Magazine

In 2025 the Festspielhaus will be dedicating another festival with international artists to the composer, conductor, and music educator Pierre Boulez, who would be 100 years old and lived and worked in Baden-Baden for over 60 years up until 2016. "We feel positively obliged to commemorate this outstanding artistic personality and, together with the city of Baden-Baden, the Südwestrundfunk, and the country's music universities, to present a birthday program that points to the future," says Benedikt Stampa about "Pierre Boulez: Matter of Honor." 

The 2025 Baden-Baden festival year also promises many encounters with music celebrities outside of the seven festivals. To open the season, Bayreuth stars Camilla Nylund and Andreas Schager will sing an evening of Wagner and garnish it with operetta classics (12 January 2025). Shortly afterwards, pianist Kit Armstrong, once supported by Alfred Brendel, invites members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to an Expedition Mozart in Baden-Baden (17 January 2025).

A premiere in 2025 will be the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden’s first summer open air concert in front of the city's world-famous Kurhaus. A new attraction in the city's summer program is being created in cooperation with Baden-Baden Events GmbH and the Kurhaus Baden-Baden. The premiere edition will be conducted by the music director of New York's Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He will be bringing the Orchestre Métropolitan from Montreal to the "La Capitale d'Été" summer festival in Baden-Baden for the first time. The soloist will be Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa (29.6.2025), a star of the New York Metropolitan Opera. 

The Festspielhaus Baden-Baden will be hosting the new Winter Festival from December 12 to 22, 2025. Guests will include the Budapest Festival Orchestra with its chief conductor Iván Fischer and the National Ballet of Ukraine, which works under the most difficult conditions in its homeland. The program will include Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio, and the ballet The Snow Queen. 

Playing opera, enjoying the beautiful scenery - and last but not least, the good food! Musicians from the Berliner Philharmoniker talk in the video about what they love about Baden-Baden and why they are so looking forward to the Easter Festival.

Parts weighing hundreds of kilograms, boxes, hoists, lifting platforms - and a lot of manual work. For a week, the stage technicians at the Festspielhaus, together with the team led by set designer Christian Fenouillat, stomped the stage construction for "Queen of Spades" out of the black plank floor. The time-lapse video gives an impression of the stage worlds that were moved for this. From April 9, when the curtain rises on the premiere, life will be in full swing here.