The Linz Music Theater opened on April 11, 2013, and in 2023 we’re celebrating “not out of vanity, but to say how important it is that it exists and how grateful we are for it,” says director Hermann Schneider in an APA interview for the tenth anniversary with managing director Thomas Königstorfer. The number of visitors is satisfactory, but you can no longer make theater like ten years ago, “because the needs of the audience are different”.
Theater also has a lot to do with the psyche, with the mental state, according to Schneider, who has been artistic director in Linz since the 2016/17 season. “I think if you’re doing very well, psychologically you can afford to deal with dark and heavy and complex things, on the contrary, you might even have a craving or a need for it.” Now the artistic director asks what people need now, “and I’m not just adapting to any zeitgeist, I’m giving people what this institution is able to give them. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a modern chamber opera in the black box do, but what I can use to reach and touch people is initially the focus of the work.” He is happy to accept criticism of this view.
From many experiences of the past few years, such as Corona, there is a great deal of uncertainty, and it is also about “giving people security in the ritual of going to the theater … something where they find themselves, where they like to be”. Königstorfer cited this approach to the audience and the fact that in 2021 it was the only theater that played through until the end of July as reasons why subscribers were won back from 2020/2021 to 2022/2023 and the number of visitors in September/October 2022 was not changed up to 50 percent collapsed as elsewhere. In the summer of 2021, various open-air formats were launched, in February 2022 the high-priced “Great Voices” series with Juan Diego Florez, this year with Elina Garanča, among others: “We went into advance sales during the lockdown in December 2021, although we didn’t knew whether there would be a lockdown in February or not. There wasn’t one and we were sold out,” says Königstorfer, describing “things where we tried to show our presence despite the uncertainty”.
In the current season, 260,000 tickets have already been sold by the end of the season, and almost 300,000 visitors are expected. At EUR 8.8 million, the proceeds from the previous season (EUR 8.7 million) had already been exceeded. “It’s a phenomenon that people are currently spending more than in the past,” explained Königstorfer, who, after a guest performance at the Vienna Burgtheater (2013-2019), has again been in charge of commercial management since 2019. The individual ticket prices have not increased as much, but “people are buying higher-priced tickets. What they choose is worth more to the visitors”. The subscriptions are 5.2 percent higher than in the previous year, but still below the pre-Corona level.
The strategy envisaged in 2018/19 to play productions more often worked well and is “a major reason why we are doing well this season”. Increased energy costs – by around 30 percent to 1.3 million euros – are covered from reserves this year, long-term contracts will only expire at the end of 2023. According to Königstorfer, there is a bundle of measures, including an expansion of the PV system on the roof and the switch to LEDs for the lights.
In addition to the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” – “we would have done it that way too” – there will be a children’s birthday party at the celebrations in April: “We invite the children who were born in 2013, who are the same age as the theater, and do something with them,” announced Schneider. Other items on the program include a ceremony with invited guests and an open day, because the house belongs to all Upper Austrians.
The fact that everything is under one roof has proven itself in music theater “in very practical terms”. “Everything is there, rehearsal stages, the costumes, the workshops, it’s a house of short distances, it makes ecological sense because you don’t need storage and no transport containers. And it creates a lot of identification, because the technician, the colleague, who works in the carpentry shop, can walk across the stage and say that it’s the result of my hands’ work,” Schneider continues to be enthusiastic. He also regularly takes a different route through the house himself and “take a look here and there. I think it’s something really great that you had the courage to think so big. This quality is something very important for the spirit and the power that reigns in the house.”
The native of Cologne would not want to miss the foyers, which would not have made the distance to be kept tormenting people even in times of restricted visitor operations. The black box is artistically a great asset. “Very few houses have a second venue.” It allows the audience “a much more authentic, more direct contact, a different world of experience” than the big stage. The musical in Linz in particular earned a certain reputation on this. “Now it’s like producers and publishers like Walt Disney Productions are like, ‘We don’t give that to anyone, but you get this because we know you’re up to par.'” The quality provided by Matthias Davids and the entire team “cannot be found in any other multi-genre theater with a fixed ensemble and repertoire system”.
For musical performers, Linz is “an artistically enriching story, because they have everything from standard and blockbusters to the unknown in one season,” in dedicated musical houses, on the other hand, they would always play the same thing for three years. There is no explicit wish for an actor, “we make the desired cast ourselves,” states Schneider. “If roles cannot be filled by the ensemble, Matthias Davids brings some very prominent figures from London, Germany or Vienna to Linz,” Koenigstorfer recalls, for example, Ana Milva Gomes in “Ghost” and “Sister Act” and exclaims the ensemble Lukas Sandmann, who was awarded the German Musical Theater Prize for Best Actor in 2021 (for “The Wave”). “With the mixture of a highly professional ensemble and prominent guests, we are no worse than a stage in Hamburg or the United Stages in Vienna,” says Königstorfer.
The individual department lines are also manned as desired and no changes are planned. With regard to a larger line in programming, “I let the sections work very autonomously, I know the name Davids is also a program, but that also applies to Stephan Suschke (acting), Nele Neitzke (youth) and Roma Janus (dance)” , says Schneider, whose contract has already been extended to 2026. For the opera he is in charge of, there will always be the focus “that we deal with the German romantic literature of a Richard Wagner, a Richard Strauss, because we have this great Bruckner Orchestra, because we have this space, an orchestra pit, where you can do that. I derive a bit of an obligation from this. Here you can simply put an ‘Elektra’ orchestra in the orchestra pit, which is already an act of violence for many other stages.” Furthermore, there has been a Mozart opera almost every year so far, “you’ll see where you can build on”, and a third line is that with the Italian opera with permanent guest conductor Enrico Calesso. “To a certain extent, the modern, the contemporary is also a profile for us, the black box plays a role here, this multifunctional space in which we make contemporary chamber operas, commissioned works and premieres.”
In addition, the EU program “PlayOn!”, with cooperation partners in York and Dortmund, is working on “generating new formats and also hybrids”, including immersive technologies such as virtual or augmented reality. There are a number of projects for the Young Theater “because this is an audience that is far more tech-savvy.” This is also the generation that would have suffered the most from the pandemic and the closed doors. “What do I do with those who haven’t had their first theater experience between the ages of six and eight? Where do I pick them up? What do they know? They know video games and we work with the Hagenberg University of Applied Sciences and other institutions that develop things for us and sometimes generate such formats in order to achieve them,” says Schneider, taking care of the next generation of theater audiences.