Music Festival Berlin 2025: French sounds hardly represented!

Music Festival Berlin 2025: French sounds hardly represented!

Music is king in the capital – the “Music Festival Berlin 2025” is just around the corner! An exciting variety of sounds and compositions awaits us from August 30th to September 23rd. This year, however, the organizers are also taking a critical look at the programming policies, especially when it comes to French music. Of the 15 works listed, only three will come from the land of grandeur. The reason for this cannot be denied: French music history has much more to offer than the great hits such as Ravel's “Boléro” or Berlioz's “Symphonie fantastique”, and many works remain in the drawer because their performances are rare.

The roots of today's music scene go back to 1871. At that time, the gifted composer Camille Saint-Saëns founded the “Société Nationale de Musique”. Founded out of dissatisfaction with the programming policy of the Paris concert organizers at the time, this society was originally intended to primarily promote local composers. Founding members included some of the best-known names in French music, such as Gabriel Fauré and César Franck, and soon works by renowned figures such as Debussy and Dukas were premiered long before the society closed its doors in 1939.

The smaller tones of French music

What about all the excellent pieces that may not be in the mainstream? Winrich Hopp, who has been the artistic director of the music festival for 19 years, calls for courage to have unusual programs. And that is urgently needed, because in this way the general public could be introduced to the diversity of French composers. In any case, the “Société Nationale de Musique” was founded to change exactly that – and not just in the past. The society further refined this mission by organizing Janus-faced premieres of works in the first decades after its founding, before allowing more international sounds in the 1880s.

The festival days end in September with various birthday celebrations for well-known composers. The focus is on Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez, among others. It remains exciting to see whether these contemporaries are properly honored by the variety of guest orchestras such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouworkest, which plays Bela Bartok, or the Orchester des Champs-Elysées, which performs Beethoven. This reflects the globally networked classical music market, which is increasingly restricting the scope for festival organizers.

French composers in retrospect

But what makes French music history so fascinating? It occupies a special position in the classical music landscape. From the Baroque period to the modern era, many outstanding composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel and Antonio Vivaldi have left their mark. The works of Jean-Baptiste Lully and François Couperin bring the heritage of opera and chamber music to life. We also find masterpieces by Berlioz, Gounod and Bizet in subsequent eras such as Romanticism, which emphasized emotional depth and harmonic complexity.

Particular attention is also paid to contemporary composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, who broke new ground with works such as “Clair de Lune” and “Daphnis et Chloé”. Édith Canat de Chizy, a significant voice of our time, represents the enduring legacy of French music. Even if only three French works will be heard at the “Music Festival Berlin 2025”, the hope for a renewed discovery of the great classics and an examination of the lesser-known treasures of music history remains strong.

The “Music Festival Berlin” is not only a platform for sonic diversity, but also a stage for contemporary interpretations and the examination of a cultural heritage that is infinitely rich and complex. The deep roots of French composers in the classical music landscape do not change this.

For further information on the background and developments, please take a look here: Daily Mirror, Wikipedia and system.