Opera houses need to be refurbished – culture

Excessiveness in art has a name: opera. Its beginnings 400 years ago, the attempt to cross spoken theater and music, are excessive. Initially only a few singers and musicians were involved, everything quickly became immoderate: large orchestra, choir, in France the indispensable ballet, stage construction pomp, machine magic, the horrific fees for castrati, ever larger theaters and hours of seasons long before Richard Wagner. Today the most famous and most expensive classical musicians are opera singers: Anna Netrebko, Plácido Domingo, Jonas Kaufmann. And the annual budgets of the largest opera houses are tending towards 100 million euros.

Woe if one of the opera houses, now all digital high-tech temples for decidedly analogue art, is getting on in years and needs to be renovated. Then the costs are also immense. At least 600 million are often needed, as in Cologne. In Stuttgart Almost a billion is forecast for the upcoming renovation, including a buffer of up to 25 percent for probable cost increases. However, the forecasts are not that cautious everywhere. That is one of the reasons why such renovations occasionally get out of hand. In spite of the epidemic, what is a miracle, the public sector is currently sticking to such renovations.

Do you even need that? Isn’t that just a luxury for the rich?

Stuttgart and Cologne are just two of many examples. The Theater an der Wien closes early next year. Renovation work is also pending in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg and Augsburg, at Berlin’s Komischer Oper and sometime (2030?) At the Munich National Theater, the largest opera house in Germany with 2100 seats. Anyone who has included in the calculation is now at many billions of renovation costs. Opera is the measure of excess, that is its unique selling point in an increasingly underdeveloped theater scene.

But who has any idea how much a billion euros is? You could get ten for that Eurofighter to buy. Then it’s better to renovate an opera house. Incidentally, these costs are not paid from the culture budget, but from the respective building budget, from which, for example, new university buildings are paid for, which can cost several hundred million. However, the pressure to justify publicly paid cultural expenditures and especially for opera house renovations is particularly high: Do you even need that? Isn’t that just a luxury for the rich? Those are quite legitimate questions. The construction of the Amsterdam Opera is called “Stopera”, which is said to go back to the slogan of those who opposed the building that opened in 1986: “Stop the Opera!”. A small survey of citizens has now been carried out in Stuttgart, which signaled an okay for the renovation. They know there that 350,000 people buy the 500,000 opera and ballet tickets. This is anything but a small wealthy elite, Stuttgart doesn’t even have twice as many inhabitants. And it’s not just Stuttgart residents who come to their legendary opera.

Stuttgart without an opera house, that would mean province

In addition, explains Marc-Oliver Hendriks from the State Theater there, that an opera is important even for non-opera goers. People want Stuttgart to play in the top soccer league, that there is a State Gallery and an opera house. This is what makes a city so attractive and unique, even for people who rarely and never go to a football match, the opera or the museum. Stuttgart without an opera house, a particularly shimmering piece of the mosaic would be missing from the city’s portfolio, that would mean province.

The festival hall in Bayreuth has been refurbished for years, the work should be completed by 2026: 150 years of the festival. Façade renewal, fire protection, barrier-free access and a new sprinkler system were topics here as elsewhere, the first construction phase cost 30 million, for the next 170 million have been promised. Unlike in other opera houses, Bayreuth only plays for six weeks in the summer. In addition, there are four months of rehearsals in years with the “Ring des Nibelungen”, which is due in 2022, otherwise it is three months. The rest of the year can be renovated in this mystical wooden theater that has never had heating. That is why Bayreuth does not need what all other opera houses need during the renovation: an alternative venue.

And the audience? Will it take part in the moving of the houses?

Stuttgart plays operas on 160 evenings and 80 other ballets, which are particularly important here. Because the miracle choreographer John Cranko, who shaped the house, is still the figurehead today, some of his big productions are still in the repertoire. When the Stuttgart-based company leaves its parent company for eight to ten years in 2027, they too will need an interim venue where Cranko’s technically complex pieces can continue to be played as well as operas. In the meantime, the Stuttgart-based company has found an area for their interim in the “Wagenhallen”, which are already used for cultural purposes. A technically advanced stage will be built there, the heart of every theater, with a fully functional upper stage, which is for ballet, and a lower stage, which is indispensable for operas. Sustainability is also an issue: The interim should continue to be used after returning to the headquarters. And the audience? Will it go through the two moves? Will the occupancy rate collapse and with it the income from ticket sales, which are an existential factor for every theater, especially in view of the partial and total closings as a result of the epidemic? All opera renovators ask themselves these questions.

In Frankfurt it is not yet clear how the renovation will be handled. However, there is an impressive plan that has real opportunities: the city will build a new house and the opera will simply move. That saves the costs for an interim. But not every city has developable land within its borders. In Munich, the Free State could not find what it was looking for in the longed-for new concert hall on its own property and had to agree to a long-term lease. The Theater an der Wien will soon be moving for two years and will benefit from the fact that the “Wien Modern” festival, in Hall E in the Museum Quarter, has a characterless alternative quarter that is suitable for operas. That is 200 places smaller than the main building. But the view is good everywhere, which is why you can charge higher entrance fees so that the income stays the same. In Austria this means: The “Massettenwert” (wonderful word!) Remains the same. However, it is unclear whether the audience will move from the old theater building, which Ludwig van Beethoven had already used and lived in, to Hall E, a fifteen-minute walk away.

The situation is more comfortable for the Komische Oper in Berlin, which is in need of renovation. There is the Schillertheater, from 2010 to 2017 already renovation interim for the State Opera Unter den Linden. The Komische Oper will move there in 2024. The stage technology in Berlin Mitte dates in part from 1946, the stage tower is to be raised, and barrier-free access is to be created. So far, wheelchair users have only been able to get to the stalls through the stage gate. Here, too, the alternative quarter is smaller than the main building, and here too the question arises as to whether the public will move from Berlin-Mitte to Charlottenburg and back again. A metro ticket to the west? Sometimes the excessiveness of the opera is narrowed down by very banal everyday problems.