At Streichquartettfest 2025, the 20th anniversary of the festival, three distinctive and very individual composers came together: Helmut Lachenmann, Béla Bartók and Ludwig van Beethoven.

With the great contemporary Helmut Lachenmann, who celebrates his 90th birthday in 2025, the pioneer of New Music Béla Bartók and the late Ludwig van Beethoven, the programme featured three composers from different eras. Their works show how much music has changed over the centuries, how dramatic the upheavals and spurts of innovation have been.

At the same time, the three composers share a common spirit of artistic freedom. They all used the string quartet as a place for radical innovation: Bartók and Beethoven broke away from traditional forms and Lachenmann also completely redefined the genre. In his commentary on the second string quartet "Reigen seliger Geister" (1989), he reflects on how he transferred his "Musique concrète instrumentale" to the string quartet for the first time in the 1970s with "Gran Torso". At the time, the string quartet was considered bourgeois and reactionary in avant-garde circles, which is why progressive composers such as Wolfgang Rihm and Lachenmann's teacher Luigi Nono avoided this form in order to avoid encountering resistance in the new music scene. But Lachenmann dared to rethink the string quartet. His music demands a completely new approach to sound and instrument from musicians and listeners.