Between September 2 and September 12, 2004, the City of Seville will be the host of the first "Seville International Music Festival".
The production of Bizet's widely popular opera "Carmen" will provide the culminating and crowning-star event in a series of cultural and tourism promotional events planned for that occasion. Included are orchestral concerts, recitals, and flamenco shows with top interpreters.

Classical music lovers from around the world will have the option to attend not only individual performances but also to book different "cycles" which ensure the visitor optimal seating and an attractive discounts.


NEW! August 10, 2004
The declaration from the City of Seville guaranteeing the Sevilla International Music Festival for 2005! www.sevilla.org
Statement from the city hall - English translation

Official Letter from Mr. Alfredo Sanchez Monteseirín
Mayor of Seville

Ladies and gentlemen, Dear Friends;

First of all I would like to express my warm welcome to all of you, who have come from other places of Spain and the whole world.

History has reserved to Seville a curious fate: During our "golden century", this city became in an effective way an original global enclosure, the place where fue oId and the new world would meet. The decadence experienced during the next centuries would not erase, and this is the curious fact, the name of Seville from tbe collective universal imagination.

On the contrary, it made the personality of our city even more attractive which, despite it was not eitber admired or envied because of its economic importance as a metropolis, it would become a mythical and evocate scenery where to set the action of a number of stories which, as the city itself, have become universal.

Carmen, Don Juan, Fidelio, The Barber of Seville... All of them are part of that group of myths that has it cradle in Seville.

The opera that will be performed in the next month of September is, witbout any doubt, the most rooted one in the popular Sevillian symbols.

I mean the cigar makers, working women who would have enjoyed a certain economic independence from tbeir men, and, because of that would have deveIoped a strong personality, and a way of behaving that placed them beyond tbe common women of tbeir times. Professor Alain Tourain would tell us, some months ago, the evidence that we have passed from an industrial revoIution to the cultural one together from the hand of the women.

Some of this way of acting is still kept, and we can see it when we see nowadays the workers of the factory struggling to keep in Seville this historical feature.

I believe that today there is a hopeful future to place Seville as a reference in the intemational agenda of cultural events: The magic of our city, the attraction of Seville, its myths and realities. .. Would help much. We would like to strengthen culture in Seville and Andalusia.

Together with the Intemational Music Festival, we have the 25th anniversary of the Flamenco Biennale. And the new Biennale of Contemporary Art. And a new organisation of our Film Festival, so in a few month's time we will see how Seville bets to become an international cultural focus.

Here we have capacity of organisation, wonderful infrastructures, , creativity and a great imagination. But above all, I would like to remark how the city is eager to host such events gain, in the universal atlas of culture, so in this sense the next Cultural Autumn will be of great importance.

Nothing could please me more, as mayor of the city, on behalf of its citizens, than inviting you all to come, enjoy, and fall in love with Sevilla.

Thank you very much,

Alfredo Sanchez Monteseirín
Mayor of Seville