Festival · 2025 · The breakthrough year
Münstermann Festival
Festival 2025
In 1627 Heinrich Schütz set Martin Opitz’s “Dafne” for a princely wedding at Torgau — as far as anyone knows, the first opera in the German language. The music is lost.
The festival imagines that work sounding in Oldenburg instead: a comparable wedding was celebrated here in 1635, and in those same years the sculptor Ludwig Münstermann was making his altars and pulpits in the churches of the region. The two belong together — one transregionally networked Protestant artistic landscape of northern Europe.
For Forum neue Kunst this was the breakthrough: the first fully professional opera production at Schloss Oldenburg, and the starting shot for a concert series in the Münstermann churches, together with the Ludwig-Münstermann-Gesellschaft.
Within this project
- 11–12 October 2025Dafne Opera · Heinrich Schütz
Dates
- 5 October 2025„Kröger"-Orgel & „Münstermann"-Altar St. Aegidius, Berne17th-century organ music · Reading and commentary
- 8 November 2025musica est divinum donum St. Laurentius, Langwarden
- 23 November 2025Verkündigung · Abendmahl · Kreuzigung Schlosskirche, Varel
- 29 November 2025Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt St. Matthäus-Kirche, Rodenkirchen
- Creative team
- Nicholas Tamagna · Festival director
- Olaf Kreitsmann · Production
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