When we have the culture of excellence, we do not praise mediocrity despite the circumstances facing us with the crisis, unless it is necessary to recall the state of this country, a country in way of collapse, even for its culture. The finding is all the harder as this show was indeed unique this year, with no possibility of making up for it.

Baalbeck is Bacchus: this visual and auditory delight with in particular the foreign philharmonic orchestras, the ballets, the concerts which occur for once in Lebanon for lack of a serious alternative on the spot and catch oneself dreaming of being in a another world, the time of a show.

Baalbeck is Venus or love: it was Rostropovich who celebrated a few years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rediscovered unity of Europe, the rediscovered coexistence of Lebanon, this country-message formerly in civil war, with an improvisation against the background of the song of the call to prayer of a muezzin who had previously interrupted him and thus mingling West and East as in a new honeymoon.

Baalbeck is Jupiter or pride and impertinence, especially when Madame Hraoui was booed because she was late and delayed the opening show by as much. It was Béjart and his avant-garde ballets that surprised the whole world and well-meaning minds here. It is also Johnny Hallyday, formerly banned from staying in Lebanon in the 1960s until being turned back at the airport and which was finally able to occur under the columns of the temple of Jupiter in the 2000s.

Baalbeck is the grandeur of a country beyond its borders which radiates and not the smallness of a country which withdraws into mediocrity as we know it daily.

Baalbeck, it was obviously good … before

If the excuse was to offer young local artists the opportunity to succeed in the shade of the lions of the bas-reliefs, the organizers instead offered them the spectacle of a collective artistic suicide where we quickly had to skip quickly on social networks or on television to stop the massacre so as not to even mention the rest. They could thus have called on great Lebanese artists like M, Mika, Hiba Tawaji, Ibrahim Maalouf and many others, to learn and to give these young people the opportunity to succeed in seducing us with them on stage. They would certainly not have refused to be at the service of their country … and nay!

If it was necessary to discover different artistic sites, the format was not the right one. Rather, it was necessary to explain the history or importance of the places and not expose them to new nameless whining unless it is a new type of sacrifice 2.0 offered to the old gods to obtain their benevolence in the great course of the sacrifices of the Great Temple of Jupiter in order to improve the current situation of crisis in the country.

Perhaps this is the very pious wish of the organizers … who seem to have exhausted all their bag of tricks and who should pass the torch to new blood which alone could save this monument that is the festival today in agony.

And better, they could have spared us and thus retain a memory of greatness that was ours.

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