The Morgenland Festival Osnabrück was founded in 2005 and, within a short time, achieved an outstanding reputation amongst the international music festivals.

The Morgenland Festival presents the music culture of the Near and Middle East, from traditional music to avant-garde, from “classical” music to hip-hop.

The festival received extraordinary resonance from both audiences and the press, not least due to the guest appearance of the Teheran Symphony Orchestra in Germany (with works by Persian composers as well as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Frank Zappa) and the return visit of the Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra to Teheran.
Newspapers and media from all over the world such as the New York Times and the Hindu Post, the Australian News and the Syria Times carried reports about the Morgenland Festival.

The project grew from a desire to juxtapose the horror images in the media with positive impressions of a region which boasts an impressively lively culture. Here in this part of the world, people’s knowledge of Arabic and Persian culture is still startlingly scant. This is surprising, when one considers that this region of the Middle East is one of the most important cradles of our own culture. The three monotheistic religions originated here and modern-day “western” music has its roots here. Most of our music instruments have their origins in the Arabian and Persian region and later came to Western Europe via Andalusia and Sicily.
The Morgenland Festival would like to impart impressions and knowledge about a culture which is of immense importance for the history of the world – a culture which, because of immigrants, is also alive in Germany, although it is mostly isolated from local cultural life.