Attention Wagnerians of Catalonia: The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra returns to Barcelona.

PeraladaMajor news for lovers of Richard Wagner's music. On August 29, 2026, the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, an absolute benchmark ensemble in the Wagnerian repertoire and considered one of the best opera orchestras in the world, will perform at the Palau de la Música, fourteen years after its last visit to Catalonia. The concert will mark the beginning of a historic tour that will take the German ensemble to various venues in Spain, also coinciding with the closing ceremony of the 40th anniversary of the Perelada Festival.

The tour, conducted by maestro Pablo Heras-Casado and promoted by Katharina Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter and current director of the Bayreuth Festival, will tour venues such as the Palacio de la Música in Valencia, the Santander International Festival, the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, and the Teatro Real in Madrid. Each performance will include a selection of excerpts from the tetralogy. The Ring of the Nibelung, the composer's magnum opus, with some emblematic moments from the four operas (The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods), performed by a cast of soloists yet to be announced.

This will be the first time in history that the Bayreuth Festival ensemble, founded by Wagner himself in 1876, will offer a multi-city tour of a foreign country. The ensemble, which has a tradition of more than a century and a half of wisdom, knowledge and devotion to the music of the German genius, has until now given occasional performances on venues all over the world (such as the Gran Teatre del Liceu, 1955 and 2012), but not one tour with different stops. The reason is that it's an orchestra with a truly unique idiosyncrasy that makes it difficult to balance schedules and calendars: it doesn't have a permanent roster, but rather is made up of the best musicians from orchestras across Europe, who gather every August to perform Wagner's operas at the legendary Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, a world theater.

An orchestra that inherits "a 150-year artistic and musical tradition"

At the presentation of the tour at Perelada Castle, the director of the Perelada Festival, Oriol Aguilà, the main driving force behind the initiative, highlighted: "Today is a memorable day for music and for our country. A group of festivals, auditoriums and theatres united to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Bayreuth Festival is an org. For his part, Joan Oller, general director of the Palacio de la Música, recalled the institution's long Wagnerian tradition and described the concert as "a historic event that connects with the musical and architectural roots of the Palau".

The Granada-born conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, who speaks Catalan thanks to his brief stint conducting the Girona Orchestra between 2003 and 2005, highlighted "the unique pedigree" of the Festival Orchestra, "a group made up of musicians of an excellent technical level, as well as knowledge capable of playing any piece of music by heart". Wagner, heirs to a 150-year-old artistic and sound tradition that is passed down from generation to generation." The director, who after the acclaimed Parsifal In Bayreuth he will conduct a new one Tetralogy At the festival in 2028, he expressed his excitement at "being able to bring this mystical sound outside the sacred hill of the Bayreuth Theatre and share it with the Spanish public."

Katharina Wagner, in turn, expressed her satisfaction at being able to celebrate the festival's anniversary in a country "with such a Wagnerian tradition." "The musicians have enthusiastically agreed to be part of this tour. It's not usual for us to leave our stage, but the collaboration with Perelada and Heras-Casado has made it possible," she remarked.