In Europe there is no festival like it: Lucerne quite simply has the most spectacular scenery, the most concentrated lineup of leading international musicians, and the smoothest festival organization. Cradled in an idyllic Alpine lakeside setting, this bustling Swiss city--where Richard Wagner settled in the 1860s and wrote some of his finest music--has in recent months been celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its international music festival. Like most anniversaries, it has been an occasion to celebrate the past and the present, as well as to look to the future--to the 1989 festival's focus on Russian music, plans for a new top-class concert hall, and a rising young generation of soloists and conductors.
Lucerne has never followed the formulas of other leading European festivals. It is essentially a concert festival, based on the German Romantic repertoire but taking all other schools of music, new and old, within its grasp. It receives barely a cent of public subsidy, but never seems to have any difficulty balancing its books regularly around $2.6 million. It always chooses a theme to provide an artistic link in its annual program, but never applies it too rigidly. It recognizes that a festival's reputation rests on the musical personalities who are seen to return year after year.
The festival's program booklets of the past fifty years are a virtual compendium of the great names in twentieth-century musical life. It all started in 1938. The Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet was looking for summer work for the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, which he had founded in Geneva twenty years earlier; the Lucerne city authorities saw the chance to develop a full-fledged festival out of the occasional concerts that had been given during the summer holiday season in previous years. The international element in that first year was provided by Arturo Toscanini, who gave a gala concert on August 25, 1938, at the Wagner house at Tribschen (where the Siegfried Idyll had been composed and first performed), followed by another at the Lucerne Kunsthaus, the city's main concert hall.
Early Years
In the early years, the festival was shaped as much by political as musical events. After the German occupation of Austria and its incorporation in the Third Reich, Salzburg came under Nazi influence, and for many personalities in the world of music it was no longer possible, either for reasons of conscience or because of their ethnic origins, to take part in the festival there or at Bayreuth. Toscanini, a fierce opponent of all totalitarian regimes, had already turned his back on Mussolini's Italy and emigrated to the United States. He rejected invitations from Salzburg and Bayreuth--and Lucerne stepped into the breach, attracting several other leading musicians in the process. In its early years, the festival was seen by its participants as a way of defending the spiritual values embodied in Europe's great musical tradition and of reflecting Switzerland's cultural heritage of tolerance, freedom, and diversity.
The success of that opening year persuaded the organizers to put the festival on a permanent footing. Toscanini returned in 1939, and four years later the festival formed its own orchestra, drawn from the main Swiss concert and theater orchestras. To this day the Swiss Festival Orchestra remains the only musical ensemble in Switzerland to draw its members from all around the nation, working every summer on
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