Friday 16 to Sunday 25 May
Visit the overall festival with as much as 40% discount!
€309 instead of €515
Friday 16 to Sunday 18 May
Visit the opening weekend with as many 30% discount!
€151 instead of €215Â
Friday 23 to Sunday 25 May
Visit the closing weekend with as much as 30% discount!
€ 119 instead of € 170Â
For ten years in green Zeist, listen to the richness that songs have to offer us. Songs that so often sing of that same greenery and touch us with their stories. Next year, therefore, nature itself will be our protagonist. Because we live in nature and its nature. And what better way for song to do this than to propound to us each time that one question: how do we relate to ourselves and our origins? For the 2026 festival, we therefore chose the theme Back to nature.
BACK TO NATURE
A quick glance at the news tells us about heat records, fallen climate agreements, wildfires and rising sea levels. At the same time, we are tempted by advertisements inviting us to go out and indulge in nature holidays in forests, on beaches and in the mountains. After all, we are looking for the relief that makes us forget, even if only for a moment, our hectic lives. It marks our complicated relationship with nature and the environment. To the world we live in and are part of. 'Umwelt' is aptly called that in German. It encompasses everything that surrounds us: nature and ourselves.
Back to nature is also the title of a poem by Rutger Kopland. In Nunspeet, the first stanza can be read as a wall poem close to the railway station:
There was a man, I won't say who
he was, who loved nature,
At least he thought so, because he had
Heard there was so much to find there,
the silence, freedom, joy and yourself
and so on. Enough in any case to get there
once to go. *
The next line of the poem reads, "And when he finished his sandwiches? In the stanzas after that, the poet questions our attitude towards nature. Is nature just a place 'where there is so much to find' that we should go there sometime? Do we then find silence, freedom and joy and ourselves? Or do we also bear responsibility for it and influence it?
FRIDAY 15 TO SUNDAY 24 MAY 2026: INTERNATIONAL SONG FESTIVAL ZEIST
From Friday 15 to Sunday 24 May, we will explore our relationship with nature and how our human nature sees it. Because nature is not a 'recreational park' where we can stay for entertainment and relaxation. We are part of it and can 'make' and break it. Nature is also the inspiration for countless beautiful songs from the past to the present that hold up a mirror to us. For when he finished his sandwiches, the man in the poem heard the rain, smelt the grass under his feet, the laughter of people and "the voice of mother / owl crying in the elms and calling / for him.
Join us and listen to the voice of nature!
Henk Neven and Hans Eijsackers
* from: Rutger Kopland. Poems. Amsterdam, Van Oorschot, 1999
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