda were on the schedule.

 

Miscellaneous

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder: "An opera house that is probably almost as big as the Berlin opera house and one of the largest and most magnificent opera houses in the world."
In 1998, Deutsche Post issued a special stamp “250 years of the Bayreuth Opera House”.