Festival: City of music

Lucerne is a city with powerful musical associations, the most celebrated being Wagner’s living there for the six years between 1866 and 1872, the most tranquil of his life, in Haus Triebschen, now a magnificent Wagner museum.

Lucerne is a city with powerful musical associations, the most celebrated being Wagner’s living there for the six years between 1866 and 1872, the most tranquil of his life, in Haus Triebschen, now a magnificent Wagner museum. But he had visited before, most notably in 1859, when he finished Tristan und Isolde in the Hotel Schweizerhof; but also in 1850, a visit recorded with surprising sympathy by Stravinsky, a late convert to Wagner, when he visited Lucerne for the last time in 1969: ‘I went from Triebschen to the Schwann Hotel for tea. Sitting there — where Wagner, not yet amnestied, followed with watch in hand the first performance of Lohengrin in Weimar — it seemed impossible that my own childhood could be so far away, and impossible that that world of feeling could be extinct, except in me.’

For any music lover with an associative turn of mind, these things are haunting. Add, if you live in the UK, the relief and incredulity of arriving for a few days in a country where things work, and the prospect of exciting musical events to attend, and you could hardly ask for more before the long Christmas cultural close-down.

There are several Lucerne music festivals, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years’ time, they are continuous round the year. The first one was started in 1938, by Toscanini and Fritz Busch, among others, as a defiant gesture against the Nazification of Salzburg, and has been held every year since, except 1940.