In our multimedia stories, we highlight selected topics of the festival, explore background information and start conversations.

Musikfest Berlin

Sir Simon Rattle races round the Ringbahn (circular railway) through Berlin, Georg Baselitz operates his marionette from the sky and Tamara Stefanovich plays her grand piano on the roof of the Philharmonie Berlin. A new poster has been produced for the Musikfest Berlin: for the third time, Alexandra Klobouk has created an illustration of indviduals closely connected with the festival alongside images of a number of stories featured in the concerts and events. This year's poster is focused on Berlin with its diverse performance locations. You can read more about the numerous anecdotes concealed in the poster in our multimedia story.

Stories in the Poster

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Musikfest Berlin 2026

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Reflexe und Reflexionen

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Musikfest Berlin is the international orchestra festival of the Berliner Festspiele, organised in cooperation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. Top international orchestras, instrumental and vocal ensembles present a sophisticated festival programme with a changing thematic focus together with the major symphony orchestras of the city of Berlin.

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Today’s Events

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Key Visual Musikfest Berlin 2026

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Major Orchestras, Choirs and Ensembles as Guests in Berlin

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In 2024, the Musikfest Berlin will once again open the concert season in late summer with top-class international orchestras, celebrated conductors and remarkable soloists. Tickets are already available to purchase for selected concerts. The full programme will be published on 8&nbsp;April 2024.

Musikfest Berlin 2024

Advance ticket sales for three more concerts have started. The events with, among others, the mastermind of Early Music Jordi Savall and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra refer to the focus of the 2024 festival edition: the Americas!

More Concerts in advance ticket sale

Musikfest Berlin will take place from 28 August to 23 September 2026 in co-operation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation and marks the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele. Tickets are already available now for ten selected concert highlights at the Philharmonie Berlin. These guest concerts include some of the world’s best symphony orchestras and choirs from Finland, Spain, England, South Africa, the USA, Austria, Germany and Switzerland.&nbsp;The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Helsinki Chamber Choir conducted by Nicholas Collon will open Musikfest Berlin 2026 with a concert performance of Gy&ouml;rgy Ligeti’s anti-opera Le Grand Macabre. George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess will be presented jointly by the Chineke! Orchestra, the Cape Town Opera and the conductor Enrique Mazzola. The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra conducted by J&ouml;rg Widmann will tackle Wolfgang Rihm’s irrepressible Artaud ritual Tutuguri. Two leading ensembles for historically informed performance practice, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra with Sir Simon Rattle and the Ensemble Le Concert des Nations with Jordi Savall, will present guest concerts with music by Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelsohn. In addition to the WDR Sinfonieorchester with Kent Nagano and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra with Alan Gilbert, the Vienna Philharmonic with Tugan Sokhiev, the Kansas City Symphony with Matthias Pintscher and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano are also awaited at Musikfest Berlin 2026.&nbsp;The complete festival programme will be announced on 23&nbsp;April 2026.

First Concert Highlights 2026

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<a id="wimmelbild" name="wimmelbild"></a>The music metropolis of Paris provides the setting for the hidden object picture created by illustrator <a href="https://alexandraklobouk.com/">Alexandra Klobouk</a>&nbsp;for the Musikfest Berlin 2025. She brings to life 27 personalities closely connected to this year’s festival. Among them are historical figures, but also composers, singers, instrumentalists, and conductors of our present day.Klaus M&auml;kel&auml; conducts the pigeons of Montmartre, Helmut Lachenmann converses with King Charles III, and Lisa Streich listens to the singing sculptures of the Stravinsky Fountain. Who will you discover?Learn more about the many anecdotes hidden in the hidden object picture in the Berliner Festspiele music newsletter – you can sign up for it <a href="${link:{uuid:{33d8810e-15e6-4fbe-b77c-1970ebd4df00},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/service/newsletter}}}">here</a>. You can also take part in our <a href="${link:{uuid:{412138ee-f146-4804-9ccf-0ff6de90ce96},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/musikfest-berlin/programm/2025/gewinnspiel}}}">prize draw</a> related to the illustration: Two tickets for the opening concert on 30&nbsp;August 2025, at the Philharmonie Berlin and a surprise package await the winners.The <a href="${link:{uuid:{7247200b-e7ea-4173-b795-0fd7ec40cc91},repository:{website},path:{/bfs-de/musikfest-berlin/programm/2025/kalender/royal-concertgebouw-orchestra}}}">Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra</a>, together with its future chief conductor Klaus M&auml;kel&auml;, will kick off the more than three-week orchestral festival of superlatives.<a href="${link:{uuid:{db06a896-af61-405e-8c89-83c86116d7c5},repository:{dam},path:{/bfs-de/indizierte-pdfs/DE/Musikfest-Berlin/2025/mfb25_wimmelbild_c_alexandra_klobouk.pdf}}}">Download Hidden Objects as a PDF</a>

