Greetings

The Berliner Festspiele open this year’s Musikfest Berlin with György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre to mark and celebrate their 75th anniversary. Ligeti was one of the most influential composers at the Berliner Festwochen, first held in 1951. His opera Le Grand Macabre, which he himself regarded as an “anti-opera”, is a vehement pastiche on totalitarian rule, mismanagement and corruption, inspired by the paintings of Pieter Bruegel and the eponymous ballad by Michel de Ghelderode. Le Grand Macabre comes to Musikfest Berlin in a production by the Finnish Broadcasting Company, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Helsinki Festival, where the opera will receive its Finnish premiere a few days earlier.

The programme for Musikfest Berlin 2026 plays on numerous references to the 75-year history of the Berliner Festspiele and former Berliner Festwochen: to the presentation primarily of the music and culture of the Western world in the years of its foundation (a New York production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess visited the Titania-Palast in 1952), the establishment and expansion of a continuous East-West dialogue across the Iron Curtain in the 1970s and 1980s (composers of the Soviet Russian post-war avant-garde), the guest performances of music and theatre from the world’s great cultures in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the contemporary composers who shaped the programme of the Berliner Festwochen over many years (such as Igor Stravinsky, Hans Werner Henze, Sofia Gubaidulina and Wolfgang Rihm).

In addition to Le Grand Macabre, other large-scale events at Musikfest Berlin 2026 are drawn from the realms of music theatre, the scenic arts, and performance: most notably George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess in a new production by Cape Town Opera and the Chineke! Orchestra; Wolfgang Rihm’s orchestral ritual Tutuguri based on Antonin Artaud with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra; Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht directed by Susanne Kennedy, with which Aviel Cahn, the new Artistic Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, will herald a new era at Berlin’s storied opera house; Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat in the acclaimed production by the Salzburger Marionettentheater, for which Georg Baselitz created the puppets and designs; and finally the guest performance of Noh theatre from Tokyo with Kiyokazu Kanze, the 26th Grand Master of Japan’s famous Kanze School.

Hans Werner Henze would also have celebrated his 100th birthday this year – and from the very outset, hardly any other contemporary composer was such a significant presence in the Berliner Festspiele’s programmes. As recently as 2007, in response to a commission for a new work from the Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin, his final opera Phaedra received its world premiere, performed by the Ensemble Modern with a stage design by Ólafur Elíasson at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. To honour Hans Werner Henze at this year’s Musikfest Berlin there will be performances of Musen Siziliens, first performed at the Festwochen in 1966, his opulent piano concerto Tristan, a composed veneration of the music of Wagner, Chopin and Brahms, and finally his large-scale 9th Symphony – a Berliner Festspiele commission from 1997 – which Henze dedicated to the heroes and martyrs of German anti-fascism.

Anatol Vieru, Romania’s great composer of strictly non-conformist avant-garde music, was also born 100 years ago. His Second Symphony, written in Berlin in 1973 on a DAAD scholarship, is performed by Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. While Vieru was studying in Moscow in the 1950s, his contemporaries included Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina – the avant-garde troika famous in the West and notorious in the Soviet Union – whose works also resonated strongly with the Berliner Festwochen. In addition to the RSB, their works will also be played at Musikfest Berlin by the London Symphony Orchestra, the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

When Yvonne Loriod – the outstanding pianist and legendary piano teacher of French modernist and avant-garde music who was born in 1924 – died in 2010, hardly anyone knew that she had left behind an immense body of original compositions which she had written in her student years. She did not pursue these works any further while she dedicated her abilities as a pianist to brilliant performances of the music of her husband Olivier Messiaen. The compositions now discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris have caused a sensation. 80 years after it was written, the 15-movement orchestral poem La Sainte Face will receive its world premiere at Musikfest Berlin with the WDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Kent Nagano in a concert that will launch the recording of Yvonne Loriod’s hitherto unheard oeuvre.

Meanwhile Brett Dean, Cathy Milliken and Liza Lim, leading composers of our own time, are united by their Australian heritage and the fact that they all lead a more or less “globetrotting” musical existence. Their works will be performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker and the DSO. Despite all the historical references to the earlier Berliner Festwochen, there will be no shortage of concerts devoted to music written today, including works by Alex Nante, Olga Neuwirth, Milica Djordjević, Clara Iannotta, Márton Illés and Enno Poppe.

Friends of the Classical and Romantic repertoires and early modernism will also encounter music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Benjamin Britten, Anton Bruckner, Claude Debussy, Antonín Dvořák, Manuel de Falla, Leoš Janáček, Gustav Mahler, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Robert Schumann, Peter Tchaikovsky and Richard Wagner.

Finally, in a special event, following the large-scale Noh theatre performance the day before, Kiyokazu Kanze will offer Berlin school pupils insights into the Japanese art and culture of Noh theatre. And for the youngest Berliners, including those who remain children at heart, the Konzert mit der Maus will make its first guest appearance at the Philharmonie Berlin with the WDR Sinfonieorchester.

Together with our colleagues from the Berliner Festspiele and the Musikfest Berlin team, we would like to thank all the participating artists and institutions, our host and cooperation partner the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation and its General Manager Andrea Zietzschmann, our partner orchestras based in Berlin and the Japanese-German Center Berlin for their excellent collaboration, and finally the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Minister of State Dr Wolfram Weimer, for funding the Berliner Festspiele’s Musikfest Berlin.

We wish you great pleasure attending the events of Musikfest Berlin 2026.

Matthias Pees
Director Berliner Festspiele                    

Winrich Hopp
Artistic Director Musikfest Berlin