Felix Breisach

Don Florestan is a personal enemy of the governor Don Pizarro and also a confidant of the minister Don Fernando. As Pizarro sees Florestan as a threat, he wants to eliminate him. He cannot bring himself to commit open murder, so he has him secretly imprisoned and hopes that he will soon die of his own accord. Florestan's wife Leonore suspects that Pizarro is behind her husband's disappearance. Disguised as a man, she sets off in search of Florestan and, under the name "Fidelio", takes up service as an assistant to the jailer Rocco - she suspects Florestan is in the prison he administers and hopes to free him.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt is the conductor in this 2004 production of Beethoven's only opera staged at the Zurich Opera House. Finnish soprano Camilla Nyland takes the title role, with performances by Jonas Kaufmann, Laszlo Polgar and Alfred Muff.

A musical show combining pop, theater, and circus inspired by Johann Strauss's operetta “Cagliostro in Vienna,” written by Thomas Brezina and presented by the Roncalli circus company.

Janáček's three-act opera Katya Kabanova, staged by Barrie Kosky and staged at the Felsenreitschule by Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša with an international cast of soloists, was performed on August 7 at the 2022 Salzburg Festival. The opera is based on the play The Storm by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. Set in a small Russian town, the story revolves around Káta, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive man named Boris. When she meets and falls in love with a young man named Vána Kudrjáš, she finally experiences happiness and passion. But their relationship is short-lived, as Boris finds out and forces Káta to confess her infidelity in front of the entire town. The opera explores themes of social conformity, oppression, and the consequences of forbidden love. Stage director Barrie Kosky creates an intimate but impressive setting in the magnificent Felsenreitschule.

The virtuoso pianist Víkingur Olafsson electrifies the Bremen Festival with Edvard Grieg's “Piano Concerto in A minor” (1868).

A spectacular production of Aida filmed at Bregenz Festival's lakeside stage in 2009, with Carlo Rizzi conducting the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra and the Polish Radio Choir.

Faust - a lonely scholar, despairing of life, who has so far failed to discover its highest meaning - is given a book on black magic from three mysterious students from Cracow. When Mephistopheles appears and proposes a pact with Faust, the two of them set off together on a (dream) journey. Doktor Faust remained a fragment at the time of the composer's death. Busoni died in 1924, unable to complete what he himself described as his "state masterpiece" - an opera to which he had a deep personal attachment. The missing scenes from the score were completed by his pupil, Philipp Jarnach, whom Busoni had become acquainted with during his period in exile in Zurich. In this form the opera was given its first performance in Dresden in 1925. Then in the 1980s the conductor Anthony Beaumont came across previously undiscovered sketches by Busoni and produced a new version of Doktor Faust. The current recording uses the Jarnach score.