Post of Festival´s Artistic Director advertised

Bregenz, 19.8.22. The Executive Board of the Bregenz Festival Foundation is advertising the post of artistic director of the summer festival. The position is vacant from the 2025 season. The application period starts on 1 October and ends on 12 November 2022. The new artistic director should have been selected by April 2023. The Bregenz Festival’s current artistic director, Elisabeth Sobotka, leaves for the Staatsoper Berlin at the end of the summer in 2024.

The five-member executive board, chaired by festival president Hans-Peter Metzler, will appoint an ad hoc advisory committee of experts and hire the respected management consulting company Egon Zehnder GmbH. This will ensure that internationally accepted standards in filling leadership vacancies are met. “Just as successfully as with the designation of Elisabeth Sobotka, the ideal candidate for the artistic directorship of the Bregenz Festival will now be found in a professional selection procedure,” Metzler said.

The Bregenz Festival Foundation, established in 2002, is the one hundred percent shareholder of Bregenzer Festspiele GmbH, organiser of the Bregenz Festival, which is held in the summer months every year. The founders are the patrons’ association Friends of the Bregenz Festival, the Republic of Austria, the federal state of Vorarlberg, and the municipality of Bregenz. The foundation is directed by the members of the executive board: Hans-Peter Metzler (president), Verena Brunner-Loss (vice president), Wilhelm Muzyczyn (vice president), Michael Grahammer and Sabine Haag.

First new lake stage production under the new artistic director in 2026
The first season for the Bregenz Festival’s new artistic director will be the summer of 2025, and the first new opera production on the lake stage under the new artistic director will be in summer 2026. The lake stage production of Madame Butterfly in the 2022 and 2023 seasons will be followed in 2024 and 2025 by Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, to be staged by the director of the Bregenz Rigoletto, Philipp Stölzl.

Elisabeth Sobotka artistic director since 2015
The Berlin Senate’s Culture Department and the Bregenz Festival announced Elisabeth Sobotka’s move in mid May. The Vienna-born cultural manager Sobotka has been in charge of programming at the summer festival in Bregenz since 2015. She will take over as artistic director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, one of the world’s leading opera houses, starting in the 2024/2025 season. She will fulfil her contract with the Bregenz Festival as agreed until the end of summer 2024.

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