Heidelberg Castle Festival

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The Heidelberg Castle Festival is the most famous and most popular open-air theater in North Baden . They take place every summer in the inner courtyard or in other areas of Heidelberg Castle . At the opening in 2001, Gerhard Stratthaus , the former finance minister of Baden-Württemberg, called it a “first-rate cultural figurehead for the city and the region”.

organization

The Heidelberg Castle Festival is organized by the Heidelberg City Theater . The director there is also the festival director. Guest performances were also integrated in the pre-war period, but today the festival management deliberately relies on exclusively “in-house” productions.

history

The Heidelberg Castle Festival was brought into being in 1926 with a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare . The following festival summers were also successful; Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann were invited as guests of honor. In the late phase of the Weimar Republic (i.e. from the Great Depression in 1929 to Hitler's seizure of power in 1933), however, the festival had to be discontinued due to a lack of funding.

In 1934 they were revitalized as the “Reichsfestspiele” and ideologically exploited under Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels . The idea of ​​turning Heidelberg into “a Salzburg of the German south-west” (see below), however, essentially came from the Weimar Republic. Things games (example: Kurt Heynicke : Der Weg ins Reich ) were mixed between Shakespeare classics . Heinrich George , who was involved in the Weimar Republic but also came to terms with the Nazi Empire, is a name that is associated with the Heidelberg Castle Festival of that time.

The Second World War caused the Reich Festival to end in the summer of 1940; In the post-war period and the years of reconstruction, the tradition was initially not taken up again.

It wasn't until 1974 that the festival was revived, primarily as a tourist attraction. The old Heidelberg musical The Student Prince, popular with Americans (see also Heidelberg in the poetry ), developed into a classic in the years that followed. The director was Helmut Hein, who in the early years also played the role of the prince educator Dr. Angel sang. Hein staged the “Light Opera” of the Hungarian composer Sigmund Romberg , who had made a career in the USA, until 2000. The conductor of this production was James Allen Gähres .

With Günther Beelitz , who had become director in 2000, the concept changed. Instead of a castle romanticism that could be marketed to tourists, he aimed for a profound unity of the essentially medieval architecture as a backdrop with the contents of the pieces. There were two more performances (2001 and 2002) of the operetta based on the play Alt-Heidelberg by Rudolf Meyer-Förster, staged by Ingo Waszerka. The effect was no longer the same, because Beelitz had relocated the performance location within the palace area and thus reduced the area.

Successful new productions under the direction of Beelitz, which took his harmony concept into account, were

Opera, dance theater and concerts have also been added to the program as genres. The number of visitors has risen sharply since the introduction of this concept and in the 2005 season reached almost 30,000 for the first time.

From summer 2006 to 2010, the Heidelberg artistic director Peter Spuhler was festival director of the Heidelberg Castle Festival. In 2009, in addition to the Heidelberg cult operetta Der Studentenprinz , the opera Der Liebestrank and Hamlet as well as the productions Verliebte & Verrückte , Amphitryon and Wild Roses in the Dicken Turm were on the program. In addition, as always, there were the palace concerts with the Philharmonic Orchestra. The children's and youth theater was represented with its version of Alice in Wonderland and the dance theater showed Rabbit is crying .

In 2020 the Castle Festival was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic .

literature

  • Oliver Fink: Theater on the castle. On the history of the Heidelberg Festival. Brigitte Guderjahn Publishing House, Heidelberg 1997.
  • Oliver Fink: A Salzburg in the German southwest? Castle Festival in Heidelberg . In: Heidelberger Jahrbuch zur Geschichte der Stadt, ed. from the Heidelberg History Association, 6/2001, 61–77.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Archive Theater Heidelberg Heidelberger Schlossfestspiele - Conductor Accessed April 20, 2017.
  2. ↑ Peter Spuhler. Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, accessed on May 18, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Schlossfestspiele 09 balance sheet. Retrieved May 18, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Heidelberg Castle Festival canceled. In: heidelberg.de. City of Heidelberg, April 16, 2020, accessed on May 18, 2020 .