Theater landscapes

During this time, Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz von Anhalt had the parks, palaces and gardens of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom laid out, engaged a well-known traveling theater group and opened the Dessau stage with a musical play.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hugo Junkers revolutionized aviation development: in Dessau.
And finally, the Bauhaus (1919-1933) had a lasting impact on architecture, art and design worldwide.
The Dessau Theater was opened in 1938 as a prestige project for the Nazis and destroyed by a bomb in 1944.
The theater was reopened in 1949 with a performance of "The Magic Flute".
In 1953, the Dessau Richard Wagner Festival was held for the first time under the then artistic director Willy Bodenstein.
Dessau was now regarded as the "Bayreuth of the North".
Since 1993, the "Kurt Weill Fest Dessau" has been held annually in Dessau in honor of the composer Kurt Weill, who was born there.

In addition to opera, operetta and musicals, the multi-genre theater in Dessau also offers drama, ballet, puppet theater and the Anhalt Philharmonic Orchestra.
With 1096 seats in the main auditorium, the Anhaltisches Theater Dessau is the largest theater in Saxony-Anhalt.
Its musical productions are internationally renowned, and in the autumn of 2001 the theater staged two operas in Japan under the direction of Johannes Felsenstein, who has been director since 1991.