Societaetstheater
The Societaetstheater is the oldest theater in Dresden , supported by civic engagement . Societaet and Theater were founded in 1776 and in this way carried the first amateur theater in Dresden. Performances were only accessible through the members of the Societaet, i. H. they were "non-public" in today's sense. The Societaet's amateur theater began to decline in 1800 and was finally dissolved in 1832. It was not until the 1980s that the decision was made to rebuild the baroque theater building and to revive the Societaetstheater. The reopening of the theater, now as a public theater, took place in 1999.
Foundation of the Societaetstheater
After the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the Dresden theater landscape changed. The French actors who had dominated up to that point were dismissed "partly out of economy, partly out of patriotism" and German theater groups were employed instead. Abel Seyler's drama troupe in particular acquired the reputation of a reformed stage in Dresden, apart from what is perceived to be inferior “spectacle”. In addition to the upgrading of the German theater groups outside of the court theater, the aristocracy's amateur play also gained in importance and was imitated in the middle-class scholarly circles.
On May 19, 1776, a “society of long-standing friends was founded in Dresden, [who] had the same taste in art and similar instincts for social enjoyment [...] with united forces on [the] establishment of a private stage." On the 2nd day the Societaetsbühne was opened with a festive preface. The association comprised 15 nobles and citizens. They planned to "arrange the joint performance of plays during their leisure hours".
Shortly after the start of the game on a makeshift stage near today's main train station , which could hold around 50 spectators, the move to a larger building in Borngasse took place in 1777 with the support of the publisher Conrad Georg Walter . Since Walther died a year later, the Societaetstheater moved again. On December 7, 1779, it moved into the garden building of the government chancellor Johann Christoph Hoffmann , which was located in the courtyard behind the building at 19 Hauptstrasse .
The theater
The complex at Hauptstraße 19 with the front building, garden building and garden was laid out in the Baroque style around 1740, but was not used until the theater moved in. Contemporary writings described the interior of the theater hall:
“A hall that was intended for masquerades 30 years ago and never reached its destination, located in the middle of the main street in a separate back building, was [...] set up as a scene. It can accommodate 250 people on the ground floor and in the amphitheater gallery, and 24 musicians play in the orchestra. The theater has two cloakrooms on the side and eight decorations by Mr. Giesel. The main entrance is spacious and the theater, orchestra, gallery and ground floor have their own special [entrances]. "
With a size of 6 × 5 meters, the stage was also rather small for the time. It was illuminated with wax or tallow candles in special proscenium holders that could reflect the light in a targeted manner.
Johann Ludwig Giesel (1747–1814), the outfitter of the Leipzig Gewandhaus , also decorated the Societaetstheater. The design for the theater curtain from 1779 came from Johann Eleazar Zeissig , known as Schenau, one of the directors of the Dresden Art Academy . Scenes from Greek mythology were found on it, such as the muse of the comical poem Thalia , who shows a young man to the temple of virtue while a bacchante wants to lead him to the temple of lust , “fluttered by genii and chains of roses. The whole thing has a wonderful effect and is admired by art connoisseurs. "
The Societaet
The Society of Theater Lovers initially consisted of 15 and later 50 members, until it had grown to over 75 members by the end of the 18th century. These came from the Dresden bourgeoisie and the nobility and committed themselves in the association to a joint theater statute that comprised 25 articles. Among other things, it stipulated the equality of all members. Votes were used to make decisions and distribute the offices. Five heads, a secretary and a cashier were elected from among the members. Among other things, they decided on the schedule and the cast of roles.
According to the statutes, a distinction was made between the members in an active and passive part, with the active members predominantly coming from the vicinity of the Electoral Saxon court. The privy councilor of the Privy Council, Hans Ernst von Teubern, worked as a translator for foreign plays. The poet August Gottlieb Meißner used his role within the Societaet to stage works by his poet friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing . Other members composed their own pieces or, like the painter Ernst Ferdinand Oehme in the 19th century , were active as actors on the stage of the theater. In total, between 20 and 30 members were regularly active on stage as actors, which is why there were often double roles. The passive members included noble patrons who, for example, financed costumes or the upkeep of the house. The supporters of the Societaetsverein included Karl von Sachsen , Count Alois Friedrich von Brühl and Count Hans Moritz von Brühl .
Most of the presentations of the association took place between September and the beginning of May, i.e. during the extended winter half-year. Like all other theaters, the stage remained closed during Lent . During the week, however, they also played on Fridays and Sundays, i.e. on weekdays on which there were no public theater performances in Dresden until the beginning of the 19th century due to religious considerations.
