2024 Festival

Dear Friends of the Herrenchiemsee Festival,

It is with great pleasure that we present to you the program of the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2024.
Once again, great classical music and renowned performers invite you to the Frauenchiemsee Minster as well as to Herreninsel, the royal palace that Ludwig II once had built on the model of Versailles, setting no limits to his imagination.

After an artistic reflection on the dramatic state of our world last year, the 2024 Festival will once again follow the former Bavarian king and, with its motto “I will remain an eternal enigma …”, will take up one of Ludwig II’s most famous quotes, taken from a letter from the king to his former governess. The enigmatic aura that surrounded the fairy-tale king still fascinates today. New ideas, spaces for thought and possibilities are stimulated, which can become a constructive confrontation with life in the here and now. May the musical experiences offered by the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2024 accompany you a little way along this path.

In 2024, the music world commemorates the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth.
With his symphonics, the Herrenchiemsee Festival, under the musical direction of our patron Kent Nagano, explores the exciting world of this perhaps most enigmatic symphonist of the 19th century. Another focal point of the program is the music of Antonio Vivaldi, whose life path between priesthood and girls’ boarding school still poses many mysteries for us today.

In addition to traditional focal points with works by Johann Sebastian Bach and symphonies by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, “The Magic Flute” rounds off the 2024 festival program. Mozart’s last opera with its mysterious ciphers of Masonic thought seems to remain a mystery forever.

It is the riddles of the universe, of belief and non-belief that pervade our 2024 program. Together with our artists and our patrons His Royal Highness Duke Franz of Bavaria and Kent Nagano, I cordially invite you to join us on an imaginative journey. Perhaps the shared experience of art will be able to reveal a solution to one or another of the riddles of our lives …

We look forward to seeing you!

Your Josef Kröner
Managing Director