In his autobiographical work "Theme and Variations", Bruno Walter wrote: “It was in the summer of 1938 that the first festival concerts were held in Lucerne, to which Toscanini and I had been invited. One curious event stands out in my mind – a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll conducted by Toscanini in front of the house in Tribschen where Siegfried Wagner was born, the same house where the piece was composed and premiered.” Here, the great conductor Walter was recalling the great “gala concert” that has become lodged in the collective consciousness as the moment when the Lucerne’s festival tradition was born, despite the fact that several concerts in the new “festival” format had already been held prior to it. The maestro’s expert Rudolf Serkin no less had declared the setting “suitable” for a concert and on that beautiful summer’s afternoon, Toscanini conducted a unique, elite orchestra free of charge. Adolf Busch was the concert master and many of his illustrious musician contemporaries played in the orchestra, which performed pieces by Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven in addition to the Siegfried-Idyll. (The English-language programme (!) described its as “specially dedicated to the memory of Richard Wagner”.) The concert was broadcast live in the United States by the National Broadcasting Company and 80 affiliated radio stations.

The concert was held in unusual circumstances, which may explain why Bruno Walter uses the word “curious” to describe it. The city police department and the transport authorities took unprecedented measures to reduce noise emissions and make sure the nervous Toscanini would be disturbed during the dress rehearsal or the concert. The orders issued were as strict as those of a military drill. The site was hermetically sealed to outsiders for the entire day; the audience was instructed to be seated a full 15 minutes before the start of the concert, and were ferried in from the Hotel Schweizerhof or the railway station by specially arranged motor boats; all boat traffic, with the exception of regular transport boats, was prohibited, and those that were allowed to run were told not to sound their horns and to sail slowly in order to not to create waves; all factories were instructed to avoid industrial noise;
the football pitch in Tribschen was temporarily closed down; parents of young children in the neighbourhood were encouraged to take their offspring out walking, away from the site; the proprietor of the lakeside Hotel Hermitage was entreated “not to allow saxophones to play in his orchestra, as this instrument could be heard in Tribschen”; the Office of Aviation in Berne was mandated to keep the area clear of noise; and to top it all, all of the dogs at surrounding farms were rounded up and taken to soundproof kennels for the duration of the event. The concert tickets were exorbitantly expensive for the time, with guests paying 55, 44, 33 or 22 Swiss francs for the privilege of attending.

The “Siegfried-Idyll”: A milestone in the history of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL

Since this memorable event, which was reported as a resounding success by the newspapers, the Siegfried-Idyll has been on the programme at every LUCERNE FESTIVAL anniversary. Ten years after the piece’s debut at the Festival, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted not one, but two renderings in the old “Kunsthaus”, one of them as a charity event. On the Festival’s 25-year anniversary, the musicians of the New Philharmonia Orchestra London gave a special concert, once again at the Tribschen villa where the music was written. The Siegfried-Idyll featured on the programme of the Schweizerisches Festspielorchester conducted by the Festival’s then artistic director, Ulrich Meyer-Schoellkopf, in 1978. In 1983, designated the “Year of Wagner”, the Luzerner Kammersolisten replicated the original performance on the steps of his former residence in Tribschen. The 50-year anniversary of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) saw the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by Claudio Abbado, play the Siegfried-Idyll together with all the other pieces on the programme of Toscanini’s original “gala concert”. In 2008, on the occasion of the 70-year anniversary of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL, our guests from Chicago presented the piece under the baton of Bernard Haitink, who lives in Lucerne himself.

Another former resident of Lucerne, Rafael Kubelík, featured the Siegfried-Idyll on the syllabus for his 1962 conducting course. One of the students on this course, Sylvia Caduff – herself a long-time resident of Lucerne – conducted the Siegfried-Idyll in the concluding concert. In a 1989 concert in memory of Herbert von Karajan, who had died the previous month, James Levine conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in yet another performance of the work. Other performances include one conducted by Georg Solti in 1966 with the Vienna Philharmonic, and Bruno Walter in 1950 conducting the Schweizerisches Festspielorchester for the last time. It is fair to say that Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll is inextricably woven into the historical fabric of Lucerne and the LUCERNE FESTIVAL.

Erich Singer (2008)