Maria Stuart - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Maria Stuart

The last fifteen years of Friedrich Schiller's life were marked by extremes: On the one hand, they were characterized by enormous creative power, on the other hand, the poet was tormented by illnesses that repeatedly prevented him from working, and the most merciless of which, tuberculosis, finally led to his death in 1805 led. He largely paused from writing plays for more than a decade, from 1787 to 1798, before he wrote his late works within just five years in a major final spurt in his life: WALLENSTEIN, MARIA STUART, THE VIRGIN OF ORLEANS, THE BRIDE OF MESSINA and WILHELM TELL . The previous decade, without any dramatic work, he worked, when his health permitted, on his best-known philosophical writings on art and the theatre.

What he wrote there sometimes sounds astonishing: “In Über das Erhabene” Schiller uses a medical metaphor to illustrate the relevance of theater for people and society: “The pathetic is an inoculation (= inoculation) of inevitable fate , which robs it of its viciousness.” Translated for today’s readers: Excitement in the theater is an inoculation for the audience against the catastrophic vicissitudes of real life. Schiller, who studied medicine, meant that literally: For him, the theater was a large vaccination station that one only had to visit often enough to be armed against the catastrophes of fate and suffering from suffering.

After the longest closure in its history, the Burgtheater will open its doors again in September 2021 for regular theatrical vaccinations - with what is probably the most famous queen drama in the world, with Schiller's MARIA STUART. The eponymous Queen of Scotland has formulated claims to the throne of England, on which Elizabeth sits. After two decades in English prison and a lost trial in which she was sentenced to death for high treason, Maria sees herself in a hopeless situation. Could one of the numerous attempts by the Catholic side to free her succeed? Will one actually dare to put a crowned head under the guillotine? And on her hesitant opponent, the Anglican Elisabeth, the pressure from her advisory staff increases to finally sign the death sentence.

MARIA STUART is a political thriller, a historical exaggeration, a passionate examination of the questions that plagued Schiller throughout his life: What is freedom? How does politics work? And how can theater immunize against the deadly virus of power?

Subject to change.

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