Feuernacht - Premiere

What's it about?

FELIX MITTERER: FEUERNACHT Felix Mitterer returns to Telfs. Herbert Pixner composes - and plays live with his band every evening. The real star of the evening, however, is Tyrolean history: With this spectacular world premiere, the Volksschauspiele 2026 bring the continuation of Mitterer's "Die verkaufte Heimat" about stories and fates of people in South Tyrol between the late 1930s and the 1960s to the stage for the first time. "Die Feuernacht" takes place in the early 60s, at the height of the so-called "Bumser" (bombers), when South Tyrol was in a permanent state of emergency. In the "Feuernacht" (Night of Fire) from June 11 to 12, 1961, numerous power poles were blown up to draw international attention to the cause of the German-speaking South Tyroleans. Even today, 65 years after the "Feuernacht", there is highly emotional debate about the sense or nonsense of these actions. Is there a historically unjust border? Does it become less unjust just because time passes? Should one finally stop talking about it? The history of Tyrol, apart from this regional trauma, contains precisely the explosive material that is familiar to us from the global history of mankind. These are also patterns and dynamics of our present. Did the level-headed forces of that time, despite or because of the violent rebellion, gradually receive a far-reaching autonomy status - a prerequisite for one of the most prosperous regions in the entire EU to be created out of the catastrophe? As if under a magnifying glass, "Die Feuernacht" examines the people involved in the conflicts of those times of upheaval and their stories. The South Tyrolean settlement, which has now largely been demolished, becomes a breathtaking open-air stage for the incomparable sound of Felix Mitterer and Herbert Pixner, for grand opera and small stories amidst grand history, directed by Thomas Gassner, in a specially created stage version by Peter Lorenz - an explosive, captivating theater evening about courage and doubt, responsibility and consequence, flight and homeland, freedom and identity.