Provisional attendance figures for 2024

Bregenz, 16.8.24. Total audience figures are expected to reach approx. 274,000 when the Bregenz Festival, now in its 78th year, comes to an end on Sunday evening. The last under Elisabeth Sobotka as artistic director, the summer festival on the shore of Lake Constance had a programme that featured over 80 events within a five-week span. Philipp Stölzl's production of the opera Der Freischütz on the lake stage drew an enthusiastic audience that totalled 198,655. 

Der Freischütz, staged by director and set designer Philipp Stölzl, has hit the bull’s eye. It's the first time that the Romantic opera by Carl Maria von Weber has been performed on the Bregenz lake stage. The production was very well received and has been sold out every evening since opening on 17 July. Providing no performances are cancelled due to bad weather before the last night on Sunday, the opera on the lake will have been seen by 198,655 people during its 28 show run (including the dress rehearsal and Young People's Night). It’s therefore already certain that the opera will play to a 100 percent capacity audience. There has also been great demand for guided tours of the Freischütz stage and for introductory talks about the opera which in total 31,331 people will have attended. 

Including Sunday, the final day of this year's festival, there will be three more performances of Der Freischütz. The Opera Studio production The Marriage Contract | Gianni Schicchi can only be seen today and tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the last performance of Hold Your Breath, an Opera Workshop production that premiered on the Werkstattbühne stage. On Sunday morning, the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra will give its traditional matinee concert in the Festspielhaus.

Tickets for Der Freischütz on sale from 1 October 
Booking for next year's Bregenz Festival, the first under the new artistic director Lilli Paasikivi, opens on 1 October 2024. 

The 79th Bregenz Festival will open on 16 July 2025 with a production of George Enescu's opera Œdipe in the Festspielhaus. The following day sees the first performance of Der Freischütz, returning for its second run. It is scheduled to play on 25 dates on the lake stage in 2025.

House opera in demand
Beyond the lake stage, interest in other events on the Bregenz Festival programme was gratifyingly high. The opera at the Festspielhaus this summer, Jan Philipp Gloger's production of Tancredi, that "masterpiece of Gioacchino Rossini’s youth", was seen by 4,543 people during its three-performance run, with 99 percent of tickets sold. 

Exciting world premieres
The Werkstattbühne stage was the venue for the exciting world premieres of two original pieces of contemporary music theatre, which were seen by 1,053 visitors, corresponding to a capacity of 78 percent. The first of these was Unmögliche Verbindung / Connection impossible, a new piece conceived and created jointly by the German director and author Thomas Fiedler and the Czech composer and conductor Ondřej Adámek specifically for the Ensemble Modern. Towards the end of the festival the opera Hold Your Breath received its premiere after three years' preparation time as part of the Bregenz Opera Workshop. The work is a collaboration between the festival’s former artistic director David Pountney, the Irish composer Éna Brennan, and the Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas. 

Strong interest in guest theatre performances
There was strong interest among festival-goers in guest performances of spoken theatre by Vienna’s Burgtheater (Der Menschenfeind / The Misanthrope), Deutsches Theater Berlin (Der zerbrochne Krug / The Broken Jug) and by the klagenfurter ensemble (Mondmilch trinken / Drink Moon Milk in co-production with the Bregenz Festival and Theater KOSMOS in Bregenz) – and also in the hybrid operetta Hotel Savoy with Musicbanda Franui, a Schauspiel Stuttgart and Staatsoper Stuttgart production. The performances – staged in the Festspielhaus, the Kornmarkt Theater and Theater KOSMOS – drew a combined audience of 4,311, with 95 percent of available tickets sold.

An entertaining Opera Studio at the Kornmarkt
The last week of the festival has seen the debut of the double bill The Marriage Contract | Gianni Schicchi, the final Opera Studio production under Elisabeth Sobotka’s tenure as artistic director. The entertaining production directed by Brigitte Fassbaender at the Kornmarkt Theater will close tomorrow, Saturday evening. Attendance figures are expected to reach 1,856, corresponding to 95 percent capacity. 

Thrilling orchestral concerts
Symphonic masterpieces and new sound worlds have figured on the programme of the four orchestral concerts of summer 2024. Total attendance stands at 5,712 people, corresponding to 92 percent of tickets sold. Conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was the festival’s Conductor in Residence Enrique Mazzola, along with the Lithuanian conductor Giedrė Šlekytė and the orchestra’s designated chief conductor, Petr Popelka. The final concert is the matinee by the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra to be conducted by Leo McFall on Sunday 18 August. 

The two small-scale concert series Music & Poetry and The Vienna Symphony – Personally proved to be very popular again, drawing a total of 1,306 visitors to the Seestudio at the Festspielhaus, which represents 95 percent capacity.

Young People’s Festival popular
The Young People’s Festival in 2024 featured the wind band show Zirkus Luft-i-Kuss, the children’s opera Pinocchio, opera workshops and the Children’s Festival. Altogether 4,942 children and young people took part.