Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar
About This Site
The building on the Theaterplatz is younger than the company inside it: Max Littmann's house was inaugurated in January 1908, while the ensemble goes back to the court theatre Goethe was given to run in 1791. In February 1919 the constituent assembly sat in this hall, which is why the republic it was elected to give a constitution is called Weimar.
The company is older than the house
Goethe was given the direction of the court theatre in 1791 and opened it with Iffland's Die Jäger; from 1799 until Schiller's death in 1805 he ran the stage together with Schiller. None of that happened in this building. By 1906 the house then standing was almost eighty years old and no longer adequate in size, fabric or machinery, so Max Littmann was commissioned to build a new one, and it was inaugurated on 11 January 1908 as a formal state occasion. Its foundation rests on more than 1,800 wooden piles, which still carry it; the hall seated 1,080, and the house calls it one of the most modern of its time.
Two premieres that left the house
Two works went out from this stage into the repertoire. In 1850 the Hoftheater gave Wagner's Lohengrin its first performance under Franz Liszt, at a point when the composer was wanted by warrant. In 1893 it premiered Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel; Richard Strauss, second Kapellmeister in Weimar from 1889 until 1894, conducted it, and the following year gave his own first opera Guntram here as well. Both nights belong to the theatre that preceded the present building.
January and February 1919
On 19 January 1919, the day Germans voted for a constituent assembly, the house was renamed once more — Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, the name it still carries. On Thursday 6 February the assembly held its opening session in this hall, and Friedrich Ebert opened it at 15.15. It met here rather than in Berlin because the capital was still too unsettled by the revolution to be safe for it. The republic and its constitution took the town's name from those few weeks.
Bombed, and the first one back
An American air raid on 9 February 1945 left the theatre in rubble apart from its façade and its foyer. It was the first German theatre rebuilt after the war and reopened in 1948 with Goethe's Faust — so the façade and the foyer a visitor walks into are Littmann's, and what stands behind them is the reconstruction. It has worked as a repertory house ever since, with drama, opera and the Staatskapelle sharing one programme.
Connected Historical Figures
dictator • leader of the NSDAP • Reich chancellor
The party's rally of July 1926 met here in his presence, and the centre box of the first tier was later remodelled for him.[^buchenwald-reichsparteitag][^weimar-im-ns-dnt]
actress • singer
The court theatre where she debuted in 1797 and stayed until the duke's death in 1828.
novelist • dramaturg • librarian
He established himself as dramaturg at the court theatre from 1790.
composer • pianist • conductor
As Hofkapellmeister he conducted here when it was the Hoftheater — including the world premiere of Wagner's "Lohengrin" in 1850.
politician • statesman
Opened the constituent session in this house at 15.15 on 6 February 1919, and was elected Reichspräsident here five days later.
composer • pianist • Kapellmeister
He stood at the head of the court orchestra attached to this house from 1819 until his death in 1837.
architect
He designed the present building: commissioned 1906, opened 11 January 1908, and still standing on his 1,800 piles.[^dnt-weimar-geschichte]
composer • poet
The house, then the Hoftheater, that premiered his opera in 1858 and then withdrew it — in the building before the present one.
composer • conductor
The court theatre on this site, predecessor of the building of 1908, was his house from 1889 to 1894, where he premiered "Hänsel und Gretel" in 1893 and his own "Guntram" in 1894.
composer • conductor
This house, then the Grand Ducal Court Theatre, gave Lohengrin its first performance anywhere on 28 August 1850 — in the building that preceded the present one.
Also associated with this site:
Visit Information
Prices are set per production; the house publishes them with each performance in its programme.
Box office: Mon–Fri 10:00–18:00, Sat 11:00–18:00; closed Sun and public holidays
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
50.9794, 11.3247
Stay and eat nearby
Where to stay
Goetheplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
The theatre is on the Theaterplatz; the hotel is on the Goetheplatz.
Schützengasse 1, 99423 Weimar
The house sits between the Theaterplatz and the Schillerstraße; the theatre is on the first of them.
Goetheplatz 6, 99423 Weimar
The theatre is on the Theaterplatz; the hostel is on the Goetheplatz.
Where to eat
Theaterplatz 1A, Weimar
The restaurant is on the Theaterplatz, the square the theatre stands on.
On stage
On stage
Schauspiel · Duncan Macmillan
Oper
A production of the house, though it is played away from it, at the stellwerk junges theater.
Schauspiel · Robin Ormond
Starts at the house's Kassenhalle and goes outdoors from there.
Schauspiel
Oper · Georg Friedrich Händel
Events held here
Events
The weekend before Easter, every year
The theatre fronts the second of the market's two squares.
One July night, crowning the season
The Staatskapelle is the theatre's house orchestra — this is the DNT's players out of the building for one night.
Late August into early September
The theatre both hosts the festival and organises it.
A weekend in early September
The theatre fronts the square the market occupies, at Theaterplatz 2.
A weekend at the end of October, every year
The house where the National Assembly adopted the constitution in its final form in 1919 — the event this festival exists to keep arguing about.
In Weimar's history
Historic sites
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
The building the constitution was adopted in, and the address the register gives for the plaque.
Theaterplatz, 99423 Weimar
It stands directly in front of the theatre the two of them ran together.
The house stands directly opposite the theatre — the hall in which the National Assembly sat and the constitution was carried.
Historical periods
The court theatre Goethe was given to run in 1791 — the company of that period, not this building.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.
The constituent assembly opened here on 6 February 1919, and the republic took the town's name from it.
Germany's first democracy is named after this town for an almost accidental reason: in 1919 the capital was too dangerous to write a constitution in, and Weimar was quiet.
The court theatre of Liszt's premieres, rebuilt by Max Littmann and reopened in 1908, still within this period.
Goethe died in 1832, and Weimar had to work out what a town does after its golden age. It decided to keep going, and the answer took eighty-six years — the era the Klassik Stiftung Weimar calls the Silver Age. Music replaced literature as the thing Weimar was for, two royal patrons paid for it, and the schools they founded outlived the monarchy that funded them.
In Weimar's history
The duke handed Weimar's most famous writer a theatre to run, and he opened it with a box-office hit by somebody else.
Where the house's own history starts — though in an earlier building, not in this one.
A small ducal theatre gave the first performance of an opera whose composer could not attend, because the police were looking for him.
The premiere took place in this house, then the Hoftheater; the present building did not exist until 1908.
An organised hissing campaign wrecked a premiere, and Weimar lost Liszt as a result.
The house, then the Hoftheater, in the building that preceded the present one — its own Intendant is named as leading the opposition.
One of the most performed operas in the German repertoire was heard for the first time in Weimar, conducted by a 29-year-old assistant Kapellmeister.
The premiere was given by this house, then the Hoftheater, in the building that preceded the present one.
The theatre everyone photographs in Weimar is younger than the Wagner premieres it is famous for.
This is the building: commissioned from Max Littmann in 1906 and inaugurated on 11 January 1908, it is the house standing on the Theaterplatz today.
On the day Germans voted for the assembly that would write them a constitution, the theatre that assembly was about to sit in took the name»Deutsches Nationaltheater«.
The name this building has carried since that January, in the form the house announced then.
Stages and venues
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
Theaterplatz 4, 99423 Weimar
Both carry a Theaterplatz address — the theatre at number 2, the garden at number 4 in the square's quieter back.
The theatre gives the square its name.