As a rule, performances by the Societaetstheater were not open to a wider public. The audience on the stage was deliberately limited to the family, friends and acquaintances of the Societaets members. “Each member receives three tickets which they can distribute to their friends and acquaintances. One can only attend the theatrical performances of this society with a ticket like this. ”Strangers were only allowed to attend performances in exceptional cases and then only when a name card was handed over. This admission practice did not diminish the reputation of the stage.
The exemplary form of organization of the company as well as the quality of the performances made the Dresden Societaetstheater known beyond the borders of Saxony soon after it was founded. In contemporary theater magazines, the Dresden Liebhaberbühne received equal mention alongside the established court stages and guest performances by well-known traveling groups. The stability of the association was also noted with astonishment, since comparable stages of this time mostly only existed for short periods of time. The high status of the theater was also expressed in its role model function. In other cities, for example, new social theaters were founded on the model of the Dresden stage. In Dresden, where there were two public theaters in addition to guest performances by the traveling troupes and the summer theater, a second comparable theater company was established in 1787, the "Freundliche Theater". Since some of the members of this society also belonged to the Societaetstheater, both theaters were united in 1789. The number of lovers' theaters in Dresden continued to grow in the following years, so that in 1802 there were twelve other theaters in addition to the Societaetstheater.
Closure of the theater
At the time of its establishment, only amateurs were active in acting at the Societaetstheater. Up to 1800 no appearances by actors of the public theaters on the stage are recorded. This changed around 1800, when the Societaetstheater was increasingly discovered as a talent factory for aspiring professional actors. Women like Demoiselle Hartmann, the Weinhold sisters and Richard Wagner's sister , Luise Wagner (1805–1872), made the leap from amateur to professional actress here. At the same time, a generation change took place around 1800. The generation of the “family stage founders” resigned. Of the descendants who embarked on a professional acting career, many remained closely connected to the Societaetstheater, as they had gained their first acting experience on this stage.
The bourgeois "custom and family paintings", which still dominated the general repertoire of the large and small stages around 1800, could mostly be performed anywhere with little expenditure of staff and time, props and sets. With the general implementation of the great historical and verse dramas by Goethe and Schiller's , among others , which required elaborate costumes, difficult-to-recite and memorable verses and numerous actors, the short-term gap between the big stages and the amateur play deepened again. As already indicated in Goethe and Schiller's fragment On Dilettantism, the dilettante received the negative connotation of the inferior. In the Societaetstheater they performed simple dramas, comedies and antics according to their own means and possibilities . There is no proof that a play by Goethe or Schiller was staged on the stage of the Societaetstheater.
While the Societaetstheater had received national attention even before the turn of the 19th century, its popularity was much lower in the last decades of its existence. None of the numerous artists whose work was associated with Dresden between 1810 and 1830 can be traced back to at least one visit to a performance by the Societaetstheater. While the professional stages and the stage of the Societaetstheater originally pursued the common goal of establishing German bourgeois drama, the Societätstheater now stood outside of the established theater society with the increasing importance of the National Theater. Compared to the big theaters with their technical and artistic superiority, large parts of the upper middle class saw in the amateur game at best a "harmless pleasure" that had no special moral or aesthetic use. Financial, social and political reasons led to the closure of the Societaetstheater on May 19, 1832.
Rediscovery and use today
After the dissolution of the Theatersocietaet in 1832, an auxiliary building was built in 1837, with which the front side of the theater building was almost half covered. The building itself received a second floor and additional windows. From the second half of the 19th century the building was used as a residential building. At the beginning of the 20th century, small craft businesses moved into the former foyer. Traces of a metal workshop, probably a coppersmith or an electroplating workshop can still be found today. It is reported that the premises also served as a photo studio and branch of the Neustädter Post. The house was not hit during the bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945, but fell into disrepair in the decades that followed. Urgent repairs were not made in the 1950s and 1960s. The building has been empty since the 1970s. Plans for gutting the house and the subsequent demolition were not implemented during the rebuilding of the main road from 1978 onwards. The architect Jürgen Mehlhorn, who was entrusted with the reconstruction of the old town houses on Hauptstrasse and thus also the old Societaets property, played a decisive role in maintaining the building. He had already dealt with the dilapidated building as a student and now used it as a storage room for building materials. For the facade of the front building at Hauptstrasse 19 in 1979 he designed a gate stone that showed two larvae with the inscription Societaetstheater 1715 1779 1979 . This was followed by the establishment of the "Societaetstheater interest group", from which the "Societaetstheater eV" association was formed in 1992. In the years that followed, the interest group campaigned for the building to be preserved and collected money to be able to carry out roof repairs and temporary securing work, for example. In 1985 the building was included in the GDR's list of monuments. Major security work was carried out in autumn 1989.
