The Baalbek International Festivals marked their 70th anniversary in 2026 away from their historic amphitheatres, as the festival foundation held a retrospective celebration week on the campus of the American University of Beirut after security conditions in Lebanon forced another absence from the Roman temples in the Bekaa Valley.
The event brought back voices and faces that shaped the festival’s history, while silence hung over a site that had long hosted performances by Fairuz, Wadih El Safi, Umm Kulthum, Miles Davis and others. Its beginnings date to the mid-1950s, when Lebanon, having gained independence, was seeking to forge a cultural identity for the young state and secure a place for itself on the region’s and the world’s tourism and cultural maps.
The Baalbek Festival is established with Lebanese state support
The project began to take shape in 1955 through the hosting of theatrical performances in cooperation with the General Directorate of Antiquities. In 1956, the festival acquired an official and national character with direct support from then Lebanese President Camille Chamoun. Foreign participation dominated the first edition, which hosted the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, alongside French and British theatre companies.
This approach formed part of a political and cultural vision that sought to establish Lebanon’s image as the “Switzerland of the East”, presenting Beirut as a centre for finance, banking, journalism and publishing, and turning Baalbek into a cultural and tourist destination reflecting openness to Western arts and providing a space where multiple civilisations could meet.
The Lebanese Nights build a local artistic identity
But the dominance of Western music and theatre at the outset prompted the festival’s founders to seek a local presence that would go beyond hosting arts from abroad. This approach gave rise to the “Lebanese Nights” in 1957, a project that went beyond adding a local item to the performance programme and sought to build an artistic image of a national identity capable of representing Lebanon on stage.
Those nights brought the details of life in Lebanese villages to the spaces between the Roman columns, from embroidered dresses, gathering and harvest seasons to weddings, dabke dances and folk songs.
Everyday popular elements were transformed into a modern theatrical language led by the brothers Assi and Mansour Rahbani, with the participation of Fairuz, whose voice became one of the most prominent features associated with the Baalbek stage and its artistic memory. Over time, the performances moved beyond spontaneous folk displays towards a fully developed dramatic structure and musical theatre.
This experience produced works that left a mark on the Lebanese and Arab consciousness, including “The Season of Glory”, “The Baalbekiya”, “The Bridge of the Moon”, “The Days of Fakhreddine” and “Mount Al-Sawan”. The space also attracted poets who helped shape a new language for the heritage, including Said Akl, Joseph Harb and Michel Trad. The Rahbani school was not the only force re-presenting Lebanese heritage.
Composer and director Romeo Lahoud, with his “Al Anwar” troupe, offered a different visual and musical treatment, moving heritage into a more spectacular space less tied to the conventions of classical theatrical staging. This approach helped broaden the forms of local performance at the festival and show the various possibilities for turning popular material into contemporary artistic production.
At a later stage, choreographer Abdel-Halim Caracalla pushed Lebanese movement heritage towards experimentation and international reach by combining dabke and popular movement techniques with ballet and dance theatre. In a number of his works, Caracalla drew on the poetic worlds of the poet Talal Haidar, bringing together text and movement in performances that reshaped the presence of heritage on stage.
Together, these experiments changed the concept of “Lebanese heritage” within the arts. What had been an everyday social and rural practice became carefully designed national material and a theatrical language that could be presented beyond its original setting.
Baalbek opens its amphitheatres to international arts
Over time, the theatrical formulation itself acquired the status of a reference point. The experiment began by searching for heritage suitable for presentation and ended by producing an image of heritage created by the stage and helped to entrench it. Alongside consolidating the Lebanese presence, Baalbek opened its stages to classical and experimental global artistic currents, becoming a meeting point between Cairo, Beirut, Paris and New York.
Its amphitheatres hosted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, while jazz experiments arrived with Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, alongside singer Ella Fitzgerald’s improvisations, in a programme that did not confine internationalism to a single artistic form. The diversity extended to dance, with choreographer Maurice Béjart and his “Ballet of the 20th Century” troupe, which re-examined the conventions of classical dance and pushed ballet towards contemporary theatre.
In 1968, the Temple of Bacchus witnessed one of the festival’s landmark moments when Umm Kulthum, known as the “Star of the East”, sang there in a concert that gave Arabic song a presence equal to that of major Western arts and cemented Baalbek’s position as a meeting place for the arts of East and West. Yet the festival’s course remained linked to fluctuations in Lebanon’s situation.
Wars interrupt the festival’s course and delay its return
In the summer of 1975, preparations were under way for the Rahbani brothers’ play “Alissar, Queen of Carthage”, and the costumes were awaiting Fairuz, before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war led to the sets being torn apart and the performance cancelled. The war brought down the curtain on the first golden era, and the festival entered an interruption that lasted 22 years.
Baalbek resumed its activities in 1997, reopening with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the Radio France Orchestra and the Caracalla troupe. The return came at a time when artistic tastes had changed, with pop and world music gaining a larger presence alongside opera, confronting the festival with a musical scene different from the one that had preceded the civil war. Interruptions returned later with the country’s crises.
In the summer of 2006, the July War scuppered Fairuz’s long-awaited return in the play “Goodnight”. As the repercussions of the Syrian war intensified and drew closer to the Bekaa region, organisers moved the performances for the 2013 and 2014 seasons to Beirut, holding them away from the festival’s historic site.
The repercussions continued in 2026, so the 70th anniversary was not held in its original home, with the celebrations limited to the retrospective event in Beirut.
The interruptions and returns of the Baalbek Festivals have thus become a parallel record of the milestones of Lebanon’s modern history, from their establishment in the 1950s to the latest seasons of absence.
