Drottningholm Palace Theatre

The Drottningholm Palace Theatre (Swedish: Drottningholms slottsteater) is an opera house located at Drottningholm Palace in , Sweden. It is one of the few 18th century theatres in Europe that is still used as a theatre with its original stage machinery.

Currently, the reinvigorated theatre has acquired a growing international reputation as a summer opera festival theatre by focusing on works by Haydn, Handel, Gluck and Mozart and emphasis on authentic performance. The theatre has also had guest performances by the Royal Swedish Opera.

The first theatre to be built on the Drottningholm site was designed by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and completed by Nicodemus Tessin the Younger. The interior was decorated between 1665 and 1703, at first in a heavy, sumptuous baroque style, but later increasingly refined to French patterns. The theatre opened in 1754 and hosted a new troupe of French actors, the Du Londel Troupe (1753-1771), that had been engaged by the court a year earlier. The troupe used the theatre in the summer months to show French and Italian opera for Queen Lovisa Ulrika and her court.

When the original theatre burned down on August 27, 1762, during the performance of a comic opera Queen Lovisa quickly decided to rebuild a theatre for the Drottningholm Palace court, commissioning a replacement opera house by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz. Work began on the building in 1764, and it eventually included the theatre as well as a complex of smaller chambers off the main auditorium to house members of the court who did not stay at the palace, including Adelcrantz, the master of the revels, the noble chambermaids, the actors and staff of the theatre, and young aristocrats. The building that Adelcrantz created was unusual architecturally in several respects. Most notably, although the theatre was intended to mimic Versailles’s artistic style, the lack of funds of the Swedish Treasury forced a much sparser style. The exterior of the building is very plain in comparison to other palatial theatres, in the style of a country manor with no indication from the exterior that an opera house is inside. The interior, decorated by Adrien Masreliez, uses trompe l'oeil, papier-mâché, and stucco to imitate more expensive materials like marble and gold. The theatre is also architecturally unusual for its shape, since the auditorium is shaped like a T with the two thrones for the reigning monarchs placed in the cross of the T in front of the stage and the rest of the court seated on wooden benches. The stage is also unusually deep, 27 by 57 ft (8.2 by 17.4 m), which helped the set designers to create optical allusions of great distance on the stage.

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