Open End

What drives the director and curator of a major music festival?

For more than a quarter of a century, Michael Haefliger led the Lucerne Festival. Around the turn of the millennium, he reshaped it together with Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez, and later with Riccardo Chailly, Wolfgang Rihm, and Dieter Ammann and his festival team.

In the last summer of his directorship, my co-author Graziella Contratto and I accompanied Michael Haefliger for this film: great symphonic music in one of the world’s finest concert halls; contemporary music; workshops for musicians, conductors and composers; formats for families and children such as “40 Minutes”, music in the streets of the old town. For four weeks, Lucerne lives "wie im Rausch" (“as if in an state of rapture“), as the new festival director Sebastian Nordmann put it - he will lead the festival from 2026 onward.

Michael Haefliger grew up in a musical family, became a violinist, and made his debut in Lucerne together with his brother, the pianist Andreas Haefliger. In Davos, where his father, the tenor Ernst Haefliger, came from, he founded the Festival Young Artists in Concert with ideas that were revolutionary at the time. They led him to Lucerne - and will now carry him onward, to Asia.

At the end of the summer, Michael Haefliger fulfilled a dream and presented Ark Nova on Lake Lucerne: the inflatable concert hall, a work by the English artist Sir Anish Kapoor, developed together with the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki and the concert agent Masahide Kajimoto after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. A keystone, a signal of new beginnings.