Bolzano City Theater
The City Theater Bozen ( Italian Teatro Comunale di Bolzano , Ladin Teater Comunel ) is a theater building in the South Tyrolean capital Bozen ( Italy ). In particular, it serves as an event location for productions of spoken theater , music theater and stage dance . It is played primarily by the United Theaters of Bozen , the Teatro Stabile di Bolzano and the Haydn Orchestra .
The multi-purpose building is the work of the architect Marco Zanuso and was inaugurated in 1999. Its administration was entrusted to the Bolzano City Theater and Concert Hall Foundation . In the house there is a large hall with 802 seats as well as various rooms for smaller events and rehearsals.
history
At the end of the 18th century the composer most performed in Bolzano was Giovanni Paisiello . There were regular opera performances only from 1784. The performances took place in the Palais Menz and then in the Mercantile Magistrate. There was no real theater, it was not until 1805 that a first location was established specifically for performances at Musterplatz. In the Palais Pock all were 19th century on operas from the Magic Flute to the Barber of Seville listed. After Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gioachino Rossini , Gaetano Donizetti , Giuseppe Verdi , Charles Gounod , Johann Strauss , Engelbert Humperdinck , Mario Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo also performed in Bozen. In 1906 the theater was closed after 100 years of existence for fear of fires, but also because of nationalist-tinged controversies that attacked the excessive presence of an Italian musical culture in an Austrian border town.
Bolzano got a theater again in 1918, which had been built from 1913 on a project by the architect Max Littmann from Munich in the station park and was inaugurated on April 14, 1918 with Beethoven's Egmont . The “City Theater” was renamed the Teatro Verdi from 1919, when the city became part of the Kingdom of Italy , and became the seat of Italian melodrama , while German opera lost its importance and was finally banned in 1934.
In July 1923, the fascist politician Ettore Tolomei presented a catalog of measures for the Italianization of South Tyrol approved by the Grand Council of Fascism in the city theater .
In 1943 the theater was destroyed in an Allied bombing . In 1951, the remains of the theater were completely removed and until the inauguration of the new city theater on September 9, 1999, the performances took place in various places: in cinemas and arenas, exhibition halls of the Bolzano Exhibition Center , in the Cristallo Theater , in the Gries City Theater or in the Waltherhaus . In the eighties it was decided to give the city a theater again, which would offer the possibility to house all event activities from spoken theater to music to dance.
The project for the New City Theater was awarded to the architect Marco Zanuso in 1985, who was supposed to rebuild an area of the city that stretched from the cathedral to Verdiplatz and should unite the buildings between Eisackstrasse and Südtiroler Strasse.
architecture
Facade and building envelope
The theater looks like a box of enigmatic contents, “which was built like a modern ziggurat, carefully chiseled and hollowed out in its forms so that all the curved lines of the facades and every gradation of the surroundings can blend.
The thickness of the building is softened by the homogeneous cladding with regular slabs of glossy Chiampo: a rough skin, with fine, deep joints between the slabs, envelops the building without interrupting the continuity, whereby the supporting structure is completely hidden. The double term structural cladding thus radically merges into a single part: the shell of the building. "
The interior halls: the great hall and the studio theater
The parquet in the shape of a half hexagon emerges from a rectangle. Above is the tier, which extends sideways almost to the arch of the stage and thus forms two balconies. The hall is closed off by the suspended ceiling, which is based on an original architectural construction principle.
The inclined surfaces are attached to facing beams made of glued laminated timber, which are anchored to pillars standing at regular intervals on the side walls of the hall in order to converge in a center near the stage and thus improve the acoustics.
As with the Chinese boxes, one (the hall) is inserted into the other (the shell of the building). And on the roof, the large “shell” of the main hall is revealed by a step-shaped hexagonal body that, like the Piccolo, determines the coordinates with which the heart of the theater is located.
The inner shell of the hall, consisting of a single cladding material, albeit of different texture (wood), is kept simple. The cladding of the hall stands out from the opulence of the foyer with its floors and walls with Venetian stucco work. It should be one of the medium-high standards of the best structures in Europe and is equipped with 802 seats and ideal for spoken theater, music theater and dance.
In the studio theater ( Teatro Studio , maximum 272 seats), a refined atmosphere and proportions, especially between hall and stage, of certain small theaters of the 17th century are sought because of the nature of its performances.
The foyer
The theater's foyer extends over three levels, its floors and walls are lined with Venetian stucco and the middle level, which is decorated with a glass bay window overlooking the theater square, is the place for receptions, small artistic performances, discussions, etc.
The internal structure
The spatial distribution of the building reflects the idea of theater as a machine for the production of performances, which is at the heart of Zanuso: in the middle the place where the drama takes place (hall and stage), and around it, compact and at the same time separated depending on the function, The workshops for the stage design, the actors' area, the offices of the Foundation City Theater and Concert Hall Bozen , the Teatro Stabile di Bolzano and the United Stages Bozen are located . With the new equipment of the hall, with which the Bolzano architect Renzo Gennaro was entrusted in 1998 for the optimization of the acoustics , the architectural requirements of the design by Zanuso, who for the walls a modular cladding made of glossy and sandblasted Douglas in honeycomb form and for the hip surfaces, were met the suspended ceiling provided differently processed wooden panels, sometimes not taken into account.
The theater square
The tone of Zanuso's architecture can be found in the concept of the paving of the theater square, two closely shifted circles of different radius around the building, just as the concept of the fountain carved into the gently sloping patio of the Valle in Arenzano was: definite and essential but gentle.
literature
- Hubert Stuppner , Music and Society in South Tyrol: Bozen 1800-2000 , Bozen, Raetia, 2009, ISBN 978-88-7283-337-7 .
- Città di Bolzano (a cura di), City Theater / Teatro Civico / Teatro Verdi di Bolzano. Storia di un teatro di confine (1918-1943) , Quaderni di storia cittadina / Booklets on the history of Bozen, n ° 3, Bolzano, Archivio Storico, 2011, ISBN 88-901870-8-5 .
- Oskar Pausch, curtain up !: a failed guest performance of the Burgtheater at the opening of the Bolzano City Theater in 1918 , in “ Der Schlern ”, No. 84, 6-7 2010, pp. 55-60.
- Walter Schneider, The Bozen City Theater in the Bahnhofspark , in Bozen: City in Transition , publisher: Südtiroler Kulturinstitut, Yearbook of the Südtiroler Kulturinstitut, No. 7, Bozen, Athesia, 1973, pp. 393–409.
- Gottfried Solderer , The 20th Century in South Tyrol , Vol. 2: 1920-1939: Fascist ax and swastika , Bozen, Raetia, 2000, p. 62, ISBN 88-7283-148-2 .
- Città di Bolzano, Marco Zanuso, Nuovo Teatro Comunale , Bolzano 1999.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Our structures. Bolzano City Theater and Concert Hall Foundation, accessed on April 2, 2018 .
- ↑ The Bolzano City Theater and Concert Hall. Retrieved March 28, 2019 .
Coordinates: 46 ° 29 ′ 44.1 ″ N , 11 ° 21 ′ 12.9 ″ E