Open End

“How did you do it, Mr. Haefliger?”

We look behind the scenes of Michael Haefliger’s final summer at the Lucerne Festival. A violinist himself, he has shaped the festival for 26 years as Artistic Director and, together with Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez, has given Lucerne a new artistic identity – one rooted in the great symphonic tradition, open to contemporary creation and sustained by close artistic collaboration. The film reveals the special bond between Haefliger, his team and the artists — a rare form of communication that is an art in itself: creating the space and conditions for artists to give their best.

The delight Michael Haefliger takes in bringing joy to others is palpable. For four weeks, as Sebastian Nordmann, the new festival director, puts it, “Lucerne lives in a continuous state of rapture”.

Michael Haefliger grew up in a family of artists. His father was the great Bach tenor Ernst Haefliger. He studied at Juilliard in New York, together with his brother, the pianist Andreas Haefliger. The two made their debut at the Lucerne Festival before Michael founded his “Young Artists in Concert” festival in Davos in 1986: “No champagne, no stars.” It was a bold and unusual concept at the time.

The dialogue between classical and contemporary music was already central in his Davos Festival, with musicians from all over the world, Americans and Russians playing side by side, and tours to Japan. Friendships were forged with artists such as the young cellist Sol Gabetta who would later also perform in Lucerne. She tells this story in the film.

In 1999 Michael Haefliger’s dream of leading the Lucerne Festival became a reality. Together with Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez – two of the great artists of the twentieth century – he opened a new chapter in the festival’s history. Abbado wished to create the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with musicians personally chosen by him. Pierre Boulez founded the Lucerne Festival Academy dedicated to the music of our time, with seminars for young musicians, conductors and composers and its own orchestra: the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. In later years, Riccardo Chailly and Wolfgang Rihm – followed by Dieter Ammann and Unsuk Chin – continued to develop these ideas with Haefliger.

The violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who performed in Haefliger’s “Les Adieux” concert together with Sol Gabetta, describes the Lucerne Festival as a place where major classical concerts in one of the world‘s finest halls can coexist with “wild programs”. She herself curated one of them — in the year when the festival motto was “Crazy”.

At the end of the summer, Michael Haefliger fulfilled a dream of his own: he brought Ark Nova to Lake Lucerne – an inflatable concert hall developed in collaboration with the artist Sir Anish Kapoor, the architect Arata Isozaki and the concert agent Masahide Kajimoto. Created in Japan after the Fukushima disaster, it became a “sign for hope“. For Haefliger, it embodies his artistic vision and marks a new beginning — pointing towards the next chapter of his work as artistic advisor in Shanghai and at the Japanese Kusatsu Festival.