Theater World - World Theater

This provincial exhibition focused on the world of the stage, showing the development of the stage from 1880 to 1925. The theater as we know it today was created in this era: the built rather than the painted stage set, the stage direction, electric lighting and stage technology. In this exhibition, housed in the Waissnix Castle in Reichenau, which was revitalized at a cost of 3.4 million euros, “the exciting birth years of modern theater were brought back to life”.

In terms of content, tradition and modernity were on offer, with the avant-garde from historicism to New Objectivity on display. Among the 1,200 exhibits and documents from renowned lenders from European theater centers, many were on display that had never been shown in Austria before.

In addition to the stars of the time, the focus was on the stage visions of the theater reformers, highlights of the visual arts, the development of stage technology, theater buildings and the interaction of the theater metropolises according to the motto “Europe in Vienna - Vienna in Europe”. The exhibition included original costumes by Eleonore Duse and Sarah Bernhardt and Bruno Ganz's Iffland Ring. 

The most important lender, with 400 exhibits, was the Austrian Theater Museum, which was founded in the 1920s as the theater collection of the Austrian National Library. “Described by the media as the 'most beautiful theater museum in the world', this museum houses extensive collections of hand drawings, theater graphics, stage design models and costumes, the collection of autographs and bequests, theater photography and puppet theater, as well as the collection of oil paintings and quisquilia, which shows memorabilia of important personalities of the theater,” wrote the director of the Theatermuseum, Thomas Trabitsch, in his catalog foreword.

“While the theater in the 19th century was dominated by traveling virtuosos who appeared as actors, singers and dancers wherever an enthusiastic and solvent audience was waiting for them, the dominant artists in the 20th century were the directors, the lovers and dictators of the stage,” said Wolfgang Greisenegger, curator of the provincial exhibition. They took power and never relinquished it. “The theater in the first three decades of the 20th century therefore became the laboratory in which the tendencies of social change and aesthetic transformation first manifested themselves.”

A multimedia show was shown in the new foyer of the Reichenau Theater, inviting visitors on a journey through the development of the stage. The Kurpark was also included in the show under the title “Der Weg ins Freie” (based on Arthur Schnitzler's novel of the same name). This themed path, designed by Hans Hoffer, was intended to remind visitors that Reichenau was also very popular as a spa town among poets, actors and visual artists at the beginning of the 20th century.

Schloss Reichenau