This Festival began with an act of reclamation: opera has been performed in this very amphitheater as far back as the 1920s, and we have now returned to a tradition that was first silenced by war, then shadowed by the moral wreckage of its Nazi-era incarnation. And we have returned on our own terms. We believe art’s role is to build bridges when politics burns them, and the long, quiet marginalization of German-language opera in postwar Poland has been a cultural impoverishment we are now reversing. We also feel a responsibility to the forgotten: too many Polish works, too many European masterpieces, gather dust simply because no commercial logic could justify the risk of staging, and we refuse to let that remain the only logic that counts. None of this is easy in a country without a deep tradition of private arts patronage, and we will not pretend otherwise – this has been and remains an act of faith, sustained by passion more than by precedent. But the single most powerful argument Baltic Opera Festival is the venue itself: an open-air amphitheatre dissolves, as if by magic, everything that makes opera feel forbidding – the dress codes, the hushed intimidation, the sense that you must already belong to deserve a seat – and gives it back to everyone. We want the person who has loved Wagner for forty years and the person who has never heard an aria in their life to sit side by side, equally welcome, equally moved. We have been honored to see that happen night after summer night. 

At Sopot’s historic Forest Opera, exceptional art meets the living presence of nature in a setting unlike any other. The great outdoors becomes an integral part of each performance – an unseen force shaping every note, every gesture. Year after year, Baltic Opera Festival returns to this space to draw out its full promise: architecture, open sky, and natural acoustics entwined to form something rare and elemental. In this meeting of the crafted and the wild, each production gains a new depth, and every emotion finds a fuller voice. It is simultaneously a formidable logistical feat and an irresistible artistic temptation: conductors and directors both seek to invite the forest in. Here, art is no longer a mere spectacle, but a primeval  summons to reflection.