Drottningholm Palace Theatre - Twentieth Century Restoration and Revival

Twentieth Century Restoration and Revival

In 1920, under the direction of Swedish theatre historian Agne Beijer, it was restored with the addition of electric light, which today is designed to flicker like candles. It re-opened on 19 August 1922 and is today run by a private foundation, the Drottningholm Theatre Museum, and is funded by government and private grants.

Almost all of the equipment is original, and the stage is unusual for having a significantly greater depth than width. The operas are often performed by musicians wearing period costume, and the orchestra performs using period or copies of authentic instruments. Most productions demonstrate some of the possible stage effects using the original equipment.

In 1991, the theatre, along with the Drottningholm Palace (the residence of the Swedish royal family), the Chinese Pavilion and the surrounding park, became the first Swedish patrimony to be inscribed in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites. Parts of the Palace, the Pavilion and the Theatre are open to the public.

Recent Artistic Directors of the theatre are Arnold Östman (1980-92), Elisabeth Söderström (1993-96), Per-Erik Öhrn (1996-2007). British conductor Mark Tatlow took over as Artistic Director in 2007.

Read more about this topic:  Drottningholm Palace Theatre

Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, twentieth, century, restoration and/or revival:

    A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious “retreat” of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.
    Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)

    How easily some light report is set about, but how difficult to bear.
    Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)

    The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    I do not think a revival of business will be greatly postponed by [Samuel J.] Tilden’s election. Business prosperity does not, in my judgment, depend on government so much as men commonly think.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)