The political turnaround brought a sponsor, Dresdner Bank, who financed the reconstruction of the building. In October 1994 the Dresden city council decided to operate the building as a municipal theater after its reconstruction. Construction work began in 1996.
The historical theater building was reconstructed based on the historical template. In addition, a side building was created as a functional building with a basement stage, restaurant and five guest rooms. The baroque garden, which belonged to the sculptor Johann Benjamin Thomae among others , was restored to its original shape. A restored Thomaes garden pavilion also found its place in the middle. On February 19, 1999, the Societaetstheater was reopened.
The theater sees itself as a modern chamber theater that provides space for performances of spoken, dance, music and puppet theater. Freelance artists from the region and guests from home and abroad also appear in the Societaetstheater. Events can take place on two stages in the building, a play room in the foyer and an additional play room in the baroque garden.
Heiki Ikkola is to become the new artistic director from May 2020.
literature
- From the Societäts-Theater in Dresden . In: Heinrich August Ottokar Reichard (ed.): Theater calendar to the year 1785 . Gotha 1785, pp. 83-94.
- Wilhelm von Biedermann: A Dresden lovers' stage a hundred years ago . In: Dresden history sheets . Volume 4, No. 2, 1895, pp. 187–196.
- Eckhard Gruber: "People are incessantly looking for pleasure". On the history of the Societätstheater and other 'pocket-sized stages' . Alexander, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3895810363 .
- Eckhard Gruber: Moral citizens evening school. The Societätstheater - a Dresden lovers stage at the end of the 18th century . In: Dresdner Geschichtsverein e. V. (Ed.): Dresdner Hefte . Volume 22, Issue 79, No. 3, 2004, pp. 16-25.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ August Wilhelm Iffland: Fragments about the representation of people on the German stages . 1. Collection. Gotha 1785, p. 19.
- ^ From the Societäts-Theater in Dresden . In: Theater calendar to the year 1785 . Gotha 1785, p. 83f.
- ^ Eckhard Gruber: Moral citizens evening school. The Societätstheater - a Dresden lovers stage at the end of the 18th century . In: Dresdner Geschichtsverein e. V. (Ed.): Dresdner Hefte. Volume 22, Issue 79, No. 3, 2004, p. 17.
- ↑ The Hygiene Museum is located nearby today .
- ↑ a b Vom Societäts-Theater in Dresden , pp. 86f.
- ↑ Eckhard Gruber: "Man is incessantly looking for pleasure". On the history of the Societätstheater and other 'pocket-sized stages'. Alexander, Berlin 1998, p. 97.
- ↑ Gruber: "Man is incessantly looking for pleasure", p. 101.
- ↑ Gruber: "Man is constantly looking for pleasure", p. 104.
- ^ Dresden oddities of non-profit content . No. VIII, February 24, 1792, p. 61.
- ↑ Gruber: "Man is constantly looking for pleasure", p. 109.
- ↑ report from Dresden on 05/15/1802 . In: Journal of Luxury and Fashions . July 1802, p. 403.
- ↑ Gruber: “Man is incessantly looking for pleasure”, p. 160.
- ↑ Gruber: “Man is incessantly looking for pleasure”, p. 162.
- ↑ Gruber: “Man is incessantly looking for pleasure”, p. 171.
- ↑ Reinhard Meyer: Limited Enlightenment. Investigations on the bourgeois cultural consciousness in the late 18th and early 19th centuries . In: Hans Erich Bödecker, Ulrich Herrmann (Hrsg.): About the process of the Enlightenment in Germany in the 18th century. People, institutions and media . Göttingen 1987, p. 177.
- ^ A b Heinrich Magirius: On the building and art history of the Societätstheater in Dresden-Neustadt . In: Gruber: “Man ceaselessly pursues pleasure”, pp. 203–230, here p. 222.
- ↑ a b "The path is created by walking". A report on the history and goals of the Societätstheater-Verein , In: Gruber: “Man is incessantly seeking pleasure”, pp. 231–255, here p. 235.
- ↑ “The path is created when walking”, p. 238.
Coordinates: 51 ° 3 ′ 37.8 " N , 13 ° 44 ′ 33.8" E