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Lucerne: Music Festival Sui Generis
| Article
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15752 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
2,153 Words |
| Author
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Andrew Clark
Andrew Clark is a broadcaster and critic living in Switzerland. |
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
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