Hidden Objects

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To mark the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, the artist Akira Takayama invites the public to take guided tours on the Berlin Ringbahn that will enable them to encounter ghosts of alternative futures.

What If Berlin

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With more than 130 international musicians performing in 24 acts, Jazzfest Berlin 2026 presents a multi-faceted view of the global jazz scene. The full festival programme, complete with concerts, films, jam sessions, discursive events and a range of community and outreach projects is published. Advance ticket sales start on 17 September.

Jazzfest Berlin

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More than 60 productions from across Germany applied to take part in this year’s Tanztreffen der Jugend. Following the jury’s selection process, the 10&nbsp;productions chosen for the final programme have been announced. The programme schedule has been published, advance ticket sales are open.

Tanztreffen der Jugend

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For more than five decades, Gabriele St&ouml;tzer has been grappling with questions of justice, gender and self-determination. Opening at Gropius Bau in June 2026,&nbsp;Dabei sein und nicht schweigen&nbsp;(Showing up and Not Remaining Silent)&nbsp;is the artist’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date.

Gabriele St&ouml;tzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen

More Berliner Festspiele

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From classic to jazz to contemporary music: The music newsletter informs you regularly about concerts and all events at our music festivals.

Discover the Music Programme of Berliner Festspiele

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Musikfest Berlin 2026 will take place from 28&nbsp;August to 23&nbsp;September. Advance ticket sales for selected programme highlights starts on 4 December 2025. The complete programme schedule will be published in April&nbsp;2026.

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Musikfest Berlin 2025: Impressionen

Musikfest Berlin 2025

Impressions 2025

Conversations with composers and conductors, video statements from performers, and selected radio concert recordings are available for you in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library.

Musikfest Berlin in the Media Library

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Combine a minimum of five concerts and save 20&nbsp;% in comparison to individual ticket prices. The offer includes all normal prices and reduced rates in all price categories and closes on 31&nbsp;January 2026. The minimum of five concerts per package must be combined and booked within the framework of a single payment process.

Early Booking Offer

Musikfest Berlin sees itself as a forum for the innovative creative work carried out by large-scale orchestras and ensembles in the genre of classical and modern music. It presents an ambitious festival programme with alternating focal points.

About Musikfest Berlin

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Sir Simon Rattle races round the Ringbahn (circular railway) through Berlin, Georg Baselitz operates his marionette from the sky and Tamara Stefanovich plays her grand piano on the roof of the Philharmonie Berlin. A new poster has been produced for the Musikfest Berlin: for the third time, <a href="https://alexandraklobouk.com/">Alexandra Klobouk</a> has created an illustration of indviduals closely connected with the festival alongside images of a number of stories featured in the concerts and events. This year’s poster is focused on Berlin with its diverse performance locations. You can read more about the numerous anecdotes concealed in the poster in our multimedia story.<a href="${link:{uuid:{03d38e7d-b9ed-4a46-8dc2-1509d2b6c384},repository:{dam},provider:{jcr},path:{/bfs-de/indizierte-pdfs/DE/Musikfest-Berlin/2026/mfb26_wimmelbild_c_alexandra_klobouk.pdf}}}">Download poster as a PDF</a>

