Inhabiting a festival
Summer is festival time. Year after year, when the programs are announced, an expectation is renewed that goes far beyond the shows presented. Festivals continue to occupy a privileged place in our way of experiencing the arts because, for many people, they represent much more than a cultural program: they are a way of relating to culture, to artists, and also to others.
Inhabiting a festival is being part, even if only for a few days, of a community that shares the same predisposition: to let itself be challenged by creation. It is a time different from the everyday, a contemporary ritual that renews, edition after edition, the invitation to share an artistic experience. We return to rediscover artists, repertoires, or spaces that are part of our imaginary, but also because we know that each new edition is, above all, an opportunity for discovery.
"In classical Greece, the representation of tragedies and comedies transcended entertainment to become a space for collective reflection on the city, the human condition, and destiny."
Festivals have much deeper roots than we often imagine. Since antiquity, music, theater, or dance have been much more than forms of artistic expression: they have been a way of building community. In classical Greece, the representation of tragedies and comedies transcended entertainment to become a space for collective reflection on the city, the human condition, and destiny. Perhaps this is the ultimate reason for the relevance of festivals: they continue to offer us a place where a community gathers to look at itself, think about itself, and imagine itself through the arts.
More than two thousand years later, festivals continue to be necessary when they are able to go beyond the program. The most relevant ones are not defined only by the artists who perform there, but by the community they build, by the territory they transform, and by the way they contribute to broadening our view of the arts. It is this capacity to generate a shared cultural identity that explains why Europe has made them one of its most unique cultural institutions.
Thinking Europe
Europe has turned festivals into one of its great cultural institutions. The most relevant ones have not only presented some of the most important artists of their time; they have contributed to defining an idea of culture, have promoted creation, and have established a permanent dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity. It is at this moment when a festival stops being defined by its programming and begins to be defined by its mission.
Among all of them, the Salzburg Festival occupies a specially symbolic place. Founded in 1920 by Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Richard Strauss, it was born in a Europe devastated by the First World War with an ambition that transcended the performing arts. It was not just about organizing a great music and theater festival, but about contributing to rebuilding a shared idea of Europe through culture. Its founders understood that the arts could become a space for reconciliation, dialogue, and the future. A century later, Salzburg continues to remind us that a festival can be much more than artistic programming: it can be a way of thinking about culture and its role in society.
"Festivals began to build a cultural Europe before a true European cultural policy existed"
Other festivals have developed this same conviction from different sensibilities and missions. Jean Vilar imagined Avignon as a project of public culture, accessible and rooted in the city's historical spaces, capable of making universal repertoire coexist with contemporary dramaturgy. Aix-en-Provence consolidated a Mediterranean idea of a festival based on creative freedom and on the dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity. Bayreuth, for its part, continues to represent, one hundred and fifty years later, exceptional fidelity to an artistic idea. Different in their nature, all share the same conviction: cultural tradition only remains alive when it is capable of generating new interpretations.
After the Second World War, festivals acquired a new dimension. They became spaces for cultural reconstruction, for the circulation of ideas and for international cooperation long before Europe articulated a shared cultural policy. It is no coincidence that the European Festivals Association was born in 1952: more than a network of programs, it represented the conviction that culture could contribute to rebuilding a European consciousness based on dialogue, mutual recognition and the circulation of creators. In many ways, festivals began to build a cultural Europe before a true European cultural policy existed.
This mission has never been free of tensions. Every festival coexists with the need to find a balance between artistic demand and sustainability, between cultural responsibility and project viability. Programming what we already know will work is relatively simple. Maintaining a sustained commitment to creation, to risk and to languages that are still looking for their audience is a much more demanding decision. But it is precisely in this tension that festivals reveal their true relevance: their legacy is not measured only by the works they present, but also by those they help make possible. When a work is born, when a creator finds the confidence to take risks or when a new perspective transforms heritage, the festival has already fulfilled an essential part of its mission.
Making creation possible
The Perelada Festival participates in this same European cultural tradition, not from the desire to mirror any model, but from the conviction that every relevant festival must find its own way of contributing to culture. Peralada has built its response from Empordà and the Mediterranean, with an identity rooted in the territory and, at the same time, open to dialogue with Europe.
