»A little dark, a little dreamy...«

Nils Mönkemeyer has long been associated with Bonn through his own festival »Klassik für alle«. At the 2024 Beethovenfest, he for the first time contributed his ideas for more participation through the Sponsorship Ticket. 2026 he returns for the Long Concert Night.

I don’t know exactly whether you actually choose the instrument yourself or the instrument chooses you. What I say with the music is more or less how I hear music inside. That then comes out through the instrument and other people hear it. And there has to be a correspondence in between. The way I perceive music is like the sound of the viola: a bit dark and sometimes a bit dreamy. The viola is never completely direct, but actually very friendly.

You hold and play the viola just like the violin. With the violin, at least for me, it’s like this: I have relatively long arms. When I stretch out my arm and put a viola in it, everything is in the right place. With the violin, I always didn’t know where to put my arms and my body. That’s why I always felt a bit like a giant with a miniature instrument. And then I got the viola! It’s a bit like the cello: the low notes produce a kind of vibration. When I play, I can feel it all over my body and I find that very, very beautiful. That’s why the viola was much more physical and bodily for me than the violin.

There is nothing in particular, but I am very happy to be part of Beethovenfest. I think that with this renewal that has taken place here, there are so many exciting programmes and a spirit of openness and exploration. I find that totally exciting. Of course I hope that I am part of something new happening, that something is created for the audience that perhaps wasn’t there before in this form, that people take something away with them.

There is perhaps nothing more democratic than music. Music has this incredible advantage of starting outside of language. When I talk to people in the audience, for example, there are bound to be things that separate us. With music, you just brush that aside and it doesn’t matter at all. That’s why I think the concert hall is democratic in the deepest sense. I think it’s a beautiful symbol that the Democracy Music Festival brings music to all these places that are characterised by the goal of finding a consensus together.

For a while, it really annoyed me that there was a lot of larmoyance behind the scenes in the music market. Along the lines of »people aren’t coming to the concerts any more« and so on. I thought: enough of this complaining. We simply have to do something. I currently live in Munich. This city is extremely expensive. That was my first thought: the cost of going to a concert is too high for many people. That’s why I think the Pay What You Can pricing model for the concerts at the Democracy Music Festival in 2024 were a great idea.

In principle, this is also the idea behind the Sponsorship Tickets that I developed in the »Klassik für Alle« (»Classical Music for All«) project with Caritas in Bonn. These are concert tickets for people from the Caritas clientele. Any person or company can donate tickets and the system then distributes them to those in need. At the 2026 Beethovenfest, there will also be the opportunity to donate sponsorship tickets for four concerts.