Famous Opera Houses and Concert Halls

Among the world's best-known opera houses and concert halls are the Palais Garnier in Paris of 1875, with its staircase for seeing and being seen; the Sydney Opera House of 1973, with Jørn Utzon's white shells; the Berliner Philharmonie of 1963, where the audience surrounded the orchestra for the first time; the Oslo Opera House of 2008, with a roof one can walk on; and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg of 2017. In Sweden, Ivar Tengbom's Concert Hall in Stockholm and the Drottningholm Court Theatre are the best known. The shape of the halls, from the horseshoe to the vineyard, tells how the view of music has changed.

Facts

The courts' theatres: the horseshoe and the boxes

Opera was born at the European courts, and the first opera houses were court theatres. The auditorium was shaped like a horseshoe with several tiers of boxes, and the position of the boxes reflected rank: the prince sat opposite the stage, and the others were arranged according to how close they stood to him. The horseshoe also gives good sightlines and a short distance to the stage, and the form survived in opera houses well into the 20th century.

The Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, designed by François de Cuvilliés and built in 1751–1753, is a jewel box in red, gold and ivory, and Mozart's Idomeneo had its premiere here in 1781. During the war the carved interior was dismantled and saved, and it was reassembled in 1958 in another part of the Residence.

The Drottningholm Court Theatre, designed by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz and built in 1764–1766 for Queen Louisa Ulrika, is unique for another reason. Beneath and above the stage is a machinery of ropes, drums and winches that changes the scenery in a few seconds and makes waves, clouds and thunder. The theatre was forgotten during the 19th century and rediscovered in 1921 with its scenery and machinery almost untouched. It still performs opera every summer and is part of the Drottningholm World Heritage Site.

19th-century opera: seeing and being seen

In the 19th century opera became the great entertainment of the bourgeoisie, and the opera house the finest building in the city. The Palais Garnier in Paris was built in 1861–1875 to designs by the then unknown Charles Garnier, who won the competition. He blended Renaissance and Baroque into something he called the Napoleon III style. From the façade a sequence of rooms leads to the auditorium, and the grand staircase, in marble of various colours with balconies all round, is built so that the audience can show themselves off to one another. The auditorium is horseshoe-shaped and in 1964 received a new ceiling painted by Marc Chagall.

Beneath the rich surface an iron frame carries the structure, and under the building lies a vast reservoir that holds the groundwater in check and gave rise to the myth of a lake beneath the opera, which Gaston Leroux used in The Phantom of the Opera. In Stockholm the same idea can be seen in the Royal Swedish Opera, which Axel Anderberg designed in neo-Baroque style and which was inaugurated in 1898 with a magnificent foyer.

Concert halls were long plainer. Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, built in 1818–1821 as a theatre, was rebuilt after the war and opened in 1984 as a concert hall. In Barcelona, Lluís Domènech i Montaner built the Palau de la Música Catalana in 1905–1908 for a choral society: a steel frame made it possible to replace the walls with glass, and from the ceiling hangs a dome of stained glass like a sun.

The shoebox and the vineyard

Many classical concert halls are rectangular, narrow and tall, and are therefore called shoeboxes. The form gives the sound many reflections from the side walls and a full tone. The Concert Hall in Stockholm, designed by Ivar Tengbom and inaugurated in 1926, is a blue cube with ten tall, slender Corinthian columns facing Hötorget and one of the best-known buildings of Nordic Classicism. The Nobel Prizes are presented here, and the smaller hall is painted by Isaac Grünewald. On the steps stands Carl Milles's Orpheus Fountain, since 1936.

Six years later the Helsingborg Concert Hall by Sven Markelius was completed, one of the first public Functionalist buildings in Sweden, white and smooth with a glazed foyer facing the town. It showed that the new architecture suited the houses of culture as well.

The great change came with Hans Scharoun's Berliner Philharmonie, built in 1960–1963. Scharoun wanted to put the music at the centre and placed the orchestra near the middle of the hall, with the audience on terraces all round that slope like vineyards. No one sits far from the musicians. The vineyard hall became a model for concert halls all over the world, and on the outside the building became a tent-like landscape of yellow, folded roofs.

Landmarks by the water

The Sydney Opera House on a point in Sydney Harbour is perhaps the world's best-known building of the second half of the 20th century. The 38-year-old Dane Jørn Utzon won the competition in 1957 with a proposal that consisted almost entirely of sketches, and no one knew how the shells could be built. The solution was to cut all the shells from the same sphere, so that the parts could be manufactured in series. The shells are clad with 1,056,006 glazed tiles from Höganäs. Utzon left the project in 1966 after conflicts with the state government, and the interiors were completed by others. The opera house was inaugurated in 1973 and became a World Heritage Site in 2007.

The Oslo Opera House, designed by Snøhetta and inaugurated in 2008, rises out of the fjord like a floe of white marble, and the roof slopes so that everyone can walk up onto it. The auditorium is a horseshoe clad in oak. The building became a public space for the whole city, not just for the audience, and received the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 2009.

The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, by Herzog & de Meuron, stands on top of an old brick cocoa warehouse. Above it rises a glass body with a wave-shaped roof, and in the middle lies a vineyard hall whose walls consist of about 10,000 gypsum panels, each one milled with its own pattern to scatter the sound. The cost rose to about ten times the estimate, and the building was inaugurated only in 2017.

How to read the shape of the hall

Look at where the audience sits in relation to the stage. Rows of boxes in a horseshoe belong to the opera and the court theatre; stalls and balconies in a long, rectangular hall belong to the classical concert hall; terraces all round the stage mean a vineyard hall, after Berlin in 1963. Then look at the foyer: in Garnier's opera the staircase is the main thing, in Oslo the foyer facing the fjord, in Hamburg the plaza between the warehouse and the glass.

All the buildings are on the map below. Utzon's architecture and his platforms are described on the page about Jørn Utzon, and the great buildings of the 20th century in the guide to the most important buildings of the 20th century.

What to look for

Exercise

What was new about the Berliner Philharmonie of 1963?