TEATRO BAROCCO transports its audience to Mozart's era

In 2012, Viennese opera director, stage and costume designer Bernd R. Bienert founded the opera festival TEATRO BAROCCO with the aim of transporting a contemporary audience back to the historical opera and theater of Mozart's era. At the original venues and in cooperation with first-class singers, musicians and conductors, Bienert has since succeeded with outstanding success in presenting the most important operas of European music history, such as Mozart's famous masterpieces Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte, as well as Hasse's Piramo e Tisbe and Gluck's La Corona, in first performances at the palace theaters of Laxenburg and Schönbrunn. Most recently, Bienert's TEATRO BAROCCO made history with the world premiere of Georg Anton Benda's melodrama Philon und Theone. Like hardly any director before, Bienert knows how to unite the revival of the visual language and movement idiom of the great musical theater tradition of the 18th century with the musical language of that era in magnificent, handmade costumes and hand-painted sets designed by himself, and to convey the total work of art to a contemporary audience as a memorable key experience.

WORLD PERFORMANCE after 242 years

The score of the masterpiece Philon und Theone, composed in Vienna in 1779 by the Bohemian composer Georg Anton Benda, who was highly admired by W. A. Mozart, remained unperformed until its rediscovery by TEATRO BAROCCO in the summer of 2021. Bienert lifted the treasure of European music history stored in the Austrian National Library and brought Benda's masterpiece to sound for the first time in the world with the incredible delay of 242 years. The magnificent work, full of enchanting effects, unleashes its storms of musical emotion through the unusual use of the glass harmonica, which had only just been invented at the time. In this way, Benda succeeded in taking a completely new dramaturgical path, interweaving the glass harmonica, actors, soprano, chorus and orchestra, thus bringing the form of melodrama into the immediate vicinity of opera. With the world premiere of this unjustly unknown masterpiece, TEATRO BAROCCO continued its successful performance tradition, which since 2012 has brought all three of Mozart's much-loved melodramas by fellow composer G. A. Benda - Pygmalion, Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea - to the stage for the first time in the historical directing style.


BERND R. BIENERT | Opera Director and Founding Director of TEATRO BAROCCO

The more than forty years of practice of artistic director Bernd R. Bienert as an opera director, choreographer, stage and costume designer at major international opera houses such as the Vienna State Opera, the Zurich Opera House, the Theater Basel, the Düsseldorf Opera, the Dresden Semper Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Salzburg Festival, the Festspielhaus Bregenz, the Karlsruhe Handel Festival, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at Expo 2000 and at the ZKM Karlsruhe, as well as guest performances in Barcelona, Japan, Korea, Washington D.C., Holland and Turkey allow him to combine his stage experience gained there with personal research results on Mozart's operas and the era of Viennese Classicism and to bring them together in his productions for TEATRO BAROCCO and to bring them into harmony with the intentions of the creators of these historical works.