Leadership / 05.20.20

An Audience Comes Out of Lockdown for Schubert and Mahler

Access Staff

New York Times (5/19/20) Ewing, Jack

On Monday, May 18, the State Theater of Hesse in Wiesbaden, Germany, hosted a socially distant concert from Günther Groissböck, performing works by Schubert and Mahler. During the performance, attendees were separated by at least three empty seats, and no more than 200 people were in attendance. Groissböck understood the rationale behind the empty seats, but it still felt strange. “At the beginning it felt almost like an art installation, an experiment,” he says. “But from song to song, it very quickly became something human.” Audience members were required to wear face coverings into the theatre, but they were allowed to remove them once they took their seats. There was no assigned seating, and members of a household could sit together. The theatre has everyone’s name and address, should they need to contact them if someone got infected. Uwe Eric Laufenberg, the theatre’s director and driving force behind the event, says hosting this concert in line with health guidelines involved negotiating with officials and reprogramming ticketing software in less than three days.

Read the full story from the New York Times.

Tags: Theater , News , COVID-19 , Coronavirus