Margravial Opera House
Markgrรคfliches Opernhaus
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The building is about 71.5 metres long, 31 metres wide and 26 metres tall, far larger than its modest street front suggests.
- The theatre was placed where the street widens so that carriages could draw up in front of it.
- Despite the magnificent court box, the margrave and margravine rarely sat in it, preferring seats in the front row near the stage.
- Parts of the interior are painted canvas stretched over the wood, a trick used to prevent cracks and improve the acoustics.
- The original stage curtain is the only major loss of the court box ensemble: it was carried off by Napoleon's troops during the 1812 Russian campaign.
- In 1872 Richard Wagner conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony here to celebrate laying the foundation stone of his Festspielhaus.
- Scenes of the 1994 film Farinelli, about the celebrated castrato singer, were shot in the opera house.
- Wilhelmine also wrote opera librettos; one of them, set by Andrea Bernasconi, was performed here at the 2009 festival.
- The architect of the facade, Joseph Saint-Pierre, was the French-born court builder of Bayreuth, while the Bibienas came from a Bolognese dynasty of stage designers.
Why it is worth it
Behind a sober sandstone facade on a street in central Bayreuth hides one of the most complete Baroque theatres in Europe. The Margravial Opera House was built between 1745 and 1750 for Margrave Frederick of Brandenburg-Bayreuth and his wife Wilhelmine of Prussia, the elder sister of Frederick the Great, and in 2012 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List as an outstanding example of Baroque theatre architecture.
Wilhelmine was the driving force. She founded the court theatre company in 1737 and composed, acted and directed herself. The occasion for the new building was the wedding of her only daughter, Elisabeth Fredericka Sophie, to Duke Charles Eugene of Wรผrttemberg in 1748. The French architect Joseph Saint-Pierre designed the exterior, with Corinthian columns and statues of Minerva, Apollo and the Muses on the balustrade, but the heart of the house was the work of Giuseppe Galli Bibiena and his son Carlo from Bologna, the leading theatre designers of their age.
Their auditorium is bell-shaped, entirely of wood, painted and gilded, with tiers of boxes curving towards a trompe-l'ลil ceiling; it holds about 500 people. Opposite the stage, the margravial box rises through all three tiers, dense with the emblems of the House of Brandenburg. After Wilhelmine's death in 1758, performances stopped and the building fell almost silent, and that neglect is one reason it survived so intact. More than a century later its stage, 27 metres deep, drew Richard Wagner to Bayreuth, although he went on to build his own Festspielhaus north of the town.
Today the auditorium can be visited as a museum, with a multimedia installation evoking the 1748 wedding, an interactive digital orchestra and a working reconstruction of a Baroque stage where visitors can move scenery themselves; it is also used again for performances, including the Bayreuth Baroque festival.
Getting there
The opera house is in the centre of Bayreuth, within walking distance of the old town. The nearest airport is Nuremberg Airport (NUE), about 61 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Margravial Opera House is a Baroque opera house in the town of Bayreuth, Germany. Built between 1745 and 1750, it is one of Europe's few surviving theatres of the period and has been extensively restored. On 30 June 2012, the opera house was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List because of its exceptional Baroque architecture.
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