Hamburg State Opera

Stand for a moment on the pavement of Dammtorstraße and listen. Buses hiss past and bicycles tick along the cycle lane. Then, on a performance night, the glass doors swing open and a low murmur of voices spills out into the street. The building in front of you is plain and broad. It looks more like an office block than a palace of music. But inside this calm, modern shell sits one of the oldest opera traditions in Europe.

This is the Hamburg State Opera, known in German as the Hamburgische Staatsoper. Its story begins in 1678. That year, a group of Hamburg citizens opened an opera house near the Gänsemarkt, the old goose market, just a few minutes' walk from here. It was the first public opera house in Germany. That detail matters more than it sounds, and it is easy to miss.

In most of Europe at the time, opera belonged to kings, dukes and princes. It was performed in court theatres for the nobility and their guests. Hamburg was different. It was a rich, independent trading city, run by merchants rather than a royal family. So its opera was a business. Anyone who could pay for a seat could walk in. Sailors, shopkeepers and wealthy traders could all sit in the same hall and hear the same music.

Here is the first surprise. A young musician from Halle came to Hamburg in the early 1700s and found work in the orchestra of this opera house. He played the violin and the harpsichord. His name was George Frideric Handel. In 1705, his very first opera, Almira, had its premiere here. Years later, Handel became a celebrated composer in London. But his career in opera started in this merchant city, for an audience that had bought its own tickets.

Handel was not the only great name of that early period. The composer Reinhard Keiser wrote a large number of operas for the Gänsemarkt stage. Georg Philipp Telemann, one of the most productive composers of the eighteenth century, also worked with the house. Many of these early Hamburg operas were sung partly in German. That was unusual in an age when Italian ruled the opera world. Hamburg helped to show that German could be a language for the stage.

In the early nineteenth century, the company moved to this site on Dammtorstraße. The city was growing beyond its old walls, and a new municipal theatre rose here. For more than a century, operas, plays and concerts filled that building. The street outside became one of the cultural addresses of Hamburg, close to the green ribbon of the old ramparts and the parks that still run past the Dammtor station today.

Now the second surprise. In the 1890s, the chief conductor here was Gustav Mahler. Today most people know Mahler as a composer of huge symphonies. But in his own lifetime, he earned his living mainly as a conductor and opera director. He spent several years in Hamburg, rehearsing singers and leading the orchestra from the pit. He was known as demanding and intense. He also used his summers to compose. So some of the music that later filled concert halls around the world grew out of the years he spent working in this theatre.

The twentieth century brought destruction. During the Second World War, Allied bombing raids devastated Hamburg, and in 1943 the auditorium of the opera house was destroyed. Much of the city around it burned. But the stage house survived. That was the tall block behind the hall, where scenery is stored and moved. After the war, performances continued in improvised conditions, using the stage area that was still standing.

The building you see today opened in 1955. Its architect was Gerhard Weber. He chose not to rebuild the old nineteenth-century style. Instead, he created a modern, open design of concrete, steel and large areas of glass. Notice how the foyers face the street through their glass walls. In the evening, when the lights are on, people walking past can see the audience moving up the stairs and gathering with drinks. The building does not hide its public. That openness fits the old Hamburg idea of opera for the citizens.

If you go inside, look at the auditorium itself. The side balconies do not run in smooth, continuous curves like those in a classic horseshoe theatre. Instead, the boxes step forward in separate blocks along the walls. Some people say they look like open drawers pulled out of a cabinet. It is a distinctive, very 1950s solution. It also gives many seats a clearer view of the stage than the old tiered boxes could offer.

The house is not only for opera. It is also the home of the Hamburg Ballet. From 1973, the American choreographer John Neumeier led the company for about half a century. He built it into one of the most respected ballet ensembles in the world. In the orchestra pit, the musicians of the Philharmonic State Orchestra of Hamburg play for both opera and ballet. On a busy week, the same stage may hold a grand Verdi opera one night and a full-length ballet the next.

That constant change is a quiet engineering achievement. Behind the plain walls, crews move heavy sets, lighting rigs and costumes in and out, often overnight. The audience sees only the curtain rising. But the stage house, the same part of the building that survived the bombs, works like a factory for illusion. Every evening, it turns wood, fabric and light into Egypt, Paris or a forest at midnight.

As you stand here now, look again at the long, calm facade. It is easy to walk past it on the way to the shops of the Gänsemarkt or the Alster lake. But try to picture the line that runs through this spot. A merchants' theatre in 1678. A young Handel at the harpsichord. Mahler driving his singers in rehearsal. A burned-out hall, and a glass foyer rising in its place.

When you walk away, listen for a moment to the street again. The buses, the bicycles, the voices. Hamburg built its opera for exactly this kind of crowd — ordinary people of a busy port city. More than three centuries later, the doors still open onto the same idea... music for anyone who decides to come inside.