The Frankfurt Opera will be forced, from December 16, to refuse entry to part of its audience.
The musical institution complies, in this, with the new batteries of health measures presented Tuesday by the government of the Land of Hesse.
Hit hard by the new wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a 25% gauge counted from 251st place has been - among other things - imposed for all events organized indoors.
That is, a maximum of 530 people authorized in around 1,400 seats, in the case of the Frankfurt Opera.
Read alsoThe grand ball of the Vienna Opera canceled for the second year in a row due to the Covid
“After having already had to tell several hundred people per performance not to come, we are now forced to disappoint other opera lovers in the space of two days!
, was moved in a statement the manager of the opera Bernd Loebe, insisting on the stacking of restrictive measures for a few weeks.
It's almost impossible, but we are going to try, and we hope that our regulars at the Opera will understand ”.
Among the shows affected by the tightening of the gauge are performances of
The Christmas Night
by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov or
The Merry Widow
by Franz Lehár, both conducted by German conductor Sebastian Weigle.
New performances should be rescheduled in the coming weeks.
Threat of further closures
The new turn of the sanitary screw comes in a context marked by a sharp increase in the rate of infection with the Omicron variant of Covid-19, as well as by the growing tension in the hospitals of the region.
"If we do not react, the health system risks continuing to be overloaded,"
Hesse Minister-President Volker Bouffier said at a press conference on Tuesday.
A difficult decision for the management of the Frankfurt Opera to swallow.
However, the opera house and the other large venues in the region are still escaping outright closure, as could have been the case in 2020. The hypothesis remains nevertheless raised by the government of the region, to the chagrin by Bernd Loebe.
"A closure of places of culture would have disastrous consequences
," warned the manager of the Frankfurt Opera two weeks ago, in a letter addressed to Volker Bouffier and relayed by the German press.
During the last closure, we lost 6,000 of our subscribers. ”
Another venerable Frankfurt institution, the Old Town Opera, for its part, has simply canceled two of its three shows in December.
With the hope of reprogramming them as soon as the new pandemic wave has passed.
