Wie Goethe und Schiller die Klassik erfanden
The classical decades from the wings, out of the memoirs of an actor who worked twenty years beside both of them.
Today
2 September 2026 · 21:00 Uhr
About Wie Goethe und Schiller die Klassik erfanden
The best witness to how a period is made is rarely the people credited with making it. This evening takes the memoirs of Anton Genast, who spent more than twenty years at the Weimar court theatre with Schiller and Goethe, and lets the view from the acting side do the work: what the rehearsals for Faust, Egmont and Wilhelm Tell were actually like, the Mozart operas, and the occasional disaster that only a company member would record. Schiller wrote that no garlands are woven for the actor; the two performers weave a few affectionate ones anyway, for colleagues long dead — a generous answer to his line.
Performances
Also on stage here
Where
Lucas-Cranach-Haus, Markt 11/12, 99423 Weimar
Organiser
Theater im Gewölbe
Facts checked against the organiser on 29 August 2026
Places and people
Historical figures
1749–1832 • writer • statesman • naturalist
Seen from the stalls and the wings: the director of the court theatre, at work on his own plays.
1759–1805 • writer • poet • historian
The other half of the partnership the evening watches from the acting side — and the author of the line about garlands it answers.
Historical periods
The period's own making, told by someone who was in the building for it.
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.