The Estates Theatre Opens

JAN 01 1783 · 12:00

The Estates Theatre (Stavovské divadlo) on Železná street, Old Town. Built 1781–83 by Anton Haffenecker for Count Nostitz, opened 21 April 1783 with Lessing's Emilia Galotti, and still operating on its original stage. One of the few European theatres of its century never to have burned down. Place: Stavovské divadlo (then Gräflich Nostitzsches Nationaltheater), Železná street, Old Town Figures: Count Franz Anton von Nostitz-Rieneck, patron · Anton Haffenecker, architect · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (the opening play, posthumous) · Pasquale Bondini, impresario from 1784 Count Nostitz, a Bohemian aristocrat with the means and the taste, pays for the theatre out of his own pocket: fifty-eight thousand gulden, raised entirely from his estates. Haffenecker designs a Neoclassical box of severe restraint, in keeping with Joseph's reign: pale yellow facade, plain pilasters, no exterior statuary. Inside, four tiers of boxes line a horseshoe; the acoustics are calculated against the Italian opera houses that Nostitz has visited. It opens on 21 April 1783 with Lessing's Emilia Galotti, performed by a German troupe. The choice is deliberate: Lessing has been dead two years, and the play is the keystone of the German bourgeois tragedy, the genre Nostitz wishes to plant in his city. Joseph II approves by letter from Vienna and does not attend.