A spookily poetic "Freischütz" returns

When the devil pulls the strings: Der Freischütz returns to the lake stage

“The first time I came to Bregenz I wanted to do this opera here,” the highly regarded film and stage director Philipp Stölzl, who directed Verdi’s Rigoletto on the lake stage in 2019/21, revealed in spring 2024 at the stage preview and topping out ceremony for the Weber opera.

The form that Stölzl has chosen for his Freischütz production is the result of a very conscious decision: “Here on Lake Constance, we wanted to wholeheartedly embrace the Romantic gothic horror tale on which the opera is based.“ And sure enough, we witness a fire-spewing serpent hitching a horseback ride with the devil Samiel, eerie spirits writhing in the black water of the lagoon, and a ghostly pale Agathe dancing on her bed.

Stölzl pays particular attention to the spoken scenes in his production at Bregenz, because, as he says, “almost half of this opera consists of spoken theatre”. In collaboration with author Jan Dvořák, he has revised and extended the spoken scenes and has promoted Samiel, the devil, to the role of narrator, conférencier and string-pulling Svengali. The Bregenz Freischütz has proved fascinating for audiences because Carl Maria von Weber’s memorable melodies and arias alternate with many passages of dialogue – and with the caustic comments of the devil.

Samiel, played alternately by the actors Moritz von Treuenfels and Niklas Wetzel, is an omnipresent eminence in the Freischütz. He climbs up trees, rides a skeletal horse, and appears on the top of the church spire. It is Samiel, moreover, who drives the story forwards; he directs the characters and dictates their actions as well as delivering sharp-tongued commentaries on them.

The scene in the Wolf’s Ravine is visually and dramatically the highpoint of the Bregenz production. Weber’s creepy music and ominous orchestration, paired with impressive lighting effects, thick billowing fog, howling wolves and thunderclaps transform the stage into a surreal, nightmarish place. When Kaspar in a sea of flame casts his magic bullets, the audience gets goosebumps.

The second season of the Bregenz Freischütz opens on 17 July 2025. The music directors of the lake stage production in summer 2025 are the Swedish conductor Patrik Ringborg and his German colleague Christoph Altstaedt. 

Inescapable fate: George Enescu’s opera Œdipe at the Festspielhaus

He kills his father and marries his mother, but at no point is actually aware of their identities. Guilty through no fault of his own, Oedipus gets more and more deeply entangled in a destiny which was preordained for him. The story by the Greek dramatist Sophocles has enthralled people since antiquity; and when the composer Enescu attended a performance of the tragedy Oedipus Rex at the Comédie Française in 1909, he was deeply moved by it. He adapted the play as a monumental choral opera that is regarded today as Enescu’s masterpiece. Œdipe combines French Impressionism with Romanian folk music and is remarkable for its colourful scoring, powerful rhythms and song-like melodies.

Œdipe opens at the Festspielhaus on 16 July 2025. The Bregenz production will be directed by the internationally acclaimed stage director Andreas Kriegenburg. Together with stage designer Harald B. Thor and costume designer Tanja Hofmann, Kriegenburg relates each of the four independently narrated acts to one element: fire, water, air and earth, combined with archaic materials like wood, clay, plain fabric as well as bare skin. The Finnish star conductor Hannu Lintu will be music director of the production. The role of Œdipe will be performed by the Danish baritone Johan Reuter. 

Music theatre in the Werkstattbühne: Shadows and light, devotion and liberty

The Werkstattbühne theatre space will be the venue for three music theatre works as enthralling as they are different: Borrowed Light, Study for Life and Emily – No Prisoner Be, which put the focus on devotion and community, spiritual freedom and powerful sensory experience.

For the first two productions, in late July, the Tero Saarinen Company will be making its first guest appearance in Bregenz. Well-known Finnish choreographer Saarinen’s huge international success Borrowed Light will be performed here on 23 July 2025. The piece – a hypnotic fusion of movement, music and light – has captivated more than 50,000 since its premiere in 2004. In Borrowed Light, Tero Saarinen was inspired by the traditional songs and dances of the Shakers, a religious movement founded in the USA in the 18th century that is known for its strict, ascetic principles on how to live, its strong sense of community, and the quality of its craftmanship. The central theme of the piece is not the Shaker movement itself, however, but universal issues like spirituality and community. Saarinen’s choreography, underscored by the powerful traditional songs of the Shakers, communicates a feeling of human communion and collective surrender. 

