From Beethoven to Ø – The past echoes at Ultima 2025

A route to Ultima 2025

The future doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. Voices, ideas, and experiences from the past inspire—and are challenged—in this year’s festival programme.

In Wayne McGregor’s opera-ballet Jocasta’s Line, we encounter both Igor Stravinsky and an even older legacy: Greek mythology, alongside new music by Samy Moussa. Dancer Tale Dolven and pianist Alain Franco rediscover Beethoven’s piano sonatas in In this time, through movement, conversation, and contemporary expression. Composers Sarah Nemtsov (in And Fear of Loss Will Not Oppress Your Heart) and Jörg Widmann (in Widmann & Beethoven) also turn to Beethoven—captivated by his free forms and radical spirit.

The Western canon is examined critically with both humour and gravity by Trond Reinholdtsen / The Norwegian Opra in HISTORY DOES NOT EXIST, a performance that radically questions whether history exists at all.

What do we inherit? What do we reject? What do we reinvent?

Join the artists at Ultima 2025 as they make the past resonate and trace the path towards what has yet to come.