Few topics touch art as existentially as the end. Under this leitmotif, the International Music Festival Hamburg 2026 unfolds a panorama of musical borderline experiences - from apocalypse and farewell to spiritual consolation and creative new beginnings. The 45 events form a multi-layered network of monumental key works of music history, extraordinary projects and programmatic expeditions into threatened worlds of sound.

Franz Schmidt's oratorio The Book with Seven Seals, performed by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under Manfred Honeck, paints the biblical apocalypse in late Romantic colors - a dramaturgical prelude that unmistakably captures the festival's motto in sound. Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem, with which Daniele Gatti and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden conclude the festival, moves in a different dimension of finiteness. A dense network of artistic perspectives unfolds between these poles: Kent Nagano explores the sound of a declining age with his historically informed Götterdämmerung, while Leonard Bernstein's explosive Mass condenses the tension between ritual, protest and social upheaval into a modern oratorio.

Franui Musicbanda © Julia Stix

Hans Werner Henze and Miles Davis are two artists of the century whose works each demonstrate a radical approach to transitions. Henze's music, characterized by political sensitivity and a delight in sensual melodiousness, appears in large symphonic tableaux as well as in chamber music gems. Miles Davis, the revolutionary of jazz, will be celebrated in five concerts on the occasion of his 100th birthday - as the architect of cool jazz, innovator of fusion and relentless explorer of sound.
Among the most striking items on the program are border crossings that explore the theme of "the end" with surprising artistic freedom: The B'Rock Orchestra transforms Marco Ferreri's cult film Das große Fressen into a bitterly wicked musical-theatrical banquet; the Musicbanda Franui fuses Mahler with circus art; the Ensemble Resonanz confronts Haydn's contemplative Last Words with texts from Wolfgang Herrndorf's moving legacy.

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields © Alan Kerr

With Lost Music, the festival also focuses on those musical traditions that are in danger of disappearing in the shadow of geopolitical crises. Crimean Tatar melodies, Aramaic chants or the voice of the Afghan Hazara become sounding documents of the times - vulnerable, precious and at the same time full of resilience.
As every year, the music festival not only opens up international stages, but also social spaces: in the Lost and Found community project, Hamburg residents and professional artists work together to develop a poetic exploration of loss and new beginnings.
The International Music Festival Hamburg 2026 will thus become a cultural resonance space in which the end does not appear as the end, but as the beginning of a new way of hearing, feeling and remembering. A festival that takes the big questions of the present seriously - and illuminates them with the power of music.
May 1 to June 3, 2026
www.elbphilharmonie.de