Comoedienhaus

The Comoedienhaus was Frankfurt's first municipal theater, built between 1780 and 1782 to designs by city architect Johann Andreas Liebhardt. With 1,016 seats, the neoclassical building on Theaterplatz served Frankfurt's bourgeois audience for nearly a century. Numerous works by Goethe and Schiller were premiered or first staged here, and the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart also performed concerts on its stage. The Comoedienhaus stood as a symbol of the growing self-confidence of Frankfurt's middle class during the late phase of the Free Imperial City. The building was demolished in 1902; no comparable structure stands in its place today, but a plaque and the street names recall the site's importance for Frankfurt's theater history.