Ecstasy, violence and death
Othmar Schoeck’s Penthesilea to be the opera at the Festspielhaus in 2027
Vienna/Bregenz, 2 June 2026. In a few days, rehearsals begin for the opera at the Festspielhaus in 2026, Leoš Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček. Meanwhile, the Bregenz Festival is already looking ahead to the 2027 season. Next year the Festspielhaus production will be Othmar Schoeck’s late Romantic–Expressionist Penthesilea, a one-act opera based on the tragic drama by Heinrich von Kleist. The rarely performed piece is being staged at Bregenz to mark the 250th anniversary of Kleist’s birth. The production opens on 21 July 2027. It will be followed on 22 July 2027 by a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, which returns to the lake stage for its second run.
A sound-world of tension and strife
During the Trojan War, the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, falls in love with the Greek hero Achilles. However, according to their law an Amazon must first defeat a man in battle before she can make him her lover. A fatal misunderstanding sets off a spiral of passion, mania and violence which ends in one of the most disturbing scenes in all opera: descending into an ecstatic frenzy, Penthesilea tears apart her beloved Achilles – before she herself perishes.
In 1927, the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck adapted Heinrich von Kleist’s tragedy, creating a piece of music theatre of great dramatic force, as radical as it is unusual. Blending late Romanticism with atonality, Penthesilea is an intense and intoxicating opera of barely 80 minutes’ duration. A through-composed work, it constantly shifts between spoken passages to musical accompaniment (Melodrama), speech-song (Sprechgesang) and singing, generating a grim, archaic atmosphere of enormous emotional power. The instrumentation is unusual as well – lots of percussion, ten clarinets, a piano and only a few violins, which produces a dark, feverish sound-world charged with tension and inner strife.
The opera will be staged by the French director Mariame Clément, already known to Bregenz audiences for directing Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte at the Festspielhaus in 2019. The stage and costumes will be designed by Julia Hansen from Germany. The music director will be the Estonian Kristiina Poska, conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The title role will be created by the Greek soprano Melissa Zgouridi.
The 2027 Bregenz Festival runs from 21 July to 22 August. For tickets and information, please visit our website www.bregenzerfestspiele.com or call 0043 5574 4076.