Poster 2026

Popular music from jazz to hip-hop has characterised the faces of many different Americas. However, to a broader public or even amongst lovers of “classical” music, the art music of the USA, the American double continent or its three regions (North, Central and South America) remains largely unknown territory. The 20th edition of Musikfest Berlin is called “Amériques”: the extravagant plural &nbsp;title of Edgard Varèse’s powerful orchestral piece from 1921, that used contemporary and as yet unheard sounds in an attempt to offer listeners a musical experience and sense of the utopia of endless possibilities offered by the New World. However, the luggage that this composer, who was born in Burgundy, championed during his time in Berlin by Romain Rolland, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss and Ferruccio Busoni and then emigrated during the First World War, took with him to the New World was filled with the accumulated tradition of old Europe. &nbsp;2024 is not only the year of a US Presidential election, it also marks the double anniversary of Charles Ives and Arnold Sch&ouml;nberg, who were born in the same year&nbsp;– 1874 – and died only a few years apart. Sch&ouml;nberg, who was forced to emigrate to the USA after the Nazis seized power, is still recognised by many today as the composer who fundamentally changed the “language” of European art music in order to extend its tradition.&nbsp;And Charles Ives, who first travelled Europe when he was no longer composing, is regarded as the no less innovative founding father and first main figure of an original&nbsp;art music whose identity is independent of old Europe: American – or, to be more precise, North American – modernism.The programme of the upcoming festival goes beyond this – oft repeated – narrative of modernism to pay special attention to the works of America’s female composers, for example in the three portrait concerts with the Ensemble Modern dedicated to the complete works of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953). Her music is programmed in combination with works by Johanna Beyer (who was born in Leipzig in 1888 and emigrated to the USA in 1923), the Cuban-born grande dame of contemporary American music Tania León (born in 1943) and the Californian Katherine Balch (born in 1991). There will also be opportunities to hear works by the American composers Allison Loggins-Hull (Cleveland Orchestra) and Missy Mazzoli (Berliner Philharmoniker), 7 and 8 September.Above all, however, on 24 August – the opening day of Musikfest Berlin, South American and North American modernism meet with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, while the orchestra’s big band follows this with a late-night concert of “música popular brasileira.” The BigBand of Deutsche Oper Berlin – in common with the Brazilian formation, it was also founded by musicians from the symphony orchestra – responds to this at the end of the festival, on 16 September, with an evening commemorating Duke Ellington.The so-called “discovery” of America is also a crime against humanity - one that took place in the Atlantic as well as on land: the slave trade operating in the triangle between Europe, Africa and the “Americas” has shaped the world and had an enduring influence on musical history. In the project “Un mar de músicas” the grand seigneur of historically informed performance practice and expert on global musical history across the continents Jordi Savall will be joined by his two ensembles Tembembe Ensemble Continuo and La Capella Reial de Catalunya as well as guest musicians from Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Mali, Venezuela and Mexiko for a dialogue of reciprocal influences between the European Baroque and the songs of the slaves between 1440 and 1880. They are spanning a musical net over the Black Atlantic, from the coast of Africa to the coast of America, the Caribbean and back to Europe.&nbsp;The international guest orchestras at this year’s Musikfest Berlin include the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-M&ouml;st, the Kansas City Symphony with Matthias Pintscher, the Oslo Philharmonic with Klaus M&auml;kel&auml;, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks with Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic with Christian Thielemann. The Filarmonica della Scala’s concert with its Chief Conductor Riccardo Chailly at Musikfest Berlin 2024 forms part of the programme of events “Roots in the Future” to celebrate Italy as the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2024.&nbsp;Together with the Berliner Philharmoniker and the orchestras based in Berlin, the visiting ensembles present a programme that matches our focus on America with a comprehensive panorama of European music: from the music of the Renaissance to the classics of the grand repertoire, to Gustav Mahler, Antonín Dvořák and Dmitri Shostakovich; from those with anniversaries this year – Anton Bruckner, Arnold Sch&ouml;nberg and Luigi Nono – to the composers of our time, to Isabel Mundry, to who features in a three-concert portrait, to Einojuhani Rautavaara and Wolfgang Rihm. And we also remember the composers who have gone from us: Kaija Saariaho, Aribert Reimann and Peter E&ouml;tv&ouml;s. Finally, Anna Prohaska, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Isabelle Faust and the instrumentalists of the Berliner Philharmoniker will provide a series of chamber music delicacies. &nbsp;Together with our colleagues at Berliner Festspiele and the Musikfest Berlin team we would like to thank all the participating artists and institutions, our hosts and co-operation partners the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation and its Managing Director Andrea Zietzschmann and our partner orchestras based in Berlin for their excellent teamwork, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for sponsoring the Isabel Mundry portrait concerts, the Capital Cultural Fund for funding the guest concerts from São Paulo, by Jordi Savall and the Ruth Crawford Seeger portrait concerts with the Ensemble Modern curated by Hermann Kretschmar, and finally the Federal Governmnet Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Minister of State Claudia Roth, for funding the Berliner Festspiele’s Musikfest Berlin.We hope you will very much enjoy Musikfest Berlin 2024

AMÉRIQUESFrom 24 August to 18 September 2024 Berlin’s new concert season begins with the 20th edition of Musikfest Berlin, presented by Berliner Festspiele in co-operation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. In around 40 concerts in the Philharmonie, its Chamber Music Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin and St. Matthew’s Church, over 160 works by more than 80 different composers will be performed by 30 ensembles and some 60 soloists from Berlin and around the world. &nbsp;

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Musikfest Berlin 2023

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The complete programme schedule will be published on 23&nbsp;April.

