Passion, commitment and inspiration: "Elisabeth Sobotka’s contribution to the development of the Bregenz Festival is incalculable"

Seebühne, Festspielhaus, Werkstattbühne – there’s probably no other place in the world where you have three such different venues right next to each other. It generates a strong energy.
Elisabeth Sobotka, November 2018

"Subtle theatre and a big, sophisticated show" – this is how Elisabeth Sobotka, speaking in an interview with the magazine Festspielzeit, defined what the festival on Lake Constance aims for. The statement also encapsulates well what she has achieved in her ten remarkable years at the helm in Bregenz.

Praising the outgoing artistic director, the festival president Hans-Peter Metzler said: "Elisabeth Sobotka has mounted operas on the lake shore that no other Bregenz artistic director before her would have dared to do. In the Festspielhaus and the Werkstattbühne, she has celebrated both what’s forgotten and what’s new; she has brought classics into focus and provided ample space for the contemporary. The Bregenz style of dramaturgy has been very capably continued and filled with new, independent life by Elisabeth Sobotka over ten festival seasons. In the process, she wasn’t only interested in what was established, safe. She was always on the lookout for new talent, young singers and musicians, outstanding artists on and behind the stage, and for themes that are moving and exciting. Elisabeth Sobotka’s contribution to the development of the Bregenz Festival is incalculable, and we are profoundly grateful to her for her passion, commitment and inspiration."

Matching the ideal work with the perfect team: Opera on the lake

On the Seebühne, the lake stage, between 2015 and 2024 we’ve been treated to an intimate Turandot, a dazzling Carmen, a spectacular Rigoletto, a poetic Madame Butterfly and an altogether extraordinary Freischütz. It wasn’t only Elisabeth Sobotka’s keen instinct for the right operas and her wide network of personal contacts with great directors and stage designers which accounts for the enormous success of the operas staged here since 2015. On top of that, for nine years she has managed to match the ideal work with a creative team that’s perfectly suited to it. Every single opera on the lake stage has accordingly been the product of a close dialogue between the artistic director and the artists who have been engaged. "In an artistic process, you never know what the outcome will be. That’s what makes it so exciting," Sobotka said in an interview on Carmen in 2017.

This unique form of collaboration has led to the creation of a half-submerged, wintry village that made the audience shudder (Der Freischütz – Philipp Stölzl, 2024/25), delicate poetry on a gigantic sheet of white paper (Madame Butterfly – Andreas Homoki | Michael Levine, 2022/23), a clown’s head with an eerily changing expression (Rigoletto – Philipp Stölzl, 2019/21), a pair of giant hands with playing cards suspended mid-air (Carmen – Kaspar Holten | Es Devlin, 2017/18) and the Great Wall of China surrounded by water (Turandot – Marco Arturo Marelli, 2015/16).

The poetry, the drama and the intimacy of the operas were at the heart of all these productions. Equally essential was each opera’s own particular sound, which was embodied on stage by singers chosen with sensitivity. For the operas on the lake as well as the Festspielhaus productions and the orchestral concerts, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Prague Philharmonic Choir ensured the musical quality was exceptionally high.

Classics, rediscovered rarities and novel stagings: Opera at the Festspielhaus

At the Festspielhaus, Elisabeth Sobotka used the "classic proscenium stage" in the Great Hall for the rediscovery of operatic rarities as well as for novel productions and outstanding musical interpretations of well-known works. For instance, Stefan Herheim’s production of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann with Johannes Debus as music director was hailed as a "stroke of genius and a milestone in the reception history of this difficult piece", as the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported (Johannes Debus | Stefan Herheim, 2015). In Franco Faccio's opera Hamlet, the eponymous hero who trod the boards was unusually an impetuous, impassioned figure (Paolo Carignani | Olivier Tambosi, 2016). Lotte de Beer parted the Red Sea for Gioachino Rossini’s Moses in Egypt, assisted by the theatre collective Hotel Modern (Enrique Mazzola | Lotte de Beer, 2017). Sinful opulence and the abuse of power made a patrician daughter plan to murder her father, supposing it to be her only way out – in the Berthold Goldschmidt opera Beatrice Cenci (Johannes Debus | Johannes Erath, 2018). A new perspective on the "knight of the sad countenance" was offered in Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte (Daniel Cohen | Mariame Clément, 2019), and one of the most notorious figures in history was conjured up on the Festspielhaus stage in Arrigo Boito’s Nero (Dirk Kaftan | Olivier Tambosi, 2021). The cruelty of society, unconditional love and dashed hopes were the theme of Umberto Giordano’s Sibiria (Valentin Uryupin | Vasily Barkhatov, 2022), while honour and love, murder and revenge dominated Giuseppe Verdi’s Ernani, a story about those "imperfect beings called people" (Enrique Mazzola | Lotte de Beer, 2023). And last but not least, that "masterpiece of Rossini’s youth", Tancredi, was boldly translated to a gangland setting by Jan Philipp Gloger – a male world in which two young women try to find happiness together (Yi-Chen Lin | Jan Philipp Gloger, 2024).

