Opera House (Hanover)

Hanover Opera House and Opernplatz

The Hanover Opera House is the venue for the opera , ballet and concert divisions of the Lower Saxony State Theater in Hanover .

history

Opera house around 1900

The opera house was built as the "Royal Court Theater" in the years 1845-1852 in the late Classicist style on the eastern edge of the old town on the former Wealden sandstone hill . This was one of the today's Georgstraße advanced bastion , which is part of the Hanover fortification was. The architect of the opera house was the court architect Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves . The construction manager was his employee and later court architect Christian Heinrich Tramm . The first opera performance ( Mozart's Marriage of Figaro ) took place on September 5, 1852. The opera house replaced the Royal Court Theater (Schlosstheater) in the Leineschloss , in which opera performances have taken place since 1689. In the new opera house from 1852, both opera and drama performances were initially held.

In 1918 it was renamed the Opera and Playhouse and was in the hands of the Prussian state . In 1921 it was transferred to the sponsorship of the city of Hanover. In 1925 the theater moved to the communalized “ Schauburg ” theater, and both venues were henceforth called “Städtische Bühnen Hannover”.

During the Second World War the opera house was hit by incendiary bombs on July 26, 1943 during one of the Allied air raids on Hanover and burned to the ground.

After the reconstruction in the historical style (according to the plans of the Hamburg architect Werner Kallmorgen ) it was put back into operation on November 30, 1950 with the performance of Richard Strauss ' Der Rosenkavalier . 1950–1964 further extensions and extensions followed, including the foyer rooms in the style of post-war modernism. In 1985 it was modernized by the architect Dieter Oesterlen . The theater hall now has around 1,200 seats. After the Second World War, the State of Lower Saxony's share of the funding for the theaters, now known as the “Landestheater Hannover”, was gradually increased. In 1970 the name was changed to " Lower Saxony State Theater Hanover ", which has been the sole sponsor of the State of Lower Saxony since 1992.

From 2006 Michael Klügl was director of the Hanover State Opera. General music director Ivan Repušić and Jörg Mannes as ballet director supplemented the artistic direction of the house, which not only received the German Theater Prize Der Faust twice (for the direction of Benedikt von Peter in Luigi Nonos Intolleranza and by Barrie Kosky in Aus einer Totenhaus ), but in 2017 the German theater publishers also received the award for the best annual program. Kay Voges' production of Weber's Freischütz has recently caused a stir nationwide . New music played a special role in the program policy - the State Opera not only devoted itself intensively to the works of Hans Werner Henze , Krzysztof Penderecki , Karl Amadeus Hartmann , Detlev Glanert and Manfred Trojahn , but also annually organizes the "Klangbrücken" festival with cooperation partners was dedicated to one great modern composer.

Laura Berman has been director of the house since 2019 .

The orchestra of the house is the Lower Saxony State Orchestra Hanover .

Great personalities

The first directors of the house came from the administration and court officials of the Kingdom of Hanover.

• August Otto Ludwig von Grote (1787–1831), general manager, war chancellery and chief customs director
• Count Georg Wilhelm von Platen-Hallermund (1785–1873), director
• 1837–1839 and provisionally 1842–1845: Ernst von Meding , director
• 1840–1849: Friedrich August Theodor von dem Bussche-Lohe (1791–1855), general manager and chamberlain
• 1840–1854: Carl Ernst von Malortie , general manager and chamberlain
• until 1853: Heinrich Marschner as court conductor
• 1853–1865: Joseph Joachim as concertmaster
• 1854–1867: Julius von Platen as artistic director
• 1867–1869 (provisional) and 1869–1886: Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf , general manager, then went to Weimar as general manager
• 1877–1879: Hans von Bülow as Kapellmeister
• 1945–1949: Franz Konwitschny as general music director
• 1949–1960: Johannes Schüler as general music director
• 1961–1965: Günter Wich as general music director
• 1965–1994: George Alexander Albrecht as general music director
• 1972–1979: Günter Roth as artistic director
• 1980–2001: Hans-Peter Lehmann as artistic director
• 2001–2006: Albrecht Puhlmann as artistic director
• 2006–2019: Michael Klügl as artistic director
• since 2019: Laura Berman as artistic director

In 2006 the artist Ralf-Peter Post created a film documentary about Stephan Thoss, the choreographer of the Hanover State Opera at the time . Post accompanied the work of the ballet director and his ensemble during the staging of the farewell performance in the opera house with Le Sacre du Printemps , from the first step sequences drawn as sketches to the training of the ballet ensemble and right up to the premiere. The film was first broadcast on the ZDF theater channel in 2007.

