Cultural ties have linked Baden-Baden with Russia for over 200 years. The story that began with a princess who became the tsar’s bride continues to this day with the many residents of our city with Russian roots. At the 2021 Easter Festival, the Berliner Philharmoniker and Chief Conductor Kirill Petrenko will join us in remembering one of Russia’s most celebrated composers, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The orchestra will not only be interpreting his opera Mazeppa, but also Rachmaninoff’s Francesca da Rimini. Different Russian schools existed during Tchaikovsky’s time as the vast empire, its position straddling East and West, searched for an identity and aesthetic of its own. Tchaikovsky himself drew inspiration from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – a connection we will also be exploring during the Festival. At the 2021 Easter Festival, we will be building a bridge that spans a large cross-section of European cultural history – an undertaking for which BadenBaden is the ideal venue. Welcome to the 2021 BadenBaden Easter Festival!

Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich were in love with melody, an infatuation that was entirely due to the influence of Tchaikovsky. The Easter Festival will be offering the opportunity to discover these composers anew – while surprising us with two rarely heard operas: a staged production of Mazeppa and a concert performance of Francesca da Rimini.

Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa and Rachmaninoff’s Francesca da Rimini: two operas that already speak to us through their titles alone. With Mazeppa we can hear the Eastern sounds approaching, but Francesca da Rimini? An Italian subject set to music by a Russian composer? And so we find ourselves immersed in the theme of this year’s Easter Festival: the question of identity. In Russia this was an essential part of the cultural conversation, with the “westerners” on the one hand, and those who demanded a distinctive and purely Russian musical language on the other. The Festival’s chamber music program in particular will be showcasing proponents of both schools. However, aesthetic ideals are one thing and practical reality another. Tchaikovsky already found himself in conflict with this reality: though he himself was regarded as a Westerner, he chose, with his Mazeppa, a subject that corresponded to the taste of the Russophiles. And his Romeo and Juliet Overture? Tchaikovsky takes an Italian story retold by an Englishman and transposes it to an entirely Russian setting. Just how inhumane such categorizations can be is something the eponymous hero of Mazeppa experiences firsthand, as a Ukrainian who is considered too Russian by his countrymen and too Ukrainian by the Russians. And as if there weren’t enough confusion already, Mozart’s Requiem also enters into the picture – a work that invites us to discover the Russian Mozartian through the lens of his great predecessor. Mozart’s primacy of melody, the tender woodwind passages, the omnipresent sighs – all these turn up in Tchaikovsky’s music as well. Mozart’s courtly society and the city life of Tchaikovsky’s time share a delight in sumptuousness and flirtation. And with Tchaikovsky, this includes not only Moscow, but Paris and Florence as well. His international orientation serves as a connecting link with Rachmaninoff, who loved the sound of the American brass and influenced American composers in his turn.