Bregenz’s first Conductor in Residence

Elisabeth Sobotka also realised that having a musical director in place, long term, could benefit the festival significantly. In 2022, she appointed the Italian conductor Enrique Mazzola as the festival’s first Conductor in Residence. In him she has found a reliable partner for a number of projects – the opera on the lake, the production in the Festspielhaus, and concerts by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

World premieres, new works from the Opera Workshop

The Bregenz Opera Workshop, which the artistic director developed jointly with the contemporary arts centre Kunsthaus Bregenz and the two stage directors Yilmaz Dziewior and Thomas D. Trummer, is an original way of creating new works of music theatre. It sprang from two ideas. Firstly, the composer and the director should work together from the beginning with a visual artist on every new piece of music theatre. Secondly, members of the public should be invited to follow the creation of the new opera in "Insight" sessions during its three-year gestation from inception to the premiere. This highly unusual and multifaceted glimpse behind the scenes of the creative process has been enthusiastically received by the Bregenz public.

So far, three visual artists have transformed the Werkstattbühne stage in highly individual ways into a space for unique opera experiences. First there was an opera stage that became two-dimensional (To the Lighthouse – Jakob Kolding with the composer Zesses Seglias, librettist Ernst Marianne Binder and director Olivier Tambosi, 2017), followed by an organ pipe installation that doubled as a performance space (Wind – Flaka Haliti with Alexander Moosbrugger, 2021) and finally an octopus that floats above the stage (Hold Your Breath – Hugo Canoilas with Éna Brennan and David Pountney, 2024).

Outside the Opera Workshop, too, Elisabeth Sobotka has made world premieres at the Werkstattbühne a regular feature of the summer festival. It began with Staatsoperette. Die Austro-Tragödie (Otto M. Zykan, 2016), followed by The Hunting Gun (Thomas Larcher, 2018),

Wunderwandelwelt (François Sarhan, 2019), Upload (Michel van der Aa, 2021), Melencolia (Brigitta Muntendorf | Moritz Lobeck, 2022), Judith of Shimoda (Fabián Panisello, 2023) and Connection impossible (Ondřej Adámek, 2024). Ensemble Modern, one of the leading contemporary music ensembles in the world, was involved in several of the projects.

Nurturing young talent: Opera Studio, Bregenz Orchestra Academy, Young People’s Festival

Right at the start of her tenure as artistic director, Elisabeth Sobotka engaged the one and only Brigitte Fassbaender for the Opera Studio, doing so because the grande dame of the German-language opera world shares Sobotka’s passionate commitment to the professional nurturing of young talent, which in the best cases could lead to young artists making a career in opera. Just how much talent may be found in singers of the younger generation has been demonstrated by the Opera Studio productions at the Theater am Kornmarkt from 2015 until 2024 in operas like Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, Eugene Onegin, Armida, L’Italiana in Algieri, Werther and The Marriage Contract | Gianni Schicchi. In all Opera Studio productions, the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra was a dependable partner.

With the Orchestra Academy, established in 2022, the Bregenz Festival, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Stella Vorarlberg Private College of Music are together making an important contribution to nurturing young talent. Young musicians aged 17 to 27 present the results of their week-long rehearsals under conductor Daniel Cohen at a concert as part of the academy, which takes places every two years.

In the Young People’s Festival, the principal addition under Elisabeth Sobotka was the series of opera workshops in which kids get actively involved under the direction of Aslico – Opera Domani (Carmen – The Star in the Circus of Seville, 2018; The Magic Flute –The Sound of Peace, 2023). Multiple musical projects initiated by the Vorarlberg ensemble "Die Schurken" have proved wildly popular with children. Direct personal participation in theatre has a much more intense effect on young people than purely consuming music. "Experience of this kind can stay with you all your life," says the outgoing artistic director with conviction.