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 'Fest-Stellung' of the festival itself. For its essence first and foremost includes its temporality; its beginning and its end, but at the same time also the striving for infinity: in sounds, words, and gestures, using the artistic device allowed only by imagination that transforms the either-or into the both-and, intertwining finitude with infinity. For when on September 4, 2026, Riccardo Chailly and the Filarmonica della Scala commemorate Anton Bruckner's birthday 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 up 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 banks of fog 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 recognizable 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 seeks to unfold this "timeless time" and thereby create an auditory field, a meeting place that literally concentrates us and brings us together in the finite space of the here and now. And Bruckner? His music is the sonorous foundation for this very 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 festive 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, at familiar and new locations. Andreas Meier Head of Program Planning & Dramaturgy