Gustavo Dudamel

Music & Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic

You gave us a home

Estimados amigos y colegas de Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland, 

For seventy-five years, you kept the pulse of humanity beating in harmony. 

When Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland was born from the quiet ruins of a fractured world, yours was a radical and beautiful defiance: to place an instrument in the hands of the young and declare that the future would sing, not be silenced. 

For me, this anniversary is a deeply personal celebration. I look back with immense gratitude to the year 2000, when you opened your doors and your hearts to welcoma a young Venezuelan orchestra for our very first historic tours across Germany. You gave us a stage, but more than that, you gave us a home. Through your vision – and through your prestigious prizes and plattforms you bestow upon the next generation – you have continuously proven that music never merely an ornament of culture. It is an act of shelter. 

We share the profound conviction that an orchestra is not just a musical ensemble, but a living, breathing vehicle of social transformation. It is a microcosm of an ideal society – a space where  diverse voices must listen  to one another with intense devotion to achieve harmony, where individual discipline transforms into collective joy, and where  art belongs to the human soul as a fundamental right, not a privilege.