Opera House (Leipzig)
The opera house is the venue for the opera and ballet divisions of the Leipzig Opera . The opera house is located in the center of Leipzig on Augustusplatz , opposite the Gewandhaus . It was built between 1954 and 1960 according to a design by Kunz Nierade and Kurt Hemmerling and is in the neoclassical style.
history
The New Theater on Augustusplatz, inaugurated in 1868 - on the site of today's opera house - had housed the opera stage from 1912. It was destroyed in an air raid on the night of December 3rd to 4th, 1943. The opera ensemble continued to play in the Dreilinden House - today the Musical Comedy .
In 1950, the GDR Council of Ministers decided to demolish the New Theater, which had been destroyed by the war, and to build a new opera house. Immediately afterwards there was a competition in which the renowned architect Hans Scharoun took part. The drafts for the Leipzig Opera House developed in 1950 were neither awarded nor did they have any influence on the further planning process. In the following year an open competition for the design of Augustusplatz in connection with the opera project was announced; as these results were again unsatisfactory, a third competition was initiated in 1952, which the Warsaw architect Piotr Biganski won. After this design was too complex, the architects Kunz Nierade and Kurt Hemmerling finally received the order in 1954.
On October 8, 1960, the opera house, the construction of which cost a total of 44.6 million marks, was inaugurated in a festive ceremony. The traditional cultivation of Richard Wagner's works, which continues to this day, was continued in the festival week from October 9 to 16, 1960 with the start of Wagner's Meistersinger von Nürnberg . The stage equipment of the new Leipzig Opera House was one of the most modern in Europe at the time. In the 1970s, the basement theater for the performance of chamber play-like stage works (now closed) and in 1990 a small art gallery are integrated into the building.
architecture
Exterior design
The actual design provided for cornices , sculptures , statues and a magnificent portico . Due to the departure from the architectural principles of socialist classicism in the mid-1950s, the facade designs were reworked and the plastic jewelry was reduced. The facade is made of light-colored Pirna sandstone . It has a 350-meter attic railing, which at the building corners with peace doves adorned. Above the ground floor windows there is a bas-relief showing theater symbols and the state emblem of the GDR . The entrance area consists of a two-story simple loggia . The window and door frame as well as the pillars in the loggia area are made of gold-colored anodized aluminum . The house has the shape of a step pyramid measuring 115 meters by 85 meters; from the foundation to the top there are 52 meters in seven floors. There is also an upper stage structure and cellar, 680 rooms with 737 aluminum-framed windows. The building appears sober by day. At night, when everything is lit up, the house looks more festive and glassy thanks to the large window fronts. In contrast to the front, the rear view of the swan pond looks more impressive, which can be attributed to the staggering of the building wings and the terrace. Even after its inauguration, the house was no longer up-to-date because it obviously followed the standards of classicist theater architecture for the time. Today the Leipzig Opera House is one of the most beautiful buildings of the architectural style of the late 1950s in Germany.
The architect Hans Hopp described the building in 1961 with the following words:
“In its external appearance, the opera house is the work of a transitional era, a compromise between a historicizing structure and a skin that is independent of the construction. A compromise because the structure is too weak and the skin has too many details. This view is confirmed by the different effects of the house by day and night. During the day one misses a strong shadow formation of the individual links. But at night, when all the windows are lit and the outside areas are illuminated, the large building is covered with a light, almost transparent skin, and the house appears as a radiant palace, a festive center of the city, in contrast to the somewhat sober effect during the day . "
Interior design
The increased sequence of rooms in the foyer is characteristic. You enter the opera through the vestibule , the ticket hall, which is decorated with a blue-black diabase floor and, like the adjoining cloakroom, is kept low. The walls are partly clad with handmade tiles made of Meissen porcelain , which reflect the light in a warm way. Then you get to the bright, elegantly upward swinging, double-barreled main and parquet stairs. The brass handrails, by Fritz Kühn art forged banisters , the color of the walls, wall lights, ornaments from gold and burgundy carpet are typical for the time of construction. The color selection consists mainly of the components white gold , gold and wine red . The parquet foyer is lighter and larger. The walls and the square columns are clad with Swiss pear tree. The polychrome ceiling consists partly of figurative and partly of painted ornaments and stands in contrast to the strict wall structure. Small stucco rings made of sound-absorbing materials were embedded in the ceiling for sound insulation. This is particularly evident in the side foyer on the "ring ceiling". The subtle-colored foyer looks friendly and relaxed. Round pillars divide the room in half. There are refreshment rooms to the side of both foyers. The trapezoidal auditorium is designed according to the one-tier principle. The walls are clad with flamed maple . In order to achieve better acoustics, the walls were folded. The hall is spanned by a coffered ceiling. The fields are arranged flat towards the stage and are always steeper towards the tier. This is supposed to cause even sound reflection into the audience. A differentiated ceiling painting ensures a visible balance between the different cassette fields.
There are also two boxes in the hall - the director's box and the state council box (today: city box). These have separate entrances and reception rooms. Today you can book these boxes as a normal opera visitor, where you can only see two thirds of the stage, but you can be seen because the boxes are very prominently above the parquet and halfway between the stage and the tier. The main stage has a portal section 16 meters wide and eleven meters high.
Luminaire design
The light nform in the foyer is striking. Those in the cloakroom resemble the buds of flowers. When you reach the parquet foyer, the buds have blossomed and the lights resemble large umbels like a dandelion . When you get into the foyer, the umbrellas fly away from the large chandeliers . If you go back down the stairs you will find the seed pods in the banisters.
