The Halle Opera House ( German : Opernhaus Halle ) is an opera house in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt . Originally named the Halle Town Theatre ( German : Stadttheater von Halle ), the theatre was built in 1886 by Heinrich Seeling . A bomb attack on 31 March 1945 destroyed much of the original building. Restorative work ensued a few years later, and the theatre reopened in 1951 under the name Landestheater Halle . In January 1992 it was renamed to its current title. The theatre is currently used for performances of opera , ballet , and orchestral concerts. It is also the main performance venue for the annual summer Handel Festival held in the city.
17-485: 51°29′12″N 11°58′17″E / 51.48667°N 11.97139°E / 51.48667; 11.97139 This article about an opera house or structure is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Opera house An opera house is a theater building used for performances of opera . Like many theaters, it usually includes a stage , an orchestra pit , audience seating, backstage facilities for costumes and building sets, as well as offices for
34-405: A religious nature found a special place in the mystery plays performed on cathedral squares. As before, they dealt with sacred subjects, but they were not about worship per se. Secular musical theater also existed, but had a more popular and intimate aspect (see, for example, Adam de la Halle 's Jeu de Robin et Marion ("Play of Robin and Marion"), in the 13th century). At the beginning of
51-448: A style which might be considered popular. The melodies to which these are set have the character of folk music, and seem more spontaneous than the author's more elaborate songs and motets . Two of these melodies in fact appear in the motets Mout me fu gries de departir/Robin m'aime, Robin m'a/Portare and En mai, quant rosier sont flouri/L'autre jour, par un matin/He, resvelle toi Robin . The attribution of these motets to Adam de la Halle
68-574: Is unconfirmed. Adam de la Halle wrote the Jeu de Robin et Marion for the Angevin Court of Charles I of Naples . He originally went to Naples in the service of Robert II of Artois . The play was first performed there and it has been suggested that the choice of genre was particularly poignant for those members of the court homesick for France. Although it is tempting to link the characters of French medieval pastourelle and Le Jeu de Robin et Marion with
85-516: The Opernhaus vorm Salztor in Naumburg in 1701. With the rise of bourgeois and capitalist social forms in the 19th century, European culture moved away from its patronage system to a publicly supported system. Early United States opera houses served a variety of functions in towns and cities, hosting community dances, fairs, plays, and vaudeville shows as well as operas and other musical events. In
102-513: The Church abandoned spectacles as practiced in Antiquity. Histrions , representative of Greco-Roman civilization , gradually disappeared. The Middle Ages saw the abandonment of ancient theaters, which were transformed into gigantic stone quarries , like many other ancient buildings, both public or private. Music still had its place in worship. It continued to bring audiences together, but its content
119-431: The pastourelle . This genre typically tells of an encounter between a knight and a shepherdess, frequently named Marion. Adam de la Halle's version of the story places a greater emphasis on the activities of Marion, her lover Robin and their friends after she resists the knight's advances. It consists of dialogue in the old Picard dialect of de la Halle's home town, Arras , interspersed with short refrains or songs in
136-656: The 17th and 18th centuries, opera houses were often financed by rulers, nobles, and wealthy people who used patronage of the arts to endorse their political ambition and social position. There was no opera house in London when Henry Purcell was composing and the first opera house in Germany, the Oper am Gänsemarkt , was built in Hamburg in 1678, followed by the Oper am Brühl in Leipzig in 1693, and
153-857: The 17th century, in Italy, singing underwent yet another renewal, with the emergence of Baroque art at the height of the Renaissance . Italy continues to have many working opera houses, such as the Teatro Massimo in Palermo (the biggest in the country), the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan . The Teatro San Cassiano in Venice was the world's first public opera house, inaugurated as such in 1637. In
170-483: The 2000s, most opera and theatre companies are supported by funds from a combination of government and institutional grants , ticket sales, and private donations. In the 19th-century United States, many theaters were given the name "opera house", even ones where opera was seldom if ever performed. Opera was viewed as a more respectable art form than theater ; calling a local theater an "opera house" therefore served to elevate it and overcome objections from those who found
187-459: The early history of Robin Hood and Maid Marian , there has been no link proved between the two. The function of these characters within their respective societies was similar: to offer a form of escapism through the imagination into a world of innocent rustic play or heroic greenwood bravery. An adaptation by Julien Tiersot was performed at Arras in 1896 at a festival in honour of Adam de la Halle, by
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#1732852603480204-471: The ideal acoustics of theaters. He explained the use of brazen vases that Mummius had brought to Rome after having had the theater of Corinth demolished, and as they were probably used in the Theater of Pompey . As wooden theaters were naturally sonorous, these vases, placed between the seats on the stands, served as resonators in the stone buildings: "By means of this arrangement, the voice, which will come from
221-455: The institution's administration. While some venues are constructed specifically for operas, other opera houses are part of larger performing arts centers. Indeed, the term opera house is often used as a term of prestige for any large performing arts center. Based on Aristoxenus 's musical system, and paying homage to the architects of ancient Greek theater , Vitruvius described, in the 1st century BC, in his treatise De architectura ,
238-415: The jury to audition musicians competing for a prize. Ancient theaters provided the ideal conditions, but it was not yet time for opera: the aim was to worship the deities, not to venerate the muses . The subject was religious, it was accompanied by singing and instrumental music. Worship was public, and the audience was made up of citizens as well as other categories of the population. Four centuries later,
255-531: The stage as from a center, will extend in circles, will strike in the cavities of the vases, and will be made stronger and clearer, according to the relationship of consonance that it will have with one of these vases." The odeon built by Pericles near the Theater of Dionysus in Athens was, according to the Suda , intended for the rehearsal of music that was to be sung in the grand theater or, according to Plutarch , for
272-466: The theater morally objectionable. Notes Sources Jeu de Robin et Marion Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion is reputedly the earliest French secular play with music, written in around 1282 or 1283, and is the most famous work of Adam de la Halle . It was performed at the Angevin Court in Naples around this time. The story is a dramatization of a traditional genre of medieval French song,
289-510: Was completely renewed. The Jeu de Daniel ("Play of Daniel") was a sung play, characteristic of the medieval Renaissance of the 12th century . The subject, taken from the biblical Book of Daniel , deals with Israel's captivity in Babylon . The play was written and performed by students of the Episcopal School of Beauvais , located in northern France. In the 15th century, sung theater of
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