Lucerne Festival: Michael Haefliger's Big Shoes

All's well that ends well. This saying is quickly at hand in everyday life when a project or a longer phase of life and creativity has come to a close. It almost always fits and sounds generous to boot. Ultimately, the saying, which is said to go back to Shakespeare, suggests that things have come full circle, and all in all, one can be satisfied with what has been achieved. But secretly, we know that this snappy saying is often used to gloss over one or two inconsistencies and postpone the solution of many an open question indefinitely. Occasionally, it even masks a completely different consideration: better a terrible end than a horror without end.

Something also came to an end in Lucerne this Sunday: not only the Lucerne Festival's four-week summer program, but also the more than quarter-century-long era of artistic director Michael Haefliger. No one wanted to simply talk about "all's well that ends well" – grander and more dignified words seemed appropriate, even a touch of pathos. At the same time, there was an opportunity to revel in retrospectives and memories. The setting for this was a nearly four-hour gala concert entitled "Les Adieux" in the sold-out KKL.

Tributes and emotional farewells abounded here – and rightly so. After all, over the course of these 26 years, Haefliger has significantly expanded the program and budget of the former International Music Festival Weeks and permanently established the largely privately financed festival in the exclusive circle of Europe's leading music festivals. Institutions such as the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which he founded with conductor Claudio Abbado, and the Festival Academy, for which he first recruited Pierre Boulez and later Wolfgang Rihm as his spiritus rector, have become far-reaching beacons in the music world.

The honoree himself, however, didn't want to make too much of a fuss about his departure. "Directorships end, they have to end at some point – like mine after this season," Haefliger had stated, emphatically soberly, in an interview with this newspaper beforehand. But the festival will continue.

In short, this was also the central idea behind the sophisticated season motto "Open End," which ran from the brilliantly successful opening with Mahler's 10th Symphony through numerous concerts and vividly illustrated the paradox of the "open ending" in music. This was particularly striking a few days before Haefliger's farewell at a guest appearance by the Munich Philharmonic under the direction of its designated Chief Conductor, Lahav Shani.

The concert took place on Thursday evening, the very day the shameful exclusion of the Israeli conductor and his orchestra from a music festival in Belgium caused outrage in the cultural world. Anyone who wanted to visualize the political stubbornness of those responsible there only needed to imagine that the Lucerne Festival had sent the audience home that evening with the justification used literally in Belgium: that Shani had not sufficiently distanced himself from the "genocidal regime in Tel Aviv." A bizarre idea! In passing, this thought experiment makes one aware that under Haefliger, the Lucerne Festival has never been a platform for such political demonstrations at the expense of art.

The fact that the concert in Lucerne took place despite the strain on those affected – incidentally, under heightened security measures – was more than a defiant triumph. It was also a small artistic miracle. Shani needed only a few minutes to rally the tense minds to the common cause. With the entry of the brilliant violinist Lisa Batiashvili in Beethoven's Violin Concerto, at the very latest, an intense, sensual dialogue unfolded that made the circumstances forgotten. It is concerts like these that impressively demonstrate how far great art can rise above such lows, if allowed to.

The performance was also particularly relevant for the Lucerne Festival in another respect: With Schubert's "Unfinished," the concert delivered a key work, so to speak, on the home stretch, which no program on the theme of "open ending" should be without. In a wonderfully vocal interpretation that reaches out into the expanse and openness, Shani truly succeeds in making the two closed movements of the symphony sound complete, yet at the same time like a promise never fulfilled.

Something also remained unclear the following day during the performance of Wagner's "Siegfried," another highlight of the final week of the festival. There are still only a few hopeful signs that Haefliger's successor, Sebastian Nordmann, will continue and complete the groundbreaking "Ring" project in collaboration with the Dresden Festival with "Götterdämmerung" in the summer of 2026. A cancellation would be a shame, however, given that the planned complete performance of the four-part Nibelungen saga on period instruments has already shaken up musical Wagner interpretation more profoundly than any other "Ring" cycle in decades.

Thanks to conductor Kent Nagano's unusually flowing tempi, "Siegfried" here lasts well under four hours, yet finally regains its often-assumed character as a comedy within the tetralogy. The agile, not-too-large voices of Thomas Blondelle in the title role and Thomas Ebenstein as Mime are ideally suited to the lighter, almost parlando-like tone of the semi-concert performance. One hardly misses a stage production, because the period instruments convey Wagner's whispering evocation of myth so naturally and often dramatically that one feels like one is listening to a film soundtrack. At the same time, one learns how much Wagner's music was refined sonically in the 20th century.

Haefliger's farewell on Sunday was fortunately not a tearful occasion, even though the departing artistic director briefly lost his voice as he thanked his team and the large number of artistic colleagues gathered. The audience embraced the touching moment with a standing ovation, clearly sensing that after 26 years, not only was a contract ending, but also a pivotal life's work coming to a close.

Haefliger freely admits that projects failed and questions remained unanswered during this time. Reflecting on successes and failures is part of such farewells. However, the decisive factor in assessing this era will be which of the established structures can be preserved or further developed under the new aegis. It is already clear that much will continue under Sebastian Nordmann; the signs point to continuity.

Nordmann also mentions in passing that he's been hearing everywhere that these are rather big shoes he's about to step into. However, it doesn't sound as if that bothers him too much.