World premieres (selection)

• 1852: Austin by Heinrich Marschner
• 1859: Piano Concerto No. 1 op.15 in D minor by Johannes Brahms
• 1921: The Princess Girnara by Egon Wellesz
• 1931: Princess Brambilla by Walter Braunfels
• 1943: The Thebes Cuckoo by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari
• 1952: Boulevard Solitude by Hans Werner Henze
• 1970: Diether de la Motte's board of directors
• 1977: Faust and Yorick by Wolfgang Rihm
• 1980: An adventure in the cemetery of Alfred Koerppen
• 1992: Outside the door of Xaver Paul Thoma
• 2000: Gilgamesh by Volker David Kirchner
• 2005: iOPAL by Hans-Joachim Hespos
• 2017: Lot by Giorgio Battistelli

literature

• Hermann Alexander Müller : Chronicle of the royal court theater in Hanover. A contribution to German theater history . Helwing, Hanover 1876
• Arnold Nöldeke : Municipal Opera House (former court theater). In: The art monuments of the city of Hanover , part 1, monuments of the “old” city area of ​​Hanover , Hanover, self-published by the provincial administration, Schulzes bookstore, 1932, pp. 707–714
  • Neudruck Verlag Wenner, Osnabrück 1979, ISBN 3-87898-151-1
• MF Gerhäuser: The planning of theaters and their development in Hanover. In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter , New Series 23 (1969), pp. 85–144
• Gerd Weiß, Marianne Zehnpfennig: Court theater, today an opera house. In: Monument topography of the Federal Republic of Germany , architectural monuments in Lower Saxony, City of Hanover, Part 1, [Bd.] 10.1 , ed. by Hans-Herbert Möller , ISBN 3-528-06203-7 , p. 70, as well as attachment center. In: List of architectural monuments according to § 4 (NDSchG) (excluding architectural monuments of the archaeological monument preservation), status: July 1, 1985, City of Hanover, Lower Saxony State Administration Office - Institute for Monument Preservation , p. 3ff.
• Sabine Hammer (ed.), George Alexander Albrecht (co-author): The opera house in Hanover. Architecture and theater history , Hannover: Schlueter, 1986, ISBN 3-87706-029-3
• Franz Rudolf Zankl : The stage curtain of the palace opera house painted by Johann Heinrich Ramberg . Outline etching by JH Ramberg. 1828. In: Hanover Archive , sheet K 14
• Harold Hammer-Schenk : The GLF Laves court theater in Hanover. In: Laves and Hannover: Lower Saxon Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (earlier edition under the title Vom Schloss zum Bahnhof ), ed. by Harold Hammer-Schenk and Günther Kokkelink , with contributions by Sid Auffarth a . a., revised new edition, Hanover: Edition Libri Artis Schäfer, 1989, ISBN 3-88746-236-X , pp. 215–294
• Sabine Hammer (ed.), Dieter Brosius (co-author): Opera in Hanover. 300 years of change in a city's music theater , ed. from the Lower Saxony Sparkassenstiftung , Hanover: Schlüter, 1990, ISBN 3-87706-298-9
• B. Kruger et al. a .: Hanover Opera House. Future visions with tradition. A documentation about the renovation of the stage technology in the years 1996–1998 , 1998
• Dieter Schmalstieg: The opera house in Hanover - extensive restoration work on the exterior. In: Hans-Herbert Möller (Ed.): Restoration of cultural monuments. Examples from the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony (= reports on preservation of monuments , supplement 2), Lower Saxony State Administration Office - Institute for Monument Preservation , Hameln: Niemeyer, 1989, ISBN 3-87585-152-8 , pp. 91–96
• S. Sunday: That is what my mind seeks. The Hans-Peter Lehmann era in the Hanover State Opera from 1980–2001 , 2001
• Helmut Knocke , Hugo Thielen : Opernplatz 1. In: Hannover Art and Culture Lexicon , p. 175ff.
• Günter Katzenberger (ed.), Katharina Hottmann (edit.): "Our court is a very strong god ..." Hanover's opera around 1850 in the field of tension between artists, king and court officials. With numerous unpublished documents and letters from Heinrich Marschner and others. Heinrich Marschner's personal file from the Hanover Theater Museum (= Prinzenstraße , Doppelheft 13), 1st edition, Hanover: Lower Saxony State Theater Hanover in cooperation with the Theater Museum and Archive, 1988, ISBN 978-3-931266-12-7 and ISBN 3- 931266-12-5 (false); Table of contents as a PDF document
• Hugo Thielen: Opera House. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 487f.

Web links

Commons : Hanover Opera House  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Official website of the State Opera
• Interactive 360 ​​° panorama photo of the opera house and the surrounding area

Individual evidence

1. ^ State Archives Hanover , inventory of the directorate of the Hoftheater in Hanover
2. ↑ Ralf-Peter Post: Handwritten countersigned printout of the Wikipedia article version about himself in Wikipedia
3. ↑ Kerstin Hergt: The power of the body / dance I: A film about Stephan Toss. In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of March 27, 2008, p. 9
4. ↑ Compare the 2007 ZDF yearbook

Coordinates: 52 ° 22 ′ 24 ″  N , 9 ° 44 ′ 27 ″  E