3. - Schlösser-Magazin

I. Report on the Architectural and Art Historical Importance: Prof. Dr. Michael Hesse
The Court Theatre
The Schwetzingen court theatre is the oldest
surviving theatre in Baden-Württemberg. It
is of outstanding importance in a musical
context as well as in those of art and
architectural history. For a quarter of a century
under Carl Theodor’s rule, Schwetzingen was
the scene of major musical innovations all
connected with the term “Mannheim School”.
Europe’s best musicians were active here.
During the most important years of European
opera reform all forms and styles of music
theatre, of the highest order, were cultivated
at Schwetzingen. With the Mannheim theatre
buildings lost, Schwetzingen alone is left to
represent those epoch-making developments
today.
The Schwetzingen court theatre, opened on
15th June 1753, was the world’s first galleried
theatre. Designed by Nicolas de Pigage in the
spring of 1752, it precedes the Lyons theatre
by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, occasionally
quoted as the prototype in older literature, by
about a year. It was not until December 1753
that Soufflot presented his plans for the Lyons
theatre to the local academy; the building,
opened in August 1756, was pulled down in
1826.
The Schwetzingen court theatre was a
very modern building that met the ideas
of Enlightened reformers as worked out in
the mid-18th-century and put into practice
in 1771, in the shape of the new Comédie
française (today Théâtre de l’Odéon) by
Charles Dewailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre.
They wanted a house that allowed viewers
to enjoy the performance as a shared
experience, with no separations dictated by
social rank. The surprising modernity of
the Schwetzingen theatre becomes evident
from a look at the Margravian opera house at
Bayreuth, designed only a few years earlier,
in 1744, by Giuseppe Galli da Bibiena. It is a
traditional structure with boxes separated by
high partitions. At Schwetzingen these “hen
cages” (as critics called them) stacked next to
and on top of each other have been replaced
by an auditorium with a monumental and
all-encompassing layout, notwithstanding the
fact that the building’s size is actually quite
modest.
The fine interior decoration enhances this
impression. The popular name for the
building – “Rococo theatre” – is misleading.
The original décor did combine restrained
rocailles and Neoclassical elements in the
so-called “Transition” style, but the house’s
current appearance was largely created
during a rebuilding by Pigage in 1762. Even
compared to the most progressive French
creations of its time it is a remarkably early
example of the new Neoclassical Louis Seize
style.
The Palace Gardens and their Sculpture
The Schwetzingen palace gardens are unique.
Almost everywhere else new gardening styles
replaced older ones, resulting in the loss or
complete conversion of the earlier layout. At
Schwetzingen the older, formal garden in the
French style and the more modern landscape
garden based on English models combined
to grow into a unique, organic synthesis with
an unbroken tradition of maintenance and
preservation.
The historic garden of Schwetzingen will be
the subject of another expert report; suffice
it to say here that the garden sculpture is of
outstanding historical and art historical value.
It includes many works by the Flemish artist
Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, trained in Paris
and for a time active in Rome, one of the
major exponents of European sculpture in the
transitional period between the late Baroque
and early Neoclassical eras. Moreover, some
pieces in the Schwetzingen garden are all
that remains of the once-magnificent garden
sculpture of Lunéville, summer residence of
the Polish King in exile and last ruling Duke
of Lorraine, Stanisław Leszczyński, whose
court was considered one of the most splendid
of mid-18th-century Europe. The sculptures
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