In their 1856 plan for the reconstruction of central Riga, architects Otto Dietze and Johann Daniel Felsko set aside a special place for a theater beside the canal. The St. Petersburg architect Ludwig Bohnstedt won the project competition for the Riga City Theater, also called the German Theater. Construction was begun in 1860 atop the former Pancake Bastion. Three years later, the completed theater featured more than 2,000 seats.
The new building was unveiled in 1863 with productions of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio. In 1882, a large portion of the theater building burned down in a fire. Reinhold Schmaeling, the city’s chief architect at the time, oversaw the reconstruction project, which closely followed Bohstedt’s original design. Renovation work was completed in 1887, and the new building offered several modern improvements.
The theater was closed during the First World War and resumed its activities, as the German Theater, only in 1917. In 1919, control of the building was transferred to the Latvian opera company; later that year, the theater was renamed the Latvian National Opera.
When Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union, in 1944, the Latvian National Opera became the Latvian S.S.R. State Opera and Ballet Theater.
The opera house was renovated in 1957 and 1958, though the building was not modernized but only refurbished. In the mid 1970s, the need to reconstruct the opera house was widely discussed, as the nineteenth-century building no longer conformed to the technical and aesthetic requirements of the twentieth century.
In 1990, after the theater was once again renamed the Latvian National Opera, the building was closed following a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. Over the next five years, the exterior of the building was renovated and the interior was restored in keeping with Schmaeling’s historical design, which provided a stylistic model for the new space.
Reconstruction was completed in 1995, and the opera company returned to the stage with a series of remarkable symphonic concerts and a performance of Jānis Mediņš’s opera Uguns un nakts (Fire and Night).
A modern addition to the building was completed in 2001. This project included new spaces for technical and creative staff, as well as the 300-seat New Hall, which now hosts various art projects.
