Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar

The state theatre where classical repertoire and contemporary work sit side by side, with the Staatskapelle Weimar as its house orchestra.

Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar

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About Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar

No room in Weimar carries more history, and few work harder: the state theatre plays around six hundred times a year. Opera, drama and concert share the Großes Haus with the Staatskapelle Weimar as the resident orchestra, the repertoire reaches from the classics to work written this decade, and the company spills out of its main auditorium into a studio stage, the foyer, the Redoute over in Weimar Nord and, in summer, the open air at the e-werk.

The theatre Goethe ran

Goethe directed the Weimar stage, and for the six years between 1799 and Schiller's death in 1805 the two of them worked at it together — the partnership the monument outside the door commemorates, and the reason a small court theatre turned into a German institution. Neither man would recognise the place now. What has survived them is not a building but a job.

A state occasion, 1908

The house standing on the square today opened on 11 January 1908. The theatre's own history describes the ceremony as a formal act of state and notes Kaiser Wilhelm II among those present, which tells you what a national theatre was understood to be worth at the time.

Where the republic got its name

On 31 July 1919 the delegates of the National Assembly, sitting in this auditorium, gave Germany's first democratic constitution its final approval. That vote is why a republic ended up named after a town of sixty thousand people, and why the address is a stop on a political pilgrimage as well as a theatrical one.

Bombed out, reopened with Faust

An American air raid on 9 February 1945 destroyed the theatre; by the house's own account only the façade and the foyer came through it. Three years later, in 1948, the company reopened with Goethe's Faust.