Carsten Schmidt keeps three harpsichords, three cellos, two fortepianos, and one Steinway in his Staunton house. That is not a metaphor for how seriously he takes music. It is a literal inventory of what a person accumulates over nearly three decades of running a classical music festival that started, by his own account, without any plan at all.
In 1998 Schmidt, a German-born harpsichordist who had settled in the Shenandoah Valley, invited some friends from Europe to visit for what he has described as a casual house party built around music. There was no institutional backing and barely a budget. “There was really no budget,” Schmidt told WMRA on the festival’s twentieth anniversary. “The budget was maybe $500 and most of it went towards beer.”
What a House Party Becomes After Twenty-Eight Years
This August, the Staunton Music Festival returns for its 28th season, running August 15 through August 23, and the operation Schmidt now runs bears almost no resemblance to that first gathering except in spirit. The festival draws more than 90 professional musicians from around the world for roughly 30 concerts across ten days, filling a rotation of downtown venues that includes the Blackfriars Playhouse, Silver Line Theatre, and Central United Methodist Church. Travel and Leisure has called it, without much argument from anyone in the classical music press, Virginia’s world-class music festival.
What hasn’t changed is Schmidt’s specific taste for friction. Jason Stell, the festival’s executive director, has described Schmidt’s programming philosophy as a deliberate embrace of contrast, pairing a staged Handel oratorio with a cabaret night, or a familiar Mozart symphony against a piece almost nobody in the room will have heard before. “He loves programs that challenge and shock you a little bit,” Stell has said. Schmidt is unapologetic about the mix. “The broader your spectrum,” he has said, “the more enriched you are.”
This Year’s Bill
The 2026 season opens Saturday, August 15, with an all-Baroque afternoon program built around Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4, timed deliberately for 3 p.m. rather than evening, in what the festival’s own program notes describe as an attempt to beat the worst of the August heat. The festival’s featured guest artist this year is JP Jofre, a Grammy-nominated Argentine composer and bandoneon player praised by Great Performers at Lincoln Center as one of the leading artists of his generation. Jofre appears across six separate events during the ten-day run, including a free conversation and performance at Central United Methodist Church on August 17 and a late-night program of tango and Spanish repertoire.
Elsewhere on the bill: Jake Heggie’s one-act opera “For a Look or a Touch,” staged at Silver Line Theatre under director Timothy Nelson, and a closing weekend built around Mozart, with the festival’s Summer Festival finale on August 23 leading into a full concert performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni that same evening. Most days open with a free noon concert, a structural holdover from the festival’s earliest years, before the ticketed evening programs begin.
The Part That Doesn’t Show Up in the Program Notes
What the printed schedule doesn’t capture is how deliberately small-scale the whole operation still is by design. Every festival venue is intimate, the largest holding around 600 people, and the festival’s own promotional materials lean on that scale rather than apologize for it. Musicians are booked less through agents than through personal relationships and recommendations from other performers Schmidt already trusts, a booking philosophy that has held since the years when the whole roster fit in Schmidt’s living room.
Stell, who first came to the festival as a performer in a Renaissance vocal group in the early 2000s before moving to Staunton with his family in 2006 and eventually taking on the festival’s administrative work, has put it plainly: the whole enterprise still runs on one person’s specific, occasionally contrarian musical imagination. “He has years’ worth of programs in his head,” Stell has said of Schmidt.
A $500 beer budget in 1998 turned into an internationally attended ten-day festival. That’s an improbable outcome for a small city in the Shenandoah Valley, but Staunton has a way of doing this. A theater company that started as college students touring rural high schools became a Blackfriars Playhouse that draws Shakespeare audiences from across the country. A harpsichordist’s house party became a festival that fills Beverley Street with 90 visiting musicians every August. Tickets for individual concerts run $25, with passes and free programs also available, and the full schedule is posted at stauntonmusicfestival.org.