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The world's largest festival of classical operettas on the shores of Lake Neusiedl, 60 km south of Vienna, under the direction of Peter Edelmann.
About the SeeFestSpiele Mörbisch
The Seefestspiele Mörbisch, originally: Seespiele Mörbisch, is an annual operetta festival in Mörbisch am See (Austria). With around 150,000 visitors, the Mörbisch Lake Festival is the world's largest festival of the operetta genre. In addition to operettas, classical musicals are also performed on an irregular basis. Above all, the natural scenery of Neusiedler See is always incorporated into the stage set. The area is very flat, so transmission technology specially developed for the Lake Festival is used.
The initiative for the Seespiele, founded in the years 1955–1957, came from the celebrated chamber singer Herbert Alsen (among others) at the Vienna State Opera (1906–1978), who, together with his wife, the costume designer Gisela Bossert (†2012), who had worked in Berlin, discovered the venue by chance while looking for a holiday location that was climatically conducive to his voice, and whom the peculiar musicality of this landscape permanently touched.
Alsen's plans found favour with the municipal council of Mörbisch as well as with the representative of the province, Landesrat Hans Bögl (1899–1974), especially as the project fitted into the tourism concept of the municipality and the province, and Alsen subsequently agreed to take over the directorship of the Seespiele for an initial period of five years (with reference to possible competition with the Bregenz Festivals), stressing that the Seespiele in Mörbisch did not want to be a festival that would add to the excessive number of festival venues.
After two years of preparation, the opening took place on 6 July 1957 with the operetta The Gypsy Baron by Johann Strauss II.
