Burgtheater
Why is it significant?
From the edge of the Rathauspark you can see the Burgtheater stretched along the Ring: a curved central front and two long wings reaching out like arms.
Key Facts
| Place | Burgtheater |
|---|---|
| Address | Universitätsring 2, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21030, 16.36150 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Ringstrasse: The Grand Boulevard That Replaced the City Walls |
| Generated | Generated |
From the edge of the Rathauspark you can see the Burgtheater stretched along the Ring: a curved central front and two long wings reaching out like arms. Above the entrance Apollo sits between the muses of tragedy and comedy, and along the facade the busts of playwrights keep watch, Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe and Austria's own Franz Grillparzer among them.
The court theatre is much older than this building. Empress Maria Theresa founded it in 1741 in a converted ball-game hall beside the Hofburg on Michaelerplatz, and Mozart premiered operas there, The Marriage of Figaro among them, in 1786. The company only moved into this palace by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer in October 1888, and it is still one of the great stages of the German-speaking world. For generations its actors set the standard for spoken German, so much so that Burgtheater German became a phrase of its own.
Inside, on the ceilings of the two grand staircases, are paintings by a young team that called itself the Künstler-Compagnie: Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and their friend Franz Matsch. Gustav was in his mid-twenties. In one scene, a performance at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, he painted himself into the audience, and that little face is said to be the only self-portrait of the man who later made gold his signature.
The grand new house had one embarrassing flaw: from some seats you could hardly hear the actors, and from others you could hardly see the stage. Critics mocked it, and within ten years the auditorium was rebuilt. In April 1945 the theatre burned after bombing and fighting, and the company played in borrowed halls until the restored house reopened in October 1955, a few weeks before the State Opera.
Right next door is Café Landtmann, open since 1873, one of the classic coffee houses of the Ring, where actors, journalists and politicians still meet. Now cross the Ring once more, towards the long Renaissance palace of learning opposite.