From its beginnings, the Perelada Festival has understood that its mission goes beyond presenting great artists in an exceptional heritage setting. Its ambition has been to create a space where creation can develop freely and where artists find the necessary confidence to take risks. This way of understanding the festival responds to a conviction that Carmen Mateu always defended and that has ended up defining Peralada's identity: festivals also exist to make creators' dreams possible.
Making creators' dreams possible is not a slogan. It is a way of understanding what a festival should be. The vision of festivals that leave a mark has historically been to generate authentic free zones for creation: spaces of trust where artists can take risks and even claim a certain praise of error as an essential part of any creative process. Because a festival's mission does not begin when the curtain rises, but much earlier: when it accompanies a work that does not yet exist, a creator who is still searching for their voice, or an intuition that does not yet know what it will become.
From this perspective, new creation commissions, co-productions, the recovery and reinterpretation of heritage, artistic residencies, the Easter Festival, and the Perelada Campus are understood. They are not independent programming lines, but different expressions of the same mission: to accompany creators, generate new opportunities, and contribute to making possible what does not yet exist.
"Preserving a legacy does not mean repeating it, but offering new readings, opening new paths, and giving space to the generations that must continue writing it"
Over forty years, the Perelada Festival has built its own identity without ever ceasing to renew its mission. Faithful to a tradition that has placed opera and dance at the center of its artistic project, it has also understood that preserving a legacy does not mean repeating it, but offering new readings, opening new paths, and giving space to the generations that must continue writing it. A festival only remains alive when it is capable of evolving while remaining faithful to its raison d'être.
This way of understanding a festival implies assuming that creation always involves a part of uncertainty. Programming what we already know will work is relatively simple; betting on a work that does not yet exist, on a language that is still looking for its audience, or on a creator who is still building their voice requires a different conviction. It is precisely in this capacity to assume risk that a festival ends up defining its identity. When it renounces risk, it also renounces an essential part of its mission.
Peralada participates in a deeply European cultural tradition, but expresses it from a Mediterranean sensibility, based on hospitality, on the proximity between artists and audiences, on the dialogue between disciplines, and on the conviction that the territory is not a backdrop, but an active part of the creative act. Empordà is the landscape from which the Festival has built its own way of understanding creation, reception, and dialogue between the arts. Perhaps this is its most singular contribution: not having wanted to be a replica of the great European festivals, but having built its own voice within this same tradition. Because legacy is not honored by repeating it, but by creating the conditions for it to remain alive.
Renewing the commitment
Anniversaries invite us to look back, but a festival can only celebrate them if they are also an invitation to look forward. The relevance of a cultural institution is not measured by the time it has been able to endure, but by its capacity to continue being necessary.
Being a festival today means defending the long term in an era fascinated by immediacy. It means reclaiming the value of creative processes, shared experience, and the encounter between artists and audiences at a time when almost everything seems oriented towards instant consumption. Perhaps this is its most necessary function today.
The responsibility of festivals is not only to present an excellent program. It is to create the conditions for creation to continue advancing, for new voices to emerge, for heritage to continue dialoguing with the present, and for artists to find spaces of freedom from which to imagine what does not yet exist.
Over forty years, the Perelada Festival has been updating this mission without ceasing to be faithful to the idea that saw it born. Formats, languages, creators, and audiences have changed. But the conviction remains the same: a festival is, above all, a place at the service of creation.
The great European festivals have endured because they have never confused tradition with repetition. They have understood that legacy is not a refuge, but a responsibility. Each generation is called to reinterpret it so that it remains alive.
This is also the challenge that the Perelada Festival faces today. To continue making risk a responsibility; to continue generating spaces of trust for creators; to continue dialoguing with Europe from its Mediterranean identity; to continue understanding that a festival is not only a place where works are presented, but a place where they can begin to exist.
Perhaps this is, after all, the reason why festivals continue to be necessary. Not because they accumulate editions, nor because they preserve a tradition, but because they continue to offer a space where creation can find the time, freedom, and trust it needs to exist. This has been, from day one, the ambition of the Perelada Festival. And it continues to be, forty years later, its invitation to the journey.