THE TWO THEATRES IN THE CENTRE

The history of theatre in Vienna goes back a long way before 1776, but the date has passed into legend, celebrated in the centennial jubilees beloved of Austrian institutions. Its significance lies in two decrees that Joseph II, the reforming Emperor, issued on 23 March 1776 in an autograph instruction to the Master of the Imperial Household (Obersthqfmeister), Johann Josef Fürst Khevenhüller-Metsch. One decree elevated one of the two court theatres to the status of a ‘National Theatre’; the other, still more important, broke the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the court theatres by establishing a new ‘liberty for theatre’ (Spektakelfreiheit or Sckauspielfreikeit). This permitted the building of new play-houses outside the walled city centre and so paved the way for the flowering of Viennese theatre in the early nineteenth century. Both measures had their rationale in the cultural politics of the Enlightenment.

As a consequence partly of the Thirty Years War, partly of the fragmentation of the political map, the history of the stage in the German-speaking countries lagged behind that in France and England. Heinrich Laube, the most distinguished director of the Burgtheater in the second half of the nineteenth century, traced the idea of an ‘educated’ German theatre back to about 1730, when Gottsched's reforms enjoyed the support of Caroline Neuber's company in Leipzig. But it was later still, in the 1760s and 1770s, that the first public theatres were founded in the German-speaking cities.