Rossini, Puccini and the audience underneath an octopus

Bregenz, 8.8.24. The last ten days of this year’s festival will see the premiere of two special music theatre events. At the Kornmarkt Theater, The Marriage Contract | Gianni Schicchi opens on 12 August, the final Opera Studio production under the artistic directorship of Elisabeth Sobotka. On 15 August, after three years of preparation, the opera Hold Your Breath will be premiered at the Werkstattbühne as part of the Bregenz Festival’s Opera Workshop.       

The highlights of the second half of the Bregenz Festival’s programme feature legacy hunting, the bride trade, and a giant octopus. The double bill The Marriage Contract | Gianni Schicchi opens at the Kornmarkt Theater on 12 August. The Bregenz Opera Studio production will once again be directed by the grande dame of music theatre in the German-speaking world, Brigitte Fassbaender. The second world premiere of contemporary music at this summer’s festival follows on 15 and 17 August with Hold Your Breath, staged at the Werkstattbühne. The third production of the Bregenz Opera Workshop collaboration with the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the opera has been jointly developed by Irish composer Éna Brennan, Portuguese-born visual artist Hugo Canoilas and stage director and librettist David Pountney, former director of the festival.

OPERA STUDIO
Ironic situational comedy and dazzling young performers
Fourteen singers and a stage director of unique talents have created a special evening of opera. Even though more than 100 years separate Gioachino Rossini’s first publicly performed opera The Marriage Contract (La cambiale di matrimonio) and Giacomo Puccini’s one-acter Gianni Schicchi, the two works are an excellent match. They are both impressive for their wealth of musical humour, witty language and situational comedy. The amusing and unusual double bill is being directed by Brigitte Fassbaender, the legendary opera singer and Kammersängerin.

The Marriage Contract is Rossini’s first publicly performed opera. In 1810, when he presented himself with it to the public in Venice, he had just turned eighteen. Although he still possessed very little experience at the time, the elements of his unmistakable style are already apparent. His natural comedic talent is also clearly in evidence. In the witty one-acter, the merchant Tobia Mill intends to sell his daughter Fanní to his rich business partner Slook from Canada. However, the young woman is already in love with Edoardo Milfort, and is finally allowed to marry him thanks to Slook’s unexpected generosity.

More than 100 years later, in New York, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi was performed on stage for the first time. The story of a legacy hunter of that name originates in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy; and the one-act opera that’s based on the story forms the final part of Puccini’s three-part Il trittico. The wealthy Buoso Donati has died. The bereaved gather at his deathbed, greedy and on edge, and are horrified to learn that they must go away empty-handed. Then the crafty Gianni Schicchi appears. He lies down on Donati’s deathbed, pretends to be the deceased in front of the notary, and generously distributes the estate among the relatives present. However, Schicchi bequeaths all the best property to himself.

"Both operas are about love and greed. And in both of them, wit and cunning win out," says Fassbaender. She emphasises that the young artists are always central to her productions in Bregenz: "I want to tell exciting, clever, entertaining stories." How do the rehearsals work with so many young singers and two such different pieces? "We rehearsed both pieces in parallel so that the ensemble was constantly busy and nobody had any idle time. It’s a big challenge to work on two such different styles of music and perform them in one evening. But it’s also appealing, exciting and professionally instructive to slip into such different roles," she says.

In previous productions for the Bregenz Opera Studio, Brigitte Fassbaender has delighted audiences with her sure touch for comedy. How is she able to generate such enthusiasm in young performers? "The comedic is more difficult to put on stage than the dramatic, because it demands incredible precision and perfect timing. I don’t think it’s easy for anyone, young or old. It takes craft and skill."

OPERA WORKSHOP
World premiere of Hold Your Breath: Together under the octopus
After three years of preparation in the Bregenz Opera Workshop, the opera Hold Your Breath will be performed for the first time on 15 August in the Werkstattbühne theatre space. The new piece of music theatre is the result of a long collaborative process between the composer Éna Brennan, the artist Hugo Canoilas and the stage director and librettist Sir David Pountney. The public has been able to follow the creation of the work at several Insight sessions with the three artists. The musical director of Hold Your Breath is the Irish conductor Karen Ní Bhroin and the choreography is by British choreographer Caroline Finn. 

For the libretto, the former artistic director of the Bregenz Festival threaded the trio’s ideas together into a moving story that utilises the entire space of the Werkstattbühne for sound, stage and spatial processes: "We’ve tried to conceive a piece that can only be staged in this way at the Werkstattbühne."

The story of Hold Your Breath centres on a giant octopus, and Hugo Canoilas has created one for the stage; larger than life size, it will be suspended above the heads of the audience. Visitors to the performance will be able to move around the theatre space freely, individually and in groups. As director David Pountney explains, "the visitors will experience everything for themselves. That’s a much more intense experience than sitting in a seat, watching something and then going home again."

But what would an opera be without music? The Belgian-Irish composer Éna Brennan, who moves between two worlds as violinist and composer, describes her music for Hold Your Breath as stylistically very diverse. "There are fanfares and dances inspired by the Baroque, which alternate with free-tonal sections, but also with improvisation. Another element is electronic sounds, some of which are heard separately, others together with the musicians of the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra," she says.

For Lisbon-born artist Hugo Canoilas, the octopus he has created for Hold Your Breath is his first work for the stage. Developing a piece of music theatre with other people was a fascinating new experience for him. "It was an interesting learning process," he says. "The knowledge and skills of the various departments, from set construction to the costume department, were great. I could always ask for help." New, too, for Canoilas is the fact that the audience will be confronted with his work over a comparatively long period of time during the performance: "In a gallery, you stand in front of a piece of art for a few minutes, not more."

But why an octopus of all things? "I’ve been fascinated by these creatures for a long time," says David Pountney. "There’s a lot of literature about kraken – about how intelligent they are, that they can recognise us humans and remember us. That they know who we are and what we do. One day I said to Hugo, ‘You know what, I see this huge octopus in our piece.’ Hugo thought that was interesting. He went off and painted a ninety metre long picture of an octopus: a spontaneous reaction to our conversation."

Symphony and whistling concerts in the last week of the festival
The Bregenz Festival in association with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Stella Vorarlberg Private College of Music are on a mission to nurture young talent with the Orchestra Academy, established in 2022. The young musicians will present the results of their week-long rehearsals under the direction of Daniel Cohen at a concert on Sunday 11 August. The soloist will be soprano Marlis Petersen.

A special and long sold-out concert will follow on the evening of 11 August – a performance by Nikolaus Habjan, puppeteer, stage director and one of the world’s premier whistling artistes. He joins Ines Schüttengruber in a humorous review of Elisabeth Sobotka’s artistic directorship in Bregenz. The concert, part of the Music & Poetry programme, will take place in the Seestudio and is punningly entitled Ich pfeif’ auf die Sobotka (literally "I whistle on Sobotka" but colloquially "I don’t give a damn about Sobotka").

On Sunday 18 August, the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra’s matinee is the last concert of this year’s Bregenz Festival, which ends in the evening with the 28th performance of Der Freischütz on the lake stage.