Theater St. Gallen

The St. Gallen Theater

The St. Gallen Theater (formerly Stadttheater St. Gallen ) is a three-part theater with opera, operetta, musical, drama, children's theater and dance in St. Gallen . It is considered to be the oldest existing professional theater in Switzerland .

history

The first amateur theater in St. Gallen was built in the Middle Ages around the year 900; the driving forces were the monks Tutilo and Notker Balbulus . Because the dominant church in the monastery town was hostile to the theater, no theater business could gain a foothold until the beginning of the 19th century. The "Deutsche Löhlein'sche Theatergesellschaft" applied to the city authorities for a performance permit in the spring of 1801, to no avail. Her play “ The noble lie” by August von Kotzebue was shown in a shack in St. Fiden .

Later the troops were allowed to move into the abbot's monastery remise outside the city limits. This was created in 1795 under Abbot Beda . On October 14, 1801, the première of the first St. Gallen theater took place in the simply furnished room, with The Silver Wedding or the Happiness of the Satisfied Farmer again with a play by the then successful author Kotzebue. From 1801 to 1856 the remise between Karls- and Spisertor served as a theater building. At the beginning of the 19th century, a small expansion was made to accommodate the ticket office and a small refreshment room.

With his «Theater-Actionnairs-Gesellschaft», the first Landammann of the new canton of St. Gallen , Karl Müller-Friedberg , created the basis for the first Swiss professional theater with a three -branch offer on a private basis in 1805 and headed it until his resignation in 1831.

In 1850 the city commissioned Johann Christoph Kunkler to look for a suitable building site. He chose the former monastery garden of St. Katharinen and the old armory, today's Bohl. On November 5, 1857, the new Kunkler building on Bohl was opened with Mozart's Don Giovanni . For more than a century, the productions of the city theater could be seen in this building until the curtain was closed for the last time in January 1968 after Millöcker's Der Bettelstudent . The Kunkler building was demolished in 1971; Today there is a McDonald’s branch there.

stairway

New building

The consistently implemented basic architectural idea of the new theater building ( Claude Paillard ), in which the performances of the St. Gallen Theater take place to this day, is the regular hexagon and thus the 120 ° angle. The building was opened on March 15, 1968 with Ludwig van Beethoven's Fidelio . On the occasion of the new building, the stock corporation was replaced by a cooperative , in which the city and canton were and still are involved. The neighboring cantons and municipalities gradually participated in the theater. As part of the new financial equalization scheme, the theater is to be considered as an infrastructure service for the region.

Since 2000, the St. Gallen Symphony Orchestra and the former St. Gallen City Theater have operated under the St. Gallen Concert and Theater . This legal form made it possible to optimize VAT , as the orchestra provides theater services for operas, operettas and musicals. The city theater name was dropped because the canton had decided to pay more than half of the subsidies.

Konzert und Theater St. Gallen has been one of the largest recipients of money from the lottery fund in recent years .

On March 4, 2018, in a cantonal vote, the population of St. Gallen approved a renovation with costs of around CHF 48.6 million with 62.47% yes-votes.

Guest performances

While from 1926 to 1977 the ensemble of the theater performed at the Kurtheater Baden in the summer , today there are only drama excursions with individual performances in Baden, Visp and Friborg as well as to Chur and Schaffhausen .

game schedule

The St. Gallen Theater, run as a three-branch operation, brings out over 20 new productions every season and is attended by over 150,000 spectators (figures 2015/16) from all over the Lake Constance area at around 450 performances (of which around 40 are away) and is thus ( after the Zurich Opera House and the Basel Theater) in third place of all Swiss theaters. The large hall seats 741 people, and the number of seats on the studio stage and the two halls of the Lokremise varies depending on the staging.

Much acclaimed premieres in recent years were e.g. E.g. the first performance of the restored sheet music for Medea in Corinto by Johann Simon Mayr in 2009, the rediscovery of the Swiss musical Bibi Balù in 2010, the world premieres of the musicals Moses - The 10 Commandments by Dieter Falk and Michael Kunze in 2013 and Artus - Excalibur by Frank Wildhorn in 2014 , the world premiere of the opera Anna's Mask by David Philip Hefti and the first new production of the musical Tanz der Vampire .

In general, the St. Gallen Theater has made a name for itself in the last few years with productions of musicals, although the stage cannot offer the technical possibilities of a Broadway stage. The world premiere of the musical Matterhorn ( libretto by Michael Kunze, music by Albert Hammond ) took place here in February 2018 . Not least thanks to the income from the musical productions, but also due to a generally good occupancy rate, the house is able to contribute to its financing with a very large contribution for German-speaking theaters of around 35%.

Head (season 2019/20)

Managing Director: Werner Signer
Opera director: Peter Heilker
Concert director: Florian Scheiber
Acting director: Jonas Knecht
Chief conductor: Modestas Pitrėnas
Head of the dance company: Kinsun Chan

literature

Keckeis, Silke Christiane: Theater St. Gallen, St. Gallen SG . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , pp. 1883–1886.
175 years of the St. Gallen City Theater. On the occasion of its 175th anniversary . Rorschacher Neujahrsblatt, Rorschach 1980, ISBN 3-85819-034-9