With their prominent position in front of the audience in anticipation of the play, the stage curtains are the most impressive part of the theater interior because they have been used to display various visual content since the Renaissance. Curtains in Baroque theaters mostly depicted themes related to ancient mythology and underlined the authority of royal or aristocratic theater owners with their metaphors. Romanticism artists presented compositions rich in national messages, paying tribute to royal houses, and themes related to local history were especially popular in Italian theaters.
A new understanding of dramaturgy since the 1860s simplified theater curtains and they were usually simple and without figurative representations. The architect of the Paris Opera, Charles Garnier, for the otherwise unusually richly decorated space, imagined a sumptuous drapery, which, however, did not suggest any story to the audience. The curtain designed by Richard Wagner for his plays was supposed to open in such a way as to facilitate the audience's introduction to the dramatic story that began on the stage, and was again simple in appearance.
During its existence, the Croatian National Theater in Zagreb collected seven stage curtains, which is an extremely large number even in the largest theater houses, and the painters who created them are among the most important Croatian visual artists: Vjekoslav Karas (1850), Vlaho Bukovac (1895), Fran Šimunović (1969), Krsto Hegedušić (1969), Ivan Lacković (1994), Ivan Lovrenčić (1997) and Vasilije Jordan (1999). And yet, the audience rarely has the opportunity to see these curtains, and they have never been shown at the same time. For this reason, on this occasion, we will briefly turn the stage of the Croatian National Theater into a gallery space and present all seven curtains in their European and Croatian context.
On Saturday, October 5th, the new festive curtain Judith by author Zlatko Kauzlarić Atač will be presented on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the death of Marko Marulić, the father of Croatian literature.
Zdravko Blažeković lives in New York, where he is the director of the Research Center for Musical Iconography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and executive editor at the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale. In 1998, he started the scientific magazine for musical iconography, Music in Art, and in 2016, he established the monographic series Music in Visual Cultures (Brepols), of which he is still the editor. He is the president of the ICTMD Study Group on Iconography of the Performing Arts. His research interests include the music of Southeast and Central Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, musical iconography, organology, musical historiography, the reception of ancient Greek and Roman organology in the 18th century, musical contacts between Europe and China until the 19th century, and musical symbolism in medieval and Renaissance astrology.