The archive · Brand & Identity · Strategic decision · 2024–2025
Tiroler Festspiele Erl turns its 400-year Passion Play thorns into a TFE brand mark
Scholz & Friends Austria brands Erl’s opera festival with thorns from the town’s coat of arms, arranged along the crossbars of the letters TFE.
Tiroler Festspiele · Scholz & Friends Austria
What it had to solve
Tiroler Festspiele Erl is a central part of Austria’s cultural landscape, and in 2024 opera star Jonas Kaufmann took over its artistic leadership. The town of Erl carries a 400-year Passion Play tradition, reflected in the thorn crown of its coat of arms and in the architecture of the festival house — history the festival’s new identity needed to carry forward.
How it works
Tiroler Festspiele Erl is a fixture of the Austrian cultural landscape — an opera festival in a village whose 400-year Passion Play tradition appears in the thorn crown on the town’s coat of arms and in the architecture of its festival house. In 2024 the festival entered a new era when Jonas Kaufmann, one of opera’s biggest names, took over artistic leadership, and the identity had to carry that history with it.
The design answer was thorns. Scholz & Friends Austria took the thorn — the town’s own emblem of the Passion Play — as the entire basis of the new brand and arranged individual thorns according to the crossbars of the letters TFE, the festival’s initials (Tiroler Festspiele Erl). Coat of arms, festival house and festival name therefore resolve into a single graphic device, produced with Blaupapier, Engagemedia and Factory.
The identity gave the festival one memorable mark for the Kaufmann era, one that belongs to Erl rather than to generic opera-house imagery, and the project was recognized in D&AD’s awards archive in the New Brand Identity category, putting a regional Austrian festival in front of an international design audience.
Why it lands
- The thorn comes from Erl’s own coat of arms, so the mark is authentic local history rather than an invented metaphor.
- Restricting the system to one charged symbol keeps the identity memorable across stage, print and architecture.
- Laying the thorns on the crossbars of TFE folds the festival’s name into the ornament, so the mark only works for this client.
- Anchoring the change to Kaufmann’s 2024 artistic takeover gave the rebrand a moment and a story.
What it did
The thorn system gave the Kaufmann-era festival a single, heritage-loaded mark instead of generic opera imagery, linking its programme to Erl’s Passion Play story, and earned the work a place in the D&AD awards archive under New Brand Identity.
What you can take
Don’t invent a metaphor for a place that already has one: a town’s own 400-year-old emblem carries instant meaning, so the designer’s job was arrangement, not invention.
Since then
The thorn identity became the visual face of the festival’s Kaufmann era, tying opera programming to the Passion Play history the village has staged for 400 years. The source documents the concept and credits but no attendance or sales figures, so the case rests on the design idea itself: a place’s own emblem, arranged with restraint, can be stronger than any invented brand story.
Sources
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