In July 2022, after a gap of seventeen years, I returned to Bregenz and took another tour of the festival grounds and the lakefront stage, this time to see the stage that had been built up for Andreas Homoki’s new production of Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924). Since I Read More …
Bregenz, Austria, is best known for its open-air opera performances at the lakefront stage on Lake Constance, but the town also has a conventional theater building called the Theater am Kornmarkt, which is used each year from September through June as the main venue of the Vorarlberger Landestheater, the state Read More …
An option for those who have found accommodation in other cities on Lake Constance is to travel to Bregenz on a special ship that is timed to arrive shortly before the performance, and leave shortly afterwards. There is a ship to and from Lindau, Germany, for every performance, and usually Read More …
The Bregenz Festival began on a very small scale in 1946, directly after the Second World War, while this part of Austria was still under French military rule. The stage that first summer consisted of two small barges moored in Bregenz harbor. That first year, the festival already included two Read More …
You can take a tour of the Bregenz Festival grounds at 10:30, 11:30, 12:30, 13:30, 14:30 or 15:30 any day during the five-week festival season. The cost (as of 2022) is € 7.50 per person and usually includes the inside of the festival building, the grandstand, and of course the big stage Read More …
Before my first trip to Bregenz in the summer of 2002, I was very skeptical about the loudspeaker system. I was afraid it would either sound tinny, like a London musical, or ear-splitting like a rock concert. But it was neither of these. It was pleasant, natural, clearly audible but Read More …
The Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) is one of the world’s busiest opera houses, with 350 performances per year. When I was there, in the last week of October 2016, they put on five performances of three different operas. I went to all three of these. There were two evenings Read More …
The Volksoper (meaning “People’s Opera”) in Vienna puts on about three hundred performances per year — nearly every evening from September through June — of operas, operettas, musicals and ballets. Like the Komische Oper in Berlin and the Gärtnerplatz opera house in Munich, the Volksoper has a policy of performing most their Read More …
This historic theater got its name from the fact that it was built on the bank of a small river called the Wien — a river that has since been banished underground. For many years the Theater an der Wien presented a mixed bag of operas, operettas, musicals and spoken Read More …
All you loyal readers of my Kaiserslautern post might recall that one of the operas I saw there was Jonny spielt auf by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). This was the opera that sparked a remarkably sudden shift in the tastes of German-language opera-goers in 1927, away from the lavish Neo-Romantic extravaganzas of Read More …