"Der Freischütz" makes its lake stage debut

Bregenz, 22.11.23. A German-language hit opera on the lake stage, an emotional operatic thriller at the Festspielhaus, two world premieres at the Workshop Theatre, big and small concerts plus the Opera Studio, the Opera Workshop and three stage plays – the Bregenz Festival in its 78th season presents a rich and varied programme for more than 210,000 visi-tors over five summer weeks from 17 July to 18 August 2024.

Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz – one of the most popular operas in German-speaking countries and a work, moreover, that has never been performed on the lake stage at Bregenz – marks the return of director Philipp Stölzl to Bregenz for the 2024/25 seasons. After his acclaimed Rigoletto, the opera on the lake stage in 2019/21, the Romantic opera about the young court clerk Max who sells his soul for earthly happiness will be the Munich-born director’s second production on the Lake Constance stage at Bregenz. Stölzl will not only direct but also design the set and lighting. On the conductor’s podium will be Enrique Mazzola, the festival’s conductor in residence, who was incidentally also music director for the Rigoletto production. Der Freischütz opens the Bregenz Festival for its 78th season on 17 July 2024. 

The opera on the lake stage in 2024 is scheduled to play on 26 evenings. In total, 185,000 tick-ets are available (incl. dress rehearsal and Young People’s Night), about one quarter of which have already been booked. Around 213,000 tickets have gone on sale for the more than 80 events at next summer’s festival.

“Masterpiece of Rossini’s youth” – Tancredi at the Festspielhaus
On 18 July 2024, the curtain goes up on a “masterpiece of Rossini’s youth” at the Festspielhaus. Tancredi is an emotional operatic thriller that was first performed in Venice in 1813, when it catapulted Gioachino Rossini, only 20 years old, to the forefront of Italian composers of his time. Although an early work, Tancredi already displays Rossini’s musical inventiveness with its lively melodies and rousing finales. This opera about love, trust and the impossibility of finding happiness in times of crisis is being staged in a production by Jan Philipp Gloger. The music director will be Yi-Chen Lin, who Bregenz Festival audiences will remember for her conducting of Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

Human speechlessness and mysterious beings at the Workshop Theatre 
The two world premieres – Unmögliche Verbindung by the Czech composer Ondřej Adámek and Hold Your Breath by the Irish composer Éna Brennan – make the Workshop Theatre once again into a unique location for contemporary music theatre. Unmögliche Verbindung (“Impossible connection”), to be given on 27 July 2024, is a piece about the failure of intrapersonal communication. In Hold Your Breath, which has been created in the Bregenz Opera Workshop in collaboration with Kunsthaus Bregenz and plays on 15 August 2024, people are confronted with a mysterious creature whose movements affect and alter everything.

Unmögliche Verbindung is a work of music theatre that captures, in a sequence of scenes, certain moments in which communication between people breaks down, is hindered or blocked. Be it in a dialogue with oneself, with another individual or vis-à-vis a collective, situations of great emotional strain often leave people speechless. The German director and author Thomas Fiedler and the Czech composer and conductor Ondřej Adámek have con-ceived and composed this new performative piece of  music theatre especially for Ensemble Modern. The set and costumes will be designed by Christian Wiehle. 

Hold Your Breath is the fruit of a creative process in the Bregenz Opera Workshop spanning several years and involving the Irish composer Éna Brennan, the British stage director and librettist Sir David Pountney, and the Portuguese painter and multimedia artist Hugo Canoilas. Pountney, former artistic director of the Bregenz Festival, has gathered all the ideas together in a moving story that sets things in motion sonically, spatially and in terms of stag-ing.

Guest appearance by Franui with Hotel Savoy: operetta dreams in exile
In Joseph Roth’s early novel Hotel Savoy, the eponymous establishment becomes a metaphor for a world that’s out of joint as a result of the First World War. Musicbanda Franui have created a hybrid operetta in which exile, loss and desolation, dreams and hopes are linked together not only by the characters of the novel: the lives led by many outstanding composers from the period between 1900 and 1935 are marked by a common, decisive experience, namely being compelled to leave their homeland by the National Socialists. The greatest hits of this “silver era of operetta” have been adapted and “recomposed” by Franui. The music so produced sounds different and can be heard in a fascinatingly new way by listeners familiar with these life stories. Franui’s Hotel Savoy, a production by Schauspiel Stuttgart and Staatsoper Stuttgart, premieres on 21 July at the Theater am Kornmarkt. 

Opera Studio: ironic situational comedy and musical effects
More than 100 years separate Gioachino Rossini’s first publicly staged opera The Marriage Contract (La cambiale di matrimonio) and the one-acter Gianni Schicchi from Giacomo Puccini’s Il trittico. Both works share a keen sense for ironic situational comedy and humorous musical effects. The grande dame of the opera world, Brigitte Fassbaender, will be directing this unusual though witty coupling in the coming summer with young singers from the Opera Studio. The Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra will play under the baton of its chief conductor, Leo McFall. The double bill will be the British conductor’s first appearance as music director of an opera production at the Bregenz Festival. The premiere is on 12 August at the Theater am Kornmarkt.