Stage house
The orchestra pit , which can hold 88 musicians, can be continuously adjusted to different heights or matched to the stage floor. The stage is about 80 centimeters above the floor of the first row of seats and has an area of about 30 × 25 meters. The usable area is 25 meters wide and 22 meters deep. Half of this total of 550 square meters is used for the revolving stage . This cylinder turntable has a diameter of 17.5 meters and weighs 300 tons. It has four double-decker platforms (2 × 12 meters, 4 × meters) which can be continuously lowered, raised and beveled. Due to the double-decker principle, stage sets can already be set up below the stage surface , which are then visible when the podium is extended. The stage is limited by the roller floor at a height of 27 meters. There are decorative hand hoists, machine hoists and point hoists at a height of 30 meters. When all trains are fully utilized, several tons of backdrop material can be stowed.
The stage is surrounded by three stage galleries from a height of about eleven meters. At a height of around 17 meters, there used to be a 42-meter-long circular horizon, which, depending on the imagination, could accommodate differently painted horizons with an area of 722 square meters. Today this horizon will be attached if necessary. The course of the circular horizon was followed by a lighting walkway on which spotlights were mounted until the stage building was converted in 2001. This type of lighting was unique and not found in any other theater in the world. Today, six skylights are used for this. In addition, there are panorama trains parallel to the galleries. There is an additional soundproof curtain behind the main curtain. The line of sight for the spectators was limited to a height of 12 meters. On the portal bridge behind it there are spotlights to illuminate the panoramic horizon or other brochures.
There is an iron curtain between the orchestra pit and the audience . So it is possible to build backdrops right up to the audience. The iron curtain consists of two parts. The lower third moves up out of the orchestra pit, while the upper two thirds are lowered down from the ceiling of the hall. Its weight is 180 tons. It is filled with sand and can be sprinkled with water in an emergency. It must close within 28 seconds without the use of electricity.
The main stage is delimited by the side and back stages. These can be closed with sound curtains. On the side stages, which have a usable area of 19 × 11 meters, there are stage wagons with which scenery material can be brought onto the stage. There is a rail-mounted carriage on the backstage. The back stage has a usable area of 22 × 12.5 meters, including the technical systems on an area of 220 square meters. On the back stage there is still a brochure store and two decoration lifts that reach down into the passage. There the sets are stowed in trucks and brought to the warehouses.
The Leipzig Opera has its own fleet of vehicles. Sometimes it takes a lot of transport to get to the performances. The prospectus elevator moves from the passage in which the trucks are loaded and unloaded to the stage and passes through several magazines for temporary storage. If the elevator goes up to the stage, it passes a fire compartment, a 20 meter long and one meter wide plate opens.
In addition, there are two rehearsal stages, ballet rehearsal rooms, the costume store and a choir rehearsal room in the opera house. The cellar theater is located in the basement under the stage building. With 99 seats it was the venue for the children's choir and contemporary music-dance-theater. In 1995 the “1. Festival of Contemporary Music Theater ”in cooperation with the Dresden Center for Contemporary Music. The basement theater is currently closed.
In the basement there is a collection on opera history and lighting technology, which is shown when school classes visit or during opera house tours. Here, employees and trainees have spent years collecting stage lights and have also restored and installed one of the world's last electromechanical stage light signal boxes. This is still functional and is shown at the regular opera house tours. The Technical Cabinet of the Leipzig Opera contains the largest collection of spotlights in Europe.
Renovation 2007
In 2007 the auditorium was extensively refurbished and renovated for a total of 9.5 million euros. The fire protection was renewed and adapted to the legal requirements. Asbestos has been replaced by suitable materials in the ventilation ducts . The old carpets were replaced by new, faithfully woven floors, and the wall coverings were polished up. The lighting that was installed in the early 1990s for the side foyer was reinstated. A redesigned checkout area and the new seating are also among the improvements. The slope and the row spacing in the hall reduced the available space by 148 seats, but improved the seating quality of the visitors. The opera house now has 1264 seats.
On November 11, 2007, the opening ceremony took place with an “open day”. Over 8,000 visitors came to see the opening. The musical reopening took place on November 15, 2007 with the performance of Richard Wagner's opera Rienzi .
literature
- Fritz Hennenberg : History of the Leipzig Opera. Sax-Verlag, Markkleeberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-86729-045-6 .
- Birk Engmann: The Leipzig Opera House is turning fifty. An overview of architecture and building history. In: Leipziger Blätter, No. 56, edited by the Leipzig Cultural Foundation. Passage-Verlag, Leipzig 2010, pp. 4-7, ISSN 0232-7244 .
- Thomas Topfstedt : Leipzig Opera: the building. Verlag Kunst und Touristik, Leipzig 1993, ISBN 3-928802-28-3 .
- Alexander von Maravic, Harald Müller: Leipzig Opera: Spotlights on five decades of music theater. Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-940737-81-X .
Web links
- Official website of the Leipzig Opera
- Oper Leipzig at Operabase (productions, artists and calendar)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alexander von Maravic, Harald Müller (ed.): Oper Leipzig. Spotlights on five decades of music theater. Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2010, pp. 18–31.
- ↑ Alexander von Maravic, Harald Müller (ed.): Oper Leipzig. Spotlights on five decades of music theater. Theater der Zeit, Berlin 2010, p. 27.
Coordinates: 51 ° 20 ′ 25.3 " N , 12 ° 22 ′ 53.3" E