On your left is a low, pale concrete-and-glass theater with sharp angled sides, a broad entrance front, and a design built around a repeating hexagon.
This is Theater St. Gallen, the oldest surviving professional theater in Switzerland... which is slightly ironic, because for centuries St. Gallen barely wanted theater at all.
The story starts around the year nine hundred, when two monks, Tutilo and Notker Balbulus, helped spark early local performance. But this was a monastery city, and church leaders often looked at theater the way a cat looks at bathwater. So the art form never really settled in.
In the spring of eighteen oh one, a troupe called the Deutsche Löhlein’sche Theatergesellschaft asked the city for permission to perform. The answer was no. They staged August von Kotzebue’s The Noble Lie anyway, in a wooden shack in St. Fiden. Later, the troupe finally got space in the princely abbey’s carriage house just outside the city limits. On the fourteenth of October, eighteen oh one, St. Gallen’s first real theater opened there with another Kotzebue hit, The Silver Wedding, or The Happiness of the Contented Farmer.
Then Karl Müller-Friedberg stepped in. In eighteen oh five, he created a shareholders’ theater society and gave St. Gallen something remarkable: Switzerland’s first professional theater with three divisions, meaning it could produce different kinds of work under one roof instead of doing just one thing well and the rest badly.
The theater moved again in eighteen fifty-seven, when Johann Christoph Kunkler’s new building at the Bohl opened with Mozart’s Don Giovanni. That house lasted more than a century. Its final curtain fell in nineteen sixty-eight after Der Bettelstudent. The building came down in nineteen seventy-one... and yes, there is now a McDonald’s on the site.
What you see here replaced it. Architect Claude Paillard opened this theater on the fifteenth of March, nineteen sixty-eight with Beethoven’s Fidelio, and he built the whole design around a strict hexagon and the one-hundred-twenty-degree angle. If you glance at the image on your screen, the interior staircase makes that geometry beautifully obvious.
This house still runs as a true multi-genre theater: opera, operetta, musicals, drama, children’s theater, and dance. It stages more than twenty new productions each season, draws over one hundred fifty thousand people a year, and ranks just behind Zurich and Basel among Swiss theaters. It has also become unusually bold with musicals, premiering works like Matterhorn and Wüstenblume, even without Broadway-sized machinery. Ambition, apparently, can improvise.
The theater closed for a full renovation from twenty twenty to twenty twenty-three, after voters approved the plan in twenty eighteen, and it reopened on the twenty-second of October, twenty twenty-three. The aerial photo in the app shows how neatly it now sits in the cityscape.
If you ever want tickets, the box office usually opens Monday through Friday from two to six-thirty in the afternoon, and it is closed on weekends.
For all its reinventions, this place still carries the old St. Gallen argument between caution and imagination... and imagination keeps winning.
Take a moment here, and when you’re ready, we can continue on to the Kunstmuseum.
