On a cold day in February 2021, coming from the mouth of the Bregenzer Ach, I left the footpath that leads into the city and pushed through the bushes toward the shore. I was not the first to have this idea, yet little by little, the tracks of others disappeared, until eventually I traced my own lonely path through the snow.

I struggled through a rough stretch of riverside forest and finally reached the belt of reeds, weighed down by the heavy blanket of snow, with only a few withered stalks protruding here and there. The sun had already disappeared behind the Swiss mountains, and the last traces of its light would soon be gone. Suddenly, I heard a glasslike clinking beneath the snow crust and realized I was no longer on solid ground but treading on a layer of ice of rather questionable stability.

Startled, I stopped and looked around in the dim light. I was perhaps a hundred meters from the proper path, which would have brought me to the Festspielhaus in fifteen minutes, where I usually took the passage between the outdoor auditorium and the stage, open all year round, thanks to an old right of way along the entire Austrian shore of Lake Constance—a right that even the Festspiele could not suspend, unless a performance was held on the Seebühne.

Normally, I would have passed by the enormous head of the horror clown with wide-open eyes and a grinning mouth, symbolizing Rigoletto’s fate and function, and the equally huge, tethered balloon, in whose basket Rigoletto’s daughter dramatically ascended into the night sky at the end of each performance. Instead, I stood amid this wilderness, and with the next step I could have broken through snow and ice and sunk beneath.

Following an impulse, I had come here, stepped off safe ground to find myself in touch with nature’s true essence. Yet this nature, like the opera itself, is a product of romantic imagination, born from humans’ fantasy who sought intense emotions in moments of fateful entanglement, hoping to gain clarifying insight into the meaning of their existence. In other words, the impulse that drew me off the path into the reeds was the result of my cultural imprint, which compelled, or enabled me to experience remote, lonely places like this as sites of longing and emotional depth.

It is the same imprint that allows us to perceive the Opera at the Lake, the lake itself, the presence of all the people, the sunset that occurs daily at the start of the show, or the approaching storm and sudden rain that interrupts the performance, as a coherent, dramatic event. The culturally attuned human, especially the one shaped by romantic sensibilities, tends to perceive in every happening, even unpleasant ones, elements of a staged play designed for their edification. This culturally shaped understanding of the world offers profound emotions and ever-new insights, which few of us would willingly forgo. Even if it comes at a price—namely, the loss of sight of what lies behind the veil that culture has cast over the true nature of things.

It is unlikely that such thoughts crossed my mind as I stood on the ice, hesitant to move. What I certainly thought was: The colder it gets, the harder the ice, the more likely I will be able to save myself. So, I waited. But waiting was of no use, and my little drama, unworthy of an opera, unfolded. Knee-deep in water and with only one shoe, I returned home late at night, shivering. Without a glance of the Seebühne, where Rigoletto laughed mockingly—his laughter lingering, though as the libretto promised, it would soon cease.