Frankfurt Opera House
Oper Frankfurt (right) and Schauspiel in 2014
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| Formation | 1961 |
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| Location |
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| Bernd Loebe | |
| Website | www |
Opern- und Schauspielhaus Frankfurt (Opera and Play House) is the official name of the opera and drama theatres in Frankfurt am Main. The Oper Frankfurt (Frankfurt Opera) is one of the leading opera houses in Europe, and voted best "Opera house of the year" several times since 2003. The present opera- and playhouse was built after World War II, because the historical building was destroyed. The former house was reconstructed as the Alte Oper and serves as a concert hall today.
Frankfurt's first opera was Johann Theile's Adam und Eva, performed in 1698 by Johann Velten's touring company. The young Goethe's first operas in his home town of Frankfurt were productions by Theobold Marchand's company.
During the 1920s the opera in Frankfurt had more prominent Jewish singers than any other company in Germany, including the tenor Hermann Schramm, bass Hans Erl (the first King in Schreker's Der Schatzgräber), baritone Richard Breitenfeld and contralto Magda Spiegel, who also toured with Frankfurt Opera performing Wagner in the Netherlands. These singers were forced to leave the opera in June 1933, though the opera's director Hans Meissner was able to persuade the mayor to speak up for Schramm, who had a non-Jewish wife. Other Jewish members of the opera company among those rounded up at 9 November 1938 at the Festhalle Frankfurt, where Erl sang In diesen Heilgen Hallen, from the Magic Flute for the deportees. Members of Frankfurt Opera were sent to Auschwitz and other camps where they perished. Schramm survived, living to testify against the Frankfurt Gestapo officer Heinrich Baab in 1951.
The opera house was damaged in an air raid in January 1944, and then almost completely destroyed in March. After the war money was tight. A new house for opera and play was built, completed in 1962.
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