In Borrowed Light, Saarinen collaborates closely with The Boston Camerata, one of the leading vocal ensembles for early music, and also with his creative partners of many years, lighting designer Mikki Kunttu and costume designer Erika Turunen. The piece employs light as a powerful religious metaphor and plays with contrast: heavy felt material meets airy, transparent fabrics, while the lighting design brilliantly evokes the alternation between mystical shadows and dazzling brightness.

These pieces are followed, on 30 July 2025, by Study for Life, Tero Saarinen’s latest, immersive, multidisciplinary work. It’s a hommage to the music of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, until her death a close friend and artistic collaborator. Four of Saariaho’s compositions can be heard, including one that gives the piece its title, the Miniature for Soprano, Electronics and Light, based on a passage from T. S. Eliot’s famous poem The Hollow Men. Study for Life is a co-production with the Holland Festival and will be receiving its Austrian premiere at the Werkstattbühne theatre. Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) is one of the most significant composers of the present day. Known for her dense, colourful musical idiom, she combines electronics and orchestra in an innovative manner. Study for Life, Saariaho’s first piece conceived for the stage, is the starting point for a multi-artistic arc that initially leads the audience through an empty, lonely landscape before bathing it in a rich synaesthesia. 

On 14 August 2025, the Werkstattbühne theatre space will be the venue for the world premiere of Emily – No Prisoner Be, commissioned by the Bregenz Festival. At the heart of this new work by the Tero Saarinen Company is the audacious, mysterious, at times provocative but also humorous verse of American poet Emily Dickinson (born in 1830). The American composer Kevin Puts, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, joins forces with opera singer Joyce DiDonato, a multiple Grammy winner, to take a new look at Dickinson’s poetry – ably assisted by the stage director and lighting designer Marie Lambert-Le Bihan and the Time for Three string trio, who defy all musical conventions. Dickinson’s work deals with the freedom of the spirit and the search for identity, often calling faith and social norms into question. Emily – No Prisoner Be explores a unique poetic cosmos characterised by deep emotions, existential questions and a particular connection with nature.

Opera Studio at Kornmarkt Theatre: Human kindness and comical twists 

Gioachino Rossini’s opera La Cenerentola, a retelling of the timeless story of Cinderella, will be staged at the Kornmarkt Theatre as next year’s Bregenz Opera Studio production. The premiere is on 12 August 2025. The annual masterclass for young singers will be given this time by Lilli Paasikivi herself, the Bregenz Festival’s first “singing” artistic director. 

La Cenerentola, premiered in Rome in 1817, is regarded as a masterpiece of opera buffa and as a fascinating adaptation of the Cinderella folk tale. In Rossini’s piece, it becomes a very human story full of comical entanglements and unexpected twists in the plot. Angelina, who is called Cenerentola, finds happiness not through fairy tale magic, but as a result of her good heartedness and abiding modesty. The opera will be directed by Amy Lane, once Keith Warner’s assistant stage director in the Bregenz lake stage production of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier and today known for her creative stagings. The musical director will be the up-and-coming Finnish conductor Kaapo Ijas. The stage and costumes will be designed by Anna Reid, who like Amy Lane is from the UK. 

In March 2025, the young singers will have the opportunity to improve their musical skills in a masterclass. It will be given by Lilli Paasikivi and the artistic personnel manager Jaakko Kortekangas, who have both performed  in La Cenerentola themselves during their successful singing careers.  

A society in a state of emergency: Burgtheater co-production in July 2025

The partnership with the Vienna Burgtheater will resume in 2025. For the first time in the recent history of the festival, Austria’s famous national theatre will visit Bregenz during the summer festival – with guest performances that feature a world premiere and a co-production. The co-production, opening at the Kornmarkt Theatre on 18 July 2025, will be bumm tschak oder der letzte henker, the latest work by the multiple-award-winning Austrian playwright Ferdinand Schmalz. The topical, unsettling play about a society in a state of emergency marks the beginning of an association with the Bregenz Festival that will extend over several years. The play will be directed by the Swiss stage director Stefan Bachmann, artistic director of the Burgtheater. 