Major Orchestras and Vocal Ensembles as Guests in Berlin

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The Berliner Festspiele open this year’s Musikfest Berlin with Gy&ouml;rgy 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 FestspieleWinrich Hopp Artistic Director Musikfest Berlin

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Musikfest Berlin is Berliner Festspiele’s international orchestra festival, hosted in co-operation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. International top orchestras, instrumental and vocal ensembles join the great symphony orchestras of the city of Berlin to present a sophisticated festival programme with various focus topics.

75 Years of the Berliner Festspiele

From 28 August to 23 September 2026, the Berlin concert season starts with Musikfest Berlin, organised by the Berliner Festspiele in cooperation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. In 36 events at the Philharmonie Berlin, in its Chamber Music Hall, the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, more than 60 works will be presented by some 40 composers, performed by orchestras and choirs from the musical capital Berlin, by over 65 international soloists and more than 30 instrumental and vocal ensembles from Finland, Spain, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, England, Japan and Germany, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, Le Concert des Nations, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony and the Chineke! Orchestra with Cape Town Opera.

Highlights Musikfest Berlin 2024

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Festivals & Programme Series

Upcoming

The Berliner Festspiele organise a range of festivals and art exhibitions, concerts, dance and theatre performances, readings, lectures, debates and much more throughout the year. These events are presented at a range of locations across Berlin but are concentrated primarily at their own two venues: the Gropius Bau and the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

In our multimedia stories, we highlight selected topics of the festival, explore background information and start conversations.

Berliner Festspiele

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furtherInformation

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In our Festspiele Stories series, we highlight some of the many facets of the 75-year history of the Berliner Festspiele. Explore our Media Library for behind-the-scenes insights, as well as new and historical perspectives and personal recollections connected to the history of the Berliner Festspiele.

Festspiele Stories

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In 2026 the Berliner Festspiele celebrate their 75th anniversary. A selection of events programmed throughout the entire year engage take the anniversary as their theme or mark the occasion with works at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Gropius Bau, the Philharmonie, on Berlin’s Ringbahn and at other locations in the city. Outstanding international that liberal societies and their cultural institutions face in a new, multipolar world order. artists such as Marina Abramović, Gabriele St&ouml;tzer and Akira Takayama will set the agenda both thematically and aesthetically. Entitled “Die gro&szlig;e Unordnung” (The Great Disorder), the four-day focus Reflexes &amp; Reflections will also enquire about the challenges.

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The massacre, hostage-taking and rocket attacks by Hamas have shaken us deeply. The grue-some attack on Israel on 7&nbsp;October left us stunned and initially lost for words.

The Berliner Festspiele on Current Events in Israel, Gaza and Germany

With this letter of intent, we, the signing cultural organizations, express our intention to welcome, host and stage Ukrainian theatre artists in our venues, to make Ukrainian dramatic work visible to the European community.

Support of the Ukrainian Cultural Scene

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More than 60 productions from across Germany applied to take part in this year’s Tanztreffen der Jugend. After the expert jury had the opportunity to view the shortlisted works live, the jurors selected 10&nbsp;productions for the final programme. The programme schedule has been published, advance ticket sales are open.

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The exploration of myths and rituals shapes the fourth edition of the Performing Arts Season with works by Marina Abramović, Mario Banushi, Marie Chouinard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Rosas, Ictus, Bl!ndman, Dumb Type, Damien Jalet / Kohei Nawa and Gisèle Vienne. The programme is published and ticket sales are on.

Performing Arts Season

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With A Year without Summer by Florentina Holzinger, the last of the 10 most remarkable productions selected for Theatertreffen 2026 will be presented this autumn. The performances will take place at the Volksb&uuml;hne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Remaining tickets may be available at the box office.

A Year without Summer