A neoclassical building from 1901, built as a concert hall with a municipal theatre and since 1945 the seat of the Silesian Opera, with a main stage and the Adam Didur Hall.
The Silesian Opera building stands on Moniuszki Street in Bytom, on a corner plot of 5,090 square metres. It was built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as a concert hall with a municipal theatre, the first such building in the Upper Silesian conurbation. Since 1945 it has housed the Silesian Opera. It is entered in the heritage register.
The initiator of the construction was the banker and music lover Franz Landsberger, who founded the Concert Hall Society. The project was supported by the Bytom mayor Georg Brüning and the directors of Upper Silesian industrial works, and the main donors were the Caesar Wollheim shipyard and the mining entrepreneur Fritz von Friedlaender-Fuld. The city authorities donated the plot and granted an interest-free mortgage loan. The building was designed by the Berlin architect Alexander Böhm, and construction was carried out from 1898 or 1899. It was accepted in September 1901, and the official opening took place on 1 October 1901 with Beethoven's overture “The Consecration of the House”. The building housed the Municipal Theatre, a concert hall and rooms for social organisations.
In 1927 the building was remodelled to a design by Hans Poelzig: the halls were linked by a passage, the acoustics of the concert hall were improved, and some windows of the west façade were bricked up as blind windows. Since 1945 the Silesian Opera has operated in the building. In the 1950s the concert hall was turned into a ballet hall, and in the following decades the building was rebuilt and extended many times. In 1957 a bust of Frédéric Chopin by Aleksander Żurakowski was unveiled in front of the west façade.
On the night of 24 August 2000 a fire broke out: the roof, the ceiling and the decor of the ballet hall burned down. The concert hall was rebuilt in line with the original concept, and a new ballet hall was set up on the top floor of the western part, above which a modern dome was built. In 2022-2023 the building was extended and remodelled, and in November 2023 the opera stage was reopened.
The style of the building is neoclassicism with elements of Expressionism, Art Nouveau and Empire. The body of the building is in two parts. The eastern part houses the main opera stage, crowned by a ventilation lantern, with 391 seats. The western part is the Adam Didur Concert Hall with 200 seats, used for concerts and ballet. The west façade has a central projecting bay with a tympanum and a mascaron. In the foyer hangs a plaque dedicated to Napoleon Siess, a former director of the Silesian Opera.
Close to the opera lies the Franciszek Kachel Municipal Park, and further on the Szombierki Power Station and Żabie Doły.
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