Dear audience, dear friends of the Herrenchiemsee Festival!
It is a special pleasure and honor for us to welcome you today to the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2024.
The motto of this year’s festival program is “I will remain an eternal enigma …”, one of Ludwig II’s most famous quotes. These words of the king, taken from one of his personal letters, determine the dramaturgy of our concerts this year, sometimes more, sometimes less obviously.
Our multifaceted instrumental concerts show that the baroque repertoire of Johann Sebastian Bach or Antonio Vivaldi still holds many a surprise – and therefore many a “riddle” – in store today. In “Bach’s Italianità”, we encounter Vivaldi’s influence on the great German Baroque master and his exploration of Pergolesi’s “Stabat mater”. Bach placed the Italian composer’s music almost unchanged in a new context – no! No plagiarism! At the time, such reminiscences were regarded as a sign of reverence and an expression of deepest admiration.
A further focus of this year’s festival program is Mozart’s “Magic Flute” – a work that not least reminds us once again of the legendary era of Enoch zu Guttenberg, whose interpretation of the “Magic Flute” set an unforgettable and groundbreaking accent on Lake Chiemsee. Today we present the “Magic Flute” in a perhaps somewhat unconventional, “lean” dramaturgy, which nevertheless emphasizes the opera’s multifaceted mythological content. In fact, Mozart’s “Magic Flute” per se also wants to remain “an eternal enigma” …
… which is no less true of Anton Bruckner’s work, the 200th anniversary of whose birth will be celebrated in 2024. The universality of his symphonic oeuvre makes the Romantic composer one of the greatest myths in European music history. Bruckner’s symphonic cosmos leads us out of Richard Wagner’s haze and into the transcendent atmosphere of the Ninth, which is dedicated to the “dear God” and whose view of the universe concludes the program of the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2024 by no means by chance: In our present day, in which mankind’s empirical knowledge has reached an unprecedented level, it is perhaps even a special gift that not everything has to be explained down to the last detail, that some mysteries can remain mysteries …
May you enjoy the Herrenchiemsee Festival 2024 together with us and our artists.
Sincerely
Yours, Josef Kröner
Managing Director