Orchestral concerts: Epic tales told in music

Epic tales loom large in the orchestral concerts. The concerts by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra lead us first, on 21 July, into the world of A Thousand and One Nights with a performance of Ravel’s Shéhérazade under the baton of Elim Chan. On 27 July, conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste with an 80-member male choir introduces the Bregenz public to the Finnish anti-hero Kullervo, while Petr Popelka explores the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in a concert of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra on 4 August. The Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra matinee brings the 2025 festival to a close with Leo McFall conducting a programme of Gustav Mahler.

On 21 July 2025, the Chinese conductor Elim Chan makes her Bregenz Festival debut with a French concert programme that features music written in that era of upheaval around the year 1900. We will hear Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La Mer in addition to Maurice Ravel’s Shéhérazade, one of the composer’s first great successes. The soloist in these three orchestral songs inspired by Persian tales is the Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb. Femmes de légende by French composer Mélanie Bonis dates from the same time. It is a series of musical portraits of famous female figures from literature and mythology. Originally for piano, three of the pieces – portraying Ophelia, Salome and Cleopatra – were orchestrated by the composer. 

Jean Sibelius’ Kullervo, a five-part symphonic suite, is considered a milestone in Finnish music history. Sibelius drew inspiration for the work, which was premiered in 1892, from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. With its folk melodies, the piece has been praised as “the first truly Finnish music”. The monumental composition relates the tragic story of Kullervo, who seduces his sister without realising her identity – it accordingly displays parallels with the Oedipus myth. Under the musical direction of Jukka-Pekka Saraste, the work’s dramatic force and impressive orchestral and vocal sound world will be awakened to life by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Finland’s YL Male Voice Choir, joined by the gentlemen of the Prague Philharmonic Choir and the Bregenz Festival Chorus. Danish baritone Johan Reuter will debut in the title role. The concert is on 27 July 2025.

The YL Male Voice Choir, one of the leading male-voice choirs in the world, can also be heard a couple of days earlier, on 25 July 2025, in the concert Waldeinsamkeit (“forest solitude”) in the Bregenz parish Church of the Sacred Heart. The a cappella concert showcases Finnish choral music, but also includes choral compositions by Franz Schubert and Arnold Schoenberg. 

On 4 August 2025, Japanese pianist Mao Fujita will make his debut at the Bregenz Festival with Sergei Rakhmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, one of the most challenging works in the piano repertoire. This “concerto for elephants”, described as “the concerto with the most notes per second” and often considered unplayable, demands supreme technical virtuosity and particular emotional depth from the soloist. Also on the bill is Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra. Made world famous by Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the piece evokes Friedrich Nietzsche’s visionary idea of a superhuman spirit which frees itself from religious norms and constantly recreates itself. In the concert, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra will play under the baton of Petr Popelka, its chief conductor. 

In the matinee concert on 17 August 2025, the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor Leo McFall explores the life and work of Gustav and Alma Mahler. Along with Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G, several of Alma Mahler’s songs for piano will be performed in an orchestration by David and Colin Matthews. Mezzo-soprano Dorottya Láng will sing the songs, while the solo part in Mahler’s Fourth will be sung by soprano Sonja Herranen. The programme also includes a composition by a close associate of Mahler’s, Oskar Fried, who produced an impressive orchestral fantasy on themes from Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel.

Chamber music in the Lake Studio and the KUB: Mad Kings, Nordic Cool and All about Eve

The chamber music programme in the Lake Studio and the Kunsthaus Bregenz embraces both traditional Nordic musical culture and contemporary electronic soundscapes, monarchs on the verge of madness, and “Eves without Adam”. On top of that, members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra will return in chamber music formations to play their personal favourites. The concerts will be given in the Lake Studio on 26 July, 2 and 9 August 2025.

