The Birgit Nilsson Prize 2025: A Celebration of Many Voices

In 2025, the world’s largest award in classical music — the Birgit Nilsson Prize — made history. For the first time, it honoured not an individual artist or orchestra, but a festival: the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, one of today’s most vibrant homes for contemporary opera.

Aix has become a place where composers, writers, performers and audiences meet to reshape the future of the art form. The jury singled out Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence — a multilingual, deeply human exploration of guilt, loss and connection, premiered at Aix in 2021 — as a defining example of that artistic courage.

In this feature, Breandáin O’Shea travels to Stockholm to discover how the Birgit Nilsson Prize celebrates music as a collective achievement. With insights from Paul Hermelin, Susanne Rydén, Sir George Benjamin and Sofi Oksanen, the story reveals how opera thrives when many voices shape its path forward.