Steintheater Hellbrunn
Open-air stage carved by hand from an old rock quarry, its passages once let performers appear from the stone.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Steintheater Hellbrunn in Salzburg follows Archbishop Markus Sittikus, who around 1616 looked at the stone quarry his workers had just finished carving above his new summer palace and decided the leftover pit was too good to waste. You'll hear how the quarrymen's hollow became an open-air oval theater, its tunnels cut so performers could seem to step straight out of the rock, and how Monteverdi's opera Orfeo was staged there in 1617. It also weighs a claim long attached to that performance that guides have repeated for generations. Stand in the old quarry bowl and picture the hammer strikes that shaped it long before any audience sat down.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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