Music and Poetry

The Bregenzer Festspiele program opens surprising perspectives through the interplay of chamber music and literature.

Butterfly Effects

Melodies and Literature from Japan

This year, The Opera at the Lake follows the story of the geisha Cio-Cio-San, known as Madama Butterfly, into an imagined Japan—a world that seems exotic and unfamiliar. But how do artists living there view the empire in the Pacific? Which narratives and melodies call it home?
In Butterfly Effects, members of Ensemble Modern present music by Japanese composers such as Malika Kishino and Yu Kuwabara, interwoven with contemporary literature. A sonic and imaginative journey through Japan—only a wingbeat away.

Works by Malika Kishino, Yu Kuwabara, and others.

Members of the Ensemble Modern

Reading Miki Sakamoto

Inner Worlds

Anyone attending a concert with Marlis Petersen should expect everything but routine. Celebrated worldwide for her unique voice and intense stage presence, the soprano is a singular phenomenon. In Inner Worlds, she leads us through songs ranging from Franz Schubert to Richard Strauss, from Gabriel Fauré to Henri Duparc, into the very spaces where thoughts, desires, and feelings take shape—the remote inner worlds of being. These musical explorations are deepened and enriched by literary texts spanning epochs and genres, probing the nature of our existence. Read by the acclaimed theater and film actor Ulrich Reinthaller.

Voice and poems: Marlis Petersen, Stephan Matthias Lademann and Ulrich Reinthaller

Fly Ganymed

A nine-year-old boy flees from war. Forced to leave his village, he is handed over by his grandfather to a smuggler. Hidden in a pipeline on a truck, he embarks on a dangerous journey, unpredictable, perilous, and subject to arbitrary fate.
But he is not entirely alone. In his hiding place is another refugee child, an older girl who knows much and fears nothing. Together, they find solace in memories of places and people from their homeland.
 

A musical reading with Nikolaus Habjan and Kyrre Kvam.