Dear audience,
Dear friends of the Herrenchiemsee Festival!

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you today to the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2023. In keeping with our long-standing tradition, you can once again expect a well thought-out and carefully selected program that will take you through different eras of music history and at the same time reflect the history of Europe – in a place that seems predestined to reflect on the past and present in an artistic experience “removed from the world”. This leads quite naturally to an inevitable confrontation with the “world noise” – the motto of this year’s festival.
“Far from the dull roar of the world / Under this sky clear and pure, / I sink into the past greatness, / Live to nature and her alone.” – This is how King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Ludwig II’s grandfather, described his feelings during a stay on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples, and his grandson was no stranger to such thoughts either – Ludwig II also used his castles as “islands” that offered him distance from the noise of the emerging cities, the sabre-rattling of quarrelling nations and the onset of industrialization. The “world roar” has hardly become any quieter since then: The great themes of the past are also those of the present and the future.

But the concerts of the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2023 want to go further and show that it is sometimes only a small step from the confusing “world roar” to pure world harmony – especially in music: wonderful examples are the big bang in Haydn’s “Creation” in radiant C major or the thunderous elements that seem to be tamed in Vivaldi and Rebel’s baroque formal elegance. And the sacred mysticism of the Renaissance or the mighty grandeur of Bach’s cantatas not only speak of noisy turmoil, but also of a powerful ordering spirit of the world’s structure. “Per aspera ad astra” – this is not least the dramaturgical guideline in Beethoven’s symphonies, which the Romantics Schubert and Schumann followed.
A second focus of the 2023 program is dedicated to the work of Joseph Haydn, a European cosmopolitan who shaped the musical history of his time with his cosmopolitan attitude and also left a profound mark on Western music.
We consider ourselves extremely fortunate that our patron Kent Nagano will be conducting four different concert programs with three ensembles at this year’s festival. In addition, we are delighted to welcome numerous internationally renowned artists and ensembles with you, dear audience – some of them for the second time, others making their debut at the Herrenchiemsee Festival.

Now we wish you a wonderful art experience – may you also feel for the moment of the concert that the “noise of the world” always accompanies upheavals, which always carry the chance of new harmony.

Yours, Josef Kröner
Managing Director