Performance History
The founding director was Christian Rossbach, who served from October 1787 to March 1788. Rossbach's venture lasted only a few months and ended in financial failure, despite a dispensation from the Emperor to perform during Lent. He first tried playing in cheaper venues in Vienna, then left Vienna with half of his troupe to play the provinces in Moravia.
Rossbach was succeeded by Johann Friedel, who ran the productions from March 1788 to his death in March 1789. Friedel worked in collaboration with his lover Eleonore Schikaneder, the estranged wife of Friedel's former theatrical colleague Emanuel Schikaneder. Like Rossbach Friedel was unable to make the theater a success, despite making improvements to the property and mounting as many as nine productions within a period of two weeks; Honolka comments that "they can scarcely have been properly rehearsed."
Following Friedel's death, Eleonore reconciled with her husband and invited him to take on the directorship, which he held from July 1789 until the theater's closure in June 1801. Schikaneder created a new troupe partly from the participants in Friedel's ensemble, and partly from personnel he brought with him from his former troupe, playing in Regensburg. The company offered "mostly German operas and plays with songs and incidental music (tragedies, comedies, and spectacles with elaborate stage machinery)". The company staged Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio in April and May 1789.
Starting in 1789, Schikaneder's company staged a series of fairy tale operas. These included Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosopher's Stone), a collaboratively written work to which Mozart contributed a small portion of the music (see Benedikt Schack). The fairy tale series culminated with the premiere in September 1791 of Mozart's The Magic Flute. The latter was a success, and played for over 100 performances in its first year alone, 223 over the life of the theater. And there had been a sequel of this opera by Schikaneder himself and Peter von Winter: The Magic Flute Second Part (1798).
The theater continued to be used for opera until 1801, when Schikaneder moved the troupe to his newly-built Theater an der Wien. Prince Starhemberg, an efficient businessman, promptly tore down the old theater and replaced it with apartment housing. The roof tiles were reinstalled on the parish church of Perchtoldsdorf, where they can be seen to this day .
Read more about this topic: Theater Auf Der Wieden
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