Open Air im Kurpark

Wiesbaden's Kurpark extends behind the Kurhaus, combining an English landscape garden with spaces for outdoor performance. Laid out in 1852 and enlarged by court garden director Carl Friedrich Thelemann in 1855–56, it contains mature trees, winding paths and a lake with an island and fountain. Its concert shell can accommodate an orchestra. Open-air concerts continue a musical use of the grounds that reaches back to the earlier social garden of 1810, where concerts, illuminations and fireworks accompanied the life of the spa. Behind the Kurhaus at Wiesbaden lies the Kurpark, laid out as an English landscape garden for a spa city that built its reputation on taking the waters. Each summer a stage goes up in it. Verdi's Aida has been staged there, a work that has always drawn audiences larger than any indoor house in the Rhine-Main region can seat.