"Statues on the opera house" Top 5 Page for this destination Opera House Tip by Nemorino

On top of the entrance hall, which originally was open on both sides so the rich people could be driven up to the front door in their horse-drawn carriages, there are several statues of famous composers and authors. These statues look very much like the ones that were there when the building was first opened in 1852, but no one could tell me if the current statues are the originals or replicas.

The first statue (at least the first one I took a picture of) shows the composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), who was born in Bonn on the Rhine River. Beethoven’s birth house in Bonn now houses a museum about his life and times, along with a highly unusual room called the Stage for Music Visualization. Here you are given 3D glasses (which you can wear over your regular glasses, if any) and can listen to excerpts of Beethoven' music which take on what they call "an optical acoustical shape" in the form of abstract figures which move to the music. Beethoven is best known for his nine symphonies and other orchestral works, but he also wrote one opera, Fidelio, which I have described on my Edinburgh page.

Second photo: This is a not-very-flattering statue of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). So far I have seen fourteen of Mozart’s twenty-one operas and have written about them on my Augsburg, Aachen, Milan, Pforzheim and Prague pages, among other places.

Third photo: This is a statue of the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), whose birth house in Frankfurt am Main is now a museum devoted to his life and works. There have been at least four operas based on Goethe’s works – probably more, but four that I have seen in the last few years.

Fourth photo: The statue of the German author Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) looks typically square-jawed and determined – not that Schiller really looked like that, but in the nineteenth century he was something of a German national hero, so sculptors used to rearrange his physiognomy to fit the legend. There is a much better but still highly idealized statue of Schiller at the Wiesbaden State Theater, where I have seen two of the many operas based on Schiller’s plays. In Frankfurt am Main there is another Schiller statue which is now surrounded by 20th and 21st century skyscrapers. Nine of the tips in the Frankfurt Skyline Countdown on my Land Hessen page feature Schiller scornfully ignoring the modern buildings all around him.

Fifth photo: Statues of the English playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the German author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). One of Shakespeare's biggest fans in the 19th century was the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), who based three of his operas on Shakespeare plays, namely Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff.

Address: Opernplatz 1, 30159 Hannover
Directions: Location of the opera house on Google Maps
Phone: 0511 - 9999 1111
Website: http://www.oper-hannover.de/oper/