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Every year in the autumn, between the end of August and the beginning of October, Beethoven’s native city of Bonn celebrates the Beethovenfest, welcoming top international orchestras, well-known soloists, major ensembles and promising young performers. The Beethovenfest has seen renowned Beethoven interpreters and big stars like Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Hélène Grimaud, Paavo Järvi, Gustavo Dudamel, Daniel Hope and Martin Grubinger. These and many other musicians return regularly to Bonn in order to present at the Beethovenfest programmes which have been specially compiled for this festival.

The Beethovenfest Bonn feels a responsibility to contribute to the shaping of the repertoire of the 21st century. Every year it commissions new works, and since Ilona Schmiel took charge, the festivals between 2004 and 2011 have witnessed 43 first performances. Ilona Schmiel’s programming guidelines are future-oriented and revolutionary, just as Ludwig van Beethoven was in his day.

The Beethovenfest is innovative not just in its commission policy, but also in its approach to Beethoven and his œuvre, seeking to promote new ways to confront the composer and his work. These include the »Look at Beethoven« project, which has been running since 2006, in which young media creatives visualize their own approach to Beethoven through short films, installations and videoclips. The Beethovenfest Bonn uses this project as a rendezvous for young film-makers, and as a forum for the contemporary music film.

The successful concept of the Beethovenfest Bonn – in 2011 88% of seats were sold, in 2010 86%, in 2009 90% – rests on three constants:
1. Beethoven’s work is not presented as a museum-piece, but as an inexhaustible well of lively confrontation;
2. the programme serves as a platform for encounters and artistic exchange between prominent stars and highly talented new blood; the high reputation which the Beethovenfest Bonn enjoys among sponsors, media partners and the public reflects the correctness and persuasiveness of this concept;
3. the Beethovenfest Bonn takes place not just in the city itself, but in numerous venues in its Rhenish hinterland, each with its own ambience.

At around 60 concerts and operatic performances from 2004 to 2007, the Beethovenfest Bonn focused on a different cultural region each year, relating it to Beethoven’s works and the music of his day and of ours, and of the centuries between.  The festivals from 2008 to 2010 did also each have a theme. In 2008 the motto was »Macht. Musik.« This play on words can be translated both as »Make music« and as »Power. Music.«. Starting out from Beethoven’s political legacy Beethovenfest was casting light on the marginalization of composers and the political abuse of their names and works for propaganda purposes in the 20th century.
Against the background of Beethoven seen as the first romantic composer the 2009 motto »In the Light« was to be understood, drawing attention as it does to inimitable and fascinating artistic personalities who are never out of the limelight. The motto of the Beethovenfest Bonn 2010 »Into the Open. Utopia and Freedom in Music« stood for an approach the Beethovenfest has been pursuing and continuously expanding for years. The artists at the Beethovenfest experiment with new concert formats, break the traditional boundaries of the concert ritual and search for unconventional approaches to working with musical material, and all at the highest standards.
In the year 2011 that marks the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth, the Beethovenfest Bonn could look back on its long tradition and connexion with the composer, for it was in 1845 that Franz Liszt organized a three-day festival of music on the occasion of the dedication of the Beethoven Memorial on the Münsterplatz in Bonn, which itself coincided with what would have been Beethoven’s 75th birthday. The Beethovenfest Bonn 2011, with its motto »Music for the Future« has presented Liszt as a personality, virtuoso, visionary, patron and composer who revered Beethoven, and on this basis developed his own »music for the future«, whose echo resounded until well into the 20th century.
In a further 70-100 events, the accompanying programme, including readings, discussion, education projects, exhibitions and films, concerned itself with the motto.

The Beethovenfest Bonn has a reputation which extends well beyond the Rhineland itself, which of course, with its natural attractions is a Mecca for the culturally interested from all over the word. The venues of the Beethovenfest Bonn are highly varied, each being specially chosen as the ideal forum for the programme in question: visitors have the opportunity to experience concerts not only in concert-halls such as the Beethovenhalle Bonn and the chamber-music hall of the Beethoven-Haus, but also in churches (e.g. St. Evergislus in Bornheim), museums (Kunstmuseum, Bundeskunsthalle, Haus der Geschichte), former parliament buildings (Altes Wasserwerk), sites where political history has been made (Palais Schaumburg, Villa Hammerschmidt, Grandhotel on the Petersberg), industrial heritage sites (Dransdorf tram depot) and modern corporate forums (Telekom Forum, Volksbankhaus).