King George III’s early life as a farmer and his later descent into madness will be sketched in a concert on 19 July 2025 in the Lake Studio. The British monarch, born in 1738, was initially seen as a modest, pious and upright king, known as “Farmer George” as he was more interested in agriculture than the ostentations of court life. His final years, by contrast, were overshadowed by mental illness. Blind and suffering from dementia, he died isolated from his kingdom and from reality. Peter Maxwell Davies’ monodrama Eight Songs for a Mad King deals with the mental decline of King George III and is a disturbing and caustic commentary on the interplay of power and insanity. In the companion piece Farmer George, written for the Bregenz Festival, the Finnish composer Osmo Tapio Räihälä and the German baritone and librettist Thomas Florio illuminate the early life of a man who battles in vain against the gathering darkness that will one day engulf him.

The Norwegian soprano Hedvig Haugerud is one of the most promising voices of her generation. Her recital in the Lake Studio on 3 August 2025 – Im Sturm der Sehnsucht (“In the storm of longing”) – features music by Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius and contemporary works such as Gösta Nystroem’s popular song cycle Sånger vid havet (Songs by the Sea). The programme reflects her intimate connection with Nordic musical culture. Accompanied by the pianist Mats Knutsson, she will create an atmosphere of sound in which the bleak beauty of the North will make itself felt in all its emotional aspects. 

An unusual artistic collaboration can be enjoyed in the Kunsthaus Bregenz on 5 August 2025 when the Finnish kantele player Ida Elina meets the jazz saxophonist Jukka Perko. Ida Elina is an acknowledged virtuoso on the kantele, a traditional Finnish string instrument, while Jukka Perko is an internationally acclaimed jazz saxophonist. In Nordic Cool, the two instrumentalists blend traditional Nordic music with modern electronic sounds to create a new, mythology-infused sound world.

The concert All About Eve on 10 August 2025 in the Lake Studio showcases the work of female composers from different periods. Musicians Sophie Heinrich and Maria Radutu offer an appreciation of the composers’ extraordinary courage and creative diversity, with pianist Maria Radutu bringing their music to life and Sophie Heinrich shedding light on their lives by recounting stories and quoting from diaries and letters. The featured composers include the sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger and also Florence Price, an African American who in her lifetime was barred from the concert stage because of her skin colour.  

Midsummer night on Lake Constance: Finnish tango in the assembly hall

The new assembly hall of the Bregenz Festspielhaus, whose giant doors open directly onto the lake shore, will be the venue of a very special festival event on the evening of 11 August 2025 – Tango am See (Tango on the lake). For the Finns, tango belongs to the summer as the Northern Lights do to winter, and nobody loves the dance as passionately as they do. The concert on the Lake Constance shore will capture the atmosphere of midsummer night dancing in a Finnish landscape. The music is courtesy of the Finnish-British Alakulo Ensemble – musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra who will play traditional and modern Finnish tangos. The dancers Arja Koriseva (Tango Queen of 1989) and Johannes Vatjus (Tango King of 2019) will appear as soloists. The compere guiding us through the evening will be Roman Schatz, who comes from the Lake Constance area but has lived in Finland for nearly 40 years and is now regarded as an expert in Finnish tango.

Young People’s Festival: Freischütz for Kids and Brass Amore

The Young People’s Festival returns in 2025 with colourful and enjoyable activities designed to enable youngsters to discover the fascinating world of music for themselves. There will be opera workshops, the Children’s Festival, Young People’s Night, and the MINT project in which schoolchildren learn about theatre technology. The programme also includes Freischütz for Kids in March 2025. In this co-production with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, stage director Kai Anne Schuhmacher tells an updated version of the story set in a school playground. Children can be involved in the performance of some of the opera’s numbers from the auditorium. The show will be staged at the Festspielhaus on 31 March 2025.

The 7th International Wind Band Camp (IBC) will take place from 5 to 10 August 2025. Young musicians will come to Vorarlberg to form a symphonic wind ensemble under the direction of Martin Kerschbaum, conductor and percussionist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. They will rehearse music by the opera composers featured at the festival, Gioachino Rossini and Carl Maria von Weber, as well as pieces by Alfred Reed, John Philip Sousa and John Williams. The camp concludes with a concert on 10 August 2025, entitled Brass Amore. In association with the Vorarlberg Blasmusikverband (wind ensemble association).