Drottningholm Palace Theatre, Stockholm

The Drottningholm Palace Theatre outside Stockholm in 2014, with the musicians in the pit, chandeliers lit and the painted drop curtain down. It is small and pale, almost plain, and that is its charm: this is what a court theater really looked like in the 1700s. Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz built it for Queen Lovisa Ulrika in 1766. After decades of neglect it reopened in 1922, and it is one of the few 18th-century theaters still in use with its original stage machinery, wooden and still worked by hand. Summer performances of Mozart, Handel and Gluck show exactly how the scene changes were meant to look.