History
The Opera House was donated to the Danish state by the A.P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller Foundation in August 2000 (A.P. Møller was a co-founder of the company now known as Mærsk). Some politicians were offended by the private donation, in part because the full cost of the project would be tax deductible, thus virtually forcing the government to buy the building; but it was accepted by the Folketing and the government in the autumn of 2000. It was designed by the architect Henning Larsen and engineers Ramboll and Buro Happold and Theatre Consultant Theatreplan. The acoustics were designed by Arup Acoustics and architectural lighting design by Speirs and Major Associates. A.P. Møller had the final say in the design of the building, however, adding steel to the glass front, among other things. Construction began in June 2001 and was completed on October 1, 2004. It was opened on January 15, 2005 in the presence of Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and Queen Margrethe II.
The tenor Plácido Domingo made a gala guest appearance as Sigmund in Wagner's Die Walküre on April 7, 2006 (production by Kasper Bech Holten). The performance was attended by Queen Margrethe II.
Read more about this topic: Copenhagen Opera House
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)