Луизенбург-Фестшпиле

Among the granite boulders of the Luisenburg rock labyrinth, seven hundred metres up in the Fichtelgebirge, an audience of some 1,900 sits beneath a tent roof designed by Frei Otto. Performance on this ground is older than the festival itself: pupils of the Latin school held summer celebrations here as early as 1665. The Luisenburg-Festspiele in their present form date from 1924 and run each year from late spring into early September, mounting four or five productions of their own — musicals and spoken drama, one of them for families — and receiving guest opera, operetta and concerts on the days between. Some 140,000 people make the climb annually; the record, in 2011, passed 151,000. Birgit Simmler has directed the festival since the autumn of 2017.