The stage is overwhelming. This happens regularly at the Bregenz Festival when it plays on the lake; after all, every summer it has to delight almost 200,000 spectators, but this year it was particularly successful. You look out over a village in winter, eight little houses standing around, crooked and twisted, one is half submerged in the swamp, one has two floors, it is the inn, some are very small and stand at the far edge of the gently rolling landscape, creating an enormous spatial effect. If the shingle-roofed houses light up from the inside, it is reminiscent of a Märklin train; if they don’t light up, you think more of “Harry Potter”, not necessarily of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Freischütz”, for which all this was built. In front of the village there is a lake, with the church tower half submerged in it, a few crosses from the cemetery also peeking out of the water, the church tower clock runs backwards.