Masquerades playing with foreign countries and distant cultures are as old as the discovery of those countries. Reports of adventurous journeys and the rare and pre-cious goods brought back to Europe inspire the imagination about the exotic. Mer-chants are lured by gold and spices, the maps become ever more precise and the learned men studying them become aware of more and more distant and exciting shores. Empires that were for centuries peacefully governed by wisdom suddenly appear. A faraway paradise.

Three spheres inspire the Europeans to dream of distance: Asia, that was visited by European missionaries, the new world that was conquered by the Spanish and the black continent, Africa. Chinoiserie, Aztec gold and arabesque, the exotic constantly influenced fashion, architecture and handcraft and many masterpieces are a result of its examination in musical terms: from the Turkish, the Indian and the Chinese op-eras in the 17th and 18th century via Oriental masquerades such as Rimsky-Korsakovs »Sheherazade« up to Debussy playing with Far-Eastern flavours in the 20th century.

Carl Heinrich Graun’s opera »Montezuma« is based on an idea by Friedrich II. Tak-ing the production of the opera and the many architectural depictions of the exotic in Potsdam as their inspiration, Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci 2010 follow the de-sire for distant places and discover how it has influenced music from the renaissance until the 20th century. And very soon one realizes that Europe has merely moved its utopias to faraway places.