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Bregenz Festival

17st July to 18nd August 2024

The 2022 Bregenz Festival will be showing the opera Der Freischütz on the floating stage.

 

Foundation, history and development

 

1946

One year after the end of the Second World War, the first Bregenz Festival Week took place on two gravel barges - one for the stage construction of Mozart's youth work Bastien et Bastienne, the other for the orchestra. In a city that didn't even have a theater at the time, the idea of ​​holding a festival seemed ludicrous, but the stopgap solution of choosing the most beautiful part of the city - Lake Constance - as the stage turned out to be a resounding success.

Visitors from Austria, Germany, Switzerland and France made the festival an international event in its first year. The Wiener Symphoniker formed the festival orchestra from the beginning and have played a major role in the development and success of the festival to this day.


2006

The summer of 2006 was mainly dominated by the newly renovated festival hall - the “most beautiful birthday present for the 60th anniversary of the festival”, as Festival President Günter Rhomberg called it: “Finally, this summer it was possible to present our program to the audience in an infrastructure that does justice to the quality of the festival performances. "

The play on the lake, The Troubadour, was among the most successful operas on the lake stage of the past ten years: 301,573 visitors saw the spectacular production by Robert Carsen and Paul Steinberg in two years.

There was unanimous enthusiasm among critics and audience for the opera in the Festspielhaus Der Untergang des Haus Usher by Claude Debussy: In the first opera production as part of the Bregenz Festival on the stage of the newly renovated Festspielhaus, Debussy's ballets Prélude à l ' après-midi d'un faune and Jeux as well as the newly completed one-act opera The Downfall of the House of Usher.

The contemporary program series Art from Time and the orchestral concerts achieved record attendance.