Konzerthaus Berlin

Konzerthaus Berlin occupies Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s former Schauspielhaus on Gendarmenmarkt, with a 1,412-seat Great Hall that serves as the home stage of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. Expect a formal seated concert experience in a theatre-derived room: parquet, dress circle, upper circle and choir balcony face a 210 m² stage, and the Jehmlich concert organ gives organ recitals their own visual and sonic focal point.

A theatre remade for music

The building opened as the Königliches Schauspielhaus on 26 May 1821, inaugurated with a Goethe prologue before Frederick William III and his court. Its musical history gained an early landmark on 18 June, when Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” premiered there. Bombing and a fire in the final days of the Second World War left the Schauspielhaus destroyed. In 1977, the GDR commissioned architects Ehrhardt Gißke, Klaus Just and Manfred Prasser to turn the ruins into a concert hall, with Prasser securing an interior shaped in Schinkel’s spirit. The conversion had its own sharp scene on 15 October 1981: the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester played Johann Strauss for construction workers in the shell. On 1 October 1984, Kurt Sanderling and Claus Peter Flor reopened the house with Weber’s “Freischütz” Overture and Beethoven’s Fifth; the institution adopted the Konzerthaus Berlin name in 1994.

How the room works now

Classical music drives the calendar: the resident orchestra, visiting symphony orchestras, chamber groups, solo recitals and organ programmes form its core. House-produced events sit alongside partner presentations, while series such as Berlin Tracks bring classical players into contact with voguing, strings-and-synthesizers work and jazz. The Great Hall provides traditional end-stage sightlines across 696 parquet seats, 462 dress-circle seats and 254 upper-circle seats. Smaller bills can land in the 402-seat Small Hall or the Werner-Otto-Hall, a variable black-box space with seating for up to 255.