Compromises in orchestra pit design: A ten-year trench war in The Royal Theatre, Copenhagen

The ``old stage'' of The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen-a classical horseshoe theatre with an almost flat audience floor and four balcony levels—is the primary opera and ballet theatre in Denmark. In the early 1980s the orchestra pit was enlarged and its size made flexible. However, in the following years this new flexibility caused a formal battle between the orchestra, the singers, and management, because each group had different interests as to how the pit should be configured for each new production. In the 1990s, increased concern about the musicians' hearing and the increase in the popularity of opera finally opened the way for a new renovation of the pit, which solved most of the problems. The paper describes the many lessons learned during the ten-year period in which the authors were involved with the case as acoustic consultants. Questions of how pit configuration influences mutual hearing and exposure levels in the pit, balance between singers and orchestra as judged by the audience, communication between stage and pit, as well as the influence of pit floor construction on orchestra timbre will all be illustrated by results of numerous objective measurements, subjective surveys, and computer simulations.