The main theater of the city is, of course, M. Zankovetska’s Theater. It was built in 1842 and has long been the largest theater stage in Europe after the theaters of Milan and Dresden. It is interesting to note that the theater was built at the expense of just one person!
Among the people whose names are engraved on the tablets of the history of our city forever, Count Stanislaw Martin Skarbek possesses a distinguished place; Lviv has never seen such a generous philanthropist.
Skarbek was contradictory person. A clever businessman, he valued art and was a fan of the theater, and at the same time a spendthrift, a forester, a figure in the spirit of Casanova and other adventurers of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout his life, the count traded in timber, metal, fuel, grain, flour, meat, oxen, beer, vodka, and bought estates, jewelry, and antiques. There were legends about his extravagance (they told how the count paid for a romance with a maid with a hat filled with banknotes) and fantastic projects (for example, to connect the Dniester and San). Sometimes Skarbek did not have a shell in his pocket. However, fortune smiled to him again – and soon the count, having paid his debts, again squandered money to the last cruiser.
Finally a funny story about Skarbek’s collaboration with Count Alexander Fredro.
Skarbek was unlucky with women. But in 1814 he married Princess Sophia Jablonowska. That’s how it was. During the ball in Lviv in honor of the Neapolitan Queen Carolina, Count Skarbek, the marshal of the ball, opened the party by inviting a fifteen-year-old princess to the dance, not a queen (as the etiquette required). It was a scandal. But the queen smiled, and Jablonowska was so impressed that she agreed to marry her gentleman. The marriage was short-lived. After a long trial on the divorce Jablonowska married Count Oleksandr Fredro – a famous comedian.In result owing to their wife Skarbek and Fredro quickly found a common language; Fredro’s plays were regularly staged in Skarbek’s Theater. Instead, in sub-Russian Warsaw, Fredro’s works were under prohibition, there was a theater in Krakow, but it was too small. So, few people would know Fredro’s name today, if not Jablonowska and Skarbek.
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- Rybrovsky. Theater of Skarbek (1900). Wikipedia