Illustrious guests in spoken theatre
Easter is a time for spoken theatre in Bregenz and in 2024 Vienna’s Burgtheater will be paying another visit over the Easter weekend. On 30 and 31 March, the company will present the comedy The Misanthrope by the French playwright and stage director Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by the stage name Molière (1622–1673). The production at the Festspielhaus will be directed by Martin Kušej, director of the Burgtheater, in a set designed by Martin Zehetgruber. Molière’s Misanthrope gleefully digs down below the glossy surface, examining what’s behind the glittering party facade of a society that pretends that morality and truth actually exist as generally agreed principles for living together. 

Also making a guest appearance is Deutsches Theater Berlin, which returns to Bregenz to present Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug) in a production by Anne Lenk. Last year’s performances  had to be cancelled at short notice; the new dates are 18 and 19 June 2024 and the venue is the Theater am Kornmarkt. Kleist’s play about a village justice called Adam was first performed in 1811. What makes it comic is the audacity with which the patriarchy exercises power, secures positions, and cements relationships. 

“Deal or no deal” – alluding to Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz – was the theme of the drama competition announced by the Austrian Theatre Alliance in 2023. The prize went to Josef Maria Krasanovsky for his Mondmilch trinken (“Drinking moon milk”). The play will premiere at Theater KOSMOS in Bregenz on 1 August in a co-production between Theater KOSMOS and Klagenfurter Ensemble. Mondmilch trinken will go on to be staged at the other theatres that are part of the alliance. 

Orchestral concerts: popular classics from the 19th century to the present day
New sound worlds to be discovered rub shoulders with symphonic masterpieces in the four orchestral concerts that give an illustration of the richness of music from the 19th century to the present day. With Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastorale, Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” and Gustav Mahler’s 1st Symphony, three of the best loved symphonic works feature in next summer’s concert series, along with pieces by Carl Maria von Weber, Antonín Dvořák and Igor Stravinsky as well as Emilie Mayer, dubbed the “female Beethoven”, who enjoyed considerable success in the middle of the 19th century with her compositions.  

Familiar faces return to the conductor’s rostrum at the Festspielhaus: Enrique Mazzola as Conductor in Residence on 28 July 2024 and Leo McFall as chief conductor of the  Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra on 18 August 2024. The Lithuanian conductor Giedrė Šlekytė will be making her Bregenz debut on 22 July 2024 and so will the chief conductor designate of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Petr Popelka, on 5 August 2024. The latter evening sees the first performance in Austria of a new choral symphonic work by Thomas Larcher, Love and the Fever, jointly commissioned by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, the Bregenz Festival, the Filharmonie Brno and the NTR Saturday Matinee.

As part of the Orchesterakademie of the Bregenz Festival and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, set up in 2022 in association with the Stella Vorarlberg Privathochschule, young musicians aged between 17 and 27 will rehearse one week long with the Israeli conductor Daniel Cohen and the soprano Marlis Petersen for their first concert together. On the bill this time round are works by Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and Béla Bartók. The concert will be given in the Festspielhaus on 11 August 2024.

In the popular series The Vienna Symphony personally, members of the orchestra appear in varying chamber music formations without a conductor, not in formal dress and playing their own personal favourites. They will give three concerts in the Lake Studio on 27 July, 3 and 10 August 2024. 

The Concert at the KUB on 6 August will be performed by the vocal ensemble The Present. Drawing inspiration from Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Hanna Herfurtner – one of the singers of the role of Ännchen on the lake stage – and her vocal ensemble The Present will perform a highly varied programme.

Music and poetry at the Lake Studio 
Every summer, the Music and Poetry series comprises concerts combining chamber music with literature that illuminate the festival programme from a surprising angle. On 28 July, two Vorarlberg artists will make a guest appearance in the series: the “master of story telling” Michael Köhlmeier and the composer Markus Nigsch. Nigsch’s Landkarte eines Verbrechens (“Map of crime”), commissioned by the festival, will receive its premiere during the concert. On 4 August there’s a chance to hear the spooky story that inspired Weber to write his opera Der Freischütz (“The free-shooter”). The tale, which appeared in the 1810 volume Gespensterbuch (“Ghost book”), will be read by Sarah Viktoria Frick accompanied by Sergey Tanin on the piano. Lastly on 11 August 2024 there’s a performance by Nikolaus Habjan, one of the world’s greatest whistling artistes. He presents an evening of best-loved arias from the world of opera along with artistic director Elisabeth Sobotka’s own favourite numbers – all of which he will whistle at breakneck speed. 

Young People’s Festival: magical wind music and a wooden marionette
The Young People’s Festival once again presents a wide array of events to encourage kids and youngsters to get interested in the arts and culture, including the ever popular Young People’s Night. The programme kicks off in June 2024 with, among other events, the children’s opera Pinocchio by Christof Dienz and the magic wind band circus show Luft-i-Kuss, presented in association with the wind ensemble association of Vorarlberg. 

The 2024 Bregenz Festival runs from 17 July to 18 August. For tickets and information, please visit www.bregenzerfestspiele.com or call tel. 0043 5574 4076.
 

Musikaufnahmen des Trailers von Der Freischütz aus dem Album "Weber: Der Freischütz" performed by NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT (P) 1996 Teldec Classics, a Warner Music UK Division. Courtesy of WARNER MUSIC Group Germany Holding GmbH. A Warner Music Group Company