ARD Music Competition faces shortened future
NewsGermany’s most influential competition is facing existential cuts and insecurities from its broadcast owner.
Cuts in public broadcast funding mean that ARD’s current contribution of 740,000 euros will be slashed to 370,000 euros in 2025, according to the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation (BR) which has organised the event since 1952.
BR aims to increase its contribution to offset the loss of ARD funds but they will soon discuss how the competition will continue from 2026 onwards. ‘2025 is secured and 2026 is not cancelled,’ said BR spokesman Markus Huber in response to a question about the future of the event. The number of categories, which change every year, will drop from four to three. In addition, according to BR, three subjects will probably have to be dropped from the competition altogether. Organ, guitar and wind quintet are under discussion.
Report here from Robert Braunmüller.
Pictured: 2022 Winner Yubeen Kim
A short contribution to the discussion about the guitar – Tom Wolfe on Leonard Bernstein’s dream, or vision, as he saw himself in front of an orchestra, had a grand piano on the side of his podium, but he sits on a chair and picks a guitar: “A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are for the Learn-to-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ fourteen-year-olds of Levittown!”
The idea that music can be reduced to a ‘competition’ is demeaning and ridiculous. “Your artistic vision is much superior to other competitors” or “Your ability to play many more notes per minute that others wins you the prize!” Banish them all.
German state media, financed by mandatory fees which everyone living on German territory has to pay, will continue to spend hundreds of millions of euros for their really well paid managers and officials, all of them political appointees. Cutting their income has never been even heard of. And there’s also always enough money for acquiring sports rights, credible sources are speaking of hundreds of millions (leaving that business completely to private competitors is nearly unthinkable in Germany as the bloated sports coverage is a core point of the oversized state media’s raison d’être).