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.

OPERA RARITY by C. W. Gluck

In the summer of 2021, founding artistic director and opera director Bernd R. Bienert and his TEATRO BAROCCO presented two special treasures from the treasure trove of historic Austrian music theater: the opera rarity La Corona by Christoph Willibald Gluck from 1765 and the world premiere of the melodrama Philon und Theone by Georg Anton Benda from 1779. The premieres of the two works had originally been planned for Vienna, but neither work was premiered in the 18th century. 242 years later, Bienert's TEATRO BAROCCO now brought these particularly remarkable premieres to the stage for the first time at the former original venue. The libretto to Gluck's opera La Corona was written by Pietro Metastasio, "poeta cesareo" at the Viennese court. Not only the title, but also the performance history of the work is reminiscent of current events, for the planned premiere of the opera commissioned from Gluck by Empress Maria Theresa for four of her daughters had to be cancelled due to the sudden death of the Emperor, Franz Stephan of Lorraine, the father of the four young actresses. Thus the opera met a fate similar to that of many contemporary works that could not be performed as a result of the Corona pandemic.

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.