This Year’s Theme

We are right in the middle of this transformation process, which has caught us by surprise. Whether we like it or not, we have to accept the changes in order to intervene in them with our own artistic means. We have to work on the future ourselves by operating in the present between “pure” art, which cannot exist, and social responsibility.

For 74 years, the Festival of Young Artists Bayreuth has been working on a project for the future by combining tradition and innovation, i.e., tradition and change: in the encounter of people and cultures, music and communication, preservation and new beginnings. To put it pathetically: You have no other chance of saving the future of the world than to talk to each other or / and to come into contact with each other in musical conversation. This year, the Lost (in) Nature project will once again draw attention to the fragility of nature, and singers from problem regions will come together to literally bring their classical or non-classical music to the so-called people: with free admission, thus enabling a particularly high level of participation. In this way, art can become politics without robbing it of the freedom to be itself. New media formats, the challenges of AI, old works and their current interpretation: all of this is already part of a future in the present.