Bruckner Festival 2026

FINALLY "When finally finally comes [...] Then be different, so that the world changes, so that it changes direction, finally!" Ingeborg Bachmann: The Thirtieth Year together in the 'standing now' Finally, it begins – the theme that the Bruckner Festival Linz 2026 is dedicated to is nothing less than the 'statement' of the festival itself. For its essence first and foremost includes its temporality; its beginning and its end, but at the same time the striving for infinity: using the artistic device allowed only by imagination, which transforms the either-or into the both-and, intertwining finitude with infinity through sounds, words, and gestures, in thinking together and encountering one another.

For when on September 4, 2026, Riccardo Chailly and the Filarmonica della Scala commemorate Anton Bruckner's birthday, which is 202 years ago, when Franz Welser-Möst celebrates his farewell as chief conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra on Bruckner's 130th death anniversary on October 11 after 25 years – and when, framed by these highlights, from September 13 to 30, the Brucknerhaus and all of Linz enter a state of musical exception, then, finally, the space of the 'Nunc stans,' the 'Standing Now,' opens up: Time holds its breath, between infinite past and infinite future, the one precious moment emerges that can only be conjured by the shared experience of the extraordinary.

Perhaps it is Immanuel Kant's "Land of Truth," a place of ideals, "surrounded by a vast and stormy ocean, [...], where some fog bank and some soon-to-melt ice lie about new lands." An island amidst what we call everyday life. Not a retreat, but a place of departure on the "barely discernible path of non-time [...], a kind of timeless time in which people can create timeless works to transcend their own finitude" (Hannah Arendt). The Bruckner Festival Linz 2026 aims to unfold this "timeless time" and thus create an auditory field, a meeting place that concentrates us in the literal sense and brings us together in the finite space of here and now.

And Bruckner? His music is the sonorous foundation for precisely this space "in which we can see anew, relate differently to ourselves and to the world and to the possibility of infinity," as Jagoda Marinić so urgently articulated in her festival speech in 2025. In 2026, Bruckner will stand at the center of the Bruckner Festival in many forms beyond the expected: improvised, newly contextualized, unconventionally arranged, creatively rethought – in world premieres and final works, debuts and farewell concerts, in familiar and new places.

Andreas Meier Head of Program Planning & Dramaturgy