Stadttheater Minden

Few houses of 535 seats would attempt the Ring. Minden's theatre, raised between 1906 and 1908 to designs by August Kersten and Paul Kanold in a neo-Baroque manner that looks back to Frederician models, opened on 1 October 1908 with Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris and has no permanent company. What it has instead is a Wagner project of remarkable persistence, mounted in collaboration with partners and carried by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie: Der fliegende Holländer in 1999, Tannhäuser in 2005, Lohengrin in 2009, Tristan und Isolde in 2012, and from 2015 a Ring begun with Das Rheingold and continued the following year with Die Walküre. The extreme intimacy of the room — singers and orchestra almost within reach of the audience — has drawn listeners from well beyond Westphalia. Between these undertakings the theatre presents its own productions, receives touring work, serves as a concert hall, and has staged Bizet's Carmen.