Qualla: Semperoper

Semperoper: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christian Barth, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the night of February 13, 1945, Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz was on the bill at the Semperoper in Dresden. The performance never finished. The first wave of British Lancasters appeared over the city around 10 p.m., the firestorm followed, and by morning the opera house was a roofless shell with its interior burned out. Forty years later, on February 13, 1985, exactly to the day, the rebuilt Semperoper reopened. The first opera back on the program was Der Freischutz. There is a kind of brutal symmetry in the sequence that the building's history rewards. Burned in 1869, rebuilt by 1878. Burned in 1945, rebuilt by 1985. Wagner premiered three operas here. Richard Strauss premiered nine.

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Image: Christian Barth | CC BY-SA 3.0

Semperoper: Semper's first house

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0. Gottfried Semper was thirty-eight years old, a young architect with one major commission, when his first opera house opened on April 13, 1841 with a Weber program. The building stood on the Theaterplatz between the Zwinger palace and the Elbe in the historic center of Dresden. Cr...

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Image: Thomas Quine | CC BY 2.0

Semperoper: The fire and the second house

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0. On September 21, 1869, a faulty stovepipe set the building on fire. By morning there was nothing salvageable. The citizens of Dresden wanted Semper back to rebuild it. Semper, still in exile, designed the second building from Vienna. His son Manfred Semper supervised construction...

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Image: Thomas Quine | CC BY 2.0

Semperoper: February 1945

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Avda, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bombing of Dresden on the nights of February 13 and 14, 1945, killed roughly 25,000 people and destroyed almost the entire historic center. The Semperoper was gutted. The exterior shell stood, blackened and roofless, but the auditorium, the stage machinery, the foyers, the pa...

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Image: Avda | CC BY-SA 3.0

Semperoper: The flood, and what keeps coming

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. Reconstruction was completed for the February 13, 1985 reopening. Seventeen years later, in August 2002, the Elbe flooded across central Dresden and water poured through the Semperoper at basement level, soaking the new stage machinery and the storage rooms. International donatio...

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0