HErr von Goethe is not present, but a musical journey through time transports actors and audience to the eighteenth century, to the great era of courtly theater. The setting is Kochberg Castle near Rudolstadt. There the young poet met regularly with his adored Charlotte von Stein at their country estate. “My soul is looking for you in Kochberg and often rushes over to you,” he wrote in one of his seventeen hundred letters to the lady-in-waiting. The small classical theater, in which the art-loving von Stein family staged their own plays, served as the stage in this rural idyll. The traditions of the so-called amateur theater were preserved: after the Weimar court theater burned down in 1774, noble families with the participation of family, friends, courtiers and remaining actors performed their often self-written plays and singing pieces in private circles, and Goethe was one of the leading protagonists .
The theater at Schloss Kochberg is the only remaining architectural relic of the Weimar theater environment from Goethe’s time, and has now been restored with meticulous historical accuracy. High windows behind the stage allow an unusual incidence of light from the back room. The opulent wall decoration made of marbled paper is a rarity today, and each strip of wallpaper is a handcrafted one-of-a-kind. Audience and actors are on the same level and therefore meet with a closeness that makes every performance an intimate communal experience now as it was then. In contrast to the past, there are of course not amateurs, but well-known artists on stage.
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