Conference: Tagung: Festspiele! Gestern - Heute - Morgen

From July 9 to 11, 2026, the conference “Tagung: Festspiele! Gestern - Heute - Morgen” at Haus Wahnfried will explore the influences that Richard Wagner’s concept of the festival continues to exert on the cultural landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries. The focus will be on current challenges facing the global festival scene, as well as the question of what future festival institutions—as venues for temporarily concentrated artistic events—are heading toward. The Bayreuth model—offering a specific program to an audience that travels there specifically to experience it in an aura-filled, extraordinary setting—continues to shape many festivals and festival series to this day. At the same time, festivals and festival series navigate the tension between a rich tradition and the imperative to innovate, between the promise of the extraordinary and the constraints of limited resources. These contemporary ecological, social, and political issues will be explored through an exchange between academic festival research and practical festival work, featuring keynote presentations, open-forum lectures, and a moderated discussion. The event is a collaboration between the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, the University of Bayreuth, and the Department of Historical Musicology at the Technical University of Dortmund.
View the conference program.