71st Bregenz Festival opens

Bregenz, 20.7.2016. The 71st season of Bregenz Festival was officially opened by the Joint Acting President of Austria, Doris Bures, this morning in the Great Hall of the Festspielhaus. The 2,000 guests at the opening ceremony were treated to a selection of excerpts from the coming festival programme. In addition, speeches were held and the Austrian national anthem as well as the Vorarlberg anthem were sung to inaugurate the anniversary season of the festival 70 years after it was founded in 1946.

This evening will see the first performance in Austria of the opera Hamlet at the Festspielhaus, while Turandot returns to the lake stage tomorrow. The latter production will run until 21 August, with a total of 24 performances. Hamlet will be given three times in all. Interest in both works is big: about 80 per cent of the 162,000 tickets for Turandot have already been booked; tickets are still available for all performances and dates. Likewise about 80 per cent of the 4,600 tickets for Hamlet have been sold. The programme of this year's festival also includes Mozart's Don Giovanni and the first ever staging of a contemporary piece of music theatre, Staatsoperette - Die Austrotragödie, based on the play by Otto M. Zykan and Franz Novotny.

As a prelude to the festival, Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne was performed yesterday evening, commemorating the founding of the festival 70 years ago. Just as in 1946, Mozart's early singspiel was staged on a gravel barge in the Gondelhafen marina in Bregenz. Admission was free. A good 1,800 visitors came to the show, which lasted about an hour and ended with a firework display.