A committee of distinguished musicians, among them Ferruccio Busoni, Joseph Haas, Hans Pfitzner, Arthur Nikisch and Richard Strauss, met in 1921 to discuss possible formats for the event.

[4] Three years later, guest composers included Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Josef Matthias Hauer, who were among the main representatives of the Viennese twelve-tone technique.

With experimental forms of music and art such as Oskar Schlemmer's 'Triadic Ballet', the festival encompassed an increasingly wide range of activities and became more and more attractive to avant-garde composers and performers alike.

A cooperative agreement between the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden and its orchestra shifted the program emphasis to larger orchestral works.

In 1951, Olivier Messiaen and his student Pierre Boulez offered new compositions,[7] along with older works by Hindemith and Béla Bartók.