From the local narrow to the cosmopolitan

He is undoubtedly one of the most profound connoisseurs of the Lucerne Festival: Erich Singer, who worked for the Festival from 1980 as head of the artistic office and editor of the program booklets. A positive as well as a negative circumstance, because anyone who is so close to an institution finds it difficult to maintain a critical distance.

We have been waiting a long time for the result of Singer's research, and now it is finally here under the title Lucerne Festival - From Toscanini to AbbadoA comprehensive, highly bibliophile "tome" of 400 pages with countless, previously unknown illustrations that you can linger over for hours - one of the great advantages of this festival history.

After reading the detailed text, however, one has to ask oneself where an interpretative author is at work and where this claim ends. Until the end of the Ulrich Meyer-Schoellkopf era, Singer more or less chooses the individual seasons as a structuring principle, presents programs for discussion or focuses on the debuts of important conductors or soloists. In the Matthias Bamert era, the design changes, with Singer now setting thematic priorities: "Festival within the Festival", "Composer in Residence" or "Late-Night Concerts" are the headlines. These are innovations that Bamert has introduced during his time in Lucerne.

This is followed by the "special year 1997", the demolition of the Kunsthaus and the guest performance in Emmen. Here, Singer suddenly has personalities interviewed by him, such as Bamert and Toni Krein, then head of the artistic office, tell their stories. A principle that the author also applies to the following "Gegenwart" from 1998 onwards, where he lets Artistic Director Michael Häfliger, President Hubert Achermann and others provide information on just 23 pages.

Singer describes this approach as an "accelerating procedure", which allows him to elegantly avoid friction with the current artistic director and also prevents the history of the festival from getting too out of hand. As far as the beginnings are concerned, they have been extensively researched and evaluated in a differentiated manner. Although there is nothing new about the myth of the anti-fascist "counter-festival" of 1938 with Toscanini, Singer aptly writes: "The political events acted, step by step, as a prerequisite for the Lucerne organizers' room for manoeuvre."

The way the author develops the story is always stimulating: the euphoria surrounding Toscanini, the financial blessing of the controversial Emil Bührle from 1942, the establishment of the festival orchestra that this made possible, the triumphant years with the charismatic conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan, the arrival of such renowned artists as Dinu Lipatti, Yehudi Menuhin and Clara Haskil - to name but a few.

It always gets exciting when Singer intervenes in a judgmental way, for example when he sums up Walter Strebi's presidency, because he "left ... the solvent audience in the cultural bourgeois belief that beautiful things must above all be served beautifully and festively". Or when he describes 1966 as a year of replacement: "André Cluytens died barely a year after his last Lucerne concert ..., while Bernhard Haitink and Claudio Abbado took to the Kunsthaus podium for the first time." The crisis of 1968 is also dealt with and the press reprimanded: "In short, every untruth and half-truth was exploited." At that time, the hour of professionalization struck for Lucerne, the introduction of the directorial principle "long practised and proven abroad". Rudolf Baumgartner was the first artistic director to place the entire program under a central theme.

Singer impressively describes Baumgartner's innovation, his consideration of modernity, his efforts to attract new audiences and his failure: "Baumgartner thus overshot the mark under the conditions and circumstances of his time. The artistic vision alone was not enough: the subsoil (audience, economy, local politics, etc.) was not (yet) able to swallow the overly loaded seed of uncompromising creativity."

While there is analysis here, the closer one gets to the present, the more descriptive the account remains. The background to the dissolution of the festival orchestra remains in the dark, and there is not a critical word about the festival's development in recent years. "As a former hotelier with an international clientele, he [Jürg R. Reinshagen, President of the Foundation Board until 2009] shifted the emphasis from the locally narrow, even provincial to the cosmopolitan," writes Singer, whose focus is on the huge expansion. The KKL has contributed a great deal to this.

Erich Singer: Lucerne Festival - From Toscanini to Abbado, 400 p., incl. DVD, Fr. 79.00, Pro Libro, Lucerne 2014,
ISBN 978-3-905927-03-0