Festival to stage "Rigoletto" for the first time

Verdi's opera on the lake stage in 2019 and 2020

Bregenz/Vienna, 2.6.16. The lake stage production at the Bregenz Festival in summer 2019 and 2020 will be Rigoletto. Giuseppe Verdi's opera with the famous aria La donna è mobile has not been performed on the open-air lakeside stage before. It will follow Carmen, the opera on the lake in the 2017 and 2018 seasons. This summer, the audience favourite Turandot returns for a second season. There is still ticket availability.

The choice of opera was announced at a press conference in Vienna today by the artistic director Elisabeth Sobotka and the commercial director Michael Diem. "Rigoletto is a superb work – highly dramatic, compact and with wonderful melodies, and what's more the story is set by the water," Sobotka said.

The director and stage designer on Rigoletto will be Philipp Stölzl. Born in Munich in 1967, Stölzl made a name for himself as a director of music videos for artists like Madonna and then began making feature films, attracting attention for North Face, Young Goethe in Love and The Physician. Trained as a set and costume designer, he has directed operas for the Salzburg Festival, Theater an der Wien as well as the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Deutsche Oper in Berlin, among other opera houses.

On the lake stage, preparations are currently under way for Turandot, rehearsals for which begin on 21 June. Among other things the technicians are checking the more than 500,000 light-emitting diodes of the circular video screen in the centre of the giant stage set which recalls the Great Wall of China. The nearly five week long festival opens on the evening of 20 July with the first performance in Austria of the opera Hamlet in the Festspielhaus. Next day sees the premiere of Turandot in its second season. About 80 events are on the programme before the Bregenz Festival closes on 21 August. Altogether just under 183,000 tickets are available (not including dress rehearsals and Crossculture night).

For tickets and information, please visit www.bregenzerfestspiele.com or call tel. +43 (0)5574 407-6.

(ar)

20.08.2010

Pressekonferenz Endspurt 2010

© Bregenzer Festspiele / Dietmar Mathis