Opera in the Quarry St. Margarethen 2023
Opera in the Quarry St. Margarethen 2023
Every summer, the Opera in St. Margarethen Quarry impresses music connoisseurs and opera enthusiasts from all over the world who come to enjoy the spectacular and outstanding open-air performances on Europe’s largest natural stage. In 2023, at the Festival, which will run from July 12 to August 20, Georges Bizet's opera "Carmen" will be presented.
Two young, very different people meet on the streets of Seville on a scorching hot summer evening: the fateful love of the impulsive factory worker Carmen and the undaunted Sergeant José pulls the unlikely couple into a whirlpool of love, jealousy, hate and disgust. In the end, the honest soldier murders the woman who has never really loved anything or anyone – apart from her boundless freedom.
For this limitless love, Georges Bizet created an equally boundless score featuring a wealth of grandiose melodies: Habanera, Flower and Toreador Song, Seguidilla, the Smuggler's March – all these sonorous masterpieces will find their own echoes in the both wild and gentle landscape of the quarry St. Margarethen, who thus becomes a parable for the most fascinating figure of the opera stage.
About the Opera in the Quarry St. Margarethen
The Oper im Steinbruch in the St. Margarethen quarry is an annual open-air opera festival in the Roman quarry in Sankt Margarethen in Burgenland (Austria).
The opera in the St. Margarethen quarry was founded at the suggestion of Marcel Prawy under the name of the St. Margarethen Opera Festival. From the very beginning, the Opera Festival intended to offer so-called “true to work” productions and took place for the first time in 1996. Since then, opera performances and concerts with classical and pop music have been held annually in the summer months of July and August on the open-air natural stage. From 2001 onwards, a children's opera was staged every year in the side quarry “Papagenos Opernwelt” in St. Margarethen as part of the opera festival. The stage was in the disused part of the Roman quarry. The founder and director of the festival until mid-2014 was the Austrian Wolfgang Werner.
