Time is relative

The festival season is just flying by! Didn’t we just recently cycle diligently from station to station at the Prélude? Weren’t we still at the Palace Theater yesterday, enjoying wonderful concerts in the Ordenssaal? Just like that, seven weeks later—world-renowned star Hilary Hahn is thrilling the sold-out Forum, the first Park Music performance at Wine After Work on the Monrepos lakeside terrace has taken place, and the Monrepos and Favorite palaces have been inaugurated with the festival season’s first prize-winners’ concerts.

Time is indeed a fitting keyword to describe the past festival week—from »Labyrinthe du temps« to turtles to snow.

A Tribute to Slowness

So far, 129 bouquets have been distributed to the wonderful festival artists at the 2026 Ludwigsburg Festival (we’d like to take this opportunity to extend our heartfelt thanks to Svenja Holzhauer of Blumen-Wohlgemuth for the beautiful bouquets we were able to present this festival season!). Ironically, it was one of the festival’s leading musicians who posed a problem with the customary bouquet: star violinist Hilary Hahn has a flower allergy.

What to do in such a case? The possibilities seem endless, which makes the matter more difficult—after all, you don’t want to hand over just anything on stage. It had to be meaningful, so the artistic director and the artistic planning office set out on a search. The answer wasn’t far away at all—in fact, just across the street from the Grävenitz palais (as always, the best things are so close at hand)—at the local historic porcelain manufactory. A piece of Ludwigsburg to take home! The choice fell on a figurine—admittedly somewhat unusual, but all the more symbolic for it: a turtle.

Aesop himself aimed to highlight the special symbolism of the tortoise in his fable: it embodies longevity, tenacity, and slowness—but in a positive sense! You don’t have to literally walk tortoises on a leash, in the style of the fin-de-siècle flâneurs, to reflect on the tangible benefits of patience and mindfulness. During rehearsals, for example, proceeding step by step is essential, and especially when attending a concert—particularly one like the one featuring Hilary Hahn, Omer Meir Wellber, and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen—the moment of focusing on the here and now, of perceiving the moment along with all its impressions, is a formative experience. In this respect, the turtle could almost be considered the mascot of the festival experience! The fact that Aziza Sadikova’s new composition »Labyrinthe du Temps«—whose title evokes time, its complexity, and its intricacy—was also performed that evening seems all the more significant when one thinks of Michael Ende’s »Momo«, in which not only time but also the turtle Cassiopeia plays a very special role.

So perhaps it was a stroke of luck that, for once, no flowers could be handed out. In any case, we enjoyed the concert with all our senses, and hopefully the turtle will continue to remind Hilary Hahn of the Ludwigsburg Festival for quite some time to come.

Time flies when you’re having fun, and here we are already thinking about winter

Traveling through time—that was on the agenda for Jonas Müller and Aris Alexander Blettenberg. These two self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades took the audience on a journey from the High Romantic period to the threshold of ironically subverted modernism, and there was no shortage of humor along the way. Not only were the lyrics brimming with satirical humor—Jonas Müller also delivered them in a style to match! It wasn’t uncommon to see the baritone half-reclining on the piano, winking mischievously at the audience, and the spontaneous applause mingling with laughter. For the nearly 80 festival guests who treated themselves to this fun event at Monrepos Palace, it was definitely a memorable concert evening—one that, as always when you’re having fun, flew by in the blink of an eye.

Our colleague Markus Zwanziger, on the other hand, experienced a rather ambivalent sense of time this week. In the middle of midsummer, with an outside temperature of 30 degrees, he set out to get some snow—just the sort of thing you do in July. That’s an interesting undertaking even in the winter months. In this case, it highlighted the parallel-world-like reality of the ongoing festival: Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo needed stage snow for their production of »Ma Bayadère«, which was to drift down from the ceiling at the climax of the performance. No sooner said than done—snow was procured. And it must be said: it was well worth the effort! The parallel or dream world depicted in the second act of »Ma Bayadère« really came to life with fog and snow, briefly allowing the audience to forget which time period they thought they were in.

The Signs of the Times

Hosting concerts in historic venues is one of the wonderful highlights of the Ludwigsburg Festival. Sometimes we can’t quite grasp the beauty of the venues themselves, and in the middle of a concert, we find ourselves wide-eyed at the beauty that surrounds us. As the name suggests, these historic sites carry their history deep within their walls; and it’s only natural that, after several hundred years, some of their functions are somewhat limited. Nevertheless, we were all a bit surprised when our artistic director, Lucas Reuter, came around the corner at Favorite Palace shortly before the doors opened, holding the doorknob of the men’s restroom in his hand. Unfortunately, it had lost all desire to remain attached to the hunting lodge and pleasure palace… But don’t worry—visitors to Alexander von Heißen’s concert didn’t have to go without a restroom; we were still able to persuade the doorknob to stay in its rightful place for the duration of the concert, at least until further notice.

So we still have a week of the festival ahead of us. And to make sure we get the most out of this time—and don’t just let it fly by—we’re going to try to channel our inner turtle. We’ll savor every moment, soak it all in, and sharpen our eye for detail—so that we can report back on the special festival experiences again next week.

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