page_title: Drottningholm Palace Theatre
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Drottningholm Palace Theatre / History
caption_attribution_description: Svenska: Drottningholms slottsteater salong och scen
context_page_description: The Drottningholm Palace Theatre is an opera house located at Drottningholm Palace in Stockholm, Sweden. It is one of the few 18th century theatres in Europe that is still used as a theatre with its original stage machinery.
  Currently, the reinvigorated theatre has acquired a growing international reputation as a summer opera festival theatre by focusing on works by Haydn, Handel, Gluck and Mozart and emphasis on authentic performance. The theatre has also had guest performances by the Royal Swedish Opera.
context_section_description: The first theatre to be built on the Drottningholm site was built at the behest of  the Queen Lovisa Ulrika  by the German master builder, Georg Greggenhofer (1718 or 1719-1779). The theatre opened in 1754 and hosted a new troupe of French actors, the Du Londel Troupe, that had been engaged by the court a year earlier and was to use the theater until 1771. The troupe used the theatre in the summer months to show French theater and Italian opera for the queen and her court.
  When the original theatre burned down on August 27, 1762, during the performance of a comic opera Queen Lovisa Ulrika  quickly decided to rebuild a theatre for the Drottningholm Palace court, commissioning a replacement opera house by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz. Work began on the building in 1764, and it eventually included the theatre as well as a complex of smaller chambers off the main auditorium to house members of the court who did not stay at the palace, including Adelcrantz, the master of the revels, the noble chambermaids, the actors and staff of the theatre, and young aristocrats. The building that Adelcrantz created was unusual architecturally in several respects. Most notably, although the theatre was intended to mimic Versailles’s artistic style, the lack of funds of the Swedish Treasury forced a much sparser style. The exterior of the building is very plain in comparison to other palatial theatres, in the style of a country manor with no indication from the exterior that an opera house is inside. The interior, decorated by Adrien Masreliez, uses trompe l'oeil, papier-mâché, and stucco to imitate more expensive materials like marble and gold. The theatre is also architecturally unusual for its shape, since the auditorium is shaped like a T with the two thrones for the reigning monarchs placed in the cross of the T in front of the stage and the rest of the court seated on wooden benches. The stage is also unusually deep, 27 by 57 ft (8.2 by 17.4 m), which helped the set designers to create optical allusions of great distance on the stage.
  For scholars, the most important part of the theatre, however, is not the architectural uniqueness of the space, but instead the stage machinery that is a rare surviving example of common stage effects from its time. The machinery for the theatre was possibly designed by the Italian Donato Stopani, although some historians think the designer may have been George Fröman, master builder for the court who studied similar stage machinery when he travelled through Europe in 1755. One of the stage machines that is still intact and in use in the theatre is the chariot-and-pole system, which helps to change scenes quickly by sliding the wings with wheels (“chariots”) on tracks in the floor, controlled by a capstan under the stage (“pole”). The theatre has an unusually large number of wings, with a total of four possible scene changes in a single performance, but the chariot-and-pole system allows a scene change in as little as six seconds. Other machines that are still used in the theatre are purely for special effects, including a wave machine consisting of giant painted corkscrews that are turned to simulate a rough sea, thunder machine to create storm sound effects, and a flying chair which is often used for "deus ex machina" effects. Lighting is controlled by turning metal sconces and their candles toward or away from the stage.
  In 1766, the theatre was opened by Queen Lovisa Ulrika, and there were several performances that included court members and the royal family as actors celebrating the occasion. The theatre was used every summer by the court until 1771, when Adolf Frederik died and the French acting troupe he had imported was dismissed. The theatre remained unused until 1777, when Queen Lovisa Ulrika gave it to her son King Gustav III. King Gustaf was deeply interested in the theatre, hiring an acting troupe, and even writing and directing several works at Drottningholm. The theatre that was performed under King Gustaf was a departure from the theatre of his predecessors, since although French and Italian t
caption: Interior of the Theatre, 1966 photo
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