Easter Festival Baden-Baden 2023
Easter Festival Baden-Baden 2023
It was to be a grand fairy tale, and the "last Romantic opera": Richard Strauss and the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal dreamed up a monumental, dazzling musical drama for fin de siècle Vienna – Die Frau ohne Schatten. Kirill Petrenko, who will be conducting the cult opera in a new production, sees it as the Magic Flute of the 20th century. No wonder he chose this work to celebrate ten years of the Easter Festival with the Berliner Philharmoniker in Baden-Baden.
Ten years of the Easter Festival with the Berliner Philharmoniker! If you’re also lucky enough to stage opera with Kirill Petrenko, it makes sense to think big. With operas featuring plenty of stars, more chamber concerts, and varied symphonic programs for music lovers from all over the world. As befitting the occasion, we aim to celebrate the fin de siècle with its sumptuous excesses, its monumental ambitions, its desire to take on the whole world. And also its courage to set out into unknown realms.
And so, from Baden-Baden and Berlin, we looked back to Vienna, to the years after 1900, to Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg – in order to build a new, longer bridge from Strauss to Handel, from the art nouveau fairy tale to the Baroque allegory. Both fairy tales and allegories seek to view the world through images, and this is also the aim of the extensive supporting program, which reveals interconnections, but also leaves the other-worldly in its foreignness. Art dazzles. And people shine when they marvel, when they celebrate and learn something new.
About the Easter Festival Baden-Baden
The Baden-Baden Easter Festival is a classical music festival that has been held annually since 2013 with the Berlin Philharmonic in the Baden-Baden Festival Hall and other venues in the city.
The Berliner Philharmoniker announced in May 2011 that they would end their participation in the Salzburg Easter Festival at the end of the 2012 season and instead start a new festival in Baden-Baden from 2013 at Easter. The reason for the separation was given that the Salzburg Easter Festival could not implement the demands of the Berlin Philharmonic for a significant expansion of the program for financial reasons. The Festspielhaus Baden-Baden under artistic director Andreas Mölich-Zebhauseron the other hand offer a "long-term secure overall situation", explained a spokesman for the foundation's board of directors. In Baden-Baden, "a creative, lively and affordable opera festival" should be created. The spectacular change - the Berliner Philharmoniker have been a central component of the Salzburg Easter Festival since its foundation in 1967 - caused a sensation in the European festival landscape at the time. In June 2011, the Salzburg Easter Festival announced that from 2013 it their festival with Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden will continue.
The first Baden-Baden Easter Festival took place in 2013. The Berliner Philharmoniker under Simon Rattle played Mozart's Magic Flute , directed by Robert Carsen . The festival concept developed by Mölich-Zebhauser and Rattle now includes numerous orchestral and chamber music concerts, a chamber opera and educational projects at various venues around the city, centered around a new central opera production. According to the festival management, the Easter Festival recorded 25,000 visitors in the 2017 season, which corresponds to an occupancy rate of 93 percent. At the end of the 2018 season, Simon Rattle said goodbye to the Baden-Baden Easter Festival. At Easter 2019, Zubin Mehta conductedthe opera production of the festival. After taking over as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in the fall of 2019 took Kirill Petrenko from 2020 the management of the opera productions. But the 2020 Easter Festival - for the first time under artistic director Benedikt Stampa - was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany . By contract, the continuation of the Baden-Baden Easter Festival - as a collaboration between the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Festspielhaus - has been extended until 2022 and beyond.
