Opera at sea

A new addition to my must-see travel list: the summer Bregenz Festival (Bregenzer Festspiele) in Austria, of which the highlight is opera presented on an outdoor stage that appears to float on the shore of Lake Constance (Bodensee). The set designs I’ve seen are amazing. Soaring and modern. They play so much with scale. I first saw a photo of this venue recently in an opera anthology, which featured its set for Un Ballo in Maschera–basically the stage was a huge, open book, with a skeleton rising out of the water–and pictured here is La Bohème (from 2001-02), where the stage resembles a round tabletop with chairs on either side. Stunning. Next summer the floating stage is home to West Side Story.