Opening speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the 150th anniversary of the Münchner Opernfestspiele

Munich, 26 June 2025

It is a pleasure to be here at the Munich Opera Festival.

This festival draws on a tradition that stretches back 150 years. And over the next five weeks, audiences will experience a rich variety of performances.

The programme includes some of opera’s canonical heavyweights, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But it also ventures into rarer territory, with works such as Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae.

But one work especially caught my eye: Fauré’s Pénélope, which will be performed at the Bavarian State Opera for the first time at this year’s festival.^[1]

Now, I can already hear some members of the audience thinking: “Well, of course she chooses the French one.” Yes, but I would like to highlight Pénélope for an entirely different reason.

It is the perfect distillation of European culture – both past and present.

It is a story based on a…