In August 2026, WE presented THE OPERN-WAGON with a new production of the Swabian opera Adam & Eve’s Erschaffung.

4 Locations · 4 days · Over 1.300 visitors · freE Entrance

“If the audience cannot come to the theatre, the theatre must come to the audience.”

The tradition of touring theatre is as old as theatre itself. All it needs is a space, indoors or outdoors, an attentive audience, and something worth seeing.

In the summer of 2026, Alte Musik am Bodensee e.V., together with the ensemble Société Lunaire and Kulturzentrale Süd – Knapp Striegel Hutter GmbH, set the OPERA-WAGON in motion: a mobile opera stage that appeared at a variety of venues throughout Swabia. Whether in Baroque palaces and churches, on farms, in breweries, or on lively village squares under the open sky, the Opera Wagon transformed every location into a stage and made opera accessible wherever people came together.

With a compact set design and a production directed by Martin Butler the entire production fitted into a trailer that could be pulled from village to village.

Audiences sat on beer benches, brought their own chairs, or picniced together on a warm summer evening . The performances were free of charge to invite as diverse an audience as possible.

This unique comic chamber opera in the Swabian dialect was composed in 1796 by Meingosus Gaelle, the “Mozart of Meckenbeuren.” It is based on The Swabian Creation (Schwäbische Schöpfung, 1743) by the Weißenhorn poet Sebastian Sailer and tells the story from the creation of humankind to the expulsion from Paradise from the perspective of the Swabian rural population.

Three opera singers and four instrumentalists from the ensemble Société Lunaire presented Adam & Eve’s Erschaffung as an playful open-air production using replicas of original late-18th-century instruments, flute, harp, viola and cello.

The high-summer Swabian landscape, became the stage for this unique piece of German Classicism that transported everyone into